The monk stood in the shadows under the trees, steeling himself to cross the trail and knock on the heavy pine door. A wisp of smoke arose from a chimney. Except for the light from fire that caused the smoke, it must be rather dark inside, for there were only two small windows, set high in the thick wall. Nimmy had been in a proper frame of mind and heart when he left the cottage, ready to make a good confession. But now that he was here, a kind of dread came over him.
He had left Leibowitz Abbey unshrived and stinking of guilt; moreover, on the trip to Valana from the desert he had done unspeakable deeds, and now he quaked at the prospect of confessing to a stranger, thing he had never before done. The sacrament of penance had always been administered to him by a priest of the Order, and usually once a week. There was only so much mischief a monk could accomplish in a week, even an unruly monk such as Blacktooth St. George. Usually, it was a matter of whispering his self-accusations to his regular confessor, and hearing himself sentenced to, say, a few decades of the rosary, or at worst to make a public apology to a brother, or to flagellate himself three or five lashes with a not very painful piece of rope for solitary sins of impurity, resentful thoughts, and failures of charity or courage. Such penances always left him feeling cleansed and ready to receive the Holy Eucharist at Mass.
But now he had been sinning rather copiously for weeks on end, often neglecting his prayers, breaking his vows, and secretly disobeying his benefactor, the cardinal. It was to the cardinal, in fact, that he had mentioned his fear of confessing to a stranger; when the cardinal had suggested e’Laiden, and e’Laiden had declined, it was the cardinal again who had arranged for him to confess in Valana to a reputed holy man, none other than Amen Specklebird himself, whose name had been once or twice brought before a previous conclave as a candidate for the papacy! Blacktooth now wished he had never mentioned his problem to Brownpony. He would much rather confess anonymously to a faceless priest behind a grille at the seminary chapel than do it in the presence of a holy man, and he thought of sneaking away to do just that before the time came for his arranged interview. But Father Specklebird would ask how long since his last confession, as was customary, and would then realize that Blacktooth had circumvented him. Furthermore, he imagined, a seminary priest might be so horrified by what he heard that he would refuse to absolve him, and then he would have to tell Specklebird about that too. Even outside the abbey, being a Catholic was a very complicated business for a simple ex-Nomad recluse with little knowledge of the external world.
Suddenly the pine door was flung open, and an old black man with a cloud of white hair and great white eyebrows came out and walked straight toward him. His beard was white too, but close-cropped, as if he shaved it once a month or kept it trimmed with scissors. He wore a clean but ragged gray cassock, and sandals that appeared to be made of straw. He was gaunt, almost a skeleton with tight muscles strung along the bones, and hollow cheeks and hollow abdomen that hinted at much fasting. He walked with a lively limp, using a short cane heavy enough to be an effective club. When he came out the door, he was looking straight at Blacktooth in the shadows, and he came right toward him, wearing a thin smile and running his luminous gray-blue eyes over the small and timid figure beforehim.
“Deacon Brownpony has told me something about you, son. May I call you ‘Nimmy’? You have left the monastery for good, is that so? Why?”
“Well, I began to feel I was wearing cangue and chains, Father. But in the end, they threw me out.”
Amen Specklebird took his arm and led him across the trail toward his hermitage.
“And now you have lost your cangue and chains, yes?” They entered a room which with its bare stone walls reminded the monk of Leibowitz Abbey. There was a fire at one end and a private altar at the other.
Blacktooth thought about the priest’s question. “No. If anything, they fit tighter than ever, Father.”
“Who tightened them? Who chained you in the first place? Was it the abbot? Was it your brothers? Was it the Holy Church?”
“Of course not, Father! I know that I did it to myself.”
“Ahh.” He sat quietly. “And now you want to know how to free yourself?”
“‘Ye shall know the truth and…’” He shrugged. “One must know the truth to be free.”
“So. And what is the truth that you already know?”
“The truth was made flesh, and dwelt among us. We must cling to him alone.”
