It had been easy to toss the zucchetto, but leaving behind the coarse brown Leibowitzian habit was not so easy. After a few moments of hesitation, Blacktooth rolled it up like a bindle and carried it with him. He felt like a pilgrim, or a booklegger again.
Under a clear sky speckled with buzzards, he pushed on south and west.
Hilbert’s fever traveled with him. Blacktooth had no hunger, and after a few days no diarrhea, but no strength either. There were fewer and fewer travelers on the road, and those Blacktooth saw spoke in Ol’zark, or not at all. The stream of refugees had diminished to a trickle. Some had crossed the Great River, counting on the water to protect them from the depredations of Filpeo’s soldiers and their Nomad adversaries, still thought of as the Antipope’s army. Others had just disappeared into the forests to hide, to die, to wait for neighbor or kin.
Blacktooth never caught up with the wagons. He had lost Brownpony; now he lost Axe. When the road forked west he followed it, putting the morning sun at his back, even though he knew that Wooshin must be heading south for Hannegan City. Blacktooth was hungry for Empty Sky. The fever was like a companion, another consciousness. Often it took on a human form, as when he was crossing a small creek (the creeks got smaller and smaller, the farther west he went) and he saw Specklebird waiting on the far bank. Eagerly, Blacktooth waded across, but when he reached the bank the old black man with the cougar face was gone. Another time he saw Ædrea standing in the doorway of an abandoned hut. The illusion, if it was illusion, was so perfect that he could hear her singing as he climbed the hill toward her. But in the hut he found only an old man, dead, with a crying baby in his arms.
He waited for the baby to die before burying them both together. Bury the dead.
It would be dry and hot for days, and then the rain would come, announced by lightning, attended by thunder, falling in sheets and turning the roads to mud. Hilbert’s fever was handy, enabling Blacktooth to go for miles without eating. The long feverish days reminded him of his Lenten fast as a novice, when he had been seeking his vocation and thought he had found it among the Albertian book-leggers of Saint Leibowitz. And hadn’t he? He missed the abbey and the Brothers, now that he had the freedom he had sought. He had even been released from his vows by the Pope himself; or had he simply been bound in new chains?
Go, and be a hermit.
• • •
The day Blacktooth saw Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, he had been traveling all morning over open grasslands between wooded draws. He was worried about outlaws because he had seen several campfires near the road, still smoldering, yet never saw anyone. He considered putting his habit back on, but decided against it. Even those who didn’t hate the Church for what it had supposedly done to their world, often thought it was rich, and even a poor monk could be a target for highwaymen.
By midday he had the distinct feeling someone was following him. He looked back every time he crossed a high spot—the road was empty and he saw only buzzards, flyspecks to the south and east. Blacktooth was glad to see that he had crossed that shifting boundary where the forest begins to give way to the grass; but the feeling of being followed wouldn’t go away. It became so real that when he crossed the next creek, he hid on the far bank behind the corpse-colored trunk of a fallen sycamore, to watch.
Sure enough, a white mule with red ears came through the trees and down the muddy bank. At first he thought the woman on the beast’s back was Ædrea, with the twins she had gotten by him under the waterfall. But it was the Fujæ Go, the Day Maiden herself. Far beyond Ædrea in beauty, she carried an infant in each arm, one white and one black, both nursing at her full breasts. Even as she rode the mule down the muddy bank and into the water, they sucked on.
Then she dropped the reins. The mule stopped in the center of the sluggish stream. Its black eyes were looking straight at Blacktooth; no, through him.
He stood up, no longer trying to hide. As he stepped over the log, he realized that what he was seeing was not in his world and not for him to touch. He knew with certainty that if he spoke, she would not hear him, and that even if she looked straight at him, she would not see him. He felt that he had changed places with one of his own fever dreams, and that it was they, and not he, that were real.
That he was the dream.
