On the twentieth evening of their journey, Holy Madness saw Nunshån, the Night Hag. They made camp early, and Høngan had ridden ahead in the late afternoon to check the condition of the passes, and he came back ashen and babbling after sundown.
“I looked up, and there she was standing on a crag against the early stars. Ugly! I have never seen a woman so huge and ugly. There was a kind of black light around her, and I could see stars through it. The sun was behind a mountain, but the sky was still light. Then she cried out to me—a great sobbing sound, wild as a cougar.”
“Maybe it was a cougar,” said Brownpony. “This thin air can make you dizzy.”
“Cougar? No, no, a horse! She was there, and then she was a black horse and galloped away, into the very sky, it seemed!”
Brownpony was silent, busying himself with a plate of beans. Blacktooth studied Chür Høngan’s expression and found it excited but sincere. He had learned that the Nomad was at least nominally a Christian, but Nomad myths were not dispelled by baptism.
It was Father e’Laiden at last who spoke. “If you saw the Night Hag, who is dying?”
“The Pope is dying,” said the Red Deacon.
“Does the Nunshån appear for popes, m’Lord?” asked Blacktooth, almost amused.
“It could be my father dying,” the Nomad said quietly.
“God forbid,” said the cardinal. “Granduncle Brokenfoot must be elected Lord of the Three Hordes, and become the successor of the War Sharf Høngan Ös.” He looked quickly at Blacktooth. “This is something else you must forget you heard, Nimmy.”
“I shall obey, m’Lord.”
For Blacktooth, things were falling into place. There had been no Lord of the Three Hordes since the War Sharf Høngan Ös had led his people to defeat against Hannegan the Conqueror seven decades ago, and been sacrificed by his own shamans. The Jackrabbit Horde had been completely subdued, as well as a few tribes, including Blacktooth’s, of the Grasshopper Horde, and the descendants of these either lived within the Empire as small ranchers, or on the Denver Freestate farmlands. Without the participation of electors from the Jackrabbit Horde, the military and priestly office of the kingship could not be filled. The Hannegans had prevented this from happening. Blacktooth thought of his crazy dream in which he had been Pilate crucifying would-be kings of the Nomads. He believed in the meaningfulness of dreams; such was his Nomad heritage.
Now there were stirrings of rebellion from the conquered peoples, for whom the free Nomads had in Blacktooth’s childhood years displayed only contempt. Chür Ösle Høngan, then, was a relative of Høngan Ös, and his motherline was qualified for the high kingship. Brownpony was involved (meddling?) in Nomad politics, which was the same as Nomad religion, for only the shaman class could be electors. The thought came to him now that the cardinal, the elderly priest, and the Nomad with royal family connections in the Wilddog Horde might have stopped to confer with Jackrabbit shamans before they visited Leibowitz Abbey. Several half-overheard conversations during the journey supported the idea.
He was ordered to silence, and he meant to obey. But to regard it as a matter of no concern to him would be to turn his back on his late parents and their heritage. He was grateful for Chür Høngan’s kindness toward him. One day it might be possible to become proud of his heritage, if pride were not one of the deadly sins his faith warned him against. If the two northern Hordes, the Wilddog and the unvanquished tribes of the Grasshopper, stopped showing contempt for the conquered tribes, Jackrabbit and Grasshopper, he might be able to hold his head up in the world. But he knew the Jackrabbit Horde and his own exiled people must again assert themselves before that could happen. He knew he would be glad to help if he could.
Blacktooth saw her the following morning. She was a young girl, much like Ædrea but beyond Ædrea in beauty. Naked, she stood under a ledge washing herself and dancing in a little waterfall made of new-melted ice. A stone’s throw away, she looked once at Blacktooth, who stopped and stood frozen, his scalp crawling. Her eyes left him to follow Holy Madness, himself unseeing, who rode the cardinal’s stallion. They followed him until a big wad of loose wet snow fell over the ledge and made her dart back out of sight. Seconds later a delicate white mare galloped out from under the ledge and disappeared into a thicket of snow-dripping spruce. Blacktooth shook his head. The altitude made one quite dizzy.
