Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

CHAPTER 18

THEY REACHED THE OUTSKIRTS OF HANNEGAN City by early evening, and the cardinal decided to rent rooms and spend the night at an inn outside the city limits. There was the possibility of learning recent news from the innkeeper or fellow travelers; there was the inevitability of reading the government bulletin boards to learn of the response of the bureaucrats to the same recent news. There was a need to change from a monk’s habit to red and black. Weh-Geh would need new clothes altogether, and could again wear his weapons as the cardinal’s bodyguard. All Blacktooth needed was a bath and a change of habit. They had grown beards during the journey, but only Weh-Geh decided to shave. His whiskers were rather thin and added an alien touch to his appearance. Brownpony’s beard was redder than his thinning hair. Blacktooth had more gray on his chin than on his pate, which badly needed reshaving. Weh-Geh barbered Nimmy’s tonsure with a short sword, grasping the blade with both hands and drawing it smoothly under the soapy hair. Blacktooth complained that the swordsman was leaning on him too hard.

“Only to hold you still. If you prefer, I could shave you just as easily standing back here,” Weh-Geh said to the lathered monk. Blacktooth looked at him with affected fright. The guardsman held the sword drawn back past his right shoulder, as if to deliver a roundhouse cut to the scalp’s long stubble.

“Stop boasting. Lean on me if you need to.” He was surprised, because it was the first time Weh-Geh made a joke, a sinister joke besides, and one of the few times he spoke at all. In Jackrabbit country, only once did a need arise to draw his long sword and Brownpony’s pistol, when a group of young bullies had decided to pick on three itinerant mendicant monks for fun. Both Nimmy and the cardinal missed Wooshin. Blacktooth wondered if they had, without meaning to, resented Weh-Geh as a poor substitute for the Axe, on whose head there was a price in this realm. But Weh-Geh had no wish to be a substitute for anyone. Nimmy resolved to befriend him, if there was still time.

By midafternoon of a cold and sunny day, they were standing on the steps of the Cathedral of Holy Michael, the Angel of Battle, talking to its Cardinal Archbishop. At the Archbishop’s left and rear stood an attractive young acolyte wearing a long surplice with lacework and crocheted borders. Torrildo smiled happily at Blacktooth on first seeing him, but then misinterpreted Nimmy’s expression and cast his eyes on the ground. The monk was less shocked that Benefex had hired the pretty fugitive than surprised by a sudden realization that the letters BRT beneath the painted “Boedullus was here” legend at Yellow’s crater lake stood for “Br. Torrildo,” who had been traveling from Valana to Hannegan City.

Weh-Geh seemed ill-at-ease, for Benefez kept glancing at him, until finally the cardinal asked, “Young man, where have I seen you before?”

Brownpony answered for him, “In Valana, Urion. Weh-Geh was in Cardinal Ri’s employ. Now he is in mine.”

“Ah, yes, there were five or six of them, weren’t there? Where are the others?”

Brownpony shook his head and shrugged. “I’ve been on the road for two months.” The evasion was almost a lie, Blacktooth noticed.

“Of course,” Benefez said, then returned to their previous conversation: “Elia, mmm, Your Eminence, of canon law, I too have been a scholar. Before the Flame Deluge there had been only two papal resignations. One Pope, so-called, was a great sinner, one was a great saint. The former sold the papacy, the latter fled from it in holy terror. But the question arises whether either of these men was a legitimate pope. So can a real pope resign? I think not. If he resigns, he was never elected by the Holy Ghost in the first place. This may be against the majority opinion, but it is my opinion. A poet of his own time put him in Hell, but that poet was a bitter man. I think the old fellow was really hallowed, but I doubt the legitimacy of his election in the first place. If he were Pope, he would not and could not resign, and would not be talking about resignation.”

“Are we talking about San Pietro of Mount Murrone, or Pope Amen Specklebird?” Brownpony asked.

“Aren’t they two of a kind?”

“No, Urion, they are not.” He hesitated. “Well, how can I say? Amen Specklebird I have known. I know San Pietro only from a book at Leibowitz Abbey. The writer thought he was a saintly clown.”

“Doesn’t this describe Amen Specklebird? In a charitable way?”

Brownpony paused. He seemed to be leaving himself open on all sides. Blacktooth tried to remember Wooshin’s word for it. Happu biraki, he thought. In a fight, it was usually a deadly invitation to be foolhardy.

Brownpony closed in. “If so, then this saintly clown, Pope Amen, His Holiness, is disposed to absolve you, Urion, of any penalty of excommunication you may have incurred, crimine ipso laesae majestatis facto, or any other act of rebellion you may have committed in thought, word, or deed. I am here to announce this.”

