A Canticle For Leibowitz l-1 Read online

  “I thought perhaps be was a pilgrim on his way to visit our shrine, Reverend Father.”

  “It isn’t a shrine yet, and you’re not to call it that. And anyway he wasn’t, or at least, he didn’t. And he didn’t pass our gates, unless the watch was asleep. And the novice on watch denies being asleep, although he admitted feeling drowsy that day. So what do you suggest?”

  “If the Reverend Father Abbot will forgive me, I’ve been on watch a few times myself.”

  “And?”

  “Well, on a bright day when there’s nothing moving but the buzzards, after a few hours you just start looking up at the buzzards.”

  “Oh you do, do you? When you’re supposed to be watching the trail!”

  “And if you stare at the sky too long, you just kind of blank-out-not really asleep, but, sort of, preoccupied.”

  “So that’s what you do when you’re on watch, do you?” the abbot growled.

  “Not necessarily. I mean, no, Reverend Father, I wouldn’t know it if I had, I don’t think. Brother Je — I mean — a brother I relieved once was like that. He didn’t even know it was time for the watch to change. He was just sitting there in the tower and staring up at the sky with his mouth open. In a daze.”

  “Yes, and the first time you go stupefied that way, along’ll come a heathen war-party out of the Utah country, kill a few gardeners, tear up the irrigating system, spoil our crops, and dump stones in the well before we can start defending ourselves. Why are you looking so — oh, I forgot — you were Utah-born before you ran away, weren’t you? But never mind, you could, just possibly, be right about the watch — how he could have missed seeing the old man, that is. You’re sure he was just an ordinary old man — not anything more? Not an angel? Not a beatus?”

  The novice’s gaze drifted ceilingward in thought, then fell quickly to his rulers face. “Do angels or saints cast shadows?”

  “Yes — I mean no, I mean — how should I know! He did cast a shadow, didn’t he?”

  “Well — it was such a small shadow you could hardly see it.”

  “What!”

  “Because it was almost noon.”

  “Imbecile!I’m not asking you to tell me what he was. I know very well what he was, if you saw him at all.” Abbot Arkos thumped repeatedly on the table for emphasis. “I want to know if you — You! — are sure beyond a doubt that he was just an ordinary old man!”

  This line of questioning was puzzling to Brother Francis. In his own mind, there was no neat straight line separating the Natural from the Supernatural order, but rather, an intermediate twilight zone. There were things that were clearly natural, and there were Things that were clearly supernatural, but between these extremes was a region of confusion (his own) — the preternatural — where things made of mere earth, air, fire, or water tended to behave disturbingly like Things. For Brother Francis, this region included whatever he could see but not understand. And Brother Francis was never “sure beyond a doubt,” as the abbot was asking him to be, that he properly understood much of anything. Thus, by raising the question at all, Abbot Arkos was unwittingly throwing the novice’s pilgrim into the twilight region, into the same perspective as the old man’s first appearance as a legless black strip that wriggled in the midst of a lake of heat illusion on the trail, into the same perspective as he had occupied momentarily when the novice’s world had contracted until it contained nothing but a hand offering him a particle of food. If some creature more-than-human chose to disguise itself as human, how was he to penetrate its disguise, or suspect there was one? If such a creature did not wish to be suspected, would it not remember to cast a shadow, leave footprints, eat bread and cheese? Might it not chew spice-leaf, spit at a lizard, and remember to imitate the reaction of a mortal who forgot to put on his sandals before stepping on hot ground? Francis was not prepared to estimate the intelligence or ingenuity of hellish or heavenly beings, or to guess the extent of their histrionic abilities, although he assumed such creatures to be either hellishly or divinely clever. The abbot, by raising the question at all, had formulated the nature of Brother Francis’ answer, which was: to entertain the question itself, although he had not previously done so.

  “Well, boy?”

