nd his surprise was reflected by the warrior's. Neither of them ever mentioned Brownpony's origins to others, judging it a taboo subject. Now the Red Deacon was announcing his mysterious bastardy to the world, which already knew of it in whispers. And yet he himself knew little or nothing of it, according to the file the monk had seen at the Secretariat.
    "And there is my secretary," said Brownpony, looking down at Blacktooth. "His ancestors were Grasshopper refugees from your Texark pacification. They lost all their cattle to Hannegan's diseased animals. His parents died without horses, farming another's land. From him, I know something of the Grasshopper people and their history. For centuries they have pastured their animals on the land of which you speak, among their other lands. That region was called 'Iowa' on  the ancient maps, I believe, but it is nearly treeless, and yet fertile enough for the farmers to covet it. And the Grasshopper has always gathered wood for poles, stakes, arrows, and spears from the thinly forested lands north and south of that area. If the farmers are there now, they've settled there since Hannegan's slaughter. You paint the Texark forces as protectors. You want the Pope back in New Rome, in the midst of his protectors. I too want the Pope back in New Rome, in spite of his protectors, in the midst of his enemies, among whom you have just counted yourself. You have been sent here to draw fire away from your master. Now the Cardinal Archbishop of Texark, who we all know has sent you, must either underwrite your views, or denounce your slander against the people of the Plains."
    There was an astonished silence, followed by brief applause and cheering from two Westerners. Father General Corvany ominously lost his smile again, and came to his feet. The applause quickly subsided. Brownpony sat down smiling. Cardinals were looking over their shoulders at him. On the stage, Jarad's jaw dropped. Brownpony was known as a diplomat, always courteous, a peacemaker who rarely took sides. His tone had been calm, but he had just declared war, and it had to be premeditated.
    Before Corvany could speak, a sputtering archbishop from the delta of the Great River, now part of the Texark Empire, arose in a huff to defend the speaker's thesis concerning the protective role of past Hannegans in the Midwest, and to deplore the interruptions. He pointed a finger toward the balcony and began to say something about Brownpony, but the Dean of the Sacred College arose and roared, "God's peace! God's peace!"
    The seminar was about to become a verbal melee, and few in the audience noticed the student who wandered down the center aisle. He was staggering slightly. Aberlott suddenly clutched Blacktooth's arm and pointed. The man in the aisle was Jæsis, uncombed and un-shaved, his face livid but with red blotches. He stopped in the middle of the cardinals' section and pulled something out of his half-buttoned cassock. He croaked Yordin's name and a curse. There was an explosion and a burst of smoke. Thon Yordin put his hand to his chest, looked down, but there was no blood. Instead, one of the men seated behind the podium fell from his chair. It was the Father General of the Order of Saint Ignatz himself who lay bleeding. The assailant in the aisle waved a Texark cavalry pistol aloft, yelled again at Thon Yordin, fired the other barrel toward the ceiling, and collapsed in the aisle. The audience was on its feet and roaring.
    "Assassin! Texark assassin! Hannegan's agents!"
     Blacktooth looked around for the source of this irrational voice, but saw only a fist waving in the surging crowd.
    Men swarmed over the fallen student, and from the platform came cries for a physician. Blacktooth and Aberlott were seized by police as they hurried out of the building.
    There followed eight hours of questioning at the Valana police barracks, but Cardinal Brownpony quickly appeared on their behalf. There had been no brutality. The police learned from the college that Jæsis was from Texark, had attended Thon Yordin's classes at the university there, had failed his tests and then transferred to Saint Ston's. A physician stated that even now he was delirious with fever. The police released Blacktooth and Aberlott just past midnight; they walked home by the light of the Pascal moon. Jæsis died that night in custody.
    While the city slept, the Reverend Urik Thon Yordin sent a rider galloping toward the telegraph terminal at the final outpost on the road to the Province. The message he carried was addressed to Urion Cardinal Benefez and, with a copy to the Emperor, would reach Hannegan City by Good Friday's sunrise:
    
FATHER CORVANY WAS KILLED TODAY BY A STUDENT ROOMMATE OF BROWNPONY'S NOMAD SECRETARY. THE SECRETARY WAS QUESTIONED BUT RELEASED AFTER BROWNPONY INTERVENED. KILLER DIED IN POLICE CUSTODY. DETAILS FOLLOW. I AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.
YOUR OBEDIENT SERVANT IN CHRIST,
YORDIN.
    
     
    
    
    
    
CHAPTER 10
     
     Let a man consider that God is always looking at him from heaven, that his actions are everywhere visible to the divine eyes and are I constantly being reported to God by the Angels.
     —Saint Benedict's Rule, Chapter 7
     
     
     
     
    
I
N VALANA ON SUNDAY THE 17TH OF APRIL 3244, Blacktooth arose before dawn and watched the moon, now past full, settle behind the mountains, then washed his teeth with ashes and boiled water, relieved himself in the outhouse, got dressed, and then spent in prayer the short time it took for the sun to come up. Without eating anything prior to receiving the Eucharist, he left the house. On the way to Mass in the early-morning chill, he sensed someone following him. Turning, he saw only a man talking to an open window a stone's throw away, and someone wandering in the other direction. The window's occupant, if any, was not visible. The man talking to the window was the same man Blacktooth had seen begging on the same street the day before Jæsis shot Corvany. Probably a denizen of the neighborhood. The feeling of being followed was an illusion caused by shame, the monk decided. He kept walking toward the Cathedral of Saint John-in-Exile. It was Easter morning.
    With hundreds of cardinals participating, the Mass of the Resurrection was spectacular in the Pope's own Church, even without a pope. Blacktooth had come early enough to be assigned a spot to stand with room enough to kneel, but most latecomers waited in crowds outside the nave and outside the cathedral itself. Getting out of the building after Mass was worse than getting in, because many of those pouring outside paused to talk to acquaintances and blocked the way. It was a perfect situation for murder. Blacktooth felt the dagger pierce his side as the arm holding it darted between two other worshipers, who immediately fell back in dismay. Blacktooth clutched his side and faced his attacker. It was the man who talked to empty windows, the beggar. Feeling people moving back, he looked around. There were three of them, dirty and shabbily dressed, two with knives, one with a chain. They fought there on the great ascent of cathedral steps which had no landings, and two of them were thrown sprawling to the bottom by a victim with unexpected skills. Someone was screaming for the constable, others for the Papal Guard. The original attacker, the beggar, now cut the monk's face and might have gone on to kill him, but the blast of a constable's horn sent the three of them fleeing.
    His wounds were cleaned and dressed at the police station, and he was interrogated by an irritable lieutenant who insisted on believing that he, Jæsis, Aberlott, and Crumily were conspirators in some larger scheme. Blacktooth's relationship with the cardinal provided him with a secure identity in which he dared feel immune to intimidation in the face of anything short of violence. He told the lieutenant what he needed to know and tried to ignore what he wanted to know, based on a wrong assumption.
    "No common hoodlums would try to rob a poor monk."
    "They weren't out to rob me, just kill me."
    "Exactly! and why? They must have some reason to hate you."
    "Well, they seemed to be common hoodlums, they had no reason to hate me, so they must have been hired."
    "By whom, do you think?" asked the officer.
    "By some fool who thinks Jæsis planned on killing Father Corvany, and that I was involved."
    The lieutenant, who apparently thought the same thing, glowered at him and left the room for several minutes. Blacktooth prayed to Saint Leibowitz. When the lieutenant came back, his manner had changed.
     "You will have to be on guard against another attempt. Stay with people you know. Stay home at night. Stay away from crowds like this morning's. Come outside my office and sit on the bench here. Your employer will be here soon."
    "His Eminence? For me?"
    "For himself. There was an attempt on his life too. Here, his own man can tell you."
    Wooshin had emerged from another interrogation room. He sat beside Blacktooth and briefly described the attack on Brownpony by two strangers armed with handguns. Brownpony was unharmed, and the attackers were dead. The police found one beheaded corpse on the scene, and a severed arm with a gun still in hand. The armless assassin had been found bleeding to death in an alley. If he said anything before he died to the constable who found him, the police were keeping it to themselves. There was no need to ask how they died. Soon an officer brought Wooshin his swords. They had been wiped, but were not quite clean of dried blood. The Axe frowned but sheathed them without complaint. Soon Brownpony emerged, and after an inquiry about Blacktooth's wounds, they all walked together back to the Secretariat with two armed men following at a respectful distance.
    "You have thought about what this means, Nimmy?"
    "It means somebody made a mistake, connected me with Jæsis, for one thing. And you, m'Lord?"
    "Same mistake. It is politically important to the Hannegan that gennies, Nomads, and citizens should live in mutual loathing and fear, that they might be more easily governed in their disunity. Did you know, Nimmy, did you know—Jæsis was a spook?"
    "A hidden genny? Oh no, m'Lord! That's hard to believe. I've seen him undressed."
    "There was an autopsy, and they found the signs. They've not made the fact public. There hasn't been a pogrom in decades, and we don't want one to start. Move your things immediately. Until the crowd leaves the city, you will live in the Secretariat's basement. In case they try again. We may never know who hired these men, but they were amateurs."
    "Locally recruited," the monk added. "I saw one of them before."
    "Yes, but the telegraph makes us a suburb of Texark, and words now travel faster than the sun moves over the earth. Fortunately, the conclave should begin by midweek. When Benefez, or even Corvany's replacement, gets here, he'll take command of their people. I don't think Cardinal Benefez hires assassins."
    "His nephew does," grunted the monk.
     "Professionals only, Nimmy, not amateurs," Wooshin said.
    When they came to the Secretariat, a large but low building set well back among trees, Blacktooth found three basement rooms already furnished for use by occasional messengers or political fugitives, one of them now occupied by Axe. Blacktooth chose the room closer to the privy's exit, but Axe immediately warned him: "At night, use a slop jar. Never go out that door in the dark unless I go with you."
    But no further attacks had occurred by the time the requisite number of cardinals had assembled on Wednesday of Easter week, and while people afflicted with Jæsis' disease ran amok in the streets, stripped naked in public, or just lay in bed and howled, the attempt at a conclave began. First the cardinals assembled in the great Cathedral to offer Mass together, then left the building in procession to cross the square and enter the palace where the election was to occur. An altar was set up at one end of the great throne room, and the palace was temporarily consecrated.
    Cardinal Brownpony had chosen as his conclavists Brother Blacktooth St. George and Sister Julian of the Assumption; the rule that his conclavists be clergy from Saint Maisie's applied only in his absence, and he would not be absent. Nimmy recognized his master's choice of the sister as an exquisitely diplomatic one, but his own selection jolted him into surprise, until he noticed that Brownpony was having frequent conversations with Jarad, and that Jarad had brought with him as one of his conclavists Brother Singing Cow. Nimmy became vaguely uneasy. Perhaps Nomad politics were to be considered by the Holy Ghost in the choice of a pope. Well, why not? But he dreaded meeting with Singing Cow or the abbot face-to-face.
    No sooner had the conclave convened, however, than a cardinal from Utah fell deathly ill and had to be excused, thus forcing an adjournment for lack of a quorum. Blacktooth returned to his new basement home. Police watched the building, but there was no further attack.
    During the three days the Cardinal President of the Conclave allowed the adjournment to continue, seven more electors arrived from a far northeastern province. Word came from the telegraph terminal that the Archbishop of Texark would arrive within ten days. As soon as the conclave reconvened, Cardinal Brownpony, joined by one of Benefez's conclavists to show nonpartisanship, proposed a rule empowering the sergeant-at-arms to arrest any cardinal elector attempting to leave the city or even the building without permission from the conclave. A heated protest was made by cardinals fearing the epidemic, but Brownpony in his reply pointed grimly to the anger of the people in the streets, and what might happen to the cardinal electors if they failed to sustain the quorum. The rule was passed by a large majority, and was sent on to the Valana city government with a request for help in enforcement. The request was approved, and it became a crime for a cardinal to flee Valana. And so began the process of finding a candidate agreeable to the Holy Ghost and various earthly powers, began even before that most eminent of earthly powers, Lord Cardinal Archbishop Urion Benefez, had arrived.
    The city continued to sicken.
    The ancient custom of burning ballots with or without moist straw as a signal to lend white or dark color to the smoke from the chimney was observed, but the laws governing the election of a pope had changed according to the requirements of the age. In theory, the Bishop of Rome was elected by the clergy of Rome, locked in a closed building (con clave) until two-thirds reached agreement. For thousands of years, each new cardinal, wherever he might live, was assigned a Roman Church whose upkeep was his responsibility, and whose name was part of his title: Elia Cardinal Brownpony, Deacon of Saint Maisie's in New Rome. Now there were more cardinals than there were Churches in New Rome and Valana combined.
    From time to time a protest group would march across the city to gather in Saint John's square and chant slogans before the palace. By the fifth day of the conclave, people were throwing occasional stones at the doors, and the Papal Guard, in mourning for the dead Pope, were sent out to keep order. Unwilling to shed blood, they were soon disarmed by the populace. The civil police were unable to control the crowd, short of using firearms. The crowds gathered and dispersed as they pleased. In fear, the cardinals voted for three days. When there was voting, the crowds drifted away, although there were always people who watched for white smoke.
    An occasional cardinal, usually ill, tried to leave the city, was caught, and was hauled bodily back to the palace, where a room adjoining the great hall of the conclave was staffed as an infirmary. An elector in bed could vote, his ballot carried up to the altar by a conclavist helper who held it aloft so that everyone could see that no switching was done before he placed it in the chalice. While the early and indecisive balloting continued, however, citizens from outside the palace were sealing the great, bronze double doors by building wooden scaffolding against them. A blacksmith anchored the scaffolding by hammering long spikes into lead anchors set in holes drilled into the granite walls. Other men boarded up windows.
    On the sixth day of confinement, a man climbed to the roof with a sledge and a crowbar and broke away clay tiles while another man, with an axe, chopped a hole in the roof deck beneath the tiles. Buckets of slops were drawn up to the roof, and a citizen cheerfully poured them through the hole. The ladies of the Valana Altar Society were prevented from bringing emergency food, since the kitchen had been closed by rioters. The water to the palace was shut off.
    The cardinal with the loudest voice climbed to a broken window and yelled anathemas at the crowd, excommunicating everybody who remained in the plaza after five minutes. The crowd cheered and applauded as if he had been heard to announce good news. Actually, he was not heard at all above the din.
    By late afternoon, a cardinal with diarrhea wailed that the privies were full to overflowing, for the Sanjoanini who worked outside were being prevented from emptying them. All requests from within for candles and lamp oil were refused. The palace began to smell like the local jail, with incense. The conclave was now indeed "with key." Also with nails and timbers. There were cots enough for the cardinals, but their conclavists slept on the floor.
    Blacktooth sat against the wall, alert lest his master beckon, and watched and listened and smelled and tried not to be afraid. He had gained much self-confidence in Brownpony's employ. Also, that he could fight off attackers was a relaxing bit of knowledge to have with him in any situation. Blacktooth knew that he had not been changing, but unfolding in new dimensions. But he felt he was becoming worldly as he did so.
    Brownpony waved him forward. "Talk to as many of the cardinals' conclavists as you can. Sound them out on Cardinal Nauwhat and Abbot Jarad, especially Nauwhat."
    "Yes, m'Lord." He looked around at a particularly loud crash of a window breaking.
    "I've been to four conclaves and never seen anything like this," Brownpony told him as he sent him on the vote-counting mission. 'The sickness must be causing madness."
    Blacktooth began moving from cardinal to cardinal, not approaching the electors directly, but consulting the prelates' assistants. But he came finally to Abbot Jarad. The self-confidence that had helped him with the police suddenly vanished. Brother Singing Cow was there as the abbot's conclavist, but Blacktooth fell to his knees and kissed the abbot's ring. Jarad pulled him gently to his feet and smiled but did not embrace him, and called him by name without calling him Brother. "You wanted to see me, my son?"
    "Domne, my master asked me to solicit advice as to the possible nomination of Sorely Cardinal Nauwhat."
    "From me, or everyone?"
    "From everyone, Domne."
     "Tell him that if the Holy Ghost is not against it, I'm for it." He smiled at Blacktooth and turned away again.
    "What of the nomination of Jarad Cardinal Kendemin?"
    "The Holy Ghost and I are both against it. Is that all?"
    "Not quite."
    "I was afraid not."
    "I would like to ask the abbot's blessing on my release from the Order."
    Jarad looked at him remotely. "I was the minister who conferred on you the sacrament of Holy Orders, remember?"
    "Of course."
    Jarad pressed his palms together, eyed the darkness above, and said to God, "Have you ever been known to take back Holy Orders?"
    "Never," said Cardinal Brownpony, joining them. "What do we have, a problem here?"
    "None whatever," exclaimed Jarad, clamping an arm around his shoulder.
    "No problem with you, Nimmy?"
    "Yes, a problem. When and how am I going to be laicized?"
    "Well, that's partly up to the abbot here."
    "And without his permission, it's up to the Pope?" Blacktooth shifted his gaze toward Jarad, noticed the anger, noticed the controlling of anger, and saw Jarad's lips move slightly in prayer while he breathed deeply and listened to Brownpony.
    "Oh, it's up to the Pope in the end anyway, but his permission is almost automatic if the abbot has given his." Brownpony looked questioningly at Jarad. Jarad let go of his shoulder.
    "And almost automatically refused if the abbot refuses?" Blacktooth also looked at Jarad.
    "No," said the Red Deacon, "probably the Pope would want to talk to you personally. In your case, I'm sure he would."
    Jarad faced Blacktooth squarely. "I suppose I owe you a hearing. Do you want to talk to me about it? Come to my quarters when all this is over."
    "I thank you, Domne!"
    When he turned away, Brownpony fell in step with him. "Do you want to be laicized, or do you just want to make the whole thing a quarrel with the abbot? He'll let you go, if you don't make him any madder than he is now. Let it alone, Nimmy. He's not happy with you. Don't make it worse."
    The monk left the vicinity, his self-confidence drained. He missed the abbey. He yearned for Jarad's blessing, or at least some evidence of forgiveness. He continued canvassing, although he knew that all Brownpony really wanted was to spread the knowledge that he was considering Sorely Nauwhat. A deception, Nimmy thought. Or maybe not. The Northwest had probably been happier when the papacy was located across the Plains. There had been less interference in the Northwest Church's affairs from New Rome than from Valana. Nauwhat was leaning toward an immediate return, in spite of the hostility of Cardinal Benefez toward the Northwest's independence in matters of liturgy and of Catholic teaching. Brownpony was dragging in a red herring to lead the hounds away from politics toward theology, if Blacktooth correctly understood his master's hints. But on the other hand, Sorely Nauwhat would perhaps be a good man for the highest office.
    From outside came the repeated roar: "Elect the Pope! Elect the Pope!" Occasionally, it became, "Elect the Amen! Elect the Amen!" Rumor came in from outside that Father Specklebird had left his cave and gone up the mountain, and a committee of citizens searched for his trail. Blacktooth prayed to Saint Leibowitz, and tried to keep up with his breviary, but could not pray well in the midst of havoc, as Abbot Jarad seemed able to do.
    He was becoming very hungry.
    Cardinal High Chamberlain Hilan Bleze tried to lead the frightened prelates in a Veni Creator Spiritus, but the hymn could scarcely be heard above the racket on the roof, the hammering of doors and windows, the splash of slop on the floor, and the babble of frightened conversation among the hundreds of electors and their conclavists.
    Two hours later, perhaps in response to the invocation of the Holy Ghost, someone tossed a living bird down through the hole in the roof and covered the hole to prevent its escape. Not a dove but a vulture flapped around the Cathedral in terror and finally alighted atop the giant crucifix which hung suspended in midair by chains from a roof beam between the nave and the altar. Several cardinals were screaming about an omen, a warning from God.
    Brownpony climbed up on the temporary altar itself and roared, 'Silence! In the name of God, silence!"
    Only the desecration of the altar could have caught their attention, and silence did at last prevail.
    "What you see and hear is indeed the judgment of God on us! Now this congregation must invite Father Amen to address us. He should be one of us. We shall hear him, and hear him now. How say you?"
    "Get down from there, Elia!" Abbot Jarad shouted.
    "Not until you vote!"
    There were dissenting murmurs among the cardinals, and a few cries of outrage, but after some muffled shouting outside the walls, the crowd fell suddenly silent. The crowd had posted reporters to listen at some of the broken windows.
    "Quiet! Let the nays vote first," Brownpony called. "They'll be easier to count. Those who refuse to hear Father Amen, raise your hands."
    Pointing here and there, counting aloud, Brownpony said, "Seventeen!" and stopped. "Amen Specklebird shall speak to us." He nodded and climbed down.
    A face was looking in through a broken window above the choir loft. It was a Valana policeman. Brownpony and the Cardinal High Chamberlain disappeared through a doorway and soon were in the balcony talking to the officer. He shouted their words to the crowd. The hole in the roof was uncovered to allow the buzzard to escape, but the frightened bird took no notice and remained perched on the upright above the INRI sign. A roar of enthusiasm went up from the mob outside.
    Soon some of the windows were uncovered, but nothing was done about the doors. Within two hours, shit was being shoveled from the privies. Baskets of sour rye bread with the black specks were lowered through the roof hole, and the water pumps began working again. Screaming reerupted, however, when the buzzard suddenly descended from the cross to the floor, attracted by a smelly lump of garbage on the tiles. Three Sanjoanini were finally allowed entrance through a loft window to shoo away the bird and clean up the slops from the floor.
    Chaos subsided, order returned, and the only sound in the palace was the murmur of hiccups, moans, sighs, groans from the ill, a murmur which occluded any whispered conversations drifting past and echoing in the great and temporarily sacred cavern. The light was low, near sunset. Servants were beginning to light the candles, but only a few of the cardinals were up and about. The rye bread had been consumed, and most of the water, but hunger, thirst, and fear presided over the night.
    Blacktooth overheard a Texark conclavist talking to one of the abbess's assistants:
    "Everybody knows Cardinal Brownpony has taken off his gloves. Brownpony went to Leibowitz Abbey and hired himself a secretary and a bodyguard this spring. And who is this new bodyguard? A Texark runaway criminal, the former executioner Wooshin, now under a sentence of death for treason. And who is this secretary? A Texark-hating refugee from the Grasshopper Horde, brought up to despise imperial civilization but educated at the abbey, who was a friend of Corvany's assassin. The cardinal deacon stood up and denounced our learned Thon Yordin and at the same time slandered Cardinal Benefez and all but declared war on the Texark Church. Now he wants a mountain-dwelling hermit, who barely speaks Latin and would be frightened to death by New Rome, to become the next Bishop of New Rome, in absentia again. Permanently in absentia, as Cardinal Brownpony would probably have it. However my master might otherwise have voted with respect to Amen Specklebird, Cardinal Brownpony's support of him will cause him to abstain, of that I am certain."
    The necessary twenty votes were quietly gathered, however, and Amen Specklebird became a candidate for pope even before he appeared to speak.
    
     
    
CHAPTER 11
     
     Therefore, since the spirit of silence is so important, permission to speak should rarely be granted even to perfect disciples, even though it be for good, holy, edifying conversation.
     —Saint Benedict's Rule, Chapter 6
     
     
     
     
     
     
    
A
MEN SPECKLEBIRD WAS NOT STRONG ENOUGH to resist the crowd that dragged him reluctant to the Papal Palace by midmorning. And so at last, to pacify the people and the conclave, the black, old hermit priest agreed to address the cardinals. For this purpose, the dying Cardinal Ri consented to appoint the old man as his special conclavist, for Specklebird's status as a cardinal in pectore of his former persecutor was doubted by most. He was passed in through the broken window in the balcony, and more baskets of bad bread and flagons of water were lowered through the hole in the roof.
    
    There were scribes who were appointed to record all speeches during the conclave, subject to later editing or deletion by the speaker, but some of the few who actually listened to the old hermit through out his seemingly interminable homily later swore that some of the scribes had been asleep, and none had accurately recorded the full speech. But at first, the electors listened with intense curiosity.
    Strange stories were told of Amen Specklebird by the old people of the countryside. Some said he walked silently on the mountain paths by moonlight and spoke to the antelope, the mountain spirits, and the risen Christ. Some had seen him flying above the treetops at morning twilight, and in the hole in the back of his cave he kept serpents, the mummy of an old Jew, or a wonder-working genny girl. Sometimes he visited the farms of the settlers and made it rain for them. He was a man of subtle power. He had placed a spell on Pope Linus VII, the story went, who as the Bishop of Denver had forced his retirement, and the spell made Linus call him to the Papal Palace several times during his long illness, either to have the spell removed or to treat the sickness whose cause eluded the physicians. (Blacktooth had seen him change into a cat and back, but Blacktooth would be the first to admit that his distance vision could be sharpened by spectacles, but his reason for avoiding it was not so much poverty as the fear that sharpness would ruin the clarity of his occasional hallucinatory insights into people and things.)
    Heretics and holy men made pilgrimages to Amen's cave. Children of irreligious parents threw stones at his door and called him a buggery man, and yet it was a fact that the Lord Cardinal Brownpony often came to see him, and he was confessor to prominent sinners from the city. Pregnant women came to have their bellies blessed by him, and for a small donation he would consult the mountain spirits, who controlled the weather even on the western Plains, and whom he addressed by saints' names, about the best time for sowing or reaping or breeding sheep.
    But now this dark old man with the frizzy white cloud of hair began speaking to the cardinals in conclave, and his style of address was none other than Blacktooth himself had experienced as his penitent. He was an elderly confessor most tactfully admonishing sinners and less tactfully testing their minds with paradoxes, and sometimes tortured syntax.
    He embraced the audience with his long bony arms. "Fathers of the Church, Eminent Lords, there is a simpleton among us who has no rank at all and sits in the midst of us as a spy in an enemy camp. It is to him this sermon is addressed."
    The Archbishop of Appalotcha stood up and called out, "Point him out, Father. Call the sergeant-at-arms!"
    "He is here without authorization, it's true," said Specklebird, waving the ushers back. "But please sit down, he was here among us from the beginning, and he always will be. He's here to spy for Jesus anyway. And this conclave is the enemy camp."
    There was a murmur of righteous protest about the Holy Ghost and the apostolic succession, but it quickly died.
    "The simpleton who sits in the midst of us as a spy is conscience. A conscience has no rank and no position. A conscience cannot be a cardinal's conscience or a beggar's conscience. It adheres to the naked man, wholly exposed. And to the naked woman." The Abbess of N'Ork flinched, but Specklebird avoided looking at her. "In him or her, the Father gives birth to His Son.
    "To this naked simpleton I speak, regardless of his office. The offices have fought each other. Rank has quarreled with rank. Regional origin argues with regional origin. Does the simpleton want a one and only pope, an everybody's pope? Then let him put off his rank, his office, his regional origin and beg God's grace to vote as a simpleton, a pure man." From this rational opening, he began to wander.
    At first he spoke mostly about the return of the papacy to New Rome, because he knew that this was the foremost issue, not the closest to his heart. And he made it clear from the beginning, to the complete astonishment of his Valanan supporters, the mob outside, that he favored an unconditional restoration of the New Roman Papacy in its ancient See. Brownpony, his friend, even looked shocked by this disclosure.
    Only cardinals from the Denver Republic were in favor of making the exile permanent, and they too were truly shocked. They had refrained from calling the exile Exile, and proposed to change the name of Valana to "Rome." Their motives were well rationalized, but they agreed with the rabble in the streets that the end of exile would be the end of Valana. But the Valana faction was a tiny minority in the conclave. Everyone else wanted the papacy returned to New Rome. The sharp division of opinion concerned the circumstances of that return, and the demand for a demilitarization of the surrounding terrain by the Empire.
    The conclave had dragged to a standstill.
    In a general way, the far East and the West were aligned against the middle. The middle was Texark and its vassal states along the Great River. There were also single-issue electors for whom the Valanan exile was not of major importance. Emmery Cardinal Buldyrk was one example. From the far northeast, she had voted with the West in two previous conclaves, but was now apparently leaning toward Benefez because of a possible softening of his position against the ordination of women. Benefez, however, was not present to confirm the inclinations of his conclavists, so the lady's vote was not se cure. Cardinal Brownpony was doing his charming best to reconvert her, and she her charming best to seduce his feminine side.
    Blacktooth himself took notes occasionally, but the old man rambled on and on. He misquoted Scripture. He belched. He improved on Scripture. He broke wind. He apologized for his frailties. He talked about his boyhood in the Northwest. He talked about barnyard matters. He talked about the wisdom of a mindless God. One passage which was faithfully recorded, and later used against him, was this:
    "All this talk about the Church, the State, and the causes of schism reminds me of a story. When the priests asked Jesus whether they should pay taxes to the Hannegan of that time, Jesus borrowed a coin from them, asked them whose head was on it. 'Hannegan's, they said. So he told them, 'Render unto Hannegan what is Hannegan's, and to God what is God's.' Then he put the coin in his pocket and smiled. When the priest wanted his coin back, Jesus asked, 'Who do you think Hannegan belongs to?' When there was no answer, he reminded them, 'The Earth is the Father's and the fullness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein.' Of course that's just another way of saying,  ‘The foxes have their dens, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.'
    "So he gave the priest his coin back and slept under one of Hannegan's bridges that night, along with Peter and Judas. The priest went home and paid his taxes and drew up an indictment."
    Here, Specklebird began to wander wide of his topic of New Rome and Valana.
    "Why, you may ask, did Judas and Peter and Jesus sleep under a bridge," he said, pursuing a tangent. "Judas had a good reason, you see: someone had stolen his horse, and he was too tired to walk to the inn. Peter also had a good reason: he had no money to stay at the inn. Jesus had no reason, no reason at all. Jesus was free to sleep under a bridge. Such is freedom. Such is reason. Such is rumination."
    Another tormentation of Scripture that was later bound to be used against him was this:
    " 'What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his own soul?' I spoke earlier about this world, and him to whom it belongs, but what, one might ask, is one's own soul, which can be lost? The soul, insofar as it exists or not-exists, is the seat of suffering, when Jesus was born, he looked around at the world and said to his mother, 'From the outermost to the innermost I alone am the suffering one.' Cardinal Ri, whose conclavist I am, told me that. And this is the first fact of religion: I am means 'I hurt.' Why is it that I hurt? Is it God's revenge on a son? No, I hurt because I, my soul, keep grasping at the world to gain it, and the world has sharp teeth. And thorns.
    
     That is the second fact of religion. The world is slippery too, and it wiggles. Just when I think I have a grip on it, it stings me, and slips away, or part of it dies on me, and I am overcome with grief and a sense of loss—the consequence of sin. But there is a way to stop grasping at this slithery world, a way to stop hurting and hungering. That is the third fact of religion. That third fact, Venerable Fathers, can be called the 'way of the Cross.’ It leads to Golgotha. For you among you who will be Pope, it leads to New Rome."
    His return to the topic came with brutal abruptness.
    "These are elemental things. The fourth elemental fact of religion is called the 'Stations of the Way of the Cross.' " He waved toward the paintings on the Cathedral walls.
    "This, Venerable Lords, is what I say of New Rome: that the way of the Cross ends there. The last station. The Pope must go back to New Rome as to Golgotha, and be crucified. The Hannegan will have his coin of tribute, which belongs to God if you correctly understand the Lord's irony, and Peter will have his crucifixion. When Benedict fled from New Rome in the last century, Jesus appeared to him and asked 'Quo Vadis,' but Benedict mistook him for a Nomad, and said 'Ad Valanam' and did not turn around. This I heard from one of you." He smiled at the conclavists from Texark, whose expressions had changed throughout the speech from initial hostility, to astonishment, through outrage, to suspicious approval, for, although the premises by which he arrived at his conclusions were not flattering to their monarch, and his theology was outrageous, the conclusions were the same as their own. The papacy should go home without any concession of power from the Imperial Mayor of Texark.
    Usually so silent, this bewildering man was now talking through the afternoon, and when the lamps were lit in the evening, he talked on by lamplight. Once, when Blacktooth himself nodded off, he reawakened to see a cougar in a ragged cassock change to a dark brown old man with wild white hair again.
    Amen Specklebird made a speech that was to become famous in the history of the Church, as written by its severest critics. Such are the quotations and misquotations as written down by the scribes.
    Amen on the Fall and its aftermath: "The fruit of the tree, Eminent Lords, was rumination. Out of rumination came good and evil. The devil is a cud-chewing animal with cloven hooves. The serpent Satan ate souls and chewed the cud, and he taught rumination to the female, who taught it to the male. Whatever you do, do not ruminate. The anointed one never ruminates. He marches straight on to Hell from the tomb—and ascends to Heaven if it befall him.
    "But if you should ruminate, and thus sin through fornication or rage or greed, never be ashamed of your guilt. Shame is none other than pride, pride is none other than shame. Your pride is your shame, your shame is your pride. They look in opposite directions, shame and pride, because when pride looks directly into the eye of shame and shame looks directly into the eye of pride, both instantly die. They die to the accompaniment of laughter, the laughter of the man who has foolishly kept them in his heart and kept them apart. When he feels his shame as pride and his pride as shame, he is free of them, free forever from the sin of both. Guilt, however, is not a feeling.
    "When you see that you have sinned, and you repent the sin, do not wish you had not sinned. Wish instead that God in His mysterious way will turn your sin to a good end, for your sin is now already a part of the history of His ongoing creation of the world. To wish it away is to resist His will."
    Amen on truth: "The truth is God's subtle, abominable word, Eminent Lords, subtile et enfandum is His word."
    Amen, repeating himself, on man's place in God's world: "Don't you know that Jesus Christ is alone and friendless in the universe? Don't you know that the Earth is the Creator's, and the fullness thereof? What does that mean, Eminent Lords, except that the foxes have their dens, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head? He often sleeps under bridges.
    "What is God that thou art mindful of Him, and the Son of God that thou shouldst visit Him?
    "He who is close to God is in danger. It's possible to be so enlightened that blindness follows. The light was too bright for your eyes and you never see God again."
    Amen on man, woman, and the Trinity, going on in a kind of rapture: "God lives at the center of the Son. Or Daughter." He nodded toward the Cardinal Abbess. "His throne—it's hotter than Hell there, you know. Even the Devil couldn't sit down in that throne. But you can. I can. We're in His lap, and we know what the Godhead's like—from inside. God-at-the-center-of-the-sun-I am bigger than I am. Jesus too, am. Saint Spirit also, am. And, oh my yes, the Virgin, am. One should be embarrassed to speak of God in the third person."
    He went on openly to embrace what Blacktooth recognized as a tenet of the old Northwest Heresy, so called, although many in the audience seemed too sleepy to detect it.
    "Whence came the Trinity and the Virgin? The unspeakable Godhead yawns and they emerge. The Virgin is the hymnal silence into which the Word is sung by the Father through the Holy Breath and begotten and made flesh within her flesh from the beginning. ‘Before the creation, God is not God.' But behind this fearsome four fold God yawns the undifferentiated Godhead. To say so is false, however, Eminent Lords. To mention it at all is to lie. Godhead? To presume to name it or even allude to it is to miss it entirely while immersed in it. And yet it is to a union with this ultimate Godhead that we dare aspire. In such a union the soul is like a glass of water when poured into the great ocean. Its identity as a certain glass of water is diffused into its identity as the ocean. It loses nothing. Nor does it gain. It is home again.
    "And the wages of death am sin," he added. It seemed an afterthought.
    Brother Blacktooth realized early that the audience was briefly captured by his pious enthusiasm and stopped listening carefully to words. The man had a way about him. He could just be himself in front of a crowd and the strength of his spirit prevailed upon them. But after hours of it, the cardinals began to turn to one another and even to get up and slip quietly about the throne room to whisper.
    It was well into the following morning when he blessed his inattentive audience and sat down. He had talked all night. That was the first of the next Pope's miracles. He talked seventeen hours without a glass of water and without becoming hoarse. He had talked them into weariness. Only his friend Cardinal Brownpony voiced an "Amen," as the morning sunlight broke through the eastern windows, but that was because only a few had been listening toward the end, but among these a handful had listened intently. Many were asleep. Others were reading their breviaries, some were pairing off politically—actually wandering from throne to throne—and seated bishops whispered and giggled with neighbors, as innocent as girls in the early morning. When Brownpony said "Amen" to the speech, Specklebird stood up again and answered "Yes?"—and then, as if by a breath of the Holy Spirit, the few intent listeners started erect and answered "Amen" with such deep feeling that others were caught by it, and then there was a chorus of guilty amens from the bewildered.
    And that is really all there was to it. The speech was not famous then. Like many of the great orations of human history, Specklebird's speech seemed rather confusing to the conclave, which, in desperation, finally elected him in spite of the strange homily. Only much later would his words come alive, when men thoughtfully read the transcriptions and random notes, and either damned it as foulest heresy, or praised it as divinely inspired, a new revelation. But to Brownpony and all who knew him well, Amen Specklebird's talk was like the twitter of birds who say in every language such things as "Bob White," or "To Easter," or "Whip-poor-Will." The meaning is in the ear of the listener.
    
     They elected him that morning, the old man, before the crowd started throwing stones at the door. Cardinal Ri lay dead on his cot. Old Otto e'Notto had gone crazy as a loon. The corridors of the palace were places of vomit and shit. More than twenty-five cardinals were in the throes of the illness, and five were with difficulty restrained by their conclavists from becoming violent. They elected him without debate before noon.
    To the surprise of many, including Blacktooth, the old man actually said, "Accepto," and called himself by his own name, Pope Amen, to the disapproval of many. It was a break with a most ancient tradition.
    There were feeble protests preceding the election, of course.
    "He said the anointed one marches straight into Hell!" a cardinal from the Southeast complained to the abbot.
    " 'From the tomb' he descended into Hell," added Jarad. "And on the third day he arose again from the dead and ascended into Heaven. That's orthodox enough."
    "If it befall him! And he called God's word abominable."
    "A slip of the tongue," said Brownpony. "He meant admirable."
    " 'Subtle and abominable' is what he said. Attributes of the Devil. The serpent was the subtlest of beasts. God's word is Satan?"
    "Come, come!" said the abbot. "I think you misheard him. Verbum subtile atque infandum. It means finely woven but unutterable. Even elegant but unutterable. Truth so subtle it evades speech. The silence of Christ. And he was waving his arms around at the universe when he said it."
    At the end, the conclave unanimously agreed on one thing. If any man could return to New Rome as the head of the Church and play Peter to the Mayor's Caesar without any compromise of fear, it was indeed this Amen (cardinal in pectore of Linus VII, as many were now willing to concede) Specklebird. But it was in compromise and fear that the conclave at last elected him, even permitting the conclavists of Archbishop Benefez to vote in his absence, which was not legal since he had not been present to instruct them. To their later chagrin, they voted for the gaunt and wild-eyed hermit.
    "Gaudium magnum do vobis. Habemus Papam. Sancte Spiritu volente, Amen Cardinal Specklebird ..."
    The roar of the crowd drowned the rest of it, and the conclave turned within itself again as each cardinal came before the new Pope to kiss his slipper and be embraced by the new heir to Saint Peter's keys, and heir as well—if Brownpony the lawyer was correct—to both of Saint Peter's swords, meaning both the spiritual and the temporal power, the latter subordinate to the former. Brownpony the lawyer who knew more about the history of canon law and the papacy than anyone outside of Leibowitz Abbey had talked freely during the conclave about the ancient Theory of the Two Swords, to the dismay of conclavists of the absent Archbishop of Texark. He quoted from an ancient bull: "Porro subesse Romano Pontifici . . . de necessitate salutis ..." "And so to be eligible for salvation everybody must be subject to the Roman Pontiff." According to Brownpony, this never-popular decree had been aimed especially at monarchs, whether civil or Nomadic, and the Hannegans and Caesars as well, but it passed the test for infallibility defining a matter of faith and by backing it with a stated penalty, the loss of salvation, for rejecting it. Perhaps what the electors sympathetic to Texark feared most, Brownpony as Pope, was now replaced by fear of Brownpony as gray eminence. That the cardinal had been the hermit's patron and cultivated his friendship and managed to get him restored to favor with Linus VII was well known to everyone. It had seemed a harmless relationship between a rich and lordly Churchman and a humble holy man. If one lacked a conscience, one could always pay to support one, was the cynical view. But Brownpony and Specklebird, though poles apart, had always seemed genuinely fond of each other. There was that friendship to worry about now.
    There was jubilation in the streets at first, but then the people heard with outrage that their hero had reversed his initial position, which was thought to have been that the real Rome was wherever the Pope decided to settle down. A further rebuff to the city was the sentence of interdict which Pope Amen laid upon Valana until the instigators of the violence against the conclave should be brought into his presence. For three days, the population seethed. Under the interdict, Masses were forbidden to be said or confessions heard, and only the last sacraments could be offered to the dying. The city was sick, and the city knew that the punisher behind the interdict was Cardinal Brownpony. But on the fourth day, the terrorists were brought bound before the Pope. He ordered them untied, heard their common confession, and granted them absolution on condition that they repair all damage to the building under the supervision of the Cardinal Penitentiary and satisfy any other claims against them before an arbitrator. Having thus subdued the city, the Pope-elect again called together the conclave and had himself reelected in the absence of mob violence. This too was attributed to Brownpony's influence. A vote against the Pope was a vote against an early departure from Valana; there were no such votes, and only two abstentions.
    It was true that Specklebird had once said that Rome was wherever the Pope settled down, but saying that the Pope was Pope wherever he lived was not the same as saying he should live in Valana. Specklebird had never said he should, for he was Pope only by virtue of being Bishop of New Rome. The public ministry which informed and influenced popular opinion published an analysis of Specklebird's views, and it was posted on the doors or walls of every Church in the city. Valanans, this essay concluded, had nothing to fear from Amen Specklebird's return to New Rome, for this was his home, and while he left as spiritual conqueror, he could be expected to return every summer to Valana for the rest of his life, and permanently to establish here many institutions of the Church which were now in New Rome, such as the Ignatzian Order, in order to free them from imperial influence. Nevertheless, the angry burghers seemed intent upon preventing Pope Amen from leaving Valana until Urion Cardinal Benefez had arrived and paid homage to His Holiness.
    By this time the attendant electors, cardinals of the College, had knelt before, kissed the ring of, and been embraced by His Holiness Pope Amen. Only a handful refused to do so, claiming that the election was held under duress and therefore invalid. These few had obvious Texark affiliations and their attitude was not unexpected.
    It was about noon on the fateful election day that the coach bearing the Most Eminent Lord Urion Cardinal Benefez, Archbishop of Texark, arrived in the sickened city with a party of cavalry. Blacktooth caught a glimpse of the fury on the portly archbishop's face when he learned of the forced election, and heard him rain abuse on his own conclavists for their votes, but the meaning of the fury and its portent faded almost instantly from his mind. Across the plaza from the palace stood a barefoot girl in a brown nun's habit. It was Ædrea, looking at him in apparent shock.
    He took a step toward her; then Brownpony's voice echoed in his mind: You are not to intentionally see her again. If you ever see her in Valana, avoid her. He stopped. But she had already turned away and disappeared into the crowd.
    
