A Canticle for Leibowitz

by Walter M. Jr. Miller

  “I see your point.”

  “Will you send the request to the abbey?”

  “Yes.”

  Thon Taddeo appeared surprised.

  “But it will be your request, not mine. And it’s only fair to tell you that I don’t think Dom Paulo, the abbot, will say yes.”

  The thon, however, appeared to be satisfied. When he had gone, the nuncio summoned his clerk.

  “You’ll be leaving for New Rome tomorrow,” he told him.

  “By way of Leibowitz Abbey?”

  “Come back by way of it. The report to New Rome is urgent.”

  “Yes, Messér.”

  “At the abbey, tell Dom Paulo that Sheba expects Solomon to come to her. Bearing gifts. Then you better cover your ears. When he finishes exploding, hurry back so I can tell Thon Taddeo no.”

  13

  Time seeps slowly on the desert and there is little change to mark its passage. Two seasons had passed since Dom Paulo had refused the request from across the Plains, but the matter had been settled only a few weeks ago. Or had it been settled at all? Texarkana was obviously unhappy with the results.

  The abbot paced along the abbey walls at sundown, his jaw thrust ahead like a whiskery old crag against possible breakers out of the sea of events. His thinning hair fluttered in white pennants on the desert wind, and the wind wrapped his habit bandage-tight about his stooped body, making him look like an emaciated Ezekiel with a strangely round little paunch. He thrust his gnarled hands into his sleeves and glowered occasionally across the desert toward the village of Sanly Bowitts in the distance. The red sunlight threw his pacing shadow across the courtyard, and the monks who encountered it in crossing the grounds glanced up wonderingly at the old man. Their ruler had seemed moody of late, and given to strange forebodings. It was whispered that the time soon was coming when a new abbot would be appointed ruler over the Brothers of Saint Leibowitz. It was whispered that the old man was not well, not well at all. It was whispered that if the abbot heard the whispers, the whisperers should speedily climb over the wall. The abbot had heard, but it pleased him for once not to take note of it. He well knew that the whispers were true.

  “Read it to me again,” he said abruptly to the monk who stood motionless near at hand.

  The monk’s hood jogged slightly in the abbot’s direction.

  “Which one, Domne?” he asked.

  “You know which one.”

  “Yes, m’Lord.” The monk fumbled in one sleeve. It seemed weighted down with half a bushel of documents and correspondence, but after a moment he found the right one. Affixed to the scroll was the label:

  SUB IMMUNITATE APOSTOLICA HOC SUPPOSITUM EST.

  QUISQUIS NUNTIUM MOLESTARE AUDEAT,

  IPSO FACTO EXCOMMUNICETUR.

  DET: R’dissimo Domno Paulo de Pecos, AOL, Abbati

  (Monastery of the Leibowitzian Brethren,

  Environs of Sanly Bowitts Village

  Southwest Desert, Empire of Denver)

  CUI SALUTEM DICIT: Marcus Apollo

  Papatiae Apocrisarius Texarkanae

  “All right, that’s the one. So read it,” the abbot said impatiently.

  “Accedite ad eum...” The monk crossed himself and murmured the customary Blessing of Texts, said before reading or writing almost as punctiliously as the blessing at meals. For the preservation of literacy and learning throughout a black millennium had been the task of the Brothers of Leibowitz, and such small rituals helped keep that task in focus.

  Having finished the blessing he held the scroll high against the sunset so that it became a transparency. “‘Iterum oportet apponere tibi crucem ferendam, amice...’“

  His voice was faintly singsong as his eyes plucked the words out of a forest of superfluous pen-flourishings. The abbot leaned against the parapet to listen while he watched the buzzards circling over the mesa of Last Resort.

  “‘Again it is necessary to set before you a cross to be borne, old friend and shepherd of myopic bookworms,’“ droned the voice of the reader, “‘but perhaps the bearing of the cross will smack of triumph. It appears that Sheba is coming to Solomon after all, though probably to denounce him as a charlatan.

