“Last year there was Brother Noyon and his miraculous hangman’s noose. Ha! And the year before that, Brother Smirnov gets mysteriously cured of the gout — how? — by touching a probable relic of our Blessed Leibowitz, the young louts say. And now this Francis, he meets a pilgrim — wearing what? — wearing for a kilt the very burlap cloth they hooded Blessed Leibowitz with before they hanged him. And with what for a belt? A rope. What rope? Ahh, the very same—” He paused, looking at Cheroki. “I can tell by your blank look that you haven’t heard this yet? No? All right, so you can’t say. No, no, Francis didn’t say that. All he said was—” Abbot Arkos tried to inject a slightly falsetto quality into his normally gruff voice. “All Brother Francis said was — ’I met a little old man, and I thought he was a pilgrim heading for the abbey because he was going that way, and he was wearing an old burlap sack tied around with a piece of rope. And he made a mark on the rock, and the mark looked like this.’ “
Arkos produced a scrap of parchment from the pocket of his fur robe and held it up toward Cheroki’s face in the candle-glow. Still trying, with only slight success, to imitate Brother Francis: “ ‘And I couldn’t figure out what it meant. Do you know?’”
Cheroki stared at the symbols
and shook his head.
“I wasn’t asking you,” Arkos gruffed in his normal voice. “That’s what Francis said. I didn’t know either.”
“You do now?”
“I do now. Somebody looked it up. That is a lamedh, and that is a sadhe. Hebrew letters.”
“Sadhe lamedh?”
“No. Right to left. Lamedh sadhe. An ell, and a tee-ess sound. If it had vowel marks, it might be ‘loots, ‘lots, ‘lets, ‘lets, ‘latz, ‘litz — anything like that. If it had some letters between those two, it might sound like Lllll — guess-who.”
“Leibo-Ho, no!”
“Ho, yes! Brother Francis didn’t think of it. Somebody else thought of it. Brother Francis didn’t think of the burlap hood and the hangman’s rope; one of his chums did. So what happens? By tonight, the whole novitiate is buzzing with the sweet little story that Francis met the Beatus himself out there, and the Beatus escorted our boy over to where that stuff was and told him he’d find his vocation.”
A perplexed frown crossed Cheroki’s face. “Did Brother Francis say that?”
“NOO!” Arkos roared. “Haven’t you been listening? Francis said no such things. I wish he had, by gum; then I’d HAVE the rascal! But he tells it sweet-and-simple, rather stupidly, in fact, and lets the others read in the meanings. I haven’t talked to him myself. I sent the Rector of the Memorabilia to get his story.”
“I think I’d better talk to Brother Francis,” Cheroki murmured.
“Do! When you first came in, I was still wondering whether to roast you alive or not. For sending him in, I mean. If you had let him stay out there on the desert, we wouldn’t have this fantastic twaddle going around. But, on the other hand, if he’d stayed out there, there’s no telling what else he might have dug out of that cellar. I think you did the right thing, to send him in.”
Cheroki, who had made the decision on no such basis, found silence to be the appropriate policy.
“See him,” growled the abbot. “Then send him to me.”
It was about nine on a bright Monday morning when Brother Francis rapped timidly at the door of the abbot’s study. A good night’s sleep on the hard straw pallet in his old familiar cell, plus a small bite of unfamiliar breakfast, had not perhaps done any wonders for starved tissue or entirely cleared the sun-daze from his brain, but these relative luxuries had at least restored him to sufficient clarity of mind to perceive that he had cause to be afraid. He was, in fact, terrified, so that his first tap at the abbot’s door went unheard. Not even Francis could hear it. After several minutes, he mustered the courage to knock again.
“Benedicamus Domine.”
“Deo? gratias?” asked Francis.
“Come in, my boy, come in!” called an affable voice, which, after some seconds of puzzling, he recognized with amazement to have been that of his sovereign abbot.
“You twist the little knob, my son,” said the same friendly voice after Brother Francis had stood frozen on the spot for some seconds, with his knuckles still in position for knocking.
“Y-y-yes—” Francis scarcely touched the knob, but it seemed that the accursed door opened anyway; he had hoped that it would he tightly stuck.
“The Lord Abbot s-s-sent for — me?” squawked the novice.
Abbot Arkos pursed his lips and nodded slowly. “Mmmm — yes, the Lord Abbot sent for — you. Do come in and shut the door.”
Brother Francis got the door closed and stood shivering In the center of the room. The abbot was toying with some of the wire-whiskered things from the old toolbox.
“Or perhaps it would be more fitting,” said Abbot Arkos, “If the Reverend Father Abbot were sent for by you . Now that you have been so favored by Providence and have become so famous, eh?” He smiled soothingly.
“Heh heh?” Brother Francis laughed inquiringly. “Oh n-n-no, m’Lord.”
“You do not dispute that you have won overnight fame? That Providence elected you to discover THIS—” he gestured sweepingly at the relics on the desk “ — this JUNK box, as its previous owner no doubt rightly called it?”
The novice stammered helplessly, and somehow managed to wind up wearing a grin.
“You are seventeen and plainly an idiot, are you not?”
“That is undoubtedly true, m’Lord Abbot.”
“What excuse do you propose for believing yourself called to Religion?”
“No excuse, Magister meus.”
“Ah? So? Then you feel that you have no vocation to the Order?”
“Oh, I do!” the novice gasped.
“But you propose no excuse?”
“None.”
“You little cretin, I am asking your reason. Since you state none, I take it you are prepared to deny that you met anyone in the desert the other day, that you stumbled on this — this JUNK box with no help, and that what I have been hearing from others is only — feverish raving?”
“Oh, no, Dom Arkos!”
“Oh, no, what?”
“I cannot deny what I saw with my own eyes, Reverend Father.”
“So, you did meet an angel — or was it a saint? — or perhaps not yet a saint? — and he showed you where to look?”
“I never said he was—”
“And this is your excuse for believing yourself to have a true vocation, is it not? That this, this — shall we call him a ‘creature’? — spoke to you of finding a voice, and marked a rock with his initials, and told you it was what you were looking for, and when you looked, under it — there THIS was. Eh?”
“Yes, Dom Arkos.”
“What is your opinion of your own execrable vanity?”
“My execrable vanity is unpardonable, m’Lord’n’Teacher.”
“To imagine yourself important enough to be unpardonable is an even vaster vanity,” roared the sovereign of the abbey.
“M’Lord, I am indeed a worm.”
“Very well, you need only deny the part about the pilgrim. No one else saw such a person, you know. I understand he was supposed to have been headed in this direction? That he even said he might stop here? That he inquired about the abbey? Yes? And where would he have disappeared to, if he ever existed? No such person came past here. The brother on duty at that time in the watchtower didn’t see him. Eh? Are you now ready to admit that you imagined him?”