“I got tired of being a soldier,” Aberlott said. “Did you tire of being a cardinal, Your Excellency?”
“I’m not a cardinal anymore,” Blacktooth said, finding his old companion’s sarcasm as tiresome as ever. Aberlott had a long scar under one eye, which he said he had “earned” outside the gates of Hannegan City when the Texark troops had outflanked and ambushed Høngan Ösle’s warriors. It went well with his missing ear.
“I almost bled to death,” Aberlott said. “I ended up in Hannegan City. Once the fighting was over, the Empire just folded us in, like raisins into a cake. Many of the Qæsach dri Vørdar’s Nomads are now part of the Emperor’s guard. I wandered around for a few weeks, then got a spot as secretary to a N’Ork Churchman who arrived for the conclave, and couldn’t speak Ol’zark.”
“Conclave?”
“Oh, yes,” Aberlott said. “Sorely Nauwhat called a conclave and had himself made Pope, or perhaps we might say Filpeo had him made Pope. Urion Benefez was bitter; still is, I imagine. Without Brownpony to resist and stall and prevaricate, the bishops and archbishops drifted in, and Sorely nullified all the nullifications of the Amen Two, and then Wooshin nullified Filpeo.”
“The Axe.”
“Indeed,” said Aberlott. “Stopped his carriage in the street. Sliced off his head when Filpeo stuck it out the window to see what was going on. The Hannegan’s guard showered your yellow man with bullets but he welcomed them, he bared his throat and chest and belly to them. I saw it.”
When Blacktooth closed his eyes he could see Wooshin’s disapproving narrow eyes. “I would be dead now if it were not for him.”
“Wouldn’t we both? Anyway, you are no longer a cardinal. The papacy has been removed to Hannegan City, which is ruled by Benefez, as regent for several of Filpeo’s sons, who will settle it among themselves, in typically bloody fashion, I imagine, when they come of age. In the meanwhile, a rough peace reigns.”
Aberlott had married Anala, the sister of Jæsis, bringing her and two small children to Valana from New Jerusalem. He offered Blacktooth a place to stay, but the house was small and Blacktooth discovered he had no taste for domestic life. “I have been a monk too long,” he told Aberlott, bidding him farewell and heading out toward the south.
It was a very good year for the buzzards. The younger generation waxed strong, soared high and far on black wings, waiting for the fruitful earth to yield up her bountiful carrion. One night, Blacktooth awakened in a cold sweat and thought that his fever was back. Then he looked north and saw the sky filled with Nunshån, the Night Hag, huge and ugly. He could see stars through her upraised arms. “Who is dying?” he asked aloud; he found out later it was his old friend Chür Ösle Høngan. Brownpony’s plan had been a disaster for the Nomads. After the defeat, the Three Hordes had turned their backs on one another. The Treaty of the Sacred Mare no longer held, and the Plains were littered with bodies thrown down by drought, by famine, and by the motherless ones.
Blacktooth traveled south across the Nady Ann, the Bay Ghost, and at last the Brave. No longer a cardinal, he expected to be turned away at Mother Iridia’s convent of San Pancho Villa of Cockroach Mountain, but she welcomed him almost as an old friend. She had no news, though, of Sister Clare-of-Assisi. She suspected Ædrea was somewhere with her own people.
“Her own people?” Blacktooth protested. “I was at New Jerusalem, and they knew nothing of her.”
“The gleps,” said Mother Iridia. “The spooks. The Valley of the Misborn.”
The Jackrabbit country had always been harsh, but after two dry summers it had become even harsher. The wet years were over. Sand was taking the grass. Hannegan City was prospering, though. The Empire had turned east, and was looking toward the woodlands and the growing commerce up the Red from the Great River.
Blacktooth worked several days in the marketplace as a scribe before he was summoned to a papal audience. The summoner surprised him even more than the summons, for it was Torrildo, wearing a curate’s gown, complete with feather.
“I told His Excellency you were here,” the still handsome young man told Blacktooth. “You should be more careful; you are still under interdiction.”
