It was late afternoon before the rain finally came. The clouds that had been massing in the northwest all day, like riders on a hilltop, descended just when the Grasshopper sharps party was returning. There was no pop pop pop this time, no strutting horses. The warriors looked gloomy and damp. One of the horses carried double, and the white mule carried a corpse tied on like a pack and left uncovered in the rain. The side of the mule was pink with rain and blood.
“The sharf’s shaman,” Aberlott said to Blacktooth, who was helping him dismount. He tried to hand the monk his rifle but Blacktooth wouldn’t take it.
“Texark troops?”
Aberlott shrugged. “Snipers,” he said. “They fired on us from the great houses.”
“Great houses?”
“Piles of stone, really, although some of them still have windows. We have the better guns but we couldn’t see them. We never saw any Texark troops.”
Four women untied the shaman and carried him away. The dogs were howling, straining at their leashes and jumping up to sniff the side of the white mule that was smeared with blood.
“They must have been Texark troops,” said Blacktooth.
“I don’t think so. There was a lot of fire but they only hit two men, and we were all in the open. I was right behind the shaman when he fell. He was singing some Weejus song, and they shot him through the throat. I think it was a lucky shot.”
“Lucky?” said Blacktooth.
“Lucky for someone; not so lucky for him.” Aberlott showed Blacktooth three empty cartridges, nestled in his palm like little empty eggshells. “I fired all three of my shots, though. I liked that part. Not like you.” He was referring to Blacktooth’s depression after killing the glep warrior in the battle two days’ march behind, at the edge of the grasslands, almost a year before. “I fired all three, pop pop pop.”
It was Blacktooth’s turn to shrug.
“I liked that part,” Aberlott insisted.
Aberlott had been more impressed with the city than with the fighting. The city of New Rome wasn’t a hole in the ground like Danfer, he said, or a collection of shacks like Valana. It was mostly stone, grown over with weeds and trees. “The center of the city is all great houses. They mine them for stone and steel. They don’t care about defending them either. What is there to defend? What can you carry off? You can’t fight men who won’t fight.”
“They fought you,” said Blacktooth.
“That wasn’t fighting,” said Aberlott. “There wasn’t that much firing, even. They are hiding in the city, taking pot shots at us.”
“Did you find the cathedral?”
Aberlott shook his head. “We rode out behind the sharf. Who will burn them out, he says, and toss their livers to the dogs.” He smiled sardonically, gesturing behind him to the center of the camp where the dismounted Nomads were milling angrily, confused, ashamed. A wail came up from the women tending the wounded man. The wounded man was dying. He had been shot in the side with a gun that fired stones.
Blacktooth left Aberlott for the medicine wagon where the wounded man was being bandaged. He was wondering if the Texarks had managed to duplicate the repeating weapons yet, and he imagined that he might be able to tell from the man’s wound. But the wound was just a wound and not a sign; it did not speak. The ugly welt cut through the Nomad’s flesh and hair like a road ripped heedlessly through grassland. In the back of the wagon the Grasshopper shaman’s body was being prepared for burial. The old man’s neck wound was already stuffed with clay the color of shaman skin.
Ashes to ashes, dirt to dirt. Both men would be carried out of the trees for burial under the haughty uncaring glare of Empty Sky. But not until the rain had ended.
The women and the medicine men shooed Cardinal Blacktooth away, even though he was wearing his zucchetto.
The next day a smaller party went out, while the Grasshopper war sharf met with the Qæsach and the Pontiff. As a member of the Curia, Blacktooth was invited to take part in the discussion, after he had finished the pots and pans, of course, and freed Bitten Dog for a day of drinking mare wine and playing bones. Brownpony’s suspicion that the Emperor had withdrawn all his regular forces from the Holy City was confirmed when the rear guard of Eltür Bråm’s war party came back with its only live captive, a farmer armed with a stone-firing musket. He had been dragged from one of the “great houses,” along with two of his colleagues who had not survived the ten-mile trip back to the Crusade’s war camp. Under questioning the grass-eater revealed that he and the other farmers had been driven from their homesteads into the city by the Texark regulars, then armed with leftover weapons and stationed in the tallest ruins. They had been told that if they surrendered they would be cruelly tortured by the Anti-pope’s Wilddog, Grasshopper, and Jackrabbit fanatics; but that if they held out they would be rescued by returning Texark reinforcements from Hannegan City.
