Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

CHAPTER 3

AN OIL LAMP TOO DIM FOR READING HUNG IN each alcove where books were stored. A light held by hand was needed to locate a title on the shelves. Ordinarily one then carried the book up to the clerestory reading room, but Blacktooth scanned the abstract of Duren’s De Perennibus Sententiis Sectarum Rurum, his next assigned project, by the light of a candle held close to the pages. He soon returned the book to the shelf and went to join Brother Torrildo, who was leaning against Kornhoer’s old generator of electrical essence, a rusting hulk in an alcove where no light burned.

“Let’s sit back here where nobody’ll catch us,” Torrildo muttered, and stepped into the deep shadows behind the machine. “Brother Obohl’s gone out, but I’m not sure where.”

Blacktooth hesitated. “I don’t need to hide. I have reason for being here, even if I didn’t ask permission.”

“Shhh! You don’t have to whisper, but keep it down. I’m only allowed to come in here to clean. Not that it matters much now.”

“What’s that door?” Blacktooth nodded toward the rear of the dark alcove.

“Just a closet full of junk. Parts of the machine, I think. Come on.”

The monk hesitated. The machine somehow gave him the creeps. It reminded him of the special chair in the chapel, which was really a holy relic.

With the faster travel and communication made possible by the conquests of Hannegan II, invention had become contagious in a world that was beginning to recover twelve centuries after the Magna Civitas perished in the Flame Deluge. Most inventions, of course, were reinventions, suggested by the few surviving records of that great civilization, but new devices were nonetheless cunning and needed. What was needed at Hannegan City was an efficient and humane method of capital punishment. Thus, the building of a generator of electrical essences at the Abbey of Saint Leibowitz in 3175 a.d. was followed in a few years by the building of a chair of electrical essences at Hannegan City in the Empire of Texark. The first offender to be executed by the new method was a Leibowitzian monk whose crime was carrying a cardinal abbot’s offer of sanctuary to a son of the late Thon Taddeo Pfardentrott, an enemy of the Texark state, whose work at Leibowitz Abbey had, nevertheless, made possible many new inventions that benefited the Empire, including the chair of electrical essences.

It was the first and only time the chair was used. Hannegan III had placed it on a platform in the public square, and while two teams of mules drove the electrical generator, the Mayor himself cut the ribbon that allowed a spring to close the switch. To the crowd’s delight, the voltage was low and the monk died slowly and noisily. The method was abandoned until a better generator was built. Steam power came, but the chair was never brought out of storage, because a more recent Hannegan found the best executioner on this continent in the person of Wooshin, whose ancestors came from a different continent, and who used a hatchet with such artistry and ease that a whole afternoon of severing heads left him untired and tranquil, able to sit in deep meditation for two hours before dinner.

The chair of electrical essence was eventually disassembled and smuggled across the southern Plains, then out of the Empire at the Bay Ghost frontier. It reappeared at Leibowitz Abbey, where it was placed in the Church over the crypt that contained the bones of the monk who died in it, and regularly on the day of his death, the chair was incensed, sprinkled with holy water, and venerated in his memory. Leibowitz Abbey became the only monastery on the continent with its own electric chair. Some thirty years later, the abbey inherited the now elderly executioner, Wooshin, who staggered out of a sandstorm asking for water and sanctuary. That was only three years ago.

“Are you going to stand out there until they catch me?” Torrildo asked impatiently.

Blacktooth sighed and squeezed into the dark cranny beside him. Someone had piled a number of worn sleeping pads, torn and stinking of mildew, in the shadows behind the machine. They sat in comfort.

“I never knew about this,” said Blacktooth, amused.

“Blacktooth, are you going to run away?”

The older monk was silent for a time, considering. Earlier he just wanted to run as far as Last Resort, to make a decision, and then maybe come back. Torrildo felt his thigh, as if groping for an answer. He brushed the hand away and sighed. “I just read the abstract on the Duren book. It’s a history of local cults and heresies that keep popping up and coming back in different places. God knows why Dom Jarad wants something like that translated into Nomadic. I can’t even begin to guess, until I read the whole book.”

“You aren’t going to run away?”

“How can I? I took solemn vows.”

Torrildo released a choking sob in the darkness. “I’m going to run away.”