Blacktooth noticed that the purple in the face of Benefez was not merely reflected light from his purple vestments (it had been a day for burying the dead). He did not sputter, however, but purred, “How utterly wonderful of him, Elia. From so generous a man, I’ll bet the penance I have to do is only kiss his ring.”

“I doubt he would allow you to do that, Urion. He is an honest man. There are no conditions, and no penance unless I choose to impose one.”

“You?”

“The Pope sent a plenipotentiary in this case. Me.”

“You!”

“And I unbind you, Urion, without condition, in nomine Patris Filiique Spiritusque Sancti.”

Blacktooth saw the Archbishop’s right hand twitch toward mirroring the sign of the cross Brownpony made over him, but it was only the twitch of habit.

“Your credentials are as good as your Latin, Elia. Go home and stop being my gadfly.”

“I am also empowered to offer you control over those Churches in the Province where the parishioners are mostly settlers or soldiers whose native tongue is Ol’zark.”

“Oh, I see. It’s not a matter of geography, then.”

“Geography is boundaries and fences. These don’t mean much to a Nomad.”

“Yes, we had a recent demonstration of that just west of New Rome. Human life doesn’t mean much to them either, and they eat men’s flesh.”

“Only men they honor. It is a funeral rite, or a tribute to a brave dead enemy.”

“You defend this evil thing!”

“No, I merely describe it.”

Someone was yelling “Make way! Make way!” in the distance, and Cardinal Benefez looked up the street.

“Apparently my nephew is coming down the road,” he said to Brownpony. “Do you want to step inside?”

“You mean do I want to hide? No, Urion, thank you. I must see him in order to deliver this.” He showed Benefez the sealed papers which he had received at the abbey from Valana. “I must go to the palace to request an audience, unless he sees us and stops.”

The Emperor was in ahurry as usual, and ordered his driver to wield the whip. He waved in a friendly way to his subjects in the streets who bowed or curtsied as the royal coach hurried on, preceded by two mounted guards whose costumes were more elegant than that of their ruler. Filpeo wanted to be seen as a man of frugal habits, generous to his subjects, and devoted to the economic interests of the Empire. He sought to distance himself in public from the ferocity of some of his predecessors, and had shortened the list of crimes for which the penalty was death. His own ferocity was carefully contained. He had secretly, on several occasions, insisted on administering the supreme penalty himself, but few men knew about this. One who had known it was named Wooshin, and it was the Hannegan’s personal fascination with death by the art of the headsman which had, in fact, cost him his best executioner. The fellow had been repelled by his own art when practiced by his master. And Harq had let him get away! It was one of his few mistakes in judging men.

Filpeo Harq was a Hannegan only on his mother’s side, and some considered this inheritance of the throne through the motherline supremely ironic, given the masculine, patrilineal, and certainly patriarchal cast of the Texark civilization, which in its origins was a reaction to the matriline culture of the Plains. The original Hannegan (or Høngan with a Jackrabbit pronunciation), the conqueror of the city, had been leader of a band of Nomad “outlaws,” and his acquisition of the mayorality of the small town and trading post called Texark had been by conquest. The term “outlaws” was a farmer’s word; Nomads, who despised them but feared them less, called them “motherless ones,” a term which was applied to those wanderers of the Prairie who either evaded family ties because of hostility, or found themselves unwanted by any woman of the horde, and these men formed homosexual (not necessarily in the erotic sense) war bands, taking their women by violence when they felt the urge and saw the chance, and keeping them, if at all, as servants.

From the point of view of the civis, every nomas was an outlaw, but in the Nomad view, the motherless ones had deviated so far from the Nomad cultural norm that they were loathed by the people of the Plains more than they were by the farmers along the eastern fringe whom they sometimes plundered. As is usually the case, a completely alien enemy is less to be despised than a deviant brother. The motherless ones who originally conquered Texark had been driven there by the right-thinking orthodox Nomads of the several hordes. It was an infusion of fresh blood and new ideas for the sleepy trading community and the surrounding farmers, and Texark began to grow and to be fortified. It was located in a place where, exposed on both flanks, in order to grow at all it was forced to conquer or perish. However, after five generations the mutation of barbarian outlaw into civilized aristocrat was nearly complete, and Filpeo was a popular ruler except in the conquered territories.

The town of Texark itself, or Texarkana improperly so-called in the Latin of the Church, was not located at the site (now lost) of the ancient city of that name. Now called Hannegan City, it did lie on the Red River, and it grew up at the vague boundary between forest and plain, where it was originally a minor center of commerce between the two areas, the sown and the treeless wild. The relatively peaceful Jack-rabbit people had come here to trade surplus cattle, horses, and hides for wood, metal, spirits, medicinal herbs, products of the blacksmith’s art, and whatever trinkets the merchants could show that caught the Nomad fancy. Among the merchants, however, there were a few panderers who took advantage of the sexual hungers of the motherless ones, and actually sold them brides, or rented them for a while. That was the beginning of it. When the price of brides went up, the bandits killed the merchants, took what they wanted, and settled down, but they themselves, not their captive wives, kept and managed the horses—and every other kind of property. In one generation, a way of life was turned on its head.

