Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

by Walter Michael Miller, Jr.

  “Relax, Brother. Does it hurt?”

  “Not much,” Wren whispered. “What have you done? Something popped.”

  She continued caressing his throat for a while, then left him and went to her cell. Father Moo crossed himself. Brother Wren noticed and followed suit.

  “Better not tell anyone,” Singing Cow said.

  Within three days, Wren began to get his voice back. Word got around. Within a week, Sister Clare had healed infected blisters, a hernia, an abscessed tooth, and a probable case of gonorrhea of the eye. All this might have passed unnoticed, but when she cured the old librarian, Brother Obohl, of his myopia and he got a look at the beautiful woman who had laid hands on his eyes, his squawk of astonishment was followed by the joyful noise of his thanksgiving, and this fell upon the ears of Dom Abiquiu.

  Singing Cow was present in the guesthouse when the abbot strode to the closed door of Ædrea’s cell.

  “I told you not to mix with the monks.”

  “I have not mixed with the monks.”

  “Cardinal Silentia forbade you to practice your healing tricks.”

  Sister Clare opened her door. “Beg pardon, Domne, but she did not. I do not have any healing tricks.”

  “You argue with me! Where is your religious training?”

  “You prefer Brother Librarian half blind?”

  “It was my fault, Domne,” put in Father Moo. He ventured a lie: “I sent him to her.”

  “What?” Olshuen gasped and paused for self-control. “You are not to lay hands on anyone else while you are here. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Domne.”

  “Will you obey?”

  “Yes, Domne.”

  The abbot glared at Singing Cow. “I think it is about time you returned home.”

  “Thank you, Domne.” As soon as Dom Abiquiu was gone, he said, “Alleluia!”

  Sister Clare smiled. “Will you carry a message to my family and the Mayor when you go?” she asked.

  But Singing Cow had not yet departed when her wounds began to appear. When Ædrea went to Mass, she knelt in the back of the Church behind a pillar where she was not visible to the monks in the choir. Thus she always left the Church first. Following her back to the guesthouse, Singing Cow noticed dark spots in the prints of her bare feet in the sand. When she walked across the guesthouse floor, the blood was even more apparent. He called out to her, asking how she had hurt her feet.

  The young nun stopped, pulled up the skirt of her habit, and looked down. She stared, then looked back at Father Moo. When she lifted her hand to her face, he saw that the palm was bloody. She seemed very confused.

  “Who hurt you, Sister?”

  Her voice trembled. “I don’t know. It was dark. I think it was the Devil. He was wearing a robe like yours.”

  “What? Someone actually attacked you?”

  “It’s like a dream. There was a hammer—” She stopped, looked at him wildly, then bolted into her cell and latched the door. Singing Cow could hear her praying. He went to look for Dom Abiquiu, whom he found praying before the wooden Leibowitz in the corridor.

  “She said it was like a dream,” Father Moo told him. “But she thinks somebody with a hammer, maybe the Devil—”

  “Was she raped?”

  “She didn’t say anything about it.”

  “Let’s go. Did you tell Brother Pharmacist?”

  “He is on his way.”

  The pharmacist had already arrived when they entered the guesthouse. The door to Ædrea’s cell was open, and she was lying on her cot. As they started to enter, the pharmacist pushed them back outside, joining them and closing the door behind him.

  “Her wounds?” the abbot whispered.

  “The wounds of Christ,” the medic answered softly.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The wounds of the nails. The wound of the spear.”

  “The stigmata? You’re saying the female, the, uh, Sister, has the stigmata?”

  “Yes, she does. The cut in her side is clean. The wounds in her hands and feet have bruised blue edges. She speaks of a hammer.”

  “Devil!” It was as close as Olshuen ever came to swearing. He turned and walked out of the guesthouse with Singing Cow at his heels.

  “Retaliation!” he spat. “Retribution!”

  “Excuse me? What do you mean, Domne?”

  “I forbade her to use healing powers. This is her answer.”

  Singing Cow was silent for several moments as they walked toward the convent, then he shook his head. “Domne, I am leaving tomorrow for home.”

