After a while, the guard came back for him and they returned to the throne room. He asked Wooshin in a whisper if he knew about Yordin and Torrildo, but the Axe ignored him.
“Is Gai-See sick?” Brownpony wanted to know. “Is he mistreated or badly fed?”
“He is sick at heart. Keeping him caged is mistreatment, and so is the food.”
“If you had not been hiding out with Amen Specklebird when they blew up the Palace, none of this would have happened,” Brownpony told him. “You would have come here with me. Now you are furious, as if it were my intent that you fight or kill in battle.”
“I was not ‘hiding out’ with the Pope.”
“Just praying?”
“Not quite. We talked. One thing we spoke of was war, and I made the traditional mention of ‘the Church Militant on Earth, the Church Suffering in Purgatory, and the Church Triumphant in Heaven.’ But the Pope said to me, ‘There is no Church Triumphant in Heaven, although I have heard that foolishness before.’ I asked him why he said that, in disagreement with all the elders, and he told me, ‘John says it. Chapter Twenty-one, Apocalypse, ‘‘And I saw no temple therein.’’ In the presence of God, the Church is a discarded crutch.
“What I am saying to you, Holy Father, is that if the Church Militant on Earth does not produce members of a Church Triumphant in Heaven, then its militancy is not…”
“Stop. I bow to all the words of my predecessor, but not to your explanation of them. Especially not on the subject of war.”
Nimmy fell silent, feeling stupid.
“It wasn’t murder, when you accidentally shot that man. You don’t need absolution for it—but I can shrive you if you like.” The Pope stared at Blacktooth’s face for a time, and began to frown. “I think you would not accept absolution from me if I gave it to you!”
“You have already given me a plenary indulgence and a passport to paradise in Scitote Tyrannum, Holy Father. What more could I ask?”
Brownpony reddened at the sarcasm, but Blacktooth persisted in standing there with his hands spread wide as if to receive gifts. In reality, he was frozen in fright by what he had said.
“Get out of here!” Brownpony erupted. “Go visit your patron saint at the priory. I don’t want to hear this.”
“May I be excused now?” Stupid again!
“Yes. Go.”
Blacktooth glanced at the Pope’s hand. Brownpony did not lift his ring, and Blacktooth did not reach. He made a fast genuflection and beat a faster retreat. He did not see Brownpony again during that winter.
He took residence at the Priory of Saint Leibowitz-in-the-Cottonwoods, where Prior Singing Cow St. Martha assigned him work in exchange for room and board. He was not required to assist in the Divine Office, but he was not forbidden either. So he added his voice to the choir, took dictation and penned letters for the prior, washed dishes and took his turn as cook. The brothers were kinder to him here than at the abbey, although they were the same monks; he had known them all at the monastery in the desert. They were all specialists. Brother Jonan, who used to wake Blacktooth every morning for Lauds, was a mathematician. Brother Elwen, who had been Torrildo’s lover and went over the wall, had come back repentant and become skilled in his previous studies: mechanics and engineering. Old Brother Tudlen, whom Blacktooth had barely known because he had been on leave from the abbey for so many years at sea, was a naval architect, astronomer, and navigator; he seemed somehow out of place this far from the ocean, but Brownpony, like Filpeo, had ambitions. Tudlen had built a schooner in old Tampa Bay, and it was supposedly the property of the Order; here in the mountains where the air was thin and clear, he was grinding a telescope mirror. The others were specialists in Church history, in political and military history, and in the work of Boedullus among other authorities on the Magna Civitas and its catastrophic collapse.
Persuading Mayor Dion to permit the opening of the Leibowitzian priory in New Jerusalem had been no small undertaking. Singing Cow had only high praise for the Pope as a persuader and as a devotee of their patron saint. “His Holiness convinced Dion that we would be of educational value to the community here. But so far, no schools have called on us; Linkono runs them. These spooks don’t want their superbabies growing up to be monks. There are two layers of religion here: Catholic above ground, and New Adventist below ground. They’re out to save the world. Hadala was typical.”
“The old Jew Benjamin told me about them,” said Blacktooth, “but he kept mumbling, ‘It’s still not him, still not him,’ and I don’t know what he meant.”
Singing Cow smiled as if he knew but said nothing.
He confessed to Father Prior “Mooo,” as the Brethren sometimes called him. As one ex-Grasshopper farm kid to another, it proved a strange experience for them both.
“Were you taken into the Nomad war cult, my son?” Father St. Martha asked, in connection with Blacktooth’s confession of killing a man in battle.
“No, Father. The Grasshopper people treated me with kindness, as they would a boy who had not yet passed through the ordeal. I did not intend to shoot the man.”
“Of course not, but you intended to cut his throat, did you not?”
“I thought he was begging me to. I still think so.”
Singing Cow, who sometimes liked to think of himself as a Nomad, mentioned that the Church frowned upon assisting a suicide, but that he would probably have done the same; still it was an act to be repented.
Nimmy failed to mention disobedience among his many sins. Singing Cow did not remind him. Absolution was forthcoming, and the penance was mild: pray five mysteries of the rosary and begin singing for his supper.
One cold night he and the Cow were walking home through the snow after singing Compline in the neighborhood Church which they shared with the local pastor and his small flock. Compline was the night prayer of the Church, concerned with sleep and wakefulness, life and death, sinning and receiving grace. But it was no lullaby, and left him feeling lonely.
“I can tell you something I think you’ll want to hear, Father.”
“Tell away,” said Singing Cow.
“Remember when we ran away and tried to join the Grasshopper? They fed us, let us rest two days, and then drove us out of the camp with whips in a snow like this. Were you as bitter as I was?”
“Those rope whips! Listen, I still don’t know what we did to offend them. I used to think that you or Wren must have made a pass at a girl. Because our parents farmed? Was that why? Yes, I was bitter, and Grasshopper Nomads still make me uncomfortable.”
“If we had fought back, we might have had a chance; instead, we just cringed and ran. There is a Grasshopper Weejus there who thinks she remembers three wandering orphans at about the time we visited their tents. She explained to me why they offered us no more than food, water, and two nights’ sleep.”
“Explaining cruelty doesn’t absolve it.”
“Perhaps not. But I’ll try to repeat what she told me as best I remember. ‘Who wants to adopt a teenage nimmy,’ she said, ‘no matter how he was raised? A Weejus spends four or five years feeding him, clothing him, and teaching him the horses. In exchange for what? Unskilled and lazy labor. He’s horny and he gets in fights. He starts trouble with other families. Maybe she catches him coupling with one of her own daughters, but they can’t be married under the breeding rules. Or worse, he runs off to marry a daughter of her horse-breeding rival! A family that mourns a dead son would be better off adopting a young cougar than another boy.’”