Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

CHAPTER 29

BLACKTOOTH CARDINAL ST. GEORGE, DEACON OF Saint Maisie’s, was on the hillside taking a long and painful dump, his first of many for the day, when he heard the pop pop pop of repeating guns. It was coming from the main encampment, in the wooded bend of a wide, shallow creek back over the hill.

Blacktooth couldn’t see the camp from where he was standing, or rather, squatting. For his morning ritual, which was the only one he found the leisure to perform in privacy, he preferred the western slope of the little bluff, a hill so small that it barely cleared the trees. Truth was, Blacktooth was homesick. Not for a particular place; he had never had anything even approximating a home except for Leibowitz Abbey, and while he sometimes (indeed, fairly often) missed the companionship of the Brothers and the security of the routine and the Rule, he never missed the abbey itself. He was homesick for the desert, the grasslands, the country of Empty Sky.

Even though he could see nothing to the west but more trees, Blacktooth knew there was open land beyond—rolling plains that went on and on, treeless and townless like Eternity itself. And the sky seemed definitely bigger to the west.

Unsmiling, unspeaking, unlimited.

From here I greet you, Empty Sky.

Pop pop pop.

Blacktooth stumbled as he stood up, hurriedly wiping himself with a wad of grass—then slowed, no longer alarmed, recognizing the sound. It was celebratory, ceremonial, not real; not a firefight. The Grasshopper sharf’s warriors, disciplined for firing the precious brass cartridges but bored by the lack of military action, had perfected the art of imitating the sound of the new repeating “Pope rifles.” As with everything the Nomads tried, they had quickly learned to do it well.

Blacktooth had first noticed it in the outriders returning from a scouting mission a few days before; he had remarked to his boss, Bitten Dog, that the warriors were mimicking the sound of the brass shell-firing guns from across the sea. “Imitate the sound of pots being scoured, Your Eminence,” Bitten Dog had growled.

The pop pop pop was joined by the sound of dogs. It was not barking but the alarming half-howl, half-growl of war dogs being brought up on leash. All this was coming from the camp of the Pope’s armies down at the edge of the trees, in the bend of the creek called Troublesome or Trouble Some. Attempting to shade his eyes from the early-morning, late-September sun, tying his habit back around him with his booklegger’s cord, Blacktooth crossed the crest of the hill and started down toward the camp. He took off his sandals and carried them, so that he could walk barefoot in the pleasantly wet grass. Through the trees, he could see horses milling and stomping, warily watching the dogs that circled them like a dust devil.

The pop pop pop was punctuated by whoops and cries, and Blacktooth could see the Grasshoppers now, painted up, pumping their weapons into the air. More than a small party, too.

Something was afoot; or rather, a-horse.

Blacktooth was almost glad. For several weeks now, on the final approach to New Rome, the tension had been growing among the Nomad warriors that had attached themselves to the Pontiff’s crusade. As the twelve-hundred-strong party, now fully a day’s march long, crawled east, the arms of trees extending out into the prairies had become more numerous, longer and thicker, until it had changed—in a day, and Blacktooth remembered the day—into arms of prairie ex tending into trees. It was like an optical illusion; one thing turning, with a trick of the eye, into its opposite.

As they left the tall-grass country and began to penetrate the woodlands, the warriors had expected resistance from the Texark troops Hannegan II had—supposedly—left behind to guard the approaches to the Holy City. There had been none. The warriors had expected resistance from the semi-settled Grasshopper farmers, and the settlers Filpeo had sent to live among them. There had been none. Foraging horsemen had found nothing but abandoned farms, barns burned or burning, cattle killed or driven away, leaving behind only their footprints or their still-soft droppings. The log homesteads were burned or looted, sad-looking little homes bereft of even doors or window glass. The Grasshoppers in particular had looked forward to breaking glass, and this made them even more impatient. The contemptible grass-eaters had either broken or taken their windows with them.

The new cardinal was as firmly attached to the hood wagon as the old monk had been, but several times Blacktooth had deserted his pots and pans and explored one or two of the abandoned houses, hoping perhaps—although he never admitted this to himself—to find signs of Librada, his glep cougar that had freed herself before he could set her free. But Librada didn’t eat carrion and the few farmers and farm families Blacktooth had found had been mostly carrion. Several times he had watched as parties of the Nomad horsemen, singing death songs and seated well forward on their ponies, had gone out into the trees—nervously at first and then with growing confidence, finally with boredom. The countryside around New Rome had been stripped of its people. There were no warriors to fight, no women to rape or even to be restrained from raping. Nothing but trees, dumber than horses and stiller than grass. The farmers—many of them of Grasshopper origin—had deserted their farms, and whatever troops Hannegan II had left in the region to defend the city were gone as well.

In fact, some said it was the troops that had driven the farmers away. An old man found wounded on his barn floor, and brought back to the camp to die, had told the Pope and his Curia that it was the Texark soldiers who had shattered his window glass and torched his fields, and his neighbors’ as well, but Blacktooth thought he was lying. Or at least partially lying. Truth was as rare as beauty in wartime. It occurred by accident, in unexpected places; like the glint of sun off a button on a corpse.

