Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

by Walter M Miller Jr

  HailMaryfullofgracetheLordiswiththee…

  “Ho! Who is down there?” The language was Rockymount, but the accent was from Asia. Nimmy looked up to see a rifle aimed at his face.

  “Don’t shoot, it’s Blacktooth. Is it safe to come out?”

  “It’s not safe anywhere yet,” said Gai-See, “and the fire is getting too close. Give me your hand.”

  Nimmy shook a playful kitten loose from one trouser leg and crawled upward into the smoky light of late afternoon. The din of battle had subsided, except to the east where Texark troops were still holding off gleps trying to get at the weapons. The warrior and the monk climbed the ridge and lay on the ground to look over the top. They could make out the bodies of Chuntar Hadala and Major Gleaver; both had been killed by Gai-See, who, like Wooshin, was prepared to execute anyone who betrayed his master.

  “Where is Woosoh-Loh?”

  “Ulad shot him when he saw me execute our master’s enemies.”

  “But I saw—”

  “My brother lived long enough to kill his killer.”

  Nimmy observed a detail of Grasshopper warriors hastily hitching three of the wagons to draft horses they had stolen, for the fire was coming closer. The wagons’ defenders had scattered during the infantry skirmish. The Valana Militia had been destroyed, by death, desertion, and the absence of command. From the east, Texark cavalry was riding toward the scene, but warily, for behind the ridge to the south was the Demon Light’s main force, and just to the north was the advancing wildfire. Half a mile from where they lay, a Texark trooper rode to the top of the ridge to observe the Grasshopper order of battle. Gai-See rolled over, lifted his rifle, aimed very high, and fired. The impossible shot fell close enough to frighten the trooper’s horse, and alerted the Grasshopper, who joined Gai-See in firing on the scout. The scout retreated. Gai-See stood up and looked south. Eltür’s warriors were watching. Evidently they were not shooting at militia uniforms.

  “Look!” said Gai-See, pointing. “Somebody killed a big cat.”

  Blacktooth stood beside him, then went to investigate. The animal lay on the rocks twenty paces west of them. It was a female.

  “Come on,” he said to Gai-See, and went back down the ridge to the cougar’s den. Soon they had recovered the kittens, but three Nomads rode up with drawn guns and spoke in Grasshopper.

  “Drop your weapons at once, citizens! Surrender.”

  They complied, but Nimmy smiled at the polite word “citizens,” and replied in the same language. “The troopers are riding toward the wagons, you know. We’ll gladly surrender, but we’ll need our weapons to get home again.”

  One warrior rode to the top of the ridge. The other dismounted and recovered the guns. As he unloaded them, he spoke to Blacktooth.

  “You are the man who came out to parley with the sharf. He says you are a servant of the highest Christian shaman. Is that so?”

  “It used to be so.”

  The warrior handed him back his unloaded pistol, then returned Gai-See’s empty rifle.

  “You are the man who killed the cardinal and the major, are you not?”

  Gai-See nodded. The other warrior came down from the ridge and said, “We’d better tell Sharf Eltür it’s time to attack. Let’s go!”

  They both rode away, leaving the two to follow on foot with empty firearms. As soon as the warriors returned to their command, the main party of Nomads split into two groups, one of which rode to the bottom of the ridge, dismounted, and climbed it on foot; they took prone positions on the crest as snipers. From the fact that heavy smoke was blowing south over the ridge, and that the snipers did not commence firing at once, Nimmy deduced that the fire was delaying the movement of the cavalry toward the wagons. Every time a trooper mounted the ridge to the east to reconnoiter, he was fired upon by the main Nomad party. The Texark commander probably wished to cross the ridge before riding west, but the Grasshopper made it impossible. At least some of the wagons were being pulled west by Valanan draft horses driven by Nomads. The rest would soon be caught by wildfire, if not captured first by Texark.

  By sundown, the rest of the wagons had been swept up in the fire; some exploded, all burned. Burned too were the bodies of the slain, but the wind subsided at twilight and the blaze did not cross the ridge. Sharf Bråm had rounded up and fed all the militia survivors who surrendered their arms. The few who refused to give them up, mostly spook officers who feared revenge by Valanan conscripts, he ordered killed. He ordered his warriors to treat the prisoners of war with courtesy, but the Grasshopper fighters were too full of playful malice toward farmers for the farmers’ comfort. Food was shared, but dipped in sand. One warrior lent Nimmy a leather pouch large enough for three cougar kittens, then claimed the monk had stolen it. There were less than forty exhausted captives, but some other deserters had perhaps escaped capture by the Texarki or the Nomads.