  “M’Lord Abbot, you don’t suppose he might have been—”

  “I’m asking you not to suppose. I’m asking you to be flatly certain. Was he, or was he not, an ordinary flesh-and-blood person?”

  The question was frightening. That the question was dignified by coming from the lips of so exalted a person as his sovereign abbot made it even more frightening, though he could plainly see that his ruler stated it merely because he wanted a particular answer. He wanted it rather badly. If he wanted it that badly, the question must be important. If the question was important enough for an abbot, then it was far too important for Brother Francis who dared not be wrong.

  “I-I think he was flesh and blood, Reverend Father, but not exactly “ordinary.” In some ways, he was rather extra ordinary.”

  “What ways?” Abbot Arkos asked sharply.

  “Like-how straight he could spit. And he could read, I think.”

  The abbot dosed his eyes and rubbed his temples in apparent exasperation. How easy it would have been flatly to have told the boy that his pilgrim was only an old tramp of some kind, and then to have commanded him not to think otherwise. But by allowing the boy to see that a question was possible, he had rendered such a command ineffective before he uttered it. Insofar as thought could be governed at all, it could only be commanded to follow what reason affirmed anyhow; command it otherwise, and it would not obey. Like any wise ruler, Abbot Arkos did not issue orders vainly, when to disobey was possible and to enforce was not possible. It was better to look the other way than to command ineffectually. He had asked a question that he himself could not answer by reason, having never seen the old man, and had thereby lost the right to make the answer mandatory.

  “Get out,” he said at last, without opening his eyes.

  5

  Somewhat mystified by the commotion at the abbey, Brother Francis returned to the desert that same day to complete his Lenten vigil in rather wretched solitude. He had expected some excitement about the relics to arise, but the excessive interest which everyone had taken in the old wanderer surprised him. Francis had spoken of the old man, simply because of the part he had played, either by accident or by design of Providence, in the monk’s stumbling upon the crypt and its relics. The pilgrim was only a minor ingredient, as far as Francis was concerned, in a mandala design at whose center rested a relic of a saint. But his fellow novices had seemed more interested in the pilgrim than in the relic, and even the abbot had summoned him, not to ask about the box, but to ask about the old man. They had asked him a hundred questions about the pilgrim to which he could reply only: “I didn’t notice,” or “I wasn’t looking right then,” or “If he said, I don’t remember,” and some of the questions were a little weird. And so he questioned himself: Should I have noticed? Was I stupid not to watch what he did? Wasn’t I paying enough attention to what he said? Did I miss something important because I was dazed?

  He brooded on it in the darkness while the wolves prowled about his new encampment and filled the nights with their howling. He caught himself brooding on it during times of the day that were assigned as proper for the prayers and spiritual exercises of the vocational vigil, and he confessed as much to Prior Cheroki the next time the priest rode his Sunday circuit. “You shouldn’t let the romantic imaginations of the others bother you; you have enough trouble with your own,” the priest told him, after chiding him for neglecting the exercises and prayers. “They don’t think up questions like that on the basis of what might be true; they concoct the questions on the basis of what might be sensational if it just happened to be true. It’s ridiculous! I can tell you that the Reverend Father Abbot has ordered the entire novitiate to drop the subject.” After a moment, he unfortunately added: “There really wasn’t anything about
the old man to suggest the supernatural — was there?” with only the faintest trace of hopeful wonder in his tone.

  Brother Francis wondered too. If there had been a suggestion of the supernatural, he had not noticed it. But then too, judging by the number of questions he had been unable to answer, he had not noticed very much. The profusion of the questions had made him feel that his failure to observe had been, somehow, culpable. He had become grateful to the pilgrim upon discovering the shelter. But he had not interpreted events entirely in terms of his own interests, in accordance with his own longing for some shred of evidence that the dedication of his lifetime to the labors of the monastery was born not so much of his own will as it was of grace, empowering the will, but not compelling it, rightly to choose. Perhaps the events had a vaster significance that he had missed, during the totality of his self-absorption.

