Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

CHAPTER 11

AMEN SPECKLEBIRD WAS NOT STRONG ENOUGH to resist the crowd that dragged him reluctant to the Papal Palace by midmorning. And so at last, to pacify the people and the conclave, the black, old hermit priest agreed to address the cardinals. For this purpose, the dying Cardinal Ri consented to appoint the old man as his special conclavist, for Specklebird’s status as a cardinal in pectore of his former persecutor was doubted by most. He was passed in through the broken window in the balcony, and more baskets of bad bread and flagons of water were lowered through the hole in the roof.

There were scribes who were appointed to record all speeches during the conclave, subject to later editing or deletion by the speaker, but some of the few who actually listened to the old hermit through out his seemingly interminable homily later swore that some of the scribes had been asleep, and none had accurately recorded the full speech. But at first, the electors listened with intense curiosity.

Strange stories were told of Amen Specklebird by the old people of the countryside. Some said he walked silently on the mountain paths by moonlight and spoke to the antelope, the mountain spirits, and the risen Christ. Some had seen him flying above the treetops at morning twilight, and in the hole in the back of his cave he kept serpents, the mummy of an old Jew, or a wonder-working genny girl. Sometimes he visited the farms of the settlers and made it rain for them. He was a man of subtle power. He had placed a spell on Pope Linus VII, the story went, who as the Bishop of Denver had forced his retirement, and the spell made Linus call him to the Papal Palace several times during his long illness, either to have the spell removed or to treat the sickness whose cause eluded the physicians. (Blacktooth had seen him change into a cat and back, but Blacktooth would be the first to admit that his distance vision could be sharpened by spectacles, but his reason for avoiding it was not so much poverty as the fear that sharpness would ruin the clarity of his occasional hallucinatory insights into people and things.)

Heretics and holy men made pilgrimages to Amen’s cave. Children of irreligious parents threw stones at his door and called him a buggery man, and yet it was a fact that the Lord Cardinal Brownpony often came to see him, and he was confessor to prominent sinners from the city. Pregnant women came to have their bellies blessed by him, and for a small donation he would consult the mountain spirits, who controlled the weather even on the western Plains, and whom he addressed by saints’ names, about the best time for sowing or reaping or breeding sheep.

But now this dark old man with the frizzy white cloud of hair began speaking to the cardinals in conclave, and his style of address was none other than Blacktooth himself had experienced as his penitent. He was an elderly confessor most tactfully admonishing sinners and less tactfully testing their minds with paradoxes, and sometimes tortured syntax.

He embraced the audience with his long bony arms. “Fathers of the Church, Eminent Lords, there is a simpleton among us who has no rank at all and sits in the midst of us as a spy in an enemy camp. It is to him this sermon is addressed.”

The Archbishop of Appalotcha stood up and called out, “Point him out, Father. Call the sergeant-at-arms!”

“He is here without authorization, it’s true,” said Specklebird, waving the ushers back. “But please sit down, he was here among us from the beginning, and he always will be. He’s here to spy for Jesus anyway. And this conclave is the enemy camp.”

There was a murmur of righteous protest about the Holy Ghost and the apostolic succession, but it quickly died.

“The simpleton who sits in the midst of us as a spy is conscience. A conscience has no rank and no position. A conscience cannot be a cardinal’s conscience or a beggar’s conscience. It adheres to the naked man, wholly exposed. And to the naked woman.” The Abbess of N’Ork flinched, but Specklebird avoided looking at her. “In him or her, the Father gives birth to His Son.

“To this naked simpleton I speak, regardless of his office. The offices have fought each other. Rank has quarreled with rank. Regional origin argues with regional origin. Does the simpleton want a one and only pope, an everybody’s pope? Then let him put off his rank, his office, his regional origin and beg God’s grace to vote as a simpleton, a pure man.” From this rational opening, he began to wander.

At first he spoke mostly about the return of the papacy to New Rome, because he knew that this was the foremost issue, not the closest to his heart. And he made it clear from the beginning, to the complete astonishment of his Valanan supporters, the mob outside, that he favored an unconditional restoration of the New Roman Papacy in its ancient See. Brownpony, his friend, even looked shocked by this disclosure.