“Cling to him? Nimmy, Jesus came to be sacrificed for our sins. We offer him, immolated, on the altar. And still, you want to cling to him?” He laughed, and produced a stole. “Are you ready to confess now?”
Blacktooth delayed. “Could we talk awhile first?”
“Of course, but what would you talk about?”
He groped for a subject. Anything to postpone the moment. “Well, I don’t understand what you mean about the sacrifice.”
“To sacrifice Jesus is to give him up, of course.”
The monk started. “But I gave up everything for Jesus!”
“Oh, did you! Except Jesus, perhaps, good simpleton?”
“If I give up Jesus, I will have nothing at all!”
“Well, that might be perfect poverty, but for one thing: that nothing—you should get rid of that too, Nimmy.”
Blacktooth became bewildered. “How is it possible for a priest of Christ to talk like this?”
Specklebird pointed to his mouth and worked his jaw mockingly in silence. Then, without anger, he lightly slapped the monk’s face. “Wake up!” he said.
Blacktooth sat down on a hard bench. He had been reciting formulas, trying to say the right thing for the old man, who was now laughing.
“You are a rich fellow,” said Specklebird. “Your riches are your cangue and chains.”
“I have nothing but the robe on my back; the g’tara which I made for myself was stolen,” the monk protested with some irritation. “I don’t even have a rosary, now. Also stolen. 1 eat other people’s food, and sleep in other people’s quarters. I don’t even piss in my own pot. I promised to be poor for Christ. If I’ve broken that vow, I don’t know how. I broke the others.”
“Are you proud of this unbroken vow?”
“Yes! I mean no! Oh, I see, I’m rich in pride, is that it?” Amen Specklebird sat down across from him. They watched each other in the dim light. The old man’s gaze was like that of a child, curious, open, pleasant, expectant. He snapped his fingers, unexpectedly loud. Blacktooth did not jump at the snap, but his gaze in turn was wary, and he looked away to the left. Specklebird continued to watch him in silence.
Still delaying, Blacktooth began to talk rapidly, about life at Leibowitz Abbey, not about his sins as sins, but about his frustrations, his loves and friendships, his devotion to the founder of his order and to the Mother of God, his vocation and how he lost it, and his homesickness for the very place he had tried so hard to escape. He kept pausing, hoping the hermit listening to his story would offer advice, but the old ordinary of Our Lady of the Desert only nodded his understanding from time to time. Blacktooth became embarrassed by his own self-pity and stopped talking. A long silence passed between them.
After a while, Specklebird began to speak softly.
“Nimmy, the only hard thing about following Christ is that you must throw away all values, even the value you place on following Christ. And to throw them away doesn’t mean sell them, or sell them out. To be truly poor in spirit, discard your loves and your hates, your good and bad taste, your preferences. Your wish to be, or not be, a monk of Christ. Get rid of it. You can’t even see the path, if you care where it goes. Free from values, you can see it plain as day. But if you have even one little wish, a wish to be sinless, or a wish to change your dirty clothes, the path vanishes. Did you ever think that maybe the cangue and chains you wear are your own precious values, Nimmy? Your vocation or lack of it? Good and evil? Ugliness and beauty? Painand pleasure? These are values, and these are heavy weights. They make you stop and
consider, and that’s when you lose the way of the Lord.”
Blacktooth listened patiently, fascinated at first, but drawing himself up, becoming distraught. He felt the old man was trying to undermine everything he knew and felt about religion. Was this kind of talk the reason the bishop had forced Amen Specklebird to retire?
“The Devil!” the monk said softly.
If Specklebird heard it as an accusation, he ignored it. “Him? Throw him away, dump him in the slit trench with the excrement, throw quicklime on him.”
“Jesus!”
“Him too, oh yes, into the trench with that fucker! If he makes you rich.”
Blacktooth gasped. “Jesus? Whom do I follow? Then why follow? It’s blasphemy, what you say.”
“You know, it’s all right to pick up Christ’s cross and carry it, Nimmy, but if you think you get anything special because of it, you’re selling the cross, and you’re a rich man. The path is without reason. Just follow.”
