The wind was shifting a lot that night. He kept moving.
“Christ, have mercy. Christe eleison.”
He moved again to keep the wind at his back, taking his cue from the occasional torchlight, but he went on talking softly in the direction of the cave.
“My hair is red. His was red, she told them. The Sisters who took her in. The Sisters raised me. Miriam, Mother of Jesus, pray for me. If he were living, I would kill him. Ora pro me, Wild Horse Woman. Kyrie eleison.”
Once during the night, he actually saw her: a woman’s figure, black against the glow from the fire pit. Her arms were raised like wings. The Nunshån? No, the figure was young; the Night Hag was old. Because of the wings, she had to be the Burregun, the War Buzzard. But when he stood, she vanished.
Amen Specklebird spoke of her as if she were a fourth member of the Holy Trinity, and that was one of the excuses of the Benefez faction for refusing him recognition. A pope who could utter heresy was no pope. But he had not been pope when he said it. Would he say it still? No. Surprising to Brownpony was the ease with which the old man shifted into his papal role. A doubter would call it hypocrisy. A believer would call it the work of the Holy Ghost, protecting the flock against error.
How many popes were in Hell? he wondered. Dante had named a few, but the list was incomplete. The last pope before the Flame Deluge was surely one of them.
On that thought, he lapsed into slumber, for the moon had sunk below the rim of the pit. It was the brightness of the sky and the shouting of Oxsho that woke him. The wind had gone wrong. He grabbed the blanket and trotted as fast as he could toward the path leading upward. For better or worse, his trial was over.
“If you are sick within the week, you will die,” was the matter-of-fact first prognosis of the Weejus who talked to him. “If you do not die soon, you can expect a shorter lifetime. They told you this beforehand?”
“Of course, Grandmother.”
She questioned him closely. He told her about seeing the woman with upraised arms he had seen against the glow of the hellfire. She stared at him. After a long pause, she asked, “Do you know of the Buzzard of Battle?”
“I have heard of the Burregun.”
“The Buzzard of Battle is red in the sky.”
“She was not in the sky.”
The old woman nodded, and that was the end of the interview. She took her opinions with her into the council lodge. Later that day, Chür Høngan came to tell him that the Bear Spirit accepted him conditionally as Christian shaman. The condition was that he not fall ill anytime soon.
Brownpony saw little cause to celebrate. A messenger came from Valana to report that Jarad Cardinal Kendemin, Abbot of Saint Leibowitz, had gone to meet the Judge. A report also came that the Pope and his party were encamped in the no-man’s-land between Wilddog and Grasshopper domains. Holy Madness graciously offered to swap his appointment with the Høngin Fujæ Vurn for Kindly Light’s, so that Hultor Bråm could leave with his escort party of warriors on Saturday morning to meet Amen Specklebird and lead him to the frontiers of the Empire.
Brownpony decided to ride south with the warriors. Bråm, fresh from his encounter with the Mare, offered no objection.
Early Saturday morning, an hour before their departure, Cardinal Brownpony borrowed bread, wine, a missal, and a portable altar from Father Ombroz. It was his wish to celebrate a pontifical High Mass; it would be good politics and showmanship, but he could not sing well, and had said no more than a dozen Masses since his ordination. Monsignor Sanual stiffly declined his request to serve either as co-celebrant or acolyte. The Red Deacon looked at Ombroz.
“Will you hear my confession first?” asked the old Ignatzian.
“You have something recent to confess?”
Ombroz took his meaning, and shook his head in annoyance. He called instead for Oxsho, his own altar boy. Between them, they rounded up all Christians and invited all the Weejus and Bear Spirit people who wished to attend. The Vicar Apostolic to the Three Hordes offered a simple Mass there on the high prairie with the smoke of dung fires in the breeze and a congregation of wild Nomads circling the altar at a safe distance. Probably more people came forward to receive the Eucharist than there were Christians in the encampment, but he questioned no one. Those who looked surprised at the bland flavor of the Body of Christ were probably pagan shamans. Neither Sanual nor Ombroz came forward to receive. After the Ite, missa est, a cheer arose from the crowd, but he could not be sure who incited it. Obviously, he was accepted as the Christian high shaman of the People.
Monsignor Sanual was drinking again. He came out to watch them ride away, and called out to the cardinal that he was following a loser, that the false Pope would never enter New Rome, and that grief for the whole Church would follow.
“Thanks for your blessings, Messér,” the cardinal answered.
Hultor Bråm was not yet prepared to be a friend to a friend of his rival, but he had suffered a bad Friday night in the pit, and he knew that his report to the Bear Spirit council afterward had not been well received. Plainly, the Weejus had already made up their minds. He conceded to his warriors that unless Holy Madness experienced an even worse Saturday night in the Navel of the World, the office of Qæsach dri Vørdar would fall to the Wilddog sharf. At least the ancient office would be restored, reuniting the Three Hordes.
He noticed that Cardinal Brownpony had heard his remarks, and he gruffly asked the cardinal about his experience with the Mare.
“Were you accepted as her stallion the other night?” he wanted to know. “Did you see her at all?”
The cardinal hesitated. “I’m not sure what I saw. You spend hours staring at patches of darkness, you begin to see, but it isn’t there.”
“What is it that wasn’t there?”
“There seemed to be a woman between me and the patch of dim light. I can’t describe her. She faced me, and her arms were raised. Then she disappeared.”
“Like the Buzzard of Battle?”
“They told you that’s what I saw. I never said it.”
Bråm nodded. “If I had seen it, I would be Qæsach dri Vørdar now. But I am going to die soon.”
“Are you ill?”
“You saw the Buzzard of Battle. That is your future. They say I saw mine.” Bråm laughed and rode away. Later one of the warriors told the cardinal that the Weejus had decided that the Grasshopper sharf had met the Night Hag in the pit, although, the man said, the Weejus had prejudged the contest in favor of Holy Madness, provided he survived the pit, and that he personally did not believe that Bråm would die as a result of the pit.
The warriors were feeling playful. Bråm had promised them they would be well paid by the Church for performing this escort duty. Brownpony grew more uneasy about the promise each time it was mentioned. He had not spoken of money to the Grasshopper sharf. Perhaps someone else in the Curia had made the offer, or even Papa Specklebird.
He watched the warriors gamboling on the grasslands under the September sun. A man stood up on horseback. Another stood up, and chased the first rider so closely that he had to sit down fast or fall. There was whooping laughter. One warrior could slide down his stallion’s flank and crawl under his belly and up the other side. After he had done this three times, the horse began to have an erection. He crawled down a fourth time, took a look, and crawled back up. Somebody yelled a merry insult at him, and in a moment both were on the ground in a knife fight. Hultor Bråm came riding back, watched the deadly dance for a moment, then adjusted his tall leather helmet with his grandmother’s crest and the badge of a war sharf..