A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller [19]
Cheroki nodded slowly. “He dropped it beside the road when he fell. I helped gather it up, but I didn’t look at it carefully.”
“Well, you know what he claims it is?”
Father Cheroki glanced aside. He seemed not to hear the question.
“All right, all right,” the abbot growled, “never mind what he claims it is. Just go look it over carefully yourself and decide what you think it is.”
Cheroki went to bend over the desk and scrutinize the papers carefully, one at a time, while the abbot paced and kept talking, seemingly to the priest but half to himself.
“It’s impossible! You did the right thing to send him back before he uncovered more. But of course that’s not the worst part. The worst part is the old man he babbles about. It’s getting too thick. I don’t know anything that could damage the case worse than a whole flood of improbable ‘miracles.’ A few real incidents, certainly! It has to be established that the intercession of the Beatus has brought about the miraculous-before canonization can occur. But there can be too much! Look at the Blessed Chang-beatified two centuries ago, but never canonized-so far. And why? His Order got too eager, that’s why. Every time somebody got over a cough, it was a miraculous cure by the Beatus. Visions in the basement, evocations in the belfry; It sounded more like a collection of ghost stories than a list of miraculous incidents. Maybe two or three incidents were really valid, but when there’s that much chaff-well?”
Father Cheroki looked up. His knuckles had whitened on the edge of the desk and his face seemed strained. He seemed not to have been listening. “I beg your pardon, Father Abbot?”
“Well, the same thing could happen here, that’s what,” said the abbot, and resumed his slow padding to and fro.
“Last year there was Brother Noyon and his miraculous hangman’s noose. Ha! And the year before that, Brother Smirnov gets mysteriously cured of the gout-how?-by touching a probable relic of our Blessed Leibowitz, the young louts say. And now this Francis, he meets a pilgrim-wearing what?-wearing for a kilt the very burlap cloth they hooded Blessed Leibowitz with before they hanged him. And with what for a belt? A rope. What rope? Ahh, the very same-” He paused, looking at Cheroki. “I can tell by your blank look that you haven’t heard this yet? No? All right, so you can’t say. No, no, Francis didn’t say that. All he said was-” Abbot Arkos tried to inject a slightly falsetto quality into his normally gruff voice. “All Brother Francis said was-’I met a little old man, and I thought he was a pilgrim heading for the abbey because he was going that way, and he was wearing an old burlap sack tied around with a piece of rope. And he made a mark on the rock, and the mark looked like this.’ “
Arkos produced a scrap of parchment from the pocket of his fur robe and held it up toward Cheroki’s face in the candle-glow. Still trying, with only slight success, to imitate Brother Francis: “ ‘And I couldn’t figure out what it meant. Do you know?’ ”
Cheroki stared at the symbols
and shook his head.
“I wasn’t asking you,” Arkos gruffed in his normal voice. “That’s what Francis said. I didn’t know either.”
“You do now?”
“I do now. Somebody looked it up. That is a lamedh, and that is a sadhe. Hebrew letters.”
“Sadhe lamedh?”
“No. Right to left. Lamedh sadhe. An ell, and a tee-ess sound. If it had vowel marks, it might be ‘loots,” ‘lots,” ‘lets,” ‘lets,” ‘latz,” `litz’-anything like that. If it had some letters between those two, it might sound like Lllll-guess-who.”
“Leibo-Ho, no!”
“Ho, yes! Brother Francis didn’t think of it. Somebody else thought of it. Brother Francis didn’t think of the burlap hood and the hangman’s rope; one of his chums did. So what happens? By tonight, the whole novitiate is buzzing with the sweet little story that Francis met the Beatus himself out there, and the Beatus escorted our boy over to where that stuff was and told him he’d find his vocation.