Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

by Walter M Miller Jr

  An hour late, the bell rang for supper. The meeting hall became a refectory again, and the tribunal adjourned for the meal. As the stream of monks filed silently down the corridor, Wooshin got up to join them. “You not eat?” he asked the defendant.

  Blacktooth shook his head and remained seated.

  Before the meal was finished, Levion came to the door and spoke to him: “Brother Medic says you should eat.”

  “No. Too sick.”

  “Stupid,” said Levion. “Stupid and lucky,” he added, more to himself than Blacktooth, as he turned back into the refectory. Lucky? The word lingered in his mind, but he could not find an application for it.

  There was a faintly audible reading by the lector; then supper ended. Except for the members of the tribunal, the monks filed silently out of the refectory. This time Blacktooth made bold to watch them go, but nobody, not even Wren or Singing Cow, looked down at him in passing. The last man out closed the door. The proceedings resumed.

  Soon the door opened again. Someone stepped outside and stood there. Blacktooth looked up, saw a freckled face, graying red hair, and a splash of scarlet. Blue-green eyes were staring at him. Blacktooth arose with a gasp and tried to genuflect with a leg that had gone to sleep. Elia Cardinal Brownpony caught his arm as he stumbled.

  “Your Eminence!” he croaked, and tried again to bow.

  “Sit down. You’re not well yet. I want to talk to you for a moment.”

  “Certainly, m’Lord.”

  Blacktooth remained standing, so the cardinal himself sat on the bench and tugged at the monk’s sleeve until he sank beside him.

  “I understand you have trouble with obedience.”

  “That has been true, m’Lord.”

  “Has it always been thus?”

  “I—I’m not sure. I suppose so, yes.”

  “You did begin by running away from home.”

  “I was thinking of that, m’Lord. But when I came here, I tried to obey. At first.”

  “But you tired of your assigned work.”

  “Yes. That is no excuse, but yes.”

  The cardinal shifted into Grasshopper dialect, with a Jackrabbit accent. “You speak and write well in several languages, I’m told.”

  “I seem to get along fairly well, Your Eminence, except I’m weak in ancient English,” he answered in the same tongue.

  “Well, you know, most of our present dialects are at least half old English,” said the cardinal, lapsing into Rockymount. “It’s just that the pronunciation has changed, and melted in with Spanish, and some think a bit of Mongolian, especially in Nomadic. Although I have my doubts about the myth of a Bayring Horde.”

  Silence fell while the cardinal seemed to muse.

  “Do you suppose you could serve obediently as someone’s interpreter? It would not involve hunching over a copy table for hours at a time, but you would have to translate on paper as well as interpret the spoken word.”

  Blacktooth mopped his face again with Wooshin’s waste and began crying. The cardinal allowed him to sob quietly until he regained control. Was this what Levion meant by “lucky”?

  “Do you think you could obey me, for example?”

  Blacktooth choked, “What good is a promise of mine? I broke all my vows but one.”

  “Which one is that, if you don’t mind saying?”

  “I have never had a woman, or a man. When I was a boy, I was had, though.” Torrildo’s accusing face came to mind as he said it, but he rejected the self-accusation.

  The Red Deacon laughed. “What about solitary unchastity?” Seeing Blacktooth’s face change, he hastily added, “Forgive the joke. I’m asking you seriously whether you want to leave this place forever.”

  “Forever?”

  “Well, at least for a very long time, with no reason to expect the Order would take you back even if you wanted to come.”

  “I have nowhere to go, m’Lord. That’s why I came back from the Mesa.”

  “Your abbot will release you to come to Valana with me, but you must promise to obey, and I must believe your promise. You cannot be laicized yet. You will be my servant.”

  Once more, the copyist was overwhelmed by tears.

  “Well, it’s now or never,” said the cardinal.

  “I promise,” he choked, “to do my best to obey you, m’Lord.”

  Brownpony stood up. “I’m sorry. What is ‘your best’? You can’t be allowed to decide that for yourself. That makes it a crippled promise. No, it won’t do.” He started toward the refectory door. Blacktooth fell to the floor, crawled after him, and clutched the hem of his cassock. “I swear before God,” he gasped. “May the Holy Mother abandon me, may the saints all curse me, if I fail. I promise to obey you, m’Lord. I promise!”

