Walter Miller, Jr.: Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

He waited for the baby to die before burying them both together. Bury the dead.

It would be dry and hot for days, and then the rain would come, announced by lightning, attended by thunder, falling in sheets and turning the roads to mud. Hilbert’s fever was handy, enabling Blacktooth to go for miles without eating. The long feverish days reminded him of his Lenten fast as a novice, when he had been seeking his vocation and thought he had found it among the Albertian book-leggers of Saint Leibowitz. And hadn’t he? He missed the abbey and the Brothers, now that he had the freedom he had sought. He had even been released from his vows by the Pope himself; or had he simply been bound in new chains?

Go, and be a hermit.

The day Blacktooth saw Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, he had been traveling all morning over open grasslands between wooded draws. He was worried about outlaws because he had seen several campfires near the road, still smoldering, yet never saw anyone. He considered putting his habit back on, but decided against it. Even those who didn’t hate the Church for what it had supposedly done to their world, often thought it was rich, and even a poor monk could be a target for highwaymen.

By midday he had the distinct feeling someone was following him. He looked back every time he crossed a high spot—the road was empty and he saw only buzzards, flyspecks to the south and east. Blacktooth was glad to see that he had crossed that shifting boundary where the forest begins to give way to the grass; but the feeling of being followed wouldn’t go away. It became so real that when he crossed the next creek, he hid on the far bank behind the corpse-colored trunk of a fallen sycamore, to watch.

Sure enough, a white mule with red ears came through the trees and down the muddy bank. At first he thought the woman on the beast’s back was Ædrea, with the twins she had gotten by him under the waterfall. But it was the Fujæ Go, the Day Maiden herself. Far beyond Ædrea in beauty, she carried an infant in each arm, one white and one black, both nursing at her full breasts. Even as she rode the mule down the muddy bank and into the water, they sucked on.

Then she dropped the reins. The mule stopped in the center of the sluggish stream. Its black eyes were looking straight at Blacktooth; no, through him.

He stood up, no longer trying to hide. As he stepped over the log, he realized that what he was seeing was not in his world and not for him to touch. He knew with certainty that if he spoke, she would not hear him, and that even if she looked straight at him, she would not see him. He felt that he had changed places with one of his own fever dreams, and that it was they, and not he, that were real.

That he was the dream.

It was then Saint Leibowitz stepped out of the bushes and took the rope halter. Blacktooth knew him from Brother Fingo’s twenty-sixth-century wooden statue in the corridor outside the abbot’s office; he recognized the curious smile and dubious eyes. That the Saint was no vision, Blacktooth knew from the faint, sweet fuel-oil smell that hung in the air as he passed. It was Blacktooth who was the dream.

As she rode past, the Fujæ Go gazed up toward the sky. Blacktooth hadn’t noticed how majestic the little oaks could be, a filigree of branches against a pale sky. One baby was blinding, albino white; the other was as black as Specklebird. Both had their eyes squeezed shut like tiny fists fending off the world. The mule looked straight through Blacktooth, like the Day Maiden. Only Leibowitz, in his burlap robes with his rope over his shoulder, looked directly at the monk as if to say, like Axe, “Come.”

Then he winked and walked on.

Sancte Isaac Eduarde, ora pro me!

Blacktooth followed; Blacktooth had always followed where Leibowitz had led. But now he was weak and he fell twice climbing the bank. By the time he got to the top, the two (the three? the five?) were far down the narrow trail, almost lost in the dappled shadows. He hurried after them but he was feverish, and even though they were not walking fast, he gradually fell behind. He had to stop again, and he must have fallen asleep, for when he .woke it was almost dark and they were impossibly far away, like a speck in the eye, an iota shimmering in the distance.

But something was wrong.

The sun was setting behind his right shoulder. Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman were not heading west into the sea of grass, but south, toward Hannegan City. The Høngin Fujæ Vurn always chose the victor as her Lord, and the Hannegan had won the war. By choosing a husband, she chooses a King, and she was Filpeo’s now. Leibowitz was taking her to him.

Blacktooth wandered on, hoping to find Texark soldiers who would give him pills. The winter was coming; it was the winter of 3246. The Empire and its borders were being redrawn and the few travelers Blacktooth passed were wary. Every few days he buried a corpse as he walked west, no longer a cardinal, no longer even a monk. Go and be a hermit.

It no longer rained. The trees thinned out into shadows in the draws, and the road led higher and higher into a world all grass under a dome of sky. Blacktooth’s fever had become a small fire that both weakened and sustained him. The morning he left the last of the trees behind, he saw a great bird circling far above. It was a Red Buzzard, the Pope’s bird. Ahead by the road something or someone had fallen. Two smaller black buzzards pulled at it, but the meat was not yet ripe enough for their beaks. Nimmy stopped to watch as the Burregun, the Pope’s bride (as he thought of it), swooped down. Awed by her size, the smaller buzzards stepped back, black heads bobbing; but she ignored them, and they soon joined her at the attempted feast. The Red Buzzard was stronger and had a little better luck, but still the carcass was too fresh for easy eating.

From where he sat on a hummock of grass, Blacktooth could not tell if the corpse was human. “Feed the hungry, nurse the sick, visit the prisoner,” he said aloud, reciting the corporal works of mercy.

Bury the dead.

He tossed a rock. The birds stopped and eyed him with funereal solemnity, then strutted and preened and resumed eating. He tossed another rock and they ignored it. He still carried Wooshin’s short sword, but he could not summon the resolve to quarrel with the queen of the buzzards.

Then he watched as a bald eagle came, driving them all away, even the Burregun, the Buzzard of Battle. The bald eagle was Filpeo’s National Bird. It nosed at the corpse, then lost interest and left, riding a thermal straight up into the china blue sky.

Blacktooth St. George got to his feet and went to see what it was he had been left to bury. He hoped it was not another child.

IT WAS A GOOD YEAR FOR THE BUZZARDS. THEY followed Blacktooth all the way back to the Abbey of Saint Leibowitz, little dots like eyespecks against the expanse of Empty Sky. Blacktooth gave up on finding Hilbert’s pills, and the disease gradually gave up on him, burning down to embers. If he had a fever it was the same fever that had plagued him all his life, the burning that Amen and Brownpony had noticed, each from his own particular perspective.

There was no longer a safe route across the grasslands. One could no longer evade the Empire by traveling north of the Nady Ann, or avoid the hordes by traveling to the south. Both groups had interpenetrated, and the contended territories on both sides of the Nady Ann were passable, and yet uncertain. South of the Brave, the Kingdom of Laredo had collapsed in on itself.