Later, when the Nomad stopped and waited for all to catch up, Blacktooth walked past him and said, “I saw her this morning myself. As Fujæ Go, the Day Maiden.”
“Was she young?” Chür Høngan asked.
“Very young, and beautiful.”
“Whoever he was yesterday, today he’s dead,” said the warrior. “She wants a new husband.”
“She was looking at you. Or the cardinal’s horse.”
Høngan frowned, shook his head, and laughed. “The horse. They say she copulates with stallions when there is no Lord of the Hordes. It’s this thin air, Nimmy. Works on both of us.”
Blacktooth continued to walk while the carriage caught up with the waiting Nomad. There was a trade-off somewhere behind him, and the same horse came back with a different rider.
“Why don’t you ride beside the Axe?” asked the cardinal, for the first time referring to Wooshin by that name.
“Because I have a boil on my behind, Your Eminence, but also because I need to walk.” Blacktooth had smoked some of the strong medicinal stuff the Nomad had brought down from Nebraska, and he was feeling more loquacious and less self-conscious than was his wont. Also, he had lost his fear of Brownpony, and begun to like the man.
“What’s this I hear about you and the Wild Horse Woman, Nimmy? Do you change religions often?”
“I hope, m’Lord, that my religion of today is always just a little improved over my religion of yesterday, and a vision of a maiden in an icy waterfall does wonders for my religion of today, although tomorrow I might question the vision’s reality. But did I say she was the Høngin Fujæ Vurn?”
Brownpony laughed. “You feel, then, that reality and religion might or might not have something to do with each other at this altitude?”
“At this altitude, yes and no, m’Lord.”
“Keep me informed if she turns up again,” Brownpony said lightly, and trotted on ahead.
It was a time of visions. Blacktooth had heard of miracles in the mountains, magic on the plains, and chariots in the sky. The Virgin was appearing simultaneously to small groups of her elect in three different locations on the continent. Furthermore, what her apparition said in the west, her voice in the east put to a severe test. It was almost as if she was arguing with herself. This, perhaps, was the best proof of her divinity, for in divinity opposites are always reconciled. Nunshån and Fujæ Go, Night Hag and Day Maiden, aspects of the Høngin Fujæ Vurn. There was a third aspect; at appropriate times, she became the War Buzzard, presiding over the field of battle, the feeding ground.
It’s just the thin air, Blacktooth told himself. But why not a Wild Horse Woman? He had seen her on horseback when he was a child. He had seen her this morning under the waterfall, and she was the same young woman. The women of the Hordes own the breeding mares, and pass them to their daughters. Nomad women are wonderful breeders of horses. And no warrior rides a mare into battle. To ride a mare is to advertise one’s unreadiness to fight. So Cardinal Brownpony’s stallion is both a mount and a statement. Wild horses are forbidden, except to her betrothed, because they are hers. She is a natural projection of Nomad culture onto the Nomad consensual world, but to admit this is not to say she is wholly unreal. Christians make similar projections; so many apparitions of the Virgin! And she is an arbiter of power on the Plains; by choosing a husband, she chooses a king. It amused him to imagine her choosing a pope.
Blacktooth’s departure from the abbey had not gained him a freedom to think for himself—he had always had that. But now he didn’t have to feel guilty about it. His own religious practice was necessarily suffering because of the journey,
and because of his sins, but he tried as often as he could to spend an hour silently reciting Saint Leibowitz’s Grocery List while he rode or lay awake at night: Can kraut, six bagels, bring home for Emma. Amen. Short and sweet, it kept the mind from wandering toward Ædrea. He greatly preferred it to the Maxwell’s Laws Memorabilium that had so confused Torrildo, and perhaps contributed to his delinquency.