Filpeo Harq himself was a student of this local and family history, which was not so well known to the residents of his realm. He had taken a personal interest in the writings of historians at the collegium, now a thriving university, and he who wanted tenure and royal favor wrote to please the monarch. He who wrote otherwise was rarely published, and failed to thrive. To put it mildly.

In passing his uncle’s Church, the Monarch suddenly signaled his driver to go slow. He pointed at a group of clergy, including his uncle Urion, standing on the steps in the morning sun. Cardinal Benefez seemed to be arguing warmly with another man in a red zucchetto whose back was toward the coach.

“Who is that man?” Filpeo asked sharply.

“Which one, Your Imperial Honor?”

The cardinal with his back toward the coach suddenly looked over his shoulder. The Mayor’s head disappeared inside the window and he knocked for the driver to hurry on. Beside the second cardinal stood one man in the robes of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, and another man-at-arms who was probably a bodyguard. He thought he knew who one of them might be. The armed man was too alien in appearance to be the cardinal’s secretary. And Uncle Urion appeared to have acquired another pretty young man as acolyte.

“Drive on, drive on.”

The manufacturer’s representative had already arrived at the War College when the imperial coach discharged its royal passenger and his courtiers, but he and the officers in charge were not yet ready for the demonstration. Irritated by the delay, but determined to make use of every idle moment, Filpeo called an immediate meeting of staff to discuss long-term strategy on the Plains. It was disquieting to the officers to be quizzed by the Monarch on such an impromptu basis with no preparation, and Filpeo always enjoyed putting them in such a situation. He learned a lot from the practice, and it helped him weed out the fools. The commanders of Infantry and Corps of Engineers were out of the city on maneuvers, however, and their seconds were summarily yanked out of their offices and hauled to the conference room.

Admiral e’Fondolai was there in person, and so was General Goldæm, Chief of Staff, and Major General Alvasson of the Cavalry.

Infantry and Engineers were represented by Colonels Holofot and Blindermen. Not as a joke, but in a joking manner, Filpeo Harq himself collared Colonel Pottscar, S.I., in the corridor while the Ignatzian Chief Chaplain was returning from Mass and pulled him along to the meeting. “Someone may need your services here, Father,” said the Monarch to the astonished Pottscar. “It may even be me. Did you know that Cardinal Brownpony and probably his troublesome monk-secretary are in town.”

Colonel Father Pottscar nodded. “I just heard about it as I left the Church. By now, he must have requested an audience with Your Honor, no?”

“No! Not that I have been told about.”

“I’m sure he will, but naturally he would see the Archbishop first.”

“By God, I should have him arrested. If Urion knew he was coming, he would have told me. What the hell is going on?”

“I would guess, Your Honor, that he has come to plead the cause of the man he calls Pope.”

“Hah! The man who sent the Grasshopper Horde to smash its way to New Rome! By God, they killed two-thirds of the Nomads, and we chased that bastard Curia back to Valana with their Specklebird, all right. But they left a lot of dead men and raped women and burned buildings. There hasn’t been an atrocity like that before the second Hannegan’s conquest. And now we’ve got trouble with the Grasshopper all along the frontier, mainly because of him!”

“Who, Brownpony? Sire, you have been misinformed. He was not even with the Curia, so-called, at that time. He was with Monsignor Sanual at the Nomad election. Sanual told me that. He was quite shocked by Brownpony. Says the man is a pagan. But although he rode south with the Grasshopper to meet the Pope, he did not join the others but continued south. Your Honor, according to one of my chaplains in the area of conflict, the, uh, pretender Pope turned back with his whole retinue when the guards refused to let them cross the border. This priest says the Nomad escort attacked only after they were separated from the Valanan cardinals. It’s not at all clear that they were acting under Valana’s instruction. I know the Archbishop had received a message from this crazy Specklebird. It probably told him Brownpony was coming.”

“I wonder that the guards let him cross the border!”

“I doubt that he came through the skirmishing zone, Sire. He probably crossed from the Province.”

“By way of Leibowitz Abbey, I dare say, for he was with a monk of theirs. Right now, I want you to send one of your chaplains to bring Brownpony to me. Let a military policeman go with him. Let them not take no for an answer. Bring that monk along too.”

