Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

by Walter Michael Miller, Jr.

  “Today, the herds of cattle often no longer run,” said Steps-on-Snake. All around the fringes of the Plains, fences were going up. These were attempts by some tribes to stay in one place year-round, building permanent houses, culling their herds (now flocks, even) in the fall, first picking out the breeding stock, then slaughtering whatever animals could be used, eaten now or preserved for winter, and finally selling the rest or trading with the farmers for grain. To the true People’s ultimate disgust, some of them even raised hogs.

  The hordes at first considered these fence-line Nomads as outcasts, as despicable as ex-Nomads who farmed as Blacktooth’s family did, except that Blacktooth’s kin farmed another man’s land. But the old women of the High Plains, these gaunt old grandmothers with leather fists, grinning eyes, and Weejus powers, they took up the cause of the fringe-area people, and they besieged the ears of husband, brother, son, and father with warnings about the Night Hag, who called to her dark bosom those chiefs who wronged their own realms or hurt the beings that lived therein. Not only that, but if these settled herdsmen were alienated by the roving herdsmen, they could only become allies of the farmers and of Texark.

  When people began seeing the Hag, the nervous chieftains began to agree that Nomads who settled down behind fences should not be pillaged and killed, but wooed back to the common life of the horde if possible. This tolerance was reserved for haciendas adjacent to existing fences, however. There were a few families on the Plains who had dared to fence off choice areas for themselves, far from any other fences. To these the leaders of the hordes sent warriors to tear the fence down. They forced such people to choose between returning to the common life or leaving the common land. Those foolish enough to stay were killed by outlaws, who could be counted on to save the tribes the trouble and the blood-guilt. The hordes of course joined with the Church in condemning these murderous motherless ones. Things had changed since the time of Høngan Ös, when Hannegan II had spread cattle plague as a weapon of war by driving his infected herds among those of the hordes.

  The future was revealed to the tribal seers. It was foreseeable that the open Plains would shrink, and the people and the cattle on it would either perish or change. They had been changing continuously through three generations since the Conquest, and what characterized the present population was youth. The prolific grandmothers and mothers had doubled the population in a very short time. Every Nomad warrior believed that his women’s ability to produce babies fast, running even to twins and triplets, rose and fell according to the nation’s need. For whatever reason, the Great Plains were shrinking, while their population had been growing fast of late. Was this not the chief cause of war? It usually happened when men settled down in one place with their women and had a lot of sex and babies, too many children to fit into the local scheme of things. Teenage gangs become the first warriors in this process, and because they start trouble with other neighborhoods, it is necessary to put the gangs under the chief’s command and give them violent things to do against people who are not enjoying the chief’s favor. War is caused by agriculture, in the Nomad opinion. It was, after all, a herdsman killed by a farmer when Cain slew Abel, so Christians said.

  The tribes were restless, anxious, angry. They all had compromised; even the wildest among them used the tools and the weapons that were manufactured in the towns and cities to the east and in the mountains. They brought their beef, hides, artwork, wolfskins, bear grease, and surplus ponies to a trading post, and then rode back to Grandmotherland leading a pack mule loaded with tools, gunpowder, musket balls, fabric, beans, and enough distilled spirits for at least the elders to get sloshed. They sang the old songs and danced the old rituals, honored the Wild People, and moved their dwellings and their herds according to the season. Each horde owned a sacred path, and sacred places along it to pitch camp for a season. They navigated the grasslands by the doings in the night sky as much as by landmarks. The sky told them when to move south. It was the middle of the thirty-third century, and Polaris traced a larger circle in the north sky than it did in the time of Leibowitz, but the hordes called themselves the people of the Polestar when they wandered. When they camped in summer, they were the people of Empty Sky and the Day Maiden. When they huddled down for winter, they were sons of the Wolf and the Hag.

  Blacktooth knew much about the tradition, even though he had never lived it. But things were changing. He could see the change now; he had missed it as a boy. Power on the Plains among the warrior herdsmen was out of control, and the old women worried about it. Some leaders were chosen by men without due process of consultation with the grandmothers, the Weejus women, and the Bear Spirit men. War threatened the horses and the sacred bloodlines, and it killed grandsons. The women were usually against any war, except when necessary to curb intertribal horse theft.

