Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman Read online

  “I don’t understand you, Brother.”

  “I don’t expect you would. If my own cousins Wren and Singing Cow don’t understand, how could you?” He placed his hand reassuringly over Torrildo’s where it lay on the parapet. “It’s enough that you care.”

  “I care, I really do.” The postulant was looking at him with those gray-green eyes that so reminded him of his mother’s soft and searching gaze. There was something feminine about it. Embarrassed by the intensity of the moment, Blacktooth removed his hand.

  “Of course you do. Let’s forget it. How is it with you and that difficult Memorabilium?”

  “Maxwell’s equations, they’re called. I can say them forward and backward, but I don’t know what they are or what they mean.”

  “Neither do I, but you’re not supposed to know. I can tell you this, though: their meaning has been penetrated during the past century. They’re supposed to be among the notes Thon Taddeo Pfardentrott took back to Texark with him about seventy years ago. Maxwell’s equations are among the very great Memorabilia, so I’ve heard.”

  “Pfardentrott? Didn’t he invent the telegraph? And dynamite?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well, if the meaning has already been penetrated, why do I have to keep it memorized?”

  “Tradition, I guess. No, it’s more than that. Just keep running the words through your mind, as a prayer. Keep it up long enough, and God will enlighten you, so the old-timers say.”

  “If somebody’s penetrated the meaning, maybe I could find out.”

  “That might spoil it for you, Brother. But you can try, if you want to. You can read what Brother Kornhoer wrote about the subject after Pfardentrott left, but I don’t think you’ll understand him.”

  “Brother who?”

  “Kornhoer. He invented that old electricity machine down in the vaults.”

  “Which doesn’t work.”

  “Oh, it worked when he built it, but it wasn’t very practical here; and for some reason, his abbot would never let him teach anyone to fix it. Have you ever seen an electric light?”

  “No.”

  “Neither have I, but the Palace of the Hannegans in Texark is full of them. And they’ve got some at the university there. Brother Kornhoer and Pfardentrott became friends, as I recall, but the Abbot Jerome didn’t approve. Say, why don’t you read that placard that hangs over Kornhoer’s machine?”

  “I’ve seen it, but I never read it. The machine is a nuisance to keep clean. So many cracks and crannies for dust.” Torrildo was an underground janitor and warehouse clerk. “You never told me about your Memorabilium, Blacktooth.”

  “Well, it’s a religious one. I don’t think it has any secret scientific value. They call it ‘Saint Leibowitz’s Grocery List.’” He tried to suppress the flush of pride he felt at being given the Founder’s Memorabilium, but Torrildo did not notice.

  “Does anything special happen when you say it?”

  “I wouldn’t say yes, I wouldn’t say no. Maybe I never worked at it hard enough. As Saint Leibowitz himself used to say, ‘What you see is what you get, Wysiwyg.’”

  “Where is that saying recorded? What does it mean?”

  Blacktooth, who loved the cryptic “Sayings of Saint Leibowitz,” was spared answering as the bell rang the hour of Sext, marking the resumption of the rule of silence, which the abbot had suspended for the morning of his departure. The monks on the parapet wall began to leave.

  “Come see me in the basement, if you get a chance,” Torrildo whispered in violation of the rule.

  Blacktooth’s Nomadic ancestors had always placed a high value on ecstatic magical or religious experience, and this heritage, while pagan, was not incongruent with the traditional mystical quest which he had found so attractive and natural in the life of the monastery. But as his feeling of unity with his professed brethren gradually waned, he found himself less captivated by the formal worship of the community. Processions and the chanting of psalms no longer elevated his spirits and sent them soaring. Even the reception of the Eucharist during Mass failed to entrance his heart. He felt this as a distinct loss, in spite of his doubts about his vocation to the Order. He tried to recover by his solitary devotional practice what he was losing in the public worship.

