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

The grass itself seemed to be shrinking back into the earth.

There were stretches of sand and dust that took half a day to cross. The Empty Sky seemed even more of an emptiness than before. Blacktooth wore his habit again, and said his rosary as he walked. But had he eaten? And where had he found water? The few people he saw were on horses, on the horizons.

One day there was rain. But it was a swift dry rain, the kind that comes to the high plains and barely reaches the ground, darkening the dust and throwing it up in great splotches, and then evaporating suddenly in the flashes of sun that showed, like slow lightning, after the clouds had ridden away on their long ponies.

Empty Sky.

There was no road, and then no trail. Blacktooth followed the setting sun. Wagon tracks braided across the dry rivercourses, running in every direction. The few people Blacktooth met were peaceful and shared their food; the bodies he found he buried, using the short sword he had borrowed from the Axe.

He walked alone most of the time, accompanied only by his shadow striding before him in the morning, and falling behind by evening. Only at noon, in the heat, would it desert him altogether. Reduced to its essentials, sky and earth, the world seemed more intricate and complex than ever.

Blacktooth missed the little glep cougar with its blue ears. He wondered what had become of Aberlott, who had so loved the little brass cartridges of war. Had he become one of the motherless ones? Or found his final home under the prairie soil?

Other such thoughts came, one with each step… arriving and departing without speaking, like birds. At other times Blacktooth walked with an empty mind, a gift, like Empty Sky, in which each step was a prayer.

It was a good year for the buzzards. Blacktooth could tell by how easily they were chased away. There were always other feasts waiting, just over the next hill.

Dom Abiquiu Olshuen had died after another stroke, and Prior Devendy was taking his place until a new abbot could be elected according to the time-honored Benedictine rule. Once he had arrived, Blacktooth had little desire to stay at the monastery, even though most of his good memories (as well as many of his bad ones) were set amid those ancient adobe walls. The stories of Ædrea’s stay as Sister Clare had become almost legend, and Blacktooth heard several versions. They were linked with the apparition some of the Brothers claimed to have seen of the Holy Virgin in the eastern sky.

“That’s the Night Hag,” said Blacktooth. “She means war and death, not peace and hope.” He could tell by the way Brother Wren and the others crossed themselves that they didn’t want to hear it— even though they were preparing for war in their own way. They had sealed the holy relics in their original chamber and dusted off the Jackrabbit smuggler’s cannon. Brother Carpenter was in the basement, planing boards for a heavier door. The defeat of Brownpony’s plans for a new order signaled the beginning of a new age of darkness. Somehow Blacktooth no longer feared it, or even thought about it. Blood and screams were the water in which humankind swam.

Four children had been brought in from the village. Two of them had already died. It seemed there were new diseases abroad in the desert.

After visiting Jarad’s grave, Blacktooth stood looking into the empty one that was always kept waiting. The straw around the open maw was hardly necessary, as there had been even less rain this year than usual, Prior Devendy explained. The grave was so deep that it seemed to Blacktooth that he could see all the way to the bottom of, of ...

He swayed and almost fell. “Gerard’s affliction,” the Brothers called it after the beloved fainting monk of almost a thousand years ago.

“You seem a little woozy,” said Prior Devendy. “Come.”

He led Blacktooth through the crowded dayroom of the monastery, under the old familiar vigas, into Olshuen’s office. Using a key that hung from a cord around his neck, Devendy opened a drawer, and took from it another key, with which he opened a cabinet of dusty bottles. He poured a glass of brandy. Blacktooth almost waved it away until he saw that Devendy was pouring one for himself as well.

“Oregon,” he said. “It was left here as a gift for Brownpony when he became Pope Amen Two. He took the papacy to New Jerusalem and never drank it.”

“And now he is dead,” Blacktooth said. He had told no one about the scene in the basilica of Saint Peter’s—only that the Pope was dead.

“He made you a cardinal,” said Devendy. “Where is your hat?”

“My zucchetto. I put all that behind me. I suspect whoever is made Pope will undo all Brownpony’s cardinals anyway.”

“You don’t need to be a cardinal here,” said Devendy. He smiled tentatively. “Only a priest.”

“Only a what?” Blacktooth looked at the old priest warily.

“The Brothers want to elect you Abbot. For that you will have to be ordained.”

“That’s not possible,” said Blacktooth. “Non accepto.”

“My thoughts exactly,” said Devendy, looking relieved. “But I promised I would ask.”

“I have no vocation for it,” said Blacktooth. “I was given my vocation by Pope Amen Two. I will stay a couple of nights and then go.”

“To the Mesa of Last Resort?”

“I thought I might go that way.”

“That’s where she went,” said Prior Devendy. “She was, uh, injured, you know, and she stayed with the old Jew after she left here. But I’m sure she must be gone.”

Blacktooth looked out the window toward the Mesa. It shimmered in the distance like a mirage of rock.

“Is the old Jew still there?”

The old Jew was still there. Blacktooth left the abbey the next morning with the gifts of a blanket and breviary, a canteen and a loaf of bread. He was greeted with a rattle of stones halfway up the trail that led to the top of the Mesa. He ignored them; they were only pebbles. He wedged himself up through the last crack onto the top, and there was Benjamin Eleazar bar Joshua, looking no older than he had looked ten years before, or a hundred years before that for all Blacktooth knew.

“You,” said the old man. “I suspected it might be you.”

“Brownpony is dead,” Blacktooth said.

“He was not the one” was all old Benjamin had replied. He told Blacktooth that Ædrea had stayed with him several months, until her sores had healed, and then had left without revealing her plans.

Had he found her much changed?

“Changed?” The old Jew only smiled and shook his head, apparently misunderstanding. “It never was any better, it never will be any better. It will only be richer or poorer, sadder but not wiser, until the very last day.”

Irritated, weary of oracles and parables, Blacktooth wrapped himself in his blanket and went straight to sleep. He stayed with Benjamin two nights, sleeping in the tent where Ædrea had slept. The old tent-maker himself never stayed in a tent if he could help it. Blacktooth was awakened by rain on the tent every night, a few great splattering drops. Or was that a dream sent to advertise his tentmaking and rain-making skills? There was dry lightning off to the east each night: the Horse Woman, admonishing her children on the Plains.

He left on the third day. The old Jew filled his canteen from a pool hidden under a rock. The water was cold and clear, and Blacktooth was surprised to find that it lasted him all the way to New Jerusalem.

“Even if she had come,” Prior Singing Cow told Blacktooth at Saint Leibowitz-in-the-Cottonwoods, “I would have turned her away. You heard what had happened to her.”

“Yes.”

Blacktooth had followed the papal road north, then cut off at Arch Hollow, into the Suckamints. The settlement at New Jerusalem was much diminished. Magister Dion had not made it back from the “Antipope’s war” (as even the spooks were calling it), and no one knew of Shard’s Ædrea, except that she had left for Laredo under interdiction. No one believed Blacktooth when he told them that the interdiction had been lifted by the Pope who was not a pope, at New Rome which was no longer New Rome.