Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

CHAPTER 33

IT WAS A GOOD YEAR FOR THE BUZZARDS. THEY followed Blacktooth all the way back to the Abbey of Saint Leibowitz, little dots like eyespecks against the expanse of Empty Sky. Blacktooth gave up on finding Hilbert’s pills, and the disease gradually gave up on him, burning down to embers. If he had a fever it was the same fever that had plagued him all his life, the burning that Amen and Brownpony had noticed, each from his own particular perspective.

There was no longer a safe route across the grasslands. One could no longer evade the Empire by traveling north of the Nady Ann, or avoid the hordes by traveling to the south. Both groups had interpenetrated, and the contended territories on both sides of the Nady Ann were passable, and yet uncertain. South of the Brave, the Kingdom of Laredo had collapsed in on itself.

The grass itself seemed to be shrinking back into the earth.

There were stretches of sand and dust that took half a day to cross. The Empty Sky seemed even more of an emptiness than before. Blacktooth wore his habit again, and said his rosary as he walked. But had he eaten? And where had he found water? The few people he saw were on horses, on the horizons.

One day there was rain. But it was a swift dry rain, the kind that comes to the high plains and barely reaches the ground, darkening the dust and throwing it up in great splotches, and then evaporating suddenly in the flashes of sun that showed, like slow lightning, after the clouds had ridden away on their long ponies.

Empty Sky.

There was no road, and then no trail. Blacktooth followed the setting sun. Wagon tracks braided across the dry rivercourses, running in every direction. The few people Blacktooth met were peaceful and shared their food; the bodies he found he buried, using the short sword he had borrowed from the Axe.

He walked alone most of the time, accompanied only by his shadow striding before him in the morning, and falling behind by evening. Only at noon, in the heat, would it desert him altogether. Reduced to its essentials, sky and earth, the world seemed more intricate and complex than ever.

Blacktooth missed the little glep cougar with its blue ears. He wondered what had become of Aberlott, who had so loved the little brass cartridges of war. Had he become one of the motherless ones? Or found his final home under the prairie soil?

Other such thoughts came, one with each step… arriving and departing without speaking, like birds. At other times Blacktooth walked with an empty mind, a gift, like Empty Sky, in which each step was a prayer.

It was a good year for the buzzards. Blacktooth could tell by how easily they were chased away. There were always other feasts waiting, just over the next hill.

Dom Abiquiu Olshuen had died after another stroke, and Prior Devendy was taking his place until a new abbot could be elected according to the time-honored Benedictine rule. Once he had arrived, Blacktooth had little desire to stay at the monastery, even though most of his good memories (as well as many of his bad ones) were set amid those ancient adobe walls. The stories of Ædrea’s stay as Sister Clare had become almost legend, and Blacktooth heard several versions. They were linked with the apparition some of the Brothers claimed to have seen of the Holy Virgin in the eastern sky.

“That’s the Night Hag,” said Blacktooth. “She means war and death, not peace and hope.” He could tell by the way Brother Wren and the others crossed themselves that they didn’t want to hear it— even though they were preparing for war in their own way. They had sealed the holy relics in their original chamber and dusted off the Jackrabbit smuggler’s cannon. Brother Carpenter was in the basement, planing boards for a heavier door. The defeat of Brownpony’s plans for a new order signaled the beginning of a new age of darkness. Somehow Blacktooth no longer feared it, or even thought about it. Blood and screams were the water in which humankind swam.

Four children had been brought in from the village. Two of them had already died. It seemed there were new diseases abroad in the desert.

After visiting Jarad’s grave, Blacktooth stood looking into the empty one that was always kept waiting. The straw around the open maw was hardly necessary, as there had been even less rain this year than usual, Prior Devendy explained. The grave was so deep that it seemed to Blacktooth that he could see all the way to the bottom of, of ...

He swayed and almost fell. “Gerard’s affliction,” the Brothers called it after the beloved fainting monk of almost a thousand years ago.

“You seem a little woozy,” said Prior Devendy. “Come.”

He led Blacktooth through the crowded dayroom of the monastery, under the old familiar vigas, into Olshuen’s office. Using a key that hung from a cord around his neck, Devendy opened a drawer, and took from it another key, with which he opened a cabinet of dusty bottles. He poured a glass of brandy. Blacktooth almost waved it away until he saw that Devendy was pouring one for himself as well.

“Oregon,” he said. “It was left here as a gift for Brownpony when he became Pope Amen Two. He took the papacy to New Jerusalem and never drank it.”

“And now he is dead,” Blacktooth said. He had told no one about the scene in the basilica of Saint Peter’s—only that the Pope was dead.