“That’s silly. All you need to leave in good standing is Dom Jarad’s permission, and for a postulant that’s just formality.”

“But Dom Jarad is gone. I have to leave now!” His sobbing intensified. Blacktooth put a comforting arm around his shoulders. Torrildo leaned against him and cried quietly into the hollow of his neck.

“Now, what is the matter with you?” asked the older monk.

Torrildo lifted his head and put his face close to Blacktooth’s. All Blacktooth could see was an oval shadow with Torrildo’s beautiful eyes peering out of it.

“Do you really like me, Blacktooth?”

“Of course I do, Torri. What a question!”

“You’re the only reason I’ve been staying here these past months.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Oh, you say you don’t, but you do. Now I just can’t stay here any longer. I’d just get you into trouble anyway. I’m impure. I haven’t been faithful to you.”

“What are you talking about? Faithful how?” Blacktooth shifted restlessly on the moldy mattresses.

“Oh, you’re so smart, but you’re so naive.” He took Blacktooth’s face in his soft thin hands. “I’m going. Will you kiss me goodbye?” He felt Blacktooth wince, and dropped his hands. “You won’t, then.”

“Well, sure I will, Torri.” Carefully Blacktooth offered him the kiss of peace, first a peck on the right cheek, then—

“Ohhhh,” the youth sighed, and caught him in a fierce embrace.

Blacktooth felt lips pressing his own and a tongue trying to work its way between his teeth. He tossed his head aside and leaned back, gagging. Torri fell on top of him and groped under the hem of his robe, both hands sliding up his legs. Blacktooth was first frightened, then horrified by his own erection, which the inflamed Torrildo discovered with delight.

“Torri, no!”

“You know I was meant to be a girl….”

The door of the closet burst open. A skinny arm thrust out a lantern above them. In the sudden light, Blacktooth caught a glimpse of four naked legs and two erect penes.

“Sodomites!” yelled the senior librarian, Brother Obohl. “I caught you at it. I finally caught you, you scum. Up to the prior’s office with you!” He aimed a kick at Torrildo’s bare rump, but missed. Obohl was nearsighted. Once he had owned the only pair of spectacles at the abbey, ground for him in Texark, but had given them up for religious reasons. Now he grabbed Torrildo’s arm, and yelled at Blacktooth, who was scrambling over the machine.

“Elwen! Brother Elwen! Come back here, you filthy bugger!”

Blacktooth heard ascuffle behind him as he sprinted up the stairway. He paused on the landing to compose himself, then strode quietly through the reading room into the courtyard. Outside he paused in the blinding sunlight, dazed and confused. The myopic old man had mistaken him for Brother Elwen, a novice who worked for the groundskeeper. Blacktooth had seen Torrildo and Elwen together on several occasions, but thought nothing of it. Now he seemed caught in a trap the librarian had set for another. The mistake would not endure. Across the courtyard, in plain sight, Elwen was on his hands and knees, working manure into the soil under the rosebushes. There was no honorable escape. He started to report back to the copy room, but things might become embarrassing there, when the prior sent for him. He started again toward his cell, but the sound of running footsteps made him look around. It was Torrildo, sprinting toward the main gate. Blacktooth stood waiting for a commotion to follow, but nothing happened.

He waited a full minute. After a brief prayer to Saint Leibowitz, he made up his mind to return to the basement. At the bottom of the stairs, he met only silence in the dim light. He found the candle he had used earlier and looked behind the machine. The old librarian lay on his back. He clutched his head and rolled it side to side. There was blood on his forehead. Blacktooth bent over him.

“Who’s there?” he rasped.

“Blacktooth St. George.”

“God be praised, Brother. I need a little help.”

Blacktooth picked the old man up, edged his way around the machine, and staggered with him toward the stairs.

“Put me down. I’m too heavy for you. I’ll be all right in a moment.”

They rested briefly against the wall. Then Blacktooth draped the librarian’s arm around his neck and helped him up the stairs. Obohl was croaking and wheezing.

“It was Elwen and Torrildo. Those buggers. I knew. What they were up to back there. Just couldn’t catch them. Until today. You know, so much semen. Gets spilled. Behind that machine. They call it the seminary. Now. Now. Where did they go?” Still wheezing, he blinked around at his blurred world.