  When Empty Sky was dying in the presence of his Seventeen Crazy Warriors, he promised them he would come back from the dead in their time of need if each and all seventeen of them would in time of need utter his magic name of seventeen syllables. Empty Sky as part of his last will and testament taught the name to these warrior-Priests who had served him best in battle, leaving to each man a different secret syllable which could be spoken only once—to speak it twice permanently paralyzed the tongue. A dying man could leave his syllable only to his eldest son, or if the son were unfit, to another chosen by the Bear Spirit shamans. Empty Sky promised to come whenever they spoke his name correctly, but to pronounce the name each man would have to utter his syllable in correct order.

  What was the correct order?

  They had been crowded around his couch at the time, and while most of them agreed as to who owned the first and last syllables, nobody had been counting the ones between; for example, there was a spearman who said Empty Sky had spoken in the ears of at least ten men before him, but not more than twelve. Inevitably, a skeptic who inherited his syllable from his father spoke it aloud, tried to speak it again, and was immediately struck dumb. Others heard him speak the syllable, but now doubt arose. Would it be effective if spoken in the correct order by a man other than its original custodian? And if a man spoke his own syllable, would he be able to repeat the orphan syllable as well, or would dumbness grasp his throat? But one day, about a century ago, they all got together, all except the speechless skeptic, and decided to try to call Empty Sky, because times were getting bad for the people.

  When they spoke the syllables, nothing dramatic happened. They deemed it a failure, until they heard the cry of a newborn baby from the adjacent tent. The baby was the son of a mother of the royal tribe, and she was prevailed upon to name him Empty Sky, although at the time of his rite of passage to manhood, he was given the name of Høngan Ös, Mad Bear, who grew up to become the Qæsach dri Vørdar who led the hordes into horrible disaster. Obviously, the holy name had been misspoken.

  They were fascinated by Step-on-Snake’s storytelling. Nevertheless, it was necessary to go on, and to cross one branch of the Red River to the southeast, then make haste toward Hannegan City.

  On the edge of town, following such a heading, they stopped at the rim of Yellow’s crater. There was a small lake in the center, and the ground around it was fertile and green. Two wild horses were grazing, and somebody was fishing in the lake.

  “I’m told,” said Brownpony, “that this was a Jackrabbit breeding pit before the conquest.”

  “Is it like Meldown?” Blacktooth asked.

  “No, it is not like the breeding pit of the Wild Horse Woman.”

  “I see there is a stone marker ahead. The place has a name.”

  “What is it called?”

  “Lake Blessdassurance,” Blacktooth read, and looked up atBrownpony, who was staring at the other side of the marker.

  “Does it say something on the back side, m’Lord?”

  “It says, ‘Boedullus was here.’”

  “Wh-a-at?” Nimmy took a look. “Paint! Recent paint. It’s a joke. It has to be. Or else—” He paused. “D
id you know, m’Lord, the Venerable Boedullus died in an explosion at an archaeological site he was investigating? There’s a legend about a lake with a giant catfish named Bodolos that later came to live in the crater where the bomb went off.”

  “So it’s a joke with a theory behind it. It has to be a Leibowitzian joke. Who outside your Order knows about the Venerable Boedullus?”

  “Almost nobody, m’Lord, unless Nomads have been reading my translations.”

  “It seems to be signed with initials: BRT. I’d hate to lose time by going back to ask Father Steps-on-Snake about it.”

  “Let’s ask that Jackrabbit farmer instead,” Nimmy suggested, watching a man riding a mule toward them down the road.

  The farmer laughed heartily. “My great-granduncle caught that old Bodolos nearly a century ago. He fed the whole village with it. Whoever painted the sign on the back last month couldn’t spell. He was wearing the same robes as you, though.”

  Brownpony and Blacktooth exchanged glances. Nobody at the abbey had told them of a monk of the Order who had recently departed for the Province.

  “Well, at least one Jackrabbit farmer learned to read,” Brownpony later observed.

  “There was a small Church school at Yellow, you know.”

  “I’m sure there are many Nomads in the Province who can read a book but cannot ride a horse, especially in battle.”

  “How fast can they learn to march and shoot?” asked the usually silent Weh-Geh.