     
    
CHAPTER 12
     
     Idleness is the enemy of the soul. Therefore the brethren should be occupied at certain ( times in manual labor, and again at fixed hours in sacred reading.
     — Saint Benedict's Rule, Chapter 12
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
A
S SOON AS ELIA BROWNPONY HEARD THAT HIS old friend-enemy Urion Benefez was in town, he began looking for an opportunity to escape from such ceremonies as the vesting of the new Pontiff. When he found the right moment, he insisted that Blacktooth accompany him to see the Archbishop of the Imperial City, but for what purpose the monk could not quite imagine. As they hurried to the address where Benefez had reserved a residence, Blacktooth confessed that he had seen Ædrea. There was a quaver in his voice, and the cardinal stopped smiling and looked at him sharply.
    "I told you to avoid her!"
    "I did not disobey you, m'Lord"—yet, his internal demon added silently.
    Brownpony's smile dimly returned. "I know. She avoided you. I talked to her myself."
    "Where?"
    "At the office, while you were out. I had asked Security to send her to me the next time she brought silver from the colony. When we stopped in Arch Hollow, I told you about the group of gennies in the Suckamint Mountains. They call it New Jerusalem. There's an old silver mine they work. She comes to town about once a month to the, uh, other wing of the building to exchange silver for currency. Their contacts are strictly with the covert wing, which keeps me informed. That's why she didn't know me before, although I was very surprised. We keep their secrets. They fear for their silver mine, among other things. You saw the papal flag over Shard's house.
    "I'll tell you how our visit looked from their viewpoint, Nimmy. They're on the edge of lawless country. The last party of Churchmen who stopped at Arch Hollow turned out to be Texark agents, and they were very suspicious of Shard's family. One of them penetrated behind their place to the cliff trail, and he saw too much, so the guards killed him quietly and dragged him away. When the other two realized he was missing, they wanted to go looking for him. Shard said there was danger of bear attacks. The guards would have killed them both. Ædrea went to search on their behalf, and brought back a piece of an arm with teeth and claw marks on it. So they prayed over it, buried it, and went back south the way they had come. But before they left, they let Shard know they were on Texark's side, and that all gennies should go back to the Watchitah Nation.
    "Then, right after these false Texark priests left, there came a cardinal with no bishop's ring, a monk who plays a guitar, a Nomad in a magic hat, and a swordsman who admits he had worked for the Hannegan. Furthermore, if the cardinal was who he said he was, he should know all about them, but he didn't seem to."
    "All they're hiding is a silver mine?"
    "Not quite. The gennies in New Jerusalem are about ninety percent spooks, able to pass, relatively normal, like Ædrea. They began fleeing to those mountains generations ago. They put the gleps up front and call it Scarecrow Alley.
    "Now, as for Ædrea—" He broke off and looked at the monk. "She sends her regrets."
    "For what?"
    "Probably for avoiding you in the square. For teasing you too, I suppose, back at her home. How do you feel about her?"
    Nimmy groped for words, but none came.
    "I see. The Secretariat can have no visible contact with anyone from New Jerusalem. Do you understand that?"
    "No, m'Lord."
     "Their aims are controversial. So are some of ours. They are refugees, and stand accused of killing Texark guards when they escaped the Watchitah Nation. They fear a raid from imperial forces from the Province. Stay away from the subject, and from her. She's trouble."
    Don't I know! he thought miserably.
    "She will no longer be accepted by us as their agent," the cardinal added sharply. "That should be the end of it."
    
    The coaches from Texark were still loaded with baggage and both military and civilian personnel standing around as if waiting for orders. A monsignor politely blocked the cardinal's path and asked his name and business.
    "Just tell him the Red Deacon is here."
    "May I state the purpose—"
    "Tell him I came to find out why he tried to have me and my secretary assassinated."
    Shaking his head, the monsignor went through a door with the message. Half a minute later, the lecturer Urik Thon Yordin emerged, white as a sheet, looked in terror at both of them, and fled the room. The cardinal looked at Blacktooth and smiled. Nimmy now understood why he was here.
    Brownpony was called inside. Blacktooth sat by the door, which was not quite shut. The Archbishop of Texark had not yet changed out of his traveling clothes. The Hannegan's uncle was pacing in fury.
    "Elia, how dare you accuse me, even jokingly, in front of my servants and visitors?" he raged.
    "I was not aware you had a visitor," the monk heard his master lie. "The fool seemed very upset. I apologize, Urion."
    "Well, yes, Yordin is a fool. When he notified us about Corvany's killer, he associated the thing with you and one of your men. I'm sorry someone tried to kill you, but I resent your insinuation, Elia. As you no doubt resented Yordin's."
    "I apologize again, Your Eminence. I do wonder if Yordin himself wasn't behind it. But we'll let this wound heal. And now, Urion, will you also heal the Church by paying homage to His Holiness? I know how you must feel, and while the election was very irregular, it's plainly valid. Be generous! The new Pope wants to go home to New Rome, unconditionally, where the Empire wants him, without demands. You have gotten what you wanted." There was such a stoppage of Brownpony's breath with the word "wanted" that Blacktooth could almost hear the except the tiara which did not follow. "He makes no demand for a withdrawal of Texark troops, Urion."
     There was a long silence. "I shall consult with many other cardinals, Elia. Thank you for your advice," the big man said at last. "I don't like what I'm hearing, but let's not be enemies."
    "What have you been hearing?"
    "That you stirred up the city, that your agents caused the riots. Or that the, uh, hermit himself did."
    "You have been lied to. The people had to drag that 'hermit’ to the conclave. Talk to Jarad. Talk to Bleze. Then talk to His Holiness, that hermit, for love of the Church. A love we share."
    "Oh, yes, Elia! I know you love the Church. It's what else you may love that I wonder about. We'll see, we'll see."
    On his way out, Brownpony found that Blacktooth had been joined in the outer office by three frustrated electors who had come to Valana as Texark allies. One of them, however, had already knelt at the feet of Pope Amen and been embraced by His Holiness. Brownpony exchanged weather opinions with them and hurried on.
    "Why did you want me to go with you there, m'Lord?" Blacktooth asked innocently.
    "Because I knew Yordin was there, of course. I wanted him to fear we were going to accuse him. And frankly, I wanted to get him in trouble with the archbishop."
    "You think he hired the men?"
    "If not, he knows who did, but he knows it was a mistake. I think we'll be safe now. It just proves they're dangerous. Now we all need a rest after the worst conclave I've ever seen. Take two or three days off."
    
    As Blacktooth was leaving the Secretariat, the receptionist guard at the entrance handed him two letters. One was a note from Ædrea. He glanced at the guard, who was watching him with an expression that made Blacktooth ask:
    "Did the sender give this to you personally?"
    "It was handed me by a young sister in a brown habit, Brother St. George. May it not displease Your Reverence that I did not ask her name, for she was silent herself and I did not wish to spoil it."
    "Spoil what?"
    "Her silence."
    Nimmy studied him in surprise. He was a beefy man of mature years, and looked like a retired soldier. His name was Elkin. "You've been to a monastery, haven't you?"
    "I was at your own abbey for three years in my youth, Brother, at the same time as the cardinal. Of course, he wasn't a cardinal then, or even a deacon. And I wasn't yet a soldier. But we left at the same time. He had been there to study, but I was there to—" He shrugged.
    "Find a calling or not," Nimmy finished, and resolved to be amazed later by this information. "About the silent sister. Does she come here often?"
    The guard's expression blurted a yes before he caught himself and said, "You should question His Eminence about things like that, Brother St. George."
    "Of course, thank you." He turned to go. The other letter was a note from Abbot Jarad apologizing for being unable to meet with him as promised. I am writing to His Holiness on your behalf, my son, and you may be sure I shall write only what will be favorable to your good intentions.
    Whatever that means.
    The note from Ædrea said: I shall leave your chitara in the crack in the ledge below the waterfall up the hill from the Pope's old place. Blacktooth began walking in that direction. He wondered why she hadn't left his g'tara with the guard instead of the note. It was a five-mile hike to the falls, and the climb made him dizzy. When he arrived, a white horse was drinking at the pool under the falls, and he froze for a moment; but then he saw that it was a gelding rather than a mare, and wearing a bridle but no saddle; it snorted at the sight of him and trotted out of sight around a curve in the trail. The waterfall was hardly more than a shower, and it fluttered in the wind, producing an occasional flash of rainbow. He walked around the pool, fearing and half hoping to find her behind the falls. The g'tara was there as promised. It was slightly damp from the mist of the falls, causing him to grunt irritably and wipe it against his robe. Why had she made him walk so far?
    He glanced at the hoofprints in the sand as he walked around the pool again. Then he stopped. The hoofprints of the horse crossed and partly overlaid a set of human footprints, smaller than his own. Both led in the same direction away from the pool. He wrestled with himself for a moment, then followed the trail.
    Her footprints led him into a wooded ravine, then under a low ledge which overhung the sandy bank of the swollen creek. He had to duck low to walk, then dropped to his knees and crawled. Then he found her. He had heard of this place, but never seen it. The small cavern under the ledge was said to have been the home of Amen Specklebird before Cardinal Brownpony bought him the remodeled cavern closer to town.
    Slanting sunlight filtered through the foliage and made delicate patterns on the stones and the bare thighs of Ædrea, who was no longer wearing the nun's robe but the leather skirt and a halter above her waist. She sat with bare flesh on bare sand. He had been following her trail on his hands and knees, and at the sight of her bare legs he paused to look. She laughed at him, and put away a handgun she had been holding in her lap.
    "You might as well admire the rest of me." She pulled up her skirt and spread her legs to let the dappled light shine on her crotch, then closed her thighs quickly. He had seen it before, dimly, in a barn. Her vagina was small as a nail hole because of the stitches, but her clitoris was as big as Nimmy's thumb, and maybe because he loved her he could see nothing repulsive about her crotch, however embarrassing, and she could see that he was not repelled but sad and curious, and embarrassed. She smiled wickedly and patted his arm.
    He sat in the soft sand beside her. "Why do you tease me?" he asked wistfully.
    "Now or back home?"
    "Then and now."
    "I'm sorry. There was a runaway monk from your Order who stopped at our place once. He didn't like me, not at all. He was in love with another monk. I wondered if you were like him. And your gap was showing."
    "Gap?"
    "The gap between what you are and what you try to let show. I'm a genny, remember. I see gaps. Some call me a witch, even my own father when he's angry."
    "So what did you see in this gap?"
    "I knew you weren't just a runaway like the other, but something was wrong. You were some kind of fake. I wondered if you weren't the cardinal's prisoner."
    Nimmy's laugh was remote. "Something like that. I was in disgrace."
    "Are you still in disgrace?"
    "As soon as the cardinal finds out I've seen you, I will be."
    "I know. He ordered me out of town. That's why I didn't stay by the falls, so that you could go back the way you came."
    "You left me a trail."
    "You didn't have to follow it."
    "Yes, I did." He eyed her accusingly.
    "Come back here where we can't be seen." She rolled over and crawled back into the cavern entrance, taking the gun with her. Nimmy followed. The rock overhead was less than ceiling height, and he could not stand up, but in the dim light from the door he could see a mattress on the floor, a saddle, a low table with a candle on it, and several wooden boxes.
    "You've been living here!"
    "Only for three days. Your employer told the sisters to turn me out. I've made my last trip to Valana. I'm not welcome at the Secretariat anymore. Our people will have to get somebody else. I'm going back home alone. That's my horse you saw outside."
    "But why? His Eminence told me you trade silver for scrip, but—"
    "Scrip?" She laughed. "Yes, that's truth. Not the whole truth, but true. He doesn't want me to handle it anymore because of you and me, and because of Jæsis. Jæsis was one of ours. And now your cardinal thinks we have a spy among us. He may be right, but it's not me."
    "Where did you get the gun?"
    "I swiped it from one of the crates in our shipment."
    "Shipment?"
    "From the Secretariat to New Jerusalem, of course."
    Nimmy was incredulous. "We are giving you guns?"
    "Not giving. Selling us some, depending on us to store some for the Secretary's own arsenal. Didn't you know? We're bigger than you think, a nation almost. The mountains are easy to defend."
    "I don't think I should have come here," he said in alarm.
    She caught his arm as he backed toward the door. "We won't talk about it anymore. I thought you knew." Her hand moved up his arm under the sleeve of his robe, caressing. "You're nice and furry."
    He sat down again. The gun was lying on one of the packing crates. He picked it up.
    "Be careful, it's loaded. I was afraid, staying here alone. That's the smallest model, but it shoots five times. Here, I'll show you." She took the weapon from him, manipulated it, and five brass objects fell one at a time out of the gun into her lap.
    "If those are the bullets, where is the powder?"
    She handed one of them to him. "The lead part is the bullet. The brass part contains the powder. Now watch this." She cocked it and part of the gun rotated through a small angle. She pulled the trigger, and cocked it again, causing another rotation. "See? It shoots five times. And it's this easy to reload." She turned the cylinder one click at a time and dropped the cartridges back into their chambers.
    "But how do you reload the cartridges?"
    "You don't, in the field. You carry a lot of cartridges with you. There's a loading press back at your base, if you don't lose the casings."
    "I've never seen anything like it."
    "Neither has the Texark cavalry. The guns come from the west coast. I think the design came from Cardinal Ri's country, but it was probably copied from the ancients." She put the gun away, and embraced him suddenly. "I'm not going to see you again. Let's make love—any way we can."
    Resigned to what he had started, he did what he could to please her. They lay on the mattress, rubbing bodies and kissing. God, she is beautiful, he noticed in the faint light from the entrance. Spirit in the primordial ooze fucked the Earth, and the Earth gave birth to her, golden-haired as the new corn and laughing in the wind. O Day Maiden, thy name is Ædrea, and I love you.
    "Fujæ Go!"
    "What?" she whispered, squirming under him and grinning at her own pleasure.
    "Fujæ Go, It is one of the names of—"
    "What?"
    He remained silent, watching her violet eyes search his own.
    "Unspeakable?" she guessed.
    "You, are, almost, awake," he groaned in sudden orgasm.
    "Oh, let me take it. Like before!" She reached down with her hand and caught his discharge.
    Spent, he nevertheless started up in total surprise. She was rubbing it into herself, into that tiny orifice no larger than a buzzard-quill pen. "What are you doing?" Nimmy gasped.
    Still grinning, she said, "Getting pregnant. Like last time. I'm way late for my period since we did it."
    Stunned, he sat up. It had been black as pitch in Shard's root cellar, and he had been too drunk to be certain what happened, and he could feel it but not see it, in spite of what he said in confession to an old onetime hermit.
    "Nimmy, you're white as a sheet!"
    "Why?"
    "Shard had me stitched up by a surgeon, and he won't have it undone, and he's my father, and I love him, and I won't defy him, but this way I can let a baby tear it open, if he won't let a surgeon cut me."
    "Oh, my God!" He rolled over with his face in his hands.
    "Nimmy, please don't cry." She held his shoulders and tried to keep him from shaking so. "Oh, please!—I didn't mean to make you unhappy. I just picked you to have a baby with. You!"
    
     Nimmy felt dizzy and sick. There seemed to be only a moment of blackness, but when he awoke and went outside, Ædrea and the white gelding were gone. He was alone in front of the tiny cavern. She had written in the sand: Goodbye, Nimmy. You really are a monk.
    He saw her in town again, however, on his way home from the hills. Walking down the street, he looked over his shoulder at the sound of a horse and saw Ædrea slowly overtaking him. She shook her head quickly, but barely looked at him. He nodded understanding and kept going. She had stopped somewhere along the way, but had to come through town to go back home by the main road. Blacktooth, who was wearing his Leibowitzian novice's robe, turned a corner and just avoided running into another man, who was skipping rope. He wore a wood and leather harness which held a harmonica up to his mouth. He played a rapid but recognizable Salve Regina while he jumped the rope; a cup on the ground at his side asked for, and had collected, a few coins. Blacktooth suppressed a sharp gasp and tried to pass behind him as quietly as possible. For there wearing a Leibowitzian postulant's robe in the road was Torrildo playing the fool for coins. Blacktooth had gone about six paces when the music and the slapping of the rope suddenly stopped, so that he could hear the tread of hooves of his love's mount as she too passed the excommunicated musical mendicant.
    "Hey, Blacktooth. Darling!" Torri called.
    Blacktooth broke into a fast trot. Behind him, he could hear them. Ædrea stopped to exchange pleasantries with Torrildo, whom she had apparently met before.
    "Oh, so he was the one!" he heard her say as he fled.
    
    The sound came from the chapel, a whishing slap followed by a moan. It was repeated every two or three seconds. His Eminence Cardinal Brownpony stopped to listen, then walked inside. After three days of absence without leave, his secretary for Nomad affairs was found at last. Blacktooth was kneeling before the altar of the Virgin in the Secretariat's private chapel; he was flagellating himself with a scourge of thongs.
    "Stop it," the cardinal said quietly, but the sound went on. Whish, slap, moan. Pause. Whish, slap, moan. Pause.
    The head of SEEC cleared his throat loudly. "Nimmy, stop it!"
    Finding himself ignored, he turned toward his office, the Axe at his elbow. "Come see me as soon as you can," he called over his shoulder as the flogging continued. "We have an audience with His Holiness early tomorrow. It's about your petition."
    
•      •      •
    
    
    The audience went badly. As they walked to the Papal Palace, Blacktooth, his back sore and his guilt making him sick, said nothing to his master and his master said nothing to him. There was an alienation between them that he had never felt before. Brownpony obviously knew he had disobeyed and seen Ædrea, but he could not know, or perhaps only suspected, that she had told Blacktooth about the smuggling of guns. If they had spoken as they walked, mutual accusation might arise, and Nimmy was grateful for the strained silence.
    The Pope, still looking uncomfortable in his white cassock, greeted them warmly and without formality. As Blacktooth knelt to kiss his ring, Amen nodded to the cardinal, who then disappeared, leaving the surprised monk alone with the Supreme Pontiff.
    "Please get up, Nimmy. Come let us sit over here."
    Blacktooth moved as if in a dream. As he sat down, he felt as if he were resuming his role as a penitent in Specklebird's home cavern. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Specklebird become a cougar.
    "There seems to be a divine being among us," said the cougar, smiling a thin smile.
    "The divine being should shut up," Nimmy heard himself say, and heard with pleasure the cougar's laugh. The being was playful.
    "You are going to continue in Cardinal Brownpony's employ for some time, unless you object," said the cougar, dissolving into an old black man with a cloud of white hair and white skullcap.
    "I am surprised he still wants me." (Nimmy again hearing himself.)
    "Why do you think he chose you among his translators as a personal secretary?"
    "I have wondered that myself, Holy Father. I can only think that he has become attached to the people of his unknown mother, through his frequent contacts with them. I am of the same blood."
    "It's just ethnic nepotism? Do you really think so?"
    "The alternative is to suppose that he thinks I have some particular quality or talent that he appraises rationally, and so chooses me, in spite of my disobedience, but I cannot, Holy Father, imagine what that could be. Whatever it is, it must be imaginary on his part."
    "In other words, you're just a poor sinner who deeply loves God, but hasn't got much to offer in the way of talent."
    Sarcasm? Blacktooth withered. He had unconsciously spoken through a mask of humility, and the cougar as Specklebird-Peter ruthlessly held up a mirror to the mask he was looking through.
    Recovering after a moment, he said, reflecting the sarcasm, "All  right, let's admit that I'm a genius in Nomadic languages, having invented the new alphabet myself, which even Saint Ston's uses, I'm told. Not only that, I've learned to defend myself, understand most of my master's affairs with the Nomads, and that's where we're going. So perhaps his choosing me is rational. Also, I've been taught how to kill a man."
    "You are to abstain from deadly violence, my son," said the old mountain cat.
    "Neither am I to covet my neighbor's ox, Holy Father."
    The Pope laughed heartily. "You're awake sometimes, Nimmy. I do believe it: you are called to contemplation."
    Blacktooth sighed and lowered his head. "I could be laicized and still work for the cardinal, Holy Father. And I don't have to be a monk to contemplate."
    Specklebird returned to his subject: "In your case, I think you do. Cardinal Brownpony chose you because you are a monk, Nimmy, a real monk, and a contemplative. Why do you think he, a rich and powerful man, formed a friendship with me, a hermit and beggar, a bedraggled and much-reprimanded priest with no parish, denied access for several years to the altars of Valanan Churches? Your master wants to learn more about people like us, Nimmy. There is hope for him, just because he perceives we are different, and the perception leads him to curiosity rather than contempt. If you were not truly a man of religion, why would he choose you?—who know less about the Secretariat's business than at least three of the others. I know him. He wonders what it is like to know God."
    "If you are being infallible, I surrender. If not, I say he made a mistake, because I am, or was, a very bad monk."
    "You bring in a load of donkey shit. That's yours to confess if you think so, but it's not yours to judge on the last day."
    "I'm in love with a spook, a genny girl, Holy Father."
    "Is that why you want to be laicized?"
    "Not at first." He sighed. "Maybe that's part of it now."
    "Maybe?"
    "Because she too says I'm a monk. Everybody says I'm a monk but me."
    "Smart girl. When you feel love for her, see God in her. Do not let this love lessen your love of the Lord. Passion is the other side of compassion, not its negation. You should be able to see and love God through any of His works, including a forbidden girl. But remember that you are a monk of Saint Leibowitz. Love is not a sin."
    "But consummation is."
    "For you. You yourself chose it to be so."
     "As a runaway at age fifteen."
    "Your solemn vows were taken much later, Brother St. George!"
    "But I was still ignorant of the world I was undertaking to shun by my vows, from which only you can absolve me, Holy Father."
    "You have learned so much about the world lately?"
    "I am in love."
    Pope Amen laughed. "Loving God through His creatures is admirable, if you know what you are doing. Now let me remind you of something. I have spoken to Abbot Jarad, and he reminded me. The Order of Saint Leibowitz was originally an order of hermits. It is possible for you to remain in the Order, but live apart from the monastery. You would live by the ancient rules of Saint Leibowitz, as he originally established them. This would be after your present employer releases you, of course. I ask you to consider the possibility, and postpone your request to be laicized until you decide."
    Blacktooth sighed deeply. He looked at the old black man; the cougar was gone. He lowered his head in submission, but a question remained: What if she is really pregnant? he thought, walking away empty from the audience. Well, not quite empty: a poor monk had talked back to a Pope. Riches, riches.
    
    Other employees of SEEC briefed him on events during his five-day absence. Valana was still in turmoil. The external violence and internal cowardice that tainted the Conclave of 3244 were acknowledged even by the new Pope, who had astonished everyone by placing the sickened city of Valana under a sentence of interdict. The security guard Elkin recited for Blacktooth the names of the leaders of the violence, who were brought forth to undertake to repair damages to the palace. "These seventeen thugs knelt there before Pope Amen, their hero. He got from them a promise to repair all damage. Then he imposed a penance of prayer and fasting, and then absolved them."
    "But this did nothing to satisfy the Benefez people," Nimmy guessed. Elkin nodded.
    It was immediately apparent that the election of an eccentric religious ascetic of dubious orthodoxy and religious impulsiveness caused a nervous shuddering to pass through the hierarchy and the institutions of power from coast to coast. It was either an unexpected attack by the Holy Ghost upon the conclave, or the work of the Devil and the Red Deacon.
    The Archbishop of Texark interviewed nearly 170 cardinals who had participated in the election before he found enough electors who willing to affirm that their votes for Amen Specklebird had been given under duress. He stayed only three days in the city, and, claiming illness, failed to come to pay homage to the elected Pope. He departed with his troops and quite a few Eastern cardinals who were healthy enough and eager to escape the sickened city. Some members of his faction announced that the Holy See was still vacant because the election was forced. They called upon the old man to admit the election was invalid, to announce another conclave to be held in New Rome, and then to step down from the throne he illegally occupied. Brownpony and others made the case for a valid election, and proposed that the faction recognize His Holiness or face ecclesiastical sanctions. Only one of the group changed his mind at this point, and the others left Valana for home. It seemed obvious that the old wound of schism had again burst its stitches.
    By his will, locally drawn, Cardinal Ri left his servants to Cardinal Brownpony, an embarrassment which the Secretary for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Concerns managed to share with His Holiness the Pope, to whom the Archbishop of Hong left his wife and lesser concubines. The lawyer who drew the will became angrily defensive when questioned about the possibility of a mix-up of the two bequests, with Brownpony supposed to get the women. The Red Deacon echoed his anger, and testified that Cardinal Ri before his death had asked him to take care of his servants afterward. He called it obvious that Ri had intended to leave the fate of his loved ones in the hands of none but the servant of the servants of God, Amen Papa Specklebird. Since the servants of Cardinal Ri were very happy to find a new master, Brownpony decided to keep all but one of them, not as bond servants, but on five-year contracts renewable only with mutual consent. The Pope granted SEEC an increase in funds to pay the expense of keeping them. They numbered six skilled warriors, two personal servants, and Ri's confessor. This priest he released to Saint Ston's, who wanted the former chaplain eventually to teach courses in the Oriental Rite as practiced in his land and in the language spoken there.
    As for the Pope's inheritance of the three women, Amen gave them the gold which the prelate had willed to him, plus freedom, and, if desired, he offered a choice of school, a convent, or a marriage broker.
    Wooshin for his part was delighted to be in command of a squad of well-trained fighters who shared a military tradition not unlike his own. The Axe was beginning to speak Rockymount like a native, and this fact alone made it natural that he assume command of Brownpony's private army, but he made them go through the formality of choosing him, and then swearing allegiance to him and to the Cardinal Secretary, their employer. Blacktooth wondered if Brownpony knew, as the Axe had once told him, that any one of the men of his tradition would kill anybody his employer designated, even the Pope, even themselves. Wooshin's comparison of these fighters to Hannegan's assassins revealed his contempt for even the professionals among the latter.
    There was too much excitement in Valana for anyone yet to think of questioning what excuse the Secretariat might have for keeping an army of six professional killers on the payroll, although Blacktooth had been wondering the same thing ever since he left Leibowitz Abbey with the Axe under Brownpony's wing. He felt he was less privy to the cardinal's intentions than his inside job suggested. He now realized this more clearly since he had seen Ædrea's weapon. A whole wing of the Secretariat was closed to him. A whole range of SEEC activities were invisible to him. He tried not to be curious. He was temporarily sharing Brownpony's outer office with two other specialist secretaries, and they observed that at least once a day someone from the forbidden wing came to the office with a folder of documents, was admitted to Brownpony's private sanctum, and departed without the folders, which were never filed by the outer office. He had no files in his sanctum, but a stove for burning papers. Together, the other two secretaries had induced an opinion that the forbidden wing dealt with intelligence and operations, and with this Blacktooth did not disagree. He said nothing to them about weapons.
    
     
    
CHAPTER 13
     
     The Abbot shall see to the size of the garments, that they be not too short for those who wear them, but of proper fit.
     —Saint Benedict's Rule, Chapter 55
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
I
T SEEMED TO BLACKTOOTH THAT HIS MASTER had become obsessed with Nomad politics during a time of trouble for both the papacy in Valana and the Eastern Church. While he might have been in constant correspondence with Eastern cardinals who had taken part in the election of Pope Amen, he was instead inviting Hultor Bråm of the Grasshopper to enter Valana with all the guards he cared to bring in order to meet the Pope. The purpose was obvious. The cardinal stood accused of favoring the candidacy of Chür Ösle Høngan of the Wilddog Horde over that of the Grasshopper war sharf. To establish a neutral posture, Brownpony had invited Hultor Bråm to meet the Pope before he invited Høngan. He left the Pope's immediate vicinity to ride out onto the Plains accompanied by only one meek-looking policeman instead of his usual ferocious bodyguard to meet the Grasshopper war sharf, although the Pope certainly needed him near at hand during such troubled times. Blacktooth's admiration for his employer's courage had grown, even while he was entertaining suspicions laced with fantasy about the Secretary's loyalty to the Pope and his perceived guns-for-the-misborn activities. "This is the world, O Saint Isaac Edward Leibowitz, that I abandoned as your monk. And where am I now?"
    He went early with Wooshin to the place Brownpony had set for their meeting upon his return from the Plains, and there they saw Ædrea's replacement as messenger from New Jerusalem already standing there in the street. Now that Blacktooth had learned both officially from the cardinal and directly from Ædrea something about the exchanges between New Jerusalem and the covert wing of SEEC, he and the Axe had both been introduced to Ulad from the colony. Blacktooth had assumed that all spooks were normal in appearance. Ulad looked normal, if one saw him at a distance with nothing nearby for comparison. But when he stood next to another man in a crowd, he stood about a man-and-a-third high and probably weighed about two men and a half. Thrice Blacktooth had watched the giant, whose hands seemed disproportionately slender, pick the pockets of passersby before he crossed the street to warn the giant, "If you do that again, I'll tell."
    Ulad picked him up by the head with one of those long slender hands, the thumb so crushing his temple that he almost lost consciousness from pain. Wooshin slipped behind him and did something to his knee which made him release the monk with a howl and sit down on the pavement, clutching his leg. The Axe stepped in front of him and pressed a sword to his nose, flattening it. "If you do that again, I'll kill."
    "I didn't recognize you at first," the giant sang out, his voice a surprising contralto, to the tiny old warrior.
    "Do you like your job?" asked the Axe.
    "It's good to be able to come to town, yes."
    "Do your people know you're a thief?" the monk asked, picking himself up.
    "It's part of my cover. People know me hereabout. It doesn't matter if I get arrested. The police know me. They think I'm local, and so I am, part-time. Sometimes they lock me up for a few days, but sometimes I work for them. I used to ride as a guard for Ædrea. This place is where we met before going home."
    "Does His Eminence know all this?"
    "I'm supposed to meet him here. He's coming in the Grasshopper Nomad's coach. I hate Nomads. You look like a Nomad to me, and you called me a spook."
    Nimmy faced his glower. "Did you ever see a Nomad wearing a monk's habit?" he scoffed. "Do you look like a spook?" He felt Wooshin touching his arm, trying to warn him, but it was too late.
    Ulad growled and pulled a knife. Steel met steel, slid together, and then the edge of the short sword cut the giant's forearm, all in one sweep of motion from the thrust of the dagger through the cut to the fall of dagger and blood on the ground. They stood frozen for a moment; then Wooshin sheathed his blade and said, "Go do something for your arm. It's not a deep cut."
    "I think he tried to stab me, Axe."
    "You do?" Axe snickered. "Well! The cardinal warned me about Ulad, and he is very unhappy with him as Ædrea's replacement. The man has a habit of going berserk once in a while. He's only temporary, in my opinion; the New Jerusalemites were so infuriated by our master's rejection of  Ædrea as persona non grata that they made Ulad her replacement. They can be arrogant."
    "Why isn't he caged up?"
    "Well, one, because the cardinal wants him to meet this Nomad he's bringing home, and two, because he's apparently a warrior of power and a high officer of a small army that's supposed to be on our side."
    "Our side against whom, for the love of God? Do your one and your two make a three? Which is our side?"
    "Why, our master's side!" Wooshin snapped, glaring at him. "Your loyalty is a question in my mind, Brother St. George. Do not think I would not cut your throat if you ever betray him!"
    "Whoa, please! It's me, Blacktooth. I was just trying to understand his thinking."
    "That is not your place."
    "Are you the one to tell me my place and keep me in it, Axe? This is new."
    "I can't tell you your place, but don't let me catch you out of it."
    This is new—yes, and real. It was the first time he had felt real menace from the old warrior. Brownpony must be more angry than he realized. His fear of Wooshin at the abbey was founded on nervous imagination. But lately he had learned that Wooshin lived only to carry out his master's wishes and protect his person and his welfare; this was the warrior's highest good. Blacktooth, of a different persuasion in matters of loyalty, had disobeyed his master. Wooshin knew it, at least in a vague way, because the monk had been gone so long. Things were not the same between them, although Axe had just saved him from Ulad's dagger. Ædrea had changed everything about his life.  Just as Ulad came back with a bandaged forearm, a coach pulled by four beautiful gray stallions appeared from the east and stopped in front of the Venison House. The standard-bearer of the totemic Grasshopper triumph pole rode up, dismounted, and stood at attention with his standard in front of the restaurant.
    "Forth come the banners of the king of hell," Blacktooth said sourly, quoting an ancient poet.
    Nimmy later learned that when Brownpony met Hultor Bråm, the latter was riding in his royal coach, probably of Eastern manufacture and stolen during a raid into the Eastern timberland, and he was accompanied by sixteen well-armed horsemen, while the Prince of the Church himself had left behind even his formidable bodyguard and brought along only a meek-looking Valana policeman. Bråm seemed embarrassed when he saw that the lone Churchman was his host, and promptly sent all but two of his warriors home. Thus Brownpony rode back alone in the coach with a surprised but not yet friendly sharf. As the party dismounted, Ulad the giant strode toward the coach and presented himself to the cardinal, who frowned at him, spoke a few words, and waved him away.
    "He will call you first," the giant said to Blacktooth, and to Axe, "You shall guard the entrance."
    Ulad was plainly upset. "They should put all Nomads in jail when they come to town."
    "Then how could they do any business?"
    "Their only business is to steal!"
    "I see. With you, it's a hobby, with them a business."
    Ulad growled, and Wooshin nudged the monk again.
    Next to the driver sat a Nomad with a long rifle and a mean mouth. Two mounted warriors rode guard. A policeman and a Nomad got out of the coach and then helped the prelate and another Nomad get out. The second Nomad was fancier than the first. Ulad was plainly disappointed to see that the Nomads were not in custody. Three Nomads and the policeman stayed with the carriage while the fancy Nomad and the prelate went inside to eat.
    The coach was dirty from crossing the Plains but was of costly design and workmanship. The horses, while obviously tired, were elegant and well-bred animals that could be sold for at least a thousand pios as a team. The door of the coach was enameled blue and gold, with a touch of red on the crest that showed through the dust on the door. Someone was talking about the crest. They stood among a small group of people who, upon passing by or coming out of the inn, saw the Nomads and the police and the well-fitted coach with its spirited team, and lingered, becoming a crowd. Blacktooth kept a wary eye on Ulad.
    .
    "I tell you it can't be the Secretary's," the grocer from next door was saying. "Those aren't his arms, nor any Churchman's." "What about the motto?" said a woman beside him. "It's Latin, isn't it?" When the grocer shrugged, she turned to a friar who had come out of the inn and was staring at the coach. "Isn't it Latin, Father?"
    "As a matter of fact, it isn't."
    "It can't be Nomadic!" she said.
    "No, it's a Church language, all right. It's English."
    "What does it say?"
    "I've been out of school for twenty years," said the cleric. He turned to go, but paused to add, "It says something about fire, though. And that's Cardinal Brownpony inside, so you'd better leave."
    "You leave, Father! I live here."
    "Maybe the Pope's starting his own fire department," said a student from Saint Ston's who turned out to be Aberlott.
    Blacktooth himself put them straight. "The motto says: 'I set fires.' It's the heraldry of a Grasshopper war sharf.
    "See you later," he said to his ex-roommate, left the group, and went to stand near the window.
    Inside the tavern, the cardinal shared a meal with the Nomad officials. The fare was chicken cooked with herbs served with a local beer. The hungry plainsmen were polite enough not to scorn the lack of beef, but they did scrape away every trace of greenery from the meat. Bråm was continuing a monologue he had begun on the road, but the cardinal saw his secretary at the window and beckoned him inside. Blacktooth entered and found his master being theologically harassed by an offensive sharf in the crudest of terms.
    "The father of the mother of God is also her son and her lover," the Nomad was saying. He squinted toward the window and pretended not to be watching the cardinal. "That's the way our Weejus explain it."
    The cardinal took another bite of chicken and chewed vigorously while he looked at Bråm.
    "Did you hear what I said?"
    "No," Brownpony lied. "Say it again." His Grasshopper dialect was adequate but he occasionally looked at Blacktooth for support.
    "The father of the mother of God is also her son and her lover. This is the way the Grasshopper Bear Spirit sees it as well."
    "Just so." Brownpony dipped the chicken leg in the sauce and took another bite. Hultor Bråm was trying to antagonize him in the most obvious possible way.
    The sharf straightened and frowned. " 'Just so'! You agree?"
    " 'Just so' means I heard what you said, Sharf. I'm a lawyer, not a theologian. Have a piece of chicken."
     "He invites you to have a piece of chicken," said the monk, sensing a Wilddog usage.
    "If you're a lawyer, then why don't you have me arrested?"
    "Because I'm not a theologian's lawyer, and if I had you arrested, you would be of no use to anybody." He looked at Blacktooth, who nodded. Only occasionally did he need to clarify what was being said.
    "You're the Pope's lawyer."
    "Just so. The white meat is dry. Try the dark."
    "Jesus is Mary's lover."
    Cardinal Brownpony sighed with disgust and began using his drumstick to beat on the table.
    "Why do you want to pick a quarrel with me? Do I say ugly things about Empty Sky, or your Wild Horse Woman?"
    "You did so once. At a holy council fire. That's why I'm talking to you this way. You tried to drive her away, and your Christian puppet killed her priests."
    Brownpony sighed. "So I haven't lived that down, eh? Sunovtash An was nobody's puppet. As for me, what I did was foolish. I know that now, and I regret it. But that happened in the farming areas, not on the eastern Plains."
    "No matter, the tribe was formerly Grasshopper. You must remove the sacrilege."
    "How can I do that?"
    "We have discussed it. You must go to her."
    "Where? Back to the farming area?"
    "No. In the navel of the Earth, she lives: the breeding pit for her wild horses. It is a place of deadly fires, called Meldown."
    "I have heard of it. Isn't that where Mad Bear became Lord of the Hordes before the conquest?"
    "The same. Anyone nominated for the sacral kinship had to be chosen by her in that place. After election, each had to spend the night in that place by the light of the full moon. It will be so again. A new Qæsach dri Vørdar will be chosen. One of the three of us. It is also the place where we try men charged with crimes, a place of ordeal. Many never come out alive. Many come out sick, and lose their hair. Few emerge in full health. You committed a crime in the eyes of our Weejus and our Bear Spirit, Brownpony."
    "And if I submit to the ordeal?"
    "There will be an alliance, if you live. And peace with the Wild-dog."
    "No matter who is elected Lord?" 
    Bråm shook his head, seemed puzzled. 
    "As Qæsach dri Vørdar," Blacktooth put in.
     "Ah, no doubt about that! The old women know best. And the Høngin Fujæ Vurn."
    The cardinal spoke to Nimmy in Rockymount. "Explain carefully and politely to the sharf that His Holiness is the high priest of all Christendom, and that diplomatic immunity, which he has been practicing on me, does not cover the crimen laesae majestatis, so tell him to curb his tongue before the Pope."
    Hultor Bråm was a powerful Nomad about Chür Høngan's size, but perhaps leaner. His body language had few words. The predominant accent was force, a force prepared to spring at you, either for a hearty hug or to kill. All his muscles seemed drawn up that way.
    Nervously, Blacktooth translated Brownpony's message.
    For a moment, the sharf glowered at him. The body language said "kill the messenger," but then he turned to the cardinal and nodded curtly. At that moment Ulad stooped to enter the doorway and crossed, as a crouching mass of muscle, toward the table. Brownpony sent Blacktooth away in Ulad's wake. Ulad, the monk intuitively surmised, was to discuss matters not for his ears, for Brownpony needed an interpreter more than ever, because the genny giant spoke only Valley Ol'zark and a little Rockymount. Probably Ulad was there to discuss weapons with the Grasshopper sharf, and Brownpony would have to be interpreter for both of them. Temporarily dismissed, he headed home, accompanied by Aberlott, whom he had not seen since the election.
    "Listen, I heard there is going to be schism, maybe even war. What about it?"
    "Takes two to make a schism or a war. Who do you have in mind for the war? And why ask me?"
    "You work for the Secretary."
    "Who probably couldn't answer your question either. Why don't you ask a Weejus woman?"
    "I don't know any, do you?"
    "Not yet."
    "When? I hear your cardinal is thinking of leaving for Nomad country."
    Blacktooth shot him a suspicious look. Everybody seemed to know more about his employer's doings than he did. "Where did you hear that?"
    "From a man who came out of the inn just before you did."
    Blacktooth worried. Brownpony was careless enough to let his conversation with Hultor Bråm be overheard by another customer who understood Nomadic. But there had been no one else visible from their table.
    