“He made you a cardinal,” said Devendy. “Where is your hat?”

“My zucchetto. I put all that behind me. I suspect whoever is made Pope will undo all Brownpony’s cardinals anyway.”

“You don’t need to be a cardinal here,” said Devendy. He smiled tentatively. “Only a priest.”

“Only a what?” Blacktooth looked at the old priest warily.

“The Brothers want to elect you Abbot. For that you will have to be ordained.”

“That’s not possible,” said Blacktooth. “Non accepto.”

“My thoughts exactly,” said Devendy, looking relieved. “But I promised I would ask.”

“I have no vocation for it,” said Blacktooth. “I was given my vocation by Pope Amen Two. I will stay a couple of nights and then go.”

“To the Mesa of Last Resort?”

“I thought I might go that way.”

“That’s where she went,” said Prior Devendy. “She was, uh, injured, you know, and she stayed with the old Jew after she left here. But I’m sure she must be gone.”

Blacktooth looked out the window toward the Mesa. It shimmered in the distance like a mirage of rock.

“Is the old Jew still there?”

The old Jew was still there. Blacktooth left the abbey the next morning with the gifts of a blanket and breviary, a canteen and a loaf of bread. He was greeted with a rattle of stones halfway up the trail that led to the top of the Mesa. He ignored them; they were only pebbles. He wedged himself up through the last crack onto the top, and there was Benjamin Eleazar bar Joshua, looking no older than he had looked ten years before, or a hundred years before that for all Blacktooth knew.

“You,” said the old man. “I suspected it might be you.”

“Brownpony is dead,” Blacktooth said.

“He was not the one” was all old Benjamin had replied. He told Blacktooth that Ædrea had stayed with him several months, until her sores had healed, and then had left without revealing her plans.

Had he found her much changed?

“Changed?” The old Jew only smiled and shook his head, apparently misunderstanding. “It never was any better, it never will be any better. It will only be richer or poorer, sadder but not wiser, until the very last day.”

Irritated, weary of oracles and parables, Blacktooth wrapped himself in his blanket and went straight to sleep. He stayed with Benjamin two nights, sleeping in the tent where Ædrea had slept. The old tent-maker himself never stayed in a tent if he could help it. Blacktooth was awakened by rain on the tent every night, a few great splattering drops. Or was that a dream sent to advertise his tentmaking and rain-making skills? There was dry lightning off to the east each night: the Horse Woman, admonishing her children on the Plains.

He left on the third day. The old Jew filled his canteen from a pool hidden under a rock. The water was cold and clear, and Blacktooth was surprised to find that it lasted him all the way to New Jerusalem.

“Even if she had come,” Prior Singing Cow told Blacktooth at Saint Leibowitz-in-the-Cottonwoods, “I would have turned her away. You heard what had happened to her.”

“Yes.”

Blacktooth had followed the papal road north, then cut off at Arch Hollow, into the Suckamints. The settlement at New Jerusalem was much diminished. Magister Dion had not made it back from the “Antipope’s war” (as even the spooks were calling it), and no one knew of Shard’s Ædrea, except that she had left for Laredo under interdiction. No one believed Blacktooth when he told them that the interdiction had been lifted by the Pope who was not a pope, at New Rome which was no longer New Rome.

Nor was she to be found in Valana.

But Aberlott was, working as a secular scribe in the square of Saint John’s, under the walls of the Great Hall of Saint Ston’s and next door to the old Papal Palace where Amen had delivered his now-legendary seventeen-hour acceptance speech. The air of Valana was rich with the familiar urban smells of horse dung, food, and smoke. The streets were bustling; after the Crusade’s defeat, many of the Nomads had come to settle in the narrow strip of farmland watered by the mountains. They bought and sold horses and cattle, changing their ways to suit their world’s changing ways.

“I got tired of being a soldier,” Aberlott said. “Did you tire of being a cardinal, Your Excellency?”

“I’m not a cardinal anymore,” Blacktooth said, finding his old companion’s sarcasm as tiresome as ever. Aberlott had a long scar under one eye, which he said he had “earned” outside the gates of Hannegan City when the Texark troops had outflanked and ambushed Høngan Ösle’s warriors. It went well with his missing ear.

“I almost bled to death,” Aberlott said. “I ended up in Hannegan City. Once the fighting was over, the Empire just folded us in, like raisins into a cake. Many of the Qæsach dri Vørdar’s Nomads are now part of the Emperor’s guard. I wandered around for a few weeks, then got a spot as secretary to a N’Ork Churchman who arrived for the conclave, and couldn’t speak Ol’zark.”

“Conclave?”

