Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

by Walter M Miller Jr

  Nimmy thought about it for a while. His mind caught a chilling glimpse of remembered warriors, his boyhood rapists, in action. “I suppose I’m prejudiced, Axe. The soldiers I’ve met are often pious, but I never met any warrior except you who seemed to have a spiritual dimension.”

  “Except me? Do I have a spiritual dimension, Nimmy?”

  “You may laugh, but I’ve thought so. All I really know about you is what you want me to know. Isn’t it so, Axe?”

  “Well, where these men come from, all monks, even Christians, have a weaponless warrior tradition.”

  “They’re not weaponless now! Are you saying they are monks?”

  “Yes, I think you can call them monks. As for the weapons, Ri dispensed them from that rule, and our master extended the dispensation. The order they belong to is Asiatic, and it isn’t recognized here. When either Cardinal Brownpony or the Pope understands that they do have religious vows, they will lose their freedom until the Church can decide what to do with them. They are not anxious to go home, but their vows are similar to yours. They want to be free to form a community, but they’ve been afraid to ask. That’s why they want and need to learn Churchspeak as soon as possible. You don’t need to nag us about that. I suggested to the cardinal they stay awhile at Leibowitz Abbey. There, they could wear their habits and learn your liturgy. Would they be welcome?”

  “I am not the one to speak for Abbot Jarad Cardinal Kendemin.” He fought bitterness for a moment, but went on: “You’ve read the Rule of Saint Benedict, Axe. The Brothers of Leibowitz still honor most of that rule, which means that they must offer hospitality to anybody who comes to them, as if he were Christ wandering in from the desert. But I’m not suggesting that Ri’s men take advantage of that rule.”

  “No, of course you wouldn’t want the abbot to know you suggested it by suggesting against it,” Wooshin said sourly. “But you’re right about their learning Churchspeak. I’ll drill them more. If they go to Leibowitz Abbey, it will not be at your suggestion, but the cardinal’s which he already made.”

  “All right. I hereby forget it, although I would like to know about their Order.”

  “They know that I taught you to fight a little, and they want to know if other monks of your Order would be allowed to learn weaponless combat, or would it be against rules?”

  “Well, there is no rule, as long as it’s for sport or exercise. We have occasional ball games outside the walls, those of us whose jobs don’t involve physical labor.” He laughed. “But if you can imagine getting the Lord Abbot’s permission to train fighters!”

  “I know. It’s too bad. Their Order has an interesting tradition. If they are to remain there, they would like to form a community, or merge with one.”

  Later he confessed to Blacktooth, “You know, Nimmy, my people out on the coast were refugees from these Asian Christians several generations ago. Cardinal Ri was a super-Benefez in his own country. These Christians were conquerors. My people were the losers, and crossed the ocean.”

  Nimmy looked at the executioner as if seeing him for the first time. “Mine were the losers too,” he said. “We should be spiritual brothers.”

  A sharp glance from Axe told him this intimacy was getting too thick. He wheeled his mount around and rode back toward the guards and the wagon. Once again, Nimmy realized that Axe did not fully trust him since he had disobeyed the cardinal.

  Wooshin had become strange to him again, but he knew the estrangement lay within himself. The news, conveyed by a possibly ironic Wooshin, that the Yellow Guard was trying to convert him to their Christianity—that news discomfited him. Why had he and his fellow monks ignored Wooshin’s religion, if he had any? Axe had come to Mass habitually, but never received communion. His dedication and loyalty had a spiritual quality, as did his attitude toward death. He would have made a good monk, Nimmy thought. But the Albertian Order of Leibowitz was never devoted to the conversion of the heathen. That was why. It was against the rules. Monks were free to answer a guest’s religious questions, but the Axe never asked any. Now these strange men wanted to bring him into their religious brotherhood. The Order of Leibowitz had missed its chance to have, besides its electric chair, a warrior monk and executioner.