Only cardinals from the Denver Republic were in favor of making the exile permanent, and they too were truly shocked. They had refrained from calling the exile Exile, and proposed to change the name of Valana to “Rome.” Their motives were well rationalized, but they agreed with the rabble in the streets that the end of exile would be the end of Valana. But the Valana faction was a tiny minority in the conclave. Everyone else wanted the papacy returned to New Rome. The sharp division of opinion concerned the circumstances of that return, and the demand for a demilitarization of the surrounding terrain by the Empire.

The conclave had dragged to a standstill.

In a general way, the far East and the West were aligned against the middle. The middle was Texark and its vassal states along the Great River. There were also single-issue electors for whom the Valanan exile was not of major importance. Emmery Cardinal Buldyrk was one example. From the far northeast, she had voted with the West in two previous conclaves, but was now apparently leaning toward Benefez because of a possible softening of his position against the ordination of women. Benefez, however, was not present to confirm the inclinations of his conclavists, so the lady’s vote was not se cure. Cardinal Brownpony was doing his charming best to reconvert her, and she her charming best to seduce his feminine side.

Blacktooth himself took notes occasionally, but the old man rambled on and on. He misquoted Scripture. He belched. He improved on Scripture. He broke wind. He apologized for his frailties. He talked about his boyhood in the Northwest. He talked about barnyard matters. He talked about the wisdom of a mindless God. One passage which was faithfully recorded, and later used against him, was this:

“All this talk about the Church, the State, and the causes of schism reminds me of a story. When the priests asked Jesus whether they should pay taxes to the Hannegan of that time, Jesus borrowed a coin from them, asked them whose head was on it. ‘Hannegan’s,’ they said. So he told them, ‘Render unto Hannegan what is Hannegan’s, and to God what is God’s.’ Then he put the coin in his pocket and smiled. When the priest wanted his coin back, Jesus asked, ‘Who do you think Hannegan belongs to?’ When there was no answer, he reminded them, ‘The Earth is the Father’s and the fullness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein.’ Of course that’s just another way of saying, ‘The foxes have their dens, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’

“So he gave the priest his coin back and slept under one of Hannegan’s bridges that night, along with Peter and Judas. The priest went home and paid his taxes and drew up an indictment.”

Here, Specklebird began to wander wide of his topic of New Rome and Valana.

“Why, you may ask, did Judas and Peter and Jesus sleep under a bridge,” he said, pursuing a tangent. “Judas had a good reason, you see: someone had stolen his horse, and he was too tired to walk to the inn. Peter also had a good reason: he had no money to stay at the inn. Jesus had no reason, no reason at all. Jesus was free to sleep under a bridge. Such is freedom. Such is reason. Such is rumination.”

Another tormentation of Scripture that was later bound to be used against him was this:

“‘What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his own soul?’ I spoke earlier about this world, and him to whom it belongs, but what, one might ask, is one’s own soul, which can be lost? The soul, insofar as it exists or not-exists, is the seat of suffering, when Jesus was born, he looked around at the world and said to his mother, ‘From the outermost to the innermost I alone am the suffering one.’ Cardinal Ri, whose conclavist I am, told me that. And this is the first fact of religion: I am means ‘I hurt.’ Why is it that I hurt? Is it God’s revenge on a son? No, I hurt because I, my soul, keep grasping at the world to gain it, and the world has sharp teeth. And thorns.

That is the second fact of religion. The world is slippery too, and it wiggles. Just when I think I have a grip on it, it stings me, and slips away, or part of it dies on me, and I am overcome with grief and a sense of loss—the consequence of sin. But there is a way to stop grasping at this slithery world, a way to stop hurting and hungering. That is the third fact of religion. That third fact, Venerable Fathers, can be called the ‘way of the Cross.’ It leads to Golgotha. For you among you who will be Pope, it leads to New Rome.”

His return to the topic came with brutal abruptness.

“These are elemental things. The fourth elemental fact of religion is called the ‘Stations of the Way of the Cross.’” He waved toward the paintings on the Cathedral walls.

