Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

by Walter M Miller Jr

  Did I go to a monastery to make myself morally perfect?

  No, not at all.

  What, then?

  The monk’s ultimate goal is direct union with the Godhead, But to aim at that goal is to miss it altogether. His task is to rid himself of ego so that consciousness, once its usual discordant mental content dumped out of it through ritual prayer and meditation, may experience nonself as a living formlessness and emptiness into which God may come, if it please Him to come. So Eckhart had spoken of it two thousand years ago: “God gives birth to His Son in the soul.” Only in self-emptiness may it happen one day that Christ awaken within the monk, as I-to-I. But there was someone else awake there now, for Blacktooth, and he was very lonely, very lonely for her.

  CHAPTER 9

  The third degree of humility is that a person for the love of God submits himself to his Superior in all obedience, imitating the Lord, of whom the Apostle says, “He became obedient even unto death.”

  —Saint Benedict’s Rule, Chapter 7

  LEASED BY THE INCREASE IN HIS LIVING allowance, Blacktooth planned to change his residence as soon as the crowd left town after the election, but for the time being he was forced to continue living with the students. Wooshin would be leaving in a few days at the cardinal’s bidding.

  When he came home from work on the afternoon of Holy Tuesday, the student named Aberlott called “Catch!” and tossed something to him as soon as he came through the door. Blacktooth grabbed for it, missed, and turned to pick it up when it bounced off the wall. Looking down at the object, he froze m a half-crouch.

  “What’s wrong?” the student asked. “Isn’t it yours? She said it belonged to you.”

  Blacktooth picked it up and turned to stare at Aberlott. “She?” he gasped.

  “The nun. My God, what is the matter? You’re white as snow.”

  “Nun?”

  “Sure. One of the stricter orders, I believe. Brown habit, white coif. Barefoot. Isn’t that your rosary? She said you left it in the cardinal’s coach.”

  “Was she a genny?”

  “A genny? Not that I could tell. She didn’t wear the headband. Of course, celibate religious don’t have to. You can’t see much of a nun except her face and hands and feet. She was rather pretty for a nun though. She didn’t look like a genny to me. You were expecting a genny?”

  Blacktooth sat down on his bed and stared at the beads and the cross. The silver had been carefully cleaned of tarnish, and the beads seemed brighter than he remembered, well polished now.

  “Did she say anything else?”

  “No, not that I recall. We talked a little about the conclave. I was trying to flirt, I guess. She was kind, but she was distant. Oh, she did ask where you were, in an offhand way. That’s all.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I said you were usually at the Secretariat this time of day. I don’t think she was actually looking for you though. She went off in the opposite direction. Just wanted to return the rosary, I think. I wondered what she was doing in the cardinal’s carriage.”

  “Looting it,” he whispered.

  “What did you say?”

  Blacktooth lay back on the bench and closed his eyes. After a long time, he said, “Thank you, Aberlott.”

  “Don’t mention it.” The student resumed his reading.

  Perhaps the nun was really a nun. Ædrea had given the rosary to a nun, that’s all. It was all right for a genny to be a nun and not wear the green headband, but for a genny to impersonate a religious in order to conceal ancestry was a crime under the laws of the Denver Republic, as everywhere. Persecution of the genetically diseased was nearly universal. They were protected only by the law of the Church, but not to the extent of allowing the impersonation of religious. And while the Church might protest against discriminatory legislation by the secular authority, she had never taken a firm stand against eugenic laws designed to prevent intermarriage between the healthy and the children of the Pope. Nor had she resisted laws defining the marriageability of citizens in terms of degrees of kinship to known freaks. The baptismal records of Churches were used as evidence in secular courts, and priests were required to note the pedigrees of parents on certificates of baptism. Before any couple were given a license to marry by the secular arm, both had to undress and be tested by the medical inspectors of a civil magistrate. The Nomads, of course, had their own rules, but there was no tolerance among them for deformity, hereditary or otherwise. They simply killed the deformed at birth.