  The cardinal studied him contemptuously for a moment.

  “All right, get up then, and come with me, Brother Groveler. Here, this way, give me your arm. Come on through the doorway. Face them, Blacktooth. Now.”

  Feverish and dizzy, Blacktooth stepped into the refectory, walked a few steps toward the abbot’s table, looked at their faces, and fainted.

  He was awakened by a voice saying, “Give him this when he comes to, Father.” It was Brother Surgeon.

  “All right, go see your other patient,” said Prior Olshuen.

  “I’m awake,” said Blacktooth, and sat up by candlelight as the only occupant of the three-bed infirmary. Brother Surgeon came back to his bedside, felt his forehead, and handed him a glass of milky green liquid.

  “What is it?”

  “Willow bark, tincture of hemp leaves, poppy juice, alcohol. You’re not very sick. You can go back to your cell tomorrow if you want to.”

  “No,” said the prior. “You’ve got to have him well enough to leave in three days. Otherwise, we’ll be stuck with him until the next stage to Valana.” He turned to Blacktooth, his voice turning cold. “You are confined. Your meals will be brought to you. You will not speak to anyone not in authority over you. If a sick brother needs one of the other beds here, then you will return to your cell. When you leave us, you will take your breviary, your beads, your toilet articles, sandals, and a blanket, but you will exchange your habit for that of a novice. You will remain indefinitely in the custody of your benefactor, Cardinal Brownpony, without whose intercession you would be under interdict and shunned. Is that clear?”

  Blacktooth looked at the man who had been his teacher and protector in his youth, and nodded.

  “Do you have anything else to say to us?”

  “I would like to confess.”

  The prior frowned, almost shook his head, then said, “Wait until the medicine wears off. I’ll ask Dom Jarad about it.”

  In a very weak voice: “May I have your blessing, then?”

  Olshuen stood a moment in angry indecision, then whispered, “Benedicat te, omnipotens Deus, Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus,” traced a tiny cross in the air, and departed.

  CHAPTER 5

  But if he is not healed even in this way, then let the Abbot use the knife of amputation, according to the Apostle’s words, “Expel the evil one from your midst…let him depart,” lest one diseased sheep contaminate the whole flock.

  —Saint Benedict’s Rule, Chapter 28

  NDER THE WITHERING GAZE OF HIS FORMER brethren, Blacktooth at last left his cell with his small bundle and made his way into the sunlit courtyard where the Red Deacon’s coach was made ready for departure. While he was helping the driver lash his meager belongings to the top of the carriage, he overheard the voice of Singing Cow, just out of sight, talking to a newly arrived postulant who worked in the library.

  “He tried persuasion at first, I’ll grant that,” his former comrade explained. “And when persuasion didn’t get him out, he tried violence. And when violence didn’t get him out, he tried sodomy. I heard that from a witness. But sodomy didn’t get him out either, or stealing, or running away. So he inserted a gloss into a copy of the Venerable Boedullus.”

&n
bsp; “Without attribution?” gasped the assistant librarian.

  “Despicable, isn’t it,” said Singing Cow.

  “It wasn’t Boedullus!” Blacktooth howled. “It was only Duren!”

  Blacktooth rode with the driver as they bumped along the north road toward the mountain passes. He never once looked back at the abbey. The Axe was with them, sometimes driving when Holy Madness rode the cardinal’s horse, sometimes riding inside the coach when the cardinal chose to be in the saddle. Both Wooshin and the Nomad treated the disgraced monk with courtesy, but he had as little intercourse as possible with Brownpony or his clerical companion.

  One morning when they had been three days on the road, Wooshin said to him, “You hide from Cardinal. Why you shun? You know he saved you neck back there. Abbot wring like a chicken, except Cardinal save you. Why you afraid him?”

