Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

by Walter M Miller Jr

  From the point of view of the civis, every nomas was an outlaw, but in the Nomad view, the motherless ones had deviated so far from the Nomad cultural norm that they were loathed by the people of the Plains more than they were by the farmers along the eastern fringe whom they sometimes plundered. As is usually the case, a completely alien enemy is less to be despised than a deviant brother. The motherless ones who originally conquered Texark had been driven there by the right-thinking orthodox Nomads of the several hordes. It was an infusion of fresh blood and new ideas for the sleepy trading community and the surrounding farmers, and Texark began to grow and to be fortified. It was located in a place where, exposed on both flanks, in order to grow at all it was forced to conquer or perish. However, after five generations the mutation of barbarian outlaw into civilized aristocrat was nearly complete, and Filpeo was a popular ruler except in the conquered territories.

  The town of Texark itself, or Texarkana improperly so-called in the Latin of the Church, was not located at the site (now lost) of the ancient city of that name. Now called Hannegan City, it did lie on the Red River, and it grew up at the vague boundary between forest and plain, where it was originally a minor center of commerce between the two areas, the sown and the treeless wild. The relatively peaceful Jack-rabbit people had come here to trade surplus cattle, horses, and hides for wood, metal, spirits, medicinal herbs, products of the blacksmith’s art, and whatever trinkets the merchants could show that caught the Nomad fancy. Among the merchants, however, there were a few panderers who took advantage of the sexual hungers of the motherless ones, and actually sold them brides, or rented them for a while. That was the beginning of it. When the price of brides went up, the bandits killed the merchants, took what they wanted, and settled down, but they themselves, not their captive wives, kept and managed the horses—and every other kind of property. In one generation, a way of life was turned on its head.

  Filpeo Harq himself was a student of this local and family history, which was not so well known to the residents of his realm. He had taken a personal interest in the writings of historians at the collegium, now a thriving university, and he who wanted tenure and royal favor wrote to please the monarch. He who wrote otherwise was rarely published, and failed to thrive. To put it mildly.

  In passing his uncle’s Church, the Monarch suddenly signaled his driver to go slow. He pointed at a group of clergy, including his uncle Urion, standing on the steps in the morning sun. Cardinal Benefez seemed to be arguing warmly with another man in a red zucchetto whose back was toward the coach.

  “Who is that man?” Filpeo asked sharply.

  “Which one, Your Imperial Honor?”

  The cardinal with his back toward the coach suddenly looked over his shoulder. The Mayor’s head disappeared inside the window and he knocked for the driver to hurry on. Beside the second cardinal stood one man in the robes of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, and another man-at-arms who was probably a bodyguard. He thought he knew who one of them might be. The armed man was too alien in appearance to be the cardinal’s secretary. And Uncle Urion appeared to have acquired another pretty young man as acolyte.

  “Drive on, drive on.”

  The manufacturer’s representative had already arrived at the War College when the imperial coach discharged its royal passenger and his courtiers, but he and the officers in charge were not yet ready for the demonstration. Irritated by the delay, but determined to make use of every idle moment, Filpeo called an immediate meeting of staff to discuss long-term strategy on the Plains. It was disquieting to the officers to be quizzed by the Monarch on such an impromptu basis with no preparation, and Filpeo always enjoyed putting them in such a situation. He learned a lot from the practice, and it helped him weed out the fools. The commanders of Infantry and Corps of Engineers were out of the city on maneuvers, however, and their seconds were summarily yanked out of their offices and hauled to the conference room.

  Admiral e’Fondolai was there in person, and so was General Goldæm, Chief of Staff, and Major General Alvasson of the Cavalry. Infantry and Engineers were represented by Colonels Holofot and Blindermen. Not as a joke, but in a joking manner, Filpeo Harq himself collared Colonel Pottscar, S.I., in the corridor while the Ignatzian Chief Chaplain was returning from Mass and pulled him along to the meeting. “Someone may need your services here, Father,” said the Monarch to the astonished Pottscar. “It may even be me. Did you know that Cardinal Brownpony and probably his troublesome monk-secretary are in town.”

  Colonel Father Pottscar nodded. “I just heard about it as I left the Church. By now, he must have requested an audience with Your Honor, no?”

  “No! Not that I have been told about.”

  “I’m sure he will, but naturally he would see the Archbishop first.”

  “By God, I should have him arrested. If Urion knew he was coming, he would have told me. What the hell is going on?”

  “I would guess, Your Honor, that he has come to plead the cause of the man he calls Pope.”

  “Hah! The man who sent the Grasshopper Horde to smash its way to New Rome! By God, they killed two-thirds of the Nomads, and we chased that bastard Curia back to Valana with their Specklebird, all right. But they left a lot of dead men and raped women and burned buildings. There hasn’t been an atrocity like that before the second Hannegan’s conquest. And now we’ve got trouble with the Grasshopper all along the frontier, mainly because of him!”