  He fingered the beads of his rosary and decided that Ædrea must have given it to a nun in a party of religious traveling up the papal highway. He felt shame for the fear and hope that surged within him when he turned to pick it up. Surely, it must have been a nun. What the police would do to a genny impersonating a citizen was nothing compared to what a mob would do. And surely, Ædrea herself would not have polished the beads and cleaned the crucifix so. If she had sent it back sooner, he would have escaped that horrid moment in confession about bartering it for sex, as Specklebird construed it. But why had she returned it at all, even indirectly?

  “What color was her hair?” he called to the student, who was immersed in a textbook.

  “Whose hair?”

  “The nun.”

  “Which—? Oh! Her coif hid it.” He paused. “Probably blond. She was very fair.”

  Blacktooth stirred uneasily. Blondes were not plentiful, but there were probably dozens of them in Valana. The mixed ancestry of the continent’s population produced skin colors in varying shades of brown, but fair skin and black skin were both rather rare, as were red and blond hair.

  He arose from the bench and went outside. There was nobody in the street but an old man and two children. The rotten smell from the creek behind the house was particularly strong this afternoon. Several neighbors had become ill lately, probably from the creek or its vapors. He decided to take a walk up the hill, in the direction away from the Secretariat.

  He walked for an hour. There were fewer and fewer houses as he moved along. At last he came to a guard post at the fenced limits of the city. Beyond it lay only forest and a few hermitages, including the home of Amen Specklebird. He stopped to speak to the sentry.

  “How long have you been on duty, corporal?”

  The young officer looked toward the sun, hanging low in the west. “About four hours, I guess. Why?”

  “Did a young nun pass this way? Brown robe, white coif…”

  The sentry immediately looked toward the woods, studied Blacktooth for a moment, and began to leer. “Oh, ho! I wondered why she was going out there alone.”

  Angered by the leer, the monk turned and hiked back down the road for home. The anger turned to fear again. He knew it was fear for Ædrea, but she was probably safe at home in Arch Hollow. The nun was just a nun. And yet if nuns had a small convent farther up the hillside, would the sentry have wondered about her destination?

  He dreamed that night that he was wearing a green headband and fleeing from a mob who wanted to castrate him for lying with Torrildo, who had breasts as large as Ædrea’s, or was it Ædrea with a penis as large as Torrildo’s? He was trapped in Shard’s barn, which now housed Brother Kornhoer’s old generator and the chair of electricity from the chapel. Someone was screaming. Rough hands were strapping him into the chair when somebody shook him awake. The rough hands belonged to Wooshin.

  “Stop howling,” said the Axe. “You’ll wake up the whole neighborhood.”

  “He already has,” Aberlott grumbled sleepily from the next room. Crumily was swearing and pounding his pillow. Jæsis had never stopped snoring and moaning.

  When the others had subsided into sleep again, Blacktooth felt under his hard pillow for the rosary. He fingered the crucifix and began whispering the creed, but stopped. Cleaned and polished or not, it felt desecrated. In confession, he had tried to blame Ædrea for stealing it, but Father Specklebird had forced him to admit that he had not taxed her again for the beads after
a bout of pleasant but certainly sinful sex in the hay.

  “Don’t mince words. You traded your rosary for a blow job,” the old man had said sourly, “and broke your vow of chastity. Now go on. What else have you done?”

  Blacktooth was still doing the penance which Father Specklebird had assigned him. (“You shall make a list, an inventory of all your wealth, my son.”) At first he thought it a trivial penance, and that the list would be quite short. But the more he worked at it the more clearly he recognized that his riches were coextensive with, and not different from, his sins. There was more (or less) to spiritual poverty than owning nothing.