  Abbot Olshuen stopped. “Without asking permission?”

  “You already gave it, remember?”

  “Of course.” The abbot turned on his heel and walked away, alone.

  A few hours later, when Brother Wren St. Mary came to inquire about a change in the diet for the sick, he found Abiquiu Olshuen lying on the floor of his office. He could not move his right leg. When he tried to speak, he squawked.

  Brother Pharmacist came directly to the infirmary where Wren had carried Olshuen.

  “Is it a stroke, Brother?” Wren asked.

  “Yes, I’m afraid it is.”

  The abbey had its own prior again, and Father Devendy was immediately summoned, along with Singing Cow. Wren went back to the kitchen.

  Prior Devendy turned to Prior Singing Cow. “Can you get the Sister who heals to come?”

  “You know about her?”

  “Dom Abiquiu told me what Mother Iridia told him. I know he was alarmed, but—he may die, you know.”

  “I’ll go ask her. She was, uh, injured, you know. Did Brother Medic tell you?”

  “No,” put in the pharmacist.

  “Describe the wounds to Father Devendy,” Father Moo told him, “but don’t interpret them.”

  “I understand. Make sure she wears shoes of some kind and doesn’t walk on the bandages.”

  Singing Cow glanced at the abbot. Dom Abiquiu was shaking his head from side to side with his eyes closed. It meant nothing, Moo decided.

  Cow found a small pair of sandals in the storeroom. They were very old and might once have belonged to him or to some other adolescent Nomad whose feet had not finished growing. He took them to Sister Clare and told her they might once have been Blacktooth’s. She said nothing to that, and put them on without protest.

  “Where are we going, Father?”

  “To see Dom Abiquiu. He needs you.”

  Ædrea had become accustomed to obedience, and came without asking why she was needed. When she limped into the infirmary and approached the bed, Dom Abiquiu groaned mightily and shrank back from her, his eyes wide and his face a mask of dread. He used his left hand to shield his eyes from her. Ædrea stopped and stared.

  “Oh, pigs!” she said abruptly, and crossed herself with a bandaged hand. “There is nothing I can do for him.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Prior Devendy.

  “I mean I can’t do it tonight. And he told me not to do it again anyway.” She turned and started to leave the room.

  “Sister Clare, please, he may be dying,” said Singing Cow.

  She crossed herself again, but walked on down the corridor without looking back.

  The next day, she was missing from the guesthouse, and her small traveling bag was not in her cell. No one had seen her leave, but there was a note on her bed: I’m sorry about your abbot. Thank you for your hospitality. God bless.

  No one knew where she had gone. On his way back to New Jerusalem, Singing Cow stopped in the village of Sanly Bowitts to ask about her. She had been seen going toward the Mesa of Last Resort. He followed the trail to the foot of the cliff. Once he found a spot of blood on a stone, but no other sign of her. She was with Benjamin, then. Father Moo was certain the old Jew would cure her of the Lord’s stigmata. Feeling a little guilty for abandoning her and Dom Abiquiu, he steered his mule toward the papal highway leading north. It was already September and he traveled by the dar
k of the moon.

  CHAPTER 29

  Just as there is an evil zeal of bitterness

  which separates from God and leads to hell,

  so there is a good zeal which separates

  from vices and leads to God,

  —Saint Benedict’s Rule, Chapter 72

  BLACKTOOTH CARDINAL ST. GEORGE, DEACON OF Saint Maisie’s, was on the hillside taking a long and painful dump, his first of many for the day, when he heard the pop pop pop of repeating guns. It was coming from the main encampment, in the wooded bend of a wide, shallow creek back over the hill.

  Blacktooth couldn’t see the camp from where he was standing, or rather, squatting. For his morning ritual, which was the only one he found the leisure to perform in privacy, he preferred the western slope of the little bluff, a hill so small that it barely cleared the trees. Truth was, Blacktooth was homesick. Not for a particular place; he had never had anything even approximating a home except for Leibowitz Abbey, and while he sometimes (indeed, fairly often) missed the companionship of the Brothers and the security of the routine and the Rule, he never missed the abbey itself. He was homesick for the desert, the grasslands, the country of Empty Sky.