  “Who, Brownpony? Sire, you have been misinformed. He was not even with the Curia, so-called, at that time. He was with Monsignor Sanual at the Nomad election. Sanual told me that. He was quite shocked by Brownpony. Says the man is a pagan. But although he rode south with the Grasshopper to meet the Pope, he did not join the others but continued south. Your Honor, according to one of my chaplains in the area of conflict, the, uh, pretender Pope turned back with his whole retinue when the guards refused to let them cross the border. This priest says the Nomad escort attacked only after they were separated from the Valanan cardinals. It’s not at all clear that they were acting under Valana’s instruction. I know the Archbishop had received a message from this crazy Specklebird. It probably told him Brownpony was coming.”

  “I wonder that the guards let him cross the border!”

  “I doubt that he came through the skirmishing zone, Sire. He probably crossed from the Province.”

  “By way of Leibowitz Abbey, I dare say, for he was with a monk of theirs. Right now, I want you to send one of your chaplains to bring Brownpony to me. Let a military policeman go with him. Let them not take no for an answer. Bring that monk along too.”

  Colonel Father Pottscar hurried away. The Hannegan glanced curiously at Admiral e’Fondolai and asked, “I don’t remember calling you here. Do we need the Navy to fight Nomads on the Plains? Not that you aren’t welcome—”

  “I asked him to come,” explained General Goldæm. “Brownpony inherited six alien warriors from a cardinal who died in conclave, and Carpy here knows something about their race and nation. We might need to know.”

  The admiral frowned. Carpios Robbery had been e’Fondolai’s nom de guerre in his pirate days, when he had become the second man since antiquity to circumnavigate the globe, but he hated to be called “Carpy,” especially in the presence of his Hannegan.

  They entered the conference room. First, the Emperor asked about the status of the forces protecting new farming lands, and any further encounters with the Grasshopper people. Told they had drawn back defensively, Filpeo ordered there be no punitive raids by Texark forces until he so commanded. He then stated, “If I were a Grasshopper war sharf, I would make an alliance with the Wilddog to strike the Province. I would cut the telegraph line in several places. The Wilddog will cut the Province in half, while Grasshopper strikes toward Texark. What is your response?”

  Colonel Father Pottscar entered the room and nodded to Filpeo.

  Colonel Holofot spoke. “They can destroy, but they cannot hold. Such an invasion can be
no more than a massive cavalry raid. Our forts would remain secure. They might massacre the Jackrabbit settlers and the colonists, but they would quickly exhaust themselves and be driven back, as in the Grasshopper raid.”

  General Goldæm looked levelly at his ruler and shook his head. “Your scenario is improbable, Sire. When they began establishing winter quarters after the war, they became vulnerable. If they attacked the south, they know our cavalry would strike in the north at their family settlements, which would not be well defended. When the hordes were entirely mobile, they could retreat forever. They could lead pursuers to exhaustion. Now they have fixed property. It’s vulnerable. They have no infantry to take or hold ground.”

  “Suppose the Jackrabbit revolted and joined the invaders?”

  “We have kept them disarmed,” said the engineer, Colonel Holofot. “What will they fight with, pitchforks?”

  “No, but if they could provide the invaders with food, water, shelter, and places to hide,” said the general. “The question is: would they? The Jackrabbit has bitter memories of the Northerners, for the wild hordes were contemptuous of the Jacks. Frankly, to me it seems a tossup whether they hate us more, or the Northerners. But even with Jackrabbit support, Colonel Holofot is right. A mass cavalry attack would exhaust itself in the south, and the northern underbelly would be exposed. They would be more likely to strike the farmlands north of the Valley, uh, north of the Watchitah Nation, and that is what we are not well prepared for yet. But we are preparing fast, and the whole border will be fortified in two years. The surviving farmers there are well armed now, and since the raid, they have a lot of hate for Nomads. We have the troops to back them up, but not to attack prematurely, because we have the same problem in the north as they in the south.”

  “And that is?”

  “We can attack and kill, but we don’t have the men or the logistics to occupy Grasshopper territory. Unless, of course, we weaken our forces in the Province.”

  Filpeo became thoughtful. “I wonder,” he said, “why is it that these farms on the eastern fringe, which get more rain, are not as productive as the refugee lands at the foot of the Rockies, where the land is said to be nearly a desert?”

  There was a brief silence. The Hannegan’s remarks seemed almost idle, having nothing to do with the Nomad as a military problem.

  “Sire, that question is outside my field,” said the commanding general. “But it may have something to do with discipline. As you know, ours are free peasants, and they work mostly for themselves. When you say ‘productive,’ you mean it in terms of commercial crops. The ex-Nomads are sharecroppers, working for landowners, especially the Bishop of Denver. They are forced to work, and they grow only a few crops.”

  “I think that is not an explanation,” said Father Colonel Pottscar. “And it’s not quite true. The ex-Nomads learned from the mountaineers, who have been dry-farming for centuries. And as for the rainfall—there is a monastery in the hills north of Valana where the monks keep records of events in the heavens, waiting for the coming of the Lord. One of the things they keep track of is rain, because they pray for the weather. They say the rainfall on the western side of the mountains is now nearly twice what it was eight hundred years ago. That, and that alone, is your miracle of the ex-Nomad farms. Of course, the monks think it’s their miracle, answering eight centuries of prayer. But the runoff for irrigation is better than in ancient times, miracle or no.”

