The Lord of the Hordes asked for an explanation of the problem. Blue Lightning spoke first, then Slojon and Axe. Then the Qæsach dri Vørdar told the Mayor’s son that he, Høngan Ösle Chür, ruled in favor of the Grasshopper claim and made the same threat to Slojon that Blue Lightning had made. The hordes would turn against New Jerusalem for breaking the Treaty, and might even carry the conflict into these feared mountains. The Jackrabbit would turn on the spooks in battle and kill Slojon’s father as well.
Thus it came about that the charges were dropped and Gai-See was released into the protective custody of Blue Lightning. Because the Nomad claimed plenipotentiary power to speak for his uncle, Brownpony invited him to attend the council of war, which had all but ended upon the departure of Dion, but was now renewed in the presence of the Grasshopper. The Pope dispatched a message to Bråm through the Nomad relay network to assure the sharf that Gai-See and Nyinden were free. He also thanked him for sending Blue Lightning, who added to the document his initials—Blacktooth had taught him to draw them—and peace was restored among the allies.
After his harsh beginning, Blue Lightning proved a well-rounded diplomat. In spite of his initial threat to abandon the alliance and join the other side, he brought intelligence gathered from several sources. On balance, the news was good, but there were things to worry about. Filpeo had new repeating arms now, but not yet enough of them to turn the outcome of any foreseeable battle. The countryside surrounding New Rome was by no means demilitarized, but the occupation forces there were thinned out by the withdrawal of troops being sent to the Province to halt the eastward advance of the armies of Önmu Kun and Mayor Dion. Sharf Bråm estimated that no more than seven hundred men, Texark cavalry and glep mercenaries, remained to block access to the gates of New Rome.
And there was trouble in the Valley. Texark recruiters had been ambushed and killed. “I wonder who could be doing that?” Quigler Durod asked innocently, provoking laughter. Everyone present knew that Tenesi agents disguised as gleps had crossed the Great River and infiltrated the Watchitah-Ol’zark region. Further recruiting in the Valley of the Misborn was inhibited, if not halted.
“If we don’t strike now,” Høngan said, “the Emperor’s firepower will increase rapidly. We will lose the advantage the Pope’s weapons have given us.”
Blue Lightning murmured assent. General Durod wanted to know if it was possible to use the Nomad relay network to contact his men in the Valley.
“If you have a secure cipher, maybe,” said Blue Lightning. “There is a risk of a messenger being caught. He must not know what your message is.”
Pope Amen came to a sudden decision. “We shall mount an expedition to capture New Rome, and do it as soon as possible, unless one of you disagrees.”
Nobody objected. After so many decades in exile, the Holy See was going home.
Pentecost came on May 14th in 3246, and Blacktooth had known for a week that Holy Madness and other important guests were in town to consult with the Pope, but the consultations were private and he was as ignorant as any local citizen of what happened behind the closed doors. Prior Cow wanted all eight of them to attend the Pontifical High Mass in the Pope’s log-and-stone cathedral, but Nimmy begged off. Instead, he attended Mass at their usual neighborhood Church, sang the Veni Creator Spiritus with the small choir, and assisted the priest in distributing the Eucharist to local spooks and their beautiful children.
Singing Cow found him sitting in the garden, trying to extract a still fluttering pigeon from the jaws of his growling glep cougar. Librada slashed his hand and clamped down on the bird. Nimmy gave up. “I think it’s about time for Librada to be librada,” he said to the prior.
“We’ll take care of it, Nimmy. You’re going to be too busy.”
“It’s up to me, Father. I brought her here. She ought to be let go as far as possible from humans. She’s not afraid of anybody. And why do you say I’ll be too busy?”
“I think you will be. The Pope wants to see you right now. He’s going away.”
“Away?”
“To New Rome—as a conqueror, I believe. Now go bandage your hand and run over to the Palace.”
As soon as he saw that Gai-See had been set free, Blacktooth felt shame for his earlier impudence toward his Pope, and he looked for an opportunity to apologize. But Axe had assigned him to a place in the baggage train in the rear, and the procession had been in motion for three days before he found an opportunity to approach his former employer. They were both on horseback.