Colonel Father Pottscar hurried away. The Hannegan glanced curiously at Admiral e’Fondolai and asked, “I don’t remember calling you here. Do we need the Navy to fight Nomads on the Plains? Not that you aren’t welcome—”

“I asked him to come,” explained General Goldæm. “Brownpony inherited six alien warriors from a cardinal who died in conclave, and Carpy here knows something about their race and nation. We might need to know.”

The admiral frowned. Carpios Robbery had been e’Fondolai’s nom de guerre in his pirate days, when he had become the second man since antiquity to circumnavigate the globe, but he hated to be called “Carpy,” especially in the presence of his Hannegan.

They entered the conference room. First, the Emperor asked about the status of the forces protecting new farming lands, and any further encounters with the Grasshopper people. Told they had drawn back defensively, Filpeo ordered there be no punitive raids by Texark forces until he so commanded. He then stated, “If I were a Grasshopper war sharf, I would make an alliance with the Wilddog to strike the Province. I would cut the telegraph line in several places. The Wilddog will cut the Province in half, while Grasshopper strikes toward Texark. What is your response?”

Colonel Father Pottscar entered the room and nodded to Filpeo.

Colonel Holofot spoke. “They can destroy, but they cannot hold. Such an invasion can be no more than a massive cavalry raid. Our forts would remain secure. They might massacre the Jackrabbit settlers and the colonists, but they would quickly exhaust themselves and be driven back, as in the Grasshopper raid.”

General Goldæm looked levelly at his ruler and shook his head. “Your scenario is improbable, Sire. When they began establishing winter quarters after the war, they became vulnerable. If they attacked the south, they know our cavalry would strike in the north at their family settlements, which would not be well defended. When the hordes were entirely mobile, they could retreat forever. They could lead pursuers to exhaustion. Now they have fixed property. It’s vulnerable. They have no infantry to take or hold ground.”

“Suppose the Jackrabbit revolted and joined the invaders?”

“We have kept them disarmed,” said the engineer, Colonel Holofot. “What will they fight with, pitchforks?”

“No, but if they could provide the invaders with food, water, shelter, and places to hide,” said the general. “The question is: would they? The Jackrabbit has bitter memories of the Northerners, for the wild hordes were contemptuous of the Jacks. Frankly, to me it seems a tossup whether they hate us more, or the Northerners. But even with Jackrabbit support, Colonel Holofot is right. A mass cavalry attack would exhaust itself in the south, and the northern underbelly would be exposed. They would be more likely to strike the farmlands north of the Valley, uh, north of the Watchitah Nation, and that is what we are not well prepared for yet. But we are preparing fast, and the whole border will be fortified in two years. The surviving farmers there are well armed now, and since the raid, they have a lot of hate for Nomads. We have the troops to back them up, but not to attack prematurely, because we have the same problem in the north as they in the south.”

“And that is?”

“We can attack and kill, but we don’t have the men or the logistics to occupy Grasshopper territory. Unless, of course, we weaken our forces in the Province.”

Filpeo became thoughtful. “I wonder,” he said, “why is it that these farms on the eastern fringe, which get more rain, are not as productive as the refugee lands at the foot of the Rockies, where the land is said to be nearly a desert?”

There was a brief silence. The Hannegan’s remarks seemed almost idle, having nothing to do with the Nomad as a military problem.

“Sire, that question is outside my field,” said the commanding general. “But it may have something to do with discipline. As you know, ours are free peasants, and they work mostly for themselves. When you say ‘productive,’ you mean it in terms of commercial crops. The ex-Nomads are sharecroppers, working for landowners, especially the Bishop of Denver. They are forced to work, and they grow only a few crops.”

“I think that is not an explanation,” said Father Colonel Pottscar. “And it’s not quite true. The ex-Nomads learned from the mountaineers, who have been dry-farming for centuries. And as for the rainfall—there is a monastery in the hills north of Valana where the monks keep records of events in the heavens, waiting for the coming of the Lord. One of the things they keep track of is rain, because they pray for the weather. They say the rainfall on the western side of the mountains is now nearly twice what it was eight hundred years ago. That, and that alone, is your miracle of the ex-Nomad farms. Of course, the monks think it’s their miracle, answering eight centuries of prayer. But the runoff for irrigation is better than in ancient times, miracle or no.”

“Well, doesn’t the increase apply to the whole Plains?” asked the Monarch.

“Their records are local. I can’t say. Thon Graycol points out that there are no very old trees in the edges of our forests where the prairie begins looking eastward. That suggests our tree line has been moving slowly westward for a few centuries, but nobody is sure. The Nomads may have cut the older trees for wood.”

“Well,” said General Goldæm, “if nature is closing in on them from the east and the west, they’re going to lose their precious desert anyway. We’ll just give nature a hand in their extinction.”

