A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Page A

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.”
    A perplexed frown crossed Cheroki’s face. “Did Brother Francis say that?”
    “NOO!” Arkos roared. “Haven’t you been listening? Francis said no such things. I wish he had, by gum; then I’d HAVE the rascal! But he tells it sweet-and-simple, rather stupidly, in fact, and lets the others read in the meanings. I haven’t talked to him myself. I sent the Rector of the Memorabilia to get his story.”
    “I think I’d better talk to Brother Francis,” Cheroki murmured.
    “Do! When you first came in, I was still wondering whether to roast you alive or not. For sending him in, I mean. If you had let him stay out there on the desert, we wouldn’t have this fantastic twaddle going around. But , on the other hand, if he’d stayed out there, there’s no telling what else he might have dug out of that cellar. I think you did the right thing, to send him in.”
    Cheroki, who had made the decision on no such basis, found silence to be the appropriate policy.
    “See him,” growled the abbot. “Then send him to me.”
    It was about nine on a bright Monday morning when Brother Francis rapped timidly at the door of the abbot’s study. A good