  Wooshin’s new friends in the Yellow Guard had learned of his years as a headsman for the Hannegans, Filpeo Harq and his predecessor. Nimmy had heard them talking, understood very little of their mixed dialect except when they practiced Churchspeak, but could tell that the aliens were both sympathetic and amused, and he sensed that the Axe came away from the conversation both irritated and relieved. It seemed to Nimmy that Wooshin had succumbed to an attack of almost Christian guilt about his old job, and the warriors were apparently trying to cure him of it by conversion. The Axe obviously missed the cardinal as Blacktooth did; and the monk wondered who was now acting as Brownpony’s bodyguard after the attempted assassination. Ri’s men had all been loaned by the new Vicar Apostolic to SEEC’s clandestine wing, once they had learned to communicate a little in Rockymount, but here they were: far from their new master, and as lost as Nimmy himself.

  The monk tried to make religion his only concern again, at least for the duration of the trip, but the effort gradually failed, and the effect of the failure was that he became so irritable he went for three days without even attempting to pray, meditate, or read the canonical hours. His mind, affected by periods of heat exhaustion, kept reaching out to grasp at Jarad, Brownpony, Ædrea, Holy Madness, or the Pope, and to rehearse imaginary dialogues with them, to shake sense into them. Especially Ædrea. This was self-indulgence, self-absorption, vanity, and ego. Because he could not pacify his mind internally, he finally turned outward and tried to stay busy and available for conversation with even Aberlott.

  The group of travelers had taken on an almost military structure of command under Elkin, with Wooshin and Ulad as lieutenants. By the route they were to take, there was danger neither from Texark agents nor from motherless Nomads, although drifting outlaws of every stripe occasionally wandered through the arid land, and there was always the possibility of hostile confrontation. The terrain was rougher than that which Blacktooth had encountered on his first visit to Valana. There was no fixed road; only passes through mountainous areas were clearly defined. The group carried conventional arms, besides those carried by pack mules and in the wagons, but they met no one except a wizened old man who joined them one night after sundown, having wandered in behind them from the direction of Valana. The advent of the old man was the occasion of an argument among those concerned with secrecy and security, but the old fellow seemed half dead, and he was headed toward New Jerusalem anyway. Ulad claimed that he had seen him before. “He’s been to New Jerusalem,” said the giant. “Magister Dion hired him once, so he knows about us.”

  “Hired him? For what?”

  “He can make it rain, for silver.”

  “Is he any good?”

  “It rained, but not much. Dion paid him, but not much.”

  “He knows the town, then, but does he know about our baggage?” Elkin wondered. “He’s already seen us, so he must come with us. If he behaves himself, he’s a guest. If he tries to leave, he’s a prisoner, until we get where we’re going.”

  Nevertheless, the old man refused to join them at first, and might have been arrested and bound to one of the wagons if he had not changed his mind upon learning that Blacktooth was a monk of Saint Leibowitz, a fact that seemed to amuse him greatly. He teased the monk about not wearing a habit while still wearing his rosary around his waist. Nimmy tried to avoid conversation with the old man, who seemed to know more about Leibowitz Abbey than seemed probable. The ancient stranger, after a few attempts to talk, shrugged at the monk’s reticence, perhaps attributing it to religious silence, but he continued to snipe at him occasionally as if to keep in practice.

  He called himself a pilgrim but not a Christian. He wore tattered garments of hemp, coarsely woven, and he carried his belongings in a bag tied to the end o
f his staff. He protected his pate from the sun with a curiously embroidered skullcap which he called a “yarmulke.” Although defensive and suspicious at first, he seemed harmless enough and became talkative after the first day. Nimmy could not believe that Brownpony’s enemies would send such a decrepit fellow as a spy. Elkin seemed to agree, for besides allowing him to ride an extra mule, the security man put him on one of the wagons after he complained of being saddle sore, even though he had to sit on a crate of weapons.

  He told them he was a Jew and a tentmaker among other things. He was obviously one of those wanderers who peddled his skills as a rainmaker in areas of low rainfall. This old Jew had several useful skills and thus several sources of income. For fifteen pios, he would pull a tooth; for eight, he would scrape the incrustation from the rest of your teeth and scrub them well with talc. Root canals were negotiable. He contracted as a rainmaker, and if he made no rain in a week, he got no pay beyond his week’s room and board; if rain came, he received whatever the petitioners could, in his opinion, afford. His advice in every imaginable matter was freely given to whoever would listen to him, and sometimes imposed upon whoever would not.