Pop pop pop.

And now, some action at last. Blacktooth felt like two men: one who dreaded the excitement, and one who desired it; one Brother who slipped eagerly down the hillside toward the milling horses, and one who held back, heels digging into soft dirt. He valued the hilltop because it carried him above, or almost above, the trees. Descending into them was like descending into a prison.

Pop pop pop. One of the shots, at least, sounded real. Perhaps the Texark main force had been located by a scouting party, and a battle was planned for the day. It would have to be to the east. As he half slipped and half walked down the hill, Blacktooth squinted out across the sun-bright ranks of trees. Beyond them was New Rome, within a day’s ride at most. And beyond the city, also unseen, was the Great River—the Misspee, the grass-eaters called it. Blacktooth had dreaded the Crusade’s arrival for months but now he looked foward to it, even if it meant a battle. Much to his eternal regret, Blacktooth knew battle; and he knew that even worse than the fighting was the long waiting, the constant tension, and the heavy smells of men on the move.

The camp smelled like shit and smoke. It smelled like Hilbert’s fever, the bowel-emptying sickness that Blacktooth shared with at least a third of the men, Nomad and Christian alike. The smell had thickened as the tall grass had turned to trees, as the world of Empty Sky had given way to a world folded in branches, hedged by trees. Darkness and mud and stumps and shit—in greater and greater profusion as the Pope’s Crusade approached New Rome. The Mother Church was coming home.

Pop pop pop!

Down in the camp, the huge night fire had been rekindled. Logs as big as corpses smoldered and smoked, as reluctant as corpses to flame back into life. Everything here in the woodlands was damp. The edge of his habit wet from the long grass, Blacktooth joined the milling crowd around the fire pit at the center of the camp. Horses and people and dogs made an uneasy mix. More warriors came from the smaller Wilddog and Grasshopper campfires, joined by the Qæsach dri Vørdar and his personal guard. Nomad warriors were spitting into the fire and stomping, and firing their imaginary shots toward the impenetrable gray of the sky. It looked like rain again; it had threatened rain now for a week.

The Grasshopper sharf, Eltür Bråm, came out of the trees, holding up his repeating rifle, joined by a squat shaman in an intricate hat riding a white mule.

Pop pop pop.

Brownpony was conspicuously absent, but a small contingent of his Papal Guard joined the party, leading uncomfortable-looking horses. Their rifles were identical to the ones the Wilddog warriors carried. Blacktooth was surprised to see Aberlott among them.

“Don’t look so sad, Your Eminence,” said the pudgy Valana student, holding a repeating rifle anything but sheepishly.

“Where are you going?” Blacktooth asked, ignoring his old friend’s sarcasm.

“To get a biscuit.” Aberlott gestured toward the morning wagon, where there was aline, all Wilddog and Grasshopper; or rather, all men with guns. “Come.”

Wooshin, the Axe, was in the morning-wagon line and he let Aberlott and Blacktooth in beside him. This was, Blacktooth knew, acceptable practice among the Nomads, who regarded every man as an extension of his friends and family. If a man was in line, his connections were in line as well.

“Morning, Axe.”

“Good morning, Cardinal Nimmy. Why so sad?”

Do I really look so sad? Blacktooth wondered. He shrugged. Perhaps it was the sickness. It seemed he had been sick for years, although he knew by the marks he had made on the inside of the hood wagon that it was only two weeks.

“Maybe it is war,” he said. “War makes men sad.”

“Some men,” said Aberlott. He reached up under his long hair and touched, as if for luck, the little knob of gristle where his right ear had been sliced off by Texark cavalry.

“All men,” said Axe.

The line crept forward, feet sucking in the mud which seemed to be always laying in wait, even under what looked like dry grass.

“Perhaps His Eminence is mooning over his little lost cat,” said Aberlott to Axe.

“She’s not so little,” said Blacktooth, “and I wish you would stop calling me His Eminence.”

“Sorry, Cardinal,” said Aberlott. It was his turn. He took two biscuits and gave one to Blacktooth. Apparently they were distributing extra biscuits only to the men with rifles. Blacktooth took it grudgingly. Life was difficult enough without Aberlott’s continual sarcasm.

He followed Axe and Aberlott back to the fire, which was now blazing.

“It’s a war party,” said Aberlott. “The early patrols, Wilddog I think, entered the city yesterday. There was no resistance. Today we go in with Eltür Bråm and his shaman.” He nodded toward the old man on the white mule. “Maybe we’ll get to see the basilica of Saint Peter’s.”

“You’re going?” Blacktooth asked.

“With permission. Along with most of the Pope’s Guard,” said Aberlott, glancing toward Wooshin, the Pope’s sergeant general, who shrugged. Wooshin was staying behind with his master.

Aberlott held up his rifle, pumping it toward the sky as the Nomad warriors did. “Pop pop pop,” he said, but not convincingly. He smiled, showing Blacktooth his bad teeth, and opened his hand, showing three brass shells. “His Greatness the Sharf didn’t want to take us but His Holiness, Pope Amen II, insisted. We are his eyes and ears.”

