Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

by Walter Michael Miller, Jr.

  I set fires, Eltür Bråm’s carriage was inscribed. He had made no secret of it. like hell you will, the Pope had answered.

  Like Hell—and now, look around.

  Brownpony laid his hand on Blacktooth’s brow, leaving a smear of ash. “Your fever seems better, Nimmy,” he said.

  “I got over it,” said Blacktooth. “They captured me and gave me some pills, the same pills the Texark are using south of the Nady Ann. But they are almost gone.”

  “You don’t feel feverish.”

  “I can feel it,” said Blacktooth. “I can see it coming. When I am feverish I see the girl, Ædrea. And the old Pope, Amen Specklebird. They were with me just now, before you came in.” He saw no point in lying to Brownpony; not anymore. “I was glad to see them.”

  “Do you see them now?” Brownpony asked.

  “No, of course not. The fever is not that bad.”

  “The fever is not that bad,” repeated Brownpony. He seemed more distracted than ever. Then suddenly he drew the pistol from his shoulder holster. “Do you hear that, Nimmy?”

  “Hear what, your—”

  “Shhhh!—”

  Wooshin drew his short sword from his belt; he left his long sword in its steel scabbard. Seconds later, Blacktooth heard what the old warrior and Brownpony had heard. Hooves on the paving stones, and then on steps, and then on wood—clattering “inside” the cathedral.

  It was Black Eyes, the Nomad double agent who had briefly been imprisoned across from Brownpony and Blacktooth in the Hannegan City zoo. He was dressed in the full regalia of a Wilddog warrior, riding a sorrel pony. “Your Holiness,” he said sarcastically. He nodded at Nimmy and avoided Wooshin’s eye—and sword—altogether.

  “Put it away,” said Brownpony, softly—although he still held the repeating pistol in his hand. Wooshin put the short sword away, but kept his hand on the hilt of the long one.

  “What are you doing here? I thought you were with the Emperor in Hannegan City.” Brownpony stood straighter, tried to look regal. Black Eyes didn’t seem impressed.

  “As a spy,” the Nomad said. “When the Lord of the Three Hordes came south, with the tanks and the glep army, I crossed the Red River to join them. But the battle is lost. The Hannegan’s guns spoke too loudly, and too fast. The gleps have run back to their valley, the spooks are on their way back to the Suckamints, and the War Sharf of the Three Hordes is on his way home.”

  “Høngan Ösle?” Brownpony looked stricken. “The Qæsach dri Vørdar is going home?”

  “The Weejus are calling,” said the Nomad. His pony was dancing in and out of the pew ashes, ruining their straight lines. “The Texark Wooden-Nose is burning our lodges, killing our women, stealing our horses. We ride for the short grass. I am only here to make sure that none of the children of the Big Sky Woman are left in the city when the grass-eaters arrive. You should leave also. You are also her child and she is also your mother, begging your pardon, Holiness. The Texark cavalry is on its way.”

  “From the south?” The Pope pointed with the pistol. “From Hannegan City?”

  “From the north as well. From the sea of grass. We will leave their city to them. Good luck, Your Holiness.”

  He rode off loudly, hooves clattering, and Brownpony fell to his knees, cursing his fate. “Vexilla regis inferni produent!”

  “What’s he saying?” Wooshin whispered.

  “Forth come the banners of the King of Hell,” said Blacktooth.

  “It is not their city,” Brownpony muttered. “They never wanted it!” He looked up toward the sky and saw only the blackened ruined dome. He tossed his pistol into the ashes.

  • • •

  In the center of the ruined sanctuary, the throne of Saint Peter’s had been miraculously spared. Behind it was a painted wooden statue of the Holy Virgin, also spared. Blacktooth and Wooshin silently followed Brownpony as he crossed toward the throne, picking his way through the litter. Brownpony paused in front of the throne and studied it before smoothing his cassock and sitting down. His freckled skin was drawn and thin strands of gray hair showed at the edges of his dirty white skullcap. He still wore his empty shoulder holster.

  “Here.”

  Wooshin tried to hand him the papal tiara, but Brownpony shook his head, so the Yellow Warrior placed it in the ashes at the foot of the throne. It was getting dark. Blacktooth had no difficulty finding a live ember with which to light a few candles. Set behind the throne, they hardly illuminated anything except the face of the Virgin, and that only barely.