  Blacktooth tried to use the journey for privacy and silence, insofar as his wish to be polite survived its many trials. But the old Jew would not let him be, and he asked all sorts of questions about an Abbot Jerome, who, to the best of Nimmy’s recollection, had died seventy years ago at an advanced age, and yet this old man claimed he had been Jerome’s friend, Benjamin.

  “You must be nearly a hundred years old,” Nimmy said skeptically. “Or maybe even more.”

  “Hmm-hnn! I would have to be, wouldn’t I?”

  Claims to extraordinary longevity arose in the Valley of the Misborn, but the old pilgrim was not an obvious glep. Still, he had been admitted to the secret nation in the Suckamints, had been allowed to leave again, and was not going back. Magister Dion must have looked into his background. But if he was a spook himself, Ulad should know. Ulad, however, seemed to regard the old Jew as disreputable, at least as a rainmaker. That the Suckamint Mountains were a refuge for the misborn was widely known within the Church, but the nature of the heart of the colony as a nation of spooks was obscured by the fact that gleps like Shard and his family inhabited the surrounding foothills, not admitted to full citizenship, but protected by the well-armed central colony from outlaws, loose Nomads, and Texark agents. Wanderers usually shied away from the area, as they shied away from Misborn Valley, and those who did try to enter were killed or driven away.

  “And what business would a monk of Saint Leibowitz have in New Babel,” the old man asked. “Especially a monk in disgrace.”

  “Who told you that?” Nimmy looked at him sharply, surprised that gossip had already passed on to this total stranger. Who in the party knew of his status? Well, they all did. Wooshin, Elkin, Aberlott, everybody. Nevertheless, he was embarrassed that his private life was open knowledge.

  “I am merely the bearer of a message from a cardinal to the community. Why do you call it New Babel?”

  “Why do you call it New Jerusalem?”

  “It is theirs to name, and they named it so. Where did you come from on your way to New Babel?”

  “From Valana, the same as you.”

  “And what were you doing in Valana, praying for rain?”

  “I went to see my old friend Amen Specklebird, but they would not let me in, and besides—he’s not the One.”

  “Which one is that?”

  The old Jew shrugged. “Who knows?” was all that he said.

  Ulad the giant, whom Blacktooth had first assessed as a dangerous brute and a lunatic, became almost a playful child during the expedition to the Suckamint Mountains. The ugly side of his character apparently arose from his initial mistrust of any human being except a genny, but the mistrust subsided as they all became better acquainted during the long ride south.

  On the journey, Nimmy lost his temper once, but not with the old pilgrim. It was only Aberlott, thank God. But, then, he lost it again! with the Abbot Jarad Cardinal Kendemin, in absentia, and really in a daydream. There was something beautiful about the mental image of his own hands grasping Jarad’s throat, thumbs against the windpipe, although he always stopped the strangulation before the old geezer lost consciousness. Evil could be lovely, just lovely. This he knew. It was hard to try to tell a confessor how good sin can feel; it made the priest angry, as if the penitent were trying to force him to enjoy such putrid blackguardy. He felt his mind was slipping away from reality of late, and Wooshin caught him muttering blasphemously to himself as they rode the trail. He almost started out of the saddle when Axe whacked him on the back to bring him out of it. So much had happened to him in so few months, and none of it seemed real, and sometimes he felt he was going mad. He daydreamed, when he should be praying, then swore at himself under his breath.

  “Stay busy, Brother” was the Axe’s advice.

  Staying busy was not very hard. Making and breaking camp every day took time and work. The ideal day involved eleven hours of traveling through the pitiless lands in summer, then thirteen hours packing, unpacking, seeing to the animals, hunting, cooking, eating, cleaning up, mending, repairing, and finally sleeping. Eleven hours traveling, with luck. Most days it was only ten.

