The fire was either closer, or hotter, or both. At the end of the street it was a wall of flame, taller than the “great houses.” Blacktooth now had two shadows, one that walked before him and one behind.
“I set fires,” thought Blacktooth, remembering the blue and gold inscription on the Grasshopper sharf’s carriage.
A farmer leaned over the injured mule and drew his knife. Blacktooth stopped him, with a hand on his arm. “Let him live,” he said in Churchspeak.
“Huh?” The farmer stared at Blacktooth’s robes, and then cut the traces. The mule limped off, whickering, and the farmer stuck the knife back into his belt.
“I will help with the wagon,” said Blacktooth, in Grasshopper. He put his hat back on and pushed.
It was a two-wheeled cart of vaguely Grasshopper design, loaded with household goods and junk—including an ancient, tiny black-skinned old woman with two kittens, which she was kissing, first one and then the other. Blacktooth pushed and the farmer pulled, then two more men joined in, throwing their possessions in the back along with the old grandmother. They all spoke Grasshopper, mixed with a little Churchspeak and smatterings of Ol’zark. They fled on east, toward the Great River.
Blacktooth stayed with the farmer with the cart all day. Hair-Puller was his name; or it might have been a description, or even a confession. The man was bald. He was so solicitous, sharing his food and water, that Blacktooth assumed he was a Christian; until he realized that the farmer thought Blacktooth’s red zucchetto meant that he was a soldier. Though he lived in the Holy City, he had never heard of the Church. To the farmer there were only two types of people, farmers and Texark soldiers. Though he was of them by blood, the Grasshopper Nomads, “the people,” coming in from the plain “where the trees do not go,” were less than human, or more, perhaps. An elemental like a herd or a storm.
Even after escaping from his basement jail, Blacktooth still felt imprisoned, between the fire to the west and the still unseen river to the east. By noon the smoke had eaten the sun itself, and a terrifying red darkness fell over the streets like a pall. The stream of refugees grew to a flood, all heading east. The streets grew wider, and at the same time more choked with refugees, all farmers. The “great houses” to the east were even greater, and there were no trees; Blacktooth had never imagined he would miss them.
It was late afternoon when they reached the river. Blacktooth didn’t know what it was at first. The crowd piled up on itself, then started milling, turning. There was fire to the west, and fire to the north as well. There was a scuffle, a swift panic, and Hair-Puller was lost in the crowd. Once Blacktooth thought he heard the familiar creak of the wagon, then lost it again. Luckily he had managed to save his jail blanket.
It was getting dark. Except for a few children crying, the refugees were silent again, milling in place, making decisions through some sort of slow, visceral process, like a worm. The main stream turned south, following the bank of the river out of the city. Suspecting what it was that had turned them, Blacktooth climbed a low stone wall. A few others, like himself, stood on top, looking at the Great River.
Blacktooth had never seen, or even imagined, so much water before. It was a different substance than the water he had known in the mountains or on the Plains. It didn’t dance, or swirl, or fall. It lay like a sheet of muddy glass, half brown and half silver. It was a plain of water. He thought he could walk across it, but he knew better.
Squeezing past the others, Blacktooth walked along the top of the wall to a fallen pier at the water’s edge. Boats were standing off shore. He hadn’t seen many boats before, just the flat-bottomed ferries on the Red, but he knew what they were. These were barges, some with sheds built with chimneys and window glass, and long sweeps that turned them and moved them on the water. People on the decks and roofs watched the city burn. The boats made small circles in the current, watching the fire, perhaps waiting to move in later to loot. A few farmer refugees tried to swim or wade out to the boats, but they were beaten away with the sweeps.
A few shots were fired. The people on the barges were dressed in rags, the same as the farmers, but Blacktooth assumed they were from the other shore.
The fire was getting closer. From the water, it was almost beautiful: fire, loveliest of the four elements of the world, and yet an element too in Hell. Blacktooth found a spot at the end of the pier, and wrapped himself in his jail blanket; paradoxically, it kept him cool. Beneath the wall of smoke and flame, he could see the stream of refugees heading south along the riverbank.