Blacktooth set him carefully on the end of a table in the reading room and made him lie down on it. Monks at the reading desks got up and quickly gathered around. One brought a drinking jug and wiped the librarian’s face. Another examined the cut on his scalp. Another asked, “What happened to you, Brother?”

“I caught them. I finally caught them. Brother Torrildo and Brother Elwen again, going at it behind the electric idol. Torrildo hit me—with something.”

“Torrildo hit you all right,” said Blacktooth. “But Elwen wasn’t there. It was me, Blacktooth St. George.”

He turned and walked away, not hurrying, and continued to his cell. He lay on his back and stared up at the picture of the Immaculate Heart of the Virgin until they came to get him.

Were it not for the fact that shoveling compost was defined as public punishment, Blacktooth might have preferred it as a career to the job of translating a monk’s-eye view of history for Nomads too proud to read. Taking the raw shit out of the privies and transporting it by wheelbarrow to the first composting bin was the smelliest part of the task. There he mixed it with thrice its volume of garden weeds, corn husks, chopped cactus, and plate scrapings from the kitchen, Each day he shoveled the stinking mixture from one bin to the next in line, allowing air to penetrate and hasten the decay. When the mixture reached the final bin, it was crumbling and had lost most of its odor. From there, he loaded it into a clean wheelbarrow and moved it out to the great pile near the garden, where it awaited the pleasure of the cultivators.

On the third day, after an interview with the prior, Brother Elwen went over the wall. Blacktooth expected relief. None came. For three weeks in full he prayed the compost-shoveling prayer, offering up each stinking shovelful on behalf of the soul of poor, poor Torrildo. That he fry in hell—is not my wish, O Lord, he managed to pray.

No one snubbed or shunned him (after he bathed), but the shame of public penance made him isolate himself. In his loneliness, in his cell by night, he sought ever more fervently the indescribable emptying of himself that seemed to occur in a kind of union with the heart of the Virgin: a heart not filled with sorrow, but made empty by sorrow, made open by sorrow, made selfless by sorrow, a heart which was a pit of loving darkness, wherein, sometimes, he glimpsed fleetingly another wounded but still beating heart.

“The Devil too has his contemplatives, they say” was his confessor’s harsh judgment upon the vision and upon Blacktooth’s private devotional practice. “The focus of contemplation must be Our Lord. Devotion to Our Lady is splendid, but too many monks turn to her only when their vows fit too tight, when obedience is hard. They call her ‘Refuge of Sinners,’ and so she is!—but there are two ways of looking at this: the Lord’s way, and the sinner’s way. Pay attention in choir, my son, and stop chasing visions at night.”

Thus Blacktooth learned not to mention the vision. He saw his confessor was made angry by it, for how could a professed monk who regretted his vows be granted any grace except that of contrition and repentance? He observed a similar attitude in Prior Olshuen, who, at the end of his three-week penance, sent him back to his regular work, but also ordered him to spend an hour a week with Brother Reconciliator for special counseling, to Blacktooth’s utmost chagrin.

Brother Reconciliator, a monk named Levion, was part-time assistant to Brother Surgeon as well as a Keeper of Memorabilia from certain ancient healing arts. He handled cases of senility, fits, depression, delusion, and—contumacy. He had also been ordained an exorcist. Olshuen, without doubting Blacktooth’s account of the incident in the basement, saw it as a manifestation of rebellious discontent, and saw the discontent as sin or madness.

Blacktooth’s devotion to the Virgin, however, continued and grew in the face of this disapproval. His old hero, Saint Leibowitz, was at least temporarily pushed aside to make more room for the Virgin. He had chosen Duren’s Perennial Ideas of Regional Sects for his next project, in preference to more Boedullus, partly because so many of Duren’s country religions were special cults of Mary, or of some local goddess who had borrowed Mary’s identity and carried Mary’s Babe on her arm. Duren even mentioned the Nomadic Day Maiden. It was a choice he would quickly regret, because of the extreme difficulty of translating theological ideas into Nomadic, but at first he was captivated by one section (“Apud Oregonenses”) which dealt with remnants of what had been called the Northwest Heresy a few centuries before. The description of the cult’s beliefs seemed to cast light on his own mystical vision.