“Without wanting to?”
“Sine cupidine.”
“Then why?”
“Your wish for a why is the cangue and chains.”
“I just don’t understand.”
“Good. Remember it, Nimmy, but don’t understand it. That spoils you.”
Blacktooth felt dizzy. Was the old man quite sane?
Amen Specklebird laughed gently. “Now for your confession, if you still want me to hear it.”
After confession, which he wanted to forget as quickly as possible, Blacktooth went home first, but the air was foul with recent vomit. Someone had washed the floor near Jæsis’ bed, where the student lay moaning. He had lost a lot of weight. Once he opened his eyes and glared wildly at the monk, who asked if he wanted a Doctor to come. “Here this morning,” Jæsis croaked. “It does no good.”
Blacktooth brought a cold wet towel for his head, then went back to the Secretariat, where he spent the afternoon and much of the evening translating the cardinal’s mail to and from the Plains. He was very quickly learning about Nomad politics and the important personages among the hordes. He learned that Chür Høngan had now returned to the hogans and herds of his Little Bear grandmother, that Uncle Brokenfoot had been struck down by sudden illness, that an anti-Christian faction among the Bear Spirit men and the Weejus women of the Grasshopper Horde, some of whom feared Høngan’s candidacy, had suddenly rallied to the name of one Hultor Bråm, a mankiller of undoubted prowess, as the most fit war sharf to reunite the Three Hordes. Bråm interested Blacktooth exactly (and only) because he was Grasshopper, and might even be a distant relative. His partisans translated his name as Kindly Light, but in Jackrabbit hultor bråm meant a bad sunburn. He also learned that his master was not entirely displeased by this development, for Bråm was possessed by a savagery that made Høngan’s temperament seem mild in comparison, and the cardinal, although alarmed by the illness of Høngan’s father, believed the majority of the grandmothers would never propose for the highest office and bridegroom of the Fujæ Go a hothead after the pattern of Mad Bear, whose reckless chieftainship had lost the Jackrabbit territory in the south to Hannegan II, and cost the Grasshopper dearly in men and cattle. The Wilddog on the High Plains had suffered the least from that old conquest.
Brownpony always left notes to help the monk avoid political pitfalls in his translations, when the wrong wording might offend certain groups, or compromise his plans if his correspondence fell into the wrong hands. The cardinal received more and longer letters than he wrote, and Blacktooth was surprised to learn that he had so many literate allies on the Plains. He knew, or had been told, that Nomad literacy was about five percent. The writers mostly belonged, he realized now, to the Christian minorities within the hordes, and most of them from powerful families. Brownpony was obviously trying to keep these three minorities in close contact with each other. With the help of certain Weejus women, he was even playing marriage broker to forge alliances between Wilddog, Grasshopper, and Jackrabbit families.
Blacktooth came to suspect that an unfortunate marriage of Chür Høngan to a Grasshopper girl was one result of such efforts. He had been doing this since the days of Pope Linus VI, with the blessing of subsequent pontiffs. While examining these files, he inadvertently encountered material from the Weejus women that related to the cardinal personally. For years his friends had been searching among the Wilddog people for some trace of the family of Brownpony’s mother or for anyone who remembered her. The information from the Weejus was transmitted by e’Laiden Ombroz: “With the help of the Bearcub’s family, I have come to the end of the search. I can only conclude, Your Eminence, that there is not, and never was, a Wilddog motherline using the name ‘Brown Pony.’ If your mother’s people are among us, that is not their name. The sisters who told you the story must have been misinformed. Perhaps it is a Grasshopper or Jackrabbit name, or perhaps it was an assumed name. I regret that I have been of no help to you.”
Embarrassed, the monk returned the file to its place without reading the rest of it, and never mentioned it to Brownpony.