  A monk’s time alone in his cell was limited to seven hours a night, of which at least an hour and a half was to be spent in meditative, affective, or contemplative prayer. Some of this prayer time was devoted to the reading of those parts of the divine office which his daily work at the abbey prevented him from singing in choir at the regular hours, but Blacktooth rarely needed more than twenty minutes to finish his breviary, and the rest of the time he gave to Jesus and Mary. In his sleep, however, his dreams were often colored by the myths of his childhood and of the Wild Horse Woman whom he had seen.

  His confessor and spiritual adviser had sharply warned him, more than once, against taking seriously any seemingly supernatural manifestation that came to him during the contemplative work, such as a vision or a voice, for such things were usually either the work of the Devil or simply the spurious side effects of the intense concentration demanded by meditative or contemplative prayer. When the visions began coming to him one night in his cell, he attributed them to fever, for he had fallen ill the previous day, and was excused from the scriptorium.

  He knelt on a thinly padded block of wood beside his cot and gazed unwaveringly at a small picture of the Immaculate Heart that hung on the wall. When his mind strayed, or a thought arose, he brought his attention back to the picture. The painting was undistinguished, lacking in detail, and hardly more than a symbol. The prayer was a wordless, thoughtless fixation of the mind on the image and the heart of the Virgin. He was a bit dizzy from fever, and a numbness came over him as he knelt there. Occasionally his field of vision darkened. The heart began to pulsate, and then expand. He could no longer focus his eyes on it. His mind seemed to be plunging into a dark corridor toward emptiness.

  And then, there it was: a living heart suspended before him in the blackness of space, beating in cadence with his own pulse. It was complete in every detail. A puncture of the left ventricle leaked small spurts of blood. For a time he felt neither fear nor surprise, but continued to gaze in complete absorption. He knew, beyond words, that it was not the heart of Mary, but not until later reflection did this puzzle or perplex him. He simply accepted what came to him, at the time it happened.

  A rap at the door dissolved the trance. His skin crawled at the sharp change in his consciousness.

  “Benedicamus domino,” he answered after a moment.

  “Deo gratias,” came a muffled voice from the corridor. It was Brother Jonan, arousing everyone for Matins. The footsteps receded.

  He arose and made himself ready for his usual routine, but he carried the spell cast over him by the vision all that day and the next. It was very puzzling, even after his fever passed.

  When Prior Olshuen had not summoned him by the third day of Dom Jarad’s absence, Blacktooth sought him out. Olshuen was an old friend; he had been Blacktooth’s teacher and confessor in the days before he was made prior, but just now the appearance of his old student at his office doorway evoked no smile of welcome.

  “Oh, well, I did tell you to come see me, didn’t I?” said Olshuen. “You might as well sit down.” He returned to his chair, put his elbows on the desktop, pressed his fingertips together, and at last smiled thinly at Blacktooth. He waited.

  Blacktooth sat on the edge of his chair, eyebrows raised. He also waited. The prior began flipping opposed fingertips apart, a pair at a time, and flipping them back together. Blacktooth always found this habit fascinating. His coordination was perfect.

  “I came to ask—”

  “Dom Jarad told me to throw you out if you came to ask for anything more than a blessing, unless you’re through with Boedullus, and I know you’re not. I don’t throw you out, because I had already invited you.” He punctuated each phrase with a pause a
nd a flip of the fingertips. He did this only when nervous. “So what do you want, my son?”

  “A blessing.”

  Easily disarmed, the gentle Olshuen lowered his hands, leaned forward, and laughed his relief.

  “On my petition to be released from my vows.”

  The smile vanished. He leaned back, pressed fingertips together again, and said in a mild tone, “Blacktooth, my son. What a dirty rotten little Nomad kid you are!”

  “You’ve obviously spoken to Dom Jarad about me, Father Prior.” Blacktooth risked a rueful grin.

  “He said nothing you’d want to hear, and he said a few things you’re better off not hearing. He spent at least half a minute on the subject, talking fast. Then he told me to throw you out, and he left.”

  Blacktooth stood up. “Before I get thrown, would you mind telling me how I can find out about the procedure?”