“Don’t thank me, thank God and the Grasshopper,” said the Pope after waving aside Blacktooth’s apology.
“I don’t understand, Holy Father.”
“You don’t have to!” Brownpony snapped, and after a pause relented. “Somebody told Sharf Bråm that you and Gai-See were both in jail for killing Cardinal Hadala. Hadala was violating the Sacred Mare Treaty by bringing an army onto Nomad land. The sharf would have killed him if Gai-See hadn’t I don’t know what made him think you helped kill him.”
“I did help, Holy Father. I told Gai-See that Hadala was defying you, and I knew what I was doing when I told him. Eltür knew this.”
“I see. Well, he became quite angry and sent his nephew with an oral message to Gai-See’s jailer.”
“Which nephew was this?”
“Stützil Bråm—Blue Lightning. He’s up ahead with Høngan Ösle’s party. At first he thought I was the jailer. He told everybody that unless you were released at once, he would make peace with the Hannegan and attack Dion’s forces wherever he found them. Høngan Ösle stepped in at that point and took over; he even threatened to hit New Jerusalem. So you can thank the Nomads, not me. I’m only bringing you along to satisfy Eltür Bråm.”
“So that’s why!”
“That and your prowess as a soldier,” said Brownpony, and spurred his horse to get away from the conversation.
CHAPTER 27
Except the sick who are very weak,
let all abstain entirely from eating
the flesh of four-footed animals.
—Saint Benedict’s Rule, Chapter 39
CHIEF HAWKEN CARDINAL IRRIKAWA, WHO HAD departed Valana for his own country some months ago, returned suddenly to rejoin the Curia’s wagon train. He explained that his road home north of the Misery River was temporarily blocked by the presence of Texark troops in the region. The lands beyond the Misery were considered open range, and both Grasshopper and Wilddog peoples drove cattle there in season, although the campsites were not permanent and there were no breeding pits. If Texark troops were in the area, it was in violation of the Treaty of the Sacred Mare. The Pope was alarmed at first. But those who questioned the cardinal closely concluded that what he had encountered was a band of well-dressed and well-armed outlaws, imitating Texark cavalry maneuvers. It was strange, but only Sharf Oxsho seemed worried. “Too many outlaws on the move,” he said softly to Father Ombroz. “Too many to believe.”
The Pope’s train gradually gathered a multitude as it moved east. Parties of ten or twenty warriors converged with the growing army every few hours. While passing through Wilddog country, the legion grew to sixteen hundred horsemen and their animals. Sometimes when the moon was bright in June, nocturnal riders thundered into camp with obscene war cries followed by laughter as sleepy men scrambled out of their bedrolls. There was talk of victory in the air, talk of spoils and of farmers’ women. And rebuke for such talk from Sharf Oxsho’s lieutenants.
Blacktooth rode in the back of the hoodlum wagon with Librada, his cougar. He had made a rawhide collar and kept her on a short leash. A sickness of the spirit had come over him. He was unable to pray except to God in his cat.
That was the summer of the Year of Our Lord 3246. On the eve of the solstice the moon was pink and full over the western horizon when dawn broke on the Plains. As Blacktooth crawled from under the hoodlum wagon, he could see that breakfast fires were already being extinguished here and there about the militant horizon. Groups o
f armed men, horses, cattle, and cannon as far as the eye could see: it was seething, but not yet boiling, this pot.
The Hannegan knows we are coming. When will he respond?
There was no haste to resume the journey, probably because today was a special day. Blacktooth could not be certain, for he was out of touch with those in command. A tripod with the remains of a slaughtered cow hung near the wagon. He scraped some raw meat from the bone with the hood’s stolen bayonet. A monk of Leibowitz never ate such meat without the abbot’s permission, which was rarely given, except on high holy days, or to the gravely ill. I am gravely ill, he said to Jarad breathing over his shoulder. The hood handed him a pancake, a cup of tea, and the usual morning insult. The hood was a Wilddog Nomad, whose name was Bitten Dog, drafted by the Pope’s chef as cook’s helper, and Blacktooth was supposed to be the Bitten Dog’s helper, but diarrhea and deep sadness made him useless. His only work became the gathering of dry manure for fuel during stops, and the polishing of kitchen implements during days in the wagon.
