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

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 better 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?”

“How can I? I took solemn vows.”

Torrildo released a choking sob in the darkness. “I’m going to run away.”

“That’s silly. All you need to leave in good standing is Dom Jarad’s permission, and for a postulant that’s just formality.”

“But Dom Jarad is gone. I have to leave now!” His sobbing intensified. Blacktooth put a comforting arm around his shoulders. Torrildo leaned against him and cried quietly into the hollow of his neck.

“Now, what is the matter with you?” asked the older monk.

Torrildo lifted his head and put his face close to Blacktooth’s. All Blacktooth could see was an oval shadow with Torrildo’s beautiful eyes peering out of it.

“Do you really like me, Blacktooth?”

“Of course I do, Torri. What a question!”

“You’re the only reason I’ve been staying here these past months.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Oh, you say you don’t, but you do. Now I just can’t stay here any longer. I’d just get you into trouble anyway. I’m impure. I haven’t been faithful to you.”

“What are you talking about? Faithful how?” Blacktooth shifted restlessly on the moldy mattresses.

“Oh, you’re so smart, but you’re so naive.” He took Blacktooth’s face in his soft thin hands. “I’m going. Will you kiss me goodbye?” He felt Blacktooth wince, and dropped his hands. “You won’t, then.”

“Well, sure I will, Torri.” Carefully Blacktooth offered him the kiss of peace, first a peck on the right cheek, then—

“Ohhhh,” the youth sighed, and caught him in a fierce embrace.

Blacktooth felt lips pressing his own and a tongue trying to work its way between his teeth. He tossed his head aside and leaned back, gagging. Torri fell on top of him and groped under the hem of his robe, both hands sliding up his legs. Blacktooth was first frightened, then horrified by his own erection, which the inflamed Torrildo discovered with delight.

“Torri, no!”

“You know I was meant to be a girl….”

The door of the closet burst open. A skinny arm thrust out a lantern above them. In the sudden light, Blacktooth caught a glimpse of four naked legs and two erect penes.

“Sodomites!” yelled the senior librarian, Brother Obohl. “I caught you at it. I finally caught you, you scum. Up to the prior’s office with you!” He aimed a kick at Torrildo’s bare rump, but missed. Obohl was nearsighted. Once he had owned the only pair of spectacles at the abbey, ground for him in Texark, but had given them up for religious reasons. Now he grabbed Torrildo’s arm, and yelled at Blacktooth, who was scrambling over the machine.