OKAYED BY HANNEGAN II, BY GRACE OF GOD MAYOR,

RULER OF TEXARKANA, DEFENDER OF THE FAITH,

AND VAQUERO SUPREME OF THE PLAINS.

HIS MARK: X

“I wonder if His Supremacy had someone read the letter to him later?” worried the abbot.

“If so, m’Lord, would the letter have been sent?”

“I suppose not. But frivolity under Hannegan’s nose just to spite the Mayor’s illiteracy is not like Marcus Apollo, unless be was trying to tell me something between the lines — but couldn’t quite think of a safe way to say it. That last part — about a certain chalice that he’s afraid won’t pass away. It’s clear he’s worried about something, but what? It isn’t like Marcus; it isn’t like him at all.”

Several weeks had passed since the arrival of the letter; during those weeks Dom Paulo had slept badly, had suffered a recurrence of the old gastric trouble, had brooded overmuch on the past as if looking for something that might have been done differently in order to avert the future. What future? he demanded of himself. There seemed no logical reason to expect trouble. The controversy between monks and villagers had all but died. No signs of turmoil came from the herdsman tribes to the north and east. Imperial Denver was not pressing its attempt to levy taxes upon monastic congregations. There were no troops in the vicinity. The oasis was still furnishing water. There seemed no current threat of plague among animals or men. The corn was doing well this year in the irrigated fields. There were signs of progress in the world, and the village of Sanly Bowitts had achieved the fantastic literacy rate of eight per cent — for which the villagers might, but did not, thank the monks of the Leibowitzian Order.

And yet he felt forebodings. Some nameless threat lurked just around the corner of the world for the sun to rise again. The feeling had been gnawing at him, as annoying as a swarm of hungry insects that buzzed about one’s face in the desert sun. There was the sense of the imminent, the remorseless, the mindless; it coiled like a heat-maddened rattler, ready to strike at rolling tumbleweed.

It was a devil with which he was trying to come to grips, the abbot decided, but the devil was quite evasive. The abbot’s devil was rather small, as devils go: only knee-high, but he weighed ten tons and had the strength of five hundred oxen. He was not driven by maliciousness as Dom Paulo imagined him, not nearly as much as he was driven by frenzied compulsion, somewhat after the fashion of a rabid dog. He bit through meat and bone and nail simply because he had damned himself, and damnation created a damnably insatiable appetite. And he was evil merely because he had made a denial of Good, and the denial had become a part of his essence, or a hole therein. Somewhere, Dom Paulo thought, he’s wading through a sea of men and leaving a wake of the maimed.

What nonsense, old man! he chided himself. When you tire of living, change itself seems evil, does it not? for then any change at all disturbs the deathlike peace of the life-weary. Oh there’s the devil, all right, but let’s not credit him with more than his damnable due. Are you that life-weary, old fossil?

But the foreboding lingered.

“Do you suppose the buzzards have eaten old Eleazar yet?” asked a quiet voice at his elbow.

Dom Paulo glanced around with a start in the twilight. The voice belonged to Father Gault, his prior and probable successor. He stood fingering a rose and looking embarrassed for having disturbed the old man’s solitude.

“Eleazar? You mean Benjamin? Why, have you heard something about him lately?”

“Well, no, Father Abbot.” He laughed uneasily. “But you seemed to be looking toward the mesa, and I thought you were wondering about the Old Jew.” He glanced toward the anvil-shaped mountain, silhouetted against the gray patch of sky in the west. “There’s a wisp of smoke up there, so I guess he’s still alive.”

“We shouldn’t have to guess,” Dom Paulo said abruptly. “I’m going to ride over there and pay him a visit.”

“You sound like you’re leaving tonight.” Gault chuckled.

“In a day or two.”

“Better be careful. They say he throws rocks at climbers.”

“I haven’t seen him for five years,” the abbot confessed. “And I’m ashamed that I haven’t. He’s lonely. I’ll go.

“If he’s lonely, why does he insist on living like a hermit?”

“To escape loneliness — in a young world.”

The young priest laughed. “That perhaps makes his kind of sense, Domne, but I don’t quite see it.”

“You will, when you’re my age, or his.”

“I don’t expect to get that old. He lays claim to several thousand years.”

The abbot smiled reminiscently. “And you know, I can’t dispute him either. I met him when I was just a novice, fifty-odd years ago, and I’d swear he looked just as old then as he does now. He must be well over a hundred.”

“Three thousand two hundred and nine, so he says. Sometimes even older. I think he believes it, too. An interesting madness,”

“I’m not so sure he’s mad, Father. Just devious in his sanity. What did you want to see me about?”

“Three small matters. First, how do we get the Poet out of the royal guest rooms — before Thon Taddeo arrives? He’s due here in a few days, and the Poet’s taken root.”

“I’ll handle the Poet-sirrah. What else?”

“Vespers. Will you be in the church?”

“Not until Compline. You take over. What else?”

“Controversy in the basement — over Brother Kornhoer’s experiment.”

“Who and how?”

“Well, the silly gist of it seems to be that Brother Armbruster has the attitude of vespero mundi expectando, while with Brother Kornhoer, it’s the matins of the millennium. Kornhoer moves something to make room for a piece of equipment. Armbruster yells Perdition! Brother Kornhoer yells Progress! and they have at each other again. Then they come fuming to me to settle it. I scold them for losing their tempers. They get sheepish and fawn on each other for ten minutes. Six hours later, the floor shivers from Brother Armbruster’s bellowing Perdition! down in the library. I can settle the blowups, but there seems to be a Basic Issue.”

“A basic breach of conduct, I’d say. What do you want me to do about it? Exclude them from the table?”

“Not yet, but you might warn them.”

“All right, I’ll track it down. Is that all?”

“That’s all, Domne.” He started away, but paused: “Oh, by the way-do you think Brother Kornhoer’s contraption is going to work’?”

“I hope not!” the abbot snorted.

Father Gault appeared surprised. “But, then why let him—”

“Because I was curious at first. The work has caused so much commotion by now, though, that I’m sorry I let him start it.”

“Then why not stop him?”

“Because I’m hoping that he will reduce himself to absurdity without any help from me. If the thing fails, it’ll fail just in time for Thon Taddeo’s arrival; That would be just the proper form of mortification for Brother Kornhoer — to remind him of his vocation, before he begins thinking that he was called to Religion mainly for the purpose of building a generator of electrical essences in the monastery basement.”

“But, Father Abbot, you’ll have to admit that it would be quite an achievement, if successful.”

“I don’t have to admit it,” Dom Paulo told him curtly.

When Gault was gone, the abbot, after a brief debate with himself, decided to handle the problem of the Poet-sirrah! before the problem of perdition-versus-progress. The simplest solution to the problem of the Poet was for the Poet to get out of the royal suite, and preferably out of the abbey, out of the vicinity of the abbey, out of sight, hearing, and mind. But no one could expect a “simplest solution” to get rid of the Poet-sirrah!