“The Oregonians,” wrote Duren, “considered the Mother of God to be the original uterine Silence into which the Word was spoken at the creation. She was the dark Void made pregnant with light and matter when God roared ‘Fiat!’ Word and Silence were coeval, they said, and each contained the other.”

This reminded Blacktooth of the image of the darkening heart that became a pit of blackness containing another living heart. He was deeply moved.

“Thus is was impossible,” Duren wrote in a later paragraph, “for the cultist to evade the Inquisitor’s accusation that they made of the Virgin a fourth divine person, an incarnation of God’s female wisdom.”

Since no one at the abbey could read Nomadic except Wren and Singing Cow, Blacktooth felt safe in taking a few liberties with a work so resistant to understandable expression in that primitive tongue. In translating the word eculeum (“colt”), he could choose any of eleven Nomadic words that meant a young horse, and none of them were synonymous. But any one-word translation of the Latin “eternity” or “transubstantial” would only bewilder the reader. Theological terms, therefore, he left as Latin words in the Nomadic text, and tried to define them by lengthy footnotes of his own composition. But whenever he imagined himself trying to explain such matters to his late father or boss uncle, these footnotes became flavored with a facetiousness which he knew he would have to remove from the final version. Levity made the task less hateful, but strengthened his conviction that it was useless.

After an absence of two months, Abbot Jarad wrote to the prior from Valana and requested, among other things, that a votive Mass be offered weekly for the election of a pope, for he saw no quick end to a difficult election. Without a government, the Church was in confusion and turmoil. The city of Valana was too small to be a gracious host to hundreds of cardinals with their secretaries, servants, and alternates. Some were living in barns.

He wrote little about the conclave itself, except to note with obvious disgust that more than one cardinal had already gone home, leaving behind a special conclavist to cast his ballot. The practice was made possible by a canon which had been enacted for the convenience of foreign, not domestic, cardinals, but the latter took advantage of it during long periods of interregnum. The special conclavist in such cases must, if possible, be a member of the clergy of the cardinal’s titular New Roman (or Valanan) Church, and he was entitled to vote his own convictions under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, but such a proxy was always chosen for loyalty, and rarely deviated from his cardinal’s wishes until an election became obvious and he switched his vote to back a winner. The practice made compromise more difficult, as the servant was always less flexible than the master. Jarad would make no prediction as to the date of his return. The messenger who brought the letter, however, got mildly drunk in Sanly Bowitts and expressed his own opinion of the affair: either the cardinals would all appoint conclavists and go home for the winter, leaving a hopeless deadlock, or would elect an ill old man who could be expected to die before settling any real problems.

Other news and gossip trickled to the abbey from Valana by way of travelers, guardians of the papal roads, and messengers who spent the night on their way to other destinations. Abbot Jarad Cardinal Kendemin was said to have received two votes on the thirty-eighth ballot—a dubious rumor which caused a flurry of excitement and joy at the abbey and asurge of panic in the heart of Blacktooth, who needed a pope’s assent to be released from his vows, under the laws then in effect.

“You’re not making sense,” Brother Reconciliator told him at their weekly session after he listened to five minutes of Blacktooth’s nervous chatter. “You think Dom Jarad has his foot on your neck. You think he’ll never change his mind. If he comes home still the abbot, you can appeal to the Pope. But if he’s the Pope, he’ll have nothing better to do than keep his foot on your neck, eh? You’ll spend your whole life translating the Memorabilia into Nomadic. Why do you suppose Dom Jarad hates you so much?”

“I didn’t say he hated me. You’re putting words in my mouth.”

“Excuse me. He has his foot on your neck. Your father also had his foot on your neck, you said. I forgot. It was your father who hated you, yes?”

“No! I didn’t say that either, exactly.”

Levion shuffled through his notes. They were sitting in his cell, which served as his office; his role as a special counselor was not a full-time one.

“Three weeks ago, you said exactly: ‘My father hated me.’ I wrote it down.”

Blacktooth sat slouched on Levion’s cot, leaning back against the wall Suddenly he leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, and began wringing his hands. He spoke to the floor. “If I said it, I meant when he hated me, he was drunk. He hated the responsibility. Raising me was supposed to be my boss uncle’s job. Also, he was angry because my mother was teaching me to read a little.” Blacktooth put his hand over his mouth, betrayed by this thoughtless revelation.

