Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

by Walter Michael Miller, Jr.

  “Your Eminence,” said Bitten Dog. “His Holiness and whatever, His Eminence the Pope wants to see you.”

  “Brownpony?”

  “He wants your butt in his Pope wagon right away.”

  Brownpony had stopped shaving but it had hardly changed his appearance. There wasn’t much left of his beard, just a few wisps of hair on his chin. Some were dark and some were light, giving him the look of a sketch that had been abandoned. He was finishing his breakfast of horsemeat jerky and plums when Blacktooth found him, at a small table that had been set in the shade of the papal wagon. “Nimmy,” he said, “where is your zucchetto? I have a commission for you.”

  “As a soldier?” Blacktooth answered. He was ready to refuse.

  “As an ambassador,” Brownpony said, ignoring the novice cardinal’s sarcasm. “As the papal legate to the farmers. They are all that is left in the city. Hannegan’s troops have abandoned the place and left them there to fight. We could have avoided the fight altogether by peacefully slipping a thousand men into New Rome.”

  “A thousand Nomads are not peaceful, Your Holiness,” replied Blacktooth. “And besides, the farmers have shown an inclination to fight.”

  “True. Perhaps you’re right,” Brownpony said. “Perhaps this is all for the best. We have only three hundred men anyway, mostly the Grasshopper.” The Pope waved an astonishingly skinny arm around at the camp, which looked deserted in the harsh daylight, like a dream only half-remembered. Brownpony looked weaker than Blacktooth had ever seen him. Surely, he thought, it was the Meldown. Nunshån the Night Hag was claiming her husband, calling him to her cold bed.

  “The War Sharf of the Three Hordes, the Qæsach dri Vørdar, our old friend and companion Chür Ösle Høngan, has taken almost a thousand of my crusaders south, to Hannegan City. Even Magister Dion and the New Jerusalemites have gone with him. They intend to join the Jackrabbit warriors and the gleps that are preparing to besiege the city, and instead of a siege we will have a battle.” Brownpony sat down wearily. “Perhaps it is all for the best.”

  “Not so,” said Wooshin.

  “My sergeant general disapproves,” said Brownpony. “But what does it matter? It is done.” The Pope’s hands fluttered in the air, like two birds. Blacktooth watched, intrigued; with that motion, this most worldly of men suddenly reminded him of Amen I.

  “I’m sick anyway,” Blacktooth said.

  “We’re all sick,” said Brownpony. “Except for Wooshin, of course. Where is your hat, Nimmy?”

  “Here.” Blacktooth pulled his red cardinal’s zucchetto from his robe. “I don’t wear it around the camp. It might blow off my head and fall into the dogshit.”

  “No wind here,” said Wooshin, who disapproved of Blacktooth’s attitude toward his master.

  “Oh yes, the dogs,” said the Pope distractedly. “We get to keep the dogs. The Qæsach didn’t want to take them on the campaign south. We have been left with three hundred men and almost as many dogs. And the Grasshopper sharf, of course. The farmers don’t know this, not yet. What I want you to do is go into the city, Nimmy, and make them an offer of peace. Extend to them my offer of peace. The Pope’s hand in peace.”

  “Before they discover your numbers have been reduced,” Blacktooth said, scornfully.

  “Why, yes. Wear your hat and your robes. I will give you a papal seal to carry.”

  “They will shoot me before they see it.”

  “Put it on a stick,” said Wooshin. Blacktooth could see from the yellow warrior’s eyes that he wasn’t going to be allowed to refuse the mission. He resigned himself to it. He was curious to see the city anyway, and sick to death of pots and pans. So what if he got killed? Wasn’t that bound to happen sooner or later anyway?

  “You look very sick, Cardinal Nimmy,” said Wooshin, his voice almost gentle. “Tell the farmers that we wish them no harm. We want to settle things peacefully. The Empire has deserted them but not the Vicar of Christ.”

  “And don’t mention that the Vicar of Christ is down to three hundred men and as many dogs,” Blacktooth said.

  “I will overlook your insolence since it has never been an impediment to your vocation. Indeed, Nimmy, sometimes I think it is your staff. I hope for your sake it is not your crutch. Better get going, though. This has to be done today, or at least attempted.”

