And on the Eighth Day (15 page)

And there was the question of time. While the Quenanites were not time-bound or time-harried, the Teacher could no more step out of the universal continuum than a man in Los Angeles or New York. Where had the old man been—what had he done—between 4:30, when he visited the Potter’s workshop, and 4:55, when Ellery had found him in the meeting room over the body of the Storesman, while the people stood transfixed outside?

At 4:30 he had stepped into the Potter’s shop for a new prayer jar, and obviously he had taken it at once to the sanquetum to place on the base where the broken jar had stood. This whole procedure could hardly have consumed more than five minutes. At 4:45 he had stepped into the Weaver’s shop to have a new button sewn on; could this have taken more than five minutes also?

Ten minutes accounted for between 4:30 and 4:55—ten out of twenty-five.

Leaving fifteen minutes not accounted for.

What had the old man done with them?

Still musing, Ellery came to the cottage of the Elders—the husband and wife who represented the old people of Quenan on the Crownsil. How old they were he could not imagine; he could only think of them as Adam and Eve, and he was sure that if he were able to examine them he would find them lacking navels.

Smiling toothlessly, they welcomed him; and the old woman patted the space beside her on the fleece-padded bench on which they sat soaking up the sun.

Them, at least, the tragedy seemed to have passed by. Perhaps they did not understand it, or had already forgotten it. He felt uncertain how to begin.

“You are here to help us,” Adam broke the silence at last. “And we are thankful to you. Blessed be the Wor’d.”

And Eve said, “Willy told us.”

Ellery blinked. “Willy?”

“The Teacher. His name in the world was Willy.” And the ancient lady nodded and smiled. A small thing, but astounding. The Teacher, that venerable, majestic figure out of the Old Testament, had once been a boy named Willy, wearing a lace collar and trundling a hoop with a stick along a wooden sidewalk!

“We have known him all our lives,” said Adam.

“Then let me ask you,” said Ellery. “Have you ever known him to lie?”

Neither replied. Perhaps they had gone back, in the manner of the very old, to some far-distant memory of flaring gas lamps and a harbor quilled with sharp white sails.

Then the old woman’s withered lips trembled, and Ellery saw that the pair had simply been struck dumb by his question. “Lie?” she repeated. “The
Teacher
?”

And her husband rocked as if in pain. “Oh! Oh!”

And both began at once, in their unsteady voices, to impress on him the monstrousness of his question. The Teacher would never lie. He could not lie. Even about the most trifling matter.

“Not to save his life, Guest!” Adam exclaimed.

“Not to save his life!” Eve echoed.

Lines from some old book appeared magically in Ellery’s head: Our master talks with the angels. “How do you know?” He
told us so
. “But perhaps he lies.”
Fool! As though the angels would talk to a liar!

But for some reason he could not pass their ancient testimony off with the usual smile as the product of senile delusion or narrow sectarian ignorance. All he knew—and the knowledge was a terror as well as a relief—was that he believed them without reservation or doubt.

The Teacher would not lie about even the most trifling matter.

The Teacher would not lie to save his life.

For the rest of the morning and afternoon, until the sun was well down in the western sky, Ellery pursued his investigations. The mill rasped, the waters rushed through their channels, the cattle lowed, and an old man testified in feeble, halting words. It was late in the afternoon when he returned to his room. The Superintendent was waiting for him.

“Guest,” the Superintendent said, “the Teacher has instructed me, saying: ‘Do you call upon the Guest and ask if he has any instructions. Do you then receive them and carry them out as if they came from me.’ ” He might have been reciting an inventory. “Accordingly,” the Superintendent went on, “I have called upon you, Guest, and I ask if you have any instructions. I shall receive them and carry them out as if they came from the Teacher.”

Ellery wanted to say nothing so much as, Yes, for God’s sake get out of here and let me sleep a week, a month, a year.

What he actually said was: “Yes, Superintendent. Summon the Crownsil, the Teacher, the Successor, and yourself to the meeting hall in the Holy Congregation House for after the evening meal.”

“I shall do so,” said the Superintendent, and turned to go.

“Wait,” said Ellery, and wondered why. “Aren’t you the least curious, Superintendent, about my reasons for this summons?”

“I was not to ask for reasons, Guest, only for instructions.”

“Ah, they could use you in Washington,” sighed Ellery. “My reason is this, and you may tell them so: According to the laws and customs of Quenan, tonight they are to sit in trial.”

It was quite dark in the long room. Candles had been lit by the Successor to reinforce the single lamp, but they seemed to Ellery to produce more shadows than light; they leaped and they danced and grew large and shrank away with every breath of wind let in by the opening door as the members of the Crownsil assembled. The darkness was palpable, he thought; it could be felt, a thing of shifting solids that the light of all the sun could not have melted.

While he waited for the people of the Crownsil to seat themselves about the long table, Ellery thought over the role he saw about to play. His to present, his to accuse, his to prosecute. Elroï the Procurator. The Devil’s Advocate. (For that matter, was not Satan himself a prosecutor, accusing Job?) There had been murder most foul in Eden, and the task of arraignment, indictment, and pressure for judgment was now his—assigned him by the leader of the community, his authority to exercise it accepted by the council of the community.

What choice had they? There was no one else, no one at all, in Quenan with his knowledge of such things.

Again the guilty thought surfaced that he should be reporting the crime to the authorities of jurisdiction. But, really, who were they? In every respect but geography, Quenan lay outside the borders of the United States of America.

“The king’s writ runs not in Connaught,” said an old Irish proverb. Neither state nor federal power had ever “run” in the Valley of Quenan. And where no other governance obtained, it was the right of the people of any place—by the law of nations—to set up provisional powers … not merely their right, but their duty. And such powers, established here for so many decades, and exercised without question or molestation, could not even be deemed provisional any longer. (That this was all rationalization Ellery knew very well, in the part of him that remained Ellery; but in the part of him that had become Elroï, hazy with fatigue, misted over with sorrow, he paid no attention to it.)

Of one thing he—Ellery or Elroï—was sure: this was no kangaroo court, no rumor-ridden Star Chamber, no lynch mob. It was a high court of justice; and its baliff was about to speak.

For the Superintendent had risen. “We are assembled,” his flat, dry, uninflected voice intoned, “to sit in trial according to the laws and customs of Quenan.” And he sat down; that was all.

To silence.

And the silence grew.

Ellery had expected questions, objections—something on which he could base his opening remarks. Were they trying to obstruct, to defeat him in the task they had in effect assigned to him, by the dead weight of their silence? Passive resistance? Dream-tired though he was, he felt annoyance. Why the delay? Reluctance to face facts, however prolonged, could not alter them.

But as the silence deepened he began to sense an identity between what he was now witnessing and the stillness of a Quaker meeting, