Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

by Walter Michael Miller, Jr.

  “What the Night Hag has foolishly done to your father grieves me greatly, Høngan Ösle Chür .” The utterance was fraught with portent. Ombroz noticed that Høngan was actually fidgeting before her. To attribute Brokenfoot’s illness to the Night Hag and call it foolish meant that he had been this Weejus woman’s choice for Qæsach Vørdar, and her reversal of Chür ’s name, with the matronymic placed last, meant that the rank of Brokenfoot’s son had risen in her eyes, for whatever reason. But Høngan Ösle was a diminutive for the historical Høngan Os, who lost a war and half of his people to Hannegan II.

  “Will you drink blood with us tonight?” the old woman asked. “We celebrate the birth of twin colts by Potear’s best mare. And they are healthy, too—a rare and wonderful event.”

  “Toast the Virgin for us, Grandmother,” said Father Ombroz. “My apologies for the haste, but Granduncle Brokenfoot needs us.”

  “Yes, he will want to see his son, and from you he will want last anointing. Go then with Christ and the Lady.”

  The two of them rode on, leaving Esitt Loyte behind with his bride and in-laws.

  “The captain still has much to learn about the Wetok horses,” Ombroz said wryly when they were out of earshot.

  Høngan laughed. “He will learn quite a bit in a hurry when Potear shows that old Weejus the horseshoes.”

  The mountains had all but disappeared in a dust haze to the west when Holy Madness suddenly announced that Brokenfoot had become irascible in his illness, and that his old wife had found it necessary to appoint another as temporary head of the family.

  “How do you know this?” the priest scoffed. “A vision?”

  “That vision.” Høngan pointed toward the east. Carefully he raised himself in the saddle, and soon was standing on the back of his horse.

  “My old eyes can’t see anything but emptiness. What is it?”

  “There is someone there, I think my uncle. It’s miles away, still!

  He moves its arms and dances a message. They see our dust.”

  “Ah, the Nomad semaphore language. I should have learned it when I was younger. It always amazes me.”

  “It gives us an advantage over their Texark warriors.”

  • • •

  When the hogans of the Little Bear clan hove into view on the horizon, a small cloud of dust appeared and soon a rider approached them. It was Brokenfoot’s wife’s brother, Red Buzzard, who was the nominal leader of the clan, who nevertheless deferred to his sister’s husband because she willed it so. Now during the husband’s illness, the brother resumed his rightful role. He was a thin, serious man, nearly sixty, with livid patches of skin which might have marked him as a genny except among the Nomads, where the cosmetic defect was highly regarded as a mark of Empty Sky. He spoke seriously to Holy Madness about Brokenfoot’s condition, which was disabling but apparently not getting worse at the moment.

  “Some of our drovers are already back from the south,” Red Buzzard said to Ombroz, “including our Bear Spirit men. They are with him now, Father. But of course he wants to see you.”

  Ombroz started to tell him about the Pope, but Red Buzzard already knew. Even in Cardinal Brownpony’s absence from Valana, his Secretariat was constantly sending and receiving messengers from the people of the Plains. When they came to the Little Bear village, the children and younger women came out to greet and be hugged by Høngan and their priest.

  “Will you stay with us after you see your father?” asked his mother. “Or must you ride on to Grasshopper country?”

  Holy Madness hesitated. He had not told her before. “I think Kuhaly has divorced me.” He glanced at Ombroz, who had married them, but the priest was looking away. “She said she would send for me if she wants me. Even if she does, I may not go.”

  His mother’s face melted. “They blame you for having no daughters?”

  “Perhaps. Also for being away too much of the time. Her brothers complain. I’ve done too little for the family. They say I am too attached to you. You know the word for that.”

  “I was afraid it would be so when you married Grasshopper. Our drovers told us they had to fight Grasshopper drovers again this winter, to get pasturage.”

  “Anyone killed?”

  “Among ours, only wounded. Among theirs, I don’t know. It was an exchange of shots and arrows. Now, come and see your father.”