  “I have to walk?”

  “Eltür Bråm has a white mule you can use,” said Brownpony. “And God go with you, Nimmy.”

  He made the sign of the cross and allowed Blacktooth to kiss his ring.

  The grassy swale had been a highway a thousand years before, and now it was a highway again. The muddy tracks of wagons crisscrossed in the grass. Who knew how many years this “door prairie” had pointed like an arrow from the plains into the forest and then to the city—or, Blacktooth thought, the other way? Though the monk had never thought much of the Pope’s plans to return the papacy to New Rome, lately the Holy City had been appearing to him in his dreams. It had arrived with the fever. In the dreams it beckoned on the distant horizon, like small, steep mountains. How different was the reality! There was no horizon at all. The road ran straight between trees and low ruins that were just mounds of earth, some with openings where they were mined, others barricaded where some pitiful creature had chosen an intact basement or a mined-out room as a cave. The farmsteads were smaller here, close to the city, usually just a weedy vegetable patch and a ruined building or two; perhaps a shed emptied of pigs and chickens.

  Just when Blacktooth had given up all hope of seeing New Rome, just when he least expected it, the road topped a small rise, and there it was—just as it had always been in his dream.

  “Whoa.” Blacktooth needn’t have bothered; the white mule only moved when he got on and only stopped when he got off. He slid down and the mule stopped to nose at skunk cabbages beside the road. They were at a turn: the road went at an angle down the last hill before the valley of the Great River, or Misspee as it was called locally.

  Blacktooth couldn’t see the river but he could see the distant towers of what once had been a bridge; and he could see a low line of tree-covered bluffs on the other side, like a mirror image of the hill he was on. And in between, a few miles away, were steep brush-covered stumps of towers, like low steep mountains, just as he had seen them in his dream. New Rome.

  But it was already afternoon, and there was no time to enjoy the view—even if it was the first horizon Blacktooth had seen in almost a month. He got back on the sharf’s shaman’s white mule and it started down the hill, and soon they were in the trees again.

  There was more concrete and asphalt here, mixed with the grass. It would have made for treacherous passage on a horse, but the mule seemed unbothered. There were fewer farmsteads and more houses, even though the houses were just sheds attached to the sides of the ruins. Blacktooth even saw smoke coming from one or two, and shadowy shapes that could have been children playing or their parents hiding.

  “Gee up,” he said to the mule, just to hear his own voice and to let whoever might be watching know that he was in control and on a mission. He wished now he had bothered to learn the mule’s name.

  It was late afternoon before he passed the gates of the city, a low barricade now abandoned. A couple of corpses in the sentry box showed how the Nomads had avenged their murdered shaman, and how little the grass-eaters cared about their dead.

  Of course, the corpses might have been Texark soldiers. Two pigs were rooting at the door, seemingly eager to find out.

  “Gee up!” The white mule stepped over the rubble and Blacktooth rode on through, holding up Amen II’s papal seal. It was made of parchment stretched over sticks like a kite, and held aloft on a spear decorated with feathers and the cryptic symbols of the Three Hordes. An amalgam of the sacred and the profane, the civilized and the barbaric. Like Brownpony’s papacy itself.

  There were more pigs on the street here, though there were no bodies. New Rome seemed deserted. The streets were straight
and wide. The “great houses” Blacktooth had seen from the horizon were less impressive up close, but more oppressive somehow, dark ruins shot full of holes. There was no movement. Blacktooth knew he was being watched, though. He could feel it; he could feel more and more eyes on him as it got darker and darker.

  “Whoa,” he said, but the mule didn’t stop.

  Ahead Blacktooth saw a single figure in the center of the street. It was a man carrying a rifle.

  “Gee up!” Blacktooth kicked his mule but the mule walked at the same slow pace, whether kicked or not.

  “Wait,” Blacktooth shouted at the man, but the man backed slowly into the shadows.

  “I have a message…” Blacktooth shouted, just as the man knelt and fired.

  Blacktooth slid off the mule, which was the only way to stop it.

  He waited behind the mule for another shot. The silence was excruciating.