  The question was considered by the monk and the prelate, but not answered.

  They crossed the Red River and headed east across the grasslands. In all, they stopped at twenty-three Churches, and secured the loyalty of seventeen Jackrabbit pastors, but many nights they slept in farmers’ barns or found natural shelter along creekbeds. Twice they rented rooms from Texark landlords, but there were too many prying questions. The cardinal disliked lying and decided against doing it again, although it became a very cold winter during their trip; freezing rain did not usually come until January in these parts. The cardinal was still not quite well. He began to believe the Weejus’ promise that he would have a shorter lifetime as a result of the ordeal. Blacktooth fed him a lot of apples into which nails had been pressed, but he seemed to be losing some of his graying red hair as well as his energy. Such was the curse of Meldown.

  CHAPTER 18

  The fourth kind of monks are those called

  Gyrovagues. These spend their whole lives

  tramping from province to province, staying

  as guests in different monasteries for three

  or four days at a time. ... Of the miserable

  conduct of such men it is better to be silent

  than to speak.

  —Saint Benedict’s Rule, Chapter 1

  THEY REACHED THE OUTSKIRTS OF HANNEGAN City by early evening, and the cardinal decided to rent rooms and spend the night at an inn outside the city limits. There was the possibility of learning recent news from the innkeeper or fellow travelers; there was the inevitability of reading the government bulletin boards to learn of the response of the bureaucrats to the same recent news. There was a need to change from a monk’s habit to red and black. Weh-Geh would need new clothes altogether, and could again wear his weapons as the cardinal’s bodyguard. All Blacktooth needed was a bath and a change of habit. They had grown beards during the journey, but only Weh-Geh decided to shave. His whiskers were rather thin and added an alien touch to his appearance. Brownpony’s beard was redder than his thinning hair. Blacktooth had more gray on his chin than on his pate, which badly needed reshaving. Weh-Geh barbered Nimmy’s tonsure with a short sword, grasping the blade with both hands and drawing it smoothly under the soapy hair. Blacktooth complained that the swordsman was leaning on him too hard.

  “Only to hold you still. If you prefer, I could shave you just as easily standing back here,” Weh-Geh said to the lathered monk. Blacktooth looked at him with affected fright. The guardsman held the sword drawn back past his right shoulder, as if to deliver a roundhouse cut to the scalp’s long stubble.

  “Stop boasting. Lean on me if you need to.” He was surprised, because it was the first time Weh-Geh made a joke, a sinister joke besides, and one of the few times he spoke at all. In Jackrabbit country, only once did a need arise to draw his long sword and Brownpony’s pistol, when a group of young bullies had decided to pick on three itinerant mendicant monks for fun. Both Nimmy and the cardinal missed Wooshin. Blacktooth wondered if they had, without meaning to, resented Weh-Geh as a poor substitute for the Axe, on whose head there was a price in this realm. But Weh-Geh had no wish to be a substitute for anyone. Nimmy resolved to befriend him, if there was still time.

  By midafternoon of a cold and sunny day, they were standing on the steps of the Cathedral of Holy Michael, the Angel of Battle, talking to its Cardinal Archbishop. At the Archbishop’s left and rear stood an attractive young acolyte wearing a long surplice with lacework and crocheted borders. Torrildo smiled happily at Blacktooth on first seeing him, but then misinterpreted Nimmy’s expression and cast his eyes on the ground. The monk was less shocked that Benefex had hired the pretty fugitive than surprised by a sudden realization that the letters BRT beneath the painted “Boedullus was here” legend at Yellow’s crater lake stood for “Br. Torrildo,” who had been traveling from Valana to Hannegan City.

  Weh-Geh seemed ill-at-ease, for Benefez kept glancing at him, until finally the cardinal asked, “Young man, where have I seen you before?”

  Brownpony answered for him, “In Valana, Urion. Weh-Geh was in Cardinal Ri’s employ. Now he is in mine.”

  “Ah, yes, there were five or six of them, weren’t there? Where are the others?”

  Brownpony shook his head and shrugged. “I’ve been on the road for two months.” The evasion was almost a lie, Blacktooth noticed.

