A Canticle for Leibowitz

by Walter M. Jr. Miller

  Fingo’s grin began to fade as he studied Francis’ countenance while the novice unloaded his grain and water from the frisky she-ass. “You look like a sick sheep, boy,” he said to the penitent. “What’s the trouble? Is Father Cheroki in one of his slow rages again?”

  Brother Francis shook his head. “Not that I could tell.”

  “Then what’s wrong? Are you really sick?”

  “He ordered me back to the abbey.”

  “Wha-a-at?” Fingo swung a hairy shin over the jackass and dropped a few inches to the ground. He towered over Brother Francis, clapped a meaty hand on his shoulder, and peered down into his face. “What is it; the jaundice?”

  “No. He thinks I’m–” Francis tapped his temple and shrugged.

  Fingo laughed. “Well, that’s true, but we all knew that. Why is he sending you back?”

  Francis glanced down at the box near his feet. “I found some things that belonged to the Blessed Leibowitz. I started to tell him, but he didn’t believe me. He wouldn’t let me explain. He–”

  “You found what?” Fingo smiled his disbelief, then dropped to his knees and opened the box while the novice watched nervously. The monk stirred the whiskered cylinders in the trays with one finger and whistled softly. “Hill-pagan charms, aren’t they? This is old, Francisco, this is really old.” He glanced at the note in the lid. “What’s this gibberish?” he asked, squinting up at the unhappy novice.

  “Pre-Deluge English.”

  “I never studied it, except what we sing in choir.”

  “It was written by the Beatus himself.”

  “This?” Brother Fingo stared from the note to Brother Francis and back to the note. He shook his head suddenly, clamped the lid back on the box, and stood up. His grin had become artificial. “Maybe Father’s right. You better hike back and have Brother Pharmacist brew you up one of his toad-stool specials. That’s the fever, Brother.”

  Francis shrugged, “Perhaps.”

  “Where did you find this stuff?”

  The novice pointed. “Over that way a few mounds. I moved some rocks. There was a cave-in, and I found a basement. Go see for yourself.”

  Fingo shook his head. “I’ve got a long ride ahead.”

  Francis picked up the box and started toward the abbey while Fingo returned to his donkey, but after a few paces the novice stopped and called back.

  “Brother Spots–could you take two minutes?”

  “Maybe,” answered Fingo; “What for?”

  “Just walk over there and look in the hole.”

  “Why?”

  “So you can tell Father Cheroki if it’s really there.”

  Fingo paused with one leg half across his donkey’s back.

  “Ha!” He withdrew the leg. “All right. If it’s not there, I’ll tell you.”

  Francis watched for a moment while the gangling Fingo strode out of sight among the mounds; then he turned to shuffle down the long dusty trail toward the abbey, intermittently munching corn and sipping from the waterskin. Occasionally he glanced back. Fingo was gone much longer than two minutes. Brother Francis had ceased to watch for his reappearance by the time he heard a distant bellow from the ruins far behind him. He turned. He could make out the distant figure of the woodcarver standing atop one of the mounds. Fingo was waving his arms and vigorously nodding his head in affirmation. Francis waved back, then hiked wearily on his way.

  Two weeks of near-starvation had exacted their tribute. After two or three miles he began to stagger. When still nearly a mile from the abbey, he fainted beside the road. It was late afternoon before Cheroki, riding back from his rounds, noticed him lying there, hastily dismounted, and bathed the youth’s face until he gradually brought him around. Cheroki had encountered the supply donkeys on his way back and had paused to hear Fingo’s account, confirming Brother Francis’ find. Although he was not prepared to believe that Francis had discovered anything of real importance, the priest regretted his earlier impatience with the boy. Having noticed the box lying nearby with its contents half-spilled in the road, and having glanced briefly at the note in the lid, while Francis sat groggy and confused at the edge of the trail, Cheroki found himself willing to regard the boy’s earlier babblings as the result of romantic imagination rather than of madness or delirium. He had neither visited the crypt nor closely examined the contents of the box, but it was obvious, at least, that the boy had been misinterpreting real events rather than confessing hallucinations.

