Chaos subsided, order returned, and the only sound in the palace was the murmur of hiccups, moans, sighs, groans from the ill, a murmur which occluded any whispered conversations drifting past and echoing in the great and temporarily sacred cavern. The light was low, near sunset. Servants were beginning to light the candles, but only a few of the cardinals were up and about. The rye bread had been consumed, and most of the water, but hunger, thirst, and fear presided over the night.
Blacktooth overheard a Texark conclavist talking to one of the abbess’s assistants:
“Everybody knows Cardinal Brownpony has taken off his gloves. Brownpony went to Leibowitz Abbey and hired himself a secretary and a bodyguard this spring. And who is this new bodyguard? A Texark runaway criminal, the former executioner Wooshin, now under a sentence of death for treason. And who is this secretary? A Texark-hating refugee from the Grasshopper Horde, brought up to despise imperial civilization but educated at the abbey, who was a friend of Corvany’s assassin. The cardinal deacon stood up and denounced our learned Thon Yordin and at the same time slandered Cardinal Benefez and all but declared war on the Texark Church. Now he wants a mountain-dwelling hermit, who barely speaks Latin and would be frightened to death by New Rome, to become the next Bishop of New Rome, in absentia again. Permanently in absentia, as Cardinal Brownpony would probably have it. However my master might otherwise have voted with respect to Amen Specklebird, Cardinal Brownpony’s support of him will cause him to abstain, of that I am certain.”
The necessary twenty votes were quietly gathered, however, and Amen Specklebird became a candidate for pope even before he appeared to speak.
CHAPTER 11
Therefore, since the spirit of silence is so important,
permission to speak should rarely be granted
even to perfect disciples, even though it be
for good, holy, edifying conversation.
AMEN SPECKLEBIRD WAS NOT STRONG ENOUGH to resist the crowd that dragged him reluctant to the Papal Palace by midmorning. And so at last, to pacify the people and the conclave, the black, old hermit priest agreed to address the cardinals. For this purpose, the dying Cardinal Ri consented to appoint the old man as his special conclavist, for Specklebird’s status as a cardinal in pectore of his former persecutor was doubted by most. He was passed in through the broken window in the balcony, and more baskets of bad bread and flagons of water were lowered through the hole in the roof.
There were scribes who were appointed to record all speeches during the conclave, subject to later editing or deletion by the speaker, but some of the few who actually listened to the old hermit through out his seemingly interminable homily later swore that some of the scribes had been asleep, and none had accurately recorded the full speech. But at first, the electors listened with intense curiosity.
Strange stories were told of Amen Specklebird by the old people of the countryside. Some said he walked silently on the mountain paths by moonlight and spoke to the antelope, the mountain spirits, and the risen Christ. Some had seen him flying above the treetops at morning twilight, and in the hole in the back of his cave he kept serpents, the mummy of an old Jew, or a wonder-working genny girl. Sometimes he visited the farms of the settlers and made it rain for them. He was a man of subtle power. He had placed a spell on Pope Linus VII, the story went, who as the Bishop of Denver had forced his retirement, and the spell made Linus call him to the Papal Palace several times during his long illness, either to have the spell removed or to treat the sickness whose cause eluded the physicians. (Blacktooth had seen him change into a cat and back, but Blacktooth would be the first to admit that his distance vision could be sharpened by spectacles, but his reason for avoiding it was not so much poverty as the fear that sharpness would ruin the clarity of his occasional hallucinatory insights into people and things.)
Heretics and holy men made pilgrimages to Amen’s cave. Children of irreligious parents threw stones at his door and called him a buggery man, and yet it was a fact that the Lord Cardinal Brownpony often came to see him, and he was confessor to prominent sinners from the city. Pregnant women came to have their bellies blessed by him, and for a small donation he would consult the mountain spirits, who controlled the weather even on the western Plains, and whom he addressed by saints’ names, about the best time for sowing or reaping or breeding sheep.
But now this dark old man with the frizzy white cloud of hair began speaking to the cardinals in conclave, and his style of address was none other than Blacktooth himself had experienced as his penitent. He was an elderly confessor most tactfully admonishing sinners and less tactfully testing their minds with paradoxes, and sometimes tortured syntax.
He embraced the audience with his long bony arms. “Fathers of the Church, Eminent Lords, there is a simpleton among us who has no rank at all and sits in the midst of us as a spy in an enemy camp. It is to him this sermon is addressed.”
The Archbishop of Appalotcha stood up and called out, “Point him out, Father. Call the sergeant-at-arms!”
“He is here without authorization, it’s true,” said Specklebird, waving the ushers back. “But please sit down, he was here among us from the beginning, and he always will be. He’s here to spy for Jesus anyway. And this conclave is the enemy camp.”
There was a murmur of righteous protest about the Holy Ghost and the apostolic succession, but it quickly died.
“The simpleton who sits in the midst of us as a spy is conscience. A conscience has no rank and no position. A conscience cannot be a cardinal’s conscience or a beggar’s conscience. It adheres to the naked man, wholly exposed. And to the naked woman.” The Abbess of N’Ork flinched, but Specklebird avoided looking at her. “In him or her, the Father gives birth to His Son.
“To this naked simpleton I speak, regardless of his office. The offices have fought each other. Rank has quarreled with rank. Regional origin argues with regional origin. Does the simpleton want a one and only pope, an everybody’s pope? Then let him put off his rank, his office, his regional origin and beg God’s grace to vote as a simpleton, a pure man.” From this rational opening, he began to wander.
At first he spoke mostly about the return of the papacy to New Rome, because he knew that this was the foremost issue, not the closest to his heart. And he made it clear from the beginning, to the complete astonishment of his Valanan supporters, the mob outside, that he favored an unconditional restoration of the New Roman Papacy in its ancient See. Brownpony, his friend, even looked shocked by this disclosure.
Only cardinals from the Denver Republic were in favor of making the exile permanent, and they too were truly shocked. They had refrained from calling the exile Exile, and proposed to change the name of Valana to “Rome.” Their motives were well rationalized, but they agreed with the rabble in the streets that the end of exile would be the end of Valana. But the Valana faction was a tiny minority in the conclave. Everyone else wanted the papacy returned to New Rome. The sharp division of opinion concerned the circumstances of that return, and the demand for a demilitarization of the surrounding terrain by the Empire.
The conclave had dragged to a standstill.
In a general way, the far East and the West were aligned against the middle. The middle was Texark and its vassal states along the Great River. There were also single-issue electors for whom the Valanan exile was not of major importance. Emmery Cardinal Buldyrk was one example. From the far northeast, she had voted with the West in two previous conclaves, but was now apparently leaning toward Benefez because of a possible softening of his position against the ordination of women. Benefez, however, was not present to confirm the inclinations of his conclavists, so the lady’s vote was not se cure. Cardinal Brownpony was doing his charming best to reconvert her, and she her charming best to seduce his feminine side.