But now Linus VII too was slowly dying of a wasting illness which could not be attributed to poison (unless his sisters and nephews who acted as tasters of the pontifical diet were part of the plot). After consulting the Pope’s physician, Elia Cardinal Brownpony rented a private carriage without ecclesiastical insignia, hired a Nomad driver who apparently spoke no Rockymount (“I need to practice my Wild-dog dialect,” he explained to an aide), and quietly departed for the southwest desert to confer with Abbot Jarad Cardinal Kendemin. Actually, the Nomad driver was fluent in several languages, and they had much to talk about.
Brother Blacktooth had run away from the monastery again. He knew he would have to go back, but sometimes the wildness of his Nomad heritage took possession of him, and he abandoned his vows and his sanity for a few days, and he ran. He ran not from the bad food and the hard bed and the long tedious hours, but from an all-knowing, all-seeing, pride-consuming authority of his superiors. This time he had stolen coins from the prior’s desk, bought bread and a wineskin in the village. The skin he filled with water, and went wandering northward. The first day he had moved across open country, just to avoid travelers on the road; but because of the wolves he had returned to the highway at sundown to spend the night in a monk pen. It was a roofless stone enclosure three paces square and just taller than a frenzied wolf could jump. Among the graffiti, a sign in Latin welcomed all visitors and bade them defecate extra muros. Monks of his own order had built such shelters along the way, but nobody kept them clean. A trickle of water from a spring on the mountainside ran across the floor. He built a small fire and boiled some of the water in his cup, adding some roasted mesquite beans for flavor. He ate some of his biscuits and a bit of dried mutton before the stars came out. In a few days, he would begin starving. He slept shivering in a corner, but before daylight revived his fire.
Traveling parallel—as he fallibly judged by the sun—to the direction of the highway from which he had fled at dawn after sighting a party of horsemen with long rifles, he had come to the canyon and there was no way in sight to cross it. It was already late afternoon and he had nowhere to spend the night. On the highway, there was the monk pen, where he could be safe, at least, from predators of the four-legged kind. But they would look for him there. It was soon after he doused the remains of his fire at dawn that he heard the horsemen coming beyond the hill, and he scrambled up a cut from the winding road and hid in the rocks until they came into view. They were soldiers. Papal guardsmen, or Texark? He could not be sure at that distance. He huddled lower in sudden fright. As a small boy, Brother Blacktooth had been raped by soldiers, and horror of it still haunted him.
The two-legged traffic on the highway was very light, and if a man was on foot he was either a monk or a frustrated horse thief. Today there were thieves. He had seen them from afar. It was a good hour and a half before twilight, but there was no sign of a way across the abyss below him. It was already a pit of darkness in the earth. He would have to walk. There was no law in this territory but the distant law of the Church. Turning back from the canyon, he decided to climb the Mesa of Last Resort.
It was from the Mesa that Blacktooth, missing from the abbey four days, had witnessed the Red Deacon’s arrival without realizing that the passenger in the private carriage that emerged from the rooster tail of dust out of the north and hurried on through the village of Sanly Bowitts to the Abbey of Saint Leibowitz was the man who had shaped his unhappy past by admiring his translation of Boedullus and who would even more strongly influence his future.
When his water ran low, he searched Last Resort, looking for the mythical spring and the shanty once inhabited by an eremitic old Jew who had departed from the region at the time of the Texark conquest. He found the shanty in ruins, but no spring or other source of water, which could hardly have existed so far above the surrounding desert. Another myth said that the old Jew had been a rainmaker, and needed no such spring. It was a truth, he observed, that the Mesa was greener than the land below. There was a mystery here, but he sought no solution. For most of the time, until his waterskin ran dry, he prayed to the Virgin, or simply sat in the dry wind and seethed in his own evil under the sun. It was early spring, and by night he nearly froze. Having caught a terrible cold and run out of water, he knew at last that he would have to go back and plead insanity.
Now, three days after the passage of the carriage through the village, he sat shivering with a dripping nose in the gloomy hall and awaited judgment. Occasionally a monk or a novice walked quietly past, on his way to the library or workshop, but Blacktooth sat hunched over with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, knowing that no one would acknowledge his existence even by a nod. There was an exception. Someone strode quickly past him, then stopped at the door to the meeting room. Feeling himself being watched, Blacktooth looked up to see his former therapist, Levion the Reconciliator, gazing down at him. As their eyes met, Blacktooth inwardly cringed, but there was neither contempt nor pity in the monk’s gaze. After a slight shake of his head, he entered the meeting hall, evidently summoned as a witness. What had passed between them in Levion’s cell was supposed to be as confidential as confession, but Blacktooth trusted no one.
Cardinal Brownpony had learned almost immediately of Blacktooth’s unsanctioned absence, for soon after his arrival he asked to see the work of the young monk who had been translating Boedullus into Nomadic, and Jarad had been forced to give an account of the copyist’s growing rebellion. Worse, while admiring the Nomadic version of Boedullus, Brownpony read aloud to his Nomad driver, whose Nomad name meant Holy (Little Bear) Madness, and to his secretary, a white-bearded old priest named e’Laiden who fluently spoke Wild-doe Nomadic, read to them some of Blacktooth’s translation of Duren, and the three of them became openly contemptuous of it. “These theological ideas are completely alien to the Nomad mind,” Brownpony explained to Jarad, thus lending unwitting support to the opinion of the copyist himself, against Jarad’s view. Worse, while they were perusing the work, Dom Jarad’s attention was called to the footnote in Perennial Ideas, which Blacktooth had neither deleted nor signed as his own: “This conception of the Virgin as the uterine silence wherein the Word is uttered and heard seems to accord with the mystical experience of contemplatives…”
Brownpony translated it back into Latin for him. No witness to the scene could remember a more furious Abbot Jarad.
Outside the refectory door, Blacktooth’s fear became irrational terror when the old postulant named Wooshin came and sat quietly beside him on the bench. The man mumbled what might have been a greeting in Churchspeak with his thick Texark accent (although he refused actually to speak Texark, an Ol’zark dialect), and then he rolled a cigarette, an act requiring a special dispensation from the abbot or prior. But Wooshin was a very unusual man, one who made no claim to a religious vocation of any kind, but whose status as a political refugee from Texark, and whose consummate skill as a smithy, had made him welcome at the monastery, in spite of his gruesome past. He attended Mass and conformed to ritual, but never received the Eucharist, and nobody was sure that he was even Christian. He came originally from the west coast, and his skin was yellow, quite wrinkled now, the shape of his eyes strangely different. Behind his back, those who feared and disliked him called him Brother Axe. For six years he had been a headsman for the present Hannegan, and some years before that for the Hannegan’s predecessor, before he fell from imperial favor and fled for his life to the West.