     "A secret's out?" asked Aberlott after a moment.
    "I don't know. I have a feeling I'm going to be fired, sooner or later."
    "By the cardinal? For what?"
    "Remember the person who gave you my rosary back?"
    Blacktooth said no more than that, but his friend watched his face, saw a blush, and asked no further questions. He turned away to cover a laugh with his hand, then asked, "What will happen to you then, Nimmy?"
    "I don't know. I have a big debt to pay. What the hell are you doing out of school?"
    "I take no courses during the summer. I like to travel."
    "Where do you plan to go?"
    "Where the horse takes me. No reins, you know. You just kick the animal when he stops to graze too often."
    "Be sure and pick the right horse, you half-wit, or it will take you to its birthplace." He waved east toward the flatlands. Aberlott laughed and walked on alone.
    
    It was two days before Hultor Bråm was admitted to an audience with His Holiness. During Cardinal Brownpony's absence from the Curia, the Pope announced a date for his return to New Rome. If the head of SEEC felt miffed about being left out of the decision process, he at least had an alibi for the bad decision. The Pope planned a very early departure. There had been no communication with Texark about the matter. The Pope used his interview with Hultor Bråm to send the Apostolic Benediction to the Grasshopper Weejus and Bear Spirit people, and to ask permission to cross Grasshopper lands on his way to New Rome. Graciously the war sharf promised that one hundred warriors would escort the Pope's party once it emerged from Wilddog country. Brownpony listened in silence to this, but made it clear to all that he would not accompany the expedition, having urgent business both on the Plains and in Texark itself.
    "It is my wish to make you Vicar Apostolic to the Three Hordes," the old black Pope told the Red Deacon the next day.
    Brownpony actually gasped, Nimmy noticed, and the few members of the Curia who were present exchanged frightened glances. There was a long silence, because what the Pope just said caused a mental avalanche. First thought: to make the territory of all three hordes a Vicariate Apostolic was to abolish the de facto status of the Jackrabbit Horde as missioners of the Texark Archdiocese. It would end the archbishop's authority in the Province, and would force him to recall his missionary priests there or let them submit to a new authority. Second thought: it would infuriate Benefez, no matter who was appointed. But Brownpony? Third thought: before Brownpony could be appointed a Vicar Apostolic, he would have to be ordained and then consecrated as bishop of an extinct ancient diocese, for he would be the equivalent of a bishop in a missionary area not yet a diocese. Blacktooth remembered the cardinal's own words: I was called to be a lawyer, not a priest, and that's it.
    "Well, Elia? Will you do it?"
    "Holy Father, I don't think I have a calling."
    "We are calling you. Right now." It was the first time Blacktooth had ever heard Amen use the pontifical we except in formal Latin.
    With great dignity, Brownpony prostrated himself before the old man, but still he said nothing. He stayed that way until the Pope interpreted it as consent, whereas it was, as it seemed to Blacktooth, merely submission.
    "Get up, Elia. We'll have you ordained, consecrated, and on your way by next week. If we do it quietly, you can go to the convention on the Plains before Benefez hears about it."
    Later, at the cardinal's request, Blacktooth explained the situation to Hultor Bråm before the sharf left town. "He will be the representative of the Pope to all of the hordes, and govern all Churches and missions both north and south of the Nady Ann. However, you must not speak of it before it is accomplished."
    The sharf shook his head. "He will not be accepted by the Grasshopper," Bråm growled, commenting on the appointment, "unless your master makes his peace with the Høngin Fujæ Vurn, as he has promised. And the Bear Spirit must be consulted."
    "It seems," said Brownpony, when Blacktooth relayed the remark to his employer, "that ever since I made the mistake of denouncing Yordin's speech, I have been ambushed by unpleasant surprises, not all of them from my enemies. Aren't you astonished, Nimmy?"
    "Not altogether, since I provided one unpleasant surprise myself." It was as close as he had come to an apology, but the cardinal just looked at him curiously.
    The monk's attitude toward Brownpony had been tainted by suspicion, but not to the extent of doubting that the deeds of his friend, Pope Amen Specklebird, were entirely unexpected by the cardinal. Perhaps it had been Sorely Cardinal Nauwhat or Hilan Bleze who, during Brownpony's absence, had put Amen in mind of making all Nomadic territory an Apostolic Vicariate, to be ruled as a diocese would be, but by a bishop directly responsible to the Pope, clearly ending the de facto role of the Texark Archdiocese as missioner to the conquered province. The Churches throughout that Province were now headed by missionaries appointed by Urion Cardinal Benefez, but in no way had the Province been added to the Texarkana diocese. Most of its first priests had been military chaplains. But to create a papally dominated Vicariate out of the whole domain of the Three Hordes was to deprive Benefez of power and revenue throughout half of his nephew's domain. Could a holy old hermit come up with such an idea without a sinister force at his elbow? The sinister force might indeed be the Holy Ghost, so far as Blacktooth could distinguish. The old man was, as Saint Leibowitz used to say, "Independent as a hog on ice." It was an idea just crazy enough to have come from either God or Specklebird. Or as Urion Benefez might say, from either Satan or Brownpony. The very fact that the Red Deacon became an overnight archbishop made it evident, to anyone who wished to think so, that the promotion was a coup, coaxed by cunning out of a crazy old pope-contender who began to rule before he was legally elected.
    Elia Brownpony's ordination as a priest and consecration as Bishop of Palermo were conducted in secret ceremonies to which no one was admitted except the participants, nor did Blacktooth's master change his manner of dress or wear a bishop's ring until he was ready to leave the city for the Plains, somewhat in advance of the Pope's own departure for New Rome. It was clear that Filpeo Harq and Urion Benefez were to remain in ignorance of Brownpony's new rank and office until his acceptance by the Nomads of all three hordes as the spiritual leader of Christians on the Plains and in the Province had been established.
    "There's no doubt they'll hear about it, Nimmy," the cardinal told him. "But only the Pope will inform them officially, and when he's ready to tell them. Now I have a new task for you. You will find your predecessor has taken over your office for the time being. I am going to visit first Chür Høngan, then Hultor Bråm.
    "Deliver my written message to Mayor Dion in New Jerusalem; among other things, it introduces you. Tell them that Sorely Cardinal Nauwhat will, for the time being, be in charge of the Secretariat. Tell them that Ulad is out of control and must be replaced. If they insist on knowing why I refused to deal with Ædrea, I suppose you'll have to say she became too intimate with clergy."
    "I am ashamed, m'Lord."
    "How about contrite? Never mind. Do your best to mollify them. Learn as much as you need to know about New Jerusalem. Along the Way, let Wooshin brief you on what is going to happen. These things are secret for the present, although they are becoming less secret every day. You may, or may not, continue working at the Secretariat—for Cardinal Nauwhat. You may report back to him, if you wish. If he finds no use for you, he will tell you where to find me, or you may go back to your girlfriend in Arch Hollow and perhaps find a home in the colony. Or you may go beg them to take you back at the abbey, or become a hermit. I do not want to see you again unless and until this attachment is behind you."
    "I expected to be dismissed, m'Lord. I did not obey."
    "We'll see how it goes with you."
    "And Axe is coming with me?"
    "Along with all six of Cardinal Ri's men, and someone from the other wing—Elkin, I believe you know him."
    "I didn't know he was from the other wing. I thought he was just a receptionist."
    "Top security, and also a fighter almost in Wooshin's class. He was at Leibowitz Abbey once. You'll have a lot of expensive baggage with you, a twelve-mule train, but that will be Ulad's and Elkin's responsibility. When it's safe, they may let you and Ulad and Axe ride on ahead of the train and shorten your journey. Pack your habit and wear something else on the trail. You can put your habit back on when you arrive. Nimmy, I'm trusting you with new secrets."
    "I'll be careful. And you, m'Lord?"
    "I go to the convention of all the shamans of the hordes, all the Weejus and Bear Spirit people. I hope, with help from Holy Madness and Father e'Laiden, to be admitted as a Christian shaman observer and explain my new role."
    "Hultor Bråm will try to keep you out."
    "Of course, but the Jackrabbit will want to hear what I have to say, because they will be most affected by the transition. Bråm can't put together a majority. His grandmother might be able to do it, but she won't. Depending on what happens, I may go on to New Rome after the Pope, or even to Texark. Goodbye now, Nimmy. I would bless you, but you have heard me say I have no calling, yet here I am, a pretender."
    "M'Lord, I know from history that once upon a time in a much earlier Church, a vocation to the priesthood meant a call from the bishop, not necessarily a call from God. And I heard the Bishop of Rome himself call you to be that which you have now become by ordination and consecration."
    The cardinal smiled. "Thank you, Nimmy. Bless you, then, until tomorrow."
    Blacktooth bent to kiss his ring, but the cardinal avoided his lips, squeezed his hand, said, "We'll say goodbye again tomorrow," and was gone.
    
     Nimmy found himself near tears, and began to pray as he walked toward the nearest Church. Brownpony had been to him like a kindly Nomad father who was never drunk, while Abbot Jarad had been like a sterner Nomad uncle, always judging and finding fault. But he had missed the latter; he knew he would miss the former more. He knew too that loving people was a way of loving God, but to be attached to the one loved was not proper for a poor monk, and evidence of worldliness or delusion. Not wrong to love, but wrong to be attached to the one loved, for always came the anguish of tearing loose from all impermanent things.
    By the morrow, he had sufficiently recovered from his lapse of anxious worldliness to think of his former roommate and then confidently cajole his beloved (and possibly bedamned) cardinal into interviewing Aberlott, who as a friend of the late Jæsis could serve well as an emissary from SEEC to the dead student's family and help convince the ruling council that nobody had exposed Jæsis as a spook until the police learned of it after his death. There was suspicion at both ends, in the relationship between the colony and the Secretariat, which would now be managed temporarily by Sorely Cardinal Nauwhat, and Brownpony agreed that some gesture of reconciliation was advisable.
    "But that would be one more person who knows about the armaments, Nimmy. So I think not." It was the first time Brownpony had mentioned the subject of the guns to him. And he would not have mentioned it now without a realization that the monk already knew through his forbidden contact with Ædrea.
    "Do you really believe the secret is safe from Texark, m'Lord?"
    "No, it's only possible to minimize their knowledge. They know the genny colony is there. They know it is well armed, and that I have been helping them. I hope that's all they know. I only pray the secret, as you call it, is temporarily safe from the Pope."
    The remark caused the monk some surprise. In the first place, nothing was safe from Amen Specklebird, but his surprise was more due to a smell of betrayal about the words. The surprise was duly suppressed, and after some further discussion, the cardinal agreed to see the student, and so Blacktooth departed to seek him out before he began another journey.
    "They say the mountains there are wonderfully cool in summer.  You get to ride a free horse. You'll meet the family of Jæsis. You'll learn a brand-new skill."
    "Like what?"
    "Keeping your mouth shut?"
    "What use is that?"
     "You'll live longer as a secret agent."
    Aberlott walked with him to the Secretariat. Brownpony was marching out the main entrance. He greeted his assistant, and his young friend by saying to Aberlott, "Student at the college, I'm told. And what do you think of our city and its young ladies?"
    Aberlott answered fast, and the monk felt his face grow hot. "Well, when Blacktooth and I walked down past the police station last month, we saw a corpse hung there feet-in-your-face high, with a sign tied to his ankles. Blacktooth read the sign. 'For coitus interruptus' is what it said. I'm afraid of young ladies here."
    Brownpony eyed him in mock dismay. "Do you think the Valana police force is a branch of the papacy?"
    "Theology is not my strong point, Your Eminence."
    "Or is the papacy a part of the police, perhaps?"
    "Certainly I had no such idea in mind, m'Lord!" Aberlott was beginning to turn white.
    "Of course you did, and you still do. In Texark, the mayorality is part of the police. The cities are quite different in that regard."
    Aberlott had flirted with danger and was becoming scared. Brownpony had crowded him into a corner and was pressing him for comment. The joking student was, after all, talking to a Prince of the Church.
    "Actually, I think the sign said, 'Hanged for impudence to a prelate.' I beg your pardon, m'Lord."
    "I don't have your pardon. Get your own." Brownpony smiled a consoling smile at him, then shook his head at Blacktooth. "Do you really think this man can be trusted?"
    "Of course, Your Eminence."
    "Everything you need for the journey is ready at the stable. Pick up your papers at the office. Wear mufti until you get to the colony. After Ulad is replaced, and the council is satisfied, your ties to the Secretariat continue only if Cardinal Nauwhat needs you. I am going east to meet Chür Høngan, Hultor Bråm, and a Jackrabbit sharf who is still a stranger to me. No telling how long I'll be away."
    "Then what, m'Lord?"
    "You are free until you hear from me or Cardinal Nauwhat. Or your abbot. Goodbye, Nimmy. God love you."
    Blacktooth thought about it later. He had expected to be fired. What astonished the monk most was not his master's tolerance of impudence, or even his offhand approval of Aberlott, but that Aberlott had looked at this one cardinal among cardinals and felt safe in being impudent. The student usually had a good instinct for audience. Aberlott had picked up the aura of Brownpony's nonhostile personality; his personality showed through the red cloth. Blacktooth had seen it before, and knew the aura was deceptive. Brownpony wasted no hostility when he struck. He was never hostile, except for show. He seemed to be anticipating the now of things just a moment before they happened, and anticipating with the best expectations. When he expected the best, many people hated not giving it to him.
    Others who gave him the worst usually regretted it, without much effort on the cardinal's part. He moved easily among a herd of people, but he seemed more a friendly undercover sheepdog than one of the sheep, even among cardinals most of whom had far outranked him before his consecration. He made himself a safe man, approachable from above or below, or from straight and level.
    "What a pope he would make!" was Aberlott's only comment. He looked at Nimmy for confirmation, but the monk was pointedly silent.
    
CHAPTER 14
     
     Likewise those who have been sent on a journey shall not let the appointed Hours pass by, but shall say the Office by them-selves as well as they can, and not neglect to render the task of their service.
     Saint Benedict's Rule, Chapter 50
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
T
HE WESTERN ROUTE TO NEW JERUSALEM FROM Valana was less clearly defined and proved more difficult to traverse with wheeled vehicles than was the Pope's road to the east, which Blacktooth and Wooshin had traveled with the cardinal in early spring. There were only four wagons, besides the pack mules, but their wheels had to be spoke-levered to help the animals at every draw, especially after a late summer rain. Annual rainfall was sparse, but this was the season for it, and flash floods often rushed through the desert's low places. The eastern road would have been so much easier and faster if the travelers had no reason to avoid other wayfarers. The reason was "security." While they forded a stream, one of the tarp-covered boxes fell from a wagon and broke open. Blacktooth watched Wooshin and Ri's guards scramble to retrieve rifles from the shallow water, while they furtively looked around as if for spies in the juniper scrub. Later, he was unable to avoid learning about handguns and ammunition in the mule packs. When he asked, Elkin told him it was a comparatively small shipment. The receptionist guard at SEEC seemed to be in charge of the expedition, and he let Nimmy know that he came from the covert wing. The party included several mule drivers, Wooshin, Aberlott, Ulad, and the six warriors from the party of late Cardinal Ri.
    Ri's men were already skilled as weaponless warriors. By firelight they sparred with each other, and with Wooshin, who was hard-pressed to cope with the foreman among them, his junior by thirty years. They were speaking their own language among themselves, and Wooshin was laughing. "O Axe, please do remind them," Blacktooth called, "that they're supposed to be practicing either 'Mount or Church."
    The Axe grunted at them, and they tried haltingly to continue their conversation in Churchspeak. Nimmy suddenly realized they had been talking about him, because he was an exception to what they saw to be the rule here, that monks don't fight, or can't, or won't. Whereas they themselves were Christians with vows, although one of them had a wife back home. When Wooshin explained this to Blacktooth, the monk was astonished.
    Ri's guards were a puzzle to him at first. Wooshin had fallen right in with them, and they seemed to understand each other's language well enough when words were accompanied by frenetic gesticulation. On the third day, Blacktooth dared to remind Wooshin again that he was tasked with teaching Churchspeak to the "Yellow Guard," as they had begun to be called around Valana. Wooshin glowered at the reminder, but after a moment explained, not without embarrassment, that Cardinal Ri's men had been trying to convert him to Christianity.
    The monk looked at him incredulously.
    Axe laughed at his expression. "I don't think you want to hear that argument in Churchspeak. Have you forgotten that they were Cardinal Ri's men?"
    "I assumed they were Christian, and I've heard them chanting, but—"
    "But you wouldn't expect soldiers to be very religious?" Nimmy thought about it for a while. His mind caught a chilling glimpse of remembered warriors, his boyhood rapists, in action. "I suppose I'm prejudiced, Axe. The soldiers I've met are often pious, but I never met any warrior except you who seemed to have a spiritual dimension."
     "Except me? Do I have a spiritual dimension, Nimmy?"
    "You may laugh, but I've thought so. All I really know about you is what you want me to know. Isn't it so, Axe?"
    "Well, where these men come from, all monks, even Christians, have a weaponless warrior tradition."
    "They're not weaponless now! Are you saying they are monks?"
    "Yes, I think you can call them monks. As for the weapons, Ri dispensed them from that rule, and our master extended the dispensation. The order they belong to is Asiatic, and it isn't recognized here. When either Cardinal Brownpony or the Pope understands that they do have religious vows, they will lose their freedom until the Church can decide what to do with them. They are not anxious to go home, but their vows are similar to yours. They want to be free to form a community, but they've been afraid to ask. That's why they want and need to learn Churchspeak as soon as possible. You don't need to nag us about that. I suggested to the cardinal they stay awhile at Leibowitz Abbey. There, they could wear their habits and learn your liturgy. Would they be welcome?"
    "I am not the one to speak for Abbot Jarad Cardinal Kendemin." He fought bitterness for a moment, but went on: "You've read the Rule of Saint Benedict, Axe. The Brothers of Leibowitz still honor most of that rule, which means that they must offer hospitality to anybody who comes to them, as if he were Christ wandering in from the desert. But I'm not suggesting that Ri's men take advantage of that rule."
    "No, of course you wouldn't want the abbot to know you suggested it by suggesting against it," Wooshin said sourly. "But you're right about their learning Churchspeak. I'll drill them more. If they go to Leibowitz Abbey, it will not be at your suggestion, but the cardinal's which he already made."
    "All right. I hereby forget it, although I would like to know about their Order."
    "They know that I taught you to fight a little, and they want to know if other monks of your Order would be allowed to learn weaponless combat, or would it be against rules?"
    "Well, there is no rule, as long as it's for sport or exercise. We have occasional ball games outside the walls, those of us whose jobs don't involve physical labor." He laughed. "But if you can imagine getting the Lord Abbot's permission to train fighters!"
    "I know. It's too bad. Their Order has an interesting tradition. If they are to remain there, they would like to form a community, or merge with one."
    
     Later he confessed to Blacktooth, "You know, Nimmy, my people out on the coast were refugees from these Asian Christians several generations ago. Cardinal Ri was a super-Benefez in his own country. These Christians were conquerors. My people were the losers, and crossed the ocean."
    Nimmy looked at the executioner as if seeing him for the first time. "Mine were the losers too," he said. "We should be spiritual brothers."
    A sharp glance from Axe told him this intimacy was getting too thick. He wheeled his mount around and rode back toward the guards and the wagon. Once again, Nimmy realized that Axe did not fully trust him since he had disobeyed the cardinal.
    Wooshin had become strange to him again, but he knew the estrangement lay within himself. The news, conveyed by a possibly ironic Wooshin, that the Yellow Guard was trying to convert him to their Christianity—that news discomfited him. Why had he and his fellow monks ignored Wooshin's religion, if he had any? Axe had come to Mass habitually, but never received communion. His dedication and loyalty had a spiritual quality, as did his attitude toward death. He would have made a good monk, Nimmy thought. But the Albertian Order of Leibowitz was never devoted to the conversion of the heathen. That was why. It was against the rules. Monks were free to answer a guest's religious questions, but the Axe never asked any. Now these strange men wanted to bring him into their religious brotherhood. The Order of Leibowitz had missed its chance to have, besides its electric chair, a warrior monk and executioner.
    Wooshin's new friends in the Yellow Guard had learned of his years as a headsman for the Hannegans, Filpeo Harq and his predecessor. Nimmy had heard them talking, understood very little of their mixed dialect except when they practiced Churchspeak, but could tell that the aliens were both sympathetic and amused, and he sensed that the Axe came away from the conversation both irritated and relieved. It seemed to Nimmy that Wooshin had succumbed to an attack of almost Christian guilt about his old job, and the warriors were apparently trying to cure him of it by conversion. The Axe obviously missed the cardinal as Blacktooth did; and the monk wondered who was now acting as Brownpony's bodyguard after the attempted assassination. Ri's men had all been loaned by the new Vicar Apostolic to SEEC's clandestine wing, once they had learned to communicate a little in Rockymount, but here they were: far from their new master, and as lost as Nimmy himself.
    The monk tried to make religion his only concern again, at least for the duration of the trip, but the effort gradually failed, and the effect of the failure was that he became so irritable he went for three days without even attempting to pray, meditate, or read the canonical hours. His mind, affected by periods of heat exhaustion, kept reaching out to grasp at Jarad, Brownpony, Ædrea, Holy Madness, or the Pope, and to rehearse imaginary dialogues with them, to shake sense into them. Especially Ædrea. This was self-indulgence, self-absorption, vanity, and ego. Because he could not pacify his mind internally, he finally turned outward and tried to stay busy and available for conversation with even Aberlott.
    The group of travelers had taken on an almost military structure of command under Elkin, with Wooshin and Ulad as lieutenants. By the route they were to take, there was danger neither from Texark agents nor from motherless Nomads, although drifting outlaws of every stripe occasionally wandered through the arid land, and there was always the possibility of hostile confrontation. The terrain was rougher than that which Blacktooth had encountered on his first visit to Valana. There was no fixed road; only passes through mountainous areas were clearly defined. The group carried conventional arms, besides those carried by pack mules and in the wagons, but they met no one except a wizened old man who joined them one night after sundown, having wandered in behind them from the direction of Valana. The advent of the old man was the occasion of an argument among those concerned with secrecy and security, but the old fellow seemed half dead, and he was headed toward New Jerusalem anyway. Ulad claimed that he had seen him before. "He's been to New Jerusalem," said the giant. "Magister Dion hired him once, so he knows about us."
    "Hired him? For what?"
    "He can make it rain, for silver."
    "Is he any good?"
    "It rained, but not much. Dion paid him, but not much."
    "He knows the town, then, but does he know about our baggage?" Elkin wondered. "He's already seen us, so he must come with us. If he behaves himself, he's a guest. If he tries to leave, he's a prisoner, until we get where we're going."
    Nevertheless, the old man refused to join them at first, and might have been arrested and bound to one of the wagons if he had not changed his mind upon learning that Blacktooth was a monk of Saint Leibowitz, a fact that seemed to amuse him greatly. He teased the monk about not wearing a habit while still wearing his rosary around his waist. Nimmy tried to avoid conversation with the old man, who seemed to know more about Leibowitz Abbey than seemed probable. The ancient stranger, after a few attempts to talk, shrugged at the monk's reticence, perhaps attributing it to religious silence, but he continued to snipe at him occasionally as if to keep in practice.
    He called himself a pilgrim but not a Christian. He wore tattered garments of hemp, coarsely woven, and he carried his belongings in a bag tied to the end of his staff. He protected his pate from the sun with a curiously embroidered skullcap which he called a "yarmulke." Although defensive and suspicious at first, he seemed harmless enough and became talkative after the first day. Nimmy could not believe that Brownpony's enemies would send such a decrepit fellow as a spy. Elkin seemed to agree, for besides allowing him to ride an extra mule, the security man put him on one of the wagons after he complained of being saddle sore, even though he had to sit on a crate of weapons.
    He told them he was a Jew and a tentmaker among other things. He was obviously one of those wanderers who peddled his skills as a rainmaker in areas of low rainfall. This old Jew had several useful skills and thus several sources of income. For fifteen pios, he would pull a tooth; for eight, he would scrape the incrustation from the rest of your teeth and scrub them well with talc. Root canals were negotiable. He contracted as a rainmaker, and if he made no rain in a week, he got no pay beyond his week's room and board; if rain came, he received whatever the petitioners could, in his opinion, afford. His advice in every imaginable matter was freely given to whoever would listen to him, and sometimes imposed upon whoever would not.
    Blacktooth tried to use the journey for privacy and silence, insofar as his wish to be polite survived its many trials. But the old Jew would not let him be, and he asked all sorts of questions about an Abbot Jerome, who, to the best of Nimmy's recollection, had died seventy years ago at an advanced age, and yet this old man claimed he had been Jerome's friend, Benjamin.
    "You must be nearly a hundred years old," Nimmy said skeptically. "Or maybe even more."
    "Hmm-hnn! I would have to be, wouldn't I?"
    Claims to extraordinary longevity arose in the Valley of the Misborn, but the old pilgrim was not an obvious glep. Still, he had been admitted to the secret nation ie far superior to
the Dom Fauxgnon. However the conversation in
the next half hour grew sour in Grant's mouth and
ears, unspiked by sensual desire and the urge for
sexual conquest.

Dammit!

Could Lardner Foxnall have gotten wind of what
he was up to? Could he possibly know the destina-
tion of the U.S.S. Razzia and the reason for the
trip?

If so, that could mean many things, none of
them particularly good, several of them very bad.

His mood seemed to grow fouler as he helped

ALIENS: GENOCIDE          91

the increasingly drunk secretary finish their late
night treats among the wistful smells and pulsing
sounds of Flickers nightclub.

"Mr. Grant!" she said, giggling at some stupid
sarcastic statement he'd made about some politico-
"You are so funny!"

"I think we've had a little too much champagne,
Mabel."

"But not too much caviar. I never could have be-
lieved that I ever would like fish eggs, but this stuff
is just delish! I really am enjoying myself."

"I hope you've saved some for friends," said a
cold voice from the darkness. A swath of mist
swirled away, and there stood a husky man with a
scar riding along his bald pate like a bolt of light-
ning. He wore good clothes and he smelled of good
cologne.

"Gee! Another competitor, Mr. Grant?"

Grant froze, "Not exactly" >-

Fisk. Morton Fisk.

What was this, old home night for demons from
hell?

"Good evening, Grant." The man did not even
look at Mabel. His piercing eyes just hooked on to
Grant and hung on. "I don't usually visit people
personally However I do have a tradition. I like to
make sure that my face is branded on the retinas of
dying men."

"Fisk. What are you talking about?"

Grant had a suspicion, but he didn't even want
to think about the possibility

"Who is this guy, Mr. Grant? What's going on?"
said Mabel.

"I told you. Grant, when you got me to bail you

92 DAVID BISCttOFF

out, that I was a patient man ., - until I wasn't pa-
tient." The scar on the head seemed to glow a livid
pink. Pulsing with contained rage. "And I haven't
been. You're months overdue, and you haven't even
had the dignity to send partial payments. I am truly
offended."

"Fisk! I'm not sure what you're talking about.
You've been getting regular installments!*'

A big fist grabbed a handful of his shirt, lifted
him up so that Grant began to gasp for air. "Ue! He
hes to my face! You well know that I haven't gotten
a penny for months."

Indeed, Grant did know.

All too well.

In the scrabble for solidity and power after the
Alien-Earth War; not all of the fortresses of fiducia-
ry control were entirely legal. And often as not. to
get the leverage you needed for truly inspired buy-
outs, you had to go to these underground people
for liquid assets.

Unfortunately, they were criminals.

Violent criminals,

Self-confidence was always the antigrav stuff for
Daniel Grant, the by-your-bootstraps talent that
hoisted him above the rest. Unfortunately, self-
confidence could also be a blindfold. He well knew
that he personally owed millions to Fisk and com-
pany. but since for Daniel Grant manana was al-
ways golden—well, he'd pay them manana, when
he had the money

Alas, he saw no manana in Morton Fisk's eyes.

"Look, Moriy. Sit down, pull up a glass of the
warm south, get to know this delightful creature ...

ALIENS: GENOCIDE         33

and for heaven's sake, let's jaw awhile, huh?" Grant
patted a comfortable cushion.

"Sorry."

The big man spun on his heel, and was swal-
lowed up by the stylish mists and the nightclub
gloom.

"Mr. Grant . . . Daniel .. ." said Mabel. "What
kind of gorilla was that?"

"Not the gorilla of my dreams!" said Grant,
scooting over to the end of the booth. "Look, I'll be
right back, Mabel. Got to visit the little boys'
room!"

What had happened here? Had Foxnall tipped
Fisk off to his presence here? That bastard! That
must have been what had happened.

Geez! There were such sharks in business these
days!

He was at the edge of the booth, when he heard
a click. Instinctively he dived" for the floor.

An explosion of bullets whacked over the top of
him like lateral hail. He could feel their heat. He
hit the floor and rolled, the sound of the machine
gun echoing in his ear, the scream of his secretary
joining in.

He got a glimpse of the poor brunette, jerking
amid the passion of the bullets, blood yanked from
that sweet body, making a mess of her dress. Glass
and champagne and caviar spattered every which
way, in a fantasmagoric slow-mo fountain.

The will to live turned Grant away from this
death dance, and he scrambled away, like a rat
from a pack of cats.

7

n month of her life, just get-
ting this show on the road.

Colonel Aiex Kozlowski took a swig of her coffee,
and watched as the last batch of supplies got
loaded into the shuttle. She managed to get down
to a quarter capsule a day of Fire, but she'd already
taken that now, and damned herself for wanting
more. The stuff wasn't like booze, you didn't see
creepy crawlies if you went dry It was like ciga-
rettes. And just as hard to kick. She wanted to kick
it, to show her own superiority to herself. Which
was why she felt bad now, wanting another hit.

In just a few hours they'd be boosted up to the
Razzia, stored away with the rest of the stuff Dan-
iel Grant and his scientists wanted on this
mission—along of course with the rest of the ma-
rines, her own hard ass included.

84

ALIENS: GENOCIDE         15

Alex Kozlowski was sitting on the apron of the
ramp, the lip of which sided a wing of the shuttle
that would soon trundle out of the hangar and
wing up through the atmosphere. To the other side
of her was a warehouse-sized security checkpoint
and storage room. Dawn had just shouldered
through a cloudy horizon.

She slouched in the chair, watching the crates
being loaded.

Hell of a lot of stuff going up there.

She'd been in charge of everything her crew was
going to need. She'd wanted to be in charge of the
whole shebang. Unfortunately, that was not in the
cards.

A bored-looking deliveryman walked over and
handed her a piece of paper on a clipboard. "Sign
please. Colonel."

Alex took the clipboard.

SUPPLIES, said the checklist That was all.

"How can I check 'em in, if i don't know what
they are?"

"Look, Colonel," said the man, "I'm just doing
my job. I'd like it a lot if you could just take a crow-
bar and prize open a couple and have yourself a
gander. I'm afraid, though, that it's all pretty insu-
lated and locked up and you'd be pretty hard-
pressed to lock the stuffing back in."

The guy was a ciwy, probably worked for the gov-
ernment. Kozlowski could tell by his attitude. She
didn't like any man she couldn't give orders to, or
take orders from, and the man annoyed her. What
could she do, though? Make him clean the latrines?
He was the equivalent of a third-rate, truck-driving,
trolley-pushing bureaucrat.

u

IAVIO BISCNOFF

It hit her then: what was important to bureau-
crats?

"Ooopsi" she said, and tore the papers she had
to sign into shreds.

The man looked at her, stunned. "Colonel. I'm
going to have to go and get another form now!
Why . . .?"

"File a complaint, toad-breath," she said. "But
have some respect next time you give a lady a form
to sign . . ."

The man went off, cursing under his breath, to
get another form. Kozlowski went off to sniff
around the crates.

TOP SECRET, they read.

THIS SIDE UP.
HIGHLY FRAGILE.

One was even fitted with elaborate refrigeration
equipment.

"Oh, well," she said, drumming her fingers
against a crate, "You can bet I'm going to find out
what's going on when we're light-years away"

She was almost sorry she'd signed up for this gig.

Not that she minded going long distance in in-
terstellar space. That would be fun. And the idea of
blowing away xenos en masse still tickled her pink.
However, all the mystery and bullshit attendant to
her duties had not exactly thrilled her, to say the
least. She thought that she was in charge of this
mission—but over the weeks, the fact had gradu-
ally seeped through her thick skull that she was
only in charge of the military aspects. Neo-Pharm's
other operations on the Razzia—and there was
plenty of extra room for that, which was doubtless

ALIENS: iEIBCIBE         97

why the ugly scow had been chosen—was strictly
out of her control.

Which was one of the reasons they'd probably
chosen her.

She could hear the old uniformed farts now, gas-
sing. "Kozlowsld! Yeah—she's tough, good, but
she's a woman. She's got some give to her."

Alex Kozlowski smiled to herself. The prepara-
tions were only part of the whole story. She'd taken
the shit dished to her, fried it up nice, and put
some ketchup on it. When the Neo-Pharm boys
were out there among the stars and planets and xe-
nos, they had better just hope they'd brought some
condiments along to stomach what they were going
to get from her.

Yep. This was going to be an R and R trip for her;

if it killed them and her, along with those bugs.

It would be nice to get away from the planet
where Peter had died. Maybe, just maybe, she'd
find the kind of peace—or war—she was looking
for.

She was just sauntering back for another pour of
coffee when a man whirled through the door. At
first she thought it was Mr. Mover, pissed off and
running back with that form to sign.

However, it was not the bottom-level bureaucrat
at all.

It was Daniel Grant.

He didn't see her. He ran toward the gangplank
of the loading car for the shuttle, looking as though
he wanted to climb on along with the baggage. He
looked really bad, too, fancy duds all tattered and
torn, shoes scuffed, and fancy haircut all frazzled.

"Yo!" she called out.

U          DAVID BISCHflfF

He swirled around, and the first thing that
Kozlowski noticed was how bloodshot his eyes
were, how baggy. He looked like a man who hadn't
slept much last night ... only worse.

"Look, soldier. Tell me where I get on the shut-
tle?"

"Grant?" She went closer, eyeing him suspi-
ciously What, was the Drug King flying high or
something?

"That's right, soldier. You want to help me out?
I'm in charge of this mission."

"Colonel Kozlowski here, Grant—and the last I
heard you were going to keep your oxfords firmly
hugging ground." Unfortunately, she was a bit too
astonished to be properly sarcastic.

"Oh, yes ... Colonel ... of course. I'm sony. It's
been a rough evening." He sighed, looking back at
the access room as though half expecting something
to be following him. For a moment he looked lost
and vulnerable, and quite a different human being
entirely than how she'd seen him before. Something
troubled her deeply about him ... There was an as-
pect here that reminded her ..,

"Rough evening?" But the sun was rising . ..

"Er—yes."

He seemed uncharacteristically at a loss for
words. He kept on looking behind him.

"Don't worry, Mr. Grant. Whoever's chasing you
can't get through the base's security unless they
nuke the perimeter."

"Chasing?" He seemed to shake something off.
"Nothing of the sort ... I just couldn't sleep last
night. . . That's all... Got a little groggy, fell down
a couple times—"

ALIENS: GENOCIDE          99

"Shouldn't you see a doctor then?"

"No. No, Colonel, I'll be just fine."

Before her eyes, he seemed to be putting himself
back together again. An amazing act of will. So-
matic repair: straightening of poise, sucking in of
stomach, stiffening of upper lip. Psychological re-
pair: the psychic armor erected. The eyes recov-
ered, and the willpower returned, the arrogance.

"I made a monumental decision last night,
Colonel."

"Did you."

"Yes. This mission is far too important to my
companies—to me—to allow ... I mean, not to
contribute my presence. I called both the admiral
and the general last night and made arrangements.
I'll be going along with you. Colonel Kozlowski, to
help oversee and participate in the effort." He took
in another breath, looking stronger by the moment.

"Are you." Oh, this was just^peachy keen.

"Yes. Specific orders are even now being sent
over. Now, if you'd kindly drive me to the passenger
portion of the shuttle?"

"No bags, Mr. Grant?"

"Er—uh—no. The decision was so abrupt, I did
not have time to pack. I'll use whatever's on board.
However, the admiral assured me that there are
communications facilities available aboard the
shuttle that I can use to let my people know what's
happening—and dub someone to take my place
while I'm gone."

"That's going to be a long time, Mr. Grant. Four
months at least. A lot can happen to your company
while you're gone."

"1 trust my officers here . . . just as I trust you

fflfl          DAVID IISCHGFF

and your people on the Razzia. I'm not dealing
with amateurs in either case."

"No, of course not. But don't be mistaken. It's
going to be plenty dangerous out there."

Whatever danger was "out there" did not seem
to phase Daniel Grant. He seemed far too preoccu-
pied with whatever he was running away from
here.

However, there would be plenty of time to find
out exactly what that was later.

"Fine. We'll put you on the shuttle with your
boxes and the last group of marines going up."

"Excellent, Colonel. I'm looking forward to work-
ing with you." He could not seem to help himself,
looking furtively around. "Ah—perhaps you could
bring me some of that coffee and one of your mil-
itary style donuts ... oh, and an Alka-Seltzer. That
would help a lot."

Kozlowski stepped forward and poked him on the
shoulder.

"Look, Grant. You're in my territory now. I'm not
your slave." She pointed, cringing a bit. God, he
smelled of alcohol. "There's stuff over there in the
office. Get it yourself."

Then she stomped off to get on with her work ...
and check on the promised electro-dispatches. Only
way she was going to allow Grant on the Razzia was
if she was ordered to do so.

This little wrinkle in the future did not bode
well.

••hen Grant closed his eyes,
he could see Fisk's face, grinning at him.

But he was tired. So tired.

He sat in a comer grav-couch of the shuttle,
dimmest part, telling himself he was safe, telling
himself it was okay, that he was in charge again.

Rest. He needed some rest.

He was alive, that was the important thing, he
told himself. Miserable, but alive. Why had he ever
gone out last night? He knew that he hadn't made
the payments to Fisk. He knew that Fisk's temper
got out of control sometimes.

A mistake. A goof A snafu. It wouldn't happen
again, that was for sure. Of course, he had a few
months to get the opportunity to high-life it again. By
then, hopefully, the money due to Neo-Pharm and
thus Grant Industries and thus Grant himself—the

lfl1

182 DAVID BISCHOFF

financial entity in direst need—would have arrived.
He'd just called his CEOs and ordered them to pay
Fisk what they could of his blood money . . .

Deal with the whole disaster, weep with poor
Mabel Planer's family, and make sure the insur-
ance company paid off as though it had been on
company time the girl had been shot .. .

And, above all, do what Grant was doing.

Survive.

He'd come damned close to falling off the edge
of that state last night.

Even now he wasn't quite sure how he'd done it.
When those blasts had ripped through the booth
and Mabel, some auxiliary mode in his muscula-
ture must have kicked in, because he'd never
scrambled and dodged and ducked so well in his
life. Some survival node in his brain must have
clicked on as well. He'd done exactly the right
thing, headed right on down to the dance floor.
The wrigglers and nailers there, doubtless thinking
that the explosions above were part of the show,
were still going at it to the heavy localized pound-
ing. He hadn't dared to stop for the slightest mo-
ment. He'd dived to the exit, skipped his limo,
sprinted blocks and blocks, falling down a few
times, until he felt safe enough hailing a cab.

And still the chase had not been over. He'd spent
most of the night hiding behind cans of garbage in
an alley, waiting for one of his aides to come and
pick him up. Then he'd directed him on a Toad's
Wild Ride to the launchport—and thus, he'd made it
to the base, after a sleepless night, grateful to be
alive.