“So many,” Blacktooth muttered. The man standing beside him grunted what sounded like assent. He was holding a long gun, but not a repeater. It was the type that fired stones through a thick iron barrel. For some reason, Blacktooth felt safe beside him. He had no desire to rejoin the refugees and head south.
“They could have defended the city,” Blacktooth whispered, and the man grunted again. They could have, Blacktooth thought, but they hadn’t wanted to. New Rome wasn’t their city. They had been driven there by the Texark soldiers and then driven out by the flames. Few were armed, and those with very ancient weapons, of the kind that had killed the sharf’s shaman.
Perhaps the man standing beside him had fired the shot.
The howling wind was whipping the water into whitecaps. It was blowing from the east, sucked into the city by the flames. As night fell the flood of refugees lessened to a stream, and then to a trickle, all turning south along the riverbank, heading toward Texarkana, as if drawn by some ancient, instinctive urge. Late that night their fires could be seen in the low line of wooded bluffs to the south. By then Blacktooth was asleep. He slept for hours, alone at the end of the pier. By daylight the fire had almost died away.
And the Holy City of New Rome was burned.
The smell of food awakened him. Blacktooth had slept wrapped in his jail blanket, propped against a wooden upright at the end of the pier. If the fire had kept coming it would have followed the pier to him, and consumed him along with the rest of the world. But he had been spared. He had taken off his boots and hidden them under his blanket; they were still there, as was his zucchetto, with three pills left. As soon as he sat up, he felt Hilbert’s fever returning. But couldn’t it be hunger? He hadn’t eaten in days.
He smelled fish cooking. At the end of the pier, a boat was tied up on the muddy bank. A group of men were gathered around a small fire. Blacktooth stood up, pulling the blanket around him to hide his monk’s robes. These boatmen were probably less Christianized even than the Grasshopper farmers, who were themselves barely Christian at all. And he remembered his jailer’s remark, that the Antipope was burning the city.
Something in the shape of the group, their stance or the tone of their voices, told Blacktooth that he could join them safely. Still, he edged in cautiously, walking slowly along the edge of the wooden pier.
A body floated by, buoyed by its own gases. A woman’s face smiled upward toward a scrim of smoke and sky. Blacktooth looked away and stepped onto the mud. Someone passed him a piece of fish, wrapped in big soft leaves. The smell of it was so overpowering, so delicious, that he had to sit down to eat it. No one paid any attention to him or asked him any questions. The men by the fire seemed united by a sort of rough charity; they were boatmen, and spoke a version of Ol’zark that Blacktooth could barely make out. The outsiders, two or three stragglers like himself, spoke not at all. Their silence seemed to be essential to the rough peace that prevailed.
After he had finished the fish, Blacktooth looked around. Now that the smoke had cleared he could see the big towers of the ancient bridge. He could make out low bluffs on the far side. The water was impossibly wide. The Great River, the Misspee, flowed into the sea; how big, then, must the sea be? Already this was more water than Blacktooth had ever imagined.
“The Nomads coming,” said one of the boatmen. The word for Nomad in their dialect was “horsepeople.” The implication was, so we ourselves must flee!
There were
no women among the boatmen; but even as Blacktooth was noticing this, several women walked down the bank, trudging from rock to rocky step, tracking ash and carrying armloads of what looked like rags onto the barge and into the shed/cabin. They were followed by other women with bags that clinked; perhaps crockery?
Someone passed Blacktooth another piece of fish, followed by a pot of warm water which seemed to be some kind of weak tea. “The Nomads are coming,” said another woman, arriving at a run. The “horsepeople.”
There was a shout, and Blacktooth and the other “guests” stood back while one of the boatmen scattered the fire with a stick. Before Blacktooth realized what was happening, the barge was spinning off in the current. The other “guests” by the dead fire quickly scattered—and Blacktooth found himself holding the boatmen’s water pot, alone again. It was just as well. For the first time in days, he felt his bowels calling, so it was with pleasure that he found a hidden place by the water’s edge under the pier and took a dump, and then cleansed himself and went into the city.