It was then Saint Leibowitz stepped out of the bushes and took the rope halter. Blacktooth knew him from Brother Fingo’s twenty-sixth-century wooden statue in the corridor outside the abbot’s office; he recognized the curious smile and dubious eyes. That the Saint was no vision, Blacktooth knew from the faint, sweet fuel-oil smell that hung in the air as he passed. It was Blacktooth who was the dream.
As she rode past, the Fujæ Go gazed up toward the sky. Blacktooth hadn’t noticed how majestic the little oaks could be, a filigree of branches against a pale sky. One baby was blinding, albino white; the other was as black as Specklebird. Both had their eyes squeezed shut like tiny fists fending off the world. The mule looked straight through Blacktooth, like the Day Maiden. Only Leibowitz, in his burlap robes with his rope over his shoulder, looked directly at the monk as if to say, like Axe, “Come.”
Then he winked and walked on.
Sancte Isaac Eduarde, ora pro me!
Blacktooth followed; Blacktooth had always followed where Leibowitz had led. But now he was weak and he fell twice climbing the bank. By the time he got to the top, the two (the three? the five?) were far down the narrow trail, almost lost in the dappled shadows. He hurried after them but he was feverish, and even though they were not walking fast, he gradually fell behind. He had to stop again, and he must have fallen asleep, for when he .woke it was almost dark and they were impossibly far away, like a speck in the eye, an iota shimmering in the distance.
But something was wrong.
The sun was setting behind his right shoulder. Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman were not heading west into the sea of grass, but south, toward Hannegan City. The Høngin Fujæ Vurn always chose the victor as her Lord, and the Hannegan had won the war. By choosing a husband, she chooses a King, and she was Filpeo’s now. Leibowitz was taking her to him.
Blacktooth wandered on, hoping to find Texark soldiers who would give him pills. The winter was coming; it was the winter of 3246. The Empire and its borders were being redrawn and the few travelers Blacktooth passed were wary. Every few days he buried a corpse as he walked west, no longer a cardinal, no longer even a monk. Go and be a hermit.
It no longer rained. The trees thinned out into shadows in the draws, and the road led higher and higher into a world all grass under a dome of sky. Blacktooth’s fever had become a small fire that both weakened and sustained him. The morning he left the last of the trees behind, he saw a great bird circling far above. It was a Red Buzzard, the Pope’s bird. Ahead by the road something or someone had fallen. Two smaller black buzzards pulled at it, but the meat was not yet ripe enough for their beaks. Nimmy stopped to watch as the Burregun, the Pope’s bride (as he thought of it), swooped down. Awed by her size, the smaller buzzards stepped back, black heads bobbing; but she ignored them, and they soon joined her at the attempted feast. The Red Buzzard was stronger and had a little better luck, but still the carcass was too fresh for easy eating.
From where he sat on a hummock of grass, Blacktooth could not tell if the corpse was human. “Feed the hungry, nurse the sick, visit the prisoner,” he said aloud, reciting the corporal works of mercy.
Bury the dead.
He tossed a rock. The birds stopped and eyed him with funereal solemnity, then strutted and preened and resumed eating. He tossed another rock and they ignored it. He still carried Wooshin’s short sword, but he could not summon the resolve to quarrel with the queen of the buzzards.
Then he watched as a bald eagle came, driving them all away, even the Burregun, the Buzzard of Battle. The bald eagle was Filpeo’s National Bird. It nosed at the corpse, then lost interest and left, riding a thermal straight up into the china blue sky.
Blacktooth St. George got to his feet and went to see what it was he had been left to bury. He hoped it was not another child.
CHAPTER 33
Let all things be done with moderation,
however, for the sake of the faint-hearted.
—Saint Benedict’s Rule, Chapter 48
IT WAS A GOOD YEAR FOR THE BUZZARDS. THEY followed Blacktooth all the way back to the Abbey of Saint Leibowitz, little dots like eyespecks against the expanse of Empty Sky. Blacktooth gave up on finding Hilbert’s pills, and the disease gradually gave up on him, burning down to embers. If he had a fever it was the same fever that had plagued him all his life, the burning that Amen and Brownpony had noticed, each from his own particular perspective.