  When he saw Nimmy among the refugees, Demon Light called him to his side as interpreter. After laughing at the kittens, he returned the monk’s pistol and ammunition. Nimmy immediately asked permission to turn the weapon over to Gai-See. “My eyes are too weak to hit anything. I killed a man by mistake, when I meant to miss him.”

  Eltür sent for Gai-See and after a brief conversation through Blacktooth concerning the warrior monk’s continuing loyalty to Brownpony, the sharf gave him his weapons back. Then he looked at the smoky sky.

  “Your Pope’s wife has come. Look. The sister of the Day Maiden.”

  Overhead, a large bird was circling the battlefield. In the smoke and the light of the late sun, the buzzard appeared to be bright red. Other birds were gathering. They seemed small and dark by contrast, but perhaps they flew at higher altitude.

  “It means the battle is over.”

  Nimmy and Gai-See were eerily silent.

  “Tomorrow we leave for the tents of my tribe,” Bråm said. “The wounded can stay there until they heal. The rest of you will be taken west to be judged by the Qæsach dri Vørdar, Høngan Ösle Chür. Then I imagine you will be escorted back to Valana, or in your case, Nyinden, to your Brownpony. Tell this to the others. Tell them they must travel with us, or they will fall into the hands of the motherless ones. We have recaptured enough of Hadala’s horses for you to ride.”

  Demon Light seemed quite friendly, and Nimmy dared ask, “Are you satisfied with today’s outcome, Sharf Bråm?”

  “The Burregun will not eat Grasshopper bodies; I lost no men,” said the Nomad leader. “We captured five wagonloads of rifles and pistols before the fire or the motherless got to them. The ammunition wagons exploded. The Texarki must have got about four loads of weapons that went through the fire. Those guns were ruined.”

  “Ruined as weapons, maybe, but not as patterns for Texark to copy,” Nimmy said.

  “You think so? And how long will that take?”

  “I don’t know. Months, probably.”

  “There is one other matter I do find troublesome, Nyinden,” said Eltür. “Do you know that there were many gleps among the Texarki?”

  Nimmy frowned. “The man I killed was a glep! That surprised me. It seems that the Emperor is either impressing able-bodied gleps from the Valley, or hiring them as mercenaries. It suggests he is short of manpower.”

  “Or, he is sending some of his main force to the east of the Great River, as we hoped. There was dissent in the Texark ranks. My messengers told me so. Do you understand why?”

  “I think so. Cardinal Hadala was expecting a force from the Valley to strike the troopers’ rear. When they did so, the glep troopers probably refused to fight. Maybe that’s why they retreated from us.”

  Eltür snorted. “You townsmen make good corpses but not good killers. It had to be the reason. Now, tomorrow we must go to a messenger family and send today’s news to the Lord of the Hordes and your Pope. You may, if you wish, write to Brownpony yourself, so long as you tell me what you say to him.”

  “Of course! You may read it.”

  Demon Light
laughed scornfully and departed. Blacktooth’s face burned. He had forgotten that the sharf was without letters.

  Blacktooth was prepared to write his letter on cowhide with ink made of blood and soot, but the messenger family to which Bråm brought him the following afternoon kept paper and pens for such emergencies, although they themselves were barely literate. He wrote hurriedly, because the sharf was impatient to return to his family and tribe.

  I understand that Sharf Eltür Bråm is sending you an oral account of the battle fought here, and to his words I would add nothing. While most of the weapons were recaptured by the Grasshopper war party, Texark troops found a number of them that passed through fire and are probably unfit for use, but the Mayor’s gunsmiths may learn much from studying the design.

  I am ashamed, Holy Father, that I was not present in your time of peril. I was staying with the late Pope when you departed from Valana, and then I fell into the hands of your betrayers. Sorely Cardinal Nauwhat has sought asylum in Texark. Chuntar Cardinal Hadala was executed by Brother Gai-See when he learned of his treason against Your Holiness. Many townsmen died in this futile battle. My body was unharmed, but my soul is a casualty, for I killed a man.