  “You can finish your confession as soon as we get back,” he told the novice softly, helping him to climb up behind the saddle on the mare. “I think I can absolve you if you don’t insist on personal messages from the saints. Eh?”

  Brother Francis was too weak at the moment to insist on anything.

  4

  “You did the right thing,” the abbot grunted at last. He had been slowly pacing the floor of his study for perhaps five minutes, his wide peasant face wearing a thick-furrowed muscular glower, while Father Cheroki sat nervously on the edge of his chair. Neither priest had spoken since Cheroki had entered the room in answer to his ruler’s summons; Cheroki jumped slightly when Abbot Arkos finally grunted out the words.

  “You did the right thing,” the abbot said again, stopping in the center of the room and squinting at his prior, who finally began to relax It was nearly midnight and Arkos had been preparing to retire for an hour or two of sleep before Matins and Lauds. Still damp and disheveled from a recent plunge in the bathing barrel, he reminded Cheroki of a were-bear only incompletely changed into a man. He was wearing a coyote-skin robe, and the only hint of his office was the pectoral cross that nestled in the black fur on his chest and flashed with candlelight whenever he turned toward the desk. His wet hair hung over his forehead, and with his short jutting beard and his coyote skins, he looked, at the moment, less like a priest than a military chieftain, full of restrained battle-anger from a recent assault. Father Cheroki, who came of baronial stock from Denver, tended to react formally to men’s official capacities, tended to speak courteously to the badge of office while not allowing himself to see the man who wore it, in this respect following the Court customs of many ages. Thus Father Cheroki had always maintained a formally cordial relationship with the ring and the pectoral cross, with the office, of his abbot, but permitted himself to see as little as possible of Arkos the man. This was rather difficult under present circumstances, the Reverend Father Abbot being fresh out of his bath, and padding around his study in his bare feet. He had apparently just trimmed a corn and cut too deep; one great toe was bloody. Cheroki tried to avoid noticing it, but felt very ill at ease.

  “You do know what I’m talking about?” Arkos growled impatiently.

  Cheroki hesitated. “Would you mind, Father Abbot, being specific–in case it’s connected with something I might have heard about only in confession?”

  “Hah? Oh! Well, I’m bedeviled! You did hear his confession. I clean forgot. Well, get him to tell you again, so you can talk–though Heaven knows, it’s all over the abbey anyhow. No, don’t go see him now. I’ll tell you, and don’t answer on whatever’s sealed. You’ve seen that stuff?” Abbot Arkos waved toward his desk where the contents of Brother Francis’ box had been emptied for examination.

  Cheroki nodded slowly. “He dropped it beside the road when he fell. I helped gather it up, but I didn’t look at it carefully.”

  “Well, you know what he claims it is?”

  Father Cheroki glanced aside. He seemed not to hear the question.

  “All right, all right,” the abbot growled, “never mind what he claims it is. Just go look it over carefully yourself and decide what you think it is.”

  Cheroki went to bend over the desk and scrutinize the papers carefully, one at a time, while the abbot paced and kept talking, seemingly to the priest but half to himself.

  “It’s impossible! You did the right thing to send him back before he uncovered more. But of course that’s not the worst part. The worst
part is the old man he babbles about. It’s getting too thick. I don’t know anything that could damage the case worse than a whole flood of improbable ‘miracles.’ A few real incidents, certainly! It has to be established that the intercession of the Beatus has brought about the miraculous–before canonization can occur. But there can be too much! Look at the Blessed Chang–beatified two centuries ago, but never canonized–so far. And why? His Order got too eager, that’s why. Every time somebody got over a cough, it was a miraculous cure by the Beatus. Visions in the basement, evocations in the belfry; It sounded more like a collection of ghost stories than a list of miraculous incidents. Maybe two or three incidents were really valid, but when there’s that much chaff–well?”

  Father Cheroki looked up. His knuckles had whitened on the edge of the desk and his face seemed strained. He seemed not to have been listening. “I beg your pardon, Father Abbot?”

  “Well, the same thing could happen here, that’s what,” said the abbot, and resumed his slow padding to and fro.