Blacktooth was humbly grateful that his master trusted him enough to let him learn about these matters, even by accident, but he also knew that a few messages to and from the Plains were in code, and these were attended to by Brownpony personally. Something dangerous to Brownpony himself, or to the reputation of the Secretariat, was going on, but he found no clue in the nonsecret correspondence as to the nature of the intrigue. He was not allowed to see the cardinal’s correspondence with Oregon and the west coast, but that, of course, was not written in Nomadic. A technical civilization rivaling that of Texark had been developing in the far west for nearly a century, although distance and the mountains kept them apart and not competitive.
The monk had been watching his master pore over his correspondence, wondering why the cardinal himself was rarely mentioned as a candidate for the papacy, when Brownpony whirled suddenly to confront him.
“Nimmy, I am weary of being the target of the corner of your eye, of being the addressee of all your unasked questions. What is it you want to know about me?”
“Nothing, my Lord! It is unseemly…”
“It is unseemly to lie to your patron. Ask me a question, an impertinent question, of course.”
After a silence, Blacktooth found a small voice: “How is it that you are not a priest, m’Lord?”
“Yes, that would be first question. Explain yourself to the sometime monk, Elia Brownpony. Tell him how you were married once, and now Pope Linus was going to make you a priest before he made you cardinal, but you refused, saying that Seruna might still be alive, although you knew she was dead. She was kidnapped by outlaw Nomads like those at Arch Hollow. They don’t keep kidnapped women alive long. Well, Blacktooth, there you have the waves. Do you want the Ocean as well?”
“I’m ashamed that I presumed to ask.”
“Don’t grovel. I was called to be a lawyer, not a priest, and that’s it. There are many priests who should have been lawyers instead, and a few lawyers who should have been priests. I say I have been called to practice law and settle disputes. I’m not so sure where calls come from. Practicing law and negotiating disputes, this is what I do well. Plus politics and controversy. I would not be a good priest, regular or secular. I have neither the charity nor the piety for it. I can serve the Church best as the shepherd’s dog, fighting for the flock, or snapping at the heels of the flock to keep the sheep together. There is no chance that Seruna is alive. I loved her in my way, but she was not happy. And if she were alive still, she would not come back to me. But I can’t prove she’s dead.”
“You had no children?”
“I have a son in Saint Maisie’s Seminary in New Rome.”
“And you are the Cardinal Deacon of—” Blacktooth stopped and put his hand over his mouth.
Brownpony laughed. “Deacon of Saint Maisie’s Church in New Rome, yes. Nepotism? Pope Linus made the appointment. Without asking me? Of course he asked me. Now what else do you want to
know?”
“I’m sorry I pried.”
“You didn’t Looking at me curiously behind my back is not prying. You are a good fellow, Nimmy. You know your place, and you work hard. I raise your salary by half.”
“Fifty percent of—” Blacktooth stopped.
“—of nothing is nothing. All right, you may increase your living expenses by that much, and I’ll tell Jaron to pay them. Now get on with these letters to the east. I’m so busy trying to keep track of who’s here for the conclave and guess at their votes, I’ve no time for my proper affairs.”
When he was not working, the monk fell into moods close to despair. It was not that the sin itself with Ædrea was so terrible, but that he was out of control. His life was reconsecrated to God every day, but if he had kept God in his heart, he would never have climbed into the hay with her. It did not matter to him that what they did together would not make a baby. That it might not even be a sin, if hewere not promised to God, but to love her was to love God less, was it not? It was not the act that he despised, but the flaw in his character that permitted it.
Did I go to a monastery to make myself morally perfect?
No, not at all.
What, then?
The monk’s ultimate goal is direct union with the Godhead, But to aim at that goal is to miss it altogether. His task is to rid himself of ego so that consciousness, once its usual discordant mental content dumped out of it through ritual prayer and meditation, may experience nonself as a living formlessness and emptiness into which God may come, if it please Him to come. So Eckhart had spoken of it two thousand years ago: “God gives birth to His Son in the soul.” Only in self-emptiness may it happen one day that Christ awaken within the monk, as I-to-I. But there was someone else awake there now, for Blacktooth, and he was very lonely, very lonely for her.
Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman Page 12