  On the seventh day, Ulad, Wooshin, and Elkin conferred and decided that the train with its valuable cargo would be just as well protected without Blacktooth, Aberlott, Ulad, and Elkin, who could ride on ahead of the baggage and be in New Jerusalem in half the time. Wooshin and Ri’s warriors would stay with the mule drivers to fight off any outlaws or desert drifters. The only question was about the safety of the party riding ahead, but Ulad and Elkin were soldiers, and Blacktooth had been taught to fight by Wooshin.

  The old Jew was allowed to come with the advance riders, and so was Aberlott, for both were useless if a need arose to defend the ordnance against seizure by enemies or outlaws. Aberlott attributed Blacktooth’s recent black moods to madness. “I think you’re going crazy,” the student said to him the first morning as they emerged from their bedrolls. “You talked all night in your sleep, although you won’t talk to anybody else by daylight.”

  “What did I talk about?”

  “A girl with a very small hole.”

  “What girl?”

  “One with a very small hole. You called it a hole in the universe. You’re going crazy, Nimmy.”

  “Holes? Did I call you an asshole, perhaps?” But he saw that Aberlott was serious, and he added, “Well, I was dreaming. But maybe I am going a little crazy. I’ve failed at two jobs. I guess I need somebody to tell me what to do. I don’t know how to get along without an uncle or an abbot or a cardinal.”

  “Or a pope? Once you mentioned Amen Specklebird in your sleep.”

  At last the advance party of five came to the western slopes of the Suckamint Mountains. Elkin was convinced they had gained three days on the remainder of the party with the pack mules and wagons. The slopes were steeper here than on the east side of the range near Shard’s place, and they had hardly begun to climb before a volley of arrows and stones struck the ground only a few paces ahead. They stopped immediately. Three gleps with bows and one with a musket stood atop the cliff, glaring down at them in the noonday sun. Ulad swore blasphemies at them and identified himself and their mission. The gleps withdrew.

  “Scarecrow Alley,” the old Jew scoffed. “They would be better off and safer back home in the Valley.”

  “Perhaps. There are people in the Valley who believe Christ will come again as one of them,” Ulad told them as they rode up the rocky trail.

  “You mean he will be born as one of them?” Blacktooth asked.

  “Yes.”

  “But that’s not the way it’s supposed to happen,” said Aberlott. “He will be seen coming on the clouds.”

  “But he has to be born again before he is seen coming.”

  “That’s not what it says.”

  “Does it say
otherwise?”

  “I guess not.”

  Blacktooth remained silent. The old Jew laughed scornfully at them all.

  When they came to a small plateau, Elkin asked Ulad how many hours’ journey remained until they reached the heart of the community.

  “At least eight hours,” the giant said.

  The road leading into the mountains at that place was flanked by a deep ravine on the north and on the south by a few flat acres at the foot of a mesa. As darkness was approaching, Elkin decided to make camp here, a decision which Ulad resisted first by describing the land as haunted, then as populated by cougars. A vote was taken, and the giant was overruled.

  “Just stay away from those woods, then,” Ulad insisted.

  They passed a peaceful night, with each man taking his turn at being awake to keep the fire burning. There were neither cougars nor ghosts. It fell to Blacktooth to take the last shift, and the sky became luminous with dawn as the shift ended.

  Before waking the others, he descended into the wooded ravine for a bucket of water. Beyond the trees, he found himself on a beach in a boneyard. There was a ten-pace width of sand beside the creek where floodwaters visited the place every spring, and the sand was full of small human bones washed here from some upstream disposal site. New Jerusalem produced its share of monsters, then, and its claim of returning such children to the Watchitah Nation was a lie. Not all the bones were those of newborns. One half-buried skull seemed that of a child of five. Dead kids, a blight inherited from the Great Civilization. There were places like that on the Plains. Nimmy was not shocked, but decided against filling his bucket. There was still drinking water in the canteens. Shaving and washing could wait.

  Halfway up the slope, he met somebody coming down very fast. Ulad skidded to a stop, spraying the monk with dirt and gravel.

  “What were you doing down there?” he demanded.

  “Nothing, as it turns out.” Nimmy patted the empty bucket. Ulad grabbed his arm.

  “There was an epidemic two years ago,” he said. “Many children died.”