“And rifles,” Blacktooth said.

“That too.”

It was looking more and more like rain. Blacktooth secured his cardinal hat under the cover of the hood wagon—he was afraid the red would run if it did rain—and gathered up the morning pots and pans that had been left for him by Bitten Dog. His elevation as the Crusade’s tenth cardinal had not released him from his duties as assistant to the assistant potscrubber. Nor had it reduced the intensity or frequency of the fevers that raged through his body.

A third of the camp, almost a thousand men, were sick. The rich smell of human excrement mixed with the usual camp smells of horse and smoke. The overall feeling was one of gloom. Maybe it will rain, Blacktooth thought, as loaded down with pots and pans he stepped over and around the ubiquitous dog turds. Better rain than threatening rain. Impermeable to almost every kind of adversity, the Nomads seemed to fold up in the rain.

He finished the pots, scrubbing them with sand in the feeder creek that ran from under a slab, out of a thousand-year-old drain. He took the long way back to the hood wagon, between the Pope’s carriage (“like hell you will”) and the gleaming metal wagons of Magister Dion’s caravan, which had joined them two days before, where the long arms of the door prairies were merging into one narrower and narrower grassy swale, interrupted by pitches of shattered concrete and stone.

This morning was the first time Blacktooth had seen Dion’s wagons up close, in the daylight. They looked like stoves on wheels. “Tanks,” Aberlott had called them, but who would carry water from the dry plains to the rainy east? They were clearly weapons of some kind.

A glep was dozing on the seat of one of the wagons. When he saw Blacktooth he smiled an idiot smile and crossed himself, laughing. Blacktooth thought the man was mocking him, until he saw Brownpony standing with Dion, almost out of sight behind one of the metal wagons. They seemed to be arguing and Dion seemed to be getting the worst of it. Blacktooth couldn’t see Brownpony’s face but he recognized the slow hand movements of lawyerly persuasion passing into papal compulsion. The monk, now cardinal, turned away and hurried on toward the center of the campsite. He knew that he would be in trouble if Brownpony saw him without his zucchetto.

It was late afternoon before the rain finally came. The clouds that had been massing in the northwest all day, like riders on a hilltop, descended just when the Grasshopper sharps party was returning. There was no pop pop pop this time, no strutting horses. The warriors looked gloomy and damp. One of the horses carried double, and the white mule carried a corpse tied on like a pack and left uncovered in the rain. The side of the mule was pink with rain and blood.

“The sharf’s shaman,” Aberlott said to Blacktooth, who was helping him dismount. He tried to hand the monk his rifle but Blacktooth wouldn’t take it.

“Texark troops?”

Aberlott shrugged. “Snipers,” he said. “They fired on us from the great houses.”

“Great houses?”

“Piles of stone, really, although some of them still have windows. We have the better guns but we couldn’t see them. We never saw any Texark troops.”

Four women untied the shaman and carried him away. The dogs were howling, straining at their leashes and jumping up to sniff the side of the white mule that was smeared with blood.

“They must have been Texark troops,” said Blacktooth.

“I don’t think so. There was a lot of fire but they only hit two men, and we were all in the open. I was right behind the shaman when he fell. He was singing some Weejus song, and they shot him through the throat. I think it was a lucky shot.”

“Lucky?” said Blacktooth.

“Lucky for someone; not so lucky for him.” Aberlott showed Blacktooth three empty cartridges, nestled in his palm like little empty eggshells. “I fired all three of my shots, though. I liked that part. Not like you.” He was referring to Blacktooth’s depression after killing the glep warrior in the battle two days’ march behind, at the edge of the grasslands, almost a year before. “I fired all three, pop pop pop.”

It was Blacktooth’s turn to shrug.

“I liked that part,” Aberlott insisted.

Aberlott had been more impressed with the city than with the fighting. The city of New Rome wasn’t ahole in the ground like Danfer, he said, or a collection of shacks like Valana. It was mostly stone, grown over with weeds and trees. “The center of the city is all great houses. They mine them for stone and steel. They don’t care about defending them either. What is there to defend? What can you carry off? You can’t fight men who won’t fight.”

“They fought you,” said Blacktooth.

“That wasn’t fighting,” said Aberlott. “There wasn’t that much firing, even. They are hiding in the city, taking pot shots at us.”

“Did you find the cathedral?”

Aberlott shook his head. “We rode out behind the sharf. Who will burn them out, he says, and toss their livers to the dogs.” He smiled sardonically, gesturing behind him to the center of the camp where the dismounted Nomads were milling angrily, confused, ashamed. A wail came up from the women tending the wounded man. The wounded man was dying. He had been shot in the side with a gun that fired stones.

Blacktooth left Aberlott for the medicine wagon where the wounded man was being bandaged. He was wondering if the Texarks had managed to duplicate the repeating weapons yet, and he imagined that he might be able to tell from the man’s wound. But the wound was just a wound and not a sign; it did not speak. The ugly welt cut through the Nomad’s flesh and hair like a road ripped heedlessly through grassland. In the back of the wagon the Grasshopper shaman’s body was being prepared for burial. The old man’s neck wound was already stuffed with clay the color of shaman skin.