“This, Venerable Lords, is what I say of New Rome: that the way of the Cross ends there. The last station. The Pope must go back to New Rome as to Golgotha, and be crucified. The Hannegan will have his coin of tribute, which belongs to God if you correctly understand the Lord’s irony, and Peter will have his crucifixion. When Benedict fled from New Rome in the last century, Jesus appeared to him and asked ‘Quo Vadis,’ but Benedict mistook him for a Nomad, and said ‘Ad Valanam’ and did not turn around. This I heard from one of you.” He smiled at the conclavists from Texark, whose expressions had changed throughout the speech from initial hostility, to astonishment, through outrage, to suspicious approval, for, although the premises by which he arrived at his conclusions were not flattering to their monarch, and his theology was outrageous, the conclusions were the same as their own. The papacy should go home without any concession of power from the Imperial Mayor of Texark.

Usually so silent, this bewildering man was now talking through the afternoon, and when the lamps were lit in the evening, he talked on by lamplight. Once, when Blacktooth himself nodded off, he reawakened to see a cougar in aragged cassock change to a dark brown old man with wild white hair again.

Amen Specklebird made a speech that was to become famous in the history of the Church, as written by its severest critics. Such are the quotations and misquotations as written down by the scribes.

Amen on the Fall and its aftermath: “The fruit of the tree, Eminent Lords, was rumination. Out of rumination came good and evil. The devil is a cud-chewing animal with cloven hooves. The serpent Satan ate souls and chewed the cud, and he taught rumination to the female, who taught it to the male. Whatever you do, do not ruminate. The anointed one never ruminates. He marches straight on to Hell from the tomb—and ascends to Heaven if it befall him.

“But if you should ruminate, and thus sin through fornication or rage or greed, never be ashamed of your guilt. Shame is none other than pride, pride is none other than shame. Your pride is your shame, your shame is your pride. They look in opposite directions, shame and pride, because when pride looks directly into the eye of shame and shame looks directly into the eye of pride, both instantly die. They die to the accompaniment of laughter, the laughter of the man who has foolishly kept them in his heart and kept them apart. When he feels his shame as pride and his pride as shame, he is free of them, free forever from the sin of both. Guilt, however, is not a feeling.

“When you see that you have sinned, and you repent the sin, do not wish you had not sinned. Wish instead that God in His mysterious way will turn your sin to a good end, for your sin is now already a part of the history of His ongoing creation of the world. To wish it away is to resist His will.”

Amen on truth: “The truth is God’s subtle, abominable word, Eminent Lords, subtile et enfandum is His word.”

Amen, repeating himself, on man’s place in God’s world: “Don’t you know that Jesus Christ is alone and friendless in the universe? Don’t you know that the Earth is the Creator’s, and the fullness thereof? What does that mean, Eminent Lords, except that the foxes have their dens, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head? He often sleeps under bridges.

“What is God that thou art mindful of Him, and the Son of God that thou shouldst visit Him?

“He who is close to God is in danger. It’s possible to be so enlightened that blindness follows. The light was too bright for your eyes and you never see God again.”

Amen on man, woman, and the Trinity, going on in a kind of rapture: “God lives at the center of the Son. Or Daughter.” He nodded toward the Cardinal Abbess. “His throne—it’s hotter than Hell there, you know. Even the Devil couldn’t sit down in that throne. But you can. I can. We’re in His lap, and we know what the Godhead’s like—from inside. God-at-the-center-of-the-sun-I am bigger than I am. Jesus too, am. Saint Spirit also, am. And, oh my yes, the Virgin, am. One should be embarrassed to speak of God in the third person.”

He went on openly to embrace what Blacktooth recognized as a tenet of the old Northwest Heresy, so called, although many in the audience seemed too sleepy to detect it.

“Whence came the Trinity and the Virgin? The unspeakable Godhead yawns and they emerge. The Virgin is the hymnal silence into which the Word is sung by the Father through the Holy Breath and begotten and made flesh within her flesh from the beginning. ‘Before the creation, God is not God.’ But behind this fearsome four fold God yawns the undifferentiated Godhead. To say so is false, however, Eminent Lords. To mention it at all is to lie. Godhead? To presume to name it or even allude to it is to miss it entirely while immersed in it. And yet it is to a union with this ultimate Godhead that we dare aspire. In such a union the soul is like a glass of water when poured into the great ocean. Its identity as a certain glass of water is diffused into its identity as the ocean. It loses nothing. Nor does it gain. It is home again.