  “The procedure for what, to abandon your vows?” Olshuen waited for Blacktooth’s nod, then went on: “Well, you turn right when you go out the door. You walk down the hall to the stairway, and then you take it down to the cloister. You go around to the main entrance, and on out into the courtyard. Across the courtyard is the main gate, and outside that, you go to the road. From there, you’re on your own. The way to your new future lies open before you.” He found it unnecessary to add that Blacktooth would be under excommunication, ineligible for employment in many places, deprived of all right to petition in ecclesiastical courts, cut off from the sacraments, shunned by the clergy and the pious among the laity, and readily victimized by anyone who realized that he was unable to sue in the courts.

  “I meant to get out legally, of course.”

  “There are books on canon law in the library.”

  “Thank you, Father Prior.” Blacktooth started to leave.

  “Wait,” said the prior, relenting. “Tell me, son—if, after you’ve finished Boedullus—this is hypothetical, understand?—if, then, you’re given a choice of jobs, how would you feel about the other thing?”

  The monk hesitated. “I would probably think about the other thing all over again.”

  “How close are you to being finished?”

  “Ten chapters to go.”

  Olshuen sighed and said, “Sit down again.” He rummaged through papers on his desk until he found a sealed envelope. Blacktooth could see his own name on it, written in Dom Jarad’s hand. The prior slit it open, unfolded the enclosed note, read it slowly, and looked at Blacktooth. He put his fingertips together again and began tapping them by pairs as before.

  “A choice of jobs?”

  “Yes—he left you a choice. When you finish The Book of Origins, you can do the same author’s Footprints of Earlier Civilizations. Unless you’re sick and tired of the Venerable Boedullus.”

  “I’m sick and tired of the venerable one.”

  “Then you will be assigned to translate Yogen Duren’s Perennial Ideas of Regional Sects.”

  “Into Nomadic?”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you, Father Prior.”

  Blacktooth went down the hall to the stairway, descended to the cloister, left it by the main entrance, crossed the courtyard, and walked out to the road through the main gate. There he stood for a while, gazing uncertainly at the arid landscape. Down the trail lay the village of Sanly Bowitts, and several miles beyond the village arose the flat-topped hill called the Mesa of Last Resort. There were mountains in the distance, with a few hills in the foreground. The land was lightly covered by cactus and yucca, with sparse grass and mesquite growing in the low places. There were distant antelope, and he could see Brother Shepherd leading his flock through the pass, his dog snarling at the heels of a straggler.

  A wagon drawn by a swayback mule pulled to a stop, engulfing Blacktooth in a thin cloud of dust. “Going to town, Brother?” asked its grizzled driver from his perch atop a pile of feed sacks.

  Blacktooth was tempted to go past the village and climb Last Resort. It was said to be haunted, a place monks sometimes went alone (with permission) for a kind of spiritual ordeal in the wilderness. But after a brief pause he shook his head. “Many thanks, good simpleton.”

  He walked back through the main gate and headed for the basement vaults. When Saint Leibowitz had founded the Order, tradition said that there had been nothing here except an ancient military bunker or temporary ammunition dump, which he and his helpers had managed to disguise so that one might pass a stone’s throw away and never notice its existence. It was in this place that the earliest Memorabilia were preserved. According to Boedullus, no living quarters were constructed on the site until the middle of the twenty-first century. The monks had lived in scattered hermitages and came here only to deposit books and records until the fury of the Simplification had abated and the danger to the precious documents from skinheads and simplifiers had waned. Here, still underground, the ancient Memorabilia and the latter-day Commentaries awaited a destiny which had, perhaps, already come and was swiftly receding.

  CHAPTER 3

  Let the monks sleep clothed and girded with belts

  or cords—but not with their knives at their sides

  lest they cut themselves in their sleep…. The younger

  brethren shall not have beds next to one another,

  but among those of the older ones.