Ashes to ashes, dirt to dirt. Both men would be carried out of the trees for burial under the haughty uncaring glare of Empty Sky. But not until the rain had ended.

The women and the medicine men shooed Cardinal Blacktooth away, even though he was wearing his zucchetto.

The next day a smaller party went out, while the Grasshopper war sharf met with the Qæsach and the Pontiff. As a member of the Curia, Blacktooth was invited to take part in the discussion, after he had finished the pots and pans, of course, and freed Bitten Dog for a day of drinking mare wine and playing bones. Brownpony’s suspicion that the Emperor had withdrawn all his regular forces from the Holy City was confirmed when the rear guard of Eltür Bråm’s war party came back with its only live captive, a farmer armed with a stone-firing musket. He had been dragged from one of the “great houses,” along with two of his colleagues who had not survived the ten-mile trip back to the Crusade’s war camp. Under questioning the grass-eater revealed that he and the other farmers had been driven from their homesteads into the city by the Texark regulars, then armed with leftover weapons and stationed in the tallest ruins. They had been told that if they surrendered they would be cruelly tortured by the Anti-pope’s Wilddog, Grasshopper, and Jackrabbit fanatics; but that if they held out they would be rescued by returning Texark reinforcements from Hannegan City.

Brownpony doubted that the last part of this was true; so did the rest of his Curia. As for the torture, the farmer died before he could be convinced that it was propaganda.

Aberlott thought it was a trap. “But you think everything is a trap,” Blacktooth reminded his friend. The two were sitting on the side of a wagon, in the unfamiliar sunshine, listening to the interminable martial speeches of the Nomads. Even though the speeches decided nothing, they had to be suffered by the Pope and his Curia.

“Everything is,” whispered the former Valana student. His long hair was smeared with grease, and tied back to show his missing ear: a badge of honor. He held his repeating rifle between his legs. Though he was, technically at least, a member of the Papal Guard, he wore the bone earrings and hair bracelets of a Wilddog horseman. He looked, Blacktooth thought, like a man who had avoided the trap of the Mother Church only to fall into the trap of war.

“We can wait them out,” Brownpony was saying. His Nomadic had gotten better and he no longer needed Blacktooth as translator. “If they were driven into the city, chances are they don’t have enough food to last through the winter.”

“The winter?” said the Grasshopper sharf. “The winter is far away. Our women are far behind, and like the Wilddogs they are threatened by the motherless ones who strike from above the Misery. Without the Weejus our medicine is weak but our war power is strong. We must strike now while we can. We can take them with just a few men. We can burn them out.”

Grunts of pleasure and assent greeted these words. Wettened fingers were held up, as if to confirm that the prevailing winds were from the west. The fingers were also, for the Nomads, a signal of impending fire; of their willingness to watch the world burn.

Amen II stood, looking unusually ethereal and spiritual. When Blacktooth had seen him the day before, he had not realized how sick he looked. Brownpony’s hair was mostly gone. His face looked like something drawn on an egg; a bad egg. “This is the Holy City of New Rome,” he said in measured Churchspeak. “It is sacred to the Mother Church. There will be no burning. We are here to take the city, not destroy it.”

He sat back down. There was grumbling as his words were translated into Grasshopper and Wilddog. The grumbling fell silent as the Qæsach dri Vørdar, the War Sharf of the Three Hordes, stood to speak.

“We were going to feint south for Hannegan City,” said Chür Høngan Ösle. “There is the heart of the Empire, not New Rome, which is nothing but a ruin. We will still head south. But now instead of feinting we can actually strike south. Now that we know there are few defenders in New Rome, we have more men to strike south at Hannegan City. The war will be over sooner. We can return to our women and our winter pastures.” He spoke in Wilddog with only a few words of Rockymount and none of Churchspeak. Blacktooth thought it was ominous. The Crusade was becoming less of a crusade, and more a depredation of the Three Hordes.

There were grunts and clicks of approval from the Nomads as the Qæsach sat down. He had a boy behind him to arrange his robes when he sat; another watched the feathers on his headdress in case of wind. The numbers of the Nomads had increased, so that now men (and a few women and children as well) stood on all sides of the wagon on which Blacktooth was sitting. It had turned from a meeting of the Curia to a public meeting attended by warriors and drivers and hangers on. That, too, seemed ominous. Cardinal Blacktooth St. George was feeling trapped. His bowels were grumbling like the crowd, and he began to look for an avenue of escape.

“A few hundred men left here will be enough to drive the farmers out of New Rome!” said Eltür Bråm.

Wooshin was shaking his head but, as usual, remained silent. Brownpony stood up to answer the sharfs. He stumbled as he stood, and Blacktooth was surprised and a little shocked to see that he was wearing an empty shoulder holster over his cassock, under his robe.

Holding on to the side of a wagon, Pope Amen II made one last plea.