There was no longer a safe route across the grasslands. One could no longer evade the Empire by traveling north of the Nady Ann, or avoid the hordes by traveling to the south. Both groups had interpenetrated, and the contended territories on both sides of the Nady Ann were passable, and yet uncertain. South of the Brave, the Kingdom of Laredo had collapsed in on itself.
The grass itself seemed to be shrinking back into the earth.
There were stretches of sand and dust that took half a day to cross. The Empty Sky seemed even more of an emptiness than before. Blacktooth wore his habit again, and said his rosary as he walked. But had he eaten? And where had he found water? The few people he saw were on horses, on the horizons.
One day there was rain. But it was a swift dry rain, the kind that comes to the high plains and barely reaches the ground, darkening the dust and throwing it up in great splotches, and then evaporating suddenly in the flashes of sun that showed, like slow lightning, after the clouds had ridden away on their long ponies.
Empty Sky.
There was no road, and then no trail. Blacktooth followed the setting sun. Wagon tracks braided across the dry rivercourses, running in every direction. The few people Blacktooth met were peaceful and shared their food; the bodies he found he buried, using the short sword he had borrowed from the Axe.
He walked alone most of the time, accompanied only by his shadow striding before him in the morning, and falling behind by evening. Only at noon, in the heat, would it desert him altogether. Reduced to its essentials, sky and earth, the world seemed more intricate and complex than ever.
Blacktooth missed the little glep cougar with its blue ears. He wondered what had become of Aberlott, who had so loved the little brass cartridges of war. Had he become one of the motherless ones? Or found his final home under the prairie soil?
Other such thoughts came, one with each step… arriving and departing without speaking, like birds. At other times Blacktooth walked with an empty mind, a gift, like Empty Sky, in which each step was a prayer.
It was a good year for the buzzards. Blacktooth could tell by how easily they were chased away. There were always other feasts waiting, just over the next hill.
Dom Abiquiu Olshuen had died after another stroke, and Prior Devendy was taking his place until a new abbot could be elected according to the time-honored Benedictine rule. Once he had arrived, Blacktooth had little desire to stay at the monastery, even though most of his good memories (as well as many of his bad ones) were set amid those ancient adobe walls. The stories of Ædrea’s stay as Sister Clare had become almost legend, and Blacktooth heard several versions. They were linked with the apparition some of the Brothers claimed to have seen of the Holy Virgin in the eastern sky.
“That’s the Night Hag,” said Blacktooth. “She means war and death, not peace and hope.” He could tell by the way Brother Wren and the others crossed themselves that they didn’t want to hear it— even though they were preparing for war in their own way. They had sealed the holy relics in their original chamber and dusted off the Jackrabbit smuggler’s cannon. Brother Carpenter was in the basement, planing boards for a heavier door. The defeat of Brownpony’s plans for a new order signaled the beginning of a new age of darkness. Somehow Blacktooth no longer feared it, or even thought about it. Blood and screams were the water in which humankind swam.
Four children had been brought in from the village. Two of them had already died. It seemed there were new diseases abroad in the desert.
After visiting Jarad’s grave, Blacktooth stood looking into the empty one that was always kept waiting. The straw around the open maw was hardly necessary, as there had been even less rain this year than usual, Prior Devendy explained. The grave was so deep that it seemed to Blacktooth that he could see all the way to the bottom of, of ...
He swayed and almost fell. “Gerard’s affliction,” the Brothers called it after the beloved fainting monk of almost a thousand years ago.
“You seem a little woozy,” said Prior Devendy. “Come.”
He led Blacktooth through the crowded dayroom of the monastery, under the old familiar vigas, into Olshuen’s office. Using a key that hung from a cord around his neck, Devendy opened a drawer, and took from it another key, with which he opened a cabinet of dusty bottles. He poured a glass of brandy. Blacktooth almost waved it away until he saw that Devendy was pouring one for himself as well.
“Oregon,” he said. “It was left here as a gift for Brownpony when he became Pope Amen Two. He took the papacy to New Jerusalem and never drank it.”