  I have been invited to stay with my distant Grasshopper relatives (yes, the Sharf knows who they are) of his tribe until I receive orders from Your Holiness, Abbot Olshuen, or the Secretariat concerning my future duties and destination. Meanwhile, Sharf Bråm wants me to be tutor to his nephews. I would find this work congenial, but with no books and no proper writing materials it will be difficult.

  Again, I beg your forgiveness for my absence without leave in your time of need, and shall gratefully accept and perform any penance it may please Your Holiness to impose.

  Your unworthy servant,

  Nyinden (Blacktooth) St. George,

  A.O.L.

  The relay horses of the messenger families were fast and frequently changed. In late August, the moon was waxing, permitting them to ride by night. Still, Nimmy was astonished by the speed of Brownpony’s reply. It was very simple. “Honor the slaughtering festival, then come at once,” said Amen II, only three weeks later.

  His cousins had been teasing him unmercifully about joining the fourteen-year-olds who would be undergoing the rites of passage to manhood at the festival, which normally occurred during a period of several days around the last full moon of summer, before the autumnal equinox. “They will stop calling you ‘Nimmy,’ if you endure the rite,” the great-granddaughter of his own great-great-grandmother told him.

  “Thank you, but the first man to call me ‘Nimmy’ was Holy Madness, the Lord of the Hordes, and he intended no insult. I am not a warrior, I am not a Nomad.”

  This was the same festival which had been declared a movable feast last year when its usual time coincided with the funeral of Granduncle Brokenfoot. The farmers celebrated a harvest festival at about the same date, but for the Nomads it marked the beginning of the time of killing off old cattle and weaklings who could not survive the winter. Women culled out the horses not fit for war or breeding, and sold them to farmers north of the Misery River, or had them butchered and barbecued. Many of the slaughtered animals were converted into jerky for the time of deep snow when the wild herds were hard to reach.

  It was a time for dancing, for drums, for gluttony, smoking keneb, drinking farmers’ wine, for fighting by firelight, and for celebrating the ravishing by Empty Sky of the Wild Horse Woman. Young men crawled into the tents of sweethearts, and Blacktooth was visited in the night by the dark form of a woman who would not reveal her name, but began removing his clothes. He was careful to do nothing that might offend her, and it turned out to be a hot and sweaty night.

  The following morning, one of his female cousins smiled whenever she caught his glance. Her name was Pretty Dances, and she was chubby as a pig, but cute and comely. He thought of Ædrea and avoided her glance as much as possible.

  He had established his honor by fighting several young men his own size, and did well enough to avoid further teasing, but they still called him Nimmy more often than Nyinden.

  On the day before his departure from the lands of his ancestors, the Grasshopper double agent Black Eyes brought him a book he had obtained in a transaction with Texark soldiers. Black Eyes had occupied the cage across the aisle when he and Brownpony were prisoners in the Emperor’s zoo, and he still admired Blacktooth for an alleged attempt to kill Filpeo.

  “The book cost me seven steers,” he told the monk. “The sharf thinks it might help you teach his nephews, because the soldiers said it is written in our own tongue. I don’t understand how a book can have a tongue.”

  Nimmy looked at the Nomadic title and felt a rush of grief and shame. The Book of Beginnings: Volume One, by Verus Sarquus Boedullus. The Texark publisher had done a good job of duplicating Blacktooth’s pan-Nomadic orthography, with the new vowels which permitted any Nomad of any horde to hear the words as pronounced in his own dialect. In the front matter, there was an acknowledgment that the translation had come from Leibowitz Abbey, but there was of course no mention of the translator’s name. Blacktooth had not included it in the original.

  The face of the late Abbot Jarad loomed large in his mind, and Jarad’s voice spoke to him as before, saying, “All right, Brother St. George, now think—think of the thousands of wild young Nomads, or ex-Nomads, just like you were then. Your relatives, your friends. Now, I want to know: what could possibly be more fulfilling to you than to pass along to your people some of the religion, the civilization, the culture, that you’ve found for yourself here at San Leibowitz Abbey?”