  Blacktooth began to deny it, but heard an inner cock’s crow. Wooshin was right. To him, Brownpony represented the authority of the Church, previously wielded by Dom Jarad, and he was tired of the obedience which he had been forced to swear again to save himself. But it was necessary to separate the office from the man. After Wooshin’s remarks, he stopped shrinking from his rescuer, and exchanged polite greetings in the mornings. But the cardinal, sensing his discomfort, for the most part ignored his presence during much of the journey.

  Sometimes Wooshin and the Nomad wrestled or fought for sport with staves. The Nomad called him Axe, which no one at the abbey had dared to do, and Wooshin seemed not to object to the nickname, as long as it was not prefixed by “Brother.” In spite of his age and apparent frailty, the Axe was the inevitable winner of these bouts by firelight, and made the Nomad appear so clumsy that Blacktooth once accepted an offer to try fencing the driver with staves. The driver not-so-clumsily whacked him six times and left him sitting in hot ashes while Wooshin and the cardinal laughed.

  “Let Wooshin teach you,” said Brownpony. “In Valana, you may need to defend yourself. You’ve lived in a cloister, and you’re soft. In turn, you help him work on his Rockymount accent.”

  Blacktooth protested politely, but the cardinal was insistent. So the fencing and language lessons began. “You ready die now?” the Brother Axe asked cheerfully at the beginning of each session, as if he had always asked it of his customers. Afterward, they talked a lot in Rockymount.

  But it was with Holy (Little Bear) Madness, the driver, that Blacktooth felt most comfortable, reckoning him to be a servant of no rank or status, and the two struck up an acquaintance. His name in Nomadic was Chür (Ösle) Høngan, and he called Blacktooth “Nimmy,” which in Nomadic approximated the word “kid,” meaning one who had not yet endured the rites of passage into manhood, Blacktooth was scarcely younger than Holy Madness, but he did not take offense. It’s true, he thought; I am a thirty-five-year-old teenager. So the abbot had reminded him. As far as experience in the world was concerned, he might as well have been in prison since childhood. But frightened of an unknowable future, he was already homesick for that prison.

  Life at the monastery had not really been equal parts prayer, hard labor, and groveling, as he had told himself. He had done things there he loved to do. He loved the formal prayer of the Church. He sang well, and while he tried to merge his voice in that of the choir, his was the clear tenor that defined itself by its absence when the choir divided into two groups singing the ancient psalms in a dialogue of verse and response. The group without Blacktooth missed him. And on three occasions when there were important guests at the abbey, Blacktooth, at the abbot’s request, had sung alone for everyone—once in the Church and twice at supper. In the refectory, he had sung Nomad songs with his own embellishments affiliated to childhood memories. He refused to take pride in this, but his Satan took it anyway. While at the abbey, he had made a stringed instrument much like the one his father had given him. He hedged its Nomad origin by naming it after King David’s chitara, but pronouncing it “g’tara.” It was among the few belongings he had brought with him, and he strummed it a little during the trip, when Brownpony was away on his horse. He was averse to doing anything which might make him seem ridiculous to Brownpony, and he wondered about this aversion.

  Some of the territory claimed by right of conquest as part of the Texark Province was not well defined, and the ill-defined area between the sources of the Bay Ghost and Nady Ann Rivers and the mountains to the west was a kind of no-man’s-land, where low-intensity warfare persisted at times among poor fugitive tribes of the Grasshopper who had refused to take up farming, Nomadic outlaws, also mostly Grasshopper refugees, and Texark cavalry sometimes joined by Wilddog war parties in pursuit of raiders. The cardinal’s party carefully skirted the western edge of this area, for Brownpony claimed without much explanation that the mountains, especially the moist and fertile Suckamint Range were well defended by exiles from the east, of non-Nomadic origin It was also true that Nomads were superstitious about mountains and stayed away from their heights. The trail led through the foothills, and the nights were cold. But there was much more life here than on the surrounding desert. From occasional horse-apple trees and scrub oak, the flora began proliferating and growing taller. Devoid of foliage at present, cottonwood, willow, and catalpa-bean trees flourished adjacent to creekbeds, while high upon the snowy mountainsides one could make out the trunks of mighty snow-clad conifers. There were a number of streams to ford, some flowing eastward, trickles of water edged by ice, and some were mere dry washes that would flow only during a flash flood in the foothills. The spring thaw had barely begun. All but the largest creeks would evaporate in the dry land to the east, where a small child could wade through a year’s rainfall without wetting its knees.