Blacktooth assumed that the Grasshopper warriors would arrive as soon as the fire burned out, and begin looting and raping, and with them would come Brownpony and the Curia. But it was noon and the streets were still empty. He had rolled up his jail blanket, and now he felt exposed and vulnerable in his habit and zucchetto as he walked the right angles of the streets waiting for the Nomads to find him and take him to Brownpony.
No one came. It was as if the Holy City had been cleansed. Even the corpses in the street, blackened like cinders, seemed cleansed somehow, as if the fire had swept away their corruptions leaving only a purified husk.
There wasn’t much to loot. The fire had consumed everything but the brick and stone, reducing the city back to the rubble it must have been before the Harq-Hannegans had rebuilt it. How many times had these bricks fallen? Blacktooth wondered. How many conquerors had passed under this lintel, this stone? The Holy City with its grid of streets between blackened piles of rubble and shells of burned buildings was like a palimpsest of civilization and misery, all intermixed and intermingled, one age falling onto the other like leaves; like cottonwood trash, the debris of centuries good only for a twenty-minute or a twenty-hour fire.
No Nomads came—no howling barbarians to pick through the ruined and smoking center of all Christendom. No shots, no shouts, no neighing horses, no mad laughter or cries of delight or screams of dismay. A great fire brings with it a truce in the natural order of things, a still center; and there weren’t even scavengers in the streets. The occasional corpses, one every block or so, lay in quiet dignity as Blacktooth walked around them. There were only the buzzards gathering high overhead, like fly ash.
Saint Peter’s was not hard to find. The roof had burned and fallen, but the smoke-stained dome still stood over the ruins. Most of the interior was destroyed. Blacktooth sat in the back in one of the long pews that had survived the lottery of destruction. It was curious, he thought, what was left and what was consumed, by time as well as fire. There were a few memories left of his childhood—the hard months among the Nomads, the early days at the abbey. But whole years were gone, leaving nothing but ash, like the long rows of gray ash marking where the clean-burning oak pews had been. Where a pew was gone, its footstool might be left behind. It was like the remnants of the Magna Civitas, burned to the ground more than a thousand years ago. Parts of it stood almost intact, like the Church; other parts were not even remembered.
For the first time in months, Blacktooth closed his eyes and prayed; not under duress but because he wanted to. He stayed on his knees when he finished. He could feel Hilbert’s fever returning, like an old friend. He welcomed it—for there was Ædrea again, in the waterfall that had no water where water did not fall. And there was Amen Specklebird.
Amen I with his cougar smile—
Amen was shaking him by the shoulder. But it was Amen II. “Nimmy, is it really you? We thought you were dead!”
“So here you see my Church,” said Brownpony. His hair was gone and his eyes stared out of dark hollows. Even the red beard of the Red Deacon was mostly white. All around the basilica, the great empty windows looked out on ruins. The deserted streets were quiet and only the howling of dogs could be heard, far off in the distance.
“Oh, God, the Grasshopper!” Brownpony knelt and blackened his hands in the ashes, and held them up toward the smoke-stained dome. “What a fool I have been, Nimmy. To trust the Grasshopper!”
“Holy Madness trusted them too, Holy Father,” Blacktooth replied. “And so did Axe!”
“I trusted Bråm to fight well,” said Wooshin. “He did that, before the desertions.”
“It may be,” said the Pope, “that he could not control his warriors, once they felt the battle fury—drawn down from Empty Sky, as they say.” He wiped his hands on his dirty white cassock; over it he wore a repeating pistol in a shoulder holster. “And the Grasshopper warriors have no love for the Church hereabouts.”
Wooshin stood by, still wearing the plaid tunic and sergeant general’s stripes Brownpony had made for him. He seemed depressed. Blacktooth was not surprised. All Wooshin’s friends, the Yellow Guard, were either dead or gone south with Magister Dion and the Qæsach dri Vørdar. His master, Brownpony, seemed weaker than ever; and ruined.
“Nimmy,” Brownpony was saying. “Look what I have done to my Church. It wasn’t for myself that I wanted this throne. And now look at it.”