“We need the fighters here,” he said. “With a show of strength we can force the farmers out of the city without much fighting.” Blacktooth knew that Brownpony was trying to avoid a battle. He wondered if it were to save lives, or to avoid damage to the city and Saint Peter’s. As soon as he asked himself the question, he knew the answer. Lives were cheap.

The Pope sat down, seemingly unnoticed. There was no grumbling; he was not even granted the honor of dissent. The power Blacktooth had watched him exercise over the conclave in Valana was gone. Perhaps it was the Meldown, or perhaps his rhetoric was useless with the war sharfs and their warriors, who excelled at oratory when they wanted, but were not in the mood for talk these days.

Or perhaps it was the trees. They seemed almost evil, there were so many of them crowding in on every side. Blacktooth touched the cross that rode under his habit and called up, as he did when he was panicked, the image of Saint Leibowitz. But instead of the dubious smile of Saint Isaac Edward he saw the harsh glare of the desert sun, and he felt a sudden wave of homesickness so powerful it almost knocked him off the wagon bed.

“What’s the matter?” whispered Aberlott. “Are you OK?”

“Are you?” answered Blacktooth. The warriors on the edge of the crowd were starting to make the pop pop pop. They were tired of waiting around for battle. Neither did they wish to ride into a city where the defenders were shooting at them from the windows of “great houses.”

“They’re going to burn them out, no matter what His Holiness says,” said Aberlott. “Where you going?”

Eltür Bråm had risen to speak again. Blacktooth slipped away through the crowd toward the main trench, which was, even at this hour, even with all the excitement of the debate, busy with grunting men.

When he got back to the campfire, it was too crowded to get close. The Grasshopper sharf was still speaking. Blacktooth’s fever was raging and he felt weak. He dragged himself off to the back of the hood wagon and rolled up in a blanket and went to sleep. In the distance he could hear drumming, and the martial, celebratory pop pop pop.

That night, while Blacktooth slept, Amen I came to visit him for the first time in over a week. The old man had the face of a cougar. Had he always had the face of a cougar? Blacktooth wondered in his dream; but of course! And Ædrea was there. She was sitting beside Specklebird, smiling, riding a white horse like the Fujæ Go; but no, her robe was open, and what he had thought was a white horse was the light coming from the gateway he had once—

Someone was shaking him, pulling his foot. It was Aberlott. “We are leaving,” he said.

“Leaving? Who is leaving?” Blacktooth groaned and sat up. Aberlott was outside the wagon, leaning in. His face was painted. His greasy hair was pinned back. Beyond him Blacktooth could see the sky, a metal gray. He could hear horses stamping and men cursing and laughing. In the near distance, dogs.

“They’ve been up all night,” said Aberlott. “After you went to bed there was another conference. But this was among the sharfs. The Pope was sent away.”

“Sent away?”

“Wooshin was allowed to listen, but he was thrown out when he disagreed.”

Blacktooth was amazed. No one threw Axe out of anything. “Thrown out?” Blacktooth was still woozy, half in and half out of his cougar dream. As he sat up, he realized with asudden and unusual moment of clarity that his entire life since leaving the abbey, since he had met Brownpony in fact, had had the quality of a dream. So why was it that Specklebird, instead of Brownpony, came to him in his dreams? Brownpony was in the real dream.

Aberlott grinned and shrugged. “Not exactly thrown out, then, but asked to leave.”

Blacktooth got out of the wagon. The rain clouds that had rode across the sky for days had disappeared, and the camp was almost as bright as day even though the sun hadn’t yet risen.

“They are leaving only a few men from each horde, about three hundred in all,” Aberlott said, too loudly. “The rest are heading south with the Qæsach dri Vørdar to take Hannegan City. I’m going with them!”

“But you are in the Papal Guard!”

“The Pope’s Guard is going, all except Wooshin. Besides—the Pope didn’t give me these!” Aberlott opened his hand. In his palm, where three empty shell casings had nested the night before, now there were six, and each was filled; each had a dark bullet peeping out of one end as though eager to be on its way.

“Goodbye then!” Blacktooth said angrily. Wrapping his robe around him against the morning chill, he half walked, half ran toward the latrine trench. As he squatted, through the bushes he could see hundreds of men stirring, grumbling, dressing, farting, laughing. Pop pop pop! Some were pulling at dogs, some at horses. The pall that had fallen over the camp in the last few days, the pall of rain and forest, was lifting even as the skies brightened toward the east. Almost a thousand warriors were crossing the creek, many of them slapping the sides of the metal wagons to hear them ring.

“He’s taking all the healthy men,” Blacktooth muttered to himself.

“There aren’t that many healthy men,” said the man at the trench beside him, who sounded and smelled very unhealthy. “And I’m not that healthy and I’m going.”

He spoke in Wilddog. Before Blacktooth could answer, he was off and running, barely wiping.

Through the shrubs that cloaked the latrine, Blacktooth watched the horses cross the creek, and then crawled back into his bed. It would be an hour or so before breakfast and he wanted to get some rest. He searched for Ædrea and Amen through his dream, but it was like prowling through an abandoned house, empty even of furniture. When he woke again his fever was back. He sat up, dazed. He could see by the sun on the wagon’s hood that it was almost noon.

