A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller [88]
“It sounds interesting,” said the scholar. “What is it?”
“Greasy armadillo with parched corn, boiled in donkey milk. A regular Sunday special.”
“Poet!” snapped the abbot; then to the thon: “I apologize for his presence. He wasn’t invited.”
The scholar surveyed the Poet with detached amusement.
“M’Lord Hannegan too, keeps several court fools,” he told Paulo. “I’m familiar with the species. You needn’t apologize for him.”
The Poet sprang up from his stool and bowed deeply before the thon. “Allow me instead to apologize for the abbot, Sire!” he cried with feeling.
He held the bow for a moment. They waited for him to finish his foolishness. Instead, he shrugged suddenly, sat down, and speared a smoking fowl from the platter deposited before them by a postulant. He tore off a leg and bit into it with gusto. They watched him with puzzlement.
“I suppose you’re right in not accepting my apology for him,” he said to the thon at last.
The scholar reddened slightly.
“Before I throw you out, worm,” said Gault, “let’s probe the depths of this iniquity.”
The Poet waggled his head and munched thoughtfully.
“It’s pretty deep, all right,” he admitted.
Someday Gault is going to strangle himself on that foot of his, thought Dom Paulo.
But the younger priest was visibly annoyed, and sought to draw the incident out ad absurdum in order to find grounds for quashing the fool. “Apologize at length for your host, Poet,” he commanded. “And explain yourself as you go.”
“Drop it, Father, drop it,” Paulo said hastily.
The Poet smiled graciously at the abbot. “That’s all right, m’Lord,” he said. “I don’t mind apologizing for you in the least. You apologize for me, I apologize for you, and isn’t that a fitting maneuver in charity and good will? Nobody need apologize for himself-which is always so humiliating. Using my system, however, everyone gets apologized for, and nobody has to do his own apologizing.”
Only the officers seemed to find the Poet’s remarks amusing. Apparently the expectation of humor was enough to produce the illusion of humor, and the comedian could elicit laughter with gesture and expression, regardless of what he said. Thon Taddeo wore a dry smirk, but it was the kind of look a man might give a clumsy performance by a trained animal.
“And so,” the Poet was continuing, “if you would but allow me to serve as your humble helper, m’Lord, you would never have to eat your own crow. As your Apologetic Advocate, for example, I might be delegated by you to offer contrition to important guests for the existence of bedbugs. And to bedbugs for the abrupt change of fare.”
The abbot glowered and resisted an impulse to grind the Poet’s bare toe with the heel of his sandal. He kicked the fellow’s ankle, but the fool persisted.
“I would assume all the blame for you, of course,” he said, noisily chewing white meat. “It’s a fine system, one which I was prepared to make available to you too, Most Eminent Scholar. I’m sure you would have found it convenient. I have been given to understand that systems of logic and methodology must be devised and perfected before science advances. And my system of negotiable and transferable apologetics would have been of particular value to you, Thon Taddeo.”
“Would have?”
“Yes. It’s a pity. Somebody stole my blue-headed goat.”
“Blue-headed goat?”
“He had a head as bald as Hannegan’s, Your Brilliance, and blue as the tip of Brother Armbruster’s nose. I meant to make you a present of the animal but some dastard filched him before you came”
The abbot clenched his teeth and held his heel poised over the Poet’s toe. Thon Taddeo was frowning slightly, but he seemed determined to untangle the Poet’s obscure skein of meaning.
“Do we need a blue-headed goat?” he asked his clerk.
“I can see no pressing urgency about it, sir,” said the clerk.
“But the need is obvious!” said the Poet. “They say you are writing