  Brownpony’s eyes were shut as if in prayer, and Blacktooth was glad. Looking into them had been like looking in the window of a burning house.

  Wooshin squatted beside the throne of Saint Peter, kneeling back on his heels, balanced on the scabbard of his long sword he still wore at his side. Though limber, he was also, Blacktooth saw, an old man. He moved without joy or ease.

  The truce the fire had created was ended. Outside in the street Blacktooth saw a dog chase away a buzzard, to pull at a blackened body; then it was chased away in turn by a pig. His old friend? Another dog stopped at the huge open door and looked into the basilica in the dying light. It sniffed the smoky air, pissed on the bronze door, and trotted off into the gathering darkness.

  A riderless horse wandered past, part of a severed human leg hanging from the stirrup.

  “Glory to God in the highest.” It was the weak, tired voice of Elia Amen II Papa Brownpony, speaking as if Job’s wife had told him to curse God and die, and he was wearily complying. “I think I hear the Texark cavalry coming. Blacktooth, do be sensible and run for your life.”

  “It was only a riderless horse,” Blacktooth said. But he cocked his ears and heard something in the distance. He could feel it as much as hear it: a low, indistinct rumbling that might have been faraway thunder.

  “There’s nothing to keep them out of the city now,” Wooshin said.

  “But you, m’Lord—” Blacktooth was confused. “Where will you go?”

  If Brownpony heard him he gave no sign. Blacktooth looked at the statue of the Holy Virgin behind the throne of Saint Peter’s. She stuck out her tongue. It was black, and forked.

  The fever’s coming back, Blacktooth thought. He looked around for Specklebird and Ædrea, the companions of his delirium, but they were nowhere to be seen.

  Brownpony turned and looked up at the Virgin. His eyes grew bright. “So it’s you, after all.”

  “Huh?” Blacktooth and Wooshin both asked at once.

  “Mother, Mother of the night and the mares of night, the dreams.”

  “M’Lord?” Blacktooth took the Pope’s arm.

  “Look! Look at her!” Brownpony jerked his arm loose and pointed at the Virgin. The dark spot crawled out of her lower lip.

  “A-a w-worm,” Blacktooth stuttered.

  “The Night Hag! My real Mother!” Brownpony said. “Blacktooth, escape while there’s time. Loyalty to me stops here. Obey me: go!”

  Blacktooth stepped back. “Why should I start keeping my vows by obeying you now?”

  Brownpony laughed weakly, but repeated: “Go. Go be a hermit and teach those who come to you about God. Be yourself. That is His calling to you.”

  Faintly Blacktooth could hear distant hoofbeats, getting louder.

  “Go!”

  Wooshin was still hunkered down beside the throne, his narrow eyes closed as if in prayer. Behind the throne the Virgin’s face glowed in the flickering candlelight. Blacktooth walked under her, circling slowly toward the still-standing back wall of the cathedral. There was definitely a worm on her lip. Or a tongue that moved. Forked, black. Maybe it was a shadow from a candle. Ora pro nobis nunc et in hora mortis nostrae!

  There was a door in the back. Halfway there, Blacktooth heard a sharp hissssss like an intake of breath. He recognized the sound of Wooshin’s sword being drawn from its scabbard. Then he heard the murmur of Latin. To Blacktooth’s surprise, this least orthodox of Popes was reciting the creed. In spite
of himself, Blacktooth stopped and listened. It began as the creed of Nicaea: “I believe in one God, the almighty Father, maker of the earth and the sky, and of all things seen and unseen, and in one Lord Christ Jesus…” but before Brownpony was done, the creed of Athanasius crept in and took over, saying, “and in One Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church outside of which there is neither salvation nor remission of sins—unam sanctam Ecclesiam Romanum etiam Apostolicam, extra quam neque salus est neque remissio peccatorum—”

  “Now?” It was the voice of the Axe.

  Blacktooth paused, afraid to look around, and heard the rustle of silk. There was a faint affirmative grunt as Elia Brownpony, Amen II, fell to his knees at the foot of the throne. The whisper of the sword cutting the air ended in the chunk of flesh and bone, and the thump of the head, and the splashing of gushing fluid on the littered floor.

