“Better have him watched, lest he make a run for it. He can’t be trusted. Brownpony learned that. And don’t assign him duty in the city. He’s probably too squeamish to shoot traitors.”
A cleaning woman, who came on Mondays to scrub the former Pope’s clothing, dishes, and floor, usually turned away when she saw his I pray—go away sign in place, but on the Monday in question, a brown stain from something that had leaked out under the door caught her attention. She knocked timidly, but there was no answer. She tried the latch, and the door swung inward. It was a quiet morning, and her scream echoed from the opposite hillside. A farmer and two shepherds responded. The decapitated body of Amen Specklebird had fallen sideways from the prie-dieu where he had obviously been kneeling before his altar when his killer struck. His head had bounced off the wall and rolled under a table. He had been dead at least two days.
The manner of his death—by a single horizontal stroke of a sword—caused immediate suspicion to fall on the Yellow Guard, but neither Gai-See nor Woosoh-Loh had left the fort during the week of the murder, and the others, including Wooshin, had accompanied Pope Amen II to New Jerusalem.
Blacktooth had been one of the last people to see Pope Amen Specklebird alive, and the police questioned him closely, but in the presence of his lawyer-advocate, a priest appointed by one of the cardinals to look out for his interests. As it turned out, the police did not suspect him, but his advocate was of some help in explaining the religious relationship that developed between the Leibowitzian monk and the retired Pope during their nine days of silent prayer in Amen’s residence just days before his murder. Nimmy blamed himself. He had failed to act on his intuition at the time of their parting: the feeling which had come to him that Specklebird was in imminent danger. He was distracted from this worry when Ulad had grabbed him by the neck and drafted him into the militia, but he had felt certainty that Specklebird would ignore a warning anyway.
The police were unconcerned by his guilty feelings; they had as yet no suspects, although the population of the city was being carefully screened, and any citizen who could not offer proof of his place of birth was sent to a detention camp adjacent to the fort. Fifteen known participants in the terrorist uprising had already been shot. The death sword could as plausibly have been a well-sharpened cavalry saber as one of the beautiful blades of the Asian warriors. Nimmy was allowed to go in peace, and his leave was extended to include the time of the old man’s funeral. He wanted to run away to New Jerusalem, but he would surely be caught, and Brownpony might not welcome him if he did escape.
Amen Specklebird lay in state, his body illuminated by many candles on the high catafalque in the Cathedral of Saint John-in-Exile, and all the faithful who remained in Valana after the insurgency, the purge, and the flight came now to pay their respects and to pass in a slow line to view the body. There was less pomp and grandeur than if he had died as a reigning pontiff, and a certain amount of chaos, but that was more a result of the exodus to New Jerusalem than it was of his resignation and the previous transfer of papal power to Cardinal Brownpony. Investigators found, for example, that no official had taken from the old man the signet of his fisherman’s ring and the two seals (one for wax, one for lead) of office upon his resignation; these seals were normally seized and broken by the Cardinal High Chamberlain during the interregnum after the death of the Pope. Had they been used after Brownpony had ascended? The ring was removed from his finger after death, but militiamen searched his home and found no seals. Stolen by his killer? These and other irregularities cast doubt upon many documents that emerged from the Specklebird pontificate, especially in cases where living witnesses could not be located.
After joining the slow line and awaiting his turn, Blacktooth passed the catafalque. He noticed that the undertaker had done a good job of concealing the fact that the head had been severed from the body, but otherwise the corpse looked more like a pope than Specklebird had ever looked while alive. The wild white hair was carefully combed, the deeper creases in his face were caulked, and his black skin lightened somewhat with a brown powder. The stink of the corpse, however, had begun to penetrate the background odors of incense in the Church. Nimmy choked with tears and hurried into the square.
There was a thin crowd. Many of Amen Specklebird’s admirers had been fanatically devoted to the old holy man, and enough of them disputed the validity of his resignation, and therefore the validity of Brownpony’s election, that some were heard to suggest that Brownpony himself had arranged the old man’s murder in order to secure himself in office. Nimmy overheard two hill-dwellers giving voice to this theory, and he shouted at them, “You stupid oafs! That’s exactly what Texark wants you to believe.”
The men took umbrage, and Nimmy let himself be goaded into a fight. He won the fight, but lost self-respect, although he was now wearing the green uniform of a militiaman and not his brown monk’s robe. He felt pats on the back, however, and heard cheers from Valanans who knew and liked the new Pope.
By the time of the funeral on the following day, Blacktooth smelled the stink of the corpse even through the haze of pinon pine incense that pervaded the cathedral; later witnesses for the cause of canonizing Pope Amen I would testify of the heavenly perfume exhaled by the body. He knew all about the olfactory miracles performed by saintly corpses; Saint Leibowitz had smelled like ambrosial barbecue, his followers said. He too now tried to smell the miraculous perfume of Amen Specklebird, but his piety perhaps had been diminished by his sins, for the rotten odor persisted.
Suddenly, however, the body of Amen Specklebird sat up on the catafalque and pointed straight at Blacktooth. The whiskers of the cougar twitched, and fangs were bared. Nimmy closed his eyes to squeeze the tears out of them. When he opened them again, the corpse lay back down and never moved during the high funeral Mass, concelebrated by the six cardinals who had stayed in the region.
The purge of Valana’s people continued, even during the funeral. When Nimmy emerged from the Church, he learned that the number of suspected conspirators who had been shot had risen to eighteen, and more than thirty citizens were imprisoned in the stockade next to the fort. Anyone unable to furnish proof of his place of birth, either by document or through testimony of witnesses, would, if no one appeared to testify of his participation in the terror, be sent into permanent exile. Any captive with an enemy or two in the city could expect a denunciation and testimony leading to his execution. Old scores were settled thus. The court trying the cases was neither civil nor ecclesiastical, but military. Nimmy guessed that most of the real villains had fled the city immediately after the crime, but the trials provided an outlet for revenge. In the murder of Amen Specklebird, however, the police had no suspects.
When Valana had been pacified and purged, there was no talk of disbanding the militia. That Chuntar Cardinal Hadala and his New Jerusalem officers had their own plan of battle in the war became clear when orders were posted to prepare the combined forces to move out from the city by the first of the month, when the moon was full. Messengers had been sent out to the Wilddog, and Sharf Oxsho replied by sending three guides and more than a hundred horses for those citizen soldiers of Valana who had none of their own. The guides were assigned to Blacktooth for interpretation. He found them ignorant of the fact that they were directly following the orders of Chuntar Hadala, Sorely Nauwhat, and Elswitch Gleaver instead of the Pope. He was afraid to mention it, because Nauwhat had always been close to Brownpony. Valanans were skeptical and complained a lot about leaving the vicinity of the city for a move away from the mountains, but there was as yet no talk of rebellion.