  Even though he could see nothing to the west but more trees, Blacktooth knew there was open land beyond—rolling plains that went on and on, treeless and townless like Eternity itself. And the sky seemed definitely bigger to the west.

  Unsmiling, unspeaking, unlimited.

  From here I greet you, Empty Sky.

  Pop pop pop.

  Blacktooth stumbled as he stood up, hurriedly wiping himself with a wad of grass—then slowed, no longer alarmed, recognizing the sound. It was celebratory, ceremonial, not real; not a firefight. The Grasshopper sharf’s warriors, disciplined for firing the precious brass cartridges but bored by the lack of military action, had perfected the art of imitating the sound of the new repeating “Pope rifles.” As with everything the Nomads tried, they had quickly learned to do it well.

  Blacktooth had first noticed it in the outriders returning from a scouting mission a few days before; he had remarked to his boss, Bitten Dog, that the warriors were mimicking the sound of the brass shell-firing guns from across the sea. “Imitate the sound of pots being scoured, Your Eminence,” Bitten Dog had growled.

  The pop pop pop was joined by the sound of dogs. It was not barking but the alarming half-howl, half-growl of war dogs being brought up on leash. All this was coming from the camp of the Pope’s armies down at the edge of the trees, in the bend of the creek called Troublesome or Trouble Some. Attempting to shade his eyes from the early-morning, late-September sun, tying his habit back around him with his booklegger’s cord, Blacktooth crossed the crest of the hill and started down toward the camp. He took off his sandals and carried them, so that he could walk barefoot in the pleasantly wet grass. Through the trees, he could see horses milling and stomping, warily watching the dogs that circled them like a dust devil.

  The pop pop pop was punctuated by whoops and cries, and Blacktooth could see the Grasshoppers now, painted up, pumping their weapons into the air. More than a small party, too.

  Something was afoot; or rather, a-horse.

  Blacktooth was almost glad. For several weeks now, on the final approach to New Rome, the tension had been growing among the Nomad warriors that had attached themselves to the Pontiff’s crusade. As the twelve-hundred-strong party, now fully a day’s march long, crawled east, the arms of trees extending out into the prairies had become more numerous, longer and thicker, until it had changed—in a day, and Blacktooth remembered the day—into arms of prairie ex tending into trees. It was like an optical illusion; one thing turning, with a trick of the eye, into its opposite.

  As they left the tall-grass country and began to penetrate the woodlands, the warriors had expected resistance from the Texark troops Hannegan II had—supposedly—left behind to guard the approaches to the Holy City. There had been none. The warriors had expected resistance from the semi-settled Grasshopper farmers, and the settlers Filpeo had sent to live among them. There had been none. Foraging horsemen had found nothing but abandoned farms, barns burned or burning, cattle killed or driven away, leaving behind only their footprints or their still-soft droppings. The log homesteads were burned or looted, sad-looking little homes bereft of even doors or window glass. The Grasshoppers in particular had looked forward to breaking glass, and this made them even more impatient. The contemptible grass-eaters had either broken or taken their windows with them.

  The new cardinal was as firmly attached to the hood wagon as the old monk had been, but several times Blacktooth had deserted his pots and pans and explored one or two of the abandoned houses, hoping perhaps—although he never admitted this to himself—to find signs of Librada, his glep cougar that had freed herself before he could set her free. But Librada didn’t eat carrion and the few farmers and farm families Blacktooth had found had been mostly carrion. Several times he had watched as parties of the Nomad horsemen, singing death songs and seated well forward on their ponies, had gone out into the trees—nervously at first and then with growing confidence, finally with boredom. The countryside around New Rome had been stripped of its people. There were no warriors to fight, no women to rape or even to be restrained from raping. Nothing but trees, dumber than horses and stiller than grass. The farmers—many of them of Grasshopper origin—had deserted their farms, and whatever troops Hannegan II had left in the region to defend the city were gone as well.