  “Well, doesn’t the increase apply to the whole Plains?” asked the Monarch.

  “Their records are local. I can’t say. Thon Graycol points out that there are no very old trees in the edges of our forests where the prairie begins looking eastward. That suggests our tree line has been moving slowly westward for a few centuries, but nobody is sure. The Nomads may have cut the older trees for wood.”

  “Well,” said General Goldæm, “if nature is closing in on them from the east and the west, they’re going to lose their precious desert anyway. We’ll just give nature a hand in their extinction.”

  “Extinction? I don’t want to hear that word again, General,” Filpeo Harq said sharply. “Pacification and containment are the goals, not extermination. We have achieved that in the south. The Jackrabbit population is stable.”

  “Except that their young men keep running away to join outlaw bands.”

  “The northern Nomads kill most of those. One way, maybe the only way, to secure the area between the forests and the western mountains is to colonize.”

  “How, Sire? Except along the eastern fringe, the land is poor, the water scarce, and the weather horrid. Who could, who would live there but wild herdsmen?”

  “Tame herdsmen, and a tamer breed of cattle,” said Filpeo Harq. “Fenced ranches, as in the south. Some places down there, they use yellowwood trees for fences. If you plant them a foot apart and keep them pruned, they make hedges dense enough and thorny enough to keep cattle in. There may not be enough water for agriculture, but wells can be dug to water stock. Some land can be fenced, farther north where the cold kills yellowwood. We hold much forested land in the east. Enough timber can be shipped to settlers, and they’ll pay with beef and hides. And I’m not so sure agriculture is impossible either. The university is studying that problem. Until civilized men can live there, the Plains will remain an obstacle. The Pope might as well be living on the moon, and there is no way to unify the continent.”

  “But who in hell would want to live there?”

  Harq the Hannegan thought for a moment. “The Jackrabbit itself has settled down in the south. That’s why I won’t stand for talk of extermination.”

  “But they were always half-settled anyway, Sire. The Wilddog and the Grasshopper would prefer to die in battle than give up their ways. To farm or to ranch is hard work. To the Nomad, work is slavery.”

  “The ex-Nomads learned to work when they lost their horses. You merely predict their choice. We must not allow them to have such a choice. There is no need to colonize the Plains if we can civilize the wild tribes themselves. I want Urion to send missions to the northern hordes.”

  “Cardinal Urion sent Monsignor Sanual to them, and he came back empty-handed, and I think empty-headed. The Christians among them are already tied to Valana, Sire, and there is a rumor this Pope in Valana means to take the Jackrabbit Churches away from our Archbishop,” said the chaplain.

  “There is no Pope in Valana, and until there is a Pope in New Rome, they are tied to nobody. And Urion hopes to be the next Pope. If not, we’ll see whether Urion or some antipope offers them sweeter salvation. Especially to the Grasshopper, after we punish them. The time is ripe for change. The papacy is up for grabs. The new Lord of the Hordes is a Wilddog, not a Grasshopper. We have to influence both.

  “Please understand,” continued the Hannegan, after a pause, “that what I ask of you is to tell me what you think would happen if we do this, or we do that, even if I would never do either. To show you what I mean, I ask General Goldæm what he thinks would happen if we undertook a war to simply wipe out the Nomad population of the northern Plains.”

  He spoke again after a silence. “Well, General?”

  “Sire, I did not really mean to suggest—”

  “Very well, I realize you were just making bellicose noises to exercise your military gland, but go ahead. Answer my question: What would happen if we undertook to wipe out the Grasshopper and the Wilddog?”

  The general reddened, and after a few seconds said, “I think we I would fail. We’re stretched out. We occupy and police the Jackrabbit country below the Nady Ann. If we try to hit the Grasshopper hard, he can pull back until our supply wagons can’t supply our forces.”

  “The Nomad can live on carrion and crickets. Why can’t you?”

  “I can, but we can’t fight without powder and shot.”

  “Good enough. You have now taken charge of your military gland. However, you can put it to work again and organize a battalion of a special strike force. I want men trained to out-Nom
ad the Nomads. Take the biggest, toughest, meanest men you can find, both from our own ranks and from any motherless outlaws you can recruit. Teach them to live on the land, speak Nomadic, and learn their way of signaling.”

  “And what exactly is the battalion’s mission, Sire? Not to hold ground, surely.”

  “Of course not. The mission is to surprise, kill, destroy, and run. Punitive strikes, in case there’s another attack on the farmlands. As for weapons, be sure they have the new biologicals from the university. Draft Thon Hilbert, if you have to.”

  Goldæm looked at Carpios, made a sour mouth, and winked. He did not believe that biologicals were the wave of the military future and he hoped Carpy agreed; but the pirate admiral merely shrugged.

  Filpeo turned to the chaplain.

  “Colonel Pottscar, suppose my uncle the Archbishop had unlimited funds to spend on the conversion of the Grasshopper Horde. What would happen?”

  “Well, if he didn’t spend it on young boys, he would waste it sending people like Monsignor Sanual.”

  The Mayor seemed to suppress a giggle. “How would he spend it on young boys? Charitably?”