“Oh, yes,” Aberlott said. “Sorely Nauwhat called a conclave and had himself made Pope, or perhaps we might say Filpeo had him made Pope. Urion Benefez was bitter; still is, I imagine. Without Brownpony to resist and stall and prevaricate, the bishops and archbishops drifted in, and Sorely nullified all the nullifications of the Amen Two, and then Wooshin nullified Filpeo.”

“The Axe.”

“Indeed,” said Aberlott. “Stopped his carriage in the street. Sliced off his head when Filpeo stuck it out the window to see what was going on. The Hannegan’s guard showered your yellow man with bullets but he welcomed them, he bared his throat and chest and belly to them. I saw it.”

When Blacktooth closed his eyes he could see Wooshin’s disapproving narrow eyes. “I would be dead now if it were not for him.”

“Wouldn’t we both? Anyway, you are no longer a cardinal. The papacy has been removed to Hannegan City, which is ruled by Benefez, as regent for several of Filpeo’s sons, who will settle it among themselves, in typically bloody fashion, I imagine, when they come of age. In the meanwhile, a rough peace reigns.”

Aberlott had married Anala, the sister of Jæsis, bringing her and two small children to Valana from New Jerusalem. He offered Blacktooth a place to stay, but the house was small and Blacktooth discovered he had no taste for domestic life. “I have been a monk too long,” he told Aberlott, bidding him farewell and heading out toward the south.

It was a very good year for the buzzards. The younger generation waxed strong, soared high and far on black wings, waiting for the fruitful earth to yield up her bountiful carrion. One night, Blacktooth awakened in a cold sweat and thought that his fever was back. Then he looked north and saw the sky filled with Nunshån, the Night Hag, huge and ugly. He could see stars through her upraised arms. “Who is dying?” he asked aloud; he found out later it was his old friend Chür Ösle Høngan. Brownpony’s plan had been a disaster for the Nomads. After the defeat, the Three Hordes had turned their backs on one another. The Treaty of the Sacred Mare no longer held, and the Plains were littered with bodies thrown down by drought, by famine, and by the motherless ones.

Blacktooth traveled south across the Nady Ann, the Bay Ghost, and at last the Brave. No longer a cardinal, he expected to be turned away at Mother Iridia’s convent of San Pancho Villa of Cockroach Mountain, but she welcomed him almost as an old friend. She had no news, though, of Sister Clare-of-Assisi. She suspected Ædrea was somewhere with her own people.

“Her own people?” Blacktooth protested. “I was at New Jerusalem, and they knew nothing of her.”

“The gleps,” said Mother Iridia. “The spooks. The Valley of the Misborn.”

The Jackrabbit country had always been harsh, but after two dry summers it had become even harsher. The wet years were over. Sand was taking the grass. Hannegan City was prospering, though. The Empire had turned east, and was looking toward the woodlands and the growing commerce up the Red from the Great River.

Blacktooth worked several days in the marketplace as a scribe before he was summoned to a papal audience. The summoner surprised him even more than the summons, for it was Torrildo, wearing a curate’s gown, complete with feather.

“I told His Excellency you were here,” the still handsome young man told Blacktooth. “You should be more careful; you are still under interdiction.”

“I don’t see why. If he took away my cardinalship, why couldn’t he take away my interdiction?”

“It’s Benefez,” Torrildo said. “He thinks you had a hand in killing Filpeo.”

I did, thought Blacktooth.

“He probably thanks you for it,” said Torrildo. “But he doesn’t particularly want you around.”

Sorely Nauwhat was most respectful and even curious to hear of Blacktooth’s adventures. He was especially interested in the situation on the Plains, but he knew more than Blacktooth. The apparition of the Night Hag had been seen all over the High Plains. The Weejus women were not pleased. When the Qæsach dri Vørdar returned from the South, he was called before them and put to death. After the funeral feast his bones were buried in three widely separated locations, decided by each of the three hordes.

“Why is he telling me this?” Blacktooth wondered as the plump, grave Pope rattled on, seemingly unconcerned about the time. He is burying Brownpony’s dreams. Filpeo’s were buried next: the Pope, who had been in the Emperor’s carriage, described in gruesome detail how Wooshin had done his work. Filpeo’s guard were equipped with the first copies of the repeaters, and several misfired. Axe had removed the head of the seventh Hannegan in a single stroke, then laid down his sword and knelt to receive the bullets chasing into his chest like bees into a hive.

Dominus ex deu.