  “Why are you crying, Nyinden?” asked Black Eyes. “Is it the wrong book for Nomads?”

  CHAPTER 25

  If a pilgrim monk coming from a distant region wants to live as a guest of the monastery, let him be received for as long a time as he desires, provided he is content with the customs of the place as he finds them and does not disturb the monastery by superfluous demands, but is simply content with what he finds.

  —Saint Benedict’s Rule, Chapter 61

  URING THE TWO MONTHS MOTHER IRIDIA Silentia spent at the court of Pope Amen II in New Jerusalem, one of the Pope’s informants called it to his attention that this Princess of the Church and Bride of Christ visited Shard’s Ædrea in her house of arrest three times a week, every week. He hesitated to inquire into this, for it was assumed by anybody who noticed or cared that Mother Iridia was either practicing spiritual therapy or teaching the girl the latest edition of the catechism as rewritten and promoted by Pope Amen I—the edition already condemned as heretical by several eastern bishops. Soon it became clear to her jailer that the girl wished to join Iridia’s religious community. This caused no alarm, and only Brownpony stirred and became restless. Prisoners often converted to religion in jail.

  Mayor Dion, as commander in chief of the insurgent forces in the Province, was gone most of the time, and Slojon’s only interest in religion was as a tool to be used in the governance of men. When Ædrea took her simple vows as a nun of the Order of Our Lady of the Desert on Saturday the 12th of August, Mother Iridia visited the Pope and complained that the secular government of New Jerusalem was keeping one of her nuns in prison. Brownpony smiled and sent for Slojon.

  “You are holding Sister Clare-of-Assisi in detention for unspecified offenses,” said Amen II. “Messér, must I tell you that you have no jurisdiction over religious?”

  “I don’t even know a Sister Clare-of-Assisi, Holy Father!”

  “You know her as Shard’s Ædrea,” said Brownpony. “She became a nun on the Feast of Saint Clare last week, and so Mother Iridia named her Clare, which is what she will be called in her cloister.”

  Slojon sputtered. “Her offenses are not unspecified. She violated the law by leaving the community without a permit from the Mayor’s office. And she is suspected of espionage.”

  “She is innocent of espionage against this realm, to my certain knowledge,” Brownpony growled
. “As for your other complaint against her, the Church does teach obedience to legitimately constituted government, such as yours. Since she admits her guilt in disobeying the law while it was in force, I promise you she will be appropriately sentenced for that offense by me. I must take note, however, that you are no longer enforcing the law that she broke. That is your affair. Sister Clare is our affair. You shall release her immediately to an ecclesiastical court. You well know the sanctions incurred for usurping Church jurisdiction. My predecessor of beloved memory excommunicated the Emperor of Texark himself for jailing me and my secretary.”

  “So that’s the trick! Well, it won’t work with me.” Slojon turned and walked away from the papal audience with minimum courtesy.

  Brownpony immediately drafted a letter to all clergy throughout the Suckamints commanding that the sacraments be withheld from the Mayor’s son until he obeyed the order to release Sister Ædrea St. Clare into the custody of the Curia. The Pope knew that Slojon would not give any weight to such a sanction, except for the humiliating effect of the bad publicity when the letter was prominently posted for all to read in every Church in the mountains.

  Still, Slojon would not budge until his father returned from battle a week later. Dion conferred with the Pope. First they discussed the war in the Province, which had stalled around the 98th meridian. Then they discussed Ædrea. Whatever he might believe privately, Dion was a public Catholic. After the conference, he released Sister Clare into the custody of Mother Iridia Silentia, O.D.D., who became her defense counsel. The sanctions against the Mayor’s son were lifted. In an unusual move, the Pope permitted Slojon to assist the schoolteacher Abrahà Cardinal Linkono as inquisitor and prosecutor.

  The outcome was inevitable, and the only point in dispute became the sentence to be imposed upon the nun by the Supreme Pontiff.

  Brownpony noticed that the beauty of the barefoot Sister who stood before him had not been diminished by motherhood, or completely obscured by her coarse habit. She was radiant, smiling at him faintly, and her eyes were attentive and unafraid. That was bad. It implied that there was a conspiracy, and it had worked. Slojon already knew he had been duped, but—he noticed the faint smile.