  In fact, some said it was the troops that had driven the farmers away. An old man found wounded on his barn floor, and brought back to the camp to die, had told the Pope and his Curia that it was the Texark soldiers who had shattered his window glass and torched his fields, and his neighbors’ as well, but Blacktooth thought he was lying. Or at least partially lying. Truth was as rare as beauty in wartime. It occurred by accident, in unexpected places; like the glint of sun off a button on a corpse.

  Pop pop pop.

  And now, some action at last. Blacktooth felt like two men: one who dreaded the excitement, and one who desired it; one Brother who slipped eagerly down the hillside toward the milling horses, and one who held back, heels digging into soft dirt. He valued the hilltop because it carried him above, or almost above, the trees. Descending into them was like descending into a prison.

  Pop pop pop. One of the shots, at least, sounded real. Perhaps the Texark main force had been located by a scouting party, and a battle was planned for the day. It would have to be to the east. As he half slipped and half walked down the hill, Blacktooth squinted out across the sun-bright ranks of trees. Beyond them was New Rome, within a day’s ride at most. And beyond the city, also unseen, was the Great River—the Misspee, the grass-eaters called it. Blacktooth had dreaded the Crusade’s arrival for months but now he looked foward to it, even if it meant a battle. Much to his eternal regret, Blacktooth knew battle; and he knew that even worse than the fighting was the long waiting, the constant tension, and the heavy smells of men on the move.

  The camp smelled like shit and smoke. It smelled like Hilbert’s fever, the bowel-emptying sickness that Blacktooth shared with at least a third of the men, Nomad and Christian alike. The smell had thickened as the tall grass had turned to trees, as the world of Empty Sky had given way to a world folded in branches, hedged by trees. Darkness and mud and stumps and shit—in greater and greater profusion as the Pope’s Crusade approached New Rome. The Mother Church was coming home.

  Pop pop pop!

  Down in the camp, the huge night fire had been rekindled. Logs as big as corpses smoldered and smoked, as reluctant as corpses to flame back into life. Everything here in the woodlands was damp. The edge of his habit wet from the long grass, Blacktooth joined the milling crowd around the fire pit at the center of the camp. Horses and people and dogs made an uneasy mix. More warriors came from the smaller Wilddog and Grasshopper campfires, joined by the Qæsach dri Vørdar and his personal guard. Nomad warriors were spitting
into the fire and stomping, and firing their imaginary shots toward the impenetrable gray of the sky. It looked like rain again; it had threatened rain now for a week.

  The Grasshopper sharf, Eltür Bråm, came out of the trees, holding up his repeating rifle, joined by a squat shaman in an intricate hat riding a white mule.

  Pop pop pop.

  Brownpony was conspicuously absent, but a small contingent of his Papal Guard joined the party, leading uncomfortable-looking horses. Their rifles were identical to the ones the Wilddog warriors carried. Blacktooth was surprised to see Aberlott among them.

  “Don’t look so sad, Your Eminence,” said the pudgy Valana student, holding a repeating rifle anything but sheepishly.

  “Where are you going?” Blacktooth asked, ignoring his old friend’s sarcasm.

  “To get a biscuit.” Aberlott gestured toward the morning wagon, where there was aline, all Wilddog and Grasshopper; or rather, all men with guns. “Come.”

  Wooshin, the Axe, was in the morning-wagon line and he let Aberlott and Blacktooth in beside him. This was, Blacktooth knew, acceptable practice among the Nomads, who regarded every man as an extension of his friends and family. If a man was in line, his connections were in line as well.

  “Morning, Axe.”

  “Good morning, Cardinal Nimmy. Why so sad?”

  Do I really look so sad? Blacktooth wondered. He shrugged. Perhaps it was the sickness. It seemed he had been sick for years, although he knew by the marks he had made on the inside of the hood wagon that it was only two weeks.

  “Maybe it is war,” he said. “War makes men sad.”

  “Some men,” said Aberlott. He reached up under his long hair and touched, as if for luck, the little knob of gristle where his right ear had been sliced off by Texark cavalry.

  “All men,” said Axe.