Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

CHAPTER 14

THE WESTERN ROUTE TO NEW JERUSALEM FROM Valana was less clearly defined and proved more difficult to traverse with wheeled vehicles than was the Pope’s road to the east, which Blacktooth and Wooshin had traveled with the cardinal in early spring. There were only four wagons, besides the pack mules, but their wheels had to be spoke-levered to help the animals at every draw, especially after a late summer rain. Annual rainfall was sparse, but this was the season for it, and flash floods often rushed through the desert’s low places. The eastern road would have been so much easier and faster if the travelers had no reason to avoid other wayfarers. The reason was “security.” While they forded a stream, one of the tarp-covered boxes fell from a wagon and broke open. Blacktooth watched Wooshin and Ri’s guards scramble to retrieve rifles from the shallow water, while they furtively looked around as if for spies in the juniper scrub. Later, he was unable to avoid learning about handguns and ammunition in the mule packs. When he asked, Elkin told him it was a comparatively small shipment. The receptionist guard at SEEC seemed to be in charge of the expedition, and he let Nimmy know that he came from the covert wing. The party included several mule drivers, Wooshin, Aberlott, Ulad, and the six warriors from the party of late Cardinal Ri.

Ri’s men were already skilled as weaponless warriors. By firelight they sparred with each other, and with Wooshin, who was hard-pressed to cope with the foreman among them, his junior by thirty years. They were speaking their own language among themselves, and Wooshin was laughing. “O Axe, please do remind them,” Blacktooth called, “that they’re supposed to be practicing either ‘Mount or Church.”

The Axe grunted at them, and they tried haltingly to continue their conversation in Churchspeak. Nimmy suddenly realized they had been talking about him, because he was an exception to what they saw to be the rule here, that monks don’t fight, or can’t, or won’t Whereas they themselves were Christians with vows, although one of them had a wife back home. When Wooshin explained this to Blacktooth, the monk was astonished.

Ri’s guards were a puzzle to him at first. Wooshin had fallen right in with them, and they seemed to understand each other’s language well enough when words were accompanied by frenetic gesticulation. On the third day, Blacktooth dared to remind Wooshin again that he was tasked with teaching Churchspeak to the “Yellow Guard,” as they had begun to be called around Valana. Wooshin glowered at the reminder, but after a moment explained, not without embarrassment, that Cardinal Ri’s men had been trying to convert him to Christianity.

The monk looked at him incredulously.

Axe laughed at his expression. “I don’t think you want to hear that argument in Churchspeak. Have you forgotten that they were Cardinal Ri’s men?”

“I assumed they were Christian, and I’ve heard them chanting, but—”

“But you wouldn’t expect soldiers to be very religious?” 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 aspiritual 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 aweaponless 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 of 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.”

“I understand,” Nimmy said evenly and managed to detach his arm from the other’s grip. Ulad let him go. What Nimmy understood was that communities all over the continent fell victim to such epidemics every few years. Often all the victims died in the same week, and all were incredibly glep or worse. When Nimmy later mentioned it to the old Jew, the pilgrim named the epidemic disease “Genny Passover.”

“So much for what you said about New Jerusalem and its policy of returning gleps to the Valley,” said Aberlott.

Blacktooth shrugged. What he knew of New Jerusalem, he had heard from Ædrea. Dead babies downstream of a village was more of a rule than an exception. That was just it. New Jerusalem was supposed to be the exception.

The climb into the mountains carried them into long U-turns around the sides of a valley or a mountain, and in places the trail was obscured by landslides which the drivers of the mule train would have to remove to gain passage. Great conifers rose above them on the mountainsides. Soon there were new signs of habitation, but the people who came out to eye the travelers were apparently normal. The few glep families lived on the periphery of the sprawling colony, as Shard and Tempus lived on the eastern slope of the same mountain range. But here there were real farms, although the guardian gleps inhabited the less fertile land. The mountain peaks attracted rain and snow, and the streams flowed continuously after the thaw. In the passes and valleys, beside the streams grew orchards of apples, cherries, pears, and peaches. The crops were ripe now in late summer, and peddlers hawked their produce from donkey carts parked in the community centers, of which there were several. Whole carcasses of beef, mutton, and venison were hung from poles and were cut to order for women shopping. Dusty men with faces darkened by soot and blasting powder walked home from the mines in the late afternoon.