  The city had not been well since the visitors had come. Down from the mountains perhaps, a fetid chinook or chill miasma had breathed upon it, sickening many of the young, the old, the frail. Food Was scarce. Wheat especially was in short supply, and rye of poor quality was imported at high prices. The inns were full to bulging, and inadequate sewers overflowed to the streets in lower elevations. A quorum of cardinals had not yet arrived, but among those already in town, several had fallen sick. The water was blamed at first. It happens every time, the visitors said; none but the locals could safely drink it. But this time was worse than before. There was sickness among the local population as well. The symptoms were various, and not always the same. There was vomiting and fever, as in the case of the student Jæsis. Others experienced dizziness, headache, depression, mania, delirium, or panic. One physician claimed there were two diseases at work and spreading. Only wealthy Valanans seemed immune, but the immunity was not due to wealth itself; visiting cardinals were not notably poor, but a number of them showed symptoms. There was an urgency to get the conclave started, and if possible, done with. Local people blamed the sickness on crowded conditions caused by visitors. Others cited the wrath of God, which would be appeased only by a swift election.

  Because of the sickness and of impatience at lengthy conclaves, there were demonstrations and unrest in Valana that month. On Palm Sunday, what seemed to be a religious procession had moved toward the former fortress hilltop from the college of Saint Ston’s. As it neared Saint John-in-Exile, its character changed. New banners were unfurled, and the procession became a political parade, whose half-serious purpose was to proclaim popular support of the students of Saint Ston’s Seminary for Amen Specklebird as a candidate for the triple crown and the throne of Peter. Hearing about it, Father Specklebird did not wait to be summoned by the current Bishop of Denver, but came limping hastily into town to denounce the enterprise and scold the students. Leaders of the movement were arrested by the secular police—an action which Specklebird felt forced to condemn.

  On the following day, students from the secular college staged a parody of the incident by demonstrating in favor of the candidacy of the trigamous Cardinal Ri of Hong, much to the delight of the Axe, who had made friends with Ri’s six-man bodyguard, and had learned as much as he could from them about life beyond the western ocean. Again, leaders were arrested, but the jail was already full of drunken farmers, Nomads, and pickpockets who had come to exploit the presence of the growing crowds of petitioners and lobbyists who always converged on conclaves. The student leaders were lightly flogged, the others given probation. There were also ecclesiastical penalties for attempting to influence the election.

  On Tuesday of Holy Week, the Dean of the Sacred College appeared on the balcony of Saint John-in-Exile and promised a turbulent mob of jeering people that the conclave would begin as soon as 398 cardinals were present. “Probably within ten days,” he added. Since the death of Pope Linus VI, twenty-two cardinals had followed him to the grave, and the three subsequent popes had observed a moratorium on the bestowal of red hats; but still under present law two-thirds plus one of all eligible electors, excluding those who were certifiably infirm, were necessary to elect. And when no more than the necessary 398 had arrived, they would have to vote unanimously in order to elect a pope, so the Dean’s promise was an empty one and the crowd knew it. No serious voting could begin until all but the senile, the sick, and the lame had arrived in Valana.

  Votes were being counted in advance, and the bookmakers of Valana were already taking bets, an excommunicating offense. There was no odds-on favorite, but one might bet two alabasters on Golopez Cardinal Onyo from Old Mexico in hopes of winning three, while fans of Urion Benefez could bet one to win three. There were somewhat similar odds on Urion’s talk-alike, Otto Cardinal e’Notto from the Great River Delta, and Chuntar Hadala, a greatly respected missionary bishop to the Valley of the Misborn, now the Watchitah Nation. Sorely Nauwhat from Oregon was given at ten-to-one, because of the persistent doctrinal problems in his territory. Abbot Jarad Kendemin was rated fifteen-to-one, because of his reluctance. Only by betting on such improbables as Elia Cardinal Brownpony or Amen Specklebird could a poor porter or housewife hope to become rich.

  Holy Week was celebrated with all the pomp possible in the absence of a reigning pontiff. Masses were concelebrated with all able cardinals present, and many of the religious processions were real. But the pageantry was not a distraction to a single-minded population who wanted a pope, a western pope, and wanted him soon. Much anger was directed at the absent Cardinal Archbishop of Texark for his deliberate delay, but his advance party of legists, servants, and conclavists were already busy preparing for what would no doubt be his grand entrance upon the scene at the appropriate moment.