  —Saint Benedict’s Rule, Chapter 22

  AN OIL LAMP TOO DIM FOR READING HUNG IN each alcove where books were stored. A light held by hand was needed to locate a title on the shelves. Ordinarily one then carried the book up to the clerestory reading room, but Blacktooth scanned the abstract of Duren’s De Perennibus Sententiis Sectarum Rurum, his next assigned project, by the light of a candle held close to the pages. He soon returned the book to the shelf and went to join Brother Torrildo, who was leaning against Kornhoer’s old generator of electrical essence, a rusting hulk in an alcove where no light burned.

  “Let’s sit back here where nobody’ll catch us,” Torrildo muttered, and stepped into the deep shadows behind the machine. “Brother Obohl’s gone out, but I’m not sure where.”

  Blacktooth hesitated. “I don’t need to hide. I have reason for being here, even if I didn’t ask permission.”

  “Shhh! You don’t have to whisper, but keep it down. I’m only allowed to come in here to clean. Not that it matters much now.”

  “What’s that door?” Blacktooth nodded toward the rear of the dark alcove.

  “Just a closet full of junk. Parts of the machine, I think. Come on.”

  The monk hesitated. The machine somehow gave him the creeps. It reminded him of the special chair in the chapel, which was really a holy relic.

  With the faster travel and communication made possible by the conquests of Hannegan II, invention had become contagious in a world that was beginning to recover twelve centuries after the Magna Civitas perished in the Flame Deluge. Most inventions, of course, were reinventions, suggested by the few surviving records of that great civilization, but new devices were nonetheless cunning and needed. What was needed at Hannegan City was an efficient and humane method of capital punishment. Thus, the building of a generator of electrical essences at the Abbey of Saint Leibowitz in 3175 a.d. was followed in a few years by the building of a chair of electrical essences at Hannegan City in the Empire of Texark. The first offender to be executed by the new method was a Leibowitzian monk whose crime was carrying a cardinal abbot’s offer of sanctuary to a son of the late Thon Taddeo Pfardentrott, an enemy of the Texark state, whose work at Leibowitz Abbey had, nevertheless, made possible many new inventions that benefited the Empire, including the chair of electrical essences.

  It was the first and only time the chair was used. Hannegan III had placed it on a platform in the public square, and while two teams of mules drove the electrical generator, the Mayor himself cut the ribbon that allowed a spring to close the switch. To the crowd’s delight, the voltage was low and the monk died slowly and noisily. The method was abandoned until a be
tter generator was built. Steam power came, but the chair was never brought out of storage, because a more recent Hannegan found the best executioner on this continent in the person of Wooshin, whose ancestors came from a different continent, and who used a hatchet with such artistry and ease that a whole afternoon of severing heads left him untired and tranquil, able to sit in deep meditation for two hours before dinner.

  The chair of electrical essence was eventually disassembled and smuggled across the southern Plains, then out of the Empire at the Bay Ghost frontier. It reappeared at Leibowitz Abbey, where it was placed in the Church over the crypt that contained the bones of the monk who died in it, and regularly on the day of his death, the chair was incensed, sprinkled with holy water, and venerated in his memory. Leibowitz Abbey became the only monastery on the continent with its own electric chair. Some thirty years later, the abbey inherited the now elderly executioner, Wooshin, who staggered out of a sandstorm asking for water and sanctuary. That was only three years ago.

  “Are you going to stand out there until they catch me?” Torrildo asked impatiently.

  Blacktooth sighed and squeezed into the dark cranny beside him. Someone had piled a number of worn sleeping pads, torn and stinking of mildew, in the shadows behind the machine. They sat in comfort.

  “I never knew about this,” said Blacktooth, amused.

  “Blacktooth, are you going to run away?”

  The older monk was silent for a time, considering. Earlier he just wanted to run as far as Last Resort, to make a decision, and then maybe come back. Torrildo felt his thigh, as if groping for an answer. He brushed the hand away and sighed. “I just read the abstract on the Duren book. It’s a history of local cults and heresies that keep popping up and coming back in different places. God knows why Dom Jarad wants something like that translated into Nomadic. I can’t even begin to guess, until I read the whole book.”

  “You aren’t going to run away?”