But his anger at himself about Ædrea and his feelings kept seeking an outlet. When they camped that evening, the Axe as always asked, “You ready die now?” Blacktooth, without a negative comment, immediately kicked at the Axe’s crotch. The headsman dodged, but the blow glanced off his hip; he laughed with delight. “You very mean man tonight,” he said, and allowed Blacktooth to attack thrice more before he threw him on his face in the melting snow. It was the first time the student had ever touched the teacher, and Wooshin embraced him after helping him to his feet.
This time you ready die, yes?” That was the second night. They were gathering speed as they rode northward and downward. On the fourth night, a messenger with a lantern and a bodyguard trotting along behind delivered the news to Elia Cardinal Brownpony: the Pope was dead. He and the soldier stopped for refreshments with them, then continued southward with a summons for Abbot Jarad and other cardinals across the Brave River. More such messengers would be fanning out from Valana by all roads with the same summons for all cardinal bishops, cardinal priests, cardinal deacons, cardinal abbots and cardinal abbess (1), cardinal nephews and cronies across the continent, while the city of Valana prepared for another conclave.
That night the cardinal huddled in conference with the Nomad and the chaplain, while Blacktooth and the Axe sparred farther away from the fires. On the morrow, they availed themselves of the public baths in Pobla, the first real town they had visited. Father e’Laiden shaved his beard and was seen no more with the rest of them, although Blacktooth caught sight of him later in the company of a fair-haired man in Nomad clothing and with Nomad weapons but with manners that did not come from the Plains. Out of Pobla, Holy Madness rode eastward toward the Plains. Hence too, half an hour later, his Chaplain e’Laiden followed him, accompanied by the blond, urbane young warrior.
Brownpony hired a local driver and proceeded toward Valana with his new servants, a regular headsman and an irregular monk.
Blacktooth had been nursing an unasked question for a long time. Guilt from his encounter with Ædrea made him hesitate, but now he asked it. “M’Lord, back at Arch Hollow, when they were about to rob us, why did you expect the girl to recognize you?”
Brownpony frowned for a moment, then answered easily: “Oh, my office has had some dealings with a group of armed gennies in that general area. I assumed they were a member of the group. Apparently, I was wrong.”
Blacktooth remained curious. Wooshin and Høngan had done quite a bit of exploring in the area, but had spoken only to the cardinal about what they found. He resolved to question Brother Axe.
By early afternoon, they were passing along muddy lanes full of dogs and children through brick and stone villages with log roofs with chimneys belching smoke. There was the sound of the smithy’s forge and women’s voices haggling with vendors over the price of potatoes and goat meat. These villages were now precincts of Valana, surrounding it, having grown up during the schism and the exile, brought by and bringing new commerce and industry to the foot of the mountains whose peaks Blacktooth had seen from the distance in his youth.
But they were too close now to see the peaks, and there was only the hulking presence of the massif to the west. It was all new and dirty, and bewildering to the monk who, although he had spent the first fifteen years of his life within a few days’ ride of this place, had never been inside a city. And the city began to loom up around them as the cardinal’s coach moved deeper into the more heavily populated area, where most of the buildings were, like the abbey, two and even three stories high. And all of it was dominated by the central fortified hill, looming ahead, the hill whose walls enclosed the Holy See, and from which rose the spires of the Cathedral of Saint John-in-Exile, where the vicar of Christ on Earth offered Mass to the Father. Blacktooth was in a daze and barely heard the cardinal, who turned to address him.
“Pardon, m’Lord?”
“Did you know that the plaza in front of Saint John’s is paved with cobblestones brought here all the way across the Plains from New Rome?”
“I had been told, m’Lord, that the area around the Cathedral is New Roman territory. But all of the stones?”
“Well, not all, but Saint John-in-Exile stands on New Roman soil. Imported. That’s why the natives here contend there is no need to go back. In fact, they remind everyone that New Rome itself was built on imported soil.”
“From across the sea?”