  The man was gone.

  The dialogue was too one-sided. His only chance, Blacktooth saw, was to push on toward the center of the city and hope that he came across someone with either some sense or some authority, and preferably both, before he got shot.

  He got back on the mule.

  “Gee up.”

  It was dark when they shot the mule out from under him. Blacktooth was almost in the center of the city, under the biggest of the “great houses.” It must have been a long shot, because the animal went down before Blacktooth heard the shot; the crack came rolling through just as he was falling on his side, under the mule, which fell as heavily as an abbot having a stroke.

  Blacktooth scrambled to his feet, looking for the papal seal-on-a-stick, which had snapped and was lying half under the mule. He was tensed through his shoulders, waiting for the next shot, which he knew he wouldn’t hear and might not even feel. It never came.

  With the papal seal, he ran back into the rubble of the “great house,” where he hid under a stone slab. From here, he could see down the street both ways. It was almost dark; the sky was a salmon pink turning to rose in the west, and a darker blue ahead, in the east.

  The mule was on its side, braying violently. It wasn’t bleeding much, but clearly it was done for. Its front legs were kicking but the rear legs were still; maybe spine shot. Blacktooth felt his fever growing and then a fit of diarrhea hit him, and he squatted behind the stone slab. Should he hold the papal seal aloft, or did it just make him a better target? “Not now,” he prayed aloud. “Not like this.”

  Finished, and still not shot, he decided to continue on with his mission. He had to find someone, and soon, before it got dark. Otherwise, he would be sleeping alone in the dark in one of these great piles of stone. Holding the papal seal aloft, he started walking. He knew he was still feverish, because he could sense Amen I beside him, his cougar face composed and quiet; free of concern as well as anxiety. Amen had nothing to say; lately he had had little to say.

  The problem was, the mule wouldn’t shut up. It kept braying louder and louder, the farther Blacktooth walked away from it.

  “I have to go back,” he said to Amen. He knew the old man couldn’t, wouldn’t, answer, but he wanted to hear the sound of a human voice, even if it was just his own.

  “I’ll do for him what I did for the glep soldier,” he said aloud. “It’ll be a sin, too, just the same.” A sin but he had to do it. Wasn’t that what a sin was? Something you had to do?

  No, that’s duty, replied Specklebird, with his unquiet, ambiguous smile. You have often confused them.

  It was a long way back to the white mule, and Blacktooth’s legs were getting wobbly. He walked backward, holding the seal high, his shoulders tensed against the shot he expected. The mule was almost quiet by the time he got to it; the brays had turned to hoarse, honking moans. The front legs were still kicking rhythmically. The big eyes looked at Blacktooth with neither curiosity nor fear. Blacktooth knelt and said a prayer, a made-up one, as he put his knife to the creature’s throat, and said a second prayer as he pulled it across.

  It was like pulling a string and watching the grain flow out of a bag. The mule sank into a sudden quiet restfulness.

  Blacktooth wiped his knife on the mule’s coat. He was about to stand when he felt the knife on his own throat. “Stand,” said a voice, and he did what he had been about to do anyway. He started to drop his knife when a hand took it from his.

  Grass-eater, he thought, but perhaps he said it aloud, for someone hit him from behind, almost knocking him down. There was the smell; the grass-eater smell. There were too many hands—he thought perhaps it was a glep—and then realized that it was two men who held him, and a third who picked up his papal seal from the ground where he had laid it before taking out his knife to cut the mule’s throat.

  They marched him back down the street, the steps he had retraced to kill the mule. He felt a gun prodding him through his cassock. As he passed the corner where he had turned back, he thought, Why hadn’t they taken him here? Had they been waiting for him to come back?

  “I have a message for your leader,” he said. “From His Holiness, Amen Two. I am his papal ...”

  “Shut up,” said one of the men, in a tongue Blacktooth recognized as a variant of Grasshopper.

  He was taken into a basement room that reminded him of the library at the abbey. It was lit by oil lamps, and several men were inside, armed with iron swords and old rifles. Most of them were dressed in rags but one wore the jacket of Hannegan’s Texark cavalry. He spoke to Blacktooth in Churchspeak.