  Blacktooth ran toward the exit as fast as he could. He had almost reached the doorway when Wooshin’s quavering voice called after him. “Help me, before you go, please!”

  He stopped again, and turned this time. He saw Axe sitting on the floor beside the corpse. Wooshin had taken out his other sword, the short one, and held it pressed against his belly. While he pressed slowly with one hand, with the other he picked up the bloodstained long sword from the floor, and tossed it toward the monk. It fell short, ringing like a bell on the stone floor.

  Blacktooth stepped over it, shaking his head. With long steps he strode to the warrior’s side. “No!” he said fiercely. “Would you now abandon your master?”

  Wooshin looked at the heap of bloody silk beside him, glared up at Blacktooth, and pressed the blade into his belly until the blood came. He groaned and stopped and looked up at Blacktooth again, pleading.

  Nimmy picked up the long sword. But instead of lifting it for a strike, he leaned on it as if it were a cane. “Your master’s enemy still lives,” he said. “Cut open your belly if you want to, Wooshin, but I want to hear you say ‘Long live Filpeo Harq!’ before I help you die.”

  Wooshin removed the blade from his flesh, and said something in a strange tongue, clearly a curse. Blacktooth knelt down and looked at the wound. It was bleeding profusely, but it seemed not to have penetrated far, if at all, into the abdominal cavity. He helped the aged warrior to his feet, then knelt down and tore off a piece of the Pope’s white silk cassock. He gave it to Axe to hold against his wound.

  Wooshin picked up Brownpony’s head and placed it next to his body; then he covered both with the jail blanket, perhaps forgetting that it was Blacktooth’s.

  “Shouldn’t we bury him?”

  Wooshin shook his head. “This was the way he wanted it. ‘Leave me for the Burregan, the Buzzard of Battle.’”

  “His bride,” said Blacktooth. He looked for the Night Hag, but she was gone. The Virgin was back, with her glowing baby and gentle smile. Looking down at Brownpony, dead under the blanket, a still form, Blacktooth felt strangely unmoved. So much of his life since leaving the abbey had been in service to this worldly man. But who or what was Brownpony in service to? Do any of us know, ultimately, what it is we serve? Blacktooth wondered. Then he felt immediately ashamed. Was he not a brother of the Albertian Order of Saint Leibowitz? Why had he wanted so long to be released from his vows, if the vows meant nothing?

  The hoofbeats were closer now, rattling in the square outside the front of the cathedral, then on the low, wide steps. For a moment Blacktooth thought of stepping out into the street and offering himself up for capture. Then would he be given the pills he needed; and perhaps the death.

  But no. Wooshin recovered and sheathed his long sword. Blacktooth followed him out the back door of the cathedral. There was nothing more in Saint Peter’s to do. The dogs were wandering back into the city, smelling new blood and death. Where was it written? And the dogs ate Jezebel in the field of Jezrahel…

  As he followed Wooshin down the alley toward the river, Blacktooth could hear horses’ hooves inside the cathedral of Saint Peter’s; then raised voices over the dead body of Amen II.

  CHAPTER 32

  They are able now, with no help save from God,

  to fight single-handed against the vices

  of the flesh and their own evil thoughts.

  —Saint Benedict’s Rule, Chapter I

  IT RAINED THE NEXT DAY, AND THE NEXT. THE sky was close and heavy, not like the bright Empty Sky of the grasslands, and Blacktooth felt bent by it, even more than by the rain, which was little more than a persistent drizzle. He followed Wooshin, and the Axe followed a small train of wagons and livestock headed for the Watchitah Nation. It was an informal attachment but it seemed better than traveling alone. The farmers spoke a degraded form of Grasshopper mixed with Ol’zark larded with old English Churchspeak, a dialect Blacktooth assumed was confined to the environs of New Rome. He had trouble understanding it at first but his talent for languages rescued him, and he was surprised to find a dialect so rich in sources and influences, so poor in subtlety and nuance, though it may have been his understanding that was poor; or perhaps it was the farmers themselves.

  There were few women among them. The apparent leader of the train was a spook (Blacktooth suspected) named Pfarfen. He had a daughter, beautiful except for her huge glep ears, and her hands, which she kept mysteriously covered with rags. Pfarfen kept her in the wagon where she sewed and sang all day, and (Blacktooth was alarmed to discover) entertained her father sexually at night, when the wagon was pulled up with the others alongside the muddy road.

