"Walter M. Miller - The Lost Masters - Volume 01" - читать интересную книгу автора (Miller Walter M)

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. I’ve got nothing you’re
after–unless it’s the cheese, and you can have that. If it’s meat you want, I’m nothing but gristle, but I’ll
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.
“I’m 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
novice’s sun-blistered, adolescent face. The pilgrim’s 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 novice’s 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.
The novice shuddered again. “Apage Satanas!” he hissed as he danced back and dropped the
food. Without warning, he spattered the old man with holy water from a tiny phial sneaked from his