  “‘This is to notify you that Thon Taddeo Pfardentrott, D.N.Sc., Sage of Sages, Scholar of Scholars, Fair-Haired Son-out-of-Wedlock of a certain Prince, and God’s Gift to an “Awakening Generation,” has finally made up his mind to pay you a visit, having exhausted all hope of transporting your Memorabilia to this fair realm. He will be arriving about the Feast of the Assumption, if he manages to evade “bandit” groups along the way. He will bring his misgivings and a small party of armed cavalry, courtesy of Hannegan II, whose corpulent person is even now hovering over me as I write, grunting and scowling at these lines, which His Supremacy commanded me to write, and in which His Supremacy expects me to acclaim his cousin, the thon, in the hope that you’ll honor him fittingly. But since His Supremacy’s secretary is in bed with the gout, I shall be no less than candid here:

  “‘So first, let me caution you about this person, Thon Taddeo. Treat him with your customary charity, but trust him not. He is a brilliant scholar, but a secular scholar, and a political captive of the State. Here, Hannegan is the State. Furthermore, the thon is rather anti-clerical I think–or perhaps solely anti-monastic. After his embarrassing birth, he was spirited away to a Benedictine monastery, and–but no, ask the courier about that...’ “

  The monk glanced up from his reading. The abbot was still watching the buzzards over Last Resort.

  “You’ve heard about his childhood, Brother?” Dom Paulo asked.

  The monk nodded.

  “Read on.”

  The reading continued, but the abbot ceased to listen. He knew the letter nearly by heart, but still he felt that there was something Marcus Apollo had been trying to say between the lines that he, Dom Paulo, had not yet managed to understand. Marcus was trying to warn him–but of what? The tone of the letter was mildly flippant, but it seemed full of ominous incongruities which might have been designed to add up to some single dark congruity, if only he could add them right. What danger could there he in letting the secular scholar study at the abbey?

  Thon Taddeo himself, according to the courier who had brought the letter, had been educated in the Benedictine monastery where he had been taken as a child to avoid embarrassment to his father’s wife. The thon’s father was Hannegan’s uncle, but his mother was a serving maid. The duchess, legitimate wife of the duke, had never protested the duke’s philandering until this common servant girl bore him the son he had always wanted; then she cried unfair. She had borne him only daughters, and to be bested by a commoner aroused her wrath. She sent the child away, flogged and dismissed the servant, and renewed her grip on the duke. She herself meant to have a manchild out of him to re-establish her honor; she gave him three more girls. The duke waited patiently for fifteen years; when she died in miscarriage (of another girl), he promptly went to the Benedictines to reclaim the boy and make him his heir.

  But the young Taddeo of Hannegan-Pfardentrott had become a bitter child. He had grown from infancy to adolescence within sight of the city and the palace where his first cousin was being prepared for the throne; if his family had entirely ignored him, however, he might have matured without coming to resent his status as an outcast. But both his father and the servant girl whose womb had borne him came to visit him with just enough frequency to keep him reminded that he was begotten of human flesh and not of stones, and thus to make him vaguely aware that he was deprived of love to which he was entitled. And then too, Prince Hannegan had come to the same monastery for one year of schooling, had lorded it over his bastard cousin, and had excelled him in all things but keenness of mind. The young Taddeo had hated the prince with a quiet fury, and had set out to outdistance him as far as possible in learning at least. The race had proved a sham, however; the prince left the monastic school the following year, as unlettered as he had come, nor was any further thought given
to his education. Meanwhile, his exiled cousin continued the race alone and won high honors; but his victory was hollow, for Hannegan did not care. Thon Taddeo had come to despise the whole Court of Texarkana but, with youthful inconsistency, he had returned willingly to that Court to be legitimized as the father’s son at last, appearing to forgive everyone except the dead duchess who had exiled him and the monks who had cared for him in that exile.

  Perhaps he thinks of our cloister as a place of durance vile, thought the abbot. There would be bitter memories, half-memories, and maybe a few imagined memories.

  “‘... seeds of controversy in the bed of the New Literacy,’“ the reader continued. “‘So take heed, and watch for the symptoms.