"" In the comparative safety of the shuttle, strapped

ALIENS: BENOCIDE         103

in above the equivalent of thousands of tonnes of
GeligNuke®, Daniel Grant shuddered at the
thought. No, he didn't want to think about it ...
not for a while, anyway.

Sleep. Some blessed sleep .. . that was what he
needed. Fisk's ugly mug or no ...

"Hey there. That seat by you taken?"

Grant's eyes snapped open.

There, looming over him, was a Nordic god.

Thor with a haircut.

Well, not exactly He was big and strapping, with
blond hair and blue eyes and a smile above his
square-cut chin. He looked not only damned com-
petent, but perfectly content in that state, and per-
fectly comfortable in the fatigues that snugly fit his
muscular limbs and torso.

Now this guy, thought Grant, looked like a leader.

"Ah—no. No ... please, be my guest."

The blond god secured a carryall bag in a storage
bin, and then slid into the couch, not yet buckling
himself in. "Name's Henrikson. Corporal Lars
Henrikson." They shook hands. "You must be one
of the Neo-Pharm fellows."

"Yes. I'm Daniel Grant. I own Neo-Pharm."

Henrikson did not react immediately He took
the information in thoughtfully. "Ah, I had been
told that you would not actually be on our expedi-
tion, Mr. Grant."

"A last-minute decision."

Henrikson assimilated this information and nod-
ded, as though this were the most natural thing in
the world.

"I see. Well, good, I say ... with all respect. It's
good to see bosses take a personal interest in im-

w DAVID BISCHOFf

portant tasks." A slight bend of the mouth. "Get
their hands a little dirty, you know."

Grant smiled, the first time for what seemed like
millennia. "Maybe I'm just trying to turn over a
new leaf. Corporal Henrikson."

He closed his eyes, hoping to give the man a clue
that he'd like a little privacy inside his own head,
maybe rest his bloodshot eyes.

Henrikson wasn't the clue-taking kind.

"This is a special mission," he said. "I can feel it
in my bones. Nine times out of ten a group of ma-
rines head out into space, all they come back with
are handfuls of boredom. I've had some of that out
there, let me tell you. Soon as I got wind of this
mission though, special duty entailing a beachhead
on the alien Hiveworld .. . Well, I just jumped at
the chance. Jumped."

"Couldn't get your fill of bug duty on Earth?"

Henrikson shrugged. "I've killed some bugs. Eu-
rope, mostly Special services. That's probably why
I got this gig—the experience. No, that's not it
though, sir—you see, I've got this feeling that the
human race is destined for great things in this uni-
verse. Destined. And I'd like to do my bit to make
that possible. And I guess I'm vain enough to think
I'm a talented enough guy to deal with the kind of
situation we've got lined up for us."

Granted expected an inner groan of cynicism to
echo in his head. Instead, he found the words
oddly striking a sympathetic chord within him.

"That's a compellingly homocentric view of the
universe, soldier."

Henrikson nodded. "Yes, sir. I'm sorry ... I've
had people tell me that men are just accidents in

AllENS: BENOCIDE         185

the scheme of things. I don't think so ... Why ...
Because we're men. We stand for something,
goddammit. We've got values and order and . . .
hell . .. purpose to bring to what amounts to a lot
of godless space."

"Indeed. Indeed! That kind of feeling would be a
wonderful rabble-rouser ... I mean, that would go a
long way to heal the wounded spirit of humanity!"

"I know, sir. I know." Henrikson nodded gravely.
"And that's why I'm here."

"Excellent. Well, you know, Corporal, I think
we're going to have lots of time to discuss pertinent
applications of that philosophy while we're on our
mission. In the meantime, I think I'd like to take a
little time to compose myself before the blast-off of
this shuttle. You know ... for meditation ... a little
cat nap, perhaps ..."

Henrikson looked over at Grant. 'Ah. Yes, you do
look a little tired. How thoughtless of me. Please,
dose your eyes. Relax. Snooze, I have my own inner
warrior's form of meditation. We shall meditate to-
gether."

With that, the corporal's eyes trained onto the
front of his couch, and focused.

Well, so much for that. Rest and meditation was
even valuable to big boy here. He should have tried
that tactic before.

Oh, well. He knew he'd have someone of interest
to talk to on the mission. He just wished now he'd
brought along one of his PR men to jot all these
golden thoughts down.

Grant let his heavy eyelids close.

He found peace for perhaps thirty seconds, be-
fore he heard the clamor of feet boarding the boat,

108          DAVID BISCHOFF

closets opening, packs being stored, voices jab-
bering among one another.

**... look, chum. I'm telling you, that was the
way it was ... the music was the soul of the beats!
The hot, cool black music of the streets, man.
That's where the streaming ice lava of the poetry
came from to begin withi" The voice was annoy-
ingly adenoidal and high-pitched.

"Look, Jastrow! I make one single comment the
other day that I enjoyed reading the old free verse of
the twentieth century ... and you think I'm talking
about the beat poets! I'm talking about a number of
writers, including William Carios Williams . . ."

Grant cracked his weary eyelids.

Couple of privates in fatigues and caps. White
boy, black boy. White boy was the one carping on
the literary and music themes. Unfortunate, but he
could tune them out.

"Williams! But Williams was John the Baptist to
Alien Ginsberg!"

"Sorry. Never heard of him."

" 'Howl'? You read twentieth-century free verse,
and you've never read 'Howl'?"

"Well, come to think of it ... Perhaps I have ...
but I still don't see the connection between free
verse poetry and jazz."

"Sheesh. Not just jazz, budz. Be-bop! Here, let
me show you."

The conversation had become detached, as
though Grant were listening to it through a tin-can
telephone as he drifted into exhausted sleep.

Blaaaaat... !

High-pitched, running hell-for-leather up some
spidery octave.

ALIENS: 6ENOCIDE         187

Bleeet ... BLEEEEET ...!

The sounds were fingernails and Grant's brain
had turned to chalkboard.

He jumped up, awake and disoriented. He hit his
head on a low overhang and flopped back onto the
couch.

Hank ... honk HONNKKKKK!

He looked over. Sitting on the edge of a grav-
couch was a black man wearing glasses and a gri-
mace. His hands were over his ears. Opposite him
was another bespectacled guy with a pocket-
protector face. His thin lips were clamped on the
mouthpiece of a big baritone saxophone.

Both had boot-camp bodies, but faces innocent
of the heart of war.

Blat... blat... Blat!

"Can't you hear it, Ellis?" he said, unclamping.
"I have seen the finest minds of my generation—"

The natural force that was. Corporal Henrikson
reared up like a vengeful statue. "You guys want to
give the rest of us in here some peace?"

His muscular hovering said it all. The salt-and-
pepper twins blinked, flinching back.

"Gee—sorry, Corporal."

"Just playing a little Bird, man."

Henrikson stood rock-hard. "Well, I'm clipping
your wingsl This is not a place for that thing. Now
over your head .. . maybe."

Ellis looked as though he agreed, but Jastrow got
a hurt-litde-boy expression on his face as he put
his musical instrument away in its case.

"I could use a few Z's anyway, Jazz," said Ellis,

"Yeah. Maybe you're right. We'll continue this
conversation later, though, huh?"

108 AVID BISCHOFF

"Whatever." The man sounded resigned.

Henrikson bent over Grant. "You okay, sir?"

"Sure. My ears are still ringing and I'm wide
awake. But I'm okay."

"We got a good fifteen before formal boarding, so
maybe you should use them."

"I'll try. Corporal. Believe me, I'll try."

Henrikson shot one more warning look at the
newly arrived duo and then resumed his grav-
couch. Grant found EUis and Jastrow peering at
him curiously, obviously wondering who he was.

Grant could feel it even through his closed eyelids.

"Name's Grant. The reason you're on this mis-
sion," he said. "Mind if we meet formally later? I'm
trying to get a little rest."

"Oh!"

"Oh, sure, sir. Sorry."

"Yeah. Right. We'll be real quiet." Whisper.
"Sheesh. That's Daniel Grant, man! And you had
to squeal that sax in his ear."

"How could I know? I didn't even see him!"

The whispers died into uneasy silence and once
again Grant found himself slipping into an uneasy
coma.

Which ended all too soon.

He'd been having a dream about his parents, and
he hated to dream about his parents, so it was just
as well. Still, it was all a little annoying.

The clump-clump of steps didn't wake him. He
barely heard it: background noise.

The shifting of bags, the snap of storage cases.
No problem.

However, when a body fell directly onto him—
that woke him up.

ALIENS: GENOCIDE         108

-Ooophhht" he said.

"Gahhh. Oh, dear .. . damned floor! All these
knobs and braces. Sorry!"

That the person was prominently female miti-
gated the hurt and shock somewhat, and not just
because of the softer bits. She looked good and she
smelled good, even in fatigues. She was a busty
brunette with hair about as long as the Marines
would let you wear it if you weren't male, and rich
dark eyes that now looked thoroughly repentant.

"That's all right," said Grant, flashing on the im-
mediate lady smile. "I was hoping to get some rest
before takeoff, but these things happen."

She pushed herself off of him with ease and a
great deal more grace than she'd shown in tripping
onto him. "I do better in faux grav, for some rea-
son. And null grav? I'm a swan." She shrugged.
"I'm just a space babe, that's all there is to it, and
I'll be glad to lift off this—" Shfe batted those splen-
did doe eyes. "Say. Haven't I seen you ... My God!
You're Daniel Grant, the big tycoon! I've seen you
on the vids!"

"That's me."

"You look awfu—I mean, I guess you could use
some rest." She hobbled over to an empty grav-
couch, and Grant, despite his weariness, was un-
able to take his attention off her delightfully
swiveling hips. She turned. "I'd heard you were
somewhere behind this mission. I didn't think I'd
get to really meet you though!"

"Well, get used to it. Private," said Henrikson.
"He's coming along with us for the voyage."

"No kidding! Well, isn't that . . . Isn't that news."
She swiveled back over, unconsciously smoothing her

110 DAVID BISCHOFF

hair, and gave him her hand and a markedly breath-
ier delivery "My name is Edie Mahone. Private First
Class—but I'm still young, and I really think I have
quite a bright future with the Colonial Marines."

Grant felt a little nonplussed and couldn't help
automatically turning on the charm—and wonder-
ing at the same time what this particular woman
was doing in the Marines .. . and on this mission
in particular. As he studied her though, he got an
impression of strength beneath the apparent
ditziness. The oh-gosh business was just an act.
Beneath it. Grant could tell, was strength, and it
turned him on. It challenged him.

"You have an interest in xeno development
then?" said Grant.

"The bugs? Oh, no." She shook her head, shud-
dered. "Hate 'em. But then, who doesn't? I can see
your question coming. What's a nice girl doing in a
place like this?" She shrugged. *Tm just a space nat-
ural, I guess, Mr. Grant. I wasn't fooling you . .. And
on top of that, I'm a tactical weapons specialist."

"Weapons specialist?"

"Yes, sir. Top scores." A mischievous playfulness
shaded her voice.

"I'm just glad you weren't carrying any grenades
when you fell over me."

"Hmmm? Oh, yes ... yes, of course. Mr. Grant,
I really am sorry, and it's such a surprise ... maybe
this mission isn't going to be such a grim business
after all."

"I certainly hope not. Now, Private Mahone—I
hope you'll come to my cabin sometime for drinks
and we'll have a nice long chat. In the meantime,

ALIENS: GENOCIDE         in

my sanity could really use a little rest before it gets
rattled by takeoff."

"Of course. Of course, Mr. Grant ... sir. I'll just
hop into a couch over here and leave you alone . ..
And -, ." She did a double take. "Drinks? Did you
say drinks with a tycoon! Of course, Mr. Grant. I'd
love to! I'm a regular media hound and I watch you
all the time. I even bought that unauthorized pa-
perback about you—is it true that your wife di-
vorced you when she found you in your marriage
bed with four naked women?"

Grant chuckled mischievously. "And a parrot.
Don't forget the parrot, Private Mahone."

He was pleased the legend lingered.

The starstruck private shook her head and rap-
turously wandered back to her couch. Was it an
act? He didn't know. And he didn't care.

Drinks with an attractive private who would
probably be disappointed if h6 didn't make a pass at
her. After that tragic debacle last night, he was
hardly in the mood for romance right now. But
weeks into a space cruise with a bunch of scientists
and hardened soldiers? The dominant Grant hor-
mones would doubtless trot themselves out into
quest-and-conquer mode. A willing female partner
with the requisite assets was something that
cheered him immensely.

Now, though, to sleep for just a brief sweet mo-
ment,

Grant let his head flop down into the cushion,
gratified at the silence that the cabin had cloaked
itself in. Respectful silence.

This wasn't so bad, shipping out on a boat head-
ing light-years away from Earth with a bunch of

112 AVIB BISCHOFF

scientists and marines. It was his mission, after
all ... And he seemed to be getting the appropri-
ate obeisance from his people.

This was good. This was very good. A kind of
calm descended upon Daniel Grant. His knotted
muscles unwound, and a sense of control of his en-
vironment began to knit itself around him. Yes, yes,
perhaps it would work out for the best that he was
coming along to supervise, to oversee . . . no, to
control. The boys in the office knew well enough
how he ran things by now. They could do exactly
what he would do, whatever the situation. He
didn't have to be around. Instead, he should be
doing exactly what he was doing. Heading for parts
unknown, spreading his influence, his dominion.

Daniel Grant ... a great man, destined for the
stars.

The cadences of his self-congratulations lulla-
byed him into that blessed relaxed land just short
of slumber, where not even his mother was waiting
to natter at him,

Ah ...!

Sweet, gentle peace ...

WOOOOOOONK/

WOONNNNNNNK/

The Klaxon rang like hell's own trumpet.

"That's the fire alarm!" cried Jastrow.

"Shit! Something's wrong with the shuttle. We
gotta get out of here, Mr. Grant!"

"Please," murmured Grant. "Just let me lie here
awhile. I'll die if need be. Just let me sleep."

"No can do, Mr. G!"

Grant felt himself being pulled up out of the
couch, and physically carried down the ramp.

ALIENS: CENOCIQE         113

The cooler air outside was like a slap across the
chops. He blinked, felt himself being jounced ...

And then suddenly stop still.

"Let me down!" he demanded.

"Do what the man says, turkey! Now!"

Henrikson dropped him onto hard sheetcrete.

"Ow!" Groggily he scrambled up to his feet ...

And found himself staring into the bores of
10mm blasters.

Connected to those blasters were Colonel Alex
Kozlowsld and a group of marines, travel sacks at
their bags.

"Belay arms," said Kozlowsld, striding up to
them, arms on hips. If we were a group of bugs,
you dopes would be bug food now! Emergencies
demand emergency measures!" A toothpick stuck
out from the side of her mouth. She worked it all
the way to the other side of a scowl. "Isn't that
right, soldiers!"

The marines, who somewhere in the midst of all
this had managed to effect uncomfortable poses of
attention, immediately responded.

"Yes, sir!"

Kozlowsld worked the toothpick.

"Besides, I haven't assigned seats yet, have I?"

"No, sir!"

Kozlowsld walked over to Grant, and stooped
down beside him. "Welcome to your mission, Mr.
Grant ..." She spat the toothpick.

It stuck into the loose fabric of his pants.

"Welcome to my command."

Grant sighed and closed his eyes again.

This sheetcrete was actually rather comfortable ...

9

&

Markness.

Darkness and dreams.

Dream logic tangled in its own shreds and chips
of reality and magic.

For six weeks, Daniel Grant dreamed or didn't
dream, but in the overpowering darkness, the
dreams were all he knew.

Moebius strips of dreams. Jump cuts. Swirls of
victory and laughter and glory.

The depths of the past, into secret and overpow-
ering fears.

Mostly, though, it seemed a short sleep, for the
dreams were only brief releases of hypersleep to al-
low brain function and REM.

In the glass-case cubicle, embedded like a fly in
amber, when the mechanism and gas mix slowly
began to gently pry him from his slumber, Daniel

114

ALIENS: GENOCIDE         115

Grant only vaguely sensed the springing of the lock
mechanism of his case. He clung to his dreams,
clung to the darkness, a sleeper drunk on sleep.

"Mr. Grant?"

A gentle female voice. Whose? It was sweet and
kind and understanding. The kind of voice his ex-
wife used to use, in their early love, when he gave
himself only to her.

She seemed very real now, very much a part of
reality in this darkness.

"Daniel?"

Martha. He'd been dating a lot back then, back
in the halcyon days of Neo-Pharm, when he'd first
bought it and was working on the beginnings of his
empire. She was a model his ad company had
hired for commercials. He'd swooped down and
never come back up ... not for a long time, any-
way. Suit, to this day, he was not sure why there
had been others, years down- the road. Old bad
habits? Part of the life-style he'd loved? Pure stok-
ing of an overblown ego?

He wasn't sure, and he wasn't troubled about it.

Except for moments like these, upon waking, when
he doubted himself when he felt vulnerable.

"It's time to wake up, Mr. Grant."

Wake up? Where was he?

"We've got a lot to do."

That voice. It certainly wasn't Martha's. He real-
ized that now.

"So hop to it."

It was a hard voice now, a voice used to being
obeyed.

Grant realized that he was cold. He felt quite na-
ked. Shivering, he raised himself.

Tit DAVIB IISCNOFF

He pried open his eyes.

Peripherally, he saw the overhanging cables and
cold metal of the hypersleep chamber.

In front of him, crouching, was a good eight feet
worth of talons, bony notched spars and open, an-
gry jaws.

An alien\

He screamed.

He cringed.

Then he scrabbled back, instinctively throwing
up his arms in a helpless gesture to protect him
from this, the deadliest creature in the known uni-
verse.

Even as he squirmed, trying to grapple over the
side of his hypersleep cubicle, what shreds of his
rational mind that still operated realized some-
thing.

The thing wasn't moving.

It was just hovering there, a few feet away

And come to think of it, couldn't he barely see a
bulkhead through the murky black of its articulated
body?

A shudder, a zwip! of light passed through it.

It wasn't real ... It was a ...

From the left a woman in khaki fatigues stepped,
holding a modular control unit.

Colonel Kozlowski.

The beast before him was just a hologram.

"Thought you might need to get your juices flow-
ing." She tapped a control, and moved the hologram
away "Welcome to the U.S.S. Razzia, Phase II."

"God damn you, Colonel!"

She raised a dark eyebrow. "You want to be a

ALIENS: fiENOClOE         117

part of the gang, don't you, Grant? Just consider
this a very mild hazing. You're a member of the fra-
ternity now!"

He wasn't groggy at all. The adrenaline had man-
aged to kick weeks worth of sleepdirt out of his
head. Still, his heart was racing and he was
damned angry

And, what with only a pair of briefs between
himself and nakedness, damned near naked!

He hopped out of his cubicle, one of ten spiraled
around a central control and supply center. All the
duraplas casings were lifted now, like translucent
insect wings.

They had obviously let him snooze awhile longer
than normal. All the other cubicles were empty.

"Why am I the last to wake?" he said, getting up
and out of the thing, steadying himself on the side.

"You seemed real tired when we left, Grant. We
all thought you could use a little extra sleep."

"How far are we from our destination?"

"The gravitonic engines are cut off. We've got to
use regular impulse engines to cruise among plan-
ets. We'll be in orbit around the Hiveworld in four
days." She smiled, "Are you ready for some action,
Mr. Grant?"

"It would appear I've already gotten some, Colo-
nel."

"What. From Black Fang here?" She smiled.
"Just a training hologram. No reason to be embar-
rassed. Some younger recruits have soiled their
skivvies because of Black Fang. Looks like you
pretty much did okay"

Grant snorted. "You have quite a warped sense
of humor, Kozlowsld. I guess we're going to have to

118 AV BISCHOFF

talk about that, and some other things in a few
hours. Right now, I'd like to get some pants on."

"Too bad. You look so cute that way." She
laughed and started walking away. "Come, boy!
Come! Fun's over. We've got some work to do."

The holoprojection ghosted along beside her as
she walked away toward wherever.

Grant shuddered. He took a deep breath, got his
bearings, and headed off in the direction of the
locker room where he'd left his clothing.

In the few days aboard the U.S.S. Razzia before
he was tucked away in hypersleep, Daniel Grant
had had very little time to familiarize himself with
the full extent of this very large ship. He'd spent
some time overseeing the operations of his scien-
tists and he'd spent time getting some natural
sleep. That was about it.

However, he did make sure he remembered
where he put his clothes.

He wasn't crazy about the immense and metallic
coldness of the ship. The liner he'd taken from his
home planet had at least catered to some human
amenities. It gave some feeling of warmth and so-
ciability. Here, aboard the Razzia, it was just a pure
case of military utilitarianism. There was about as
much decor inside the ship as on the outside.

All in all. Grant was just as happy to snore the
time away.

What the hell was going on back on Earth now?
he wondered. He'd warned his officers to stay in-
side, to hire security, and to reinforce measures.
He'd even had them tender a small payment to
Fisk's "company" Nonetheless, he couldn't help

AtlEKS: GENOCIDE         119

but wonder. Still, whatever was going on, there was
absolutely nothing he could do out here, light-years
distant in some godforsaken quadrant of the half-
known galaxy.

The locker room was down a narrow corridor.

Showers, toilets, benches,

It looked, smelled, tasted, felt like something out
of his high school sports hero's days. Funky, but
somehow homey Oddly comforting.

A tall blond man was in the comer, buckling the
belt of his pants. Oddly enough, he was wearing
dark glasses. They made him look more like the
MacArthur school of officer than a corporal.

"Henrikson? You just get out of cold sleep, too,
buddy?"

The corporal turned and looked at him. "Early
this morning. Just finished exercising, sir."

"Just kicked my butt out of bed now. Wonder why
they kept me down so long?""-

"Maybe they just wanted things spick-and-span
for you, sir."

"You have a first name?"

"As I told you before, sir. It's Lars."

"Oh, right. That's it. Lars. Tell you what. You can
call me Dan."

The corporal nodded. "Thanks . . . Dan."

Grant found his locker. Racked his brain. His
memory coughed up the combination. He twirled
the dial back and forth. The lock snapped open. In-
side were the ciwie scientist grays they'd provided
him with, since he hadn't brought along any of his
own clothes, and-the duds he'd come in with were
pretty shredded.

He put his pants on.

120 DAVID DiSCHOFF

"You know," said the corporal, "times like these
make me wish I could pop a tab or two of that
Xeno-Zip you make. Unfortunately, tests have de-
termined that chances are pretty good I'd go ber-
serk even on the regular stuff. Damned skittish
metabolism."

"Oh, well," said Grant paternally. "I'm sure
you're a damn fine soldier without it." He grew
thoughtful. "I'll tell you, Lars. You must be pretty
sick of that colonel of yours."

"Colonel Kozlowski. Our commanding officer."

"She had a bug holo waiting for me when I woke
up."

"No kidding. She must like you then."

"Like me? Scared hell out of me. Said it was
some sort of hazing."

"Tough. She's pretty tough all right, the colonel
is."

Grant was surprised. "C'mon. We're friends. You
don't have to pull that loyalty crap with me. Tell me
the truth .. . you've hated her for months, right?"

In a we-men-gotta-stick-together tone.

Henrikson's face was peculiarly immobile. Be-
hind those shades, his eyes were unreadable.

"Mr. Grant- I guess you could say I feel like I've
taken you under my wing. You don't know much
about the military ... and here you are on a mili-
tary craft. There arc things you have to understand
about the military . . . and I guess it's not that
much different from business life. Maybe even sim-
pler."

Grant smiled. "Right! I knew we could be
chums." He continued Velcroing his suit. Damned
thing! It sure as hell chafed!

ALIENS: GENOCIDE         121

"I'm a corporal, I haven't been in the Colonial
Marine Corps that long. But I have previous mili-
tary experience."

"Exterminating bugs?"

"That's not all the military does in this universe,
Mr. Grant . . . Sorry. Dan. Sir." He sighed. "What-
ever. At any rate, my point is that it's dog-eat-dog,
here. Domination, but in a codified, respectful
fashion. I've only served under the colonel since
she culled me from the ranks to be on this mission.
She's earned my respect."

"Oh. But she seems to have some kind of chip on
her shoulder. Think she's just trying to make up for
not having one between her legs?"

"Like I said, Dan. You've got things to learn.
There are codes and games. Just like everything in
life. You leam the ropes ., ." He shrugged. "Maybe
these little attitude snits ... Well, I guess you've
pulled a few in your time at Grant Industries."

Daniel Grant considered. "I suppose I have. In
my own charming way Good point."

"The colonel is totally in command. And she
treats every one as an equal. And if she chooses to
dump a little extra shit on your ears ..." A brusque
shrug. "Well. then like I said, Dan. She must like
you."

Grant thought about that a moment.

"Fair enough, Henrikson. That doesn't mean 1
have to like her, does it?"

Henrikson put a hand on his new friend's shoul-
der.

"Any woman ever treat you like this before?"

Grant considered. "Yes. My wife!"

"And what did you do about it?"

122 DAVID BISCHOFF

"I divorced the bitch!"

Henrikson smiled. "Well, you'll have to marry
the colonel to do that! I reckon the captain of the
ship's got the legal right to do that."

"Marry ... Henrikson, I wonder who's got the
more warped sense of humor. You or me!"

"From what you tell me, sounds like the colonel
does. I'll watch for that little holo trick. She hasn't
done that number on me—yet."

"She must not like you, Henrikson."

"No, I guess not." The corporal gave a farewell
nod and started leaving the locker room.

"You're a lucky man, Lars."

"We'll see, Dan. We'll see."

The big man was gone.

Grant sighed. He Velcroed his ship shoes, and
made a pit stop at the head.

Next stop: his scientists, and his little secret proj-
ect.

That should make him feel back in the saddle
again!




u

H

•low we doing, Pilot?"
asked Colonel Kozlowski.

The man was bent over away from her, obscuring
the motions of his hands. Around him ranged a
convex field of lights. LCD screens played spectac-
ular spectrum games. Lume-points glittered, wait-
ing for computer input. From this angle, she could
see his bald spot, like the top of a hairy egg.

"Fine, Colonel," he said in a monotone. "Almost
finished."

His elbow swiveled. His head nodded.

One last telemetry check?

The culmination of a final primary diagnostic of
the Razzia's sys/ops and structural integrity after
its long cruise through sub-Einsteinian planes of
warped mathematics?

One more little flourish of his hand and he

123

124 AVID BISCHOFF

turned to her. "What's up, Colonel?" He'd turned
so that now Kozlowsld could see that his hand was
nowhere near any of the controls. He held a pencil
and a book of crossword puzzles. The blocks in the
puzzle were all filled now.

"An interesting form of duty report, Captain,"
said Kozlowsld coldly.

The man's lined, pale face remained impassive.
He shut the book, slipped the pencil behind a
large, hairy ear, and folded his arms together. "You
forget, Colonel. You got a nice long snooze. I got to
wake up for a few weeks, to check on things. Part
of my job. Got to keep something going to prevent
the ennui from driving me nuts. Little diversion of
mine." He tapped the book. "Got a whole library of
them. After twenty-six years in the Marines, I got
lots filled, too. Next year I retire. Bought a nice lit-
tle chicken ranch on the Ulna colony. And then, I
don't want to see the inside of another freakin' in-
terstellar vessel... or for that matter the inside of
another crossword puzzle book again."

"Just the inside of chickens."

The pilot-captain's name was Hastings. Phillip
Hastings.

Hastings shrugged. "The ancient Greeks used to
study bird entrails to predict the future. Wonder
what a split-open one would tell us now."

"A few tomorrows of many spilled bug guts, hope-
fully. I take it by your inaction that everything is
functional, we're on course, minor things like
that."

"We got navigators and copilots and engineers to
take care of that garbage, Colonel. I just oversee
and coordinate." Hastings looked like a good sol-

ALIENS: GENOCIDE         125

dier gone to seed. Beer belly Slack skin that had
that waxen look that toned muscular bodies get
when they don't get exercised for a few years. He
had thinning brown hair and a network of burst
capillaries in his nose. From the look of him, he
wasn't just going to raise chickens upon retirement.
He was going to do some serious drinking.

Nonetheless, she—and doubtless Daniel Grant
as well—had been assured that he was the best in
the business. That he was a burnout did not seem
to be important.

"What can I do for you, Colonel?"

"I'm briefing the troops. I thought you might like
to join us."

"I'm not going down to that hellhole. Why
should I?"

"I thought you might find it educational. These
bugs have popped up all over the universe—and
they spread via ships, as you. know. Thought you
might like to know some tactics against them.**

The captain sucked a lip. "Thanks, Colonel. You
going to tape the meeting?"

"Yes."

"I'll watch it some other time."

"Miles and miles of crossword puzzles to do be-
fore you sleep?"

Hastings scratched his nose. "Something like
that."

"I am in command. Captain. I can order you to
be at that meeting."

"Then you already would have, wouldn't you?
You gave me an option and I'm exercising that op-
tion." He leaned forward and tapped LCD displays.
"Besides, we're in a planetary system now. A

121 DAVID B1SCHOFF

strange system can have all kinds of phenomena
waiting. Gravity wells, black holes ... as well as the
usual meteor showers, comets, asteroids ... I like
to ride close shotgun at times like this." He tapped
his book. "Besides, I've got some more puzzles to
do."

She was ticked off at the guy, but he'd rum-
maged up a good excuse, so she really couldn't pull
rank.

She just wished the admiral had given her some-
one with a better attitude, that was all.

"Just make sure we don't crash into any moons,
Captain."

Captain Hastings turned to his left where a min-
iature holotank filled with blips and sparks and
readings hung. "No moons in our immediate fu-
ture."

He opened his puzzle book and went back to
work.

Kozlowski turned and stomped away.

She stopped at her cabin first- She went inside
and splashed some water into her face. Had she
done the right thing? Should she have made Hast-
ings go to the meeting?

He was right about not really having to, but his
lack of interest, his insolence, annoyed her. She
had the command here. He should be doing not
only what she told him—but what she suggested as
well.

Kozlowsld wiped her face with a towel, looked
into a mirror.

She had a lost look to her eyes.

Light-years from home.

ALIENS: GENOCtOE         127

She'd fought for her planet a very long time.
She'd learned the basics of space travel so that she
could carry the battle against these creatures to
their home. Now, though, like some mythological
being, she felt cut off from a source of her power.

Nonsense, of course. Foolishness. All just knots
and complexes of neural patterns, easy enough to
blast apart. She was a fighting machine and she
was just taking a ferry to another part of the battle.

Still, why did she feel so homesick?

She'd popped out of hyper-sleep a full two days
before the others, so she could do some work with
the tactical computers as well as knock some of the
stasis sleep out of her brain. Wrapped up in maps
and facts, figures and projections, inventorying
weapons and supplies, and rebriefing herself on
the armor, she'd been in her own little world.

Now, though, with a day full of the troops waking
up, the whole thing was starting to get to her.

Thirty troops were going to jump down right into
the thick of thousands, maybe even millions of
creatures that could give even biblical demons a
scare, with only some half-proven experimental
weapons to do the job.

Okay, girlie, she told herself. Just knock that look
right off your repertoire. Either that, or get it out of
your system, here and now.

There was no reason for this kind of doubt. The
Hiveworld had been raided before. True, there had
been casualties. However, there had been survi-
vors. She'd studied their reports. Wilks. Billie
whatshemame. Nasty stufi, but compelling.

Kozlowski had no illusions.

You deal card hands from the bug decks, you

128 AVID BISCHOFF

came up holding some casualties. Now, though,
here on her first big extra-Earth mission, she'd
watched the troops get up today, stretch and go
through their metaphorical thawing, and when she
saw the vulnerability in their eyes, that moment of
terror, that oh-shit-here-we-are expression, she felt
what they felt,

Even with that asshole Grant.

Ever since what had happened with Peter Mi-
chaels, maybe she was just getting soft ...

Of course there was a reason she'd pulled the
holostunt with Grant. He'd been making noises be-
fore sleepytime that he wanted to jump down with
them for the mission, to see it firsthand. She was
just trying to discourage him, that was all.

Maybe, just maybe the meeting would rattle him.
When she thought deeply enough about all the im-
plications, it sure as hell rattled her.

She closed her eyes, did some inner self-
composure exercises. What came up wasn't calm
and a deep peace, though. What came up was
Daniel Grant. She didn't feel good about him being
here. Not good at all. For complex reasons she
didn't care to deal with just right now.

Even though she'd promised herself she wasn't
going to do it, she went to her bag and pulled out
a medicine bottle full of the reason Daniel Grant
bothered her.

She cut a tablet of Fire in half. She'd tried to
give it up, no go. Maybe after this fracas was over.

She washed the half-tablet down with a glass of
water.

Then she finished getting ready for the briefing.

I

•he bug wavered, capered,
lunged.

Drool cascaded down its mouth into the shad-
ows.

Its exoskeleton seemed to glow with evil, spikes
sticking out of its back erecting.

The thing looked like a dinosaur attempting to
shapeshift into the Devil.

"Yum yum," squawked a reptilian voice. "Fee fie
fo fum. I smell the blood of a bunch of bums!"

Uneasy laughter rippled among the assemblage.

"Any of you sweethearts want a date with my ovi-
positors?" it snarled. "Looks like we'd have a won-
derful party. You all look like absolutely splendid
hosts."

Groans.

Colonel Kozlowski twirled the dial of the holo-

129

130 DAVID BISCHOFf

projector, and the bug program faded. She let her
voice assume its normal timbre as she looked out
at the group of amused, anxious marines.

"Okay, listen up, people. I promise you right now,
this is going to be no party But we didn't come all
these light-years to party, did we? We came to help
make this galaxy safe for peaceful, sentient life. As
long as these things infest any of our planets or
ships or space colonies anywhere in an uncon-
trolled and above all misunderstood fashion, the fu-
ture of humanity is threatened."

The briefing room felt like the interior of a metal
egg, subtly lit in the curved comers. All of the sol-
diers assigned for planetfall sat in rows of comfort-
able, slanted chairs, as though in some military
theater. They sat at a kind of alert attention. Pro-
fessionals. Damned good people all of them, and
Kozlowski should know. She had helped to select
every single one of them,

In the front of the room, alongside her podium,
was a table where the big shots in the mission sat,
ready to support her in her explanations. Grant. A
few of his scientists- Some crew members.

"These killers, these reprehensible aliens, have
just got their claws and their blood and their teeth
and their incredible powers of survival as weap-
ons . . ." She paused for impact. "Our ignorance is
their primary weapon, and I hope to diffuse a little
more of that with you today"

The soldiers all looked entranced. Hanging on
her words. These people had been briefed on xenos
before, but now they greedily lapped up the Infor-
mation she was presenting. She was familiar with
the phenomenon. When you were a soldier, you

ALIENS: fiENDODE         131

could act as macho and as confident as you wanted
to—but if you didn't listen and absorb every ounce
of information handed to you, you could find your-
self dead. Smart soldiers learned to listen. These
grunts were smart and capable. Quirky, maybe, but
she'd gone through the choices with the command
herself, and not one of these people didn't belong
here.

Too bad about people like the captain, Grant,
and his castle of Frankenstein scientists. But then,
if she had control over everything, pffti The aliens
would be instant slag, and Peter Michaels would be
back.

Anyway, she had some interesting information
here.

Her theatrics at the beginning had probably not
been necessary, but she liked to put a little piz-
zazz into the proceedings.

She began with the parameters of the mission.

"Quite simply, people, as much -as I'd like to say
all this is perfect and noble in our mission, it's not.
We're going to a planet which is the origin of the
xenos in this sector of the galaxy. We'll be using a
specially fitted lander. People, we've got the latest
in technology at our disposal. Basically, we're going
in to do a robbery. Now, ultimately I have no doubt
this will be in humanity's best interest so take
whatever nobility you can from your participation
here. However, what we're up to here is the biggest
heist of queen mother jelly in history"

Jastrow waved an excited hand. "Why?"

"Officially, I can't tell you. You're just supposed to
do what you're ordered to do. Unofficially, though,
I don't give a shit." She grinned. "Xeno-Zip."

132 lAfIB IISC19FF

An excited buzz sounded In the meeting room.

"That's why Daniel Grant is here," someone
whispered.

"Heck, I use that stuff," another said. "It's
great."

"That's right, people," said Kozlowski. "We're on
a glorified drug run. Take my word for it. though.
I'm personally assured that it will make someone a
great deal of money—"

Laughter.

"And maybe even help the human cause as well.
In any case, be assured. We're taking the Alien-
Earth War to the source, and we'll most certainly
kill lots of xenos in the process. Call it hard-core
vengeance if you like. Call it just another job. to
any event, we're here together so I can provide you
with some information and equipment designed to
preserve your sorry lives."

Quickly she rattled off some of the basics about
the xenos, their behavior, their attack patterns, in-
dividually and in groups. She summarized what
was known about the Hiveworld, and what the
main hive itself looked like, from the information
provided by the previous expedition. It was all like
a mantra, and she ticked off the info, point by
point.

"Now then. As for the interior of the hive ..."
She thumbed the projector to a prepared setting,
kicking in the holotank in the comer.

Like some magician she conjured up a vision
from the depths of Hades.

Here was the familiar bowellike tomb, ropey with
intestoid projections and ridged with tubing.
bumps, and alien growths, organic in the very

ALIENS: GENOCIDE         133

worst and most frightening sense. All hellishly lit in
orange and yellow. In the central portion of this
chilly sight squatted a huge bulblike protuberance,
like a half-planted flower bulb. However, instead of
bright and colorful plumage, from its pustulelike
side it sprouted tubings that connected to other,
slightly smaller bulbs.

And from its top, like Mephistopheles happily
squatted atop a pile of his own excrement, rose a
gently swaying royal giantess.

An alien queen mother.

"All right." She snapped on a cursor-blip pointer
and guided it over to the central sack. "What we
have here is a quite realistic computer animation
suggesting what we might find in the alien central
chamber, once we locate it.

"This is where we'll find that royal jelly that Mr.
Daniel Grant has sent us after," she said.

Grant, seated at the table in a position similar
enough to the chairman-of-the-board's attitude to
make him comfortable, leaned back, hands behind
the back of his neck. "That's right. And if you can
trap a queen mother, that would be okay by me."

"Trap?" said Private Jastrow, a little dubiously

"It's been done before," assured Private EUis.

"Sounds awfully dangerous!" piped Private Ma-
hone, looking quite doubtful about the whole en-
terprise.

"Private—this whole trip is dangerous. You knew
that when you volunteered. Anything involving
these things is dangerous ..." Kozlowski stepped
up the magnification threefold, focusing in upon
the queen. "Alice in Wonderland time, people. Lis-
ten up. We're going in the hive, and pulling this

134 DAVID BISCHOFF

stuff out. Along the way, we will not be delicate. In
any event, be assured . . . we've by no means come
here to preserve the species. Kill all the creatures
you want," she said brightly.

Easy laughter.

"So then, let's cook up a little preliminary strat-
egy on how you pry open a bug hive, shall we?"

With the aid of more prepared graphics, she de-
lineated the technology, science, and tactics that
would allow a group of marines to storm a nest of
the nastiest monsters in the universe.

"So .. . basically—guns, guts, and lots of luck\"
she said. She paused for a moment as her people
tried to assimilate her words.

She let them twist in the wind for a moment as
a parade of aliens wilted before the onslaught of
cartoon marines. The blasts from the heavy milli-
meter carbines tore through the heads and cara-
paces, splashing splinters of alien exoskeleton
hither and thither along with gobs of alien blood
that fell upon the marines and the scene like can-
cerous amoebas.

Kozlowsld froze the animation.

"What's wrong with this picture?"

Jastrow raised a tentative hand. "Wishful think-
ing?"

"Yes. Fantasy, perhaps. Only showing the aliens
eating marines wouldn't exactly be the best way to
raise your morale, would it?"

"Not particularly, no," mumbled Ellis.

"Wait a minute," said Henrikson. "All that alien
blood on the troops. It doesn't seem to phase them.
That stuff makes toxic waste look like cotton
candy"

ALIENS: SENOClOE         135

Kozlowsld snapped her fingers, "My man\ Ex-
actly! "

"What about the acid blood?" said Edie Mahone.
"Can you tell us something about that?"

"Some good news for you all there. We do have
something special for you. Something that's going to
buck your morale right up." She smiled. "But first,
let me remind you it's still very important that at
close distance you try and avoid the torso. The splat-
ter potential is quite bad. It's best to go for the
knees." The cursor in the air flew to one of the
strong and knobby alien lower joints. "As many of
you have already discovered, a shot to the knee will
not only hamper the alien's mobility ... but such a
wound also minimizes bleeding and spatter poten-
tial. A discreet coup de grace to the head at that
point is made possible. But then, of course, if you
haven't actually been in battle with the things, you've
at least had simulation chambec. experience . .. save
perhaps for Mr. Grant."

"I'm hardly going to exactly participate in the may-
hem, now am I, Colonel?" said Grant.

"As you've never handled a gun before, I hope
not ..." said Kozlowsld dismissively "Now then . ..
I've kept you all waiting long enough ..." She pulled
out a corn unit. "Thank you, Doctor, for waiting in
the wings. You may come out now, and by all means
bring your assistant with you."

She turned to the audience, most of whom were
on the edge of their seats with suspense.

Kozlowsld turned quite serious.

., . Michaels, his head molten and sizzling, skin
sliding from naked skull. . .

She suppressed the memory

13S AVID BISCHOFF

"I know the blood issue is of great concern to afl
of you, so I'm happy to present an innovation that
should all but do away with your fears."

Yeah. Right.

Pep talk. Maybe that's what she'd given too much
of to poor Peter. Maybe if he'd been properly scared
shitless and quaking in his sweatsocks, he wouldn't
have had to act like the Big Man and gone to that
trap.

She swallowed down a dry throat, resumed.

"For more on that, I turn you over to Dr. Zato."

Dr. Zato, one of Grant's squids.

The man waltzed into the room like a stand-up
comedian just called on to do his act. He was a
toady little guy, who blinked as though the light was
too much. Receding hairline. High IQ dandruff!

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said in a high.
munchkin voice, "I give you your next best friend—"

The assistant walked into the room. slowly, clearly
a little weighted down by what he wore, but not un-
comfortably so.

Armor.

"Here it is, folks. The Z-110 Acid-Neutralizing
Combat Wardrobe."

The assistant wore a streamlined, snazzy-looking
jumble of plates, silver and blue in hue. A combina-
tion of insect and tortoiseshell. On the back was a
compact storage unit. A narrow-visored helmet fitted
snugly over his head. An antenna angled out of the
back.

Kozlowski had seen it before, but the sight of it
still impressed her.

And if it could do what Doc Z. claimed—well, all
the better!

ALIENS: GENOCIDE         137

"Efforts to produce an armor resistant to the in-
tense acidity of the alien blood have proved imprac-
tical."

EUis waved his hand, got called upon. "Yeah. I al-
ways wondered about that, Ws've got the chemical
composition of the alien's exoskeleton down cold.
That isn't eaten up by alien blood, clearly And it's
light enough. How come its elements aren't used for
armor?"

"Well, that would be all very good. Private, if you'd
care to be enignor Sanual was drinking again. He came out to watch them ride away, and called out to the cardinal that he was following a loser, that the false Pope would never enter New Rome, and that grief for the whole Church would follow.
    "Thanks for your blessings, Messér," the cardinal answered.
    
    Hultor Bråm was not yet prepared to be a friend to a friend of his rival, but he had suffered a bad Friday night in the pit, and he knew that his report to the Bear Spirit council afterward had not been well received. Plainly, the Weejus had already made up their minds. He conceded to his warriors that unless Holy Madness experienced an even worse Saturday night in the Navel of the World, the office of Qæsach dri Vørdar would fall to the Wilddog sharf. At least the ancient office would be restored, reuniting the Three Hordes.
    He noticed that Cardinal Brownpony had heard his remarks, and he gruffly asked the cardinal about his experience with the Mare.
     "Were you accepted as her stallion the other night?" he wanted to know. "Did you see her at all?"
    The cardinal hesitated. "I'm not sure what I saw. You spend hours staring at patches of darkness, you begin to see, but it isn't there."
    "What is it that wasn't there?"
    "There seemed to be a woman between me and the patch of dim light. I can't describe her. She faced me, and her arms were raised. Then she disappeared."
    "Like the Buzzard of Battle?"
    "They told you that's what I saw. I never said it."
    Bråm nodded. "If I had seen it, I would be Qæsach dri Vørdar now. But I am going to die soon."
    "Are you ill?"
    "You saw the Buzzard of Battle. That is your future. They say I saw mine." Bråm laughed and rode away. Later one of the warriors told the cardinal that the Weejus had decided that the Grasshopper sharf had met the Night Hag in the pit, although, the man said, the Weejus had prejudged the contest in favor of Holy Madness, provided he survived the pit, and that he personally did not believe that Bråm would die as a result of the pit.
    The warriors were feeling playful. Bråm had promised them they would be well paid by the Church for performing this escort duty. Brownpony grew more uneasy about the promise each time it was mentioned. He had not spoken of money to the Grasshopper sharf. Perhaps someone else in the Curia had made the offer, or even Papa Specklebird.
    He watched the warriors gamboling on the grasslands under the September sun. A man stood up on horseback. Another stood up, and chased the first rider so closely that he had to sit down fast or fall. There was whooping laughter. One warrior could slide down his stallion's flank and crawl under his belly and up the other side. After he had done this three times, the horse began to have an erection. He crawled down a fourth time, took a look, and crawled back up. Somebody yelled a merry insult at him, and in a moment both were on the ground in a knife fight. Hultor Bråm came riding back, watched the deadly dance for a moment, then adjusted his tall leather helmet with his grandmother's crest and the badge of a war sharf..
    There was a splatter of blood, not a deep cut, but it brought an order to drop the weapons. "Finish it with your hands and feet," Sharf Hultor barked, "or stop it right now. Hear me well! No killing! Not among ourselves. If you have a grudge against a comrade, save it until this war party gets back home."
    
     "Why does he call it a war party?" Brownpony asked the man who rode beside him. "It was meant to be an honor guard."
    "The Grasshopper is always at war," declared the rider, and spurred his horse to distance himself from this farmer and red-hat Christian.
    
     
    
CHAPTER 16
     
     The beds, moreover, are to be examined frequently by the Abbot, to see if any private property be found in them. If anyone should    be found to have something that he did not receive from the Abbot, let him undergo the most severe discipline.
     —Saint Benedict's Rule, Chapter 55
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
I
T WAS A TROOP OF FOOLS, THOUGHT THE commander of the police guard. Thirty-seven cardinals rode horseback along with the Pope while another twenty-four bounced along in the beds of wagons dragged across the roadless grasslands by mules. Thirty Denver mounted police and thirty Wilddog warriors escorted the party, although this force would turn back when the party reached Grasshopper country and met the riders of Sharf Bråm.
    When they reached the boundary, they pitched camp and waited for the warriors of the Grasshopper.
    Amen Specklebird had waited more patiently than the others. The tents provided by their Wilddog escorts were comfortable enough, and the Pope insisted that the cardinals join him each day in singing Lauds, the Mass, and Vespers, and to pray the other canonical prayers in common. Most of them were accustomed to muttering the first few lines of each psalm; they called it reciting the breviary.
    The camp of the itinerant Curia was surrounded by curious women and children of both Wilddog and Grasshopper families whose herds or breeding pits were located nearby, but the escorting warriors kept them at a distance to prevent thievery. Everyone was relieved, except perhaps the warriors themselves, when the Grasshopper riders appeared on the crest of the hill, not gamboling or quarreling now, but riding in a typical Grasshopper battle formation, a line of advance that surged alternately here and fell back there, making the order of battle difficult for the enemy to portray. The Wilddog scouts, outnumbered, grabbed their lances and sidearms and moved to mount their stallions, but Hultor Bråm called a halt and cried out, "Peace! In the name of the Fujæ Go."
    The Curia watched as Cardinal Brownpony left their fierce ranks and rode forward. Amen Specklebird advanced to meet him, and raised him up when he fell to the ground to kiss the fisherman's ring.
    "We have heard, Elia, that Jarad is with Christ, not yet risen."
    That was a curious way of putting it, but the cardinal answered, "I knew that would be the first thing you mentioned, Holy Father. If you will excuse me from your presence, I should like to travel now to Leibowitz Abbey and join their mourning."
    The old black panther seemed surprised. "I thought you would be going on south of the Nady Ann to visit your Churches in the Province."
    "That too, Holy Father. But the Texark forces will be expecting me to cross the Nady Ann, not the Bay Ghost. If I come in from the west, I may not be arrested. And it should only take a day or two to pay my respects at the abbey."
    "We shall excommunicate anyone who dares lay a finger on you in the Province. I'll put that in writing. You are ordered to go to Leibowitz Abbey, and then east to Jackrabbit country."
    "Thank you. I wish to go on to Hannegan City afterward, Holy Father."
    "Then you go as my legate. The wax on your orders will be sealed by my ring. I'll send the papers by messenger to the abbey."
    "Forgive me, but that may not impress the Archbishop or his nephew."
    "You do not have my permission to be a martyr, Elia."
    "Do I need it?"
    Amen smiled and changed the subject. "How are our friends among the Weejus and the Bear Spirit? And how was that cave of theirs? You were in it one night?"
    "Breeding pit, Holy Father. To be frank, I think its reputation is highly exaggerated by myth and storytelling. It must have been a dangerous place centuries ago, but unless some ill befell Holy Madness, I believe its devil has lost her cunning." He spoke these words three weeks before an attack of nausea and lethargy came over him at Leibowitz Abbey.
    When he parted from the Pope and the Curia, he went to thank Hultor Bråm for his courtesy. Bråm complained that no money was forthcoming. The cardinal merely denied any knowledge of the problem, and left it in the hands of the weary prelates of the Pope's company.
    Pope Amen's last words to him were "See about Leibowitz Abbey, Elia. Tell them to elect their new abbot, and you impart to him my confirmation. Cardinal Onyo here will be a witness that I so instructed you, if there is any later question."
    A quick embrace ended it. He looked back at the Grasshopper escort. The Wilddog warriors and the Valana police gave them wide berth. The Wilddog mounted, and rode west-northwest, while the policemen lingered for a time.
    
    Later historians were to suggest that the war which destroyed the papacy began when Amen Specklebird accepted the ninety-nine Grasshopper warriors who had been recruited by Hultor Bråm, separated from their families by Hultor Bråm, trained, drilled, and indoctrinated by Hultor Bråm, but not paid by Hultor Bråm, because the Grasshopper sharf was angry with Cardinal Brownpony, and extended his anger to Brownpony's master. After the comptroller with the Pope's party told him there was no gold with the train, the commander of the police guard explained the situation to the Pope.
    The papacy in Valana had signed a contract with certain Wilddog and Grasshopper families to furnish for hire fresh horses to Church messengers at relay stations so that crossing the Plains from the Denver Republic to the marginal farmlands of the East could be accomplished in less than ten days. One enterprising Wilddog family and one Grasshopper undertook to carry mail across the Plains, competing with Church messenger service, but not with Hannegan's telegraph. These families were given certain immunities in both written and horde law. It was too early to say that a new class of Nomad entrepreneur was immediately coming into being, but certain grandmothers were accumulating an embarrassment of riches from providing services to the enemy: to civilization. Nomad society had always followed the wild, unfenced cattle, and a wealth of possessions made one's village less portable. But it was under the terms of this contract, as construed by Bråm, that payment was expected.
    "Promise to pay them later" was all Pope Amen could say.
    After a promise was made to Bråm, the Pope and the Curia proceeded east with these tutelary demons on horseback. Because of the weariness of old men, the journey took four days instead of two. The Pope was fond of chatting with ordinary people, and he spoke frequently to members of the Grasshopper escort along the way, whenever an opportunity arose.
    "Our tribes are angry," one of them told him. "We are angry because the Wilddog has allowed Churchmen to be guests at the sacred meeting of the hordes. Not only is Cardinal Brownpony there, but so is an emissary from Archbishop Benefez. And Brownpony favors Ösle Høngan Chür over Hultor Bråm."
    The Pope took note of the warrior's polite reversal of Holy Madness' name. Angry or not, he accepted the grandmothers' political will, their favoritism for the Wilddog sharf, as legitimately governing the electoral situation on the Plains. But his resentment of Brownpony was extended to Brownpony's master, the Pope, and thus wages had been requested in advance.
    Amen tried to reassure him that the men would be paid, but the list of complaints was not ended.
    "Furthermore, the Wilddog offered Monsignor Sanual food and shelter."
    "I would have thought Benefez's man would stay with the Jackrabbit delegates," Specklebird remarked.
    "Oh, yes, he wanted to. There are Christian priests among the Jackrabbit Bear Spirit delegates. The Jackrabbit delegates are in danger of seeming to be puppets of the Texark Church."
    "There is only one Church, my son."
    And so went the journey.
    
    According to the Treaty of the Sacred Mare, any farmer or soldier of the Empire who entered Grasshopper territory while bearing arms could expect attack, and any armed Nomad within musket range of the Empire's frontier could be fired upon. Thus, when the Pope's party crossed the hill overlooking the frontier checkpoint, Hultor Bråm and his men halted. The warriors were still grumbling to their sharf about not being paid, but the sharf was watching the confrontation at the border crossing.
    
     "One way or another, you'll all be paid," he insisted, "maybe sooner than you think."
    As the procession of prelates approached the gate, Amen Specklebird descended from his coach and brushed the dust of the Plains from his white cassock. He approached the officer who stood with folded arms in the center of the road. Flanking him were two soldiers with double-barreled weapons, probably loaded with buckshot.
    "By orders of the Hannegan, you cannot pass," the officer announced. "If you try, you will be arrested."
    "Do not bar the way, my son. Bow to God's will."
    "Show me God's will."
    "Pick up your right foot, and look."
    The officer obeyed, and reddened.
    "I see my right foot's shadow," he said, ignoring the horseshit with his footprint in it.
    "His will is already done," said Specklebird. "Too bad."
    "Such a smartass! They call it your 'wisdom,' don't they? Forgive me, but it is a pain in the butt to me, Your, uh, Holiness. I don't think the Lord Mayor will find it a pleasure, either. Why don't you say something new, in plain Ol'zark?"
    Amen grinned at him and pointed to the sun while squinting. The colonel's eyes may have flickered, but he resisted looking and said, "Nice try, old man. There are good frauds and bad frauds, I guess. You're pretty good, aren't you?"
    "I never thought of it that way, my son, but my office requires it of me, doesn't it?"
    "I don't know whether to spit on you or kneel to you, old fool. But make it easy for yourself and go home."
    "Colonel, why trap yourself in dualism that way?"
    "What are you calling dualism?"
    "Spitting God or kneeling God."
    "I have my orders from the Hannegan himself. Get back in your coach, turn around, and go back to Valana, or you will find yourself in Hannegan City, facing a heresy trial. Say another word, and I'll testify to everything you say here."
    "Bless you, my son, and thank you."
    The colonel snorted, spoke in an aside to a captain, then mounted and rode away in a huff. The captain pointed a cavalry pistol at the Pope's thin black face. Two cardinals caught the Pope's arms and a third pushed him back toward the train.
    Thus was the road to New Rome closed to New Rome's bishop.
    The Grasshopper warriors parted to allow them to pass, but made no move to escort them back, even when Golopez Cardinal Onyo beckoned to Bråm. Bråm frowned and shook his head. His warriors stood there watching until they became a patch of dust in the west. Wearily, Amen's party (a good part of the Sacred College) turned to remake the long journey. From far behind came the faint sound of shouting and gunfire, but there was nothing the prelates could do about it, and Pope Amen was a little hard of hearing. From the patches of forest at the east, through scrub and tall grass, through open grassland, through blistering days and chilly nights in the near-desert, some of it irrigated at last, and finally to the mountains they passed. Along the way, they accepted Nomad charity, and they were intercepted at one point by a delegation from the breeding pit.
    Chür Ösle Høngan had married the Fujæ Go. The new Qæsach dri Vørdar, Lord of the Three Hordes, whose wife was the Day Maiden, knelt to kiss the Pope's ring and swore allegiance to His Holiness forever, in the name of God and His Virgin.
    Before they parted, Golopez Cardinal Onyo called Holy Madness aside and told him about the behavior of Sharf Hultor Bråm after they had been turned back by the border guard. "They did not return with us, and I heard gunfire and shouting. I cannot be sure, but I think there was fighting."
    The Lord of the Three Hordes sat astride his stallion and gathered a slow frown. "If he did what I'm afraid he did, I'll have his head."
    "The Pope knows nothing," Onyo told him.
    "I'll send to find something out immediately." He grunted an order to a subordinate, then rode away with his party back toward the breeding pit. The subordinate rode east.
    
    There was something to find out. At the border that day, the Grasshopper escort, standing half a mile distant from all events at the gate, began to move. As soon as the dust of the Pope's party had dwindled beyond the hills, War Sharf Hultor Bråm ordered his ninety-nine elite fighters to take the road to Rome by a feat of arms. They circled south, and cut the road to Hannegan City toward which the colonel who had defied the Pope was riding homeward. He was among the first of many troops to die that day.
    They turned north again. The road to Rome was swiftly taken, but only on a very temporary basis. These born-in-the-saddle man-animals cut through the Texark Light Horse, leaving other men and animals full of arrows and spear wounds on the ground. Slow firearms fell back before rapid and accurate bows. Many Grasshoppers used captured sidearms, but only as backup weapons. The Nomad horses were faster and better, and together with their fighters they became for the unseasoned troopers truly the riders of the Apocalypse, ninety-nine of them and a leader with a demonic attitude. They had not been paid, for nobody had brought the papal treasury. They cut the troopers to pieces, killed 146 farmers, raped their wives, daughters, sisters, mothers, sons, and then cut their way back to the frontier through fresh but green reinforcements—cut their way back, yes, all thirty-three of them, adrenaline-drunk, exhausted, including a leader with a brooding attitude and a bad leg. But their saddlebags bulged, and once on the Plains again, they made travois to carry some of the loot. Now they had been paid.
    The foray had been just a hell of a good party for the survivors, who came back to their grateful and waiting wives, some of whose hearts and crotches quivered with anxiety and hope, with mostly overworked and limp male members! It took amatory ingenuity on a warrior's part that night to convince a wife that he came home from battle with a real lust for her sexual candy, but most pleaded combat fatigue and went to bed alone.
    Being at war was more fun—no doubt about that: even with the odds at two to one you'd die before you got to rape, steal, and burn barns full of newly baled hay.
    There was both celebration and mourning that night in late September in the encampment of the sharf's own mother clan. The war cries almost drowned the sound of women crying.
    "I set fires! I set fires!"
    It was the royal motto on the flag of Hultor Bråm. And no one doubted that it was a deliberate slap in the face of the new Lord of the Hordes, whose emissaries would arrive within two days. On the morning after the celebration, several new widows brought their complaints to the Grasshopper Weejus and Bear Spirit. Bråm was summoned before the council. He listened to the accusations in silence and made no defense.
    The incursion to the very walls of High New Rome seemed of a devilish inspiration, because it fractured the Treaty of the Sacred Mare, and resumed a state of war between Texark and the Grasshopper. But everybody had fun except the dead, the raped, and the permanently maimed. In war, God is thus! old Tempus might have said.
    Helped by telegraph, the news of Hultor Bråm's raid arrived in Valana long before the Pope did, the Pope who knew nothing of what was happening a few miles behind him, except that his Nomad escort had vanished and some shouting and shooting was heard. At home, he found himself facing accusations from Texark that he or the Secretariat of State had ordered the Nomad attack.
    
•      •      •
    
    Subsequently in Valana the short, unhappy pontificate of Pope Amen Specklebird produced more important legislation for its duration than had the pontificate of any pope since the schism of the previous century. This was not surprising. The lack of participation by Texark's allies meant that the Curia could approach unanimous consent to proposals by the Pope's new advisers, who were led by Sorely Nauwhat, since Elia Brownpony was on the road. Sorely was in many ways Brownpony's talk-alike. In no way, however, was Amen Specklebird ruled by the Curia. He spoke of resigning, but first there would be legislation.
    In a bull named Unica ex Adam Orta Progenies, after its opening words, the Pope again affirmed that no one of human ancestry should be regarded as less than human, and that the misborn must not be denied equal rights under the laws of the Church or of the nations. Nor were the Pope's children to be confined by law to a special domain, such as the Valley. He specifically outlawed their use as virtual slaves in the lumbering camps of the Ol'zarks. There was nothing new in the bull, except that the Pope denounced the practice within the Church of noting family pedigrees on baptismal certificates, since the lack of such documentation was used prejudicially by many states; a stranger might be required to prove that he was not a spook trying to pass as normal. "Rulers who, for political gain, exploit the people's fear of those with hereditary defects, and who sin against them through unjust laws and by stirring up mob violence, shall be held accountable for these evils. Sentences of ipso facto excommunication passed by Our Predecessors against any who, God forbid, do violence to the so-called Pope's children, are by these presents reaffirmed." The bull ended with a punitive clause, defining penalties for the violation of its letter and spirit, and extending the penalties to include violence done under the pretense of law. The language was that of a lawyer, but the message was clearly Amen Specklebird's.
    With no help from the Curia, he originated a Motu Proprio (strictly by the Pope's own doing) in his own spidery calligraphy, deploring a drift in the Church away from proper liturgical reverence toward the theotokos (Mother of God). He did not need to mention which areas of the Church's spiritual domain needed reform in this area. The bishops of patriarchal societies were given to denouncing the Mariolatry of the Northwest, which Amen Specklebird had indirectly endorsed in a speech to the conclave before (emphasis by his supporters) his elevation to the papacy lent infallibility to his ex cathedra pronouncements. The Motu Proprio, however, lacked the defining and punitive clauses which were expected of infallible utterances by any pope; it was hardly more than a tut tut to his most vocal critics, and a poetic tribute to the Mother of All.
    A law governing papal resignation, an event which had hitherto occurred about once per millennium, was ordered revised by the Pope. He decreed that such a resignation must come from the man himself, not from a Pope. A man who had been Pope would rise from the throne, remove all his vestments, and declare that sede vacante by saying, "The Pope is no more," and walk away as if the Holy Spirit had departed from him. He would not be admired for quitting, but he would not be punished for it either, unless he tried to change his mind. Specklebird insisted on this change in the existing law, and Hilan Cardinal Bleze tried to sell the others. It did seem to put an end to an ancient argument to the effect that papal resignation was impossible.
    "He's planning his own departure," said Nauwhat, but still gave his assent to the law.
    
    Kindly Light was marked for death. He had been so marked when the Weejus told him that what he had seen in the pit was the Night Hag. He had predicted his death to Cardinal Brownpony. Within two weeks of the ordeal at the Navel of the World, he fell ill. When the Wilddog shamans came to confer with their Grasshopper counterparts, he knew what the decision would be. He offered to submit voluntarily to a sacrificial death, provided that his younger brother, Eltür Bråm (Demon Light), be made Grasshopper war sharf in his place. Otherwise, he would take his own life. The Weejus of both hordes conferred, and all the grandmothers were consulted. Eltür was a warrior of considerable renown, but he had not been a member of the raiding party, and was known to be even-tempered, unlike his surly brother. The grandmothers in turn questioned their sons and nephews as to their willingness to follow Eltür. The battle frenzy had died out in the Grasshopper camp, and even the thirty-three warriors who survived the raid understood that Hultor Bråm had committed treason against the Qæsach dri Vørdar. They were commanded to purge themselves by ritual fasting for seven days, but were not otherwise punished for obeying their sharf.
    It was decided that Hultor Bråm would not be honored by a ritual funeral such as had been conducted for Wilddog Granduncle Brokenfoot. Because of his heavy losses in battle, most of the grandmothers were quite angry with him. One of them said, "There is a wild stallion in my pit which I am about to release."
     All of them looked at her, and the manner of Hultor's dying was immediately decided.
    To prevent too much inbreeding the Weejus sometimes mated their mares with wild stallions, which men were forbidden to touch. The Weejus had her own way of stalking a wild stallion. Sometimes it took weeks, even months. A woman gradually introduced herself to a wild herd by staying far upwind. She worked her way closer, bit by bit, until the lead stallion first noticed her. Then she calmly but swiftly went away. The horses begin to tolerate her as a part of the terrain. One day a warrior of her family would bring the Weejus a jar of urine from a rutting mare of her own remuda. She smeared herself with it and approached as usual. When the lead stallion perked up and started to approach, she retreated again. This was repeated, with and without the scent, until the woman could actually walk in among the grazing mustangs. Eventually she would choose her animal, feed him tidbits, hang a rope on him, calm and cajole him, entice him, and lead him away to mate with her mares, and then be released. This was a way they had of keeping their own herds from too much inbreeding, but always, the wild ones were respected. When the Weejus seduced him, she did it without riding or breaking him. The only problem was that the stallion, no longer as wary of humans, might now be subject to capture by the motherless ones.
    To make this stallion wild and wary again, the former war sharf of the Grasshopper Horde was sacrificed to the Owner of all wild horses, dragged to death by the released animal at the end of a long rope.
    
     
    
    
CHAPTER 17
     
     Before all things and above all things, care must be taken of the sick, so that they will ,  be served as if they were Christ in person;  for He Himself said, "I was sick, and you visited me."
     —Saint Benedict's Rule, Chapter 361
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
A
BIQUIU OLSHUEN, ALTHOUGH HIS ELECTION AS abbot after a decent period of mourning was assumed by everyone, limited his decisions to small ones and exerted no more than his usual authority as prior until such elections might take place. He therefore assigned both Blacktooth and the Yellow Guard to visitors' quarters, invited them all to participate in the usual four or five hours a day of manual labor, and told Nimmy himself to join the other monks in choir in the liturgy, but not to receive the Eucharist without specific permission from a confessor, meaning himself.
    When Blacktooth told him that the alien guardsmen were not only Christian but had taken religious vows, Olshuen was perplexed. He called Levion the Reconciliator for advice, and with Blacktooth the status of the foreigners was discussed at length. Olshuen and Levion were both uncomfortable with the idea of professional killers with religious vows, and Nimmy knew really very little about their creed and practice. He did know, and reminded Olshuen, that many centuries ago the monks of Saint Leibowitz had defended the monastery by force of arms, as evidenced by the parapet walls and the rusty iron weapons in a locked basement armory, to which only Olshuen now had the key.
    Blacktooth found himself distracted by Levion's garments. The monk had become a priest. Although he did not dislike the man, Blacktooth imagined that having the Reconciliator as his confessor might be one of the pangs of his own personal hell, if both of them went there. Blacktooth had not changed a lot since leaving the abbey, but one minor change that had come from serving Cardinal Brownpony and studying warrior's arts under the Axe was a reduction of his fear of people such as these. It shocked him to realize that the ability to kill was a great tranquilizer, even among people he liked and respected.
    "Why don't you talk to them instead of to me?" he said to Father Levion, his old shrink.
    "I tried to, Brother St. George, but I can hardly understand them. Can't you?"
    Not wishing to be stuck with the role of interpreter, Nimmy shook his head. "They are learning Churchspeak, Father. It would be kind of you to help them by communicating. I'm sure you are much better at it than I."
    Afterward he tried not to indulge a temptation to feel smug. The alien Christians were soon invited to join the brethren of Saint Leibowitz at prayer; the reception of the Eucharist, however, would be delayed until their understanding of this continent's form of Catholic Christianity could be tested by catechists and confessors. Not elected abbot yet, Olshuen feared Valana's disapproval, and knew little about the character of either Amen Specklebird or the members of this yellow-skinned war band of the late Cardinal Ri.
    He put Nimmy to work washing dishes and scrubbing floors in the kitchen. The errant monk was not respected by former friends, and he tried to avoid their charity. Apparently Abbot Jarad had told them little or nothing about his work for Cardinal Brownpony, and only Olshuen seemed aware of it but not much impressed. If Brother Singing Cow had told anyone that Blacktooth was one of Brownpony's conclavists when Pope Amen was elected, no one was interested. The business of the abbey was prayer and preservation of a heritage. Interest in the outside world was deliberately kept to a minimum. Nimmy was grateful that nobody sneered in his face or spoke of him loudly enough to be overheard.
    
•      •      •
    
    Leibowitz Abbey had many visitors that season, and there were only a dozen furnished cells in the guesthouse. When Blacktooth came back from Vespers in the evening, he noticed a lamp burning in a cell which had been empty that morning. He glanced through the small door-window and froze at what he saw. Elia Cardinal Brown-pony, looking pale and drawn, was lying in bed, propped up by pillows. Blacktooth pressed his forehead against the grille, the better to stare at the ailing prelate, his once and future master.
    "Is that you, Nimmy? I wondered where you were hiding. Come in, come in."
    "Nobody told me you were here, m'Lord." Blacktooth fell to his knees and kissed Brownpony's ring. He felt the cardinal flinch, and resolved not to kiss his ring again.
    Two days later, Önmu Kun arrived at the abbey. Nimmy thought it a weird coincidence, but then saw that the Jackrabbit outlaw was taken directly to meet the ailing cardinal without even a visit to the prior. They had talked for several hours when Nimmy brought their dinners from the kitchen. Önmu was friendly, but their conversation stopped dead when Blacktooth entered, and did not resume until he departed. The Jackrabbit smuggler was on his way from the Province to New Jerusalem again, but he stayed until Brownpony was ready to depart, and then stayed some more.
    There was no doubt from the beginning that Prior Olshuen would be elected abbot, spiritual father and ruler of the Order of Saint Leibowitz, but Brownpony let him worry about the power of confirmation which had been delegated to the cardinal by the Pope and it apparently came to Olshuen's mind that restoring the cardinal's health must be a paramount concern at the abbey.
    For a time, the Red Deacon was afflicted by nausea and fatigue. He had no appetite. Attempts to vomit after picking at the cook's food usually resulted in the dry heaves. He was dizzy whenever he left his bed. He was short of breath, and his heartbeat quickened when he stood. Blacktooth asked to be relieved of his floor-scrubbing duties in the kitchen in order to consult the Venerable Boedullus again, for that respected author had written of Meldown, the breeding pit, and the illnesses that sometimes resulted from exposure to radiation there. He had even recorded a recipe called summonabisch stew, thought by the ancient Plains dwellers to be helpful in its treatment.
    Prior Olshuen at first refused to release Blacktooth from the kitchen, for Brother Medic wanted no assistance from the likes of him. But when Brownpony learned that the prior had assigned the most menial of chores to the errant monk, he called the prior to his sickroom and showed symptoms of bad temper. The cardinal even raised the question of his approval of Olshuen's election, if he were so persistent in Jarad's error.
    "What error is that, Your Eminence?"
    "Keeping your foot on Nimmy's neck, you damn fool!"
    "Why, we all do manual labor, and I thought . . ." He desisted, seeing that the Red Deacon was about to explode.
    Brother Blacktooth was relieved of his kitchen assignment, and placed at the cardinal's disposal.
    Nimmy read Boedullus again, and consulted with Brother Medic and the cooks. The cardinal allowed himself to be placed on a strict diet formulated by these consultants. Twice a day he must eat an apple into which iron nails had been driven and left for three days. The summonabisch recipe called for organ meats only. "Whatever the dogs won't eat," said a grouchy cook, quite incorrectly, according to the shepherds, whose dogs would eat every part of an animal but horns and hooves, if permitted to do so. The recipe called for wild onions and tiny wild peppers. The smelly wild onions grew only along riverbanks, and there were none near the abbey. The cook used onions from the garden, and although the shepherds found a few chiltepins while tending their flocks, hot peppers from the garden were deemed an acceptable substitute; the curative power was thought to reside mostly in the combination of tongue, liver, heart, brains, sweetbreads, kidneys, and tripe, all finely chopped. These were to be simmered in an iron pot with a splash of red wine or vinegar. The original recipe called for a calf, not a lamb, but none of the abbey's few milk cows had calved this year. Since about two young sheep a week were sacrificed for their organ meats, the monks were allowed, even encouraged, to eat mutton stew, although the Leibowitzian diet normally eschewed red meat. The very religious among them preferred to fast when it was served, but most novices ate it with relish (pepper and garlic relish) and in good conscience.
    During the second week, the cardinal's appetite improved. "You know, Nimmy, this stew is actually quite delicious. Ask the cook what's in it, will you?"
    "I doubt if you really want to know, m'Lord."
    "No? And why are there holes and brown streaks in these apples? And why do they keep feeding me pumpkin seeds?"
    "Iron nails in the apples. The Venerable Boedullus thought it's good for the blood. This is October and the pumpkins are ripe."
    "But seeds only? Boedullus, eh? He's the one to whom you added a footnote, wasn't he? But not about pumpkin seeds."
     "Apparently, I'll never live that down."
    "Don't look so downcast. It's nothing to me. Tell me about your stay in New Jerusalem."
    "She is dead, m'Lord."
    'Ædrea? I'm very sorry to hear that. She was a bright young lady. A bundle of mischief, of course. Do you think you will recover from her?"
    "I'll never forget."
    "You learned something?"
          u\7         »
    Yes.
    "Then you have a choice of coming east with me, or staying here with your Order."
    "I'll come, m'Lord. And thank you. This place has become an occasion of sin for me. I feel too much unjust anger here."
    "Save your thanks. It's likely to be dangerous. And cold. It will be winter before we reach Hannegan City. Do you think you can induce one of Cardinal Ri's guard to come with us?"
    "Induce? I don't understand. They regard you as their master, and even their owner."
    "I know. That's why I won't tell them to do anything, until they get over that idea of ownership."
    Nimmy had no trouble recruiting a bodyguard for the cardinal. They all wanted to come.
    "We can't have that," he told them. "We'll be traveling with forged papers. Whoever comes will have to hide his weapons in a bedroll and wear a cassock."
    Wooshin had told him Qum-Do was the best warrior among them, but he chose Weh-Geh, the smallest, whose skin was almost light brown. Only his eyes distinguished him from the local population.
    By the time the cardinal's sealed papers and a letter from the Pope arrived, Brownpony was ready to leave the monastery and travel east to the Province and then to Hannegan City. The letter told him very little about Hultor's raid, except that it had happened and the Pope was being blamed. The cardinal penned a reply, begging the Pope not to think of abandoning the papacy until Brownpony returned from the Imperial Court. The message was posted in Sanly Bowitts, along with the abbey's mail, which was picked up by a messenger every ten days.
    Then the three men, dressed as monks, left for the Province.
    
     Soon after their departure, two more travelers arrived at Leibowitz Abbey. One was an old Jew on his way to the Mesa of Last Resort; he was leading two young nanny goats with blue heads, full udders, and swollen abdomens. Accompanying him was a young woman with bright blond hair, only a little less pregnant than the goats. The old Jew would accept no hospitality beyond a drink of water, a few biscuits, and some cold young mutton. The girl had escaped from captivity by her family, and demanded to see the father of her unborn child.
    "They left two days ago. He told the cardinal you were dead," said Olshuen.
    "He thinks I'm dead, but the cardinal knows better."
    The abbot gritted his teeth and offered grudging hospitality, although the guesthouse was half full of alien warriors and a gunrunner; there were no separate facilities for women, and the monk she was seeking had departed.
    "You can stay in a locked cell," he told her, "with a night pot. You'll be safe enough."
    "Who keeps the key?"
    Olshuen thought for a moment. Might she not come out and molest the men, as well as the other way around?
    "Oh, well, I'll keep it myself," he said at last.
    "Locked in by you?" She glanced up at three monks regarding her curiously from the top of the parapet wall. Grinning wickedly, she pulled up the front of her leather skirt to waist level. Under it she wore nothing. With her swollen abdomen and her bright blond beaver, she did a bump and grind just for a horrified abbot, dropped the skirt, turned on her heel, and marched away with a wiggling ass toward Sanly Bowitts. Someone cheered. The abbot glared up at the parapet, but the three monks had vanished. Soon a man with a mule and a wagonload of sheep manure stopped to give her a ride. Some minutes later he picked up the old Jew, and went on with the goats tied behind the tailgate.
    "Blacktooth, Blacktooth," Olshuen muttered in disgust, and retired to the chapel, where he fell on his knees and tested his pulse before praying. A monk who began to pray, without first quieting heart and mind, prayed badly. He said a rapid paternoster with a rapid pulse and went back to his office.
    
    The journey from Leibowitz Abbey to the eastern boundary of Jackrabbit territory would take nearly two months. Önmu Kun had provided the cardinal with a list of Churches whose pastors and their flocks were of mostly Nomad ancestry, and to whom Kun had sold guns. Some of them were also on the cardinal's list of correspondents with SEEC. As long as they visited only such Churches, their identity was secure. But the cardinal wanted to pass through settlements close to the telegraph line, so that he might pick up news from Valana and Hannegan City. They traveled far enough north so that the Bay Ghost River could be forded without swimming the horses, and also without passing an imperial checkpoint. Their journey thereafter was plotted on a map from Church to Church, settlement to settlement. It was grim dry land, for they traveled mostly to the north of fertile hill country.
    It was at one such settlement at the old town of Yellow that Brownpony learned the extent of the offenses of War Sharf Bråm against the Qæsach dri Vørdar, and of the former's ritual death. He had never met Eltür Bråm (Demon Light), who was said to be Hultor's fraternal twin, younger by two hours. A Jackrabbit priest named Steps-on-Snake who knew the Grasshopper family told the cardinal that Eltür was less belligerent, less impulsive, but perhaps more cunning than his twin, whom he had worshiped. His election by the grandmothers surprised Steps-on-Snake, who said Eltür would certainly avenge his brother.
    From the Grasshopper, Filpeo Harq had demanded the surrender as criminals of all warriors involved in the massacre, and the surrender too of fifty Grasshopper children to be held as hostages insuring against future raids, and the payment of half the Grasshopper's total wealth in cattle and horses. The alternative was said to be total war. But the Imperial Mayor's forces at present lacked logistics to support a dug-in infantry force on the open Plains, although Texark was working on it. Filpeo could only send out his cavalry to harass and be decimated. He would be ready to fight when he could occupy and hold territory. It was his continued occupation and holding of Grasshopper lands that left him little to spare for enlarging his lands in the west. If Texark's fighters had lost sixty-six out of ninety-nine men in a battle, the survivors would not celebrate. "It took dirty, heathen Nomads to act thus," the priest said wryly. For the foreseeable future the war against the Grasshopper was going to be fitful and opportunistic, but cruel.
    The Province south of the Nady Ann was ruled by a proconsul commanding an army of police whose obvious and age-old job was to protect the property of the rich from the greed of the Jackrabbit poor. Blacktooth thought of the guns Önmu Kun was bringing into the territory. Lest some of them fall into Texark hands, they were not the most advanced weapons in the New Jerusalem arsenal, and it seemed to him doubtful that the Jackrabbit was yet capable of revolution, although he had heard talk in Yellow of Jackrabbit bandits, motherless ones, in the hill country far to the south. "Bandit" was a Texark political term.
    One fact to Filpeo's advantage was that the Lord of the Three Hordes, Holy Little Bear Madness, was pressing the new Grasshopper sharf to avoid battle. The only permissible attack was a counterattack. Whether Demon Light was more loyal to his lord, the Sharf of Sharfs, than his brother had been was an open question. News of Bråm’s raid had caused exultation in the Province, coupled with rage at the Grasshopper grandmothers for his ritual death.
    All these things Brownpony learned from the Jackrabbit priest at Yellow, where there was an interesting crater nearly as large as Meldown, but inhabited by living things. Steps-on-Snake was in close touch with a Grasshopper Nomad who lived nearby with the family of his Jackrabbit wife. News from his own family and the horde this husband picked up from a man who lived on the Nady Ann and watched Grasshopper and Wilddog signalmen on hilltops beyond the river. The signals were whole-body movements, many rhythmic, and the movements included those of his closely reined mount; such signals were broad enough to be seen and understood at great distance. After such a broadcast, Grasshopper news took several days to reach Yellow.
    And so Brownpony's host, Father Steps-on-Snake, was in touch with the Grasshopper, and also with a Texark sergeant who overheard all the official news at a nearby telegraph terminal, and apparently decided for himself as to the sensitivity of information.
    "How can you trust the sergeant?" the cardinal wondered.
    "His girlfriend is one of my parishioners, and she brings him to my Church every Sunday. I trust her because she likes him less than he likes her. He is too simple to dissemble. But no, I am not prepared to believe him always and every time."
    "Is there any way you can get a message to the Pope in Valana?"
    "No," said Steps-on-Snake, but hesitated. "It would be a dangerous thing to try."
    "I need to try dangerous things."
    "It would put a parishioner in danger."
    "The girl?"
    "Yes, and the corporal, and myself."
    "But you know a way?"
    "She sent a message once to a relative in the west by coding it and getting the boyfriend to inject it anonymously into the stream of traffic."
     "And she could do it again?"
    "Don't press me about it tonight," Father Steps-on-Snake answered crossly. "I'll see what can be done."
    "The Pope must be persuaded not to resign."
    "And a message from Your Eminence would persuade him?"
    "I can't promise it."
    "Neither can I, but I'll talk to her."
    In three days, the message was sent. Although it said only, "Do nothing until I see Filpeo Harq," this tiny nugget was concealed somehow in a few hundred words of schoolgirl correspondence, and Brownpony had no idea how the addressee was identified or what the method of delivery would be.
    "All I can say is that it's better than not trying" was all he could say.
    He was reluctant to hurry away from the town of Yellow, because this was as close as their journey would take them to the Nady Ann River, across which came news of events on the Plains to the north. Father Steps-on-Snake was a man knowledgeable about the ongoing interaction between civilization and the Nomadic societies of the great grasslands. He had been born during the conquest, and remembered when his father had gone to join rebels in the hill country to the south. When his father was killed, he, like Brownpony more than a generation later, found himself in the custody of nuns for schooling. Later, as a young man, he had gone north with a Wilddog friend, but he lacked the talents of warrior and herdsman, and thus found no family willing to adopt him. He considered joining a band of the motherless ones, but the nuns had given him a sense of sin, so he returned to the Province and became a priest.
    Now he was delighted to accept Cardinal Brownpony as his spiritual leader instead of Cardinal Benefez, and his sense of sin did not object to allowing his parishioners to acquire forbidden firearms from Önmu Kun. He even promised to encourage the development of a secret local militia among those he knew to be loyal both to the Church and to a Nomad heritage.
    Probably he knew little more about Nomad culture than did Blacktooth and Brownpony, but he was seventy-five years old and saw things from a different viewpoint, which seemed global and almost detached from the passion of his Jackrabbit loyalty.
    Father Steps-on-Snake had the most comprehensive view of the Nomad situation any of his three guests had ever heard. Much of it they already knew, in fragments. But the septuagenarian pastor put the fragments together in a larger picture. He was very disturbed by the raid of Hultor Bråm, and not just for the moral reasons of a priest.
    