As it turned out, the day was indeed a special day. The Nomads ordinarily celebrated the Nomad Feast of the Bonfires at the solstice; and the Church once had observed on the twentieth of June the Feast of Pope Saint Silverius, the son of Pope Hormisdas. Silverius had offended the Empress Theodora, and she exiled him—a punishment which led to his suffering and death in 538 a.d., and therefore to his being called a martyr. Pope Amen Specklebird had borrowed his feast day (which had been borrowed twice previously) for the observances of Our Lady of the Desert, patroness of his Order. But now it was not Specklebird’s feast that Brownpony chose to celebrate, but the Mass of a Sovereign Pontiff, Si diligis me; for to consecrate a bishop was his aim, during an early Mass that day in the midst of his armies on the hot and arid plain.
Amen II gathered about him the eight cardinals who accompanied the train. He called it a consistory, and made the intended announcements. He and Wolfer Poilyf, Bishop from the North Country, together with Bishop Varley Swineman of Denver, consecrated Father Jopo e’Laiden Ombroz, S.I., as Archbishop of the ancient but moribund diocese of Canterbury, and then made him Vicar Apostolic to the Nomads—including of course the Jackrabbit Nomads, whose present clergy was now fleeing from the advancing Crusaders of the Western Church. The reluctant Bishop Ombroz was obedient to Brownpony, but less than elated by his own elevation. The Pope made him a cardinal as well, as announced in consistory. The elders of the Bear Spirit would, Ombroz said, laugh at his finery, and he would be called Cardinal Cannibal in Texark. Ombroz was now the ninth cardinal accompanying the main army of the crusade, and Brownpony confided in him and in Wooshin that he would be naming a tenth cardinal soon; he did not mention a name.
From what little Blacktooth saw of the Pope from a distance, it seemed to him that Brownpony looked more ethereal and spiritual than before. Maybe closeness had made him miss something in the man. The change, however, was not necessarily good. Brownpony looked at the sky a lot, other observers said. He always seemed to be looking for something in the clouds or on the horizon, and gave little attention to those around him.
Blacktooth wondered who had suggested to Brownpony the motto he had inscribed upon his new coat of arms as Amen II. It said like hell you will in ancient English, instead of the usual Latin. He understood it, but he wondered if the Pope really did. When Brownpony’s coach overtook Eltür Bråm’s coach one day, Jopo Cardinal Ombroz was the only member of the College who knew enough ancient English to laugh at the juxtaposition of their mottos.
It was to celebrate Ombroz’s ascension to the Sacred College that Önmu Kun had traveled north with Father Steps-on-Snake and a party of thirty Jackrabbit warriors. They arrived well before the event, and brought with them disease, although none fell ill until days after their arrival. Blacktooth, already ill, was one of the first to get sick after Önmu came up from the south to meet the train; he heard talk of epidemic in the Province. At first they blamed the water, but a week later three of the warriors and several Grasshopper children fell ill, and then Blacktooth St. George, who already had the runs.
As Önmu explained it, the crusaders in the south at first attributed the affliction to poisoned wells left by retreating Texark forces, but the cattle that drank from the wells were not so afflicted. And the disease seemed to spread from the men who had drunk of the wells to men who had not. So far, the enemy was not affected by the plague, if such it was. The disease, whose symptoms were something like those suffered in Valana before the election of Pope Amen I, was not yet epidemic. To contain it, certain fighting units were quarantined.
Blacktooth did not attend the Mass of a Sovereign Pontiff or Father Ombroz’s consecration, but watched from a distant hilltop while squatting in the grass, taking a long painful dump. Blacktooth had given himself over to the Devil. He had stopped praying the Divine Office, except when it came to him in snatches. He listened to himself fart and said amen. He had ceased to meditate, except for an occasional rosary in honor of the Virgin—but then his mind dwelled on Ædrea in the role of God’s mother.