  “Are you sick?” was his first question. “You smell bad.”

  “I come from His Holiness the Pope with a message for your leader,” said Blacktooth. “We are all sick. We all smell bad. There are thousands of sick, bad-smelling warriors, bloodthirsty Nomads, on the outlying reaches of the city, preparing to strike. I am here to give you a chance to…”

  “Shut up,” said the Texark soldier. He nodded at one of the other men, a farmer, who handed Blacktooth a cup of water and a handful of brown pills that looked like rabbit pellets. “Take one,” the soldier said.

  Blacktooth smelled the pills. He shook his head.

  “Take one.” A gun prodded him in his back.

  Blacktooth took one.

  “I am here to give you a chance to surrender the Holy City peacefully,” he said. “The Empire is finished. The papacy is returning to New Rome. The Pope, His Holiness Amen Two, wants only to occupy his rightful place in the ...”

  “Shut up. I know who you are.”

  “I am the His Holiness Amen Two’s—”

  “We know who you are. The Archbishop sent us word to look for you,” the Texark soldier said. He unrolled a scroll that had already been untied. “Are you not Blacktooth St. George, Secretary to the Antipope, and banished under sentence of death to the far reaches of the Bay Ghost and the Nady Ann?”

  Blacktooth was at a loss for a reply.

  A gun prodded him in his back. “Say ‘I am.’ And what’s that hat? Military?”

  “I am a cardinal,” Blacktooth said. Suddenly the seriousness and the ridiculousness of it all struck him, simultaneously. The enterprise had been foolish. Perhaps even the Crusade. Now here he was, back in the Hannegans’ zoo. “A joke, really. Cardinal. Pope. Soldier.”

  The pill was making him dizzy. He wondered if he should take another.

  “We have orders to shoot you,” said the Texark officer, rolling the scroll back up tightly and tying it with a ribbon. “But first you should get some rest. The pills will help you sleep. Take him to the death cells.”

  It was cool under the street. By standing on tiptoe, through a barred window, Blacktooth could see an alleyway and an occasional dog or pig, the pigs wearing medallions that identified, Blacktooth presumed, their owners. One pig was especially friendly; it kept coming back and sticking its nose into the bars, perhaps for the coolness of the iron.

  As darkness fell, Blacktooth felt his fever subside, like a stream sinking into the sand. The chamber pot in the corner of h
is cell waited, empty, like the pig. The guard came just after midnight with a jug of water but no food. Blacktooth took another pill. This time they were going to shoot him, and he had little doubt that they would keep their promise. Somehow, the thought of it made him drowsy.

  That night, again, he dreamed of Ædrea. She was waiting for him under the waterfall while his old friend, the white mule, grazed on the rocks outside. There was no grass but it sprung up as the mule ate. It had a hole in its throat like a wound, and Ædrea had wounds too; she showed her wounds to Blacktooth.

  “Where have you been?” she asked in Churchspeak. “Where are you going?” Since he knew she didn’t speak Churchspeak, he knew, in the dream, that he was dreaming.

  CHAPTER 30

  In the reception of the poor and of pilgrims

  the greatest care and solicitude should be shown,

  because it is especially in them that Christ is received;

  for as far as the rich are concerned,

  the very fear which they inspire wins respect for them.

  —Saint Benedict’s Rule, Chapter 50

  THAT NIGHT WHILE BLACKTOOTH WAS dreaming, a small party of farmers mounted their horses, most of them draft plugs, and rode toward the camp of the Pope’s Crusade. These were the farmers who had survived after seeing their families and livestock killed by the Texark soldiers. Now they wanted revenge and the only one they could get it on was the Antipope, whose armies their scouts had told them were heading south, toward Hannegan City and the Red River. They knew that Blacktooth was lying. They had seen only one party of raiders, had wounded one and killed another. They wanted what the Grasshopper and Wilddog Nomads wanted: they wanted blood and revenge. It was late September and there was no moon. They left, forty riders in all, soon after dark, counting on the starlight and their knowledge of the road. It was after all the road they had ridden in on; it was the road that led to their abandoned and ruined farms.