Brownpony doubted that the last part of this was true; so did the rest of his Curia. As for the torture, the farmer died before he could be convinced that it was propaganda.
Aberlott thought it was a trap. “But you think everything is a trap,” Blacktooth reminded his friend. The two were sitting on the side of a wagon, in the unfamiliar sunshine, listening to the interminable martial speeches of the Nomads. Even though the speeches decided nothing, they had to be suffered by the Pope and his Curia.
“Everything is,” whispered the former Valana student. His long hair was smeared with grease, and tied back to show his missing ear: a badge of honor. He held his repeating rifle between his legs. Though he was, technically at least, a member of the Papal Guard, he wore the bone earrings and hair bracelets of a Wilddog horseman. He looked, Blacktooth thought, like a man who had avoided the trap of the Mother Church only to fall into the trap of war.
“We can wait them out,” Brownpony was saying. His Nomadic had gotten better and he no longer needed Blacktooth as translator. “If they were driven into the city, chances are they don’t have enough food to last through the winter.”
“The winter?” said the Grasshopper sharf. “The winter is far away. Our women are far behind, and like the Wilddogs they are threatened by the motherless ones who strike from above the Misery. Without the Weejus our medicine is weak but our war power is strong. We must strike now while we can. We can take them with just a few men. We can burn them out.”
Grunts of pleasure and assent greeted these words. Wettened fingers were held up, as if to confirm that the prevailing winds were from the west. The fingers were also, for the Nomads, a signal of impending fire; of their willingness to watch the world burn.
Amen II stood, looking unusually ethereal and spiritual. When Blacktooth had seen him the day before, he had not realized how sick he looked. Brownpony’s hair was mostly gone. His face looked like something drawn on an egg; a bad egg. “This is the Holy City of New Rome,” he said in measured Churchspeak. “It is sacred to the Mother Church. There will be no burning. We are here to take the city, not destroy it.”
He sat back down. There was grumbling as his words were translated into Grasshopper and Wilddog. The grumbling fell silent as the Qæsach dri Vørdar, the War Sharf of the Three Hordes, stood to speak.
“We were going to feint south for Hannegan City,” said Chür Høngan Ösle. “There is the heart of the Empire, not New Rome, which is nothing but a ruin. We will still head south. But now instead of feinting we can actually strike south. Now that we know there are few defenders in New Rome, we have more men to strike south at Hannegan City. The war will be over sooner. We can return to our women and our winter pastures.” He spoke in Wilddog with only a few words of Rockymount and none of Churchspeak. Blacktooth thought it was ominous. The Crusade was becoming less of a crusade, and more a depredation of the Three Hordes.
There were grunts and clicks of approval from the Nomads as the Qæsach sat down. He had a boy behind him to arrange his robes when he sat; another watched the feathers on his headdress in case of wind. The numbers of the Nomads had
increased, so that now men (and a few women and children as well) stood on all sides of the wagon on which Blacktooth was sitting. It had turned from a meeting of the Curia to a public meeting attended by warriors and drivers and hangers on. That, too, seemed ominous. Cardinal Blacktooth St. George was feeling trapped. His bowels were grumbling like the crowd, and he began to look for an avenue of escape.
“A few hundred men left here will be enough to drive the farmers out of New Rome!” said Eltür Bråm.
Wooshin was shaking his head but, as usual, remained silent. Brownpony stood up to answer the sharfs. He stumbled as he stood, and Blacktooth was surprised and a little shocked to see that he was wearing an empty shoulder holster over his cassock, under his robe.
Holding on to the side of a wagon, Pope Amen II made one last plea.
“We need the fighters here,” he said. “With a show of strength we can force the farmers out of the city without much fighting.” Blacktooth knew that Brownpony was trying to avoid a battle. He wondered if it were to save lives, or to avoid damage to the city and Saint Peter’s. As soon as he asked himself the question, he knew the answer. Lives were cheap.