“Your Eminence,” said Bitten Dog. “His Holiness and whatever, His Eminence the Pope wants to see you.”

“Brownpony?”

“He wants your butt in his Pope wagon right away.”

Brownpony had stopped shaving but it had hardly changed his appearance. There wasn’t much left of his beard, just a few wisps of hair on his chin. Some were dark and some were light, giving him the look of a sketch that had been abandoned. He was finishing his breakfast of horsemeat jerky and plums when Blacktooth found him, at a small table that had been set in the shade of the papal wagon. “Nimmy,” he said, “where is your zucchetto? I have a commission for you.”

“As a soldier?” Blacktooth answered. He was ready to refuse.

“As an ambassador,” Brownpony said, ignoring the novice cardinal’s sarcasm. “As the papal legate to the farmers. They are all that is left in the city. Hannegan’s troops have abandoned the place and left them there to fight. We could have avoided the fight altogether by peacefully slipping a thousand men into New Rome.”

“A thousand Nomads are not peaceful, Your Holiness,” replied Blacktooth. “And besides, the farmers have shown an inclination to fight.”

“True. Perhaps you’re right,” Brownpony said. “Perhaps this is all for the best. We have only three hundred men anyway, mostly the Grasshopper.” The Pope waved an astonishingly skinny arm around at the camp, which looked deserted in the harsh daylight, like a dream only half-remembered. Brownpony looked weaker than Blacktooth had ever seen him. Surely, he thought, it was the Meldown. Nunshån the Night Hag was claiming her husband, calling him to her cold bed.

“The War Sharf of the Three Hordes, the Qæsach dri Vørdar, our old friend and companion Chür Ösle Høngan, has taken almost a thousand of my crusaders south, to Hannegan City. Even Magister Dion and the New Jerusalemites have gone with him. They intend to join the Jackrabbit warriors and the gleps that are preparing to besiege the city, and instead of a siege we will have a battle.” Brownpony sat down wearily. “Perhaps it is all for the best.”

“Not so,” said Wooshin.

“My sergeant general disapproves,” said Brownpony. “But what does it matter? It is done.” The Pope’s hands fluttered in the air, like two birds. Blacktooth watched, intrigued; with that motion, this most worldly of men suddenly reminded him of Amen I.

“I’m sick anyway,” Blacktooth said.

“We’re all sick,” said Brownpony. “Except for Wooshin, of course. Where is your hat, Nimmy?”

“Here.” Blacktooth pulled his red cardinal’s zucchetto from his robe. “I don’t wear it around the camp. It might blow off my head and fall into the dogshit.”

“No wind here,” said Wooshin, who disapproved of Blacktooth’s attitude toward his master.

“Oh yes, the dogs,” said the Pope distractedly. “We get to keep the dogs. The Qæsach didn’t want to take them on the campaign south. We have been left with three hundred men and almost as many dogs. And the Grasshopper sharf, of course. The farmers don’t know this, not yet. What I want you to do is go into the city, Nimmy, and make them an offer of peace. Extend to them my offer of peace. The Pope’s hand in peace.”

“Before they discover your numbers have been reduced,” Blacktooth said, scornfully.

“Why, yes. Wear your hat and your robes. I will give you a papal seal to carry.”

“They will shoot me before they see it.”

“Put it on a stick,” said Wooshin. Blacktooth could see from the yellow warrior’s eyes that he wasn’t going to be allowed to refuse the mission. He resigned himself to it. He was curious to see the city anyway, and sick to death of pots and pans. So what if he got killed? Wasn’t that bound to happen sooner or later anyway?

“You look very sick, Cardinal Nimmy,” said Wooshin, his voice almost gentle. “Tell the farmers that we wish them no harm. We want to settle things peacefully. The Empire has deserted them but not the Vicar of Christ.”

“And don’t mention that the Vicar of Christ is down to three hundred men and as many dogs,” Blacktooth said.

“I will overlook your insolence since it has never been an impediment to your vocation. Indeed, Nimmy, sometimes I think it is your staff. I hope for your sake it is not your crutch. Better get going, though. This has to be done today, or at least attempted.”

“I have to walk?”

“Eltür Bråm has a white mule you can use,” said Brownpony. “And God go with you, Nimmy.”

He made the sign of the cross and allowed Blacktooth to kiss his ring.

The grassy swale had been a highway a thousand years before, and now it was a highway again. The muddy tracks of wagons crisscrossed in the grass. Who knew how many years this “door prairie” had pointed like an arrow from the plains into the forest and then to the city—or, Blacktooth thought, the other way? Though the monk had never thought much of the Pope’s plans to return the papacy to New Rome, lately the Holy City had been appearing to him in his dreams. It had arrived with the fever. In the dreams it beckoned on the distant horizon, like small, steep mountains. How different was the reality! There was no horizon at all. The road ran straight between trees and low ruins that were just mounds of earth, some with openings where they were mined, others barricaded where some pitiful creature had chosen an intact basement or a mined-out room as a cave. The farmsteads were smaller here, close to the city, usually just a weedy vegetable patch and a ruined building or two; perhaps a shed emptied of pigs and chickens.