The capitol, so called, was a three-story building of stone and mortar with, on the ground floor, a kitchen and communal dining hall divided into a large room for dirty miners and a smaller one for government workers and guests. The second floor, Nimmy was told, housed Mayor Dion’s office and a council room where a small body of legislators met weekly to approve or disapprove administrative decisions. There were only a dozen or so buildings in the center of town, while residences and barns—mostly log structures built on stone foundations—were scattered throughout the mountains.

Blacktooth’s perception of the country was colored by what Ædrea had told him, but the baby boneyard had aroused his suspicions. He was relieved when Ulad, who had ridden ahead into the heart of the community, rejoined them to say that Mayor Dion was away in another part of the mountains, and would not return until the next afternoon. Aberlott’s meeting with the family of Jæsis was also postponed until tomorrow. He, with Blacktooth, Elkin, and the old Jew, would spend the night in a guesthouse, which already housed one visitor from outside the colony, who came out to meet them with a wide smile. Blacktooth, who first gasped in surprise, knelt to kiss the ring of Chuntar Cardinal Hadala, Vicar Apostolic to the Watchitah Nation.

“And how is Cardinal Brownpony?” asked the Bishop of the Misborn.

“Well when I saw him last, Your Eminence. I believe he is with Chür Høngan and the other Nomad leaders on the Plains.”

“Yes, I knew of his plans. I suppose you are quite surprised that I am here?”

“Yes, but I should have realized that you would have a special relationship with New Jerusalem, which was colonized from your diocese.”

“Vicariate,” Hadala corrected him. “Well, you have come just in time to unpack and wash up for dinner. I’ll see you then.”

They followed Ulad to their assigned quarters. Hadala’s presence reawakened Nimmy’s shame for his disobedience to his own cardinal, but he weighed it against his recent perception of Brownpony as subverting the papacy, as disloyal to Papa Specklebird, and if not the author of the conspiracy then a promoter of an earlier plan. The plan was obviously to assure the Valanan Church some military power independent of Nomad alliances. Blacktooth decided nothing was necessarily wrong with this, except that the plan involved concealment from the Pope. Would Amen Specklebird necessarily disapprove the ownership by the Church of arms? Probably, was Nimmy’s guess. Was it his duty to tell? He tried to think of a way to determine whether Chuntar Cardinal Hadala was already privy to the secret, but decided he had only to watch the cardinal carefully when Axe and the Yellow Guard arrived with the weapons.

That night at dinner, however, the cardinal invited Ulad and Elkin to share his table, well across the room from where Blacktooth, Aberlott, and the old Jew dined with several clerks from Mayor Dion’s office. Watching the cardinal carefully would be a waste of time. That he used dinner for consultations with Ulad and SEEC’s covert agent told him enough. He decided to enjoy the venison, potatoes, and fresh fruit, while trying to understand the colony better by listening to Aberlott banter with the clerks. He learned little that he did not know. They described how New Jerusalem had grown by immigration from the Valley.

Watchit-Ol’zarkia, the name claimed by the mountainous region which, north of Texark, had grown into a ghetto nation from the original Valley of the Misborn, was surrounded by frontier guards of both Church and State, but the border was a sieve by night for escapees traveling without baggage, and escape by spooks was commonplace. Some escapes were mere escapades, and the fugitives returned to their homes after a few days or weeks abroad, and of course they usually came back richer than they left. Men left their mountain homes to steal or work at temporary jobs in the city. Women left for the same reasons, but also sometimes to get pregnant by farmboys with supposedly healthy genes. However, some escapees never came back, and while there were a few small colonies of spooks in the east, the isolation of New Jerusalem in the Suckamint Range, its resources and natural defenses, made it the largest congregation of genetically dubious persons outside the Valley, and most appealing as a sanctuary for permanent fugitives. Especially in the years since the conquest, the population had grown rapidly because under imperial dominance the Jackrabbit Horde was no longer a threat to travelers through the Province, and it was only necessary to evade Texark outposts and local militia.

“We can defend our mountains,” the chief clerk explained after dinner, when he walked Blacktooth back to his quarters, “but against Texark we have no offensive weapon except terror. Spooks become good at infiltration. We have people in the army and the Church in Texark. We have people in Valana as well as New Rome. If they abuse our people in Watchitah, we respond with terror.”

Nimmy paused and looked around. No one was observing or listening, and the chief clerk seemed more inclined to talk outside the dining hall.

“Was it your men who tried to kill the cardinal and me?” the monk asked.

