“Sorry, Cardinal,” said Aberlott. It was his turn. He took two biscuits and gave one to Blacktooth. Apparently they were distributing extra biscuits only to the men with rifles. Blacktooth took it grudgingly. Life was difficult enough without Aberlott’s continual sarcasm.
He followed Axe and Aberlott back to the fire, which was now blazing.
“It’s a war party,” said Aberlott. “The early patrols, Wilddog I think, entered the city yesterday. There was no resistance. Today we go in with Eltür Bråm and his shaman.” He nodded toward the old man on the white mule. “Maybe we’ll get to see the basilica of Saint Peter’s.”
“You’re going?” Blacktooth asked.
“With permission. Along with most of the Pope’s Guard,” said Aberlott, glancing toward Wooshin, the Pope’s sergeant general, who shrugged. Wooshin was staying behind with his master.
Aberlott held up his rifle, pumping it toward the sky as the Nomad warriors did. “Pop pop pop,” he said, but not convincingly. He smiled, showing Blacktooth his bad teeth, and opened his hand, showing three brass shells. “His Greatness the Sharf didn’t want to take us but His Holiness, Pope Amen II, insisted. We are his eyes and ears.”
“And rifles,” Blacktooth said.
“That too.”
It was looking more and more like rain. Blacktooth secured his cardinal hat under the cover of the hood wagon—he was afraid the red would run if it did rain—and gathered up the morning pots and pans that had been left for him by Bitten Dog. His elevation as the Crusade’s tenth cardinal had not released him from his duties as assistant to the assistant potscrubber. Nor had it reduced the intensity or frequency of the fevers that raged through his body.
A third of the camp, almost a thousand men, were sick. The rich smell of human excrement mixed with the usual camp smells of horse and smoke. The overall feeling was one of gloom. Maybe it will rain, Blacktooth thought, as loaded down with pots and pans he stepped over and around the ubiquitous dog turds. Better rain than threatening rain. Impermeable to almost every kind of adversity, the Nomads seemed to fold up in the rain.
He finished the pots, scrubbing them with sand in the feeder creek that ran from under a slab, out of a thousand-year-old drain. He took the long way back to the hood wagon, between the Pope’s carriage (“like hell you will”) and the gleaming metal wagons of Magister Dion’s caravan, which had joined them two days before, where the long arms of the door prairies were merging into one narrower and narrower grassy swale, interrupted by pitches of shattered concrete and stone.
This morning was the first time Blacktooth had seen Dion’s wagons up close, in the daylight. They looked like stoves on wheels. “Tanks,” Aberlott had called them, but who would carry water from the dry plains to the rainy east? They were clearly weapons of some kind.
A glep was dozing on the seat of one of the wagons. When he saw Blacktooth he smiled an idiot smile and crossed himself, laughing. Blacktooth thought the man was mocking him, until he saw Brownpony standing with Dion, almost out of sight behind one of the metal wagons. They seemed to be arguing and Dion seemed to be getting the worst of it. Blacktooth couldn’t see Brownpony’s face but he recognized the slow hand movements of lawyerly persuasion passing into papal compulsion. The monk, now cardinal, turned away and hurried on toward the center of the campsite. He knew that he would be in trouble if Brownpony saw him without his zucchetto.
It was late afternoon before the rain finally came. The clouds that had been massing in the northwest all day, like riders on a hilltop, descended just when the Grasshopper sharps party was returning. There was no pop pop pop this time, no strutting horses. The warriors looked gloomy and damp. One of the horses carried double, and the white mule carried a corpse tied on like a pack and left uncovered in the rain. The side of the mule was pink with rain and blood.
“The sharf’s shaman,” Aberlott said to Blacktooth, who was helping him dismount. He tried to hand the monk his rifle but Blacktooth wouldn’t take it.
“Texark troops?”
Aberlott shrugged. “Snipers,” he said. “They fired on us from the great houses.”
“Great houses?”
“Piles of stone, really, although some of them still have windows. We have the better guns but we couldn’t see them. We never saw any Texark troops.”
Four women untied the shaman and carried him away. The dogs were howling, straining at their leashes and jumping up to sniff the side of the white mule that was smeared with blood.
“They must have been Texark troops,” said Blacktooth.
“I don’t think so. There was a lot of fire but they only hit two men, and we were all in the open. I was right behind the shaman when he fell. He was singing some Weejus song, and they shot him through the throat. I think it was a lucky shot.”
“Lucky?” said Blacktooth.
“Lucky for someone; not so lucky for him.” Aberlott showed Blacktooth three empty cartridges, nestled in his palm like little empty eggshells. “I fired all three of my shots, though. I liked that part. Not like you.” He was referring to Blacktooth’s depression after killing the glep warrior in the battle two days’ march behind, at the edge of the grasslands, almost a year before. “I fired all three, pop pop pop.”
It was Blacktooth’s turn to shrug.
“I liked that part,” Aberlott insisted.
Aberlott had been more impressed with the city than with the fighting. The city of New Rome wasn’t ahole in the ground like Danfer, he said, or a collection of shacks like Valana. It was mostly stone, grown over with weeds and trees. “The center of the city is all great houses. They mine them for stone and steel. They don’t care about defending them either. What is there to defend? What can you carry off? You can’t fight men who won’t fight.”
“They fought you,” said Blacktooth.
“That wasn’t fighting,” said Aberlott. “There wasn’t that much firing, even. They are hiding in the city, taking pot shots at us.”
“Did you find the cathedral?”
Aberlott shook his head. “We rode out behind the sharf. Who will burn them out, he says, and toss their livers to the dogs.” He smiled sardonically, gesturing behind him to the center of the camp where the dismounted Nomads were milling angrily, confused, ashamed. A wail came up from the women tending the wounded man. The wounded man was dying. He had been shot in the side with a gun that fired stones.
Blacktooth left Aberlott for the medicine wagon where the wounded man was being bandaged. He was wondering if the Texarks had managed to duplicate the repeating weapons yet, and he imagined that he might be able to tell from the man’s wound. But the wound was just a wound and not a sign; it did not speak. The ugly welt cut through the Nomad’s flesh and hair like a road ripped heedlessly through grassland. In the back of the wagon the Grasshopper shaman’s body was being prepared for burial. The old man’s neck wound was already stuffed with clay the color of shaman skin.
Ashes to ashes, dirt to dirt. Both men would be carried out of the trees for burial under the haughty uncaring glare of Empty Sky. But not until the rain had ended.
The women and the medicine men shooed Cardinal Blacktooth away, even though he was wearing his zucchetto.
The next day a smaller party went out, while the Grasshopper war sharf met with the Qæsach and the Pontiff. As a member of the Curia, Blacktooth was invited to take part in the discussion, after he had finished the pots and pans, of course, and freed Bitten Dog for a day of drinking mare wine and playing bones. Brownpony’s suspicion that the Emperor had withdrawn all his regular forces from the Holy City was confirmed when the rear guard of Eltür Bråm’s war party came back with its only live captive, a farmer armed with a stone-firing musket. He had been dragged from one of the “great houses,” along with two of his colleagues who had not survived the ten-mile trip back to the Crusade’s war camp. Under questioning the grass-eater revealed that he and the other farmers had been driven from their homesteads into the city by the Texark regulars, then armed with leftover weapons and stationed in the tallest ruins. They had been told that if they surrendered they would be cruelly tortured by the Anti-pope’s Wilddog, Grasshopper, and Jackrabbit fanatics; but that if they held out they would be rescued by returning Texark reinforcements from Hannegan City.