  The Little Bear family shamans left the hogan while Father Ombroz administered the last anointing to his oldest convert. The priest knew they were embarrassed that some of their practices could not be reconciled with the religion he taught, and that they had accepted baptism themselves because Brokenfoot wished it so. When the old man died, their embarrassment (and envy?) might turn into hostility.

  But the whole family knew that when he, Ombroz, had been forced to choose between them and his Order, when a new superior general of that Order, nominated by Archbishop Benefez, and therefore by Filpeo Harq, had called him back to New Rome, he had refused to go. He had been expelled and placed under interdict—measures which he ignored. Still, the punishment hurt him more than he cared to admit. He knew the Weejus women would be his allies in any quarrel with the Bear Spirit shamans, but he wanted to avoid the quarrel, and so far, so did they. Under his teaching, most of this Nomad family had become Christians, while he himself over the years had become a Nomad.

  Ombroz was not the first teacher of the Order of Saint Ignatz to watch a favorite student whom he had taught to think for himself begin thinking otherwise than the priest had foreseen. That night he sighed heavily as he watched Chür Høngan dance the dance of the dying with the shamans in the dim and smoky light of the dung fire in front of Brokenfoot’s hogan.

  The drums seemed to say: “Gruesome go, gruesome go, gruesome Mama go….”

  The dance was to placate Black Wind, Empty Sky’s frightful counterpart, and to fend off the Night Hag. For a time he went wandering through the village, visiting similar fires and speaking to old “parishioners.” A minority were really Christian, but most he had baptized, and most accepted him as belonging to the shaman class. Among the unbaptized, his wisdom voice was still deemed worth hearing, when he sang in council.

  Before the conquest, such villages had not existed. But more and more the Plains were dotted with hogans of stone and sod resembling those of the farmers, and located beside intermittent creeks and waterholes. Here the children and the elderly stayed for the winter, while the drovers moved their woolly cattle according to the seasons or best grazing and for protection from the worst of the howling blizzards which in the dead of winter swept down the Plains from the Arctic over the lands of the Great Mare and on into the conquered province which had belonged to the Jackrabbit Horde. Long ago the Jackrabbit had held the lightly forested land with deciduous trees to the southeast, land now claimed by the Texark Imperium. The Jackrabbit had rented pasturage there, partially sheltered from the icy blasts, to the Grasshopper and the Wilddog in the winter months, and they were well paid for this in cattle and horses. As a consequence, the Jackrabbit people were the least migratory of the hordes even before the war; and only a minority fled from the south after the conquest to form the Jackrabbit diaspora in the poor farming regions, neighbors to some of the impoverished ex-Grasshopper families who like Blacktooth’s had fled toward the mountains across the short-grass country of the Wilddog.

  He could not get away from the drums. Now they seemed to say, “Freedom come, freedom come, freedom maiden come….”

  After visiting nearly every dwelling, Father Ombroz went back to Brokenfoot’s hogan. He stood near the fire watching the dance for a time; then, after a pause to catch the beat, he laughed aloud and joined the dance himself, bringing an amused cheer from his Bearcub.

  CHAPTER 8

  The fifth degree of humility is that he

  hide from his Abbot none of the evil

  thoughts that enter his heart or the sins

  committed in secret, but that he humbly

  confess th
em.

  —Saint Benedict’s Rule, Chapter 7

  THE SECRETARIAT OF EXTRAORDINARY Ecclesiastical Concerns was located in one of the few remaining buildings near the center of the city which had been there before the Pope came west. A two-story building of stone with a basement, it had once been a military barracks for a few dozen sentries, and it stood alone amid spruce trees on an acre of land fifteen minutes’ walk from Saint John-in-Exile.

  Although the monk and the old warrior spent the first night shivering in their blankets on cots in the Secretariat basement, within a day they were lodged with three seminary students named Aberlott, Jæsis, and Crumily in a small house Brownpony found for them near the western limit of the city. He had won the at-first-grudging consent of the students by paying half the rent on behalf of his servants, and by promisingthat they would share the housework and exercise no seniority over the much younger students, one of whom—Jæsis—was ill. Aberlott was a chubby, good-natured clown from the northwest, whom Blacktooth immediately liked. Crumily was a long-faced Easterner, who seemed morose at first, but who proved to have a wry wit that usually twisted the tail of Aberlott’s jokes. The character of Jæsis was difficult to fathom because of his illness, but Aberlott called him a bit of a fanatic as a student for the priesthood, but did not dislike the boy, although he came from Hannegan City.