The Pope sat down, seemingly unnoticed. There was no grumbling; he was not even granted the honor of dissent. The power Blacktooth had watched him exercise over the conclave in Valana was gone. Perhaps it was the Meldown, or perhaps his rhetoric was useless with the war sharfs and their warriors, who excelled at oratory when they wanted, but were not in the mood for talk these days.
Or perhaps it was the trees. They seemed almost evil, there were so many of them crowding in on every side. Blacktooth touched the cross that rode under his habit and called up, as he did when he was panicked, the image of Saint Leibowitz. But instead of the dubious smile of Saint Isaac Edward he saw the harsh glare of the desert sun, and he felt a sudden wave of homesickness so powerful it almost knocked him off the wagon bed.
“What’s the matter?” whispered Aberlott. “Are you OK?”
“Are you?” answered Blacktooth. The warriors on the edge of the crowd were starting to make the pop pop pop. They were tired of waiting around for battle. Neither did they wish to ride into a city where the defenders were shooting at them from the windows of “great houses.”
“They’re going to burn them out, no matter what His Holiness says,” said Aberlott. “Where you going?”
Eltür Bråm had risen to speak again. Blacktooth slipped away through the crowd toward the main trench, which was, even at this hour, even with all the excitement of the debate, busy with grunting men.
When he got back to the campfire, it was too crowded to get close. The Grasshopper sharf was still speaking. Blacktooth’s fever was raging and he felt weak. He dragged himself off to the back of the hood wagon and rolled up in a blanket and went to sleep. In the distance he could hear drumming, and the martial, celebratory pop pop pop.
That night, while Blacktooth slept, Amen I came to visit him for the first time in over a week. The old man had the face of a cougar. Had he always had the face of a cougar? Blacktooth wondered in his dream; but of course! And Ædrea was there. She was sitting beside Specklebird, smiling, riding a white horse like the Fujæ Go; but no, her robe was open, and what he had thought was a white horse was the light coming from the gateway he had once—
Someone was shaking him, pulling his foot. It was Aberlott. “We are leaving,” he said.
“Leaving? Who is leaving?” Blacktooth groaned and sat up. Aberlott was outside the wagon, leaning in. His face was painted. His greasy hair was pinned back. Beyond him Blacktooth could see the sky, a metal gray. He could hear horses stamping and men cursing and laughing. In the near distance, dogs.
“They’ve been up all night,” said Aberlott. “After you went to bed there was another conference. But this was among the sharfs. The Pope was sent away.”
“Sent away?”
“Wooshin was allowed to listen, but he was thrown out when he disagreed.”
Blacktooth was amazed. No one threw Axe out of anything. “Thrown out?” Blacktooth was still woozy, half in and half out of his cougar dream. As he sat up, he realized with a sudden and unusual moment of clarity that his entire life since leaving the abbey, since he had met Brownpony in fact, had had the quality of a dream. So why was it that Specklebird, instead of Brownpony, came to him in his dreams? Brownpony was in the real dream.
Aberlott grinned and shrugged. “Not exactly thrown out, then, but asked to leave.”
Blacktooth got out of the wagon. The rain clouds that had rode across the sky for days had disappeared, and the camp was almost as bright as day even though the sun hadn’t yet risen.
“They are leaving only a few men from each horde, about three hundred in all,” Aberlott said, too loudly. “The rest are heading south with the Qæsach dri Vørdar to take Hannegan City. I’m going with them!”
“But you are in the Papal Guard!”
“The Pope’s Guard is going, all except Wooshin. Besides—the Pope didn’t give me these!” Aberlott opened his hand. In his palm, where three empty shell casings had nested the night before, now there were six, and each was filled; each had a dark bullet peeping out of one end as though eager to be on its way.
“Goodbye then!” Blacktooth said angrily. Wrapping his robe around him against the morning chill, he half walked, half ran toward the latrine trench. As he squatted, through the bushes he could see hundreds of men stirring, grumbling, dressing, farting, laughing. Pop pop pop! Some were pulling at dogs, some at horses. The pall that had fallen over the camp in the last few days, the pall of rain and forest, was lifting even as the skies brightened toward the east. Almost a thousand warriors were crossing the creek, many of them slapping the sides of the metal wagons to hear them ring.