  “‘But, on the other hand, not only His Supremacy, but the dictates of charity and justice as well, insist that I recommend him to you as a well-meaning man, or at least as an unmalicious child, like most of these educated and gentlemanly pagans (and pagans they will make of themselves, in spite of all). He will behave if you are firm, but be careful, my friend. He has a mind like a loaded musket, and it can go off in any direction. I trust, however, that coping with him for a while will not be too taxing a problem for your ingenuity and hospitality.

  “‘Quidam mihi calix nuper expletur, Paule. Precamini ergo Deum facere me fortiorem. Metuo ut hic pereat. Spero te et fratres saepius oraturos esse pro tremescente Marco Apolline. Valete in Christo, amici.

  “ ‘Texarkanae datum est Octava Ss Petri et Pauli, Anno Domini termillesimo ...’ “

  “Let’s see that seal again,” said the abbot.

  The monk handed him the scroll. Dom Paulo held it close to his face to peer at blurred lettering impressed at the bottom of the parchment by a badly inked wooden stamp:

  OKAYED BY HANNEGAN II, BY GRACE OF GOD MAYOR,

  RULER OF TEXARKANA, DEFENDER OF THE FAITH,

  AND VAQUERO SUPREME OF THE PLAINS.

  HIS MARK: X

  “I wonder if His Supremacy had someone read the letter to him later?” worried the abbot.

  “If so, m’Lord, would the letter have been sent?”

  “I suppose not. But frivolity under Hannegan’s nose just to spite the Mayor’s illiteracy is not like Marcus Apollo, unless be was trying to tell me something between the lines–but couldn’t quite think of a safe way to say it. That last part–about a certain chalice that he’s afraid won’t pass away. It’s clear he’s worried about something, but what? It isn’t like Marcus; it isn’t like him at all.”

  Several weeks had passed since the arrival of the letter; during those weeks Dom Paulo had slept badly, had suffered a recurrence of the old gastric trouble, had brooded overmuch on the past as if looking for something that might have been done differently in order to avert the future. What future? he demanded of himself. There seemed no logical reason to expect trouble. The controversy between monks and villagers had all but died. No signs of turmoil came from the herdsman tribes to the north and east. Imperial Denver was not pressing its attempt to levy taxes upon monastic congregations. There were no troops in the vicinity. The oasis was still furnishing water. There seemed no current threat of plague among animals or men. The corn was doing well this year in the irrigated fields. There were signs of progress in the world, and the village of Sanly Bowitts had achieved the fantastic literacy rate of eight per cent–for which the villagers might, but did not, thank the monks of the Leibowitzian Order.

  And yet he felt forebodings. Some nameless threat lurked just around the corner of the world for the sun to rise again. The feeling had been gnawing at him, as annoying as a swarm of hungry insects that buzzed about one’s face in the desert sun. There was the sense of the imminent, the remorseless, the mindless; it coiled like a heat-maddened rattler, ready to strike at rolling tumbleweed.

  It was a devil with which he was trying to come to grips, the abbot decided, but the devil was quite evasive. The abbot’s devil was rather small, as devils go: only knee-high, but he weighed ten tons and had the strength of five hundred oxen. He was not driven by maliciousness as Dom Paulo imagined him, not nearly as much as he was driven by frenzied compulsion, somewhat after the fashion of a rabid dog. He bit through meat and bone and nail simply because he had damned himself, and damnation created a damnably insatiable appetite. And he was evil merely because he had made a denial of Good, and the denial had become a part of his essence, or a hole therein. Somewhere, Dom Paulo thought, he’s wading through a sea of men and leaving a wake of the maimed.

  What nonsense, old man! he chided himself. When you tire of living, change itself seems evil, does it not? for then any change at all disturbs the deathlike peace of the life-weary. Oh there’s the devil, all right, but let’s not credit him with more than his damnable due. Are you that life-weary, old fossil?

  But the foreboding lingered.

  “Do you suppose the buzzards have eaten old Eleazar yet?” asked a quiet voice at his elbow.

  Dom Paulo glanced around with a start in the twilight. The voice belonged to Father Gault, his prior and probable successor. He stood fingering a rose and looking embarrassed for having disturbed the old man’s solitude.

  “Eleazar? You mean Benjamin? Why, have you heard something about him lately?”