  The house itself was adjacent to a brewery. A creek ran through the brewery and out behind the house. It came down the hill as pure mountain spring water in summer, but was now swollen by melted snow. Their outhouse and others in the vicinity were well above the level of the creek and probably drained into it during hard rains. Blacktooth had seen children drinking from the stream down at the ford, and he wondered about the illness of Jæsis, who, when he was not in bed, could be heard moaning in the outhouse. Blacktooth and Wooshin were to share a room in back, and come and go through a rear entrance, although they might use a common kitchen and share a space for study. So it was agreed. The newcomers had several days to inspect the city before going to work at the Secretariat.

  They found the city itself rather filthy, except in local enclaves of power and wealth where street sweepers stayed busy and water arrived by aqueduct. Valana had grown up rapidly around an ancient hilltop fortress which had in earlier centuries been a bastion of defense by the mountain people against the more savage Nomads of an earlier age. Except for the ancient hilltop fortress itself, which now enclosed the center of a newer New Vatican, overshadowed in the afternoons by the spires and bell towers of the Cathedral of Saint John-in-Exile, the city was without walls. Before the exiled papacy had moved here, the city had become a sort of middle kingdom among the contiguous communities of the populated region, where merchants traded with miners for silver and pelts, with Nomads for hides and meat, and with farmers for wheat and corn. There had been two blacksmiths, a silversmith, two arrowsmiths, a fletcher, a miller, three merchants, one doctor of medicine, and one gunsmith, when the Pope had fled here from New Rome. Since then, the number of businesses had quadrupled, and there were now doctors, lawyers, and bankers. Half a dozen city governments in the region competed with Valana proper and each other for new business. It had been a growing economy, but with the coming of the head of the Church, the growth became explosive. Only one building in five was older than the beginning of the exile. Among them was the Secretariat building among the spruce trees, almost invisible from the road.

  Blacktooth went to work almost immediately at the Secretaria replacing a volunteer lay translator who spoke Nomadic better than Rockymount and who happened to be a Christian Wilddog cousin of Chür Høngan and was glad to be relieved of the job and returned to his family on the Plains. There were seventeen employees at the agency, counting a janitor, but not counting the messengers that kept coming and going between Brownpony and his many correspondents around the continent, some secret, some official. There were five translator-secretaries including Blacktooth, three copyists, three security-guard receptionists, and five men who worked in a part of the building sealed off from everyone else and accessible from the outside only through a locked iron gate and from the inside only by way of a corridor to the cardinal’s own office. Blacktooth was quick to realize that no one but the cardinal knew all the Secretariat’s purposes, and employees were isolated from each other as much as possible.

  Blacktooth inherited the office space of his Nomad predecessor, which was adjacent to Brownpony’s office because the man had needed more careful supervision than others. However secretive the cardinal might be with his own employees, he was forced to confide in a nun named Sister Julian from the Secretariat of State, who was there to keep a close eye on those “extraordinary concerns” which also might affect the official diplomatic relations of the Valanan papacy. She seemed to have a certain nay-saying power, and she treated Blacktooth and Brownpony’s other people with suspicion and an attitude of superiority, although she seemed to be on good enough terms with the master. She was, however, apparently not entitled to know what went on in the sealed-off part of the building, and was denied entry there.

  There was a confluence of cardinals now, continually arriving for the impending conclave. As soon as they found quarters, they changed their garments from red to the purple of mourning for the dead Pope. Anyway, purple was the color of penance, appropriate for Lent, now drawing to a close. After the period of mourning was finished, the color would change to saffron. They would not again wear cardinal red until the election of a pope.