“He’s taking all the healthy men,” Blacktooth muttered to himself.
“There aren’t that many healthy men,” said the man at the trench beside him, who sounded and smelled very unhealthy. “And I’m not that healthy and I’m going.”
He spoke in Wilddog. Before Blacktooth could answer, he was off and running, barely wiping.
Through the shrubs that cloaked the latrine, Blacktooth watched the horses cross the creek, and then crawled back into his bed. It would be an hour or so before breakfast and he wanted to get some rest. He searched for Ædrea and Amen through his dream, but it was like prowling through an abandoned house, empty even of furniture. When he woke again his fever was back. He sat up, dazed. He could see by the sun on the wagon’s hood that it was almost noon.
“Your Eminence,” said Bitten Dog. “His Holiness and whatever, His Eminence the Pope wants to see you.”
“Brownpony?”
“He wants your butt in his Pope wagon right away.”
Brownpony had stopped shaving but it had hardly changed his appearance. There wasn’t much left of his beard, just a few wisps of hair on his chin. Some were dark and some were light, giving him the look of a sketch that had been abandoned. He was finishing his breakfast of horsemeat jerky and plums when Blacktooth found him, at a small table that had been set in the shade of the papal wagon. “Nimmy,” he said, “where is your zucchetto? I have a commission for you.”
“As a soldier?” Blacktooth answered. He was ready to refuse.
“As an ambassador,” Brownpony said, ignoring the novice cardinal’s sarcasm. “As the papal legate to the farmers. They are all that is left in the city. Hannegan’s troops have abandoned the place and left them there to fight. We could have avoided the fight altogether by peacefully slipping a thousand men into New Rome.”
“A thousand Nomads are not peaceful, Your Holiness,” replied Blacktooth. “And besides, the farmers have shown an inclination to fight.”
“True. Perhaps you’re right,” Brownpony said. “Perhaps this is all for the best. We have only three hundred men anyway, mostly the Grasshopper.” The Pope waved an astonishingly skinny arm around at the camp, which looked deserted in the harsh daylight, like a dream only half-re
membered. Brownpony looked weaker than Blacktooth had ever seen him. Surely, he thought, it was the Meldown. Nunshån the Night Hag was claiming her husband, calling him to her cold bed.
“The War Sharf of the Three Hordes, the Qæsach dri Vørdar, our old friend and companion Chür Ösle Høngan, has taken almost a thousand of my crusaders south, to Hannegan City. Even Magister Dion and the New Jerusalemites have gone with him. They intend to join the Jackrabbit warriors and the gleps that are preparing to besiege the city, and instead of a siege we will have a battle.” Brownpony sat down wearily. “Perhaps it is all for the best.”
“Not so,” said Wooshin.
“My sergeant general disapproves,” said Brownpony. “But what does it matter? It is done.” The Pope’s hands fluttered in the air, like two birds. Blacktooth watched, intrigued; with that motion, this most worldly of men suddenly reminded him of Amen I.
“I’m sick anyway,” Blacktooth said.
“We’re all sick,” said Brownpony. “Except for Wooshin, of course. Where is your hat, Nimmy?”
“Here.” Blacktooth pulled his red cardinal’s zucchetto from his robe. “I don’t wear it around the camp. It might blow off my head and fall into the dogshit.”
“No wind here,” said Wooshin, who disapproved of Blacktooth’s attitude toward his master.
“Oh yes, the dogs,” said the Pope distractedly. “We get to keep the dogs. The Qæsach didn’t want to take them on the campaign south. We have been left with three hundred men and almost as many dogs. And the Grasshopper sharf, of course. The farmers don’t know this, not yet. What I want you to do is go into the city, Nimmy, and make them an offer of peace. Extend to them my offer of peace. The Pope’s hand in peace.”
“Before they discover your numbers have been reduced,” Blacktooth said, scornfully.
Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman Page 48