“And now he is dead,” Blacktooth said. He had told no one about the scene in the basilica of Saint Peter’s—only that the Pope was dead.
“He made you a cardinal,” said Devendy. “Where is your hat?”
“My zucchetto. I put all that behind me. I suspect whoever is made Pope will undo all Brownpony’s cardinals anyway.”
“You don’t need to be a cardinal here,” said Devendy. He smiled tentatively. “Only a priest.”
“Only a what?” Blacktooth looked at the old priest warily.
“The Brothers want to elect you Abbot. For that you will have to be ordained.”
“That’s not possible,” said Blacktooth. “Non accepto.”
“My thoughts exactly,” said Devendy, looking relieved. “But I promised I would ask.”
“I have no vocation for it,” said Blacktooth. “I was given my vocation by Pope Amen Two. I will stay a couple of nights and then go.”
“To the Mesa of Last Resort?”
“I thought I might go that way.”
“That’s where she went,” said Prior Devendy. “She was, uh, injured, you know, and she stayed with the old Jew after she left here. But I’m sure she must be gone.”
Blacktooth looked out the window toward the Mesa. It shimmered in the distance like a mirage of rock.
“Is the old Jew still there?”
The old Jew was still there. Blacktooth left the abbey the next morning with the gifts of a blanket and breviary, a canteen and a loaf of bread. He was greeted with a rattle of stones halfway up the trail that led to the top of the Mesa. He ignored them; they were only pebbles. He wedged himself up through the last crack onto the top, and there was Benjamin Eleazar bar Joshua, looking no older than he had looked ten years before, or a hundred years before that for all Blacktooth knew.
“You,” said the old man. “I suspected it might be you.”
“Brownpony is dead,” Blacktooth said.
“He was not the one” was all old Benjamin had replied. He told Blacktooth that Ædrea had stayed with him several months, until her sores had healed, and then had left without revealing her plans.
Had he found her much changed?
“Changed?” The old Jew only smiled and shook his head, apparently misunderstanding. “It never was any better, it never will be any better. It will only be richer or poorer, sadder but not wiser, until the very last day.”
Irritated, weary of oracles and parables, Blacktooth wrapped himself in his blanket and went straight to sleep. He stayed with Benjamin two nights, sleeping in the tent where Ædrea had slept. The old tent-maker himself never stayed in a tent if he could help it. Blacktooth was awakened by rain on the tent every night, a few great spl
attering drops. Or was that a dream sent to advertise his tentmaking and rain-making skills? There was dry lightning off to the east each night: the Horse Woman, admonishing her children on the Plains.
He left on the third day. The old Jew filled his canteen from a pool hidden under a rock. The water was cold and clear, and Blacktooth was surprised to find that it lasted him all the way to New Jerusalem.
“Even if she had come,” Prior Singing Cow told Blacktooth at Saint Leibowitz-in-the-Cottonwoods, “I would have turned her away. You heard what had happened to her.”
“Yes.”
Blacktooth had followed the papal road north, then cut off at Arch Hollow, into the Suckamints. The settlement at New Jerusalem was much diminished. Magister Dion had not made it back from the “Antipope’s war” (as even the spooks were calling it), and no one knew of Shard’s Ædrea, except that she had left for Laredo under interdiction. No one believed Blacktooth when he told them that the interdiction had been lifted by the Pope who was not a pope, at New Rome which was no longer New Rome.
Nor was she to be found in Valana.
But Aberlott was, working as a secular scribe in the square of Saint John’s, under the walls of the Great Hall of Saint Ston’s and next door to the old Papal Palace where Amen had delivered his now-legendary seventeen-hour acceptance speech. The air of Valana was rich with the familiar urban smells of horse dung, food, and smoke. The streets were bustling; after the Crusade’s defeat, many of the Nomads had come to settle in the narrow strip of farmland watered by the mountains. They bought and sold horses and cattle, changing their ways to suit their world’s changing ways.
Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman Page 53