  One of the first cardinals to arrive in the city came from the most remote diocese of all Christendom, one who had, in fact, set out by sea to attend not this but the previous conclave which had elected the Bishop of Denver, now deceased. His name was Cardinal Ri, Archbishop of Hong, and he had sailed across the Pacific with a wife and two lovely younger women said by some to be his concubines. These were looked upon with horror by the local Society of Purity, but the police were warned by the Cardinal High Chamberlain and former Secretary of State, Hilan Bleze, to keep such people from harassing the strange foreign archbishop, the existence of whose diocese had been unknown for centuries, until just three decades ago when a voyage of discovery had found Christian communities in islands far to the west. Pope Linus had been so delighted to learn there were still Oriental Christians that he made Bishop Ri a cardinal before fully investigating the traditions of his Church. The Axe now too was delighted to learn of Cardinal Ri, for other reasons, and set out immediately to meet some of his staff. He returned to relate that it was possible for him to communicate with them, barely, in his native tongue, so similar were the two dialects of an ancient language. He was also impressed by the advanced weaponry of Ri’s guards; when the Axe told Brownpony about the arms, the cardinal paid Ri a visit. He apparently asked that these weapons be kept out of sight, for the guards thereafter carried conventional cavalry pistols.

  Wooshin made haste to explain to Blacktooth that the apparent concubines were nominal wives, extrasacramental, and that Ri kept them because it was expected of a man of the archbishop’s rank in the society of his home island. Nevertheless, they apparently all bedded down together at times, according to the staff. While they were indeed looked upon with horror by the cardinals of the Society, there was hardly any conclavist who was not looked upon with horror by somebody. Cardinal Ri was very rich, but of course he had brought no more wealth with him than six soldiers could guard with their lives during the voyage, and he needed credit to keep his family and retinue living in comfort. Most merchants in Valana extended him credit, since Brownpony vouched for him orally (but declined to cosign his notes).

  Sorley Cardinal Nauwhat from Oregon, himself a candidate, greeted the Oriental prelate most warmly, and Emmery Cardinal Buldyrk, the Abbess of N’Ork, immediately befriended Ri’s extrasacramental wives and offered them the hospitality of her rented suite. This Ri reluctantly permitted, after he was told of the city’s attitude toward his extra women. He was somewhat ill anyway—his personal physician spoke
of dragon’s breath from the mountains—and probably felt no need of his ladies. There were other married cardinals, of course, but most of them were laymen or deacons, and most left the wives at home.

  Strangely, the most powerful prelate on the continent, Uno Cardinal Benefez, Archbishop of Texark, was late to come to the conclave, sending word by wire that he wished to celebrate Easter Mass in his own cathedral with his own people and his Hannegan.

  • • •

  Brownpony and his new servants had been in Valana for a week when Blacktooth decided to go to confession. The cardinal, always charitably helpful to the little monk in such personal matters in this strange city had gotten him an appointment with a priest whom he wanted Nimmy to meet.

  The Reverend Amen Specklebird, O.D.D. (Ordo Dominae Desertarum), lived alone in what had once been a cave in the side of a hill. But somebody with rock-cutting tools had shaped the outer cavern, squared the tunnel, deepened it, filled the hole behind the living quarters with rubble and mortar, and added short walls of stone that protruded from the hill. Father Specklebird had partially reopened the hole where the cave narrowed. (It let the mountain spirits come and go through his kitchen, he explained.) A vaulted roof, also of stone, topped the walls that protruded from the hill so that the visible part of the dwelling reminded Blacktooth of the front of a Nomad hogan that had been half-swallowed by a mountain. Blacktooth learned that the wealthy owner of an ecclesiastical tailor shop had owned it a decade or more ago, and had used it as a root cellar until Cardinal Brownpony had bought it for Father Specklebird when the Bishop of Denver had forced the old priest’s retirement. Strangely, after Bishop Scullite had become Linus VII of recent memory, he had summoned Father Specklebird to his private quarters on several occasions. If rumors were true, Blacktooth might be about to confess to a confessor of the late Pope. Another rumor, which had been traced to a papal chambermaid, had it that Linus VII, on the brink of death, had named the old man cardinal in pectore, pending the next consistory, but no one could substantiate the servant’s tale.