He assumed that he would never see her again, for she was now a nun. He had not, and would not, ask Brownpony for assurance that he had done what he had said he would do as soon as they were gone from New Jerusalem, that is, commute her sentence from permanent exile. He had no evidence for believing that the Pope had remembered or kept the promise, and he could not ask. He knew he was going mad; the origin of his cosmic madness was his inflamed bowel, which was caused by his guilt, which was driving him crazy during this summer of the Year of Our Lord 3246, the year of the Reconquest, not the previous year when he had killed a pitiful, drafted glep, for that had not been a year of diarrhea and fever.
His days of madness made him reclusive. Only the responsibility he felt for Librada, the duty to return her to the country of her birth, kept him from abandoning all hope and fleeing. Father Steps-on-Snake was available to him, but he did not confess. The idea of confession seemed to make his diarrhea worse. He had made himself a stranger to his master by his insolence. The journey was misery, and every few days he had a day of delirium and uncontrollable behavior.
But it was on such a bad day that the dead Pope Amen came to comfort him.
“Your Christ is the true man of no identity,” Amen Specklebird told him while he took a dump at sundown, “the one not wearing a mask; he comes and goes through your face, where your mask is. He comes and goes as he likes, fore and aft, and your mask sees him not.
A mask sees self only in a mirror. But the true Jesus without a mask is alive and well; austere he sits in solitude under the bridge where the Christ sleeps, and takes a dump.”
“Are not all sins, in themselves, their own punishment?” Blacktooth asked, impertinently. He thought he remembered Specklebird saying something like that during the nine days of prayer they had shared.
“Punishment like your congress with old Shard’s daughter?” the Pope replied with a grin, and disappeared before Nimmy could say that was not a mortal sin.
Besides his illness of body and spirit, another factor discouraged flight. Just out of sight beyond the southern horizon another train was traveling eastward on a parallel course, and another might be coming behind it. There was too much chance of being caught. Dust from the other train was usually visible by day, and the glow of its wagoners’ fires by night. A rare glimpse of the wagons and riders occurred when the train mounted a low hill in the distance. Some of the wagons flashed in the sunlight as if they were covered with metal, but with the heat and the distance even the hills seemed to be made of red-hot metal in the late light. The Nomad riders stayed clear of the mysterious train; they had been so ordered. No one to whom the monk talked knew much about it, except that it had departed from New Jerusalem after the Pope’s train, and that someone who knew someone who knew Wooshin said that it carried secret weapons, and that it was under the command of Magister Dion.
A few days later, Blacktooth became aware that they had penetrated int
o tall-grass country. He knew it without looking up from where he lay on the feed sacks in the back of the bouncing hoodlum wagon. He knew because the bands of incoming warriors were beginning to speak the dialect of the Grasshopper, and their animals began to include dogs. The dogs were not immediately friendly to Wilddog Nomads, and were noisily hostile toward Churchmen and New Jerusalemites. Because of the dogs, Blacktooth began sleeping inside the cramped hoodlum wagon instead of under it.
Pursued by a pack of the wolfish beasts, a screaming man leaped upon the tailgate of the hoodlum wagon one morning, and Blacktooth helped haul him inside. A snarling dog refused to let go of his shin. Librada shrieked. Cat and monk lunged for the dog at the same time. The man’s shin was well wrapped in military leggings, but he kept screaming until Blacktooth beat the dog off with a fagot and restrained the cat.
“Thank God! And thank you, Nimmy. I didn’t know you were with us.”
“Aberlott! What in hell are you doing here?”
“I’m just here for the crusade. Wooshin let me join the team. Damn, it’s bleeding. Your cat did that.”
“You’ve been on the train all along?”
“Sure, but this is the first day I’ve had free.”
Blacktooth thought for a moment. When the Pope’s party of Churchmen had left New Jerusalem, they brought with them seventeen wagons and an “elite” fighting team from the Suckamints, men whose only loyalty to the Pope was guaranteed by their frightened respect for Wooshin, their sergeant general—a rank created for the occasion by the reigning Pontiff in a moment of whimsy. The wizened old warrior wore gold chevrons and a star on his plaid tunic, which Amen II had given him. That he had accepted Aberlott among his so-called crack troops strained Nimmy’s credulity, but the student swore it was true. Blacktooth was glad for the company, at least for a day.
Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman Page 44