  A preliminary meeting of electors, their assistants and conclavists, legists, other prelates, diplomats, leaders of religious orders, and eminent scholars, among them theologians, historians, and political theorists, was scheduled for the afternoon of Maundy Thursday. The announced topic was to be the changing relationship between the Church and the Secular Power in the first half of the thirty-third century. The informal and nonsacred nature of this convention was emphasized by holding it in the Great Hall of Saint Ston at the seminary, and by admitting certain categories of nonparticipants as observers.

  “Are you going to this fistfight, Blacktooth?” asked Aberlott, who had put on his student’s uniform.

  “Who’s doing the fighting?” asked the monk.

  “Well, it’s Benefez against any challenger. Who knows, your own master might pick up the gauntlet for the west.”

  Jæsis rolled over on his cot and groaned.

  “Cardinal Brownpony doesn’t get into fights, and the Archbishop of Texark isn’t even in town yet.”

  “Oh, but his whole staff is here. And thirteen cardinals from the Imperium. He’s going to make his move, all right.”

  Jæsis yelped in his sleep, and muttered profanity.

  “Mention Benefez, and Jæsis gets mad.” Aberlott nodded toward the feverish sleeper. “Or maybe it’s the Hannegan he hates.”

  “You think there’ll be a squabble?”

  “I know it. Father General Corvany of the Order of Saint Ignatz will be there, for one.” This woke Jæsis up, and he began swearing more coherently.

  Blacktooth reached for his robe. “I know a priest of Corvany’s Order who defied him once.”

  “And he’s still a priest?”

  “…‘forever, after the order of Melchisedech,’ as they say. But he’s under interdict. He wouldn’t hear my confession.”

  “What’s his name?”

  Blacktooth hesitated, then shook his head, regretting that he had mentioned the Ignatzian. He had learned from his work as translator at the Secretariat that Father e’Laiden, with whom he had traveled to Pobla, and Father Ombroz, the tutor and chaplain of the Little Bear clan, were the one and the same man. “I get the name mixed up with somebody else,” he said. “I must have forgotten.”

  “Well, are you coming?”

  “As soon as I finish dressing.”

  The auditorium at Saint Ston’s had seating for two thousand. A quarter of the seats near the front had been roped off for the cardinals, but was still half empty when the campus bell tolled three. Another fourth of the seats were reserved for the cardinals
’ first servants, and these were filled to capacity with priests and scribes who were obviously here to take notes and be bored. The other half of the seating was open to lesser prelates, faculty, priests, monks, and students, in that order of preference. The supply was greater than the demand. Blacktooth and Aberlott, who came early, took seats behind the cardinal’s servants, and were not asked to move to the rear. A few people drifted onto the stage. He recognized the head of the seminary, then a man in a white tunic and scapular with black cappa who had to be a prominent Dominican, probably the head of the Order from the west coast. Blacktooth suddenly slid lower in his seat. The Lord Abbot Jarad Cardinal Kendemin had come from the wings and took a seat beside the Dominican. They beamed at each other, exchanged the kiss of peace, and began a lively whispered conversation over the empty seat between them.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Aberlott, looking down at Blacktooth. “Would you rather lie on the floor?”

  When the clock somewhere above them dinged the quarter hour, Aberlott stood up with a straight face and said, “Here comes the judge.” Several others in the vicinity climbed to their feet.

  Blacktooth grabbed his sleeve. “Sit down, you clown!”

  The man who had come to the podium was the president of the seminary. He spoke brief words of welcome, then invited cardinals who wished their servants to sit beside them to call them forward, and the rest of the audience to move forward to fill empty spaces. Aberlott hitched his corpulent self one seat to the left, told an interloper that the seat between them was taken, and when the audience was quiet again, he turned to beckon Wooshin, standing in the rear, to join them, but the Axe shook his head. His presence meant that Cardinal Brownpony was nearby. The warrior had become the Red Deacon’s personal bodyguard, and expected to move soon into the servants’ quarters at the cardinal’s home.