“It wasn’t you…” Blacktooth started. But he couldn’t finish. Who else had done it? It was Brownpony who had assembled the Three Hordes, who had armed them with repeating weapons, who had set them in motion across the sea of grass toward New Rome—and who had then told them not to set fires.
I SET FIRES, Eltür Bråm’s carriage was inscribed. He had made no secret of it. LIKE HELL YOU WILL, the Pope had answered.
Like Hell—and now, look around.
Brownpony laid his hand on Blacktooth’s brow, leaving a smear of ash. “Your fever seems better, Nimmy,” he said.
“I got over it,” said Blacktooth. “They captured me and gave me some pills, the same pills the Texark are using south of the Nady Ann. But they are almost gone.”
“You don’t feel feverish.”
“I can feel it,” said Blacktooth. “I can see it coming. When I am feverish I see the girl, Ædrea. And the old Pope, Amen Specklebird. They were with me just now, before you came in.” He saw no point in lying to Brownpony; not anymore. “I was glad to see them.”
“Do you see them now?” Brownpony asked.
“No, of course not. The fever is not that bad.”
“The fever is not that bad,” repeated Brownpony. He seemed more distracted than ever. Then suddenly he drew the pistol from his shoulder holster. “Do you hear that, Nimmy?”
“Hear what, your—”
“Shhhh!—”
Wooshin drew his short sword from his belt; he left his long sword in its steel scabbard. Seconds later, Blacktooth heard what the old warrior and Brownpony had heard. Hooves on the paving stones, and then on steps, and then on wood—clattering “inside” the cathedral.
It was Black Eyes, the Nomad double agent who had briefly been imprisoned across from Brownpony and Blacktooth in the Hannegan City zoo. He was dressed in the full regalia of a Wilddog warrior, riding a sorrel pony. “Your Holiness,” he said sarcastically. He nodded at Nimmy and avoided Wooshin’s eye—and sword—altogether.
“Put it away,” said Brownpony, softly—although he still held the repeating pistol in his hand. Wooshin put the short sword away, but kept his hand on the hilt of the long one.
“What are you doing here? I thought you were with the Emperor in Hannegan City.” Brownpony stood straighter, tried to look regal. Black Eyes didn’t seem impressed.
“As a spy,” the Nomad said. “When the Lord of the Three Hordes came south, with the tanks and the glep army, I crossed the Red River to join them. But the battle is lost. The Hannegan’s guns spoke too loudly, a
nd too fast. The gleps have run back to their valley, the spooks are on their way back to the Suckamints, and the War Sharf of the Three Hordes is on his way home.”
“Høngan Ösle?” Brownpony looked stricken. “The Qæsach dri Vørdar is going home?”
“The Weejus are calling,” said the Nomad. His pony was dancing in and out of the pew ashes, ruining their straight lines. “The Texark Wooden-Nose is burning our lodges, killing our women, stealing our horses. We ride for the short grass. I am only here to make sure that none of the children of the Big Sky Woman are left in the city when the grass-eaters arrive. You should leave also. You are also her child and she is also your mother, begging your pardon, Holiness. The Texark cavalry is on its way.”
“From the south?” The Pope pointed with the pistol. “From Hannegan City?”
“From the north as well. From the sea of grass. We will leave their city to them. Good luck, Your Holiness.”
He rode off loudly, hooves clattering, and Brownpony fell to his knees, cursing his fate. “Vexilla regis inferni produent!”
“What’s he saying?” Wooshin whispered.
“Forth come the banners of the King of Hell,” said Blacktooth.
“It is not their city,” Brownpony muttered. “They never wanted it!” He looked up toward the sky and saw only the blackened ruined dome. He tossed his pistol into the ashes.
In the center of the ruined sanctuary, the throne of Saint Peter’s had been miraculously spared. Behind it was a painted wooden statue of the Holy Virgin, also spared. Blacktooth and Wooshin silently followed Brownpony as he crossed toward the throne, picking his way through the litter. Brownpony paused in front of the throne and studied it before smoothing his cassock and sitting down. His freckled skin was drawn and thin strands of gray hair showed at the edges of his dirty white skullcap. He still wore his empty shoulder holster.
Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman Page 51