One morning early in mid-July, while passing the cardinals’ tent, he overheard a murmur of conversation between these princes of the Church.
“…peace, yes, but the peace of Christ!” Hadala was saying.
“Sure, Brownpony loves peace,” Brownpony’s friend answered. “He loves it so much he doesn’t care who he kills to get it.”
Blacktooth hurried away, but perhaps not before being seen; Sorely Nauwhat began avoiding him immediately afterward.
O Santa Librada! Freedom is not visible!
Pray for us!
That night he dreamed of a woman, a casualty of war. She was half buried in a hillside pocked by cannon fire.
Blood drained slowly in a thick stream from a hole at the edge of her breast. Half her body and her right arm was swallowed up by the landslide, while her left arm lay free and limp among the stones in sand. He touched her arm and felt for a pulse. He could find none, but the wound in her side continued to bleed. The flow of blood continued. It ran into the sand and between the stones and continued to run ten feet down the slide. He tore off a piece of his robe and tried to stanch the flow, but even after leaving it there while he counted to a thousand, the wound bled unchecked. He began trying to dig her out, but his work moved a critical stone, caused her body to shift, and caused several rocks to roll from above, as if the landslide had not finished its work.
Soon it became apparent that the flow of blood was increasing, until he saw that the blood could no longer be her blood but was coming through her from somewhere deep within the collapsed hill. But the blood was keeping her alive. After a while, she opened her eyes and looked at him.
For a moment, she was Ædrea. She raised her left hand toward his face, and he saw a torn palm with more blood.
“Tengo ojos, no me miren.
“Tengo manos, no me tapen.”
She was Santa Librada now, deposed from the cross.
He backed away in fear. She hissed and turned red and tried to bite him. She was the bride of Brownpony, the Buzzard of Battle. A shadow fell over him, and he looked up. There stood Elia Brownpony in white vestments and wearing the tiara. He sprinkled the woman with holy water, and she shrieked in agony.
Blacktooth always had trouble sleeping under the stars.
CHAPTER 23
Indeed at all seasons let the hour,
whether for supper or for dinner,
be so arranged that everything
will be done by daylight.
THE EMPEROR WAS A PART-TIME SCHOLAR. With the help of a young political-science professor who was also a popular author, Filpeo Harq had written a book. It was a book Brownpony not surprisingly had sent to the Holy Office as soon as he saw it. The Holy Office duly added it to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, although it bore the imprimatur of the Cardinal Archbishop of Texark, and carried an introduction by a monk of Saint Leibowitz, who, unfortunately for his career, happened to agree with the Imperial Mayor that the restoration of the Magna Civitas could only be accomplished by secular science and industry under the protection of a secular state against the resistance and hostility of religion. It was such a self-evidently wicked book that the Holy Office wrote neither an attack nor a commentary; the work was filed under “Anticlericalism.” Its author was already so thoroughly anathematized that further curses from eternal Rome would seem petty.
But Filpeo was a scholar, and among other things, he had been able to restore several ancient pieces of music, including one of regional origin which seemed well suited to become the new national anthem for the Empire, and he published it in his book. The tune was now well known. Its ancient words were English, but the Ol’zark translation scanned well enough. It began: “The eyes of Texark are upon you.” The Mayor wanted his subjects to feel well watched.
Every priest in the Empire who read the crusading bull Scitote Tyrannum aloud from the pulpit or who publicly observed the interdict imposed on the Texark Church by the Brownpony papacy—there were only thirteen of them—was arrested and charged with sedition. Two bishops who had suspended Masses and confessions in their dioceses in obedience to the bull joined the priests in jail. In six out of seven parishes throughout the Empire, however, the religious life went on as if Amen II had never spoken. After so many decades of a papacy in exile, the people of Hannegan City and even New Rome had lost sight of the Pope as a real player in their perceived world. He was distant, and his anger was like that of a player on the stage, except that the people only read the reviews without seeing the play. The communications media—mostly paper since the telegraph line to the west was down—kept them informed, but the media were deferentially kind to the relatively absolute ruler of the state.
Scitote Tyrannum, therefore—however binding it might be in Heaven—was the least of Filpeo’s worries on Earth. The Antipope’s forces were going to march, and the Antipope had used the treasures of the Church to arm the wild Nomads with superior weapons to be used against civilization. Filpeo always spoke of him as Antipope, although there was no competing Pope. Filpeo stood for the renewal of the Magna Civitas, and Brownpony the Antipope opposed it. It was that simple, from the Hannegan’s point of view. Brownpony was the past waging war against the future. He armed the barbarians and would soon send them against civilization’s holy places, if not against the City of Hannegans itself. Filpeo was confident he could defend the city until the new firearms were delivered, and after that his forces would be able to drive the spooks back to the Suckamints and herd the Jackrabbit into the southwest desert, push the Wilddog north of the Misery, and herd the Grasshopper into formerly Wilddog lands, so that the two northern hordes would be forced to fight each other for living space.
The Imperial Mayor hoped to win the Nomad outlaws over to his side, and he sent an ex-pirate to recruit them. Admiral e’Fondolai promised them Grasshopper lands in the aftermath of victory. Filpeo was amused to hear of it at first, but after giving the matter some thought, he decided that he would, if possible, honor the promise Carpy had so rashly made. If the motherless ones could marry farm women and be assigned enough land, they could raise fully domesticated cattle and live in fixed homes, and trade with the farmers and the cities. In such circumstances, they would not develop a society anything like the hordes. Very likely the taboo against capturing wild horses could not survive without the Weejus to enforce it, and the motherless ones, once they settled down, were not likely to restore the matrilineal inheritance of wild Nomads. They would acquire property and fight to defend it. In the Mayor’s dream, in the wake of his certain victory, the Grasshopper and the Wilddog and the motherless ones would each be at war against the others, and the Jackrabbit would straggle back out of the desert to be arrested and put to work repairing war-damaged properties.
Filpeo was well pleased with his admiral, but not his general.