“Extinction? I don’t want to hear that word again, General,” Filpeo Harq said sharply. “Pacification and containment are the goals, not extermination. We have achieved that in the south. The Jackrabbit population is stable.”

“Except that their young men keep running away to join outlaw bands.”

“The northern Nomads kill most of those. One way, maybe the only way, to secure the area between the forests and the western mountains is to colonize.”

“How, Sire? Except along the eastern fringe, the land is poor, the water scarce, and the weather horrid. Who could, who would live there but wild herdsmen?”

“Tame herdsmen, and a tamer breed of cattle,” said Filpeo Harq. “Fenced ranches, as in the south. Some places down there, they use yellowwood trees for fences. If you plant them a foot apart and keep them pruned, they make hedges dense enough and thorny enough to keep cattle in. There may not be enough water for agriculture, but wells can be dug to water stock. Some land can be fenced, farther north where the cold kills yellowwood. We hold much forested land in the east. Enough timber can be shipped to settlers, and they’ll pay with beef and hides. And I’m not so sure agriculture is impossible either. The university is studying that problem. Until civilized men can live there, the Plains will remain an obstacle. The Pope might as well be living on the moon, and there is no way to unify the continent.”

“But who in hell would want to live there?”

Harq the Hannegan thought for a moment. “The Jackrabbit itself has settled down in the south. That’s why I won’t stand for talk of extermination.”

“But they were always half-settled anyway, Sire. The Wilddog and the Grasshopper would prefer to die in battle than give up their ways. To farm or to ranch is hard work. To the Nomad, work is slavery.”

“The ex-Nomads learned to work when they lost their horses. You merely predict their choice. We must not allow them to have such a choice. There is no need to colonize the Plains if we can civilize the wild tribes themselves. I want Urion to send missions to the northern hordes.”

“Cardinal Urion sent Monsignor Sanual to them, and he came back empty-handed, and I think empty-headed. The Christians among them are already tied to Valana, Sire, and there is a rumor this Pope in Valana means to take the Jackrabbit Churches away from our Archbishop,” said the chaplain.

“There is no Pope in Valana, and until there is a Pope in New Rome, they are tied to nobody. And Urion hopes to be the next Pope. If not, we’ll see whether Urion or some antipope offers them sweeter salvation. Especially to the Grasshopper, after we punish them. The time is ripe for change. The papacy is up for grabs. The new Lord of the Hordes is a Wilddog, not a Grasshopper. We have to influence both.

“Please understand,” continued the Hannegan, after a pause, “that what I ask of you is to tell me what you think would happen if we do this, or we do that, even if I would never do either. To show you what I mean, I ask General Goldæm what he thinks would happen if we undertook a war to simply wipe out the Nomad population of the northern Plains.”

He spoke again after a silence. “Well, General?”

“Sire, I did not really mean to suggest—”

“Very well, I realize you were just making bellicose noises to exercise your military gland, but go ahead. Answer my question: What would happen if we undertook to wipe out the Grasshopper and the Wilddog?”

The general reddened, and after a few seconds said, “I think we I would fail. We’re stretched out. We occupy and police the Jackrabbit country below the Nady Ann. If we try to hit the Grasshopper hard, he can pull back until our supply wagons can’t supply our forces.”

“The Nomad can live on carrion and crickets. Why can’t you?” “I can, but we can’t fight without powder and shot.”

“Good enough. You have now taken charge of your military gland. However, you can put it to work again and organize a battalion of a special strike force. I want men trained to out-Nomad the Nomads. Take the biggest, toughest, meanest men you can find, both from our own ranks and from any motherless outlaws you can recruit. Teach them to live on the land, speak Nomadic, and learn their way of signaling.”

“And what exactly is the battalion’s mission, Sire? Not to hold ground, surely.”

“Of course not. The mission is to surprise, kill, destroy, and run. Punitive strikes, in case there’s another attack on the farmlands. As for weapons, be sure they have the new biologicals from the university. Draft Thon Hilbert, if you have to.”

Goldæm looked at Carpios, made a sour mouth, and winked. He did not believe that biologicals were the wave of the military future and he hoped Carpy agreed; but the pirate admiral merely shrugged.

Filpeo turned to the chaplain.

“Colonel Pottscar, suppose my uncle the Archbishop had unlimited funds to spend on the conversion of the Grasshopper Horde. What would happen?”

“Well, if he didn’t spend it on young boys, he would waste it sending people like Monsignor Sanual.”

The Mayor seemed to suppress a giggle. “How would he spend it on young boys? Charitably?”

“Oh, of course. I was only thinking about how he just last week took in a refugee from Leibowitz Abbey. He hired a young Brother Torrildo as his assistant and acolyte. He’s always thinking of the welfare of young boys.”