  What is your opinion of your own execrable vanity?

  My execrable vanity is like that of the fabled cat whostudied ornithology, m’Lord.

  His desire to profess his final and perpetual vows — was it not akin to the motive of the cat who became an ornithologist? — so that he might glorify his own ornithophagy, esoterically devouring Penthestes atricapillus but never eating chickadees. For, as the cat was called by Nature to be an ornithophage, so was Francis called by his own nature hungrily to devour such knowledge as could be taught in those days, and, because there were no schools but the monastic schools, he had donned the habit first of a postulant, later of a novice. But to suspect that God as well as Nature had beckoned him to become a professed monk of the Order?

  What else could he do? There was no returning to his homeland, the Utah. As a small child, he had been sold to a shaman, who would have trained him as his servant and acolyte. Having run away, he could not return, except to meet grisly tribal “justice.” He had stolen a shaman’s property (Francis’ own person), and while thievery was an honorable profession among the Utah, getting caught was a capital crime when the thief’s victim was the tribal warlock. Nor would he have cared to lapse back into the relatively primitive life of an illiterate shepherd people, after his schooling at the abbey.

  But what else? The continent was lightly settled. He thought of the wall-map in the abbey’s library, and of the sparse distribution of the crosshatched areas, which were regions — if not of civilization — then of civil order, where some form of lawful sovereignty, transcending the tribal, held sway. The rest of the continent was populated, very thinly, by the people of the forest and the plain, who were, for the most part, not savages, but simple clanfolk loosely organized into small communities here and there, who lived by hunting, gathering, and primitive agriculture, whose birth rate was barely high enough (discounting monster-births and sports) to sustain the population. The principal industries of the continent, excepting a few seacoast regions, were hunting, farming, fighting, and witchcraft — the last being the most promising “industry” for any youth with a choice of careers and having in mind as primary ends, maximum wealth and prestige.

  The schooling which Francis had been given at the abbey prepared him for nothing which was of practical value in a dark, ignorant, and workaday world, where literacy was nonexistent and a literate youth, therefore, seemed of no worth to a community unless he could also farm, fight, hunt or show some special talent for inter-tribal theft, or for the divining of water and workable metal. Even in the scattered domains where a form of civil order existed, the fact of Francis’ literacy would help him not at all, if he must lead a life apart from the Church. It was true that petty barons sometimes employed a scribe or two, but such cases were rare enough to be negligible, and were as often filled by monks as by monastery-schooled laymen.

  The only demand for scribes and secretaries was created by the Church herself, whose tenuous hierarchic web was stretched across the continent (and occasionally to far-distant shores, although the diocesans abroad were virtually autonomous rulers, subject to the Holy See in theory but seldom in practice, being cut off from New Rome less by schism than by oceans not often crossed) and could be held together only by a communication network. The Church had become, quite coincidentally and without meaning to be, the only means whereby news was transmitted from place to place across the continent. If plague came to the northeast, the southwest would soon hear of it, as a coincidental effect of tales told and retold by messengers of the Church, coming and going from New Rome.

  If the nomadic infiltration in the far northwest threatened a Christian diocese, an encyclical letter might soon be read from pulpits far to the south and east, warning of the threat and extending the apostolic benediction to “men of any station, so long as they be skilled at arms, who, having the means to make the journey, may be piously disposed to do so, in order to swear fealty to Our beloved son, N., lawful ruler of that place, for such a period of time as may seem necessary for the maintenance of standing armies there for defense of Christians against the gathering heathen horde, whose ruthless savagery is known to many and who, to Our deepest grief, tortured, murdered, and devoured those priests of God which We Ourselves sent to them with the Word, that they might enter as lambs into the fold of the Lamb, of whose flock on Earth We are the Shepherd; for, while We have never despaired nor ceased to pray that these nomadic children of the darkness may be led into the Light and enter Our realms in peace (for it is not to be thought that peaceful strangers should be repelled from a land so vast and empty; nay, they should be welcomed who come peacefully, even should they be strangers to the visible Church and its Divine Founder, so long as they hearken to that Natural Law which is written in the hearts of all men, binding them to Christ in spirit, though they be ignorant of His Name), it is nevertheless meet and fitting and prudent that Christendom, while praying for peace and the conversion of the heathen, should gird itself for defense in the Northwest, where the hordes gather and the incidents of heathen savagery have lately increased, and upon each of you, beloved sons, who can bear arms and shall travel to the Northwest to join forces with those who prepare rightfully to defend their lands, homes, and churches, We extend, and hereby bestow, as a sign of Our special affection, the Apostolic Benediction.”

