During the second week, the cardinal’s appetite improved. “You know, Nimmy, this stew is actually quite delicious. Ask the cook what’s in it, will you?”
“I doubt if you really want to know, m’Lord.”
“No? And why are there holes and brown streaks in these apples? And why do they keep feeding me pumpkin seeds?”
“Iron nails in the apples. The Venerable Boedullus thought it’s good for the blood. This is October and the pumpkins are ripe.”
“But seeds only? Boedullus, eh? He’s the one to whom you added a footnote, wasn’t he? But not about pumpkin seeds.”
“Apparently, I’ll never live that down.”
“Don’t look so downcast. It’s nothing to me. Tell me about your stay in New Jerusalem.”
“She is dead, m’Lord.”
“Ædrea? I’m very sorry to hear that. She was a bright young lady. A bundle of mischief, of course. Do you think you will recover from her?”
“I’ll never forget.”
“You learned something?”
“Yes.”
“Then you have a choice of coming east with me, or staying here with your Order.”
“I’ll come, m’Lord. And thank you. This place has become an occasion of sin for me. I feel too much unjust anger here.”
“Save your thanks. It’s likely to be dangerous. And cold. It will be winter before we reach Hannegan City. Do you think you can induce one of Cardinal Ri’s guard to come with us?”
“Induce? I don’t understand. They regard you as their master, and even their owner.”
“I know. That’s why I won’t tell them to do anything, until they get over that idea of ownership.”
Nimmy had no trouble recruiting a bodyguard for the cardinal. They all wanted to come.
“We can’t have that,” he told them. “We’ll be traveling with forged papers. Whoever comes will have to hide his weapons in a bedroll and wear a cassock.”
Wooshin had told him Qum-Do was the best warrior among them, but he chose Weh-Geh, the smallest, whose skin was almost light brown. Only his eyes distinguished him from the local population.
By the time the cardinal’s sealed papers and a letter from the Pope arrived, Brownpony was ready to leave the monastery and travel east to the Province and then to Hannegan City. The letter told him very little about Hultor’s raid, except that it had happened and the Pope was being blamed. The cardinal penned a reply, begging the Pope not to think of abandoning the papacy until Brownpony returned from the Imperial Court. The message was posted in Sanly Bowitts, along with the abbey’s mail, which was picked up by a messenger every ten days.
Then the three men, dressed as monks, left for the Province.
Soon after their departure, two more travelers arrived at Leibowitz Abbey. One was an old Jew on his way to the Mesa of Last Resort; he was leading two young nanny goats with blue heads, full udders, and swollen abdomens. Accompanying him was a young woman with bright blond hair, only a little less pregnant than the goats. The old Jew would accept no hospitality beyond a drink of water, a few biscuits, and some cold young mutton. The girl had escaped from captivity by her family, and demanded to see the father of her unborn child.
“They left two days ago. He told the cardinal you were dead,” said Olshuen.
“He thinks I’m dead, but the cardinal knows better.”
The abbot gritted his teeth and offered grudging hospitality, although the guesthouse was half full of alien warriors and a gunrunner; there were no separate facilities for women, and the monk she was seeking had departed.
“You can stay in a locked cell,” he told her, “with a night pot. You’ll be safe enough.”
“Who keeps the key?”
Olshuen thought for a moment. Might she not come out and molest the men, as well as the other way around?
“Oh, well, I’ll keep it myself,” he said at last.
“Locked in by you?” She glanced up at three monks regarding her curiously from the top of the parapet wall. Grinning wickedly, she pulled up the front of her leather skirt to waist level. Under it she wore nothing. With her swollen abdomen and her bright blond beaver, she did a bump and grind just for a horrified abbot, dropped the skirt, turned on her heel, and marched away with a wiggling ass toward Sanly Bowitts. Someone cheered. The abbot glared up at the parapet, but the three monks had vanished. Soon a man with a mule and a wagonload of sheep manure stopped to give her a ride. Some minutes later he picked up the old Jew, and went on with the goats tied behind the tailgate.
“Blacktooth, Blacktooth,” Olshuen muttered in disgust, and retired to the chapel, where he fell on his knees and tested his pulse before praying. A monk who began to pray, without first quieting heart and mind, prayed badly. He said a rapid paternoster with a rapid pulse and went back to his office.
The journey from Leibowitz Abbey to the eastern boundary of Jackrabbit territory would take nearly two months. Önmu Kun had provided the cardinal with a list of Churches whose pastors and their flocks were of mostly Nomad ancestry, and to whom Kun had sold guns. Some of them were also on the cardinal’s list of correspondents with SEEC. As long as they visited only such Churches, their identity was secure. But the cardinal wanted to pass through settlements close to the telegraph line, so that he might pick up news from Valana and Hannegan City. They traveled far enough north so that the Bay Ghost River could be forded without swimming the horses, and also without passing an imperial checkpoint. Their journey thereafter was plotted on a map from Church to Church, settlement to settlement. It was grim dry land, for they traveled mostly to the north of fertile hill country.
It was at one such settlement at the old town of Yellow that Brownpony learned the extent of the offenses of War Sharf Bråm against the Qæsach dri Vørdar, and of the former’s ritual death. He had never met Eltür Bråm (Demon Light), who was said to be Hultor’s fraternal twin, younger by two hours. A Jackrabbit priest named Steps-on-Snake who knew the Grasshopper family told the cardinal that Eltür was less belligerent, less impulsive, but perhaps more cunning than his twin, whom he had worshiped. His election by the grandmothers surprised Steps-on-Snake, who said Eltür would certainly avenge his brother.
From the Grasshopper, Filpeo Harq had demanded the surrender as criminals of all warriors involved in the massacre, and the surrender too of fifty Grasshopper children to be held as hostages insuring against future raids, and the payment of half the Grasshopper’s total wealth in cattle and horses. The alternative was said to be total war. But the Imperial Mayor’s forces at present lacked logistics to support a dug-in infantry force on the open Plains, although Texark was working on it. Filpeo could only send out his cavalry to harass and be decimated. He would be ready to fight when he could occupy and hold territory. It was his continued occupation and holding of Grasshopper lands that left him little to spare for enlarging his lands in the west. If Texark’s fighters had lost sixty-six out of ninety-nine men in a battle, the survivors would not celebrate. “It took dirty, heathen Nomads to act thus,” the priest said wryly. For the foreseeable future the war against the Grasshopper was going to be fitful and opportunistic, but cruel.