CHAPTER 18
The fourth kind of monks are those called
Gyrovagues. These spend their whole lives
tramping from province to province, staying
as guests in different monasteries for three
or four days at a time. ... Of the miserable
conduct of such men it is better to be silent
than to speak.
THEY REACHED THE OUTSKIRTS OF HANNEGAN City by early evening, and the cardinal decided to rent rooms and spend the night at an inn outside the city limits. There was the possibility of learning recent news from the innkeeper or fellow travelers; there was the inevitability of reading the government bulletin boards to learn of the response of the bureaucrats to the same recent news. There was a need to change from a monk’s habit to red and black. Weh-Geh would need new clothes altogether, and could again wear his weapons as the cardinal’s bodyguard. All Blacktooth needed was a bath and a change of habit. They had grown beards during the journey, but only Weh-Geh decided to shave. His whiskers were rather thin and added an alien touch to his appearance. Brownpony’s beard was redder than his thinning hair. Blacktooth had more gray on his chin than on his pate, which badly needed reshaving. Weh-Geh barbered Nimmy’s tonsure with a short sword, grasping the blade with both hands and drawing it smoothly under the soapy hair. Blacktooth complained that the swordsman was leaning on him too hard.
“Only to hold you still. If you prefer, I could shave you just as easily standing back here,” Weh-Geh said to the lathered monk. Blacktooth looked at him with affected fright. The guardsman held the sword drawn back past his right shoulder, as if to deliver a roundhouse cut to the scalp’s long stubble.
“Stop boasting. Lean on me if you need to.” He was surprised, because it was the first time Weh-Geh made a joke, a sinister joke besides, and one of the few times he spoke at all. In Jackrabbit country, only once did a need arise to draw his long sword and Brownpony’s pistol, when a group of young bullies had decided to pick on three itinerant mendicant monks for fun. Both Nimmy and the cardinal missed Wooshin. Blacktooth wondered if they had, without meaning to, resented Weh-Geh as a poor substitute for the Axe, on whose head there was a price in this realm. But Weh-Geh had no wish to be a substitute for anyone. Nimmy resolved to befriend him, if there was still time.
By midafternoon of a cold and sunny day, they were standing on the steps of the Cathedral of Holy Michael, the Angel of Battle, talking to its Cardinal Archbishop. At the Archbishop’s left and rear stood an attractive young acolyte wearing a long surplice with lacework and crocheted borders. Torrildo smiled happily at Blacktooth on first seeing him, but then misinterpreted Nimmy’s expression and cast his eyes on the ground. The monk was less shocked that Benefex had hired the pretty fugitive than surprised by a sudden realization that the letters BRT beneath the painted “Boedullus was here” legend at Yellow’s crater lake stood for “Br. Torrildo,” who had been traveling from Valana to Hannegan City.
Weh-Geh seemed ill-at-ease, for Benefez kept glancing at him, until finally the cardinal asked, “Young man, where have I seen you before?”
Brownpony answered for him, “In Valana, Urion. Weh-Geh was in Cardinal Ri’s employ. Now he is in mine.”
“Ah, yes, there were five or six of them, weren’t there? Where are the others?”
Brownpony shook his head and shrugged. “I’ve been on the road for two months.” The evasion was almost a lie, Blacktooth noticed.
“Of course,” Benefez said, then returned to their previous conversation: “Elia, mmm, Your Eminence, of canon law, I too have been a scholar. Before the Flame Deluge there had been only two papal resignations. One Pope, so-called, was a great sinner, one was a great saint. The former sold the papacy, the latter fled from it in holy terror. But the question arises whether either of these men was a legitimate pope. So can a real pope resign? I think not. If he resigns, he was never elected by the Holy Ghost in the first place. This may be against the majority opinion, but it is my opinion. A poet of his own time put him in Hell, but that poet was a bitter man. I think the old fellow was really hallowed, but I doubt the legitimacy of his election in the first place. If he were Pope, he would not and could not resign, and would not be talking about resignation.”
“Are we talking about San Pietro of Mount Murrone, or Pope Amen Specklebird?” Brownpony asked.
“Aren’t they two of a kind?”
“No, Urion, they are not.” He hesitated. “Well, how can I say? Amen Specklebird I have known. I know San Pietro only from a book at Leibowitz Abbey. The writer thought he was a saintly clown.”
“Doesn’t this describe Amen Specklebird? In a charitable way?”
Brownpony paused. He seemed to be leaving himself open on all sides. Blacktooth tried to remember Wooshin’s word for it. Happu biraki, he thought. In a fight, it was usually a deadly invitation to be foolhardy.
Brownpony closed in. “If so, then this saintly clown, Pope Amen, His Holiness, is disposed to absolve you, Urion, of any penalty of excommunication you may have incurred, crimine ipso laesae majestatis facto, or any other act of rebellion you may have committed in thought, word, or deed. I am here to announce this.”
Blacktooth noticed that the purple in the face of Benefez was not merely reflected light from his purple vestments (it had been a day for burying the dead). He did not sputter, however, but purred, “How utterly wonderful of him, Elia. From so generous a man, I’ll bet the penance I have to do is only kiss his ring.”
“I doubt he would allow you to do that, Urion. He is an honest man. There are no conditions, and no penance unless I choose to impose one.”
“You?”
“The Pope sent a plenipotentiary in this case. Me.”
“You!”
“And I unbind you, Urion, without condition, in nomine Patris Filiique Spiritusque Sancti.”
Blacktooth saw the Archbishop’s right hand twitch toward mirroring the sign of the cross Brownpony made over him, but it was only the twitch of habit.
“Your credentials are as good as your Latin, Elia. Go home and stop being my gadfly.”
“I am also empowered to offer you control over those Churches in the Province where the parishioners are mostly settlers or soldiers whose native tongue is Ol’zark.”
“Oh, I see. It’s not a matter of geography, then.”
“Geography is boundaries and fences. These don’t mean much to a Nomad.”
“Yes, we had a recent demonstration of that just west of New Rome. Human life doesn’t mean much to them either, and they eat men’s flesh.”
“Only men they honor. It is a funeral rite, or a tribute to a brave dead enemy.”
“You defend this evil thing!”
“No, I merely describe it.”
Someone was yelling “Make way! Make way!” in the distance, and Cardinal Benefez looked up the street.
“Apparently my nephew is coming down the road,” he said to Brownpony. “Do you want to step inside?”
“You mean do I want to hide? No, Urion, thank you. I must see him in order to deliver this.” He showed Benefez the sealed papers which he had received at the abbey from Valana. “I must go to the palace to request an audience, unless he sees us and stops.”
The Emperor was in ahurry as usual, and ordered his driver to wield the whip. He waved in a friendly way to his subjects in the streets who bowed or curtsied as the royal coach hurried on, preceded by two mounted guards whose costumes were more elegant than that of their ruler. Filpeo wanted to be seen as a man of frugal habits, generous to his subjects, and devoted to the economic interests of the Empire. He sought to distance himself in public from the ferocity of some of his predecessors, and had shortened the list of crimes for which the penalty was death. His own ferocity was carefully contained. He had secretly, on several occasions, insisted on administering the supreme penalty himself, but few men knew about this. One who had known it was named Wooshin, and it was the Hannegan’s personal fascination with death by the art of the headsman which had, in fact, cost him his best executioner. The fellow had been repelled by his own art when practiced by his master. And Harq had let him get away! It was one of his few mistakes in judging men.