Just when Blacktooth had given up all hope of seeing New Rome, just when he least expected it, the road topped a small rise, and there it was—just as it had always been in his dream.

“Whoa.” Blacktooth needn’t have bothered; the white mule only moved when he got on and only stopped when he got off. He slid down and the mule stopped to nose at skunk cabbages beside the road. They were at a turn: the road went at an angle down the last hill before the valley of the Great River, or Misspee as it was called locally.

Blacktooth couldn’t see the river but he could see the distant towers of what once had been a bridge; and he could see a low line of tree-covered bluffs on the other side, like a mirror image of the hill he was on. And in between, a few miles away, were steep brush-covered stumps of towers, like low steep mountains, just as he had seen them in his dream. New Rome.

But it was already afternoon, and there was no time to enjoy the view—even if it was the first horizon Blacktooth had seen in almost a month. He got back on the sharf’s shaman’s white mule and it started down the hill, and soon they were in the trees again.

There was more concrete and asphalt here, mixed with the grass. It would have made for treacherous passage on a horse, but the mule seemed unbothered. There were fewer farmsteads and more houses, even though the houses were just sheds attached to the sides of the ruins. Blacktooth even saw smoke coming from one or two, and shadowy shapes that could have been children playing or their parents hiding.

“Gee up,” he said to the mule, just to hear his own voice and to let whoever might be watching know that he was in control and on a mission. He wished now he had bothered to learn the mule’s name.

It was late afternoon before he passed the gates of the city, a low barricade now abandoned. A couple of corpses in the sentry box showed how the Nomads had avenged their murdered shaman, and how little the grass-eaters cared about their dead.

Of course, the corpses might have been Texark soldiers. Two pigs were rooting at the door, seemingly eager to find out.

“Gee up!” The white mule stepped over the rubble and Blacktooth rode on through, holding up Amen II’s papal seal. It was made of parchment stretched over sticks like a kite, and held aloft on a spear decorated with feathers and the cryptic symbols of the Three Hordes. An amalgam of the sacred and the profane, the civilized and the barbaric. Like Brownpony’s papacy itself.

There were more pigs on the street here, though there were no bodies. New Rome seemed deserted. The streets were straight and wide. The “great houses” Blacktooth had seen from the horizon were less impressive up close, but more oppressive somehow, dark ruins shot full of holes. There was no movement. Blacktooth knew he was being watched, though. He could feel it; he could feel more and more eyes on him as it got darker and darker.

“Whoa,” he said, but the mule didn’t stop.

Ahead Blacktooth saw a single figure in the center of the street. It was a man carrying a rifle.

“Gee up!” Blacktooth kicked his mule but the mule walked at the same slow pace, whether kicked or not.

“Wait,” Blacktooth shouted at the man, but the man backed slowly into the shadows.

“I have a message…” Blacktooth shouted, just as the man knelt and fired.

Blacktooth slid off the mule, which was the only way to stop it.

He waited behind the mule for another shot. The silence was excruciating.

The man was gone.

The dialogue was too one-sided. His only chance, Blacktooth saw, was to push on toward the center of the city and hope that he came across someone with either some sense or some authority, and preferably both, before he got shot.

He got back on the mule.

“Gee up.”

It was dark when they shot the mule out from under him. Blacktooth was almost in the center of the city, under the biggest of the “great houses.” It must have been a long shot, because the animal went down before Blacktooth heard the shot; the crack came rolling through just as he was falling on his side, under the mule, which fell as heavily as an abbot having a stroke.

Blacktooth scrambled to his feet, looking for the papal seal-on-a-stick, which had snapped and was lying half under the mule. He was tensed through his shoulders, waiting for the next shot, which he knew he wouldn’t hear and might not even feel. It never came.

With the papal seal, he ran back into the rubble of the “great house,” where he hid under a stone slab. From here, he could see down the street both ways. It was almost dark; the sky was a salmon pink turning to rose in the west, and a darker blue ahead, in the east.

The mule was on its side, braying violently. It wasn’t bleeding much, but clearly it was done for. Its front legs were kicking but the rear legs were still; maybe spine shot. Blacktooth felt his fever growing and then a fit of diarrhea hit him, and he squatted behind the stone slab. Should he hold the papal seal aloft, or did it just make him a better target? “Not now,” he prayed aloud. “Not like this.”

Finished, and still not shot, he decided to continue on with his mission. He had to find someone, and soon, before it got dark. Otherwise, he would be sleeping alone in the dark in one of these great piles of stone. Holding the papal seal aloft, he started walking. He knew he was still feverish, because he could sense Amen I beside him, his cougar face composed and quiet; free of concern as well as anxiety. Amen had nothing to say; lately he had had little to say.

The problem was, the mule wouldn’t shut up. It kept braying louder and louder, the farther Blacktooth walked away from it.

“I have to go back,” he said to Amen. He knew the old man couldn’t, wouldn’t, answer, but he wanted to hear the sound of a human voice, even if it was just his own.

