A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller [60]
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.