     The dead sharf was not stupid. He had believed in his own imminent death, for the Weejus had prophesied it to him after his ordeal in the pit. His raid, according to this Jackrabbit priest, was a message to none other than Cardinal Brownpony himself, right here in this rectory, to Brownpony whom Bråm had recognized as the significant figure of power in the Church at Valana.
    The cardinal shook his head in apparent discomfort with the idea, but Nimmy noticed he made no denial. "The Grasshopper is always at war," he murmured instead.
    "What do you mean by that?"
    "It's just something one of his warriors said to me when we rode south from Meldown to meet the Pope."
    Steps-on-Snake insisted that Bråm took the war party all the way to the gates of Rome to show the cardinal (and, of course, the Pope) that the brunt of any war would be borne by the Grasshopper, not the Wilddog, and that the Valana papacy was wasting its energy in courting Chür Ösle Høngan. The "success" of the raid was also a demonstration to Filpeo Harq that his opening to the west was more apparent than real, given certain advantages possessed by the Grasshopper. As he listened to this provincial Jackrabbit father, Blacktooth began to admire the late Grasshopper sharf for his bravery and steadfastness of purpose, in spite of his murderous bent. Again, Nimmy wondered if Bråm might be his remote relative.
    Steps-on-Snake summarized the military, cultural, and historical situation as he saw it:
    One advantage which the Nomad warrior had over the Texark cavalryman was that, as everyone knew, the warrior had grown up on horseback. It is commonplace that a tribe with no previous experience of horses, upon first seeing mounted warriors of an alien nation, see the horse and rider together as a single strange animal. Then they learn to see the phenomenon as two. But if the warriors of the alien nation happened to be Plains Nomads, the first impression would be the correct one. The Nomad horse and the Nomad rider together are one. When at work or at war, a mounted man is not called by his own name, but by the name of his horse, and on formal occasions by the name of his horse and the name of his horse's breeder, often the man's wife's mother. The man was, after all, only the controller of the horse, in war or at work with cattle.
    Among the things one first noticed about a Nomad encampment, temporary or permanent, was that there were more females to be seen than males, unless one happened to come on a feast day when most of the warrior herdsmen returned from the open plains, where they usually lived with the half-wild cattle. When the herdsmen came home, they appeared almost as wild strangers in their own camp or village, where the old men, young boys, the maimed or disabled lived and sometimes worked with the women. At least the boys worked. Older boys became horse wranglers. Younger boys tended the remuda and tried to ride the partly broken horses. The old men tended to feel that their deeds of past glory entitled them to nonproductive retirement in comfort while the boys and women cooked, cleaned, carried water, mended, made clay pots, and tended the horses. Occasionally, a Weejus woman would use her supernatural powers to induce a retired old warrior to work, as long as the task was not demeaning, but the veterans were a lazy lot, usually protected in their retirement by multiple affiliations to the Bear Spirit. Sometimes they redeemed themselves by offering bursts of healing wisdom when the young men were split in angry controversy.
    The average herdsman-warrior north of the Nady Ann was still illiterate, and spoke only the dialect of his horde, but his mother was Weejus, or his grandmother, and was probably learning to read herself, and might even be teaching his younger brothers and sisters. Although lacking in letters or a second language, the average Nomad now imagined in his mind a much larger world than his great-granduncle had imagined. He knew that the Earth did not drop off beyond the mountains, and that there were people who lived beyond the Great River to the east, and that they were just as dangerous and despicable as the human herbivores that lived on this side of the river. He even suspected that the great breeding pit of the Wild Horse Woman was not really the Navel of the World at all, and that his own grandmother's breeding pit, if she had one, was not necessarily lethal to a male human who dared enter it, although staying out of it was probably better for one's luck. He was not quite as much a Nomadic purist as his oldest uncles. He used the tools of citizens, wore citizen's cloth, drank citizen's liquor, and often ate the citizen's beans and corn if he didn't have to grow his own, as Steps-on-Snake remarked with a chuckle.
    The Earth was made for growing grass, for cattle and deer and antelope and rabbits and prairie dogs and horses to live on, in turn to be lived on by men and wilddogs and several kinds of cats and buzzards. The animal hierarchy of the Plains was ruled by three overlords in a predatory partnership: men, horses, and dogs. Also by their women, mares, and bitches. Things were much simpler on the Plains than in the country of the growers of corn and beans. One might feel sorrow for farmers, as one felt sorrow for one's own prey, for the Nomad could see that the farmers were actually the prey of other men: soldiers, police, priests, and tax collectors. They were bound to one piece of land, while the Nomad owned the whole world beneath Empty Sky. That indeed was one of the Nomad's ancient names for himself: the Nephew of the Empty Sky. Empty Sky, of course, was a person, but also he was just-look-up-at-it: empty sky. Nowhere but on the Plains from the back of a horse can a man see the Earth's vastness, unless it be from the masthead of an ocean schooner, but the Nomad was not sure he believed in oceans. He knew things came in opposites, so where he was surrounded by a semi-arid ocean of grass, to imagine an ocean of water was just a natural thought. But not all natural thoughts were real. Since his defeat of his great uncles by the second Hannegan's soldiers and the Hannegan's diseased cattle, this new Nomad had become a skeptic. He did not believe everything his uncles or his Weejus woman told him, unless he was getting ready to be a Bear Spirit man. But the average Nomad did not become a Bear Spirit man, and was skeptical of their powers. Among the Wilddog Horde, it was not a rare occurrence for a sick Nomad to visit a mountain town to find a doctor of a different tradition, especially for surgery. Usually the sick ones were young, but sometimes a half-willing older patient would be dragged to a mountain doctor by her younger kin. More than a few Bear Spirit men had worked for a time in the hospitals of the Church or the Empire, learning as much as they could of this different kind of healing. They learned to wash their hands. They learned which drugs to steal for use at home.
    Then there were the myths of origin, of the birth of this grassy Earth and its true People, out of an ancient cataclysm.
    During the primordial time of the great death, there was fire and ice. A few animals and a few men arose out of that terrible death. Then, after that primordial time, came the Old Time. In the Old Time, there arose a conspiracy among man, dog, and horse to rule the furry, ungoverned cattle that ranged freely on the Plains, that holy country of Empty Sky and the Sacred Mare. The alliance, the Man-Horse-Dog-Thing, controlled the furry herd to the herd's advantage, usually against the herd's will, driving them to where men knew the grass grew greener. The cattle got something from their predators in return for their flesh and hide and bone; they got Man-Horse-Dog's protection against wolves and large cats, but they remained Man-Horse-Dog's freely running prey, shot down from horseback, and the horses were superior horses.
    "Today, the herds of cattle often no longer run," said Steps-on-Snake. All around the fringes of the Plains, fences were going up. These were attempts by some tribes to stay in one place year-round, building permanent houses, culling their herds (now flocks, even) in the fall, first picking out the breeding stock, then slaughtering whatever animals could be used, eaten now or preserved for winter, and finally selling the rest or trading with the farmers for grain. To the true People's ultimate disgust, some of them even raised hogs.
    The hordes at first considered these fence-line Nomads as outcasts, as despicable as ex-Nomads who farmed as Blacktooth's family did, except that Blacktooth's kin farmed another man's land. But the old women of the High Plains, these gaunt old grandmothers with leather fists, grinning eyes, and Weejus powers, they took up the cause of the fringe-area people, and they besieged the ears of husband, brother, son, and father with warnings about the Night Hag, who called to her dark bosom those chiefs who wronged their own realms or hurt the beings that lived therein. Not only that, but if these settled herdsmen were alienated by the roving herdsmen, they could only become allies of the farmers and of Texark.
    When people began seeing the Hag, the nervous chieftains began to agree that Nomads who settled down behind fences should not be pillaged and killed, but wooed back to the common life of the horde if possible. This tolerance was reserved for haciendas adjacent to existing fences, however. There were a few families on the Plains who had dared to fence off choice areas for themselves, far from any other fences. To these the leaders of the hordes sent warriors to tear the fence down. They forced such people to choose between returning to the common life or leaving the common land. Those foolish enough to stay were killed by outlaws, who could be counted on to save the tribes the trouble and the blood-guilt. The hordes of course joined with the Church in condemning these murderous motherless ones. Things had changed since the time of Høngan Ös, when Hannegan II had spread cattle plague as a weapon of war by driving his infected herds among those of the hordes.
    The future was revealed to the tribal seers. It was foreseeable that the open Plains would shrink, and the people and the cattle on it would either perish or change. They had been changing continuously through three generations since the Conquest, and what characterized the present population was youth. The prolific grandmothers and mothers had doubled the population in a very short time. Every Nomad warrior believed that his women's ability to produce babies fast, running even to twins and triplets, rose and fell according to the nation's need. For whatever reason, the Great Plains were shrinking, while their population had been growing fast of late. Was this not the chief cause of war? It usually happened when men settled down in one place with their women and had a lot of sex and babies, too many children to fit into the local scheme of things. Teenage gangs become the first warriors in this process, and because they start trouble with other neighborhoods, it is necessary to put the gangs under the chief's command and give them violent things to do against people who are not enjoying the chief's favor. War is caused by agriculture, in the Nomad opinion. It was, after all, a herdsman killed by a farmer when Cain slew Abel, so Christians said.
    The tribes were restless, anxious, angry. They all had compromised; even the wildest among them used the tools and the weapons that were manufactured in the towns and cities to the east and in the mountains. They brought their beef, hides, artwork, wolfskins, bear grease, and surplus ponies to a trading post, and then rode back to Grandmotherland leading a pack mule loaded with tools, gunpowder, musket balls, fabric, beans, and enough distilled spirits for at least the elders to get sloshed. They sang the old songs and danced the old rituals, honored the Wild People, and moved their dwellings and their herds according to the season. Each horde owned a sacred path, and sacred places along it to pitch camp for a season. They navigated the grasslands by the doings in the night sky as much as by landmarks. The sky told them when to move south. It was the middle of the thirty-third century, and Polaris traced a larger circle in the north sky than it did in the time of Leibowitz, but the hordes called themselves the people of the Polestar when they wandered. When they camped in summer, they were the people of Empty Sky and the Day Maiden. When they huddled down for winter, they were sons of the Wolf and the Hag.
    Blacktooth knew much about the tradition, even though he had never lived it. But things were changing. He could see the change now; he had missed it as a boy. Power on the Plains among the warrior herdsmen was out of control, and the old women worried about it. Some leaders were chosen by men without due process of consultation with the grandmothers, the Weejus women, and the Bear Spirit men. War threatened the horses and the sacred bloodlines, and it killed grandsons. The women were usually against any war, except when necessary to curb intertribal horse theft.
    
    When Empty Sky was dying in the presence of his Seventeen Crazy Warriors, he promised them he would come back from the dead in their time of need if each and all seventeen of them would in time of need utter his magic name of seventeen syllables. Empty Sky as part of his last will and testament taught the name to these warrior-Priests who had served him best in battle, leaving to each man a different secret syllable which could be spoken only once—to speak it twice permanently paralyzed the tongue. A dying man could leave his syllable only to his eldest son, or if the son were unfit, to another chosen by the Bear Spirit shamans. Empty Sky promised to come whenever they spoke his name correctly, but to pronounce the name each man would have to utter his syllable in correct order.
    What was the correct order?
    They had been crowded around his couch at the time, and while most of them agreed as to who owned the first and last syllables, nobody had been counting the ones between; for example, there was a spearman who said Empty Sky had spoken in the ears of at least ten men before him, but not more than twelve. Inevitably, a skeptic who inherited his syllable from his father spoke it aloud, tried to speak it again, and was immediately struck dumb. Others heard him speak the syllable, but now doubt arose. Would it be effective if spoken in the correct order by a man other than its original custodian? And if a man spoke his own syllable, would he be able to repeat the orphan syllable as well, or would dumbness grasp his throat? But one day, about a century ago, they all got together, all except the speechless skeptic, and decided to try to call Empty Sky, because times were getting bad for the people.
    When they spoke the syllables, nothing dramatic happened. They deemed it a failure, until they heard the cry of a newborn baby from the adjacent tent. The baby was the son of a mother of the royal tribe, and she was prevailed upon to name him Empty Sky, although at the time of his rite of passage to manhood, he was given the name of Høngan Ös, Mad Bear, who grew up to become the Qæsach dri Vørdar who led the hordes into horrible disaster. Obviously, the holy name had been misspoken.
    
    They were fascinated by Step-on-Snake's storytelling. Nevertheless, it was necessary to go on, and to cross one branch of the Red River to the southeast, then make haste toward Hannegan City.
    On the edge of town, following such a heading, they stopped at the rim of Yellow's crater. There was a small lake in the center, and the ground around it was fertile and green. Two wild horses were grazing, and somebody was fishing in the lake.
    "I'm told," said Brownpony, "that this was a Jackrabbit breeding pit before the conquest."
    "Is it like Meldown?" Blacktooth asked.
    "No, it is not like the breeding pit of the Wild Horse Woman.'
    "I see there is a stone marker ahead. The place has a name.'
     "What is it called?"
    "Lake Blessdassurance," Blacktooth read, and looked up at Brownpony, who was staring at the other side of the marker.
    "Does it say something on the back side, m'Lord?"
    "It says, 'Boedullus was here.' "
    "Wh-a-at?" Nimmy took a look. "Paint! Recent paint. It's a joke. It has to be. Or else—" He paused. "Did you know, m'Lord, the Venerable Boedullus died in an explosion at an archaeological site he was investigating? There's a legend about a lake with a giant catfish named Bodolos that later came to live in the crater where the bomb went off."
    "So it's a joke with a theory behind it. It has to be a Leibowitzian joke. Who outside your Order knows about the Venerable Boedullus?"
    "Almost nobody, m'Lord, unless Nomads have been reading my translations."
    "It seems to be signed with initials: BRT. I'd hate to lose time by going back to ask Father Steps-on-Snake about it."
    "Let's ask that Jackrabbit farmer instead," Nimmy suggested, watching a man riding a mule toward them down the road.
    The farmer laughed heartily. "My great-granduncle caught that old Bodolos nearly a century ago. He fed the whole village with it. Whoever painted the sign on the back last month couldn't spell. He was wearing the same robes as you, though."
    Brownpony and Blacktooth exchanged glances. Nobody at the abbey had told them of a monk of the Order who had recently departed for the Province.
    "Well, at least one Jackrabbit farmer learned to read," Brownpony later observed.
    "There was a small Church school at Yellow, you know."
    "I'm sure there are many Nomads in the Province who can read a book but cannot ride a horse, especially in battle."
    "How fast can they learn to march and shoot?" asked the usually silent Weh-Geh.
    The question was considered by the monk and the prelate, but not answered.
    They crossed the Red River and headed east across the grasslands. In all, they stopped at twenty-three Churches, and secured the loyalty of seventeen Jackrabbit pastors, but many nights they slept in farmers' barns or found natural shelter along creekbeds. Twice they rented rooms from Texark landlords, but there were too many prying questions. The cardinal disliked lying and decided against doing it again, although it became a very cold winter during their trip; freezing rain did not usually come until January in these parts. The cardinal was still not quite well. He began to believe the Weejus' promise that he would have a shorter lifetime as a result of the ordeal. Blacktooth fed him a lot of apples into which nails had been pressed, but he seemed to be losing some of his graying red hair as well as his energy. Such was the curse of Meldown.
    
     
    
    
CHAPTER 18
     
     The fourth kind of monks are those called Gyrovagues. These spend their whole lives tramping from province to province, staying as guests in different monasteries for three or four days at a time. ... Of the miserable conduct of such men it is better to be silent than to speak.
     —Saint Benedict's Rule, Chapter 1
    
    
    
    
    
    
T
HEY REACHED  THE  OUTSKIRTS  OF  HANNEGAN City by early evening, and the cardinal decided to rent rooms and spend the night at an inn outside the city limits. There was the possibility of learning recent news from the innkeeper or fellow travelers; there was the inevitability of reading the government bulletin boards to learn of the response of the bureaucrats to the same recent news. There was a need to change from a monk's habit to red and black. Weh-Geh would need new clothes altogether, and could again wear his weapons as the cardinal's bodyguard. All Blacktooth needed was a bath and a change of habit. They had grown beards during the journey, but only Weh-Geh decided to shave. His whiskers were rather thin and added an alien touch to his appearance. Brownpony's beard was redder than his thinning hair. Blacktooth had more gray on his chin than on his pate, which badly needed reshaving. Weh-Geh barbered Nimmy's tonsure with a short sword, grasping the blade with both hands and drawing it smoothly under the soapy hair. Blacktooth complained that the swordsman was leaning on him too hard.
    "Only to hold you still. If you prefer, I could shave you just as easily standing back here," Weh-Geh said to the lathered monk. Blacktooth looked at him with affected fright. The guardsman held the sword drawn back past his right shoulder, as if to deliver a roundhouse cut to the scalp's long stubble.
    "Stop boasting. Lean on me if you need to." He was surprised, because it was the first time Weh-Geh made a joke, a sinister joke besides, and one of the few times he spoke at all. In Jackrabbit country, only once did a need arise to draw his long sword and Brownpony's pistol, when a group of young bullies had decided to pick on three itinerant mendicant monks for fun. Both Nimmy and the cardinal missed Wooshin. Blacktooth wondered if they had, without meaning to, resented Weh-Geh as a poor substitute for the Axe, on whose head there was a price in this realm. But Weh-Geh had no wish to be a substitute for anyone. Nimmy resolved to befriend him, if there was still time.
    By midafternoon of a cold and sunny day, they were standing on the steps of the Cathedral of Holy Michael, the Angel of Battle, talking to its Cardinal Archbishop. At the Archbishop's left and rear stood an attractive young acolyte wearing a long surplice with lacework and crocheted borders. Torrildo smiled happily at Blacktooth on first seeing him, but then misinterpreted Nimmy's expression and cast his eyes on the ground. The monk was less shocked that Benefex had hired the pretty fugitive than surprised by a sudden realization that the letters BRT beneath the painted "Boedullus was here" legend at Yellow's crater lake stood for "Br. Torrildo," who had been traveling from Valana to Hannegan City.
    Weh-Geh seemed ill-at-ease, for Benefez kept glancing at him, until finally the cardinal asked, "Young man, where have I seen you before?"
    Brownpony answered for him, "In Valana, Urion. Weh-Geh was in Cardinal Ri's employ. Now he is in mine."
    "Ah, yes, there were five or six of them, weren't there? Where are the others?"
    Brownpony shook his head and shrugged. "I've been on the road for two months." The evasion was almost a lie, Blacktooth noticed.
    "Of course," Benefez said, then returned to their previous conversation: "Elia, mmm, Your Eminence, of canon law, I too have been a scholar. Before the Flame Deluge there had been only two papal resignations. One Pope, so-called, was a great sinner, one was a great saint. The former sold the papacy, the latter fled from it in holy terror. But the question arises whether either of these men was a legitimate pope. So can a real pope resign? I think not. If he resigns, he was never elected by the Holy Ghost in the first place. This may be against the majority opinion, but it is my opinion. A poet of his own time put him in Hell, but that poet was a bitter man. I think the old fellow was really hallowed, but I doubt the legitimacy of his election in the first place. If he were Pope, he would not and could not resign, and would not be talking about resignation."
    "Are we talking about San Pietro of Mount Murrone, or Pope Amen Specklebird?" Brownpony asked.
    "Aren't they two of a kind?"
    "No, Urion, they are not." He hesitated. "Well, how can I say? Amen Specklebird I have known. I know San Pietro only from a book at Leibowitz Abbey. The writer thought he was a saintly clown."
    "Doesn't this describe Amen Specklebird? In a charitable way?"
    Brownpony paused. He seemed to be leaving himself open on all sides. Blacktooth tried to remember Wooshin's word for it. Happu biraki, he thought. In a fight, it was usually a deadly invitation to be foolhardy.
    Brownpony closed in. "If so, then this saintly clown, Pope Amen, His Holiness, is disposed to absolve you, Urion, of any penalty of excommunication you may have incurred, crimine ipso laesae majestatis facto, or any other act of rebellion you may have committed in thought, word, or deed. I am here to announce this."
    Blacktooth noticed that the purple in the face of Benefez was not merely reflected light from his purple vestments (it had been a day for burying the dead). He did not sputter, however, but purred, "How utterly wonderful of him, Elia. From so generous a man, I'll bet the penance I have to do is only kiss his ring."
    "I doubt he would allow you to do that, Urion. He is an honest man. There are no conditions, and no penance unless I choose to impose one."
    "You?"
    "The Pope sent a plenipotentiary in this case. Me."
    "You!"
    "And I unbind you, Urion, without condition, in nomine Patris Filiique Spiritusque Sancti."
    Blacktooth saw the Archbishop's right hand twitch toward mirroring the sign of the cross Brownpony made over him, but it was only the twitch of habit.
     "Your credentials are as good as your Latin, Elia. Go home and stop being my gadfly."
    "I am also empowered to offer you control over those Churches in the Province where the parishioners are mostly settlers or soldiers whose native tongue is Ol'zark."
    "Oh, I see. It's not a matter of geography, then."
    "Geography is boundaries and fences. These don't mean much to a Nomad."
    "Yes, we had a recent demonstration of that just west of New Rome. Human life doesn't mean much to them either, and they eat men's flesh."
    "Only men they honor. It is a funeral rite, or a tribute to a brave dead enemy."
    "You defend this evil thing!"
    "No, I merely describe it."
    Someone was yelling "Make way! Make way!" in the distance, and Cardinal Benefez looked up the street.
    "Apparently my nephew is coming down the road," he said to Brownpony. "Do you want to step inside?"
    "You mean do I want to hide? No, Urion, thank you. I must see him in order to deliver this." He showed Benefez the sealed papers which he had received at the abbey from Valana. "I must go to the palace to request an audience, unless he sees us and stops."
    
    The Emperor was in a hurry as usual, and ordered his driver to wield the whip. He waved in a friendly way to his subjects in the streets who bowed or curtsied as the royal coach hurried on, preceded by two mounted guards whose costumes were more elegant than that of their ruler. Filpeo wanted to be seen as a man of frugal habits, generous to his subjects, and devoted to the economic interests of the Empire. He sought to distance himself in public from the ferocity of some of his predecessors, and had shortened the list of crimes for which the penalty was death. His own ferocity was carefully contained. He had secretly, on several occasions, insisted on administering the supreme penalty himself, but few men knew about this. One who had known it was named Wooshin, and it was the Hannegan's personal fascination with death by the art of the headsman which had, in fact, cost him his best executioner. The fellow had been repelled by his own art when practiced by his master. And Harq had let him get away! It was one of his few mistakes in judging men.
    Filpeo Harq was a Hannegan only on his mother's side, and some considered this inheritance of the throne through the motherline supremely ironic, given the masculine, patrilineal, and certainly patriarchal cast of the Texark civilization, which in its origins was a reaction to the matriline culture of the Plains. The original Hannegan (or Høngan with a Jackrabbit pronunciation), the conqueror of the city, had been leader of a band of Nomad "outlaws," and his acquisition of the mayorality of the small town and trading post called Texark had been by conquest. The term "outlaws" was a farmer's word; Nomads, who despised them but feared them less, called them "motherless ones," a term which was applied to those wanderers of the Prairie who either evaded family ties because of hostility, or found themselves unwanted by any woman of the horde, and these men formed homosexual (not necessarily in the erotic sense) war bands, taking their women by violence when they felt the urge and saw the chance, and keeping them, if at all, as servants.
    From the point of view of the civis, every nomas was an outlaw, but in the Nomad view, the motherless ones had deviated so far from the Nomad cultural norm that they were loathed by the people of the Plains more than they were by the farmers along the eastern fringe whom they sometimes plundered. As is usually the case, a completely alien enemy is less to be despised than a deviant brother. The motherless ones who originally conquered Texark had been driven there by the right-thinking orthodox Nomads of the several hordes. It was an infusion of fresh blood and new ideas for the sleepy trading community and the surrounding farmers, and Texark began to grow and to be fortified. It was located in a place where, exposed on both flanks, in order to grow at all it was forced to conquer or perish. However, after five generations the mutation of barbarian outlaw into civilized aristocrat was nearly complete, and Filpeo was a popular ruler except in the conquered territories.
    The town of Texark itself, or Texarkana improperly so-called in the Latin of the Church, was not located at the site (now lost) of the ancient city of that name. Now called Hannegan City, it did lie on the Red River, and it grew up at the vague boundary between forest and plain, where it was originally a minor center of commerce between the two areas, the sown and the treeless wild. The relatively peaceful Jack-rabbit people had come here to trade surplus cattle, horses, and hides for wood, metal, spirits, medicinal herbs, products of the blacksmith's art, and whatever trinkets the merchants could show that caught the Nomad fancy. Among the merchants, however, there were a few panderers who took advantage of the sexual hungers of the motherless ones, and actually sold them brides, or rented them for a while. That was the beginning of it. When the price of brides went up, the bandits killed the merchants, took what they wanted, and settled down, but they themselves, not their captive wives, kept and managed the horses—and every other kind of property. In one generation, a way of life was turned on its head.
    Filpeo Harq himself was a student of this local and family history, which was not so well known to the residents of his realm. He had taken a personal interest in the writings of historians at the collegium, now a thriving university, and he who wanted tenure and royal favor wrote to please the monarch. He who wrote otherwise was rarely published, and failed to thrive. To put it mildly.
    In passing his uncle's Church, the Monarch suddenly signaled his driver to go slow. He pointed at a group of clergy, including his uncle Urion, standing on the steps in the morning sun. Cardinal Benefez seemed to be arguing warmly with another man in a red zucchetto whose back was toward the coach.
    "Who is that man?" Filpeo asked sharply.
    "Which one, Your Imperial Honor?"
    The cardinal with his back toward the coach suddenly looked over his shoulder. The Mayor's head disappeared inside the window and he knocked for the driver to hurry on. Beside the second cardinal stood one man in the robes of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, and another man-at-arms who was probably a bodyguard. He thought he knew who one of them might be. The armed man was too alien in appearance to be the cardinal's secretary. And Uncle Urion appeared to have acquired another pretty young man as acolyte.
    "Drive on, drive on."
    
    The manufacturer's representative had already arrived at the War College when the imperial coach discharged its royal passenger and his courtiers, but he and the officers in charge were not yet ready for the demonstration. Irritated by the delay, but determined to make use of every idle moment, Filpeo called an immediate meeting of staff to discuss long-term strategy on the Plains. It was disquieting to the officers to be quizzed by the Monarch on such an impromptu basis with no preparation, and Filpeo always enjoyed putting them in such a situation. He learned a lot from the practice, and it helped him weed out the fools. The commanders of Infantry and Corps of Engineers were out of the city on maneuvers, however, and their seconds were summarily yanked out of their offices and hauled to the conference room.
    Admiral e'Fondolai was there in person, and so was General Goldæm, Chief of Staff, and Major General Alvasson of the Cavalry.
    
     Infantry and Engineers were represented by Colonels Holofot and Blindermen. Not as a joke, but in a joking manner, Filpeo Harq himself collared Colonel Pottscar, S.I., in the corridor while the Ignatzian Chief Chaplain was returning from Mass and pulled him along to the meeting. "Someone may need your services here, Father," said the Monarch to the astonished Pottscar. "It may even be me. Did you know that Cardinal Brownpony and probably his troublesome monk-secretary are in town."
    Colonel Father Pottscar nodded. "I just heard about it as I left the Church. By now, he must have requested an audience with Your Honor, no?"
    "No! Not that I have been told about."
    "I'm sure he will, but naturally he would see the Archbishop first."
    "By God, I should have him arrested. If Urion knew he was coming, he would have told me. What the hell is going on?"
    "I would guess, Your Honor, that he has come to plead the cause of the man he calls Pope."
    "Hah! The man who sent the Grasshopper Horde to smash its way to New Rome! By God, they killed two-thirds of the Nomads, and we chased that bastard Curia back to Valana with their Specklebird, all right. But they left a lot of dead men and raped women and burned buildings. There hasn't been an atrocity like that before the second Hannegan's conquest. And now we've got trouble with the Grasshopper all along the frontier, mainly because of him!"
    "Who, Brownpony? Sire, you have been misinformed. He was not even with the Curia, so-called, at that time. He was with Monsignor Sanual at the Nomad election. Sanual told me that. He was quite shocked by Brownpony. Says the man is a pagan. But although he rode south with the Grasshopper to meet the Pope, he did not join the others but continued south. Your Honor, according to one of my chaplains in the area of conflict, the, uh, pretender Pope turned back with his whole retinue when the guards refused to let them cross the border. This priest says the Nomad escort attacked only after they were separated from the Valanan cardinals. It's not at all clear that they were acting under Valana's instruction. I know the Archbishop had received a message from this crazy Specklebird. It probably told him Brownpony was coming."
    "I wonder that the guards let him cross the border!"
    "I doubt that he came through the skirmishing zone, Sire. He probably crossed from the Province."
    "By way of Leibowitz Abbey, I dare say, for he was with a monk of theirs. Right now, I want you to send one of your chaplains to bring Brownpony to me. Let a military policeman go with him. Let them not take no for an answer. Bring that monk along too."
    Colonel Father Pottscar hurried away. The Hannegan glanced curiously at Admiral e'Fondolai and asked, "I don't remember calling you here. Do we need the Navy to fight Nomads on the Plains? Not that you aren't welcome—"
    "I asked him to come," explained General Goldæm. "Brownpony inherited six alien warriors from a cardinal who died in conclave, and Carpy here knows something about their race and nation. We might need to know."
    The admiral frowned. Carpios Robbery had been e'Fondolai's nom de guerre in his pirate days, when he had become the second man since antiquity to circumnavigate the globe, but he hated to be called "Carpy," especially in the presence of his Hannegan.
    They entered the conference room. First, the Emperor asked about the status of the forces protecting new farming lands, and any further encounters with the Grasshopper people. Told they had drawn back defensively, Filpeo ordered there be no punitive raids by Texark forces until he so commanded. He then stated, "If I were a Grasshopper war sharf, I would make an alliance with the Wilddog to strike the Province. I would cut the telegraph line in several places. The Wilddog will cut the Province in half, while Grasshopper strikes toward Texark. What is your response?"
    Colonel Father Pottscar entered the room and nodded to Filpeo.
    Colonel Holofot spoke. "They can destroy, but they cannot hold. Such an invasion can be no more than a massive cavalry raid. Our forts would remain secure. They might massacre the Jackrabbit settlers and the colonists, but they would quickly exhaust themselves and be driven back, as in the Grasshopper raid."
    General Goldæm looked levelly at his ruler and shook his head. "Your scenario is improbable, Sire. When they began establishing winter quarters after the war, they became vulnerable. If they attacked the south, they know our cavalry would strike in the north at their family settlements, which would not be well defended. When the hordes were entirely mobile, they could retreat forever. They could lead pursuers to exhaustion. Now they have fixed property. It's vulnerable. They have no infantry to take or hold ground."
    "Suppose the Jackrabbit revolted and joined the invaders?"
    "We have kept them disarmed," said the engineer, Colonel Holofot. "What will they fight with, pitchforks?"
    "No, but if they could provide the invaders with food, water, shelter, and places to hide," said the general. "The question is: would they? The Jackrabbit has bitter memories of the Northerners, for the wild hordes were contemptuous of the Jacks. Frankly, to me it seems a tossup whether they hate us more, or the Northerners. But even with Jackrabbit support, Colonel Holofot is right. A mass cavalry attack would exhaust itself in the south, and the northern underbelly would be exposed. They would be more likely to strike the farmlands north of the Valley, uh, north of the Watchitah Nation, and that is what we are not well prepared for yet. But we are preparing fast, and the whole border will be fortified in two years. The surviving farmers there are well armed now, and since the raid, they have a lot of hate for Nomads. We have the troops to back them up, but not to attack prematurely, because we have the same problem in the north as they in the south."
    "And that is?"
    "We can attack and kill, but we don't have the men or the logistics to occupy Grasshopper territory. Unless, of course, we weaken our forces in the Province."
    Filpeo became thoughtful. "I wonder," he said, "why is it that these farms on the eastern fringe, which get more rain, are not as productive as the refugee lands at the foot of the Rockies, where the land is said to be nearly a desert?"
    There was a brief silence. The Hannegan's remarks seemed almost idle, having nothing to do with the Nomad as a military problem.
    "Sire, that question is outside my field," said the commanding general. "But it may have something to do with discipline. As you know, ours are free peasants, and they work mostly for themselves. When you say 'productive,' you mean it in terms of commercial crops. The ex-Nomads are sharecroppers, working for landowners, especially the Bishop of Denver. They are forced to work, and they grow only a few crops."
    "I think that is not an explanation," said Father Colonel Pottscar. "And it's not quite true. The ex-Nomads learned from the mountaineers, who have been dry-farming for centuries. And as for the rainfall—there is a monastery in the hills north of Valana where the monks keep records of events in the heavens, waiting for the coming of the Lord. One of the things they keep track of is rain, because they pray for the weather. They say the rainfall on the western side of the mountains is now nearly twice what it was eight hundred years ago. That, and that alone, is your miracle of the ex-Nomad farms. Of course, the monks think it's their miracle, answering eight centuries of prayer. But the runoff for irrigation is better than in ancient times, miracle or no."
    "Well, doesn't the increase apply to the whole Plains?" asked the Monarch.
    "Their records are local. I can't say. Thon Graycol points out that there are no very old trees in the edges of our forests where the prairie begins looking eastward. That suggests our tree line has been moving slowly westward for a few centuries, but nobody is sure. The Nomads may have cut the older trees for wood."
    "Well," said General Goldæm, "if nature is closing in on them from the east and the west, they're going to lose their precious desert anyway. We'll just give nature a hand in their extinction."
    "Extinction? I don't want to hear that word again, General," Filpeo Harq said sharply. "Pacification and containment are the goals, not extermination. We have achieved that in the south. The Jackrabbit population is stable."
    "Except that their young men keep running away to join outlaw bands."
    "The northern Nomads kill most of those. One way, maybe the only way, to secure the area between the forests and the western mountains is to colonize."
    "How, Sire? Except along the eastern fringe, the land is poor, the water scarce, and the weather horrid. Who could, who would live there but wild herdsmen?"
    "Tame herdsmen, and a tamer breed of cattle," said Filpeo Harq. "Fenced ranches, as in the south. Some places down there, they use yellowwood trees for fences. If you plant them a foot apart and keep them pruned, they make hedges dense enough and thorny enough to keep cattle in. There may not be enough water for agriculture, but wells can be dug to water stock. Some land can be fenced, farther north where the cold kills yellowwood. We hold much forested land in the east. Enough timber can be shipped to settlers, and they'll pay with beef and hides. And I'm not so sure agriculture is impossible either. The university is studying that problem. Until civilized men can live there, the Plains will remain an obstacle. The Pope might as well be living on the moon, and there is no way to unify the continent."
    "But who in hell would want to live there?"
    Harq the Hannegan thought for a moment. "The Jackrabbit itself has settled down in the south. That's why I won't stand for talk of extermination."
    "But they were always half-settled anyway, Sire. The Wilddog and the Grasshopper would prefer to die in battle than give up their ways. To farm or to ranch is hard work. To the Nomad, work is slavery."
    "The ex-Nomads learned to work when they lost their horses. You merely predict their choice. We must not allow them to have such a choice. There is no need to colonize the Plains if we can civilize the wild tribes themselves. I want Urion to send missions to the northern  hordes."
    "Cardinal Urion sent Monsignor Sanual to them, and he came back empty-handed, and I think empty-headed. The Christians among them are already tied to Valana, Sire, and there is a rumor this Pope in Valana means to take the Jackrabbit Churches away from our Archbishop," said the chaplain.
    "There is no Pope in Valana, and until there is a Pope in New  Rome, they are tied to nobody. And Urion hopes to be the next Pope. If not, we'll see whether Urion or some antipope offers them sweeter salvation. Especially to the Grasshopper, after we punish them. The time is ripe for change. The papacy is up for grabs. The new Lord of the Hordes is a Wilddog, not a Grasshopper. We have to influence both.
    "Please understand," continued the Hannegan, after a pause, "that what I ask of you is to tell me what you think would happen if we do this, or we do that, even if I would never do either. To show you what I mean, I ask General Goldæm what he thinks would happen if we undertook a war to simply wipe out the Nomad population of the northern Plains."
    He spoke again after a silence. "Well, General?" 
    "Sire, I did not really mean to suggest—"
    "Very well, I realize you were just making bellicose noises to exercise your military gland, but go ahead. Answer my question: What would happen if we undertook to wipe out the Grasshopper and the Wilddog?"
    The general reddened, and after a few seconds said, "I think we I would fail. We're stretched out. We occupy and police the Jackrabbit country below the Nady Ann. If we try to hit the Grasshopper hard, he can pull back until our supply wagons can't supply our forces."
    "The Nomad can live on carrion and crickets. Why can't you?" "I can, but we can't fight without powder and shot." 
    "Good enough. You have now taken charge of your military gland. However, you can put it to work again and organize a battalion of a special strike force. I want men trained to out-Nomad the Nomads. Take the biggest, toughest, meanest men you can find, both from our own ranks and from any motherless outlaws you can recruit. Teach them to live on the land, speak Nomadic, and learn their way of signaling."
    "And what exactly is the battalion's mission, Sire? Not to hold ground, surely."
    "Of course not. The mission is to surprise, kill, destroy, and run. Punitive strikes, in case there's another attack on the farmlands. As for weapons, be sure they have the new biologicals from the university. Draft Thon Hilbert, if you have to."
    Goldæm looked at Carpios, made a sour mouth, and winked. He did not believe that biologicals were the wave of the military future and he hoped Carpy agreed; but the pirate admiral merely shrugged.
    Filpeo turned to the chaplain.
    "Colonel Pottscar, suppose my uncle the Archbishop had unlimited funds to spend on the conversion of the Grasshopper Horde. What would happen?"
    "Well, if he didn't spend it on young boys, he would waste it sending people like Monsignor Sanual."
    The Mayor seemed to suppress a giggle. "How would he spend it on young boys? Charitably?"
    "Oh, of course. I was only thinking about how he just last week took in a refugee from Leibowitz Abbey. He hired a young Brother Torrildo as his assistant and acolyte. He's always thinking of the welfare of young boys."
    "I'm acquainted with my uncle, Father Colonel Pottscar. My question is: do you think spending money to Christianize the Nomads would be a wise investment?"
    "No."
    "Why?"
    "Because the Nomads would be baptized, take the money, ignore the priests, and do as they have always done."
    "Just so. Well, look at the clock! Let us go inspect the wares of the gunsmiths, gentlemen."
    "Wait a moment, Sire," said Goldæm. "I think Carp . . . uh, the admiral might have something to say first."
    "Go right ahead, Carp," said the Hannegan.
    The admiral winced slightly, but said, "The guns the alien warriors brought with them disappeared soon after they met Brownpony."
    "How do you know that? And if true, what does it mean?"
    "I heard it from Esitt Loyte, Sire. Their homeland has firearms superior to our own, and such guns are now being made on the west coast." He took out a small pistol, only to have it snatched from his hand by one of Filpeo's bodyguards. The guard seemed to have trouble determining if the gun was loaded. The admiral assured him that it was not.
    "Where did you get that thing?" Filpeo asked.
    "About fifty-eight hundred nautical miles from here, Sire. On a great circle course, almost northwest, I'd guess. Or sixty-three hundred miles, by rhumb line course, nearly due west. That's my best guess without looking at the charts."
    "Across the ocean? Not our west coast?"
    "No, but they're in production on our west coast by now."
    "Show me how it works, Admiral," said Filpeo.
    Carpios Robbery pulled five cartridges out of his pocket, loaded the revolver, walked to the nearest window, aimed at the sky, and shocked their eardrums by holding down the trigger and rapidly fanning the hammer five times with the edge of his hand. When he turned around, Filpeo looked pale.
    "My God! Is that what's been piling up in the Suckamint Mountains?"
    "I have no way of knowing that, Sire. But this special battalion you want Goldy to organize should have a lot of firepower."
    "Give me the weapon. Let's go see the gunsmiths."
    The admiral released the pistol with obvious reluctance.
    According to the gunsmiths' salesmen, the prototype of a similar weapon was already on the drawing board and might be ready in two years, but they were alarmed to see a competitive firearm already in production.
    "Would your possession of this gun hasten production?"
    "That is very likely, Sire."
    Carpios Robbery winced again.
    "I'll let you have it before you leave the city," Filpeo said, then looked at his admiral's expression and added, "Of course, you must send it back to its owner here when you're done with it."
    "Certainly, Sire."
    