“So the story goes.”
“The Venerable Boedullus thought otherwise.”
“Yes, I know. The theory of a schism at the time of the catastrophe. Who knows? How did it happen that Latin came back into use after it was abandoned?”
“That, m’Lord, was during the Simplification, according to Boedullus. The book burners did not destroy religious works. One way of saving precious material from the simpletons was to translate it into Latin and decorate it like a Bible, even if it was a textbook. It was also useful as a secret language….”
“Now, that building ahead of us is the Secretariat,” the cardinal interrupted. “That is where you and perhaps Wooshin will work from time to time. But first, we must find quarters for both of you.”
He leaned forward and spoke to the driver. Moments later, they turned off the stone-paved thoroughfare and onto another muddy side street overarched by branches that were beginning to bud. It was not long until Holy Week, and time to begin choosing a pope.
CHAPTER 7
Now the sacred number of seven will be
fulfilled by us if we perform the Offices
of our service at the time of the Morning Office,
of Prime, of Terce, of Sext, of None, of Vespers
and of Compline, since it was of these day Hours
that he said, “Seven times in the day I have
rendered praise to You.” For as to the Night Office
the same Prophet says, “In the middle
of the night I arose to glorify you.” Let us
therefore bring our tribute of praise to
our Creator “for the judgments of His
justice” at these times and in the
night let us arise to glorify Him.
—Saint Benedict’s Rule, Chapter 16
THE WARM CHINOOK FROM THE MOUNTAINS HAD breathed on the snow, and the snow vanished. Chür Høngan skirted the poor farming communities along the bed of the Kensau River as he rode toward the northeast. In Pobla, he had armed himself with a heavy shortbow and quiver of arrows. The cardinal had given him his double-barreled handgun and bought him an unshod stallion from a Nomad trader, but he wanted to avoid trouble with Blacktooth’s people, who in season tilled the irrigated plots of potatoes, corn, wheat, and sunflowers, and who dwelled in fortified lodges of stone and sod and worked the land for its owners, among whom was the Bishop of Denver. They might mistake him for a Nomad outlaw like the ones who had visited Arch Hollow. The soil was poor here, but careful farming had enriched it. Now it was almost planting time and there were men and mules in the fields, so he avoided the rutted roads and kept to the high ground, while leaving a trail that Father Ombroz e’Laiden and the Texark turncoat could easily follow.
There were always Texark agents traveling back and forth from the telegraph terminal southeast of Pobla, so Høngan rode alone until he was well into the short grass of Wilddog cattle country before he stopped to wait for the others. He waited in a draw, concealing his horse and himself some distance from the trail he had left until he heard them passing to the north. Still, he waited. When their voices died away, he left his horse, climbed out of the draw, and listened carefully to the wind from the southwest.
He put his ear to the ground briefly, then arose and crept into the space between two boulders where he could not be seen except from the trail directly below. There were distant voices.
“Three horses have come this way, obviously.”
“But not necessarily together. Only one horse is shod.”
“That would be Captain Loyte’s.”
“Hereafter, do not call the renegade ‘Captain’! He sold his rank and honor for the cunt of a Nomad spy.”
The voices were Ol’zark. Høngan nocked an arrow and drew his bow. The first rider appeared, and fell from his horse with the arrow through his throat. Høngan leaped forth and shot the second rider while he was lifting his musket. With the second barrel, he exchanged shots with the third rider, but both men missed. The survivor turned and fled. This war between Nomad and Empire was more than seventy years old, but such battles were few and fought only when the imperial forces invaded the lands of the Mare.
Holy Madness reloaded the pistol and finished the job of killing the wounded, then went for his own mount and captured the other two horses. After searching the saddlebags and finding the proof he needed that the riders were agents, he released the animals and came back to search the bodies for more papers. He stared angrily at the tracks of the turncoat’s horse. Knowing the destination, he had previously not noticed the hoofprints because he had not been tracking.
Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman Page 9