“What is it?”
“Willow bark, tincture of hemp leaves, poppy juice, alcohol. You’re not very sick. You can go back to your cell tomorrow if you want to.”
“No,” said the prior. “You’ve got to have him well enough to leave in three days. Otherwise, we’ll be stuck with him until the next stage to Valana.” He turned to Blacktooth, his voice turning cold. “You are confined. Your meals will be brought to you. You will not speak to anyone not in authority over you. If a sick brother needs one of the other beds here, then you will return to your cell. When you leave us, you will take your breviary, your beads, your toilet articles, sandals, and a blanket, but you will exchange your habit for that of a novice. You will remain indefinitely in the custody of your benefactor, Cardinal Brownpony, without whose intercession you would be under interdict and shunned. Is that clear?”
Blacktooth looked at the man who had been his teacher and protector in his youth, and nodded.
“Do you have anything else to say to us?”
“I would like to confess.”
The prior frowned, almost shook his head, then said, “Wait until the medicine wears off. I’ll ask Dom Jarad about it.”
In a very weak voice: “May I have your blessing, then?”
Olshuen stood a moment in angry indecision, then whispered, “Benedicat te, omnipotens Deus, Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus,” traced a tiny cross in the air, and departed.
CHAPTER 5
But if he is not healed even in this way,
then let the Abbot use the knife of amputation,
according to the Apostle’s words, “Expel the evil one
from your midst ... let him depart,” lest one
diseased sheep contaminate the whole flock.
UNDER THE WITHERING GAZE OF HIS FORMER brethren, Blacktooth at last left his cell with his small bundle and made his way into the sunlit courtyard where the Red Deacon’s coach was made ready for departure. While he was helping the driver lash his meager belongings to the top of the carriage, he overheard the voice of Singing Cow, just out of sight, talking to a newly arrived postulant who worked in the library.
“He tried persuasion at first, I’ll grant that,” his former comrade explained. “And when persuasion didn’t get him out, he tried violence. And when violence didn’t get him out, he tried sodomy. I heard that from a witness. But sodomy didn’t get him out either, or stealing, or running away. So he inserted a gloss into a copy of the Venerable Boedullus.”
“Without attribution?” gasped the assistant librarian.
“Despicable, isn’t it,” said Singing Cow.
“It wasn’t Boedullus!” Blacktooth howled. “It was only Duren!”
Blacktooth rode with the driver as they bumped along the north road toward the mountain passes. He never once looked back at the abbey. The Axe was with them, sometimes driving when Holy Madness rode the cardinal’s horse, sometimes riding inside the coach when the cardinal chose to be in the saddle. Both Wooshin and the Nomad treated the disgraced monk with courtesy, but he had as little intercourse as possible with Brownpony or his clerical companion.
One morning when they had been three days on the road, Wooshin said to him, “You hide from Cardinal. Why you shun? You know he saved you neck back there. Abbot wring like a chicken, except Cardinal save you. Why you afraid him?”
Blacktooth began to deny it, but heard an inner cock’s crow. Wooshin was right. To him, Brownpony represented the authority of the Church, previously wielded by Dom Jarad, and he was tired of the obedience which he had been forced to swear again to save himself. But it was necessary to separate the office from the man. After Wooshin’s remarks, he stopped shrinking from his rescuer, and exchanged polite greetings in the mornings. But the cardinal, sensing his discomfort, for the most part ignored his presence during much of the journey.
Sometimes Wooshin and the Nomad wrestled or fought for sport with staves. The Nomad called him Axe, which no one at the abbey had dared to do, and Wooshin seemed not to object to the nickname, as long as it was not prefixed by “Brother.” In spite of his age and apparent frailty, the Axe was the inevitable winner of these bouts by firelight, and made the Nomad appear so clumsy that Blacktooth once accepted an offer to try fencing the driver with staves. The driver not-so-clumsily whacked him six times and left him sitting in hot ashes while Wooshin and the cardinal laughed.
“Let Wooshin teach you,” said Brownpony. “In Valana, you may need to defend yourself. You’ve lived in a cloister, and you’re soft. In turn, you help him work on his Rockymount accent.”
Blacktooth protested politely, but the cardinal was insistent. So the fencing and language lessons began. “You ready die now?” the Brother Axe asked cheerfully at the beginning of each session, as if he had always asked it of his customers. Afterward, they talked a lot in Rockymount.
But it was with Holy (Little Bear) Madness, the driver, that Blacktooth felt most comfortable, reckoning him to be a servant of no rank or status, and the two struck up an acquaintance. His name in Nomadic was Chür (Ösle) Høngan, and he called Blacktooth “Nimmy,” which in Nomadic approximated the word “kid,” meaning one who had not yet endured the rites of passage into manhood, Blacktooth was scarcely younger than Holy Madness, but he did not take offense. It’s true, he thought; I am a thirty-five-year-old teenager. So the abbot had reminded him. As far as experience in the world was concerned, he might as well have been in prison since childhood. But frightened of an unknowable future, he was already homesick for that prison.
Life at the monastery had not really been equal parts prayer, hard labor, and groveling, as he had told himself. He had done things there he loved to do. He loved the formal prayer of the Church. He sang well, and while he tried to merge his voice in that of the choir, his was the clear tenor that defined itself by its absence when the choir divided into two groups singing the ancient psalms in a dialogue of verse and response. The group without Blacktooth missed him. And on three occasions when there were important guests at the abbey, Blacktooth, at the abbot’s request, had sung alone for everyone—once in the Church and twice at supper. In the refectory, he had sung Nomad songs with his own embellishments affiliated to childhood memories. He refused to take pride in this, but his Satan took it anyway. While at the abbey, he had made a stringed instrument much like the one his father had given him. He hedged its Nomad origin by naming it after King David’s chitara, but pronouncing it “g’tara.” It was among the few belongings he had brought with him, and he strummed it a little during the trip, when Brownpony was away on his horse. He was averse to doing anything which might make him seem ridiculous to Brownpony, and he wondered about this aversion.
Some of the territory claimed by right of conquest as part of the Texark Province was not well defined, and the ill-defined area between the sources of the Bay Ghost and Nady Ann Rivers and the mountains to the west was a kind of no-man’s-land, where low-intensity warfare persisted at times among poor fugitive tribes of the Grasshopper who had refused to take up farming, Nomadic outlaws, also mostly Grasshopper refugees, and Texark cavalry sometimes joined by Wilddog war parties in pursuit of raiders. The cardinal’s party carefully skirted the western edge of this area, for Brownpony claimed without much explanation that the mountains, especially the moist and fertile Suckamint Range were well defended by exiles from the east, of non-Nomadic origin It was also true that Nomads were superstitious about mountains and stayed away from their heights. The trail led through the foothills, and the nights were cold. But there was much more life here than on the surrounding desert. From occasional horse-apple trees and scrub oak, the flora began proliferating and growing taller. Devoid of foliage at present, cottonwood, willow, and catalpa-bean trees flourished adjacent to creekbeds, while high upon the snowy mountainsides one could make out the trunks of mighty snow-clad conifers. There were a number of streams to ford, some flowing eastward, trickles of water edged by ice, and some were mere dry washes that would flow only during a flash flood in the foothills. The spring thaw had barely begun. All but the largest creeks would evaporate in the dry land to the east, where a small child could wade through a year’s rainfall without wetting its knees.