  “Of course,” Benefez said, then returned to their previous conversation: “Elia, mmm, Your Eminence, of canon law, I too have been a scholar. Before the Flame Deluge there had been only two papal resignations. One Pope, so-called, was a great sinner, one was a great saint. The former sold the papacy, the latter fled from it in holy terror. But the question arises whether either of these men was a legitimate pope. So can a real pope resign? I think not. If he resigns, he was never elected by the Holy Ghost in the first place. This may be against the majority opinion, but it is my opinion. A poet of his own time put him in Hell, but that poet was a bitter man. I think the old fellow was really hallowed, but I doubt the legitimacy of his election in the first place. If he were Pope, he would not and could not resign, and would not be talking about resignation.”

  “Are we talking about San Pietro of Mount Murrone, or Pope Amen Specklebird?” Brownpony asked.

  “Aren’t they two of a kind?”

  “No, Urion, they are not.” He hesitated. “Well, how can I say? Amen Specklebird I have known. I know San Pietro only from a book at Leibowitz Abbey. The writer thought he was a saintly clown.”

  “Doesn’t this describe Amen Specklebird? In a charitable way?”

  Brownpony paused. He seemed to be leaving himself open on all sides. Blacktooth tried to remember Wooshin’s word for it. Happu biraki, he thought. In a fight, it was usually a deadly invitation to be foolhardy.

  Brownpony closed in. “If so, then this saintly clown, Pope Amen, His Holiness, is disposed to absolve you, Urion, of any penalty of excommunication you may have incurred, crimine ipso laesae majestatis facto, or any other act of rebellion you may have committed in thought, word, or deed. I am here to announce this.”

  Blacktooth noticed that the purple in the face of Benefez was not merely reflected light from his purple vestments (it had been a day for burying the dead). He did not sputter, however, but purred, “How utterly wonderful of him, Elia. From so generous a man, I’ll bet the penance I have to do is only kiss his ring.”

  “I doubt he would allow you to do that, Urion. He is an honest man. There are no conditions, and no penance u
nless I choose to impose one.”

  “You?”

  “The Pope sent a plenipotentiary in this case. Me.”

  “You!”

  “And I unbind you, Urion, without condition, in nomine Patris Filiique Spiritusque Sancti.”

  Blacktooth saw the Archbishop’s right hand twitch toward mirroring the sign of the cross Brownpony made over him, but it was only the twitch of habit.

  “Your credentials are as good as your Latin, Elia. Go home and stop being my gadfly.”

  “I am also empowered to offer you control over those Churches in the Province where the parishioners are mostly settlers or soldiers whose native tongue is Ol’zark.”

  “Oh, I see. It’s not a matter of geography, then.”

  “Geography is boundaries and fences. These don’t mean much to a Nomad.”

  “Yes, we had a recent demonstration of that just west of New Rome. Human life doesn’t mean much to them either, and they eat men’s flesh.”

  “Only men they honor. It is a funeral rite, or a tribute to a brave dead enemy.”

  “You defend this evil thing!”

  “No, I merely describe it.”

  Someone was yelling “Make way! Make way!” in the distance, and Cardinal Benefez looked up the street.

  “Apparently my nephew is coming down the road,” he said to Brownpony. “Do you want to step inside?”

  “You mean do I want to hide? No, Urion, thank you. I must see him in order to deliver this.” He showed Benefez the sealed papers which he had received at the abbey from Valana. “I must go to the palace to request an audience, unless he sees us and stops.”

  The Emperor was in ahurry as usual, and ordered his driver to wield the whip. He waved in a friendly way to his subjects in the streets who bowed or curtsied as the royal coach hurried on, preceded by two mounted guards whose costumes were more elegant than that of their ruler. Filpeo wanted to be seen as a man of frugal habits, generous to his subjects, and devoted to the economic interests of the Empire. He sought to distance himself in public from the ferocity of some of his predecessors, and had shortened the list of crimes for which the penalty was death. His own ferocity was carefully contained. He had secretly, on several occasions, insisted on administering the supreme penalty himself, but few men knew about this. One who had known it was named Wooshin, and it was the Hannegan’s personal fascination with death by the art of the headsman which had, in fact, cost him his best executioner. The fellow had been repelled by his own art when practiced by his master. And Harq had let him get away! It was one of his few mistakes in judging men.