The official sighed. “I cannot be sure. The order did not come from here. Our people denied it, naturally. Rational men sometimes go crazy under cover.”

“Jæsis was to become a priest, before he failed at the university. We have others. Terror is possible. When the time comes, we may use it, although the Church will condemn us, including our friend Brownpony, for all I know. I know no more about Cardinal Brownpony’s plans than you do. Cardinal Hadala probably knows, but it may be that there is no long-range plan. I have watched Magister Dion play chess with your cardinal when Dion was in Valana. He won as many games as he lost. He looks ahead a few moves, but there can be no long-range plan in chess. He piles up arms here, for us and for others. We can’t know who the others are, but we presume there will be Nomads. He makes alliances with all nations who fear Texark. He has allies east of the Great River and south of the Brave River. He seems to me like a man playing for territory in chess. He does not take any pieces yet. He piles up power.”

Nimmy found the clerk’s openness surprising. Perhaps Brownpony was not as well liked here as he had supposed. The colony had its agenda, and Brownpony had his own. The monk changed the subject: “Can you tell me the whereabouts of your former agent to Valana?”

“And who would that be?”

“Her name is Ædrea, daughter of Shard.”

The clerk opened his mouth, then snapped it closed, frowned at Blacktooth, and replied in a hesitant voice, “I have said too much. Here are your quarters. I have to go now.” He turned on his heels and walked back toward the stone building.

That night Blacktooth dreamed he was back at the monastery. No one looked at or spoke to him, and he wondered if this were part of excommunication, this being shunned. But “shunned” was not quite the word for it. He stood directly in Prior Olshuen’s path, head slightly bowed, waiting. When the prior’s sandals advanced rapidly into his vision, he leaped aside to evade a collision. Olshuen would have walked right into him. Or through him, as if he were a ghost. He went outside to the cemetery and stood by the open grave.

It was the same open grave, and in the same place, as when he left in early spring. There was always an open grave at the Monastery of Saint Leibowitz in the Desert, even if no one was ill. No one had died, then, since the saintly Brother Mulestar. It still awaited its next occupant. The lip of the hole was protected by thatch all around, pointing inward so that drops of rain would follow the straws and drip into the hole instead of eroding the lip. When necessary, a monk would descend into the grave with a shovel and remove any earth which had fallen since the last cleaning. There were seven penitential occasions every year when the Brothers formed a procession that led to the grave. There they stood looking down for some time while the sun moved westward into the shadows of that yellowish adobe hole. A not-thing was that hole, like the soul itself, a not-thing at the center of the all. Blacktooth did not like this hole or this ceremony of meditation, although some Brothers found it to leave the mind wonderfully focused for at least the rest of that day.

Now the straw thatch appeared damp. As he watched, the grave stopped looking like a grave. As he stared, he saw that the straw was pubic straw, and the hole was not a grave. He shook his head, and, thinking of Ædrea, started to go see the abbot, to tell him that the grave was now a cunt, but then he heard a baby crying. There was a baby in the hole, and he went to look. It was covered with patches of fur, and had no hands: obviously misborn. A genny. His own son?

He heard himself making strangling sounds, then felt a sharp slap on the back of his neck. He came out of the dream-trance and Aberlott was sitting beside him. The student had stayed quite aware of the change in Blacktooth’s state of mind and body since the departure from Valana. His daylight fantasies had begun to acquire the quality of nightmare. “The Devil is on my back,” Nimmy said.

Blacktooth’s sense that the world is a weird place was stirred again when he met a Nomad, Önmu Kun, who returned with Mayor Dion and his party the following day. It was not until he spoke Ol’zark with an accent that Nimmy recognized him as a Nomad. That he was Jackrabbit was apparent from his clothing, which was cloth, his legs, which were not bowed by growing up in the saddle, and his skin color, which was not much burned by the sun. Because of diet, the present generation of Jackrabbit Nomads were shorter than both their ancestors and the wild Nomads of today. It was obvious Kun was present as an unofficial spokesman for his horde to this Parva Civitas of New Jerusalem, which was evidently becoming an arsenal for all the children of Empty Sky and the Wild Horse Woman. Nimmy approached him and spoke Nomadic, shifting to a Southern dialect. Kun grinned broadly and they exchanged pleasantries and bits of life histories. They discussed the meeting on the Plains of the Weejus and Bear Spirit people from all the hordes, and Nimmy surprised and delighted him with the news that Cardinal Brownpony was now Vicar Apostolic to the Plains, including the south, pervaded as it was by clergy from Texark. When the monk asked Önmu Kun about his business in New Jerusalem, the monk was gruffly told to mind his own. The Nomad shrugged off his apologies.