  “Last year there was Brother Noyon and his miraculous hangman’s noose. Ha! And the year before that, Brother Smirnov gets mysteriously cured of the gout–how?–by touching a probable relic of our Blessed Leibowitz, the young louts say. And now this Francis, he meets a pilgrim–wearing what?–wearing for a kilt the very burlap cloth they hooded Blessed Leibowitz with before they hanged him. And with what for a belt? A rope. What rope? Ahh, the very same–” He paused, looking at Cheroki. “I can tell by your blank look that you haven’t heard this yet? No? All right, so you can’t say. No, no, Francis didn’t say that. All he said was–” Abbot Arkos tried to inject a slightly falsetto quality into his normally gruff voice. “All Brother Francis said was–’I met a little old man, and I thought he was a pilgrim heading for the abbey because he was going that way, and he was wearing an old burlap sack tied around with a piece of rope. And he made a mark on the rock, and the mark looked like this.’ “

  Arkos produced a scrap of parchment from the pocket of his fur robe and held it up toward Cheroki’s face in the candle-glow. Still trying, with only slight success, to imitate Brother Francis: “ ‘And I couldn’t figure out what it meant. Do you know?’ ”

  Cheroki stared at the symbols and shook his head.

  “I wasn’t asking you,” Arkos gruffed in his normal voice. “That’s what Francis said. I didn’t know either.”

  “You do now?”

  “I do now. Somebody looked it up. That is a lamedh, and that is a sadhe. Hebrew letters.”

  “Sadhe lamedh?”

  “No. Right to left. Lamedh sadhe. An ell, and a tee-ess sound. If it had vowel marks, it might be ‘loots,” ‘lots,” ‘lets,” ‘lets,” ‘latz,” `litz’-anything like that. If it had some letters between those two, it might sound like Lllll–guess-who.”

  “Leibo–Ho, no!”

  “Ho, yes! Brother Francis didn’t think of it. Somebody else thought of it. Brother Francis didn’t think of the burlap hood and the hangman’s rope; one of his chums did. So what happens? By tonight, the whole novitiate is buzzing with the sweet little story that Francis met the Beatus himself out there, and the Beatus escorted our boy over to where that stuff was and told him he’d find his vocation.”

  A perplexed frown crossed Cheroki’s face. “Did Brother Francis say that?”

  “NOO!” Arkos roared. “Haven’t you been listening? Francis said no such things. I wish he had, by gum; then I’d HAVE the rascal! But he tells it sweet-and-simple, rather stupidly, in fact, and lets the others read in the meanings. I haven’t talked to him myself. I sent the Rector of the Memorabilia to get his story.”

  “I think I’d better talk to Brother Francis,” Cheroki murmured.

  “Do! When you first came in, I was still wondering whether to roast you alive or not. For sending him in, I mean. If you had let him stay out there on the desert, we wouldn’t have this fantastic twaddle going around. But, on the other hand, if he’d stayed out there, there’s no telling what else he might have dug out of that cellar. I think you did the right thing, to send him in.”

  Cheroki, who had made the decision on no such basis, found silence to be the appropriate policy.

  “See him,” growled the abbot. “Then send him to me.”

  It was about nine on a bright Monday morning when Brother Francis rapped timidly at the door of the abbot’s study. A good night’s sleep on the hard straw pallet in his old familiar cell, plus a small bite of unfamiliar breakfast, had not perhaps done any wonders for starved tissue or entirely cleared the sun-daze from his brain, but these relative luxuries had at least restored him to sufficient clarity of mind to perceive that he had cause to be afraid. He was, in fact, terrified, so that his first tap at the abbot’s door went unheard. Not even Francis could hear it. After several minutes, he mustered the courage to knock again.

  “Benedicamus Domine.”

  “Deo? gratias?” asked Francis.

  “Come in, my boy, come in!” called an affable voice, which, after some seconds of puzzling, he recognized with amazement to have been that of his sovereign abbot.

  “You twist the little knob, my son,” said the same friendly voice after Brother Francis had stood frozen on the spot for some seconds, with his knuckles still in position for knocking.