“And the wages of death am sin,” he added. It seemed an afterthought.

Brother Blacktooth realized early that the audience was briefly captured by his pious enthusiasm and stopped listening carefully to words. The man had a way about him. He could just be himself in front of a crowd and the strength of his spirit prevailed upon them. But after hours of it, the cardinals began to turn to one another and even to get up and slip quietly about the throne room to whisper.

It was well into the following morning when he blessed his inattentive audience and sat down. He had talked all night. That was the first of the next Pope’s miracles. He talked seventeen hours without a glass of water and without becoming hoarse. He had talked them into weariness. Only his friend Cardinal Brownpony voiced an “Amen,” as the morning sunlight broke through the eastern windows, but that was because only a few had been listening toward the end, but among these a handful had listened intently. Many were asleep. Others were reading their breviaries, some were pairing off politically—actually wandering from throne to throne—and seated bishops whispered and giggled with neighbors, as innocent as girls in the early morning. When Brownpony said “Amen” to the speech, Specklebird stood up again and answered “Yes?”—and then, as if by a breath of the Holy Spirit, the few intent listeners started erect and answered “Amen” with such deep feeling that others were caught by it, and then there was a chorus of guilty amens from the bewildered.

And that is really all there was to it. The speech was not famous then. Like many of the great orations of human history, Specklebird’s speech seemed rather confusing to the conclave, which, in desperation, finally elected him in spite of the strange homily. Only much later would his words come alive, when men thoughtfully read the transcriptions and random notes, and either damned it as foulest heresy, or praised it as divinely inspired, a new revelation. But to Brownpony and all who knew him well, Amen Specklebird’s talk was like the twitter of birds who say in every language such things as “Bob White,” or “To Easter,” or “Whip-poor-Will.” The meaning is in the ear of the listener.

They elected him that morning, the old man, before the crowd started throwing stones at the door. Cardinal Ri lay dead on his cot. Old Otto e’Notto had gone crazy as a loon. The corridors of the palace were places of vomit and shit. More than twenty-five cardinals were in the throes of the illness, and five were with difficulty restrained by their conclavists from becoming violent. They elected him without debate before noon.

To the surprise of many, including Blacktooth, the old man actually said, “Accepto,” and called himself by his own name, Pope Amen, to the disapproval of many. It was a break with a most ancient tradition.

There were feeble protests preceding the election, of course.

“He said the anointed one marches straight into Hell!” a cardinal from the Southeast complained to the abbot.

“‘From the tomb’ he descended into Hell,” added Jarad. “And on the third day he arose again from the dead and ascended into Heaven. That’s orthodox enough.”

“If it befall him! And he called God’s word abominable.”

“A slip of the tongue,” said Brownpony. “He meant admirable.”

“‘Subtle and abominable’ is what he said. Attributes of the Devil. The serpent was the subtlest of beasts. God’s word is Satan?”

“Come, come!” said the abbot. “I think you misheard him. Verbum subtile atque infandum. It means finely woven but unutterable. Even elegant but unutterable. Truth so subtle it evades speech. The silence of Christ. And he was waving his arms around at the universe when he said it.”

At the end, the conclave unanimously agreed on one thing. If any man could return to New Rome as the head of the Church and play Peter to the Mayor’s Caesar without any compromise of fear, it was indeed this Amen (cardinal in pectore of Linus VII, as many were now willing to concede) Specklebird. But it was in compromise and fear that the conclave at last elected him, even permitting the conclavists of Archbishop Benefez to vote in his absence, which was not legal since he had not been present to instruct them. To their later chagrin, they voted for the gaunt and wild-eyed hermit.

“Gaudium magnum do vobis. Habemus Papam. Sancte Spiritu volente, Amen Cardinal Specklebird...”