“Perhaps your position as the cardinal’s former secretary entitles you to ask, but I am unable to answer.” To soften the rejection, he then told a dirty Jackrabbit joke about a Weejus woman, the Bishop of Texark, and a long-sought erection.

Aberlott was sent to see the family of Jæsis, and Blacktooth did not see him again in New Jerusalem. No one would talk to him about Ædrea, or even admit an acquaintance with her. As for the Mayor, he did not send for the monk until the day after the party of warriors arrived with mules, wagons, and guns, and a transaction was completed between Elkin and the Civitas. Every night the monk dreamed wild dreams about the blond and blue-eyed imp with an impassable gateway. The dreams frightened him.

The dreams also prepared him for the first meeting with Mayor Dion, who came directly to the point. “We know why you are here, Brother St. George,” he said gently. “We took insult when the Secretary refused to deal with the agents we designated. We suspected that the killing of our Jæsis was a betrayal, too. But then we were persuaded by Shard’s Ædrea that we had been mistaken. She took full responsibility. You need not explain or apologize. A new representative will hereafter contact the Secretariat for us. You will meet him later today. Now do you have any other messages for us?”

Blacktooth looked down for a moment, then up into Dion’s gray eyes. “Only my own apology, Magister. Ædrea is not at fault. The fault was mine. Even the cardinal knows that. Ædrea is innocent. Where is she, and may I see her?”

The gray eyes watched him closely. Finally the Magister said, “I must tell you that Shard’s Ædrea is dead.” He watched the monk again for a moment, then beckoned a guard. “You! Don’t let him fall!” then said to another, “Get the monk some brandy, the peach is strongest.”

Blacktooth lowered his face into his hands. “How did she die?” he asked at last.

“There was a miscarriage. Something went wrong. As you know, they live way down by the Pope’s highway, and by the time our physician got there, she had lost too much blood. So I am told.”

The Magister briefly watched his grief, then quietly left the room, after whispering to Elkin, “We’ll meet again here tomorrow.”

When he had gone through all the motions, and his duties as an emissary were ended, Blacktooth went to confession at the local Church, and fasted for three days in constant prayer for his love and her lost child. To cherish grief was as bad as to cherish anything: lust, triumph, or, as Specklebird would say, as bad as cherishing Jesus. He then spent several days in the city’s library. When grief overwhelmed him, he paused in his study of the history of the colony, and studied the grief, pressing it firmly down into his abdomen from the diaphragm, then continued to peruse some of the private correspondence between early colonists and their relatives in the Watchitah Nation. He was looking for anything that would tell him about Shard’s people, or their ancestors. Evidently, they were latecomers, as they claimed to be, and of no historical interest to the beautiful inhabitants of these mountains, bristling with guns, and surrounded by their ugly first line of defense. Why did not the glep Helots of those scarecrow alleys rebel against the well-armed Spartan spooks? Perhaps because those Spartans were relatives of men like Shard, and Shard was proud of his Ædrea. There was segregation here, but no visible repression. Only the glep’s genes were unwanted.

He found out that the penalty for sexual union between a citizen of the Res Publica Jerusalem Nova and a glep was death for the citizen and the offspring, if any. There were people in New Jerusalem with special talents. Marriages were made by contract between families, and ratified by the Magisterium. People were bred like animals, but people throughout recorded history had bred not only slaves, but sons and daughters like animals. The only thing new here was the criteria by which the genetic potential of such unions was judged, whereas the historical matchmaker was usually interested in combinations of wealth. Nimmy felt vaguely that the criteria were not very different from what the Mayor of Texark would have chosen. But here you grew up a healthy citizen, with special talents, or went to the boneyard of infants, the one they had passed the morning after that night in the foothills. Maybe some glep children of citizens were returned to the Watchitah Nation, as Ædrea had said, but it was a long dangerous trip back to the Valley.