  “Y-y-yes–” Francis scarcely touched the knob, but it seemed that the accursed door opened anyway; he had hoped that it would he tightly stuck.

  “The Lord Abbot s-s-sent for–me?” squawked the novice.

  Abbot Arkos pursed his lips and nodded slowly. “Mmmm-yes, the Lord Abbot sent for–you. Do come in and shut the door.”

  Brother Francis got the door closed and stood shivering In the center of the room. The abbot was toying with some of the wire-whiskered things from the old toolbox.

  “Or perhaps it would be more fitting,” said Abbot Arkos, “If the Reverend Father Abbot were sent for by you. Now that you have been so favored by Providence and have become so famous, eh?” He smiled soothingly.

  “Heh heh?” Brother Francis laughed inquiringly. “Oh n-n-no, m’Lord.”

  “You do not dispute that you have won overnight fame? That Providence elected you to discover THIS–” he gestured sweepingly at the relics on the desk “–this JUNK box, as its previous owner no doubt rightly called it?”

  The novice stammered helplessly, and somehow managed to wind up wearing a grin.

  “You are seventeen and plainly an idiot, are you not?”

  “That is undoubtedly true, m’Lord Abbot.”

  “What excuse do you propose for believing yourself called to Religion?”

  “No excuse, Magister meus.”

  “Ah? So? Then you feel that you have no vocation to the Order?”

  “Oh, I do!” the novice gasped.

  “But you propose no excuse?”

  “None.”

  “You little cretin, I am asking your reason. Since you state none, I take it you are prepared to deny that you met anyone in the desert the other day, that you stumbled on this–this JUNK box with no help, and that what I have been hearing from others is only–feverish raving?”

  “Oh, no, Dom Arkos!”

  “Oh, no, what?”

  “I cannot deny what I saw with my own eyes, Reverend Father.”

  “So, you did meet an angel–or was it a saint?–or perhaps not yet a saint?–and he showed you where to look?”

  “I never said he was–”

  “And this is your excuse for believing yourself to have a true vocation, is it not? That this, this–shall we call him a ‘creature’?–spoke to you of finding a voice, and marked a rock with his initials, and told you it was what you were looking for, and when you looked, under it–there THIS was. Eh?”

  “Yes, Dom Arkos.”

  “What is your opinion of your own execrable vanity?”

  “My execrable vanity is unpardonable, m’Lord’n’Teacher.”

  “To imagine yourself important enough to be unpardonable is
an even vaster vanity,” roared the sovereign of the abbey.

  “M’Lord, I am indeed a worm.”

  “Very well, you need only deny the part about the pilgrim. No one else saw such a person, you know. I understand he was supposed to have been headed in this direction? That he even said he might stop here? That he inquired about the abbey? Yes? And where would he have disappeared to, if he ever existed? No such person came past here. The brother on duty at that time in the watchtower didn’t see him. Eh? Are you now ready to admit that you imagined him?”

  “If there are not really two marks on that rock where he–then maybe I might–”

  The abbot dosed his eyes and sighed wearily. “The marks are there–faintly,” he admitted. “You might have made them yourself.”

  “No, m’Lord.”

  “Will you admit that you imagined the old creature?”

  “No, m’Lord.”

  “Very well, do you know what is going to happen to you now?”

  “Yes, Reverend Father”

  “Then prepare to take it.”

  Trembling, the novice gathered up his habit about his waist and bent over the desk. The abbot withdrew a stout hickory ruler from the drawer, tested it on his palm, then gave Francis a smart whack with it across the buttocks.

  “Deo gratias!” the novice dutifully responded, gasping slightly.

  “Care to change your mind, my boy?”

  “Reverend Father, I can’t deny–”

  WHACK!

  “Deo gratias!”

  WHACK!

  “Deo gratias!”

  Ten times was this simple but painful litany repeated, with Brother Francis yelping his thanks to Heaven for each scorching lesson in the virtue of humility, as he was expected to do. The abbot paused after the tenth whack. Brother Francis was on tip-toe and bouncing slightly. Tears squeezed from the corners of clenched eyelids.