  Francis had thought briefly of going to the northwest, if he failed to find a vocation to the Order. But, although he was strong and skillful enough with blade and bow, he was rather short and not very heavy, while — according to rumor — the heathen was nine feet tall. He could not testify as to the truth of the rumor, but saw no reason to think it false.

  Besides dying in battle, there was very little that he could think of to do with his lifetime — little that seemed worth the doing — if he could not devote it to the Order.

  His certainty of his vocation had not been broken, but only slightly bent, by the scorching administered to him by the abbot, and by the thought of the cat who became an ornithologist when called only by Nature to become an ornithophage. The thought made him unhappy enough to permit him to be overcome by temptation, so that, on Palm Sunday, with only six days of starvation remaining until the end of Lent, Prior Cheroki heard from Francis (or from the shriveled and sun-scorched residuum of Francis, wherein the soul remained somehow encysted) a few brief croaks which constituted what was probably the most succinct confession that Francis ever made or Cheroki ever heard:

  “Bless me, Father; I ate a lizard.”

  Prior Cheroki having for many years been confessor to fasting penitents, found that custom had, with him, as with a fabled gravedigger, given it all “a property of easiness,” so that he replied with perfect equanimity and not even a blink: “Was it an abstinence day, and was it artificially prepared?”

  Holy Week would have been less lonely than the earlier weeks of Lent, had the hermits not been, by then, past caring; for some of the Passiontide liturgy was carried outside the abbey walls to touch the penitents at their vigil sites; twice the Eucharist came forth, and on Maundy Thursday the abbot himself made the rounds, with Cheroki and thirteen monks, to perform the M
andatum at each hermitage. Abbot Arkos’ vestments were concealed under a cowl, and the lion almost managed to seem humble kitten as he knelt, and washed and kissed the feet of his fasting subjects with maximum economy of movement and a minimum of flourish and display, while the others chanted the antiphons.

  “Mandatum novum do vobis: ut diligatis invicem…” On Good Friday a Procession of the Cross brought out a veiled crucifix, stopping at each hermitage to unveil it gradually before the penitent, lifting the cloth inch by inch for the Adoration, while the monks chanted the Reproaches:

  “My people, what have I done to thee? or in what have I grieved thee? Answer…I exalted thee with virtuous power; and thou hangest me from the gibbet of a cross…”

  And then, Holy Saturday.

  The monks carried them in one at a time — famished and raving. Francis was thirty pounds lighter and several degrees weaker than he had been on Ash Wednesday. When they set him on his feet in his own cell, he staggered, and before he reached the bunk, he fell. The brothers hoisted him into it, bathed him, shaved him, and anointed his blistered skin, while Francis babbled deliriously about something in a burlap loincloth, addressing it at times as an angel and again as a saint, frequently invoking the name of Leibowitz and trying to apologize.

  His brethren, forbidden by the abbot to speak of the matter, merely exchanged significant glances or nodded mysteriously among themselves.

  Reports filtered to the abbot.

  “Bring him here,” he grunted at a recorder as soon as he heard that Francis could walk. His tone sent the recorder scurrying.

  “Do you deny saying these things?” Arkos growled.