“I don’t see why. If he took away my cardinalship, why couldn’t he take away my interdiction?”
“It’s Benefez,” Torrildo said. “He thinks you had a hand in killing Filpeo.”
I did, thought Blacktooth.
“He probably thanks you for it,” said Torrildo. “But he doesn’t particularly want you around.”
Sorely Nauwhat was most respectful and even curious to hear of Blacktooth’s adventures. He was especially interested in the situation on the Plains, but he knew more than Blacktooth. The apparition of the Night Hag had been seen all over the High Plains. The Weejus women were not pleased. When the Qæsach dri Vørdar returned from the South, he was called before them and put to death. After the funeral feast his bones were buried in three widely separated locations, decided by each of the three hordes.
“Why is he telling me this?” Blacktooth wondered as the plump, grave Pope rattled on, seemingly unconcerned about the time. He is burying Brownpony’s dreams. Filpeo’s were buried next: the Pope, who had been in the Emperor’s carriage, described in gruesome detail how Wooshin had done his work. Filpeo’s guard were equipped with the first copies of the repeaters, and several misfired. Axe had removed the head of the seventh Hannegan in a single stroke, then laid down his sword and knelt to receive the bullets chasing into his chest like bees into a hive.
Dominus ex deu.
The audience lasted all afternoon, and was exhausting. After the lengthy and bloody assassination, Pope Sorely described the imperial situation in great detail. The repeating weapons were decisive. With them, Texarkana at last controlled the Plains. The old way of life was dying, and those who could not see the end coming could hear it keening in the wind. Even the grass was going. Crescent-shaped hills of sand marched slowly from west to east. The Empire that had secured its western frontiers now looked more and more to the east. New Rome smoldered for years but was never rebuilt….
“My son—”
Blacktooth had fallen asleep. The Pope didn’t seem insulted. When he left the log Papal Palace, Blacktooth was given a small sack of gold coins at the door. Pay for listening, he thought; and then on reflection realized it was travel money. He was to make himself scarce.
That had been his intention all along. Hannegan City, like Valana, was in turmoil. The streets were crowded with horses and men. The army was being decommissioned, new legates were piling out for the west, and the Grasshopper lands to the north were being opened up to the motherless ones and also to those among the Hannegan’s former enemies who wanted to celebrate the new peace by raising cattle and grass.
Leaving was easy. Blacktooth was weary of cities and old friends and enemies. He was weary of mankind, so using the Pope’s money he bought himself an ass, or to be precise, a mule, and headed north along the ragged edge where the forest meets the plains.
Grass. It stretched unbroken to one horizon, and meandered among the low, dark trees on the other. The little mountains called Winding Stare were lit with fires, whether of celebration or mourning, Blacktooth couldn’t tell.
He rode unchallenged past the first log outposts of the gleps. He hoped the Valley of the Misborn would take him in, and it did. The Valley, or the Watchitah Nation as it was now called, had grown to be a network of valleys, up and down the low mountains called the Old Zarks. Blacktooth wandered until he found a little community of bookleggers and memorizers, called Post Cedar. He traded his mule for a g’tara much like the one his father had given him, and lived on the mountainside above the abbey, swapping his services as a scribe and a tutor for food.
He found shelter in a rockhouse cave, very like the cave where Amen had lived, except that these eastern caves were broad and open, like a mouth. They provide protection against the rain, and some against the cold; but none against the years.
And so, Blacktooth St. George grew old, reciting the Divine Office and meditating on The Rule of Saint Leibowitz, which enjoined him to the humility he was surprised to discover had been waiting for him all along. It was a sister to the deep loneliness he treasured, a loneliness he no longer wished filled. It was an emptiness as tangible as love. Some nights, though, he found himself praying to whatever might answer such a prayer that Ædrea would come to him. He had heard that a blond spook who wore a nun’s robe practiced medicine in the next valley. The local priest called her a witch; sometimes she healed minds the priest had cursed, and because of this, the priest feared her.