“I’m acquainted with my uncle, Father Colonel Pottscar. My question is: do you think spending money to Christianize the Nomads would be a wise investment?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because the Nomads would be baptized, take the money, ignore the priests, and do as they have always done.”

“Just so. Well, look at the clock! Let us go inspect the wares of the gunsmiths, gentlemen.”

“Wait a moment, Sire,” said Goldæm. “I think Carp… uh, the admiral might have something to say first.”

“Go right ahead, Carp,” said the Hannegan.

The admiral winced slightly, but said, “The guns the alien warriors brought with them disappeared soon after they met Brownpony.”

“How do you know that? And if true, what does it mean?”

“I heard it from Esitt Loyte, Sire. Their homeland has firearms superior to our own, and such guns are now being made on the west coast.” He took out a small pistol, only to have it snatched from his hand by one of Filpeo’s bodyguards. The guard seemed to have trouble determining if the gun was loaded. The admiral assured him that it was not.

“Where did you get that thing?” Filpeo asked.

“About fifty-eight hundred nautical miles from here, Sire. On a great circle course, almost northwest, I’d guess. Or sixty-three hundred miles, by rhumb line course, nearly due west. That’s my best guess without looking at the charts.”

“Across the ocean? Not our west coast?”

“No, but they’re in production on our west coast by now.”

“Show me how it works, Admiral,” said Filpeo.

Carpios Robbery pulled five cartridges out of his pocket, loaded the revolver, walked to the nearest window, aimed at the sky, and shocked their eardrums by holding down the trigger and rapidly fanning the hammer five times with the edge of his hand. When he turned around, Filpeo looked pale.

“My God! Is that what’s been piling up in the Suckamint Mountains?”

“I have no way of knowing that, Sire. But this special battalion you want Goldy to organize should have a lot of firepower.”

“Give me the weapon. Let’s go see the gunsmiths.”

The admiral released the pistol with obvious reluctance.

According to the gunsmiths’ salesmen, the prototype of a similar weapon was already on the drawing board and might be ready in two years, but they were alarmed to see a competitive firearm already in production.

“Would your possession of this gun hasten production?”

“That is very likely, Sire.”

Carpios Robbery winced again.

“I’ll let you have it before you leave the city,” Filpeo said, then looked at his admiral’s expression and added, “Of course, you must send it back to its owner here when you’re done with it.”

“Certainly, Sire.”

Brownpony’s interview with His Imperial Majesty Filpeo Harq, Mayor Hannegan VII, happened in City Hall, also called the Imperial Palace, on Thursday, the 5th of January, thus giving the lie to a Jack-rabbit rumor extant in the Province which held that Filpeo Harq always had himself locked up in his private quarters for three days about the time of the full moon, and would see no one. That Thursday the moon was full, and after opening the sealed papers from Pope Amen, the Monarch flew into such a rage that Blacktooth wished the rumor were true. He and Weh-Geh were made to sit on a bench in the corridor outside the mayoral throne room, and they could hear only muffled shouting without being able to understand much of it. None of the shouting was done by the cardinal.

Presently a priest with a monsignor’s bellyband came down the hall and spoke to the guards. One of them knocked hard, opened the door, and shouted, “Monsignor Sanual, in obedience to the Lord Mayor’s summons,” and pushed him inside, then followed him and closed the door. There was a lull in the shouting.

Blacktooth had never seen Sanual before, but had heard enough about him from both his master and Father Steps-on-Snake to know that he would be anything but a friendly witness, and that Brownpony’s actions at the funeral festival on the Plains and his participation in the affair with the Wild Horse Woman were on the court’s agenda. He exchanged a glance with Weh-Geh, and saw that both of them were aware of this.

The guard who took Sanual inside now opened the door and spoke to the other guard. “Seize them,” he said, and again closed the door.

The guard had no way to seize them, but he pointed his gun at Weh-Geh and told him to throw his swords aside. Two seconds later, he was flat on his back with a sword point at his throat.

“Get his weapon, Brother?” It was a suggestion, not a command.

“No,” said Blacktooth. “That was a mistake, Weh-Geh. Remember the cardinal.”

Weh-Geh looked at the door. Then he booted the fallen guard in the stomach. Having taken the wind out of the man, he grabbed the gun and burst through the door. Nimmy observed the startled Monarch sitting on his throne. Brownpony had been forced to his knees, and the guard was holding a pistol to his head. Weh-Geh aimed at Filpeo Harq, and barked, “Let my master go!”

Nimmy leaped away from the door, for the Mayor was flanked by two more guards with raised muskets. The man gasping for breath crawled toward Nimmy, who leaped over him to avoid a fight.