The roar of the crowd drowned the rest of it, and the conclave turned within itself again as each cardinal came before the new Pope to kiss his slipper and be embraced by the new heir to Saint Peter’s keys, and heir as well—if Brownpony the lawyer was correct—to both of Saint Peter’s swords, meaning both the spiritual and the temporal power, the latter subordinate to the former. Brownpony the lawyer who knew more about the history of canon law and the papacy than anyone outside of Leibowitz Abbey had talked freely during the conclave about the ancient Theory of the Two Swords, to the dismay of conclavists of the absent Archbishop of Texark. He quoted from an ancient bull: “Porro subesse Romano Pontifici… de necessitate salutis...” “And so to be eligible for salvation everybody must be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” According to Brownpony, this never-popular decree had been aimed especially at monarchs, whether civil or Nomadic, and the Hannegans and Caesars as well, but it passed the test for infallibility defining a matter of faith and by backing it with a stated penalty, the loss of salvation, for rejecting it. Perhaps what the electors sympathetic to Texark feared most, Brownpony as Pope, was now replaced by fear of Brownpony as gray eminence. That the cardinal had been the hermit’s patron and cultivated his friendship and managed to get him restored to favor with Linus VII was well known to everyone. It had seemed a harmless relationship between a rich and lordly Churchman and a humble holy man. If one lacked a conscience, one could always pay to support one, was the cynical view. But Brownpony and Specklebird, though poles apart, had always seemed genuinely fond of each other. There was that friendship to worry about now.

There was jubilation in the streets at first, but then the people heard with outrage that their hero had reversed his initial position, which was thought to have been that the real Rome was wherever the Pope decided to settle down. A further rebuff to the city was the sentence of interdict which Pope Amen laid upon Valana until the instigators of the violence against the conclave should be brought into his presence. For three days, the population seethed. Under the interdict, Masses were forbidden to be said or confessions heard, and only the last sacraments could be offered to the dying. The city was sick, and the city knew that the punisher behind the interdict was Cardinal Brownpony. But on the fourth day, the terrorists were brought bound before the Pope. He ordered them untied, heard their common confession, and granted them absolution on condition that they repair all damage to the building under the supervision of the Cardinal Penitentiary and satisfy any other claims against them before an arbitrator. Having thus subdued the city, the Pope-elect again called together the conclave and had himself reelected in the absence of mob violence. This too was attributed to Brownpony’s influence. A vote against the Pope was a vote against an early departure from Valana; there were no such votes, and only two abstentions.

It was true that Specklebird had once said that Rome was wherever the Pope settled down, but saying that the Pope was Pope wherever he lived was not the same as saying he should live in Valana. Specklebird had never said he should, for he was Pope only by virtue of being Bishop of New Rome. The public ministry which informed and influenced popular opinion published an analysis of Specklebird’s views, and it was posted on the doors or walls of every Church in the city. Valanans, this essay concluded, had nothing to fear from Amen Specklebird’s return to New Rome, for this was his home, and while he left as spiritual conqueror, he could be expected to return every summer to Valana for the rest of his life, and permanently to establish here many institutions of the Church which were now in New Rome, such as the Ignatzian Order, in order to free them from imperial influence. Nevertheless, the angry burghers seemed intent upon preventing Pope Amen from leaving Valana until Urion Cardinal Benefez had arrived and paid homage to His Holiness.

By this time the attendant electors, cardinals of the College, had knelt before, kissed the ring of, and been embraced by His Holiness Pope Amen. Only a handful refused to do so, claiming that the election was held under duress and therefore invalid. These few had obvious Texark affiliations and their attitude was not unexpected.

It was about noon on the fateful election day that the coach bearing the Most Eminent Lord Urion Cardinal Benefez, Archbishop of Texark, arrived in the sickened city with a party of cavalry. Blacktooth caught a glimpse of the fury on the portly archbishop’s face when he learned of the forced election, and heard him rain abuse on his own conclavists for their votes, but the meaning of the fury and its portent faded almost instantly from his mind. Across the plaza from the palace stood a barefoot girl in a brown nun’s habit. It was Ædrea, looking at him in apparent shock.

He took a step toward her; then Brownpony’s voice echoed in his mind: You are not to intentionally see her again. If you ever see her in Valana, avoid her. He stopped. But she had already turned away and disappeared into the crowd.