    Brownpony's interview with His Imperial Majesty Filpeo Harq, Mayor Hannegan VII, happened in City Hall, also called the Imperial Palace, on Thursday, the 5th of January, thus giving the lie to a Jack-rabbit rumor extant in the Province which held that Filpeo Harq always had himself locked up in his private quarters for three days about the time of the full moon, and would see no one. That Thursday the moon was full, and after opening the sealed papers from Pope Amen, the Monarch flew into such a rage that Blacktooth wished the rumor were true. He and Weh-Geh were made to sit on a bench in the corridor outside the mayoral throne room, and they could hear only muffled shouting without being able to understand much of it. None of the shouting was done by the cardinal.
    Presently a priest with a monsignor's bellyband came down the hall and spoke to the guards. One of them knocked hard, opened the door, and shouted, "Monsignor Sanual, in obedience to the Lord Mayor's summons," and pushed him inside, then followed him and closed the door. There was a lull in the shouting.
    Blacktooth had never seen Sanual before, but had heard enough about him from both his master and Father Steps-on-Snake to know that he would be anything but a friendly witness, and that Brownpony's actions at the funeral festival on the Plains and his participation in the affair with the Wild Horse Woman were on the court's agenda. He exchanged a glance with Weh-Geh, and saw that both of them were aware of this.
    The guard who took Sanual inside now opened the door and spoke to the other guard. "Seize them," he said, and again closed the door.
    The guard had no way to seize them, but he pointed his gun at Weh-Geh and told him to throw his swords aside. Two seconds later, he was flat on his back with a sword point at his throat.
    "Get his weapon, Brother?" It was a suggestion, not a command.
    "No," said Blacktooth. "That was a mistake, Weh-Geh. Remember the cardinal."
    Weh-Geh looked at the door. Then he booted the fallen guard in the stomach. Having taken the wind out of the man, he grabbed the gun and burst through the door. Nimmy observed the startled Monarch sitting on his throne. Brownpony had been forced to his knees, and the guard was holding a pistol to his head. Weh-Geh aimed at Filpeo Harq, and barked, "Let my master go!"
    Nimmy leaped away from the door, for the Mayor was flanked by two more guards with raised muskets. The man gasping for breath crawled toward Nimmy, who leaped over him to avoid a fight.
    There were three distinct explosions, then silence, followed by Filpeo Harq's voice: "Take him and the one in the hall away."
    Blacktooth looked inside again. Weh-Geh lay in a growing pool of blood. One of the musketeers was down, but the Mayor himself was holding a pistol. It looked like the one Ædrea had showed to him in the cave. It was impossible to guess who had killed Weh-Geh. All weapons were still pointed at his body. When the Hannegan saw Nimmy standing white-faced in the door, he raised his pistol again, but the monk leaped aside. He made no attempt to escape. A frightened and humiliated Cardinal Brownpony was still kneeling there.
    
     One of the jails at Hannegan City was part of the public zoo, where interesting prisoners were exhibited in cages not unlike those used for cougars, true wolves, and monkeys. On the way in, they passed an open area girded by a heavy fence on which there was a sign saying CAMELUS DROMEDARIUS, AFRICA, CONTRIB. ADMIRAL E'FONDOLAI.
    "Guard, what are those things?" Brownpony asked.
    "It says right there," snapped the jail guard. "Don't stop to gawk."
    "They're domesticated!"
    "How astute of you. Otherwise, the boy wouldn't be riding on the animal's back, eh?"
    "Are they useful?"
    "They can go for longer periods without water than horses. The admiral says they are used in desert warfare where he got them."
    "Are there more of them?"
    "Not as far as I know, but there soon will be." He pointed to a female with a large belly. "But they're the only camels in captivity on this continent, as far as I know. The admiral brought them in the hold of a giant schooner. Now move along, move along!"
    They were escorted past cells full of lesser animals, and then cells full of human prisoners. On each cell was posted the name of the occupant species. The humans were mostly murderers: a Homo sicarius, a Homo matricidus, but two Homines seditiosi, and one child rapist. All of them jeered as the two clerics were locked into the third cell on the left. The jailer unwrapped a sign and posted it above the door of the cage, out of sight and out of reach. The man in the cell across the roofless corridor from theirs looked at it, entered a whispered conversation with the man in the adjacent cell, and fell silent, watching them as if in awe. His own cage was labeled not Homo but Gryllus (Grasshopper), and his crimes were war crimes. His jeering had been limited to Nomad grunts, so when the jailer was gone Blacktooth spoke to the man in his native tongue.
    "What does our sign say?" he asked.
    The man did not answer. He and Brownpony were staring at each other. "I know you," the cardinal said in Wilddog. "You were with Hultor Bråm."
    The Nomad nodded. "Yes," he answered in his own dialect. "We took you south to meet your Pope. You asked me why the Lord Sharf called us a 'war party.' Now you know. I was the only captive, to my great shame. But Pforft here says that you tried to murder the Hannegan."
    "Is that all our sign says?" Nimmy asked.
    Evidently the Nomad could not read. He conversed again with the man named Pforft, then shook his head. "I don't know what all those words mean."
    Pforft, himself a pederast, spoke to them: "It says heresy, simony, the crime of wounding majesty, as well as attempted regicide."
    Fortunately, the hour was late and the zoo was closed for the day. Although the other prisoners wore uniforms, none were furnished for the cardinal and his secretary. Each of them received three blankets against the January cold. The cage was open to the weather on the south side. At least they would get sun during part of the day.
    The cardinal still had not fully recovered from the curse of Meldown. "My Lady of the Buzzards had a buzzard's breath, it seems," he told Blacktooth, when he was feeling almost hysterically cheerful. "When Urion's Angel of Battle fights my Buzzard of Battle, which do you bet on to win?"
    "M'Lord, doesn't that old prayer go: 'Holy Michael Archangel, deliver us from battle'?"
    "No, it doesn't, Brother Monk. It's 'defend us in battle,' but 'deliver us from the snares of the devil.' As you well know. But what would you bet right now on either prayer being answered?"
    "Nothing. If I remember the Nomad myth right, your Burregun, since you claim her, always mourns as she eats the fallen warriors, the children of her sister the Day Maiden. She doesn't want war either."
    "You are right, we must pray for peace while girding for war. Of course you are right, Nimmy, you're always right."
    Nimmy hung his head and frowned. But Brownpony was not being just sarcastic. To avoid being understood by other prisoners, they were speaking neo-Latin, and the cardinal's speech was unguarded.
    "I mean it. You were right to leave the abbey, although you are a monk of Leibowitz. You were right to fall in love with a girl like Ædrea. You are right to disapprove of my importing and selling west-coast weapons without telling His Holiness." Blacktooth looked at him in surprise. Brownpony noticed the look and went on: "Pope Linus Six, who gave red hats to your late abbot and me, was the man who assigned me the task, in a letter which I still have in Valana. Linus told me not to show it to anyone unless I got caught, and then only to a pope. Frankly, Nimmy, I have almost wanted to get caught."
    "Oh." Blacktooth thought it over. It was certainly true that Brownpony had not been cautious, allowing even Aberlott the Mouth to learn of his activities. But he would probably rather be caught by Amen Specklebird. Suddenly the cardinal seemed less sinister, an unwell man with a hump on his back and an uneasy conscience.
    Fortunately, during visitor's hours, when children would spit at them through the bars of their cages, the human animals were fed raw beef and raw potatoes for the amusement of the crowd. No one was watching when they ate cornmeal mush for breakfast. Nimmy remembered from Boedullus that eating raw meat, or better still, drinking fresh blood as the Nomads sometimes did, was "good for the patient's own blood," and he persuaded Brownpony to eat some of the meat. Nimmy liked flesh raw, if fresh, but sometimes the jail meat tasted like coyote kill, and raw potatoes gave them both a stomachache. Filpeo's government did provide enough mush to keep the zoo's display specimens from looking starved. During their stay at the prison, three inmates were led from their death cells to the chopping block. From fellow prisoners, they learned that Wooshin had been replaced with a chopping machine, not another electric chair. The electric dynamo, an expensive affair, could be put to more productive use than frying felons.
    The moon phase had waned from full to new. Then one afternoon past visitors' hours, a man in a lacy surplice came and stood looking in at them.
    "Torrildo!"
    The former brother winked at Nimmy but remained silent.
    "What do you want, man?" Brownpony snapped.
    "My Lord the Archbishop wonders if you would like the Eucharist brought to you here."
    "I would like bread and wine with which to offer Mass myself."
    "I'll ask," said Torrildo, and departed.
    "Find out if the Pope knows we're in jail!" Blacktooth called after him.
    "Nimmy!" hissed the cardinal.
    But Torrildo had stopped. Without looking back, he said, "He knows," and resumed his departure.
    "Damn! It's all over." Brownpony was angry and downcast.
    Blacktooth decided to let him alone. He rolled up in his blankets and took a nap in the icy wind.
    Three days later Torrildo came back. This time Blacktooth winked at him. Torrildo blushed. "I never saw a sarcastic wink before," he said.
    "What about the bread and wine?" the cardinal asked.
    "Your Eminence will not have time to say Mass." He produced a letter from a sleeve and a key from his pocket. "I am to let you go when you read this and promise to obey these instructions."
    Brownpony accepted the papers and began reading, handing each page to Blacktooth as he finished.
    "Damn! It's all over," the cardinal repeated, again downcast but without anger.
    
     "I thought every cardinal had a Church in New Rome," Nimmy remarked as soon as he read the first lines.
    "There is a Saint Michael's in New Rome," Brownpony told him. "And it's Urion's Church, but there he is not called the Angel of Battle."
    They read in silence while Torrildo watched and impatiently drummed the key in his palm. The first page was thus.
    
    To His Eminence Elia Cardinal Brownpony, Deacon of Saint Maisie's.
    From Urion Cardinal Benefez, Archbishop of Saint Michael the Archangel.
    Inasmuch as the pretended Pope, one Amen Specklebird, has by trying to resign the papacy, admitted that he was never Pope, it has pleased His Imperial Grace the Mayor of Texark to pardon all of your crimes except attempted regicide, for which you and your servant Blacktooth St. George are under suspended sentences of death. You are to be expelled from the Empire as personae non gratae. By countersigning this letter in the place indicated below, you enter a plea to the remaining charge against you of nolo contendere, which His Grace is persuaded to accept, and you agree to be escorted under guard as swiftly as possible to a crossing point of your choosing on the Bay Ghost River, and promise never to return except by order of a reigning Pontiff, a General Council, or a Conclave, and only for the purpose of direct passage to or from New Rome from the nearest border crossing.
    
    There was a place for their signatures below a statement acknowledging the charges with a plea of no contest, and agreeing to obey a decree of permanent banishment.
    The other pages were a more or less personal plea from Benefez to Brownpony and other Valanan cardinals to accept New Rome as the proper place for an immediate conclave to elect a pope. When Brownpony finished reading, he looked up at Torrildo. The acolyte was holding a metal pen and a phial of ink out to him through the bars. They quickly signed, and the key turned in the lock.
    
    Their trip back to the Bay Ghost by coach on the main military highway west was a fast, rough ride, taking less than ten days. Before they left the Province, the guards permitted Brownpony to buy two horses from a Jackrabbit farmer. The moon was full again, allowing them to ride sometimes by night. When they came at last to Leibowitz Abbey, an excited Abbot Olshuen knelt to kiss the cardinal's ring and tell him that he, Brownpony, was now Pope-Elect, chosen by an angry conclave of Valanan cardinals, called by Pope Amen before his resignation. The cardinals were eagerly awaiting his accepto.
    "Who brought this crazy message?" Brownpony demanded.
    "Why, it was an old guest of ours, who went to New Rome with you. Namely, Wooshin. Cardinal Nauwhat sent him with the letter from the Curia—it's in my office—and an oral message from Sorely."
    "What was the oral message?"
    "That he had opposed the conclave, but hoped you would accept the election anyway."
    "He knows it isn't legal" was the Red Deacon's immediate comment. "Of course I won't accept."
    "You have a more immediate problem," said Olshuen, recovering from his initial awe of the cardinal.
    "And what is that, Dom Abiquiu?"
    "Have you told Brother St. George about his young lady? She came for him while you were gone. He thought she had died. She said you knew she was alive."
    Brownpony was suddenly nervous. "We'll talk about that. Let's go to your office. I need to read the letter from the Curia."
    
     
    
    
    
CHAPTER 19
     
     Let all guests who arrive be received as Christ, for He is going to say, "I came as a guest, and you received me."
     —Saint Benedict's Rule, Chapter 53
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
T
HEY HAD ARRIVED AT LEIBOWITZ ABBEY DURING the recreational hour in the late afternoon of Ash Wednesday. The Yellow Guard presided over several kick-boxing matches between novices, and even the professed Brothers Wren and Singing Cow were sparring clumsily. Blacktooth observed that the style of fighting differed in some respects from that of Wooshin—although the Axe would never admit to having a "style”. However, Foreman Jing, who had fenced with Wooshin, called it the "way of the homeless sword," and a "style of no-style."
    Brownpony's first duty was to confer with Abbot Olshuen.
    Blacktooth's was to bring bad news to the Yellow Guard. First he established himself in the guest room.
    "You're still here!" he exclaimed upon entering.
    "No, no," said Önmu Kun, the Jackrabbit gun smuggler. "I'm back for the second time since you left." He was full of wine and the urge to talk. "The Jackrabbit Weejus and Bear Spirit have chosen me as sharf, did you know that?"
    Nimmy doubted it, but didn't much care. By looking around at their war gear, Nimmy knew the comrades of the late Weh-Geh, although they were working hard around the abbey, participating in the liturgy, and teaching weaponless fighting to novices, were still staying in the guesthouse along with Önmu Kun. This to Nimmy meant that Olshuen was not about to take them on as postulants or novices without permission from on high.
    They greeted him with smiles and handclasps as they returned from the bouts in the courtyard, but Önmu was still talking and laughing about his adventures in the Province, and the warriors were a polite lot. Only their eyes questioned him ("Weh-Geh? Where?"), but they waited for the smuggler to finish.
    Brownpony's flirtations with Churches in the Province had made it easier for Önmu to sell guns, he said. He had only to ask a pastor whether he had seen Cardinal Brownpony on his way toward Hannegan City. If the priest said that he had not, Önmu hurried away. If he had seen him, and showed the slightest enthusiasm, it meant there existed a group of local partisans wanting arms. One cadre which called itself the Knights of Empty Sky was a charity organization. He had supplied them not only with infantry weapons, but made a special trip to bring them three cannon that fired either a peach-size ball or a load of heavy buckshot, for those badly in need of charity. According to "Sharf" Önmu, the Knights anointed each cannon with oil, placed it in a well-caulked box, dug a shallow grave in the Churchyard, and buried it by night.
    Blacktooth murmured politely in reply, but finally turned his back toward the tipsy smuggler, and faced the five warriors who watched him expectantly with those dark eyes with uncreased lids. He was ashamed of his failure to befriend an alien in a strange land for no better reason than that he was not Wooshin.
    "Brother Weh-Geh was killed while defending his master," he told them—rather loudly to silence Önmu. "I heard it happen, but I did not see it. There were three shots. There were four men holding guns pointed at him when I looked through the door, and he was already down. He had taken a gun he took from one of our guards. If he fired it, he must have missed. I am very sorry. Whether it was a mistake or not, he was living out his duty. He was a better monk than I."
    "Was it a mistake?" asked Jing-U-Wan, the Foreman.
    "Who were those four men?" Gai-See wanted to know.
    "Did he have last rites?" asked Woosoh-Loh. "A proper funeral?"
     "Dare we ask Abbot Olshuen to say a Mass for him?"
    Nimmy tried to answer some of their questions and apologize for his inability to answer others. He finished his talk with them by promising to see Olshuen about a Mass for the repose of souls on behalf of Weh-Geh, and he went at once to the abbot's office. The door was open, and Brownpony was sitting at the abbot's desk and talking while Olshuen sat on a stool.
    "It's a shame the Hannegan has a monopoly on the telegraph," the cardinal complained as he finished writing a letter which Nimmy was certain was addressed to the Valanan Curia. He turned sideways at the desk to look at the abbot who owned the desk and he saw Nimmy in the doorway, beckoned him in, and continued. "The Church has the money to hire Filpeo's technicians. We could build a line from here to Valana, and perhaps from Valana to the Oregonians."
    The abbot said, "Money enough, yes. But what about the copper? I heard Hannegan had to confiscate coinage, pots, and Church bells. Buy it, you might. But who has it to sell?"
    "I'm told silver conducts electrical essence even better than copper. And I'm not sure it's practical, but we have a source of silver."
    "Oh? Where is that?"
    Brownpony changed the subject. He handed Olshuen a letter and asked, "What do you think of this? Come in, Nimmy, come in."
    The abbot took it and studied for a bit, holding it so that Blacktooth might read it as well if he wanted to:
    
    To Sorely Cardinal Nauwhat, Secretary of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Concerns.
    From Elia Cardinal Brownpony, Vicar Apostolic to the Hordes.
    Non accepto!
    You know it is not possible to hold a conclave without notification of every cardinal on the continent. The Curia must have recommended to His Holiness that he clarify the law on both resignations and conclaves, and I cannot believe that he made legal a conclave such as the one the Curia has apparently conducted. You know it, and I know it. You must have been a minority in an angry Sacred College.
    My imprisonment by the Hannegan forced His Holiness to offer his resignation. But I am free now, and I pray that he reconsider. He is not bound by anything he did under pressure of blackmail; let him renounce his resignation saying that it was forced. If he will not do that, then you must summon every cardinal (including me here at the abbey) to Valana to choose another successor of Saint Peter, complying in every way with existing legislation.
    Although I appreciate the irony of electing a Pope that Hannegan just released from jail in a trade-off of this kind, I have to say again, non accepto, as you, Sorely, knew I would.
    I await instructions from my sovereign Pontiff, Pope Amen, and when they come, it would please me greatly if you can spare Wooshin to bring them here.
    
    "You ask me what I think? How should I know?" Olshuen said while shaking his head. "In the name of God, m'Lord, I am only a monk of Leibowitz. I am not Abbot Jarad. My only vocation is here, my God is here, and although I am a servant of Holy Mother Church . . ."
    "Oh, bother. Stop, stop, please! I'm sorry I showed it to you. Jarad should have refused the red hat, but the seventh Linus insisted. I know that, and you probably do too."
    "I'm trying to remember if an abbot here ever refused a Pope's request, m'Lord."
    "Maybe not, but if Amen Specklebird made you a cardinal, what would you say?"
    Olshuen hesitated before he said, "No, not even from him." It was plain that even those who knew him only by hearsay adored the old priest-hermit-magician Pope. But among lovers of power, only Brownpony seemed to feel a deep affection for him.
    Nimmy presented his petition on behalf of Jing-U-Wan's men and their deceased brother, and Olshuen promised a Mass. The next morning Brownpony sent Blacktooth to Sanly Bowitts with the message and gold enough to hire a courier with two horses to carry it quickly to Valana. The messenger promised to ride from dawn to dusk, and by night when the moon permitted, and to wait in Valana for a reply, unless Wooshin replaced him.
    While he was returning to the abbey, he met Gai-See riding toward the village. They exchanged greetings and paused for a moment. Nimmy asked why he was going to town, and Gai-See said, "After you left, the cardinal decided to send another message. I have it with me."
    "Another letter to Valana?"
    "No. New Jerusalem." He frowned at himself. "You have a right to ask that?"
    "Probably not. I'll try to forget it."
    They went their opposite directions. Nimmy knew well what the cardinal had to say to Mayor Dion. Somehow a small weapon from their west-coast arsenal had found its way into the hand of Filpeo Harq. Both master and servant had seen it. There seemed to be no other possibility than that New Jerusalem had been infiltrated by the Hannegan's agent. But he would not ask Brownpony about it, lest he make trouble for Gai-See, who told him the letter's destination.
    While Nimmy in October had found unfriendly attitudes in the atmosphere at the monastery, he now found them downright hostile in early March. He was being shunned again by the professed. On the other hand, some novices seemed to find him much more interesting than before. He tried to find out what had happened since, but "unexpected visitors" was the only mumbled answer he could get to his questions.
    The three novices who were in the abbot's waiting room overheard a shouting match between the abbot and Cardinal Brownpony—or "Pope Brownpony," as one of them called him—and mentioned it to Nimmy. Very little of the shouting was understandable, but that it was about Blacktooth, they were certain.
    Blacktooth decided to confront the cardinal, but upon finding him kneeling before the lady altar praying to the Virgin, he merely knelt beside him and waited. Brownpony stirred, and Nimmy sensed his discomfort. The Red Deacon crossed himself and arose. The monk waited a few seconds and did the same. Brownpony was pacing toward the door. Nimmy shuffled behind him. Hearing the shuffle, the Red Deacon turned.
    "Do you want something, Brother St. George?"
    "Only to know what's going on."
    They walked outside and stopped.
    "I knew she might be alive. But I did not want to arouse false hopes. Go climb the Mesa of Last Resort. The man who saw her last may be living there now." The cardinal started walking away.
    "She? Who?" Nimmy called after him.
    Brownpony looked back at him without answering.
    "Ædrea!"
    "Go to the Mesa. I'll tell the abbot I sent you. He wanted to send you himself. But it was my responsibility. I let you down."
    Pale as a ghost, Nimmy hurried toward the kitchen to beg some hard biscuits and water for the journey. From the cook, who was in a good humor, he received the biscuits, some cheese, and a wineskin filled with a mixture of wine and water. Then he went to the guesthouse to pack a bedroll; it was too late to leave that day, so he slept and left before daylight while his brethren were being called to Lauds. It was a long hike to Last Resort, and the first thing he saw when he arrived at the usual way of ascent was a recent grave with two sticks lashed together for a cross. Its meaning eluded him. After the slow climb, the sun was sinking behind distant mountains. He went straight to the ramshackle shelter he had discovered the previous year and found it rebuilt, but no one was home. He was reluctant to try the door.
    After shouting a few times and hearing no answer, he sat on his bedroll to wait. The light was becoming too dim for reading Compline, so he said his rosary, sometimes contemplating the mystery of each decade and sometimes contemplating the beautiful waif who had stolen it from him. The grave at the foot of the Mesa kept coming to mind. He shook his head impatiently and resumed contemplation of the fifth glorious mystery, which was the coronation in Heaven of the Mother by the Son, after her bodily assumption. But there was no before or after, according to Amen Specklebird, for whom the coronation of the Virgin was an event belonging to eternity. The Virgin's face became Ædrea's, and he finished the last decade as quickly as possible. When he looked up, a gaunt silhouette with a club raised on high stood over him against the twilight sky.
    It croaked: "Don't get up! Who are you? What are you doing here?"
    "I am Brother Blacktooth St. George, and my master Cardinal Brownpony sent me."
    "Oh, I remember you now," said the old Jew, squinting in the twilight. "On the road to New Jerusalem, you asked too many questions."
    "Did you make rain for them?"
    "Still asking too many questions. Your master sent you with a message? For me?"
    "No, he sent me with a question. What can you tell me about Ædrea? You saw her. Where did she go?"
    The old Jew was silent for several seconds. "I happened to be of some assistance to her when she fled from her father. She came here with me, after the abbey turned her away. She had her babies. She went away."
    "Babies!"
    "Twin boys. They were not alike, though. She left them with me, because they were not perfect. Her father would have killed them. And she had nowhere else to go but home. She knows too much about affairs in New Jerusalem to risk getting caught on the way east to the Valley."
    "Where are the children?"
     "The milk of my goat did not agree with them. I took them to Sanly Bowitts. I left them with a woman who promised to take care of them until they were sent for."
    "By whom?"
    "Hmm-nnn. How should I know? Someone from the Valley. Or you, the father, probably."
    'Ædrea told you that I am the father?"
    "She is a talkative young woman. She was here for, hmm-nnn, seven or eight weeks. She was always singing or talking. I miss her singing, not her talking." He groped in his bag and handed Nimmy pieces of flint and steel. "That's the hearth, there in the shadow. Light the tinder. The wood is stacked."
    "Was it a hard birth?"
    "Very hard. I had to cut. She lost a lot of blood."
    "Cut? You are a physician?"
    "I am all things."
    Nimmy got the fire started at last. Following the old hermit's instructions, he found in the hut a box of crumbled dry meal, dumped two double handfuls to a pot with a bail, and added water from a great jug by the door.
    "Hang it from the tripod. Stir it with a clean stick."
    "What is that stuff?"
    "Food, Father."
    "Don't call me that. I'm no priest!"
    "Did I say you were? You're a father, though. I could call you 'Dad.' "
    Blacktooth felt himself reddening. "Why don't you call me 'Nimmy'?"
    "Is that what they call you at the abbey?"
    "No, but my master does."
    "Is he not at the abbey?"
    "Yes?"
    "Well, it seems your master let you think she was dead, isn't it so?"
    "He said he couldn't be sure, didn't want to arouse false hope. I think I believe him."
    "Hah!" The old Jew began chuckling to himself.
    Nimmy stirred the pot until the mush turned thick. The old hermit brought out metal plates, spoons, and cups. Nimmy pulled his biscuits out of the bedroll, poured the cups full of his watered wine. They sat on a bench made of a flat stone supported by fat legs that were sunk in the ground, and ate dinner by the firelight.
    Blacktooth crossed himself and whispered the blessing. The old Jew, holding his bowl, sang out a few words of prayer in a strange tongue which Nimmy supposed to be Hebrew.
    The mush, Benjamin told him, was made of processed mesquite beans he had brought from Sanly Bowitts. Later in the year, he would pick and process his own. He had raised goats here before, and would try to acquire a herd again. He spoke of past ages as if he had been there personally. Several times he spoke of an "Abbot Jerome" as if he were still ruling the monastery, and referred to the conquests of Hannegan II as if they were still happening. For him, all ages seemed to coexist in his own private Now.
    Nimmy spent the night inside the old man's hut. Again he dreamed the dream of the open grave at the abbey, the one with the baby in it, but he awoke in surprise from the dream, knowing that Jarad Kendemin was buried there. In the morning, he dared to ask Benjamin about the recent grave at the foot of the Mesa. The hermit denied any knowledge of it, then noticed Nimmy's doubt.
    "If you think I buried her there, go try to dig her up."
    "I believe you."
    Nimmy was not in a hurry to leave. His anger toward the cardinal had been aroused, and he wanted to rid himself of it, or turn it into mere diminished trust. Brownpony had withheld the truth from him before, but he could not remember an outright lie. From what the old man said, he knew Ædrea thought he lied. But she had not heard his actual words to Blacktooth.
    He stayed an extra day and night. The sky was overcast, and a cold wind had risen. The waterskin and the hermit's jug were empty.
    "Where do you get water up here?"
    Benjamin looked at him, pointed casually at the sky, then continued milking the goat.
    Twenty seconds passed. A large, cold drop of water hit the monk in the face. Moments later, there was a brief cloudburst. Nimmy asked no more questions.
    The old hermit complained that Nimmy was eating more food than he brought with him. So he left shortly after dawn on the third day. When gravel came rattling down the way behind him, he looked back up the path. The old Jew was following him down with a shovel.
    Because of the dream, Nimmy had a brief vision of an open grave. And on the third day, she arose again—
    But the grave was not open. Instead, they now found two graves at the foot of the Mesa. Obviously one had been dug only yesterday. The old Jew leaned on his shovel, and squinted at Nimmy.
    "No, I won't dig," the monk said. "Goodbye and thank you." He hurried away toward Sanly Bowitts without looking back.
    
     Benjamin had given him the old woman's name. He found her old adobe house without difficulty, and counted seven children playing in the yard. He suddenly realized this was the "orphanage" the abbey had always supported in the town. The woman was sullen. She seemed to know who he was and why he was here, but considered him an outcast and a scoundrel. "Why did you not come for them ten days ago? They have been taken away for adoption."
    "By whom?"
    "Three sisters."
    "Where were they taken?"
    "I'm not at liberty to say."
    When Blacktooth showed signs of anger, she called him a scoundrel, a libertine, a false monk. She ordered him to leave at once, and retired to the old adobe building.
    "Where did the mother go?" he yelled after her, to no effect. So he marched in gloom back to the abbey.
    
    The shooting began while the monks were in the convent's refectory for lunch on the following day. Atop the parapet wall, Father Levion, now Prior, was fasting when the first distant boom! occurred. He was praying, as he often did, toward the grandeur of the broken desert horizon and to the God who made it. The first explosion scarcely distracted him from prayer, although his eyes scanned the open country for a sign of smoke. After the second boom! Önmu Kun came running out of the refectory and across the courtyard. He saw Levion on the wall and raced up the stairs to join him.
    "Where?" he asked breathlessly.
    "I don't know. I didn't see anything."
    Boom! The interval between explosions was about a minute and a half.
    "It sounds like it's coming from over there," said Levion, pointing down the valley.
    "The crosswind makes it sound that way," Önmu replied, looking straight at the Mesa of Last Resort.
    After the fourth boom!, he pointed at the Mesa. There was indeed a tiny wisp of smoke up there.
    On the fifth boom!, a plume of dust shot up from a spot about two hundred paces from the abbey.
    "Damn! He's getting our range!" cried the smuggler.
    On the sixth boom!, a cannonball hit the center of the road m front of the abbey, bounced through the open gates, caromed off the stone curb around the rose bed, and went on bouncing directly into the convent and through the refectory doors. Screaming was heard, and monks came pouring out of the building.
    "Take cover!" yelled the Jackrabbit. "He's got two balls left."
    There were no more shots, and while the monks at their meager Lenten lunch were badly frightened, the only damage was in the kitchen; but Önmu had indicted himself by knowing too much. The cannonball was found, and although it had been deformed and somewhat flattened, there appeared to be a few characters in Hebrew scratched upon it. An expert was summoned. The legible part of the inscription said, ". . . maketh bread to spring forth from the Earth." It was a blessing over food. "Apt enough, considering the target," said the translator. There was an immediate conference in the abbot's office. Blacktooth was called in, and appointed interrogator, since he knew the man as well as anyone, and spoke his dialect best.
    They met in the guesthouse.
    "By what right are you staying here, good simpleton?"
    "I was invited," said the Jackrabbit.
    "By whom?"
    "By Abbot Olshuen, who else?"
    "At the cardinal's insistence?"
    "Probably."
    "The abbot knows what you do?"
    "I don't know. But even if he knows, I would not, I could not, bring my merchandise here. I never have."
    "So you bury it in the desert here until you're ready to travel again. Then you dig it up."
    "This time, the old man dug it up. My bad luck. I thought he never came down, and never had visitors. It's the first time I used that spot. I didn't expect him to desecrate a grave."
    "He's a little crazy, but not stupid. He knew it was no grave. So he dug up your cannon, and sent us a message with it."
    "He must have exceeded the maximum load to reach this far. And pointed it up about forty degrees."
    "And he's shooting from about five hundred feet above us."
    "Was he trying to kill someone?"
    "Old Benjamin? No. He was telling the abbot about you."
    "I'd better leave."
    "What was in the other grave?"
    "Rifles."
    "If you're going to try to reclaim your merchandise, someone is going to go with you. There are six of us. Any one of us can manage you."
    "Even you?" The Jackrabbit laughed.
     Blacktooth knocked the wind out of him and threw him in the corner. Önmu looked up in surprise, gasping for breath, but without anger.
    "Why did you do that, Brother St. George?"
    "To show you, if you get into a quarrel with the old man over your guns, you're going to lose."
    "But they are my guns! They are for the Grasshopper, and I am Sharf."
    "You know that's a lie. You told me yourself you get a commission."
    "Sure, if I sell them. If I lose them, they're mine."
    "I don't understand."
    "I have to pay for them. Who do you think owns them, Cardinal Brownpony?"
    "I don't know, but I doubt it. Mayor Dion, probably. But whoever sells them, you're only the broker."
    "I am also Sharf! Secretly, of course."
    Önmu Kun disappeared from the abbey that night, never to return. Being related to the royal tribe was prerequisite to election as sharf of a horde, and Nimmy doubted that any Nomad north of the Nady Ann would recognize his claim. Gai-See was sent galloping toward Last Resort on the abbot's horse to protect the old Jew, and if possible to negotiate the surrender of the weapons. He returned the following day dragging one cannon, and reported two empty graves, also reported that Benjamin had not opened the second grave. Evidently Kun had recovered his rifles and moved on. But so it was that Leibowitz Abbey came into possession of modern ordnance, but as yet no ammunition. Abiquiu Olshuen locked the cannon in the basement room with the rusty weapons from earlier centuries.
    Novices reported another loud argument between the cardinal and the abbot behind closed doors. This time it was about guns. Brownpony emerged angry and humiliated; he told Blacktooth that Olshuen felt the abbey's hospitality had been abused.
    "He knows now that the Jackrabbit is being armed," he told Nimmy. "He's afraid for the monastery, if the Hannegan suspects his monks are involved. He wants Jing's men to leave."
    "But they have nothing to do with it!"
    "No, but the concept of warrior monks is alien to Dom Abiquiu’s idea of Christianity. To him it's a scandal. We should leave here soon."
    "Did the Jackrabbit grandmothers really choose Önmu Kun as Sharf, as he claims?"
    "Everything is  secretive in Jackrabbit country, Nimmy.  With them, the test is not legal but practical. If the men follow him in battle, he is Sharf. If they don't, he is not, no matter what the Weejus say."
    
    Well into Lent, a messenger from Hannegan City brought a petition addressed to all bishops and signed by Urion Benefez and seven other cardinals. It announced a General Council of the Church to be held in New Rome six weeks after Easter, and all bishops and abbots able to travel must attend. The purpose of the Council would be to draft new legislation concerning conclaves.
    "Only a sovereign Pontiff can summon a General Council," said Brownpony, and refused to sign. Olshuen also refused. The messenger shrugged and rode on.
    Wooshin arrived the following day with the expected summons to a conclave in Valana. He was warmly greeted by Brownpony, Blacktooth, and the Yellow Guard, but the summons he brought was rather strange. Apparently the Curia knew of the petition for a General Council, for the tone of the summons was angry, and the last paragraph threatened excommunication to any cardinal who attended a rump session in New Rome "where schismatics and heretics will try to install a known sodomite to sit on the throne of Peter the Apostle." The document was signed by Amen, Episcopus Romae, servus servorum Dei, but Brownpony was suspicious of the signature, and the language was certainly not Specklebird's.
    "Things are getting ugly," said the Red Deacon. "We must leave here at once."
    
     
    
    
CHAPTER 20
     
     We think it sufficient for the daily dinner, whether at the sixth or the ninth hour, that every table have two cooked dishes, on account of individual infirmities, so that he who for some reason cannot eat of the one may make his meal of the other.     
     —Saint Benedict's Rule, Chapter 39
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
F
OR MORE THAN A YEAR NOW,  IT  SEEMED TO Blacktooth that he was always on the road. This time there was no coach to Valana. Eight men with sixteen horses rode the papal highway north. Several miles south of the side road which led to Shard's place and on into the mountains of New Jerusalem, Cardinal Brownpony stopped, called Blacktooth and Wooshin to his side, and announced a detour around that whole area.
    Blacktooth protested. "M'Lord, the only one who needs to take a detour is me. I can ride east out into the scrub, travel a few miles north, and then catch up with you on the road before dark."
    "No," said the cardinal. "I want no more than one of us to be seen. Wooshin, pick a man to ride past the glep guards and take a message to Magister Dion. The message is really for Shard as much as for the Mayor, but Shard will accept orders only from Dion." 
    "Why not send me?" Axe offered.
     "No. Shard remembers you."
    Nimmy said, "He may remember any or all of us. He went for his gun and came out shooting when we were on our way to the abbey last fall."
    Axe went to consult the warrior monks. When he came back, he said, "I suggest Gai-See. He's the smallest target and rides the fastest horse. If he can't find a way around, he can wait until dark and gallop right up Scarecrow Alley. There's moon enough."
    Brownpony nodded and beckoned to Gai-See, then instructed him to avoid any contact with the families that guarded the passage. "Tell this to Dion: 'On the east, open gates to the Wilddog and to the Grasshopper. On the west, send gifts to the Curia.' Now repeat that, please."
    "On the east, open gates to the Wilddog and to the Grasshopper. On the west, send gifts to the Curia."
    "Good! Then remind him of what Nimmy and I saw in the hand of the Hannegan. I sent him a message about it from the abbey. If he got it, he will know what has to be done. Afterward, he will provide you with a well-laden pack mule. Leave New Jerusalem from the west and come on to Valana as fast as you can."
    Gai-See dismounted, bowed to the cardinal, and sat down beside the trail. "He'll wait until dark," said Axe. "I too think it's safer that way."
    Brownpony looked at Blacktooth. "Why so disappointed?" he asked.
    "It's nothing, m'Lord."
    "You were hoping someone would be able to find out if Ædrea is in her father's house?"
    "I know it's not practical. It would be dangerous."
    "Never mind. Gai-See can ask the Mayor about her."
    "And get the same kind of truth about her as he gave to me?"
    Brownpony shrugged. "I can't tell Dion what to say or do, except with my own property."
    It was the first time the cardinal had spoken of the arsenal as his own property, but that was not Blacktooth's concern.
    "M'Lord, I wish Gai-See would not mention Ædrea to Dion."
    "Why not?"
    "Because he will be wondering about a spy or a traitor when Gai-See tells him about the gun we saw in Filpeo's hand. And Ædrea ran away from home during that time. We know where she went, but the Mayor may not believe her."
    The cardinal looked down at Gai-See. "Did you hear and understand that?"
     "Yes, m'Lord Cardinal. I'll be discreet."
    "We'll see you in Valana. Now, let's ride a mile or so back into the juniper scrub."
    
    Three days later, they camped in the scrub half a mile east of the papal highway on the evening of Monday, April 3rd. It would be the night of the Paschal full moon of Holy Week, but the sun was not yet set, and because their food supply was running short, Nimmy went forth in search of roots and edible greens that might be beginning to sprout, while Wooshin took the party's only firearm and went to hunt small game while the cardinal's warriors gathered wood and tended the fire. Brownpony himself, clearly exhausted from the long journey and developing a nasty cough, wrapped himself in blankets and with his head on a saddle, fell asleep before dark.
    Blacktooth dug up a few bulbs of last year's wild onions from the bank of a half-frozen creekbed; they had little value except as seasoning, in case the Axe came back with meat. Of course it was a day of Lenten abstinence, but it was also an emergency, especially for the cardinal, who had never fully recovered from his ordeal in the breeding pit. Nimmy tried to keep track of his direction from camp by watching the sunset, the stars of twilight, and finally the glow of the campfire in the distance. He found yucca, and uprooted some skinny tubers from the hard ground with a sharp stick.
    He heard two gunshots, and decided that they came from Wooshin's pistol, but they were closely followed by a third—too closely for the Axe to have reloaded. A horse galloped past along a creekbank at the foot of the hill, and he caught a glimpse of a Nomad rider. There was a burst of shouting from the direction of the camp, accompanied by one more gunshot, but he could make out only the voices of Foreman Jing and Woosoh-Loh in their native tongue, until he heard Axe shout a death threat in poor but understandable Wild-dog, and a weaker echo from the cardinal that the threat was real and enforceable.
    Nimmy hurried back toward the firelight as quietly as possible. Two Nomad outlaws were sitting on the ground with their hands tied behind them, surrounded by Brownpony's guards. The cardinal himself was sitting up in his bedroll. A strange small horse was tied to a juniper, and two unfamiliar muskets were propped against a log.
    "Nimmy, where are you?"
    It was Brownpony's voice. Blacktooth hurried into the firelight and dumped the yucca and wild onions beside the body of a dead wilddog. The cardinal winced at the odor of the onions.
     Wooshin explained. Three motherless ones with only one horse among them had tried to steal two horses from the cardinal. One had succeeded but the men who had dismounted to search and rob Brownpony had been surprised and captured by Axe and the others who had heard their approach.
    The scruffy Nomads were looking around in terror at the strange warriors with their long blades.
    "Nimmy, you tell them what the situation is," said Axe with a wink.
    Blacktooth brushed the root dirt from his robe and went to stand behind his master. Facing them across the fire, he drew himself up, pointed at one of the men, and said in impeccable Grasshopper:
    "I know you. You haunt this region. Now you have accosted the Vicar Apostolic to the hordes, to whom even the Qæsach dri Vørdar Ösle Høngan Chür comes for counsel, not to mention the Grasshopper sharf, Eltür Bråm. Your fellow bandit has just stolen the horse of the High Shaman of all Christendom, the next Sharf and Great Uncle of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. He has also been chosen by the Buzzard of Battle; the Weejus have announced it."
    "Don't overdo it, Nimmy," said the cardinal in Churchspeak.
    "Horse for horse!" said the bolder of the two. "You take this horse, Great Man. We even."
    Nimmy ignored him and spoke again to the man he recognized. "You! It was Holy Madness himself, now Lord of the Hordes, that stopped you from raping Ædrea last year near Shard's place, not far from here."
    The outlaw shrugged but seemed suddenly meek.
    Brownpony picked himself up out of the bedroll and went to inspect the scruffy mustang. Having walked around the little mare, he faced them and said sternly in Wilddog, "She belongs to the Høngin Fujæ Vurn. You dare to violate a mare of the Wild Horse Woman! Lord Ösle Høngan Chür would have you eviscerated and fed to the dogs. Wooshin, release the animal at once."
    The Axe flipped his sword twice, once to slice the hackamore that made her fast to the limb, the second time to swat her behind with the flat of the blade. The mustang snorted, kicked, and clattered away into the night. Since Gai-See had not taken an extra mount on his gallop through Scarecrow Alley, they still had an extra horse per man, but neither Brownpony nor his aides were ready to let the matter lie.
    "Who is your master?" the cardinal asked.
    "His name is Mounts-Everybody."
    "How far is his camp from here?"
     "Almost a day's ride, Great Man."
    "How many men in your band?"
    The outlaw seemed to be counting on mental fingers for a moment. "Thirty-seven, I think."
    "And women? Children?"
    "Yesterday there were five captives. Today maybe more, maybe less."
    "And how many bands like yours?"
    "I don't know. Sometimes we encounter other no-family people. Sometimes we fight, sometimes we join together. There are many bachelors along the fringes of the Wilddog range, and to the south along the Nady Ann."
    "Do you ever fight or rob farmers?"
    "It is not a wise policy."
    "Does it happen?"
    "Sometimes."
    "Would you like to be paid for fighting farmers?"
    The captives looked at each other and shifted uncomfortably. Brownpony elaborated:
    "There is a war between the Grasshopper and the Hannegan's farmers."
    "We know, but we are at war with both."
    "But suppose the Grasshopper accepted you as allies?"
    "That they would never do, Great Man."
    "Did the monk here tell you that I am the Christian shaman to all the hordes?"
    "We don't know what that means."
    "It means," said Blacktooth, "that the word of His Eminence has power with all three hordes."
    "Would you fight against the Hannegan under Demon Light?"
    "There is no possibility."
    "What about a Jackrabbit sharf?"
    The idea of a Jackrabbit sharf brought roaring laughter from the bound men.
    "Let the cowards go," Brownpony ordered. "You whimpering wild puppies go tell your Mounts-Everybody to come and see me in Valana, unless he's a coward, and bring back the horse you stole. Otherwise, you will be driven south of the Nady Ann and east of the Bay Ghost. The Hannegan will know what to do with you. Now go."
    Easter arrived before they reached Valana. Brownpony concelebrated the Mass of the Resurrection in a wayside Church with a circuit-riding mission priest who stumbled through the liturgy, too frightened by high rank to get anything quite right.
    