There were three distinct explosions, then silence, followed by Filpeo Harq’s voice: “Take him and the one in the hall away.”

Blacktooth looked inside again. Weh-Geh lay in a growing pool of blood. One of the musketeers was down, but the Mayor himself was holding a pistol. It looked like the one Ædrea had showed to him in the cave. It was impossible to guess who had killed Weh-Geh. All weapons were still pointed at his body. When the Hannegan saw Nimmy standing white-faced in the door, he raised his pistol again, but the monk leaped aside. He made no attempt to escape. A frightened and humiliated Cardinal Brownpony was still kneeling there.

One of the jails at Hannegan City was part of the public zoo, where interesting prisoners were exhibited in cages not unlike those used for cougars, true wolves, and monkeys. On the way in, they passed an open area girded by a heavy fence on which there was a sign saying camelus dromedarius, africa, contrib. admiral e’fondolai.

“Guard, what are those things?” Brownpony asked.

“It says right there,” snapped the jail guard. “Don’t stop to gawk.”

“They’re domesticated!”

“How astute of you. Otherwise, the boy wouldn’t be riding on the animal’s back, eh?”

“Are they useful?”

“They can go for longer periods without water than horses. The admiral says they are used in desert warfare where he got them.”

“Are there more of them?”

“Not as far as I know, but there soon will be.” He pointed to a female with a large belly. “But they’re the only camels in captivity on this continent, as far as I know. The admiral brought them in the hold of a giant schooner. Now move along, move along!”

They were escorted past cells full of lesser animals, and then cells full of human prisoners. On each cell was posted the name of the occupant species. The humans were mostly murderers: a Homo sicarius, a Homo matricidus, but two Homines seditiosi, and one child rapist. All of them jeered as the two clerics were locked into the third cell on the left. The jailer unwrapped a sign and posted it above the door of the cage, out of sight and out of reach. The man in the cell across the roofless corridor from theirs looked at it, entered a whispered conversation with the man in the adjacent cell, and fell silent, watching them as if in awe. His own cage was labeled not Homo but Gryllus (Grasshopper), and his crimes were war crimes. His jeering had been limited to Nomad grunts, so when the jailer was gone Blacktooth spoke to the man in his native tongue.

“What does our sign say?” he asked.

The man did not answer. He and Brownpony were staring at each other. “I know you,” the cardinal said in Wilddog. “You were with Hultor Bråm.”

The Nomad nodded. “Yes,” he answered in his own dialect. “We took you south to meet your Pope. You asked me why the Lord Sharf called us a ‘war party.’ Now you know. I was the only captive, to my great shame. But Pforft here says that you tried to murder the Hannegan.”

“Is that all our sign says?” Nimmy asked.

Evidently the Nomad could not read. He conversed again with the man named Pforft, then shook his head. “I don’t know what all those words mean.”

Pforft, himself a pederast, spoke to them: “It says heresy, simony, the crime of wounding majesty, as well as attempted regicide.”

Fortunately, the hour was late and the zoo was closed for the day. Although the other prisoners wore uniforms, none were furnished for the cardinal and his secretary. Each of them received three blankets against the January cold. The cage was open to the weather on the south side. At least they would get sun during part of the day.

The cardinal still had not fully recovered from the curse of Meldown. “My Lady of the Buzzards had a buzzard’s breath, it seems,” he told Blacktooth, when he was feeling almost hysterically cheerful. “When Urion’s Angel of Battle fights my Buzzard of Battle, which do you bet on to win?”

“M’Lord, doesn’t that old prayer go: ‘Holy Michael Archangel, deliver us from battle’?”

“No, it doesn’t, Brother Monk. It’s ‘defend us in battle,’ but ‘deliver us from the snares of the devil.’ As you well know. But what would you bet right now on either prayer being answered?”

“Nothing. If I remember the Nomad myth right, your Burregun, since you claim her, always mourns as she eats the fallen warriors, the children of her sister the Day Maiden. She doesn’t want war either.”

“You are right, we must pray for peace while girding for war. Of course you are right, Nimmy, you’re always right.”

Nimmy hung his head and frowned. But Brownpony was not being just sarcastic. To avoid being understood by other prisoners, they were speaking neo-Latin, and the cardinal’s speech was unguarded.

“I mean it. You were right to leave the abbey, although you are a monk of Leibowitz. You were right to fall in love with a girl like Ædrea. You are right to disapprove of my importing and selling west-coast weapons without telling His Holiness.” Blacktooth looked at him in surprise. Brownpony noticed the look and went on: “Pope Linus Six, who gave red hats to your late abbot and me, was the man who assigned me the task, in a letter which I still have in Valana. Linus told me not to show it to anyone unless I got caught, and then only to a pope. Frankly, Nimmy, I have almost wanted to get caught.”