The audience lasted all afternoon, and was exhausting. After the lengthy and bloody assassination, Pope Sorely described the imperial situation in great detail. The repeating weapons were decisive. With them, Texarkana at last controlled the Plains. The old way of life was dying, and those who could not see the end coming could hear it keening in the wind. Even the grass was going. Crescent-shaped hills of sand marched slowly from west to east. The Empire that had secured its western frontiers now looked more and more to the east. New Rome smoldered for years but was never rebuilt….

“My son—”

Blacktooth had fallen asleep. The Pope didn’t seem insulted. When he left the log Papal Palace, Blacktooth was given a small sack of gold coins at the door. Pay for listening, he thought; and then on reflection realized it was travel money. He was to make himself scarce.

That had been his intention all along. Hannegan City, like Valana, was in turmoil. The streets were crowded with horses and men. The army was being decommissioned, new legates were piling out for the west, and the Grasshopper lands to the north were being opened up to the motherless ones and also to those among the Hannegan’s former enemies who wanted to celebrate the new peace by raising cattle and grass.

Leaving was easy. Blacktooth was weary of cities and old friends and enemies. He was weary of mankind, so using the Pope’s money he bought himself an ass, or to be precise, a mule, and headed north along the ragged edge where the forest meets the plains.

Grass. It stretched unbroken to one horizon, and meandered among the low, dark trees on the other. The little mountains called Winding Stare were lit with fires, whether of celebration or mourning, Blacktooth couldn’t tell.

He rode unchallenged past the first log outposts of the gleps. He hoped the Valley of the Misborn would take him in, and it did. The Valley, or the Watchitah Nation as it was now called, had grown to be a network of valleys, up and down the low mountains called the Old Zarks. Blacktooth wandered until he found a little community of bookleggers and memorizers, called Post Cedar. He traded his mule for a g’tara much like the one his father had given him, and lived on the mountainside above the abbey, swapping his services as a scribe and a tutor for food.

He found shelter in a rockhouse cave, very like the cave where Amen had lived, except that these eastern caves were broad and open, like a mouth. They provide protection against the rain, and some against the cold; but none against the years.

And so, Blacktooth St. George grew old, reciting the Divine Office and meditating on The Rule of Saint Leibowitz, which enjoined him to the humility he was surprised to discover had been waiting for him all along. It was a sister to the deep loneliness he treasured, a loneliness he no longer wished filled. It was an emptiness as tangible as love. Some nights, though, he found himself praying to whatever might answer such a prayer that Ædrea would come to him. He had heard that a blond spook who wore a nun’s robe practiced medicine in the next valley. The local priest called her a witch; sometimes she healed minds the priest had cursed, and because of this, the priest feared her.

Blacktooth needed his mind healed, but that was not what he feared in her. He feared the gateway beneath the clitoris, torn open by the black god and the white god he had seen riding with the Day Maiden on her rubriauricular white mule. Or had the old Jew done that to her? It was just over the hill waiting for him, the world gateway of the Lord Jesus and of all the saints, and he was a coward. Sometimes he stroked himself into a moment’s ecstasy thinking about it, and he did not hide his shame from the Holy Mother Day Maiden Fujæ Go who watched him from the corner of the hut of his mind. Neither did he mention it in his annual confession to the Leibowitzian priest who visited him every Maundy Thursday. The priest always wanted to wash Nimmy’s feet on behalf of the abbot on that occasion, but the hermit refused.

“You won’t acknowledge your poverty? Isn’t that your pride?”

Blacktooth signed and let the man wash his feet and give him communion.

He had given up Jesus several times, as Amen Specklebird had advised, when the Savior became an occasion of sin for him: but he always came back, and so, it seemed to him, did the Savior. Well, how have you been doing lately, Lord?

For three hours every weekday, he taught thirteen children of various ages how to read and write their own dialect; he also taught them a little music, and taught them—sometimes to their parents’ disbelief—a few things about the geography of the continent, and as much as he knew about the history of the world and the fall of the Magna Civitas. Some of the children believed him, and others believed their parents; but the laughing parents brought him food in payment for their urchins’ literacy, and they mended his clothes, furnished him blankets, and occasionally brought him a hemina of wine for his weakness.

When he was alone, he opened himself. Sometimes the ecstasy of God came through the opening, but more often it did not. He decided to stop leaving an opening for God. That was what Meister Eckhart advised: to be so poor that he had no place for God to come into. When God had no place to come into, He was in every place. There was nothing else.

But Blacktooth did not consider himself a religious man. He did not know if God was the Father, or the maker of Heaven and Earth, and of all things visible and invisible. He couldn’t see that it mattered, since God Himself, when He became manifest as a whirlwind bush, never bothered to tell him; never said, “Blacktooth, I am your Almighty Father, and I made this Earth you’re kneeling on and the sky you are kneeling under.”