Having given much thought to his doubtful future, he decided that upon completion of his rather unimportant mission here, he would return to the world through Leibowitz Abbey because Ri’s yellow monastic warriors wanted to go there, while Wooshin himself had been ordered back to Valana. Nimmy had his own reasons for going as a guide for the warriors. First, he suspected Brownpony had sent him here to get rid of him, and he no longer trusted Cardinals Brownpony, Nauwhat, and Hadala. He wanted to stay clear of any conspiracy, and a conspiracy was anything to which Pope Amen was not privy. His conscience and his relations with God were in need of repair as well. He wanted to confess to Jarad, and Jarad owed him a hearing. He would not be thrown out, but he knew he would not be welcome to stay beyond necessity. He intended that nobody think he was there as a suppliant, but Jarad would try to make him feel like one.

When Blacktooth and the party of warriors were packing gear and saddling horses for the trip, they were joined by Önmu Kun, who was driving a wagon, obviously loaded with arms.

“You can’t take that to the abbey,” Nimmy told him.

“Who said I’m going to the abbey?” said the Jackrabbit Nomad, and followed the party of riders eastward. The old Jew who called himself Benjamin followed them for a short distance, but changed his mind. “Tell the abbot I shall visit him before winter.”

Nimmy promised to deliver the message.

He badly wanted to visit Arch Hollow on the way out of the mountains, despite the Mayor’s warning, but as soon as Shard saw him, he ran for a gun. The guards fired a warning shot over Shard’s head; then one of them popped the rump of Blacktooth’s mount with his crop, and yelled, pointing a direction of retreat. They galloped past the homestead and down the road which led east to the papal highway. Nimmy was not allowed to weep at her grave.

As soon as they came to the Pope’s Highway, the Jackrabbit Nomad bade Blacktooth farewell, and announced his intention to leave the trail and travel cross-country to the southeast. This would take him into a kind of no-man’s-land where the border of the imperial province was in dispute.

“Aren’t you worried about Texark agents?” Nimmy asked.

“I’ll be meeting my customers tonight,” Önmu Kun said with a grin. “They will then go home, and I back to New Jerusalem.”

They parted after exchanging the Jackrabbit peace sign. Nimmy decided that Kun was simply a gunrunner for his captive horde. But he had seen the weapons in the wagon and noticed that they were not of the most advanced design—a precaution against their possible seizure by imperial forces.

On the trip to the abbey, the Yellow Guard’s Foreman, whose name was Jing-U-Wan, cautiously questioned Blacktooth about the Order of Leibowitz, and then explained his own.

“The Order of Saint Peter’s Sword has two traditions. One is purely Christian. Our creed is not much different from yours. Our canonical prayers are not identical, but quite similar. We use less from the Psalms, and there is more silent meditation. In our work, people expected us to do what non-Christian monks had always done in that country. Outside the chapter house we work in the fields and we beg only when we travel. We maintain a weaponless warrior tradition, because the Tanters monks had always done so. It was a necessity. In our history, the unarmed victim of a robbery was considered negligent for going about without a gun, and he had to pay for any police action against the robber. Unarmed monks had to be skillful with feet and fist.”

“But you carry arms now.”

“The rule is dispensed when a monk’s job requires it. When the master died, we talked about going unarmed, but the master is at the edge of war.”

It took Blacktooth a moment to realize that second master the man referred to was Cardinal Brownpony. “What makes you say he is at the edge of war?” he asked.

The man paused. Being cautious. “In a sense, we are always at war.” It was a generality to get rid of the subject.

Nimmy did not pursue it.

He had dreamed about the open grave at the abbey, and it was the first place they visited after exchanging greetings with the gatekeeper, because the gatekeeper pointed them toward it without breaking his silence. To Nimmy’s surprise, the open grave had been moved. The old one was recently filled, and a new wooden cross bore the name of the grave’s occupant:

The date of death was two weeks old.

“Brother St. George,” a familiar voice called out to him.

He turned to see Prior Olshuen approaching. He was looking with astonishment at the Yellow Guard, which bristled with swords. The prior was in mourning. The whole monastery was in mourning. Blacktooth went to the chapel to pray sterile prayers for his mistakes, but it felt like self-indulgence. After a while, he went with mounting dread to seek a conference with the prior.

It was a truly massive hemorrhage. While offering Mass on a Wednesday morning, Abbot Jarad, having consecrated the bread and the wine, turned to his community in choir and began to say the “Ecce agnus dei” when he turned white, emitted a strangled yowl, and fell down the sanctuary steps with a great crash and a ringing of brass chalice and paten on the stone floor. “Body and blood all over the pavement,” said Brother Wren. The Cardinal Abbot of Saint Leibowitz died without regaining consciousness.