  “Well, no, Father Abbot.” He laughed uneasily. “But you seemed to be looking toward the mesa, and I thought you were wondering about the Old Jew.” He glanced toward the anvil-shaped mountain, silhouetted against the gray patch of sky in the west. “There’s a wisp of smoke up there, so I guess he’s still alive.”

  “We shouldn’t have to guess,” Dom Paulo said abruptly. “I’m going to ride over there and pay him a visit.”

  “You sound like you’re leaving tonight.” Gault chuckled.

  “In a day or two.”

  “Better be careful. They say he throws rocks at climbers.”

  “I haven’t seen him for five years,” the abbot confessed. “And I’m ashamed that I haven’t. He’s lonely. I’ll go.

  “If he’s lonely, why does he insist on living like a hermit?”

  “To escape loneliness–in a young world.”

  The young priest laughed. “That perhaps makes his kind of sense, Domne, but I don’t quite see it.”

  “You will, when you’re my age, or his.”

  “I don’t expect to get that old. He lays claim to several thousand years.”

  The abbot smiled reminiscently. “And you know, I can’t dispute him either. I met him when I was just a novice, fifty-odd years ago, and I’d swear he looked just as old then as he does now. He must be well over a hundred.”

  “Three thousand two hundred and nine, so he says. Sometimes even older. I think he believes it, too. An interesting madness,”

  “I’m not so sure he’s mad, Father. Just devious in his sanity. What did you want to see me about?”

  “Three small matters. First, how do we get the Poet out of the royal guest rooms–before Thon Taddeo arrives? He’s due here in a few days, and the Poet’s taken root.”

  “I’ll handle the Poet-sirrah. What else?”

  “Vespers. Will you be in the church?”

  “Not until Compline. You take over. What else?”

  “Controversy in the basement–over Brother Kornhoer’s experiment.”

  “Who and how?”

  “Well, the silly gist of it seems to be that Brother Armbruster has the attitude of vespero mundi expectando, while with Brother Kornhoer, it’s the matins of the millennium. Kornhoer moves something to make room for a piece of equipment. Armbruster yells Perdition! Brother Kornhoer yells Progress! and they have at each other again. Then they come fuming to me to settle it. I scold them for losing their tempers. They get sheepish and fawn on each other for ten minutes. Six hours later, the floor shivers from Brother Armbruster’s bellowing Perdition! down in the library. I can settle the blowups, but there seems to be a Basic Issue.”

  “A basic breach of conduct, I’d say. What do you want me to do about it? Exclude them from
the table?”

  “Not yet, but you might warn them.”

  “All right, I’ll track it down. Is that all?”

  “That’s all, Domne.” He started away, but paused: “Oh, by the way-do you think Brother Kornhoer’s contraption is going to work’?”

  “I hope not!” the abbot snorted.

  Father Gault appeared surprised. “But, then why let him–”

  “Because I was curious at first. The work has caused so much commotion by now, though, that I’m sorry I let him start it.”

  “Then why not stop him?”

  “Because I’m hoping that he will reduce himself to absurdity without any help from me. If the thing fails, it’ll fail just in time for Thon Taddeo’s arrival; That would be just the proper form of mortification for Brother Kornhoer–to remind him of his vocation, before he begins thinking that he was called to Religion mainly for the purpose of building a generator of electrical essences in the monastery basement.”

  “But, Father Abbot, you’ll have to admit that it would be quite an achievement, if successful.”

  “I don’t have to admit it,” Dom Paulo told him curtly.

  When Gault was gone, the abbot, after a brief debate with himself, decided to handle the problem of the Poet-sirrah! before the problem of perdition-versus-progress. The simplest solution to the problem of the Poet was for the Poet to get out of the royal suite, and preferably out of the abbey, out of the vicinity of the abbey, out of sight, hearing, and mind. But no one could expect a “simplest solution” to get rid of the Poet-sirrah!

  The abbot left the wall and crossed the courtyard toward the guesthouse. He moved by feel, for the buildings were monoliths of shadow under the stars, and only a few windows glowed with candlelight. The windows of the royal suite were dark; but the Poet kept odd hours and might well be in.