•      •      •
    
    Some days later a fast rider from Pobla, where they had spent the night, brought word of their coming to Valana, and Sorely Cardinal Nauwhat and the SEEC guard Elkin were waiting for them at the Venison House Tavern, where the cardinal had entertained Kindly Light the previous year. It was close to sundown, so they ordered dinner. The two prelates with their assistants sat together, while Wooshin and the Yellow Guard took an adjacent table. Sorely Nauwhat was a fast talker, and he had a lot to explain.
    Before submitting his resignation, which Nauwhat, like Brownpony, regarded as revocable if not wholly invalid, Pope Amen had broken with a recent tradition and created new cardinals, as many as forty-nine of them, and had been induced to take the almost unprecedented action of stripping forty-nine others of their cardinalates. This shocked Brownpony, but it made the attempt at a conclave understandable, if not legal.
    Amen Specklebird, who insisted that his resignation had been duly submitted to the Curia, had retired to his former residence, the old building which seemed to grow out of the side of a mountain and which had been at one time a root cellar, and before that a cave whose deeper recesses had never been explored, and which the old man had reopened "to let the mountain spirits come and go." Here the cardinals of the Curia came to consult him, to scold and beseech him, to no avail.
    And there was news from Texark. Although the text of what purported to be Pope Amen's resignation had appeared there, by telegraph, the original signed copy of the document, if it existed, could not be found in Valana or anywhere else. One enterprising forger in the Empire's capital sold a clever counterfeit of the original to the Archdiocese of Texark for ten thousand pios, a sum paid after a police expert affirmed that the handwriting was that of Amen the Antipope. But afterward, another expert showed that the document contained egregious errors of the kind often occurring during transmission of text by a telegraph operator, including several pure operating codes, such as ZMF, meaning "break, more follows." The forger escaped into Jackrabbit country and was never seen again.
    "As I told you, the Pope refuses to live in the palace," said Nauwhat, "and he has returned to his old home. He said Easter Mass at home, not at John-in-Exile. He will see anyone who comes to him, and cheerfully submits to any indignity. He has signed blank bulls, perhaps by the dozen. He will press his seal of approval into the wax of almost anything. I don't know if he always reads it first. Did he really appoint all these new cardinals, or was it done for him? I should know, but I don't. Because he found out about some guns at SEEC, and he thinks I am responsible."
    "Well, I must confess to him on that—"
    "No, don't do it. I am responsible now. His actions are those of a man who has lost his bearings, if not his sanity, but not his good humor. You, Elia, he speaks of constantly, and he will rejoice that you have returned. You must go to see him tomorrow. You and Brother Blacktooth as well."
    "Of course. But what are the agenda, if not weapons?"
    "It was he who placed your name in nomination as Pope. His only agendum, probably, will be to submit to you as Pontiff."
    "I must set him straight on that."
    "Well, you can try. But besides the new cardinals, the College is coming into town again in numbers. And some from the East are bringing the military officers and envoys you invited. They pass for bodyguards."
    "In response to the same summons I got? Who was it wrote that foul thing?"
    "Domidomi Cardinal Hoydok."
    "Do I know him?"
    "No. He's one of the new ones. He's from Texark, but Benefez excommunicated him for supporting Pope Amen, so the Pope created him cardinal. He is a civil lawyer, not a priest."
    "How are the Easterners getting here?" Brownpony asked.
    "Mostly through the Iowa country. There, the farmers seem to get along better with the Grasshopper. They trade a lot. Only a few Texark patrols go north of the Misery River, and they wouldn't stop a cardinal there, even if they knew he was coming to conclave."
    "Misery River?"
    "The old name was 'Missouri,' m'Lord," Nimmy put in.
    " 'Misery' better suits it now," said Sorely. "Before the occupation of the farmlands, it was a natural route to New Rome."
    "Of course. My memory is slipping. The first thing I must do tomorrow is send a messenger to Holy Madness and Swimming Elk to come here for a conference, and to send a war party to New Jerusalem for the new weapons."
    "Swimming Elk?"
    "Sharf Eltür Bråm, Hultor's brother. The Grasshopper sharf."
    Dinner was brought to them. This time there was venison and a good red wine. They were nearly starved after the long Lenten trip on light rations. Nimmy wondered absently if he should confess to eating barbecued wilddog on abstinence days, even though the cardinal had granted dispensation in an emergency situation.
    "How are things in Texark, by the way?" asked Cardinal Nauwhat.
    "Well, the Province is seething with revolt. And of course there is sporadic fighting with the Grasshopper. In Hannegan City, little has changed, except they are importing some desert animals from Africa for warfare in dry country. And they know about our guns."
    "Two bad omens."
    "And one other thing." He glanced at the adjoining table and tapped Wooshin on the shoulder. "Axe, I think I forgot to tell you of one small change."
    "M'Lord?"
    Brownpony looked at Blacktooth. "You tell him."
    "His Imperial Majesty the Mayor has replaced you with a mechanical head chopper, Axe."
    Wooshin shrugged. "A man without shadow and form, when he chops heads, becomes a chopping machine. No change."
    This caused a murmur, apparently not of approval, but perhaps of recognition, from the rest of the warriors present.
    "A remarkable man," Sorely said with a shiver in his voice as Wooshin turned away again.
    "One without shadow and form," Brownpony mused aloud.
    
    Four weeks had passed since they last saw Gai-See, and they had just begun to fear that he had been shot down in Scarecrow Alley when he arrived, not with the well-laden pack mule with "gifts for the Curia" as in Brownpony's message, but with Mayor Dion, Ulad, eight heavy wagons, and a whole brigade of light-horse infantry, bristling with new and superior arms. The secret of New Jerusalem was no longer secret. Brownpony showed no surprise, and Nimmy realized that the message to Dion had been code.
    There was no way Valana could accommodate both the influx of cardinals and a whole brigade of light horse, of whom the citizens of the city were quite frightened as the word was quickly passed around that these armed men were spooks. But Magister Dion had no intention of imposing. His troops immediately set about building a fortified encampment on a hill well outside the city. As soon as the wagons were unloaded, they were returned to New Jerusalem for more supplies. Regular convoys were planned to supply his men with food, ammunition, and other necessities of military life. They would sleep in tents, at first, but within four days, a permanent log structure was built, with a basement beneath it, to store ammunition and to reload brass cartridges. The reloading machines were simple and portable, so that they might follow an army in battle.
    Seeking information about Ædrea, Nimmy had approached the gate of the newly constructed fort in the hope of obtaining an interview with the Magister, who was now in the role of commanding general. He was told politely to wait, and a guard left for the armory. He struck up a conversation with the other guards.
    Blacktooth noticed that their rifles were similar to the pistols in having revolving cylinders, with six chambers instead of five. A guard showed him that the ammunition was of the same caliber as the handguns, and used the same brass; only the weight of the bullets and the weight of the powder charge differed. The pistol ammunition might be fired with safety from the rifles, with a lesser range, but it was unsafe to shoot the more powerful loads from the handguns. With copper being so scarce, it was essential that empty brass be saved after firing, even in battle.
    After three hours of waiting, the guard returned. Nimmy was given a polite excuse from Magister Dion and turned away. He returned to the Red Deacon's own private mansion outside the city, where all of them were temporarily living.
    Brownpony had obtained a list of new cardinals created by Pope Amen during their absence. He gave a copy of it to Blacktooth for his own information, along with two copies of a summons for all incoming cardinals to register at the Papal Palace with a clerk of the Secretariat of State, which again had been placed in the hands of Hilan Cardinal Bleze by Pope Amen after the interregnum. He told Nimmy to post one copy of the summons in John-in-Exile Square, then to hire a town crier immediately to shout aloud the text of the second copy at every intersection in Valana.
    When he had finished these chores, Nimmy returned to his old residence, where he was rather mournfully greeted by Aberlott, who had fallen in love with the younger sister of the late Jæsis.
    "It seems to me," said Aberlott with unusual gravity, "that those people in those mountains are just as intolerant of outsiders, as the outsiders have always been of spooks. They actually look down on us.
    'Ædrea never did."
    "I know. And she's under arrest."
    "Oh my God! Did you see her?"
    "No, I was not allowed."
    "What are the charges?"
     "She left without permission some months ago. That's all I know."
    Through his employer's intervention, Blacktooth obtained an interview with Magister Dion. Dion listened politely to Nimmy's account of Ædrea's trip to Leibowitz Abbey, and thence to the Mesa of Last Resort, where she had given birth.
    "And then she went home to her father's place," he finished. "That's all she did."
    "And her father beat her and brought her to me. We can't have people leaving without permission."
    "But she always had permission to come to Valana!"
    "No, she had orders."
    "But her father would have killed her babies."
    "Babies?"
    "Twins, old Benjamin said."
    "Well, what you think you know, you got by hearsay. I'll consider it, but she will remain in custody for the time being. Think of it as protection from her own family. You are never going to see her again. Neither your cardinal nor I will allow it."
    Blacktooth left the camp, fuming with anger at both the Mayor and Brownpony. On the way home, he meant to stop at the hillside home of Amen Specklebird and ask for his intervention, but there were at least forty people in a queue outside the door, many of them cardinals, and the Red Deacon himself was tenth in line. So he pretended not to see him, and went instead to a nearby Church to pray his anger away.
    
    On the first day of May—normally a Nomad holy day—in response to Brownpony's call to a war council, Chür Høngan, his half-nephew Oxsho, Father Ombroz, and Demon Light with one of his lieutenants rode into town together. Brownpony was surprised to learn that Oxsho, in spite of his youth, had been chosen Wilddog sharf after Holy Madness was made judge and leader of all three hordes. The Wilddog leaders bowed and kissed the cardinal's ring. Eltür the Demon Light refrained, but offered a Nomad military salute.
    From the south on the following day came Önmu Kun, cold sober, and wearing a leather helmet with his family badge. He introduced himself as Jackrabbit Sharf. Knowing of Önmu's reputation, the others demanded documentation. He presented a roll of soft deerskin with Weejus beadwork depicting a manlike figure with the ears of a Jackrabbit. From his saddlebags, he produced a crest of buzzard feathers, also of obvious Weejus design; the sacred talisman was to be worn on the helmet of the sharf only in battle. After brief discussion, and some shaking of heads, his credentials were accepted by the others. Brownpony, who wished to honor them all, consulted with others of the Curia, then had the Nomad leadership housed in the Papal Palace, since the Pope had retired to his remodeled hillside cave and refused to return.
    A military conference was scheduled for Thursday the 4th, at SEEC, and an invitation was sent to Commander Dion to come and bring his senior officers. Then a great embarrassment rode into town on the night of the third, and by the light of the full moon rode on through town and up to Brownpony's private estate, where he made a great clatter at the main entrance. Wooshin and Woosoh-Loh immediately rushed from the dining room to investigate the visitor, but then called for Blacktooth.
    Nimmy stared out at the spectacle standing there in the moonlight. Three hundred pounds of muscle and black hair confronted them with folded arms and an angry glare. He uttered obscenities in bad Grasshopper and demanded to see "the Christian shaman who boasted to my men that he was married to the Burregun, and then called me a coward."
    Blacktooth swallowed hard and went back to the dinner table. "There seems to be a motherless one at the door who wishes to speak to Your Eminence."
    "Who?"
    "I think they called him 'Mounts-Everybody.' Remember the outlaws you released? They spoke of their leader—"
    The cardinal blotted gravy from his lips, got up, and strode to the entrance.
    "Where is my horse?" he demanded of the burly outlaw.
    "Tied to the gate, you damn grass-eater."
    "Then come in and eat beef with us, you damn thief."
    The man came in, surrounded by suspicious warriors with short swords in hand. Because of a foul odor about him, the cardinal had him seated at the foot of the table. Most of the others had finished eating. A servant carved him a few slices of roast beef and fetched him a hot baked potato and roasted onions from the kitchen. It was too early in the season for anything the Nomad would call "grass," but he grunted a few complaints about the lack of "inner meats" to go with the beef. Nimmy knew that Nomads usually ate virtually the whole animal, except for the hide, horns, hooves, and bones. It was the basis for the Venerable Boedullus's prescription for radiation sickness. The outlaw ate with his hands, wrapping slices of beef around bits of potato. The cardinal spoke.
    "I thank you for returning my horse. But do you know that all the sharfs of the hordes and the Qæsach dri Vørdar himself are here in the city?"
    Mounts-Everybody stopped eating and glowered. "You invited me here. They are enemies. You intend to have me killed?"
    "No, all I wanted was my horse."
    "You spoke to my men of fighting farmers. For money."
    "I asked them questions."
    "Which farmers are your enemies? Those nearby?"
    "No, those are under the protection of the Bishop of Denver."
    Blacktooth put in a word here. "His Eminence is trying to use your word for 'citizens,' and he means specifically the subjects of the Hannegan, and even more specifically the armed forces of Texark. He does not mean peaceful people who work the soil and grow crops. Many of them were formerly Nomads, including my own family."
    "Thank you, Nimmy," said Brownpony with a trace of irritation, then to Mounts-Everybody: "Just how many fighting men could you muster, if you were inclined to do so."
    Mounts-Everybody seemed to be doing mental arithmetic. "That depends on the pay. For gold, not many. We need good horses. The families kill us when we take wild ones. Offer us two good horses and a woman for every man, and you get a small army."
    "Horses, yes, but no women. How small an army?"
    "Maybe four hundred warriors. But the Grasshopper is at war against the farmers in the east. We cannot fight beside them."
    "I realize that. What about the Jackrabbit?"
    Mounts-Everybody was suddenly suspicious. "Wormy-Face told me you threatened to drive us south of the Nady Ann into Texark lands."
    "Gai-See, fetch one of the new rifles."
    The small warrior stepped into the adjacent room and returned with one of the west-coast weapons.
    "Load it and take him outside for a demonstration."
    Brownpony and Blacktooth remained sitting at the dinner table while a servant cleaned up after the meal. There were six loud shots in as many seconds, followed by a frightened whinny and hoofbeats in the roadway.
    Wooshin came back inside with the outlaw, who was holding the empty rifle and staring at it in awe. "I'm sorry. Your horse ran away," said the Axe.
     "When they find him, give him to the sharf of the outlaws here, and also the rifle."
    The burly guest stared at Brownpony in amazement. "I made you no promises!"
    "I know. And you won't get the gifts until you do."
    "No promises!"
    "Well, all I want you to do is stay here all night, and most of tomorrow. You can't come to the meeting tomorrow, because I'm afraid someone would kill you. On your way into town, did you observe the fortress on the hilltop?"
    "Yes. It is new."
    "Tomorrow night, you will go to the fort and talk to Magister Dion and the Jackrabbit Önmu Kun. Any men you recruit will be under their command, as will you, and you will not be driven south of the Nady Ann. You will go there well armed and with other forces."
    "I will think about it."
    The cardinal looked away. "Axe, see that he takes a bath, cuts his hair and beard, and dress him as a mountain man. He can stay here until moonrise tomorrow."
    Mounts-Everybody growled angrily and started to his feet, but six half-drawn swords had a calming effect. He allowed himself to be led away.
    Brownpony looked questioningly at Blacktooth.
    "M'Lord, those men live by murder and plunder."
    "And that is war, is it not?"
    Nimmy prayed earnestly for peace that night, but he feared the Virgin would not listen. If the cardinal came to be elected Pope, he would make the Virgin a commanding general of the hordes.
    
     
    
    
CHAPTER 21
     
     Whenever any important business has to be done in the monastery, let the Abbot call together the whole community and state the matter to be acted upon. . . . The reason we have said that all should be called for counsel is that the Lord often reveals to the younger what is best.
     —Saint Benedict's Rule, Chapter 3
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
N
IMMY  SLEPT  BADLY THAT  NIGHT,  AND  AROSE twice from nightmares to pray before the crucifix. Once he had a visitor. Moonlight shining through the window fell on white bedsheets and he could see a dark figure in the doorway. By its bulk, he knew it could only be Mounts-Everybody. He came quickly to his feet, prepared to fight if the outlaw tried to live up to his name. But the hulk merely grunted and moved on. A few seconds later, another dark figure stole down the corridor behind the motherless one. That would be one of the Yellow Guard, shadowing him. Probably he was only looking for a place to urinate.
    Nimmy went back to bed. He dreaded the morrow, for he saw clearly the direction of recent events, and how Brownpony was moving them. It was not as if the Red Deacon had drawn a map of the future, but he was bent toward one goal; whatever happened he examined it to see if it might be useful as a means toward that goal. Nimmy was not opposed to the destruction of the Empire, or the reduction of its power and the restoration of the New Roman papacy. That was Brownpony's end. The means, in part, he might deem legitimate. There was such a thing as a just war; he did not doubt the ancient teaching. But Leibowitz had been a man of peace, had he not?—after a warlike youth—and he was still the Saint's willing follower, although a half-unwilling member of the Saint's present Order under abbots like Jarad and Olshuen. He had renounced the world, just as the abbots and his brethren had renounced it, but now he was in the midst of the world, and the renunciation seemed meaningless. He lay awake most of the night, remembering his devotion to Leibowitz and the Holy Virgin. When he did fall briefly asleep, he dreamed of Ædrea, woke up with an erection, and fought an urge to masturbate because it was dawn and people were moving in the hallway.
    
    Almost unwillingly he accompanied the cardinal to conference in the Palace with the leaders of the hordes and of New Jerusalem. It would surely last most of the day. His employer noticed his reluctance, and said, "I'm sorry, Nimmy, but I'm going to need you. So will the Grasshopper."
    Only four members of the Sacred College attended: Sorely Nauwhat, Chuntar Hadala, Elia Brownpony, and a new cardinal, one Hawken Chief Irrikawa, who was said to be king of his northeast forest nation, and who wore a feather sewed to his red hat. He claimed to outrank all princes of the Church except the Pope. Besides the four cardinals, several military people of nationalities both east of the Great River and west of the continental divide were here, and they had come to town with their cardinal electors. There was a roll call, a counting of noses, and many introductions. Mayor Dion was obviously still irked by Nimmy's petition on behalf of Ædrea and at first objected to his and Wooshin's presence.
    Brownpony turned to Eltür Bråm, winked, and said, "Would you please give the commander an account of the battles that have happened between the Grasshopper and Texark since the death of your brother?"
    The sharf smiled wryly and began to speak. After half a minute of it, Dion held up his hand.
    "What is he saying?"
    "I understand most of it," said the cardinal, "but I'm only good at Jackrabbit, and fair in Wilddog. Grasshopper is Brother Blacktooth's native dialect."
    Dion looked at Nimmy and nodded.
    
     "And Wooshin commands the Yellow Guard, who offer training in very efficient methods of weaponless combat."
    The Mayor acquiesced, but as if to prove his impartiality, told Ulad and another of his own officers to warm the bench outside the doors. Blacktooth translated Sharf Demon Light's account of recent skirmishing between his warriors and the Texark cavalry, but it had been low-intensity warfare with few casualties and fewer deaths. Because of orders given by Holy Madness, the Grasshopper forces had not made any further raids on the protected farmlands. Bråm noted with irony that the unprotected farmlands north of the Misery had been free from raids since trading between farmers and Nomads had begun a generation or more ago.
    Most of the principals had their own interpreters, and local dialects were translated into Churchspeak. It made for slow going. The focus of attention was usually a wall map of that part of the continent between the Rocky and the Appalotchan Mountains. The map was a problem for all the Nomads except Holy Madness, but Father Ombroz tried to assist them with explanations of correspondences between the Earth and the paper.
    Nimmy found himself becoming the ears and the voice of the Grasshopper sharf, and was soon rebuking the others, especially Brownpony and Dion, for communicating between themselves in Churchspeak or Ol'zark Valley dialect without waiting for his interpretation. Even Önmu Kun was trilingual, but if Demon Light understood anything but the Nomad dialects, he would not admit it; Nimmy noticed, however, that the sharf frowned when the monk interpreted "Red Beard" as "Your Eminence." His Eminence himself, though understanding a bit of Grasshopper, kept a straight face. Bråm acknowledged nothing spoken to him in the form of a request or an order unless it came from the Lord Høngan Ösle Chür . Only to the Qæsach dri Vørdar did he even appear to defer. He was polite, if only to hide a natural arrogance.
    Nimmy found himself admiring the Grasshopper leader. True, it was like the admiration a man might have for grizzly bear or a cougar, but he might, after all, be a distant relative to Demon Light. The sharf was not condescending or rude to the monk, although he knew well enough that Blacktooth's ancestors had deserted the horde to farm on lands owned by the Denver Archdiocese.
    At one point during the meeting, he noticed Holy Madness looking up at one of the high windows. Blacktooth followed his gaze, and it was the same balcony window through which Amen Specklebird had been passed into the building at the last conclave. The window was open. A policeman and the young Sharf Oxsho, who had been conspicuous by his absence, at least to Blacktooth, were both gesturing. The Lord of the Hordes came to his feet.
    "M'Lord Cardinal, Your Eminence, I must excuse myself and find out what they want." He pointed.
    Brownpony looked at the window, nodded, and said, "We will discuss matters which would not much concern your realm while you're gone. If something's amiss, please let us know."
    Chür Høngan (Blacktooth tried to remember the deferential name reversal when speaking to the man, but sometimes failed to think it correctly) was gone for a quarter hour, during which the talk was mostly with suppliers of military equipment from the west coast. When the Lord of the Hordes returned, his face was a storm cloud.
    "A Texark spy has been listening to every word spoken here," he growled, staring at Brownpony.
    "They caught him up there?"
    "Yes. Our Sharf Oxsho was on watch."
    "Are you sure he's from Texark?"
    "Of course. I know him. So does Your Eminence." He paused, and his stare at Brownpony became a glare. "He is, or was, the husband of Potear Wetok. He's your Texark cavalry-tactics expert. You sent him to us, remember? I always suspected him."
    Father Ombroz who was sitting nearby dropped his head in his hands. "Esitt Loyte!" he groaned.
    Brownpony turned pale. "He is in custody now?"
    "Oh, yes, m'Lord. Oxsho bound his hands and has him tethered."
    Nimmy winced. He knew what Holy Madness meant by "tethered." Holes were punched in the captive's cheeks and a loop of rope or rawhide was passed through the holes.
    "Shall I bring him in for you to question? I'll cut the tether, so he can use his tongue."
    "No, have them keep him in the local jail. Let him rot there, for all I care."
    "NO! He belongs to me and the Wetok family. When I leave here, he goes with me, dead or alive,"
    Brownpony came to his feet and faced the angry Nomad lord. "Trusting him was my mistake," he said. "You are right to claim jurisdiction over him. But Lord Høngan Ösle Chür , as your Vicar Apostolic I forbid you in the name of God to kill him."
    They stared at each other. The Nomad gave him a barely perceptible nod. The cardinal sat down.
    Høngan left the room again. This time he was gone for nearly an hour. When he came back he faced Brownpony again.
    
     "Is he in jail?"
    "Most of him is in jail," said the QCESCZC/Z dri Vørdar. "The rest of him is here." On the table before his Vicar Apostolic, he emptied a bag of bloody parts. Nimmy could see a hand, two ears, the tip of a nose, and what was probably the captain's penis.
    Sitting next to Blacktooth, Demon Light came to his feet with a deafening Grasshopper battle cry to announce his approval. Brownpony turned and vomited.
    "You said not to kill him," Høngan said mildly.
    The meeting was adjourned while servants cleaned the table and the floor. When they reconvened, Oxsho joined the other two sharfs in the meeting, and they sat with their Lord Høngan and Eltür's interpreter. Nimmy sat surrounded by four Nomads, and it seemed to him that the others took a different seating arrangement than before. No chair adjacent to a Nomad was occupied.
    Magister Dion at first resisted the plan that Brownpony and the Nomads favored; he wanted to join forces with the Wilddog and the Grasshopper and move across the Plains north of the Nady Ann, then join forces with able-bodied gleps from the Watchitah Nation and attack Hannegan City from the north. Chuntar Cardinal Hadala, Vicar Apostolic to the Valley, was familiar with its military potential, once its people were armed, and he backed Dion in his plan for a combined army of spooks from the Suckamints and their glep relatives from Ol'zarkia. It was in expectation of this that the spook commander had brought his light-horse brigade here to Valana.
    Brownpony, however, was opposed. Having made reconnaissance in the Province, he foresaw a war on three fronts. Present were military officers from four nation-states in the Appalotcha region, who were prepared to invade the Texark's puppet allies on the east bank of the Great River. Their aim would be less to conquer than to force Filpeo to send forces to the defense of the east-bank puppets, lest he lose control of the river. The plan would be to harass, skirmish, and retreat, and prevent these forces from returning until Hannegan City itself was directly endangered. The commander in chief of the armed forces of the King of the Tenesi was present, and he outlined the plans the eastern nations had made among themselves, with the participation of Hawken Irrikawa.
    Most of the Nomads were pleased by this eastern plan. Lord Høngan Ösle Chür suggested that the Grasshopper sharf propose a temporary truce with Filpeo's forces, just before the attack on the east-bank states came.
    "That way, he won't be so uneasy about sending forces across the river."
    
     Sharf Demon Light smiled at his lord, and the smile said that the truce, if made, would be opportunely broken.
    The role of the armies of New Jerusalem in this plan would be to join with the guerrilla forces of Önmu Kun, who were at present scattered throughout the hill country in the Province. The guerrillas would move in small groups into the disputed areas a few days' ride to the west of the town of Yellow, staying away at first from the well-patrolled, but narrow, telegraph right-of-way that led to the last station nearest Valana. Kun had taken a pointer to the map and used it to draw a circle around the country where the Bay Ghost and the Nady Ann were hardly more than creeks, except for small lakes where antiquity's crumbled dams left small waterfalls. It was outlaw country, to the east of the papal highway, and Blacktooth began to see why his employer wanted Mounts-Everybody among his allies, although the prospect for such a thing was not mentioned at all by the cardinal. The northern hordes would object to the motherless ones, but because of Texark protection, the Jackrabbit had been little bothered by these outlaw bands.
    When the forces of Kun, Dion, and perhaps the outlaws themselves converged here under one command, the rearming of the Jackrabbit with the west-coast weaponry which Önmu had not previously been allowed to smuggle would quickly proceed. The complete destruction of the telegraph was contemplated; also the physical removal of the wire to New Jerusalem. Local Jackrabbit militias, already secretly armed, albeit with older weapons, would rise in revolt as Dion's and Kun's armies drove eastward, between the Red and Nady Ann Rivers.
    While Texark's forces were thus engaged in the Province and beyond the Great River, the Wilddog and the Grasshopper would join forces and attack from the west, hoping to help arm any able-bodied gleps from the Watchitah Nation and mount a combined attack.
    Eventually Magister Dion became convinced. He insisted that Valana should raise its own militia, and occupy the fort his men had built, where citizens might take sanctuary in case of raids by "infiltrators or outlaws," and the militia would be used to assist the police in apprehending disloyal citizens, especially those of Texark origin. He designated one of his two military aides, Major Elswitch J. Gleaver, a short keg of a man with a red face and long mustachios, as the right officer to command the militia. Blacktooth expected his master to resist this usurpation, but he said nothing. Chuntar Cardinal Hadala broke the silence and said to Brownpony with a wink, "I'll keep a close eye on the Major for you, Cardinal. I'm staying in the fort."
    
     No one raised a question about Valana's possible response to putting an outsider and a spook in charge.
    
    When the meeting finally ended, it was nearly dark outside. Brownpony told the Nomads that the Palace, where they were residing, would be needed tomorrow for the beginning of conclave, and asked them to pack their belongings and move to his estate for the night. "Blacktooth will show you the way."
    Then he beckoned to the monk and whispered, "Make sure they don't get there before moonrise. I'll speak privately with Dion now and tell him to expect that outlaw leader."
    Nimmy nodded his understanding. He prevailed upon the sharfs and Holy Madness to eat dinner at the cardinal's expense at the Venison House. By the time they arrived at the estate, Mounts-Everybody had gone, presumably to meet with Dion. They greeted their host with minimum cordiality, still angry about the spy, and went at once to their rooms.
    The food was gone from the dinner table, but Brownpony asked Nimmy to sit with them over a glass of wine. He asked what he felt about the day's events.
    "I felt myself in the service of the hordes instead of you, m'Lord."
    "That's quite natural. You were Bråm's interpreter. What else?"
    "I was both afraid and angry."
    "Afraid of whom? Angry at whom?"
    "You."
    This brought a threatening grunt from Wooshin.
    "I suppose that's natural too," said the cardinal. "Holy Madness and the sharfs were certainly angry at me, because of Esitt Loyte. And it rubbed off on you. Loyte was one of the few men I've ever completely misjudged. Well, tomorrow begins the conclave. You'll find that less rowdy than last year, and—" He broke off, noticing Blacktooth's expression. The Axe noticed it too, and was scowling, for his loyalty to his master was absolute.
    "Oh, I can get along without you," the Red Deacon said. "I don't need a Grasshopper interpreter in conclave, and I can borrow a secretary from Cardinal Bleze or Nauwhat. Still angry?"
    "No, m'Lord. Just very tired."
    "It's been a tiring day. All right, then take a vacation until we have a new pope. The Nomads will be in town a few more days. They have things to talk over among themselves and with Dion's officers.   But remember Loyte, and remember last year's attack. Watch your back."
    
    Early the next morning, while walking through the streets Blacktooth saw several cardinals and their servants on their way to conclave at the Palace. One of them was a woman, but she was not Cardinal Buldyrk. He had heard about her, but had not seen her before.
    There was a small convent on the south bank of the Brave River where a community of barefoot nuns, Sisters of Amen Specklebird's Ordo Dominae Desertarum Nostrae, lived, worked, and prayed, and Mother Iridia Silentia had been created cardinal by Pope Amen, the second woman in the Sacred College. Blacktooth noticed that her conclavists wore the same religious garb that Ædrea had worn when she was serving as courier between SEEC and New Jerusalem. The same Order had last year held a temporary residence in Valana, and Nimmy had assumed that among these local nuns, Ædrea's friend, Sister Julian, had provided her with a habit for disguise. But the local nuns were gone now. He had a wild hunch, and it overcame his misgivings about approaching one of them in the street. He spoke to her in a low voice.
    "Forgive me, Sister. I am a monk, not in very good standing, of Saint Leibowitz. A young woman wearing your habit used to come here sometimes from a mountain community. Her name was Ædrea. I was wondering if you might know . . ."
    The Sister kept her eyes lowered and did not speak. Mother Iridia noticed her conclavist being accosted by a brash cleric of some sort, and she approached them wearing a frown. She and her nun exchanged murmurs in a foreign tongue. Mother Iridia inspected Blacktooth from head to toe, nodded, reached in her portfolio, and handed him a prayer card.
    "God bless you, Brother Blacktooth," she said, making a tiny cross. "Pray for those in trouble." Then she gripped her helper's arm and led her fast away.
    Blacktooth, amazed that she knew his name and therefore his sin, felt the heat of a blush in his face. He looked at the prayer card. It was thick, glossy, and heavily enameled, and probably blessed with holy water like many tiny sacramental placards sold by mendicant religious orders. Most were saccharine and sentimental, but this was not. On one side it bore a picture of a crucifix at the top, but the crucified one was a woman, and the name above it was Santa Librada. Beneath  the cross was advice in ancient English, which he understood with small difficulty. The English said:
    
(Pray to Santa Librada in times of
trouble with the police, the courts,
and when freedom is not visible. She
will help you, if you believe.)
    
    For Ædrea, freedom was certainly not visible!
    He wanted to run after the nuns and ask more questions, but that would be highly improper, and they would not answer. Instead, he resolved to write them a note of inquiry, and get one of Brownpony's housekeepers to deliver it.
    He looked at the other side of the card. There was printed a prayer or poem which he had difficulty understanding, for although the language reminded him of Latin, it was not Latin:
    
Santa Librada del Mundo,
Tengo ojos, no me miren;
Tengo manos, no me tapen;
Tengo pieses, no me alcansan.
Con los angeles del 43,
Con el manto de Maria estoy tapado.
Con los pechos de Maria estoy rosado.
    
    He thought of Aberlott, who was back in school at Saint Ston's, and turned to walk toward their old shared residence. The student might know someone at the school who could translate.
    A crowd was gathering in John-in-Exile Square, but this was no mob like last year's raging rabble. There was no sickness in the city, and more fear than anger, and what anger there was, was directed at Texark and cardinals absent from the city. The people wanted Specklebird to remain as Pope, but his refusal they now seemed to accept as a sad reality. Brownpony was well known and popular, but not well revered; if he was lacking in holiness, he was also lacking in haughtiness, and he seemed to feel affection for the common people of the city.
    On his way to Aberlott's, Blacktooth paused to watch some of the cardinals recently created by Pope Amen as they arrived and entered the assembly. He stood beside a young priest, who told him their names.
    
     There was Abbot Joyo Cardinal Watchingdown, from Watchingdown Abbey, far east of the Great River.
    And Wolfer Cardinal Poilyf, from the North Country, came still wearing his furs, although it was not a cold day.
    Domidomi Cardinal Hoydok of Texark was excommunicated by Benefez for supporting Pope Amen, who then appointed him to the College. He was the one who had penned the angry summons to conclave, and he seemed still angry as he stalked into the hall.
    Then came Furi Cardinal Shirikane, quietly, almost slinking along; he was from the west coast, a priest who could also speak Wooshin's dialect, so the Axe had told him. His countenance also seemed to bear a trace of Asia in it.
    And there was Abraha Cardinal Linkono, a schoolteacher from New Jerusalem, the only known spook in the College.
    "And there is Hawken Chief Irrikawa," said the young priest.
    "I know. I saw him yesterday."
    "Did you know that it was Cardinal Buldyrk who suggested him to Pope Amen in the first place? The Abbey of N'ork is adjacent to Irrikawa's forest kingdom."
    "I'm surprised," Nimmy told his informant. "Last year, the lady seemed to be leaning toward Cardinal Benefez."
    "Hah! That was before Pope Amen ordained two women, and made another one cardinal," the priest said—rather stiffly, it seemed to Blacktooth.
    "Irrikawa makes strange claims, says his family is as old as the continent itself. And that eagle feather! He doesn't want to be called 'Cardinal.' His servants call him 'Sire' and 'Majesty.' "
    Two humbler men then went in the door: Buzi Cardinal Fudsow, a local plumbing contractor who had added a flush toilet of his own invention to Amen Specklebird's hillside retreat, and Leevit Lord Cardinal Baehovar, a merchant from the Utah country.
    Then the new Bishop of Denver, Varley Cardinal Swineman, whose diocese included the whole of the Denver Freestate, except for Valana itself; his cathedral was two days' ride to the north at Danfer, a small community on the outskirts of an expanse of half-buried rubble which was once a city of Denver. Although a Bishop of Denver had mounted the throne of Peter a few years ago, the Denver diocesan chair was not traditionally occupied by a cardinal.
    Blacktooth thanked the priest and picked his way through the crowd in the square again. The conclave, legitimate or illegitimate, was not yet officially locked and sealed. The doors and windows were all still open, and the crowd in the square was quiet because a loud voice could be heard from within addressing the prelates who had already arrived. It took a few moments for Nimmy to recognize the voice of his master, because there was anger in it:
    "I am under a suspended sentence of death imposed by the Imperial Mayor. The Pope has been denounced as an impostor by the Hannegan, the Archbishop, and their allies. They are attempting to convene a General Council of the Church in New Rome, and this—as you know—cannot be done without the approval of the Pope, and if there is no Pope, it cannot be done at all. Texark has begun to wage an undeclared war against the Valanan papacy, and we are all in danger. While we all deplore the Grasshopper raid into the illegally occupied zone around New Rome, and the ensuing massacre of innocents, we find ourselves by necessity allied with the hordes against the Empire. You must protect yourselves. There are Texark spies in Valana. One was caught yesterday and severely mutilated, without my knowledge, by the Lord of the Three Hordes. He is receiving medical treatment in the local jail. As you must recall, assassins tried a year ago Easter to kill me and my secretary. There will be more attacks of this kind.
    "Weapons are available—superior weapons—for the Papal Guard, and for any of you who wish them for yourselves or your servants. Valana is an open city. We do not have border guards, and you may be sure that the agents of the Hannegan come and go as they please. Sidearms for you and your servants will be provided ..."
    Perhaps the anger he heard in the voice was rhetorical. The monk shook his head in wonder and moved on. He did not regret that Brownpony had chosen other conclavists this time, although he hoped his obvious reluctance to serve as one of them would be forgiven.
    Aberlott was not at home. Meaning to copy the strange prayer and leave it on his table with a note, he tried the door but found it locked. He shrugged to himself and started to retrace his steps when a thought struck him: he still had not been able to see Amen Specklebird because of the crowds waiting outside his door. But people who were not at work were now forming the crowd in John-in-Exile Square, and the cardinals were inside the Palace. So he turned around and started climbing the hill to Amen's home.
    
    "I'll not translate it for you," said the old black Pope, holding Mother India's card. They were sitting together alone in the hillside house of stone. The rocks were cold, but there was a small fire on the hearth, and the room was chilly but not uncomfortable.
    "It's more poem than prayer. It is not written in the language the Sisters speak today, but their speech does have more classical Spanish in it than Rockymount or Ol'zark has. This is old Spanish with a word or two of country dialect perhaps. I have seen it before. I know what it means to the Sisters. They think the crucified woman does not depict an event of history, but an event in the mind of Mary when she allowed herself to feel the crucifixion of her son."
    "She wishes herself in his place on the cross?"
    "Wishes? In her own heart, she's already there. Librada del mundo means set free from the world. But the next three lines seem to be spoken by the crucified. She has eyes, but doesn't see herself. With her hands nailed to the cross, she can't touch herself. With her feet nailed there too, she can't walk about. The line after that—'with the angels of number forty-three'—its meaning is lost. The last two lines might be spoken by the Christ child: 'Mary's blanket covers me. Mary's breasts turn me rosy.' The child is nursing. This is the Sisters' interpretation."
    "What is yours?"
    "I'm not an interpreter. You are, Blacktooth. You have eyes, hands, and feet. Can you see yourself, touch yourself, walk about?"
    "I never doubted it before, but—" He paused. "But what I see in a mirror is not me, is it? I can touch my body