“I’ll do for him what I did for the glep soldier,” he said aloud. “It’ll be a sin, too, just the same.” A sin but he had to do it. Wasn’t that what a sin was? Something you had to do?

No, that’s duty, replied Specklebird, with his unquiet, ambiguous smile. You have often confused them.

It was a long way back to the white mule, and Blacktooth’s legs were getting wobbly. He walked backward, holding the seal high, his shoulders tensed against the shot he expected. The mule was almost quiet by the time he got to it; the brays had turned to hoarse, honking moans. The front legs were still kicking rhythmically. The big eyes looked at Blacktooth with neither curiosity nor fear. Blacktooth knelt and said a prayer, a made-up one, as he put his knife to the creature’s throat, and said a second prayer as he pulled it across.

It was like pulling a string and watching the grain flow out of a bag. The mule sank into a sudden quiet restfulness.

Blacktooth wiped his knife on the mule’s coat. He was about to stand when he felt the knife on his own throat. “Stand,” said a voice, and he did what he had been about to do anyway. He started to drop his knife when a hand took it from his.

Grass-eater, he thought, but perhaps he said it aloud, for someone hit him from behind, almost knocking him down. There was the smell; the grass-eater smell. There were too many hands—he thought perhaps it was a glep—and then realized that it was two men who held him, and a third who picked up his papal seal from the ground where he had laid it before taking out his knife to cut the mule’s throat.

They marched him back down the street, the steps he had retraced to kill the mule. He felt a gun prodding him through his cassock. As he passed the corner where he had turned back, he thought, Why hadn’t they taken him here? Had they been waiting for him to come back?

“I have a message for your leader,” he said. “From His Holiness, Amen Two. I am his papal ...”

“Shut up,” said one of the men, in a tongue Blacktooth recognized as a variant of Grasshopper.

He was taken into a basement room that reminded him of the library at the abbey. It was lit by oil lamps, and several men were inside, armed with iron swords and old rifles. Most of them were dressed in rags but one wore the jacket of Hannegan’s Texark cavalry. He spoke to Blacktooth in Churchspeak.

“Are you sick?” was his first question. “You smell bad.”

“I come from His Holiness the Pope with a message for your leader,” said Blacktooth. “We are all sick. We all smell bad. There are thousands of sick, bad-smelling warriors, bloodthirsty Nomads, on the outlying reaches of the city, preparing to strike. I am here to give you a chance to…”

“Shut up,” said the Texark soldier. He nodded at one of the other men, a farmer, who handed Blacktooth a cup of water and a handful of brown pills that looked like rabbit pellets. “Take one,” the soldier said.

Blacktooth smelled the pills. He shook his head.

“Take one.” A gun prodded him in his back.

Blacktooth took one.

“I am here to give you a chance to surrender the Holy City peacefully,” he said. “The Empire is finished. The papacy is returning to New Rome. The Pope, His Holiness Amen Two, wants only to occupy his rightful place in the ...”

“Shut up. I know who you are.”

“I am the His Holiness Amen Two’s—”

“We know who you are. The Archbishop sent us word to look for you,” the Texark soldier said. He unrolled a scroll that had already been untied. “Are you not Blacktooth St. George, Secretary to the Antipope, and banished under sentence of death to the far reaches of the Bay Ghost and the Nady Ann?”

Blacktooth was at a loss for a reply.

A gun prodded him in his back. “Say ‘I am.’ And what’s that hat? Military?”

“I am a cardinal,” Blacktooth said. Suddenly the seriousness and the ridiculousness of it all struck him, simultaneously. The enterprise had been foolish. Perhaps even the Crusade. Now here he was, back in the Hannegans’ zoo. “A joke, really. Cardinal. Pope. Soldier.”

The pill was making him dizzy. He wondered if he should take another.

“We have orders to shoot you,” said the Texark officer, rolling the scroll back up tightly and tying it with a ribbon. “But first you should get some rest. The pills will help you sleep. Take him to the death cells.”

It was cool under the street. By standing on tiptoe, through a barred window, Blacktooth could see an alleyway and an occasional dog or pig, the pigs wearing medallions that identified, Blacktooth presumed, their owners. One pig was especially friendly; it kept coming back and sticking its nose into the bars, perhaps for the coolness of the iron.

As darkness fell, Blacktooth felt his fever subside, like a stream sinking into the sand. The chamber pot in the corner of his cell waited, empty, like the pig. The guard came just after midnight with a jug of water but no food. Blacktooth took another pill. This time they were going to shoot him, and he had little doubt that they would keep their promise. Somehow, the thought of it made him drowsy.

That night, again, he dreamed of Ædrea. She was waiting for him under the waterfall while his old friend, the white mule, grazed on the rocks outside. There was no grass but it sprung up as the mule ate. It had a hole in its throat like a wound, and Ædrea had wounds too; she showed her wounds to Blacktooth.

“Where have you been?” she asked in Churchspeak. “Where are you going?” Since he knew she didn’t speak Churchspeak, he knew, in the dream, that he was dreaming.