  As they gained altitude on their northward journey, it began to snow lightly. The Nomad took the stallion and began exploring side trails. Before evening, he returned with news of some abandoned buildings less than an hour from the main road. So they turned off the papal highway and drove a few miles along a rough trail until they came to a rickety village. Several spotted children and a dog with two tails fled to their homes. Brownpony looked questions at Chür Høngan, who said, “There was nobody here when I was here a while ago.”

  “They were hiding from an obvious Nomad,” the Red Deacon said, smiling.

  But then a woman with one large blue eye and one small red eye came out of a hut to meet them with a pike and bared teeth. A hunchback with a musket limped rapidly after her. Blacktooth knew that the cardinal had a pistol well hidden in the upholstery, but he let it alone. He looked around at half a dozen sickly-looking people.

  “Gennies!” gasped Father e’Laiden, who had just awakened from a snooze in the carriage. There was no contempt in his voice, but it was the wrong word to utter at the moment.

  This was obviously a small colony of genetically handicapped, fugitives from the overpopulated Valley of the Misborn, which was now called the Watchitah Nation since its boundaries were fixed by treaty. There were pockets of such fugitives throughout the land, and they were usually at defensive war with all strangers. The hunchback lifted his musket and aimed first at Chür Høngan, who was driving, then at Blacktooth.

  “Both of you get down. And the others inside, get out!” The woman’s voice dog-whined the Valley version of the Ol’zark dialect, confirming their origins. She was as dangerous as a whipped cur, Blacktooth sensed. He could smell the fear.

  Everyone obeyed except the Axe, who was freshly missing. The executioner had been riding Brownpony’s horse only moments before. At the woman’s call, a blond young girl came and searched them for weapons. She was lovely and golden, with no apparent defects, and Blacktooth blushed as her soft hands patted his body. She noticed his blush, grinned in his face, pushed close, seized and squeezed his member, then darted away with his rosary. The woman angrily called her back, but the girl was gone long enough to have hidden his beads. Blacktooth was almost certain the girl was a spook, that is, a Valley-born genny who passes for normal.

 
He remembered stories he had heard of ogres, perverts, homicidal maniacs among the gennies. Some of the stories were filthy jokes, and most of them were told by bigots. But, having heard the stories, he could feel the shame from them, but not forget in the face of these menacing figures that one or another of the stories came true from time to time. Anything was possible.

  Brownpony stirred at last, stepped down from the carriage, and with some majesty put on his red cap. He said to them, “We are Churchmen from Valana, my children. We have no weapons. We seek refuge from the weather, and we shall pay you well for shelter and a cooking fire.”

  The old woman seemed not to hear him. “Get all their belongings, from inside and on top,” the woman told the girl in the same tone.

  The cardinal turned to the girl. “You know who I am, and I know who you are,” he said to her. “I am Elia Brownpony of the Secretariat.”

  She shook her head.

  “You never met me, but you do know of me.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said.

  “Move!” said the old woman.

  The girl climbed inside and began throwing out clothing and other belongings, including Blacktooth’s chitara, then thrust out her head and asked, “Books?”

  “Those too.”

  Brownpony’s concealed pistol would be next, Blacktooth thought, as he wondered why Brownpony insisted that he was known to the girl. He was not self-important, not an egoist who expected to be recognized everywhere. For now the cardinal shrugged and stopped protesting. Apparently, the girl never found the pistol.

  Suddenly a muffled cry came from the direction of the largest hut in the cluster. The deformed woman looked around. An old man with mottled skin and white hair appeared in the doorway. Behind him stood Wooshin with his forearm against the old man’s throat. The Axe could almost make himself invisible. Having circled the village and approached from the rear, he held up his short sword for their edification. Evidently this was the chief of the village, for the woman and the hunchback immediately dropped their weapons.