“Oh.” Blacktooth thought it over. It was certainly true that Brownpony had not been cautious, allowing even Aberlott the Mouth to learn of his activities. But he would probably rather be caught by Amen Specklebird. Suddenly the cardinal seemed less sinister, an unwell man with a hump on his back and an uneasy conscience.

Fortunately, during visitor’s hours, when children would spit at them through the bars of their cages, the human animals were fed raw beef and raw potatoes for the amusement of the crowd. No one was watching when they ate cornmeal mush for breakfast. Nimmy remembered from Boedullus that eating raw meat, or better still, drinking fresh blood as the Nomads sometimes did, was “good for the patient’s own blood,” and he persuaded Brownpony to eat some of the meat. Nimmy liked flesh raw, if fresh, but sometimes the jail meat tasted like coyote kill, and raw potatoes gave them both a stomachache. Filpeo’s government did provide enough mush to keep the zoo’s display specimens from looking starved. During their stay at the prison, three inmates were led from their death cells to the chopping block. From fellow prisoners, they learned that Wooshin had been replaced with a chopping machine, not another electric chair. The electric dynamo, an expensive affair, could be put to more productive use than frying felons.

The moon phase had waned from full to new. Then one afternoon past visitors’ hours, a man in a lacy surplice came and stood looking in at them.

“Torrildo!”

The former brother winked at Nimmy but remained silent.

“What do you want, man?” Brownpony snapped.

“My Lord the Archbishop wonders if you would like the Eucharist brought to you here.”

“I would like bread and wine with which to offer Mass myself.”

“I’ll ask,” said Torrildo, and departed.

“Find out if the Pope knows we’re in jail!” Blacktooth called after him.

“Nimmy!” hissed the cardinal.

But Torrildo had stopped. Without looking back, he said, “He knows,” and resumed his departure.

“Damn! It’s all over.” Brownpony was angry and downcast.

Blacktooth decided to let him alone. He rolled up in his blankets and took a nap in the icy wind.

Three days later Torrildo came back. This time Blacktooth winked at him. Torrildo blushed. “I never saw a sarcastic wink before,” he said.

“What about the bread and wine?” the cardinal asked.

“Your Eminence will not have time to say Mass.” He produced a letter from a sleeve and a key from his pocket. “I am to let you go when you read this and promise to obey these instructions.”

Brownpony accepted the papers and began reading, handing each page to Blacktooth as he finished.

“Damn! It’s all over,” the cardinal repeated, again downcast but without anger.

“I thought every cardinal had a Church in New Rome,” Nimmy remarked as soon as he read the first lines.

“There is a Saint Michael’s in New Rome,” Brownpony told him. “And it’s Urion’s Church, but there he is not called the Angel of Battle.”

They read in silence while Torrildo watched and impatiently drummed the key in his palm. The first page was thus.

There was a place for their signatures below a statement acknowledging the charges with a plea of no contest, and agreeing to obey a decree of permanent banishment.

The other pages were a more or less personal plea from Benefez to Brownpony and other Valanan cardinals to accept New Rome as the proper place for an immediate conclave to elect a pope. When Brownpony finished reading, he looked up at Torrildo. The acolyte was holding a metal pen and a phial of ink out to him through the bars. They quickly signed, and the key turned in the lock.

Their trip back to the Bay Ghost by coach on the main military highway west was a fast, rough ride, taking less than ten days. Before they left the Province, the guards permitted Brownpony to buy two horses from a Jackrabbit farmer. The moon was full again, allowing them to ride sometimes by night. When they came at last to Leibowitz Abbey, an excited Abbot Olshuen knelt to kiss the cardinal’s ring and tell him that he, Brownpony, was now Pope-Elect, chosen by an angry conclave of Valanan cardinals, called by Pope Amen before his resignation. The cardinals were eagerly awaiting his accepto.

“Who brought this crazy message?” Brownpony demanded.

“Why, it was an old guest of ours, who went to New Rome with you. Namely, Wooshin. Cardinal Nauwhat sent him with the letter from the Curia—it’s in my office—and an oral message from Sorely.”

“What was the oral message?”

“That he had opposed the conclave, but hoped you would accept the election anyway.”

“He knows it isn’t legal” was the Red Deacon’s immediate comment. “Of course I won’t accept.”

“You have a more immediate problem,” said Olshuen, recovering from his initial awe of the cardinal.

“And what is that, Dom Abiquiu?”

“Have you told Brother St. George about his young lady? She came for him while you were gone. He thought she had died. She said you knew she was alive.”

Brownpony was suddenly nervous. “We’ll talk about that. Let’s go to your office. I need to read the letter from the Curia.”