“Here are two things I don’t understand, Brother St. George. First, you came here illiterate, did you not? Second, why should your uncle be responsible for you instead of your father?”

“That’s the way it is on the Plains. The mother’s brothers take responsibility for her children.” Blacktooth was increasingly restless. He eyed the door.

“Oh yes, Nomads are matriarchal. Is that right?”

“Wrong! Inheritance is matrilineal. That’s not the same.”

“Well, whatever. So your father felt put-upon, because your mother had no brother?”

“Wrong again. She had four brothers. My boss uncle was the oldest. He taught me dances and songs, took me to tribal councils, and that’s about all. I could not become a warrior. Mother owned no breeding pit, no broodmares, and we were outcasts.”

“Broodmares? What have broodmares got to do with—” He left the question unfinished, waved his hand in the air as if trying to dispel echoes. “Never mind. Nomad customs. I’ll never untangle that ball of worms. Let’s get back to the problem. You felt your father’s foot on your neck. You say your mother was teaching you to read? But you said you came here illiterate. Did you lie?”

Blacktooth rested his chin on his hands and stared at his feet; he wiggled his toes and said nothing.

“Whatever you tell me stays right here in this room, Brother.”

The patient paused, then blurted, “I couldn’t read very well, or speak Rockymount very well. Wren and Singing Cow couldn’t read at all. I kept quiet because everyone thought we were real Nomads. If Abbot Graneden found out we came from the settlements, he would have sent us back.”

“I see. So that’s why you learned faster than Wren and Singing Cow. Your mother had already taught you. Where was she educated?”

“She learned what little she knew from a mission priest.”

Levion was silent for a time as he studied his occasional disciple. “Whose idea was it to run away to join the wild Nomads?”

“Singing Cow’s.”

“And when the Nomads turned you away, whose idea was it to come here?”

“Mine.”

“Tell me again. When did your mother die?”

“Year before last.”

“When did you first tell Dom Jarad you wanted to quit the Order?”

Blacktooth said nothing.

“It was right after your mother died, wasn’t it?”

“That had nothing to do with it,” he growled.

“Didn’t it? As a runaway, how did you feel when you got the news your mother had died?”

The bell rang. Blacktooth stood up with a sudden smile, unable to hide his relief.

“Well?”

“I felt very sorry, of course. Now I’ve got to go to work, Brother.”

“Of course. Next week then, we’ll talk more about this.”

Blacktooth liked these sessions less and less. He had no wish to be reconciled by Brother Reconciliator, who seemed to treat his wish to depart as a symptom of illness, if not madness. As he hurried back to the copy room, he resolved to tell Levion no more about his parents or his childhood.

Because of the man’s ignorance of Nomad life, his interviews with Brother Levion, instead of reconciling him with his calling, served instead to increase his nostalgia for that life which he had never quite inherited. He remembered his mother turning Christian, and his father, who sometimes tried to exercise an uncle’s authority over him, insisting that he prepare himself for a manhood rite which he knew at the time would never be celebrated. The Church forbade the rite which turned adolescents into fully licensed mankillers of a war cult. But he had undergone training and understood something of the spirit of the Nomad warrior and his battle frenzy. It was hard to say anything true in answer to the question: What is Nomad religion like? Everything the wild Nomad did was religiously or magically hedged. It was hard to say what his religion was not. One might add up a list of ingredients for a religion: his ceremonies, his customs, his laws, his magic, his medicine, his oracles, his dances, his occasional ritual killing, his Empty Sky and his Wild Horse Woman, and call the list his religion, but this list would omit too much of daily living. There was even a ritual for defecation.

Bending over his worktable, he read again his favorite passage from Duren’s Perennial Ideas, paused to think about his vision, and then penned a footnote to his translation of the paragraph:

He hesitated over it, neglected to add the word Translator, and thought of tearing up the page. But Brother Copymaster was standing nearby, and whenever Blacktooth tore up a page, the copymaster remarked on the cost of paper. I’ll come back to it later, he thought, for it was growing dark in the copy room, and he was not allowed more than one candle. Suppressing a sense of mortal sin, he cleaned up his table, and left the problem for tomorrow.