While he sang, the pilgrim unwrapped a biscuit and a bit of cheese. Then his singing paused, and he stood for a moment to cry out softly in the vernacular of the region: Blest be Adonoi Elohim, King of All, who maketh bread to spring forth from the earth, in a sort of nasal bleat. The bleat being finished, he sat again, and commenced eating.
The Wanderer had come a long way indeed, thought Brother Francis, who knew of no adjacent realm governed by a monarch with such an unfamiliar name and such strange pretensions. The old man was making a penitential pilgrimage, hazarded Brother Francis perhaps to the shrine at the abbey, although the shrine was not yet officially a shrine, nor was its saint yet officially a saint. Brother Francis could think of no alternate explanation of the presence of an old wanderer on this road leading to nowhere.
The pilgrim was taking his time with the bread and cheese, and the novice grew increasingly restless as his own anxiety waned. The rule of silence for the Lenten fast days did not permit him to converse voluntarily with the old man, but if he left his hiding place behind the rubble heap before the old man departed, he was certain to be seen or heard by the pilgrim, for he had been forbidden to leave the vicinity of his hermitage before the end of Lent.
Still slightly hesitant, Brother Francis loudly cleared histhroat, then straightened into view.
Whup!
The pilgrims bread and cheese went flying. The old man grabbed his staff and bounded to his feet.
Creep up on me, will you!
He brandished the staff menacingly at the hooded figure which had arisen from beyond the rock pile. Brother Francis noticed that the thick end of the staff was armed with a spike. The novice bowed courteously, thrice, but the pilgrim overlooked this nicety.
Stay back there now! he croaked. Just keep your distance, sport. Ive got nothing youre after unless its the cheese, and you can have that. If its meat you want, Im nothing but gristle, but Ill fight to keep it. Back now! Back!
Wait The novice paused. Charity, or even common courtesy, could take precedence over the Lenten rule of silence, when circumstances demanded speech, but to break silence on his own decision always left him slightly nervous.
Im not a sport, good simpleton, he continued, using the polite address. He tossed hack his hood to show his monastic haircut and held up his rosary beads. Do you understand these?
For several seconds the old man remained in catlike readiness for combat while he studied the novices sun-blistered, adolescent face. The pilgrims had been a natural mistake. Grotesque creatures who prowled the fringes of the desert often wore hoods, masks, or voluminous robes to hide deformity. Among them were these whose deformity was not limited to the body, those who sometimes looked on travelers as a dependable source of venison.
After a brief scrutiny, the pilgrim straightened.
Oh one of them. He leaned on his staff and scowled.
Is that the Leibowitz Abbey down yonder? he asked, pointing toward the distant cluster of buildings to the south.
Brother Francis bowed politely and nodded at the ground.
What are you doing out here in the ruins?
The novice picked up a chalklike fragment of stone. That the traveler might be literate was statistically unlikely, but Brother Francis decided to try. Since the vulgar dialects of the people had neither alphabet nor orthography, he chalked the Latin words for Penance, Solitude, and Silence, on a large flat stone, and wrote them again below in ancient English, hoping, in spite of his unacknowledged yearning for someone to talk to, that the old man would understand and leave him to his lonely Lenten vigil.
The pilgrim smiled wryly at the inscription. His laugh seemed less a laugh than a fatalistic bleat. Hmmm-hnnn! Still writing things backward,
he said; but if he understood the inscription, he did not condescend to admit it. He laid aside his staff, sat on the rock again, picked his bread and cheese out of the sand, and began scraping them clean. Francis moistened his lips hungrily, but looked away. He had eaten nothing but cactus fruit and one handful of parched corn since Ash Wednesday; the rules of fast and abstinence were rather strict for vocational vigils.
Noticing his discomfort, the pilgrim broke his bread and cheese; he offered a portion to Brother Francis.
In spite of his dehydrated condition, caused by his meager water supply, the novices mouth flooded with saliva. His eyes refused to move from the hand that offered the food. The universe contracted; at its exact geometric center floated that sandy tidbit of dark bread and pale cheese. A demon commanded the muscles of his left leg to move his left foot half a yard forward. The demon then possessed his right leg to move the right foot ahead of the left, and it somehow forced his right pectorals and biceps to swing his arm until his hand touched the hand of the pilgrim. His fingers felt the food; they seemed even to taste the food. An involuntary shudder passed over his half-starved body. He closed his eyes and saw the Lord Abbot glaring at him and brandishing a bullwhip. Whenever the novice tried to visualize the Holy Trinity, the countenance of God the Father always became confused with the face of the abbot, which was normally, it seemed to Francis, very angry. Behind the abbot a bonfire raged, and from the midst of the flames the eyes of the Blessed Martyr Leibowitz gazed in death-agony upon his fasting protégé, caught in the act of reaching for cheese.