Blacktooth needed his mind healed, but that was not what he feared in her. He feared the gateway beneath the clitoris, torn open by the black god and the white god he had seen riding with the Day Maiden on her rubriauricular white mule. Or had the old Jew done that to her? It was just over the hill waiting for him, the world gateway of the Lord Jesus and of all the saints, and he was a coward. Sometimes he stroked himself into a moment’s ecstasy thinking about it, and he did not hide his shame from the Holy Mother Day Maiden Fujæ Go who watched him from the corner of the hut of his mind. Neither did he mention it in his annual confession to the Leibowitzian priest who visited him every Maundy Thursday. The priest always wanted to wash Nimmy’s feet on behalf of the abbot on that occasion, but the hermit refused.
“You won’t acknowledge your poverty? Isn’t that your pride?”
Blacktooth signed and let the man wash his feet and give him communion.
He had given up Jesus several times, as Amen Specklebird had advised, when the Savior became an occasion of sin for him: but he always came back, and so, it seemed to him, did the Savior. Well, how have you been doing lately, Lord?
For three hours every weekday, he taught thirteen children of various ages how to read and write their own dialect; he also taught them a little music, and taught them—sometimes to their parents’ disbelief—a few things about the geography of the continent, and as much as he knew about the history of the world and the fall of the Magna Civitas. Some of the children believed him, and others believed their parents; but the laughing parents brought him food in payment for their urchins’ literacy, and they mended his clothes, furnished him blankets, and occasionally brought him a hemina of wine for his weakness.
When he was alone, he opened himself. Sometimes the ecstasy of God came through the opening, but more often it did not. He decided to stop leaving an opening for God. That was what Meister Eckhart advised: to be so poor that he had no place for God to come into. When God had no place to come into, He was in every place. There was nothing else.
But Blacktooth did not consider himself a religious man. He did not know if God was the Father, or the maker of Heaven and Earth, and of all things visible and invisible. He couldn’t see that it mattered, since God Himself, when He became manifest as a whirlwind bush, never bothered to tell him; never said, “Blacktooth, I am your Almighty Father, and I made this Earth you’re kneeling on and the sky you are kneeling under.”
CHAPTER 34
Let those who receive new clothes
always give back the old ones at once,
to be put away in the wardrobe for the poor.
—Saint Benedict’s Rule, Chapter 55
JUST OVER THE MOUNTAIN FROM POST CEDAR was a convent, where there lived a nun known as Sister Clare. She awakened one morning with one of her “feelings,” and knew that the hermit who lived in the next valley was dead. She had known of him for years but had elected to leave him in peace, knowing the difficulty of the journey he was on. No one told her he was dead; no one besides herself knew it yet, and she only knew because of the feeling, not unlike joy and yet not unlike sorrow either, that wouldn’t leave her. She welcomed the feeling. The hermit had few enough left in this world to miss him.
With the abbess’s permission, Sister Clare packed a loaf of bread, a little cheese, and then, as an afterthought, a freshly dead mouse from the trap in the kitchen. She walked over the steep and little-used trail to Post Cedar. On the far side of the valley, across from the monastery, she found the narrow path to the dry cave, just where she knew it would be.
The old man hadn’t been dead long. It was not his death but his age that filled Sister Clare’s eyes with tears. She had expected somehow to find a handsome young man, even though she was herself an old woman, bent and spotted with years.
Blacktooth was sitting against a stone with the head of a small cougar in his lap. The animal lifted its blue head when she approached. It was Librada. Ædrea waited but the cougar wouldn’t leave, and finally had to be coaxed away with the mouse so that she could bury Blacktooth and place at the head of his grave the little cross she had carried with her all these years.
The rosary that was clutched in his hand, and the crude g’tara he had left leaning a gainst the back wall of the cave, she took with her.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Walter M. Miller, Jr., grew up in the American South and enlisted in the Army Air Corps a month after Pearl Harbor. He spent most of World War II as a radio operator and tail gunner, participating in more than fifty-five combat sorties, among them the controversial destruction of the Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino, the oldest monastery in the Western world. Fifteen years later he wrote A Canticle for Leibowitz. The sequel, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, followed after nearly forty years.
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Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman Page 54