  The Holy City was far behind them now, still burning, a smudge on the northeast horizon that was seen only when the low clouds broke. The army that had gone south with Høngan Ösle had been routed, and the thinning stream of refugees heading south was mixed with a thickening stream of refugees heading north, giving the impression at the narrow stretches of highway of a great milling herd heading nowhere. At these points the traffic left the roads for the still-green fields, which were quickly churned into quagmires by wheels and hooves and feet. Though they all spoke versions of Grasshopper, it was not difficult to tell the Nomad warriors from the Hannegan’s semi-civilized farmers: many of the refugees heading north were wounded, and most were still armed. A few had even kept their horses, and several times these looked at Blacktooth’s clerical garb with an alarming anger.

  “Come on, Nimmy,” said Axe, whenever Blacktooth showed signs of wanting to ask about the Qæsach’s campaign. He was in a hurry to reach Hannegan City. Since Blacktooth had refused to act as his keisaku and help disembowel him, the wizened old warrior had rediscovered his own purpose. Blacktooth suspected, but didn’t want to ask, what it was. Axe had the peculiar ability to go for days without food and never look malnourished. This was not true for Blacktooth, who had a monk’s love of dinner; but because he helped with the wagons when they were stuck, he was welcome at the meager dinner and breakfast fires.

  The river was only a memory, somewhere to the east. Now there were the bottomland streams, at least two to cross every day, almost too deep to ford. At each crossing there were piles of abandoned, unburied bodies, stacked in grotesque positions as if they were in the process of composing themselves from the earth, rather than the reverse. The refugees walked by them pretending not to notice and commanding their children to look away. But children have always understood war better than adults. Death only mildly interests them; it holds neither the horror nor fascination it has for adults, who can almost hear the wings.

  Overhead the sky was black with circling dots.

  The faithful Burregun.

  The spook-farmers with whom Blacktooth and Axe were traveling were tolerant of Blacktooth’s tonsure and habit, eventhe zucchetto which he carried overhis back without wearing. Still, he worried. He remained under the Hannegan’s death sentence, as far as he knew. It was the death sentence that had given him Hilbert’s pills, which were almost gone. Leaving New Rome with three, he had cut his dose to one a day, taken in the morning with his corn gruel. There
were two left the day Blacktooth saw three brother monks, crucified by the side of the road, but whether by the Texark soldiers or by angry Nomads routed from their promised looting of Hannegan City, it was impossible to say. The Burregun had feasted and the bodies were too far gone.

  “Come,” said Axe, and after a hasty prayer, Blacktooth hurried to catch up with his companions. He wanted to bury the dead but he didn’t want to join them yet. Above all, he didn’t want to be alone.

  The next day he took his next-to-last pill. That afternoon he came across a second group of two clerics, hung from poles by a muddy roadside. It appeared that they had been hung up and then stoned and shot with arrows, a merciful death overall. Their faces looked almost peaceful, as if they had only just entered the doorway into death. Blacktooth studied them for a long time. They looked familiar; it was not their faces, although in truth all men look alike, and looked increasingly alike to his Most Reverend Cardinal Blacktooth St. George, Deacon of Saint Maisie’s, in these days in what he was beginning more and more to think of as the twilight of his life (even though it turned out to be a long twilight) . They looked to him as monks all looked, hung on the cross of life. This was not their world. There was something almost inspiring in it.

  “Come,” said Axe.

  “Go ahead,” said Blacktooth. “I’ll catch up.” Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, bury the dead. He borrowed Wooshin’s short sword and used it to bury the two by the side of the road, using stones and sticks to complete the work. When he finished, it was dark. Not wanting to travel alone at night, he slept in a shallow dirt cave by the side of the road, using his mud-stained zucchetto for a pillow.

  The next morning he took his last pill, and under the clear sky he was almost overcome by terror. He hurried all day, hoping to catch up with the spook-farmers and the Axe. The few refugees he saw on the road eyed him curiously but left him alone. But he kept remembering the crucified Churchmen, and he was afraid. He hid the red hat under a bush, and later that day saw a chance to get rid of his habit, trading it for the leggings and tunic of a farmer who had been laid out beside the road, almost tenderly, a corpse not too old. The monk buried him and took his clothes. Bury the dead, clothe the naked.