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

After an absence of two months, Abbot Jarad wrote to the prior from Valana and requested, among other things, that a votive Mass be offered weekly for the election of a pope, for he saw no quick end to a difficult election. Without a government, the Church was in confusion and turmoil. The city of Valana was too small to be a gracious host to hundreds of cardinals with their secretaries, servants, and alternates. Some were living in barns.

He wrote little about the conclave itself, except to note with obvious disgust that more than one cardinal had already gone home, leaving behind a special conclavist to cast his ballot. The practice was made possible by a canon which had been enacted for the convenience of foreign, not domestic, cardinals, but the latter took advantage of it during long periods of interregnum. The special conclavist in such cases must, if possible, be a member of the clergy of the cardinal’s titular New Roman (or Valanan) Church, and he was entitled to vote his own convictions under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, but such a proxy was always chosen for loyalty, and rarely deviated from his cardinal’s wishes until an election became obvious and he switched his vote to back a winner. The practice made compromise more difficult, as the servant was always less flexible than the master. Jarad would make no prediction as to the date of his return. The messenger who brought the letter, however, got mildly drunk in Sanly Bowitts and expressed his own opinion of the affair: either the cardinals would all appoint conclavists and go home for the winter, leaving a hopeless deadlock, or would elect an ill old man who could be expected to die before settling any real problems.

Other news and gossip trickled to the abbey from Valana by way of travelers, guardians of the papal roads, and messengers who spent the night on their way to other destinations. Abbot Jarad Cardinal Kendemin was said to have received two votes on the thirty-eighth ballot—a dubious rumor which caused a flurry of excitement and joy at the abbey and asurge of panic in the heart of Blacktooth, who needed a pope’s assent to be released from his vows, under the laws then in effect.

“You’re not making sense,” Brother Reconciliator told him at their weekly session after he listened to five minutes of Blacktooth’s nervous chatter. “You think Dom Jarad has his foot on your neck. You think he’ll never change his mind. If he comes home still the abbot, you can appeal to the Pope. But if he’s the Pope, he’ll have nothing better to do than keep his foot on your neck, eh? You’ll spend your whole life translating the Memorabilia into Nomadic. Why do you suppose Dom Jarad hates you so much?”

“I didn’t say he hated me. You’re putting words in my mouth.”

“Excuse me. He has his foot on your neck. Your father also had his foot on your neck, you said. I forgot. It was your father who hated you, yes?”

“No! I didn’t say that either, exactly.”

Levion shuffled through his notes. They were sitting in his cell, which served as his office; his role as a special counselor was not a full-time one.

“Three weeks ago, you said exactly: ‘My father hated me.’ I wrote it down.”

Blacktooth sat slouched on Levion’s cot, leaning back against the wall Suddenly he leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, and began wringing his hands. He spoke to the floor. “If I said it, I meant when he hated me, he was drunk. He hated the responsibility. Raising me was supposed to be my boss uncle’s job. Also, he was angry because my mother was teaching me to read a little.” Blacktooth put his hand over his mouth, betrayed by this thoughtless revelation.

“Here are two things I don’t understand, Brother St. George. First, you came here illiterate, did you not? Second, why should your uncle be responsible for you instead of your father?”

“That’s the way it is on the Plains. The mother’s brothers take responsibility for her children.” Blacktooth was increasingly restless. He eyed the door.

“Oh yes, Nomads are matriarchal. Is that right?”

“Wrong! Inheritance is matrilineal. That’s not the same.”

“Well, whatever. So your father felt put-upon, because your mother had no brother?”

“Wrong again. She had four brothers. My boss uncle was the oldest. He taught me dances and songs, took me to tribal councils, and that’s about all. I could not become a warrior. Mother owned no breeding pit, no broodmares, and we were outcasts.”

“Broodmares? What have broodmares got to do with—” He left the question unfinished, waved his hand in the air as if trying to dispel echoes. “Never mind. Nomad customs. I’ll never untangle that ball of worms. Let’s get back to the problem. You felt your father’s foot on your neck. You say your mother was teaching you to read? But you said you came here illiterate. Did you lie?”

Blacktooth rested his chin on his hands and stared at his feet; he wiggled his toes and said nothing.

“Whatever you tell me stays right here in this room, Brother.”

The patient paused, then blurted, “I couldn’t read very well, or speak Rockymount very well. Wren and Singing Cow couldn’t read at all. I kept quiet because everyone thought we were real Nomads. If Abbot Graneden found out we came from the settlements, he would have sent us back.”

“I see. So that’s why you learned faster than Wren and Singing Cow. Your mother had already taught you. Where was she educated?”

“She learned what little she knew from a mission priest.”

Levion was silent for a time as he studied his occasional disciple. “Whose idea was it to run away to join the wild Nomads?”

“Singing Cow’s.”

“And when the Nomads turned you away, whose idea was it to come here?”

“Mine.”

“Tell me again. When did your mother die?”

“Year before last.”

“When did you first tell Dom Jarad you wanted to quit the Order?”

Blacktooth said nothing.

“It was right after your mother died, wasn’t it?”

“That had nothing to do with it,” he growled.

“Didn’t it? As a runaway, how did you feel when you got the news your mother had died?”

The bell rang. Blacktooth stood up with a sudden smile, unable to hide his relief.

“Well?”

“I felt very sorry, of course. Now I’ve got to go to work, Brother.”

“Of course. Next week then, we’ll talk more about this.”

Blacktooth liked these sessions less and less. He had no wish to be reconciled by Brother Reconciliator, who seemed to treat his wish to depart as a symptom of illness, if not madness. As he hurried back to the copy room, he resolved to tell Levion no more about his parents or his childhood.

Because of the man’s ignorance of Nomad life, his interviews with Brother Levion, instead of reconciling him with his calling, served instead to increase his nostalgia for that life which he had never quite inherited. He remembered his mother turning Christian, and his father, who sometimes tried to exercise an uncle’s authority over him, insisting that he prepare himself for a manhood rite which he knew at the time would never be celebrated. The Church forbade the rite which turned adolescents into fully licensed mankillers of a war cult. But he had undergone training and understood something of the spirit of the Nomad warrior and his battle frenzy. It was hard to say anything true in answer to the question: What is Nomad religion like? Everything the wild Nomad did was religiously or magically hedged. It was hard to say what his religion was not. One might add up a list of ingredients for a religion: his ceremonies, his customs, his laws, his magic, his medicine, his oracles, his dances, his occasional ritual killing, his Empty Sky and his Wild Horse Woman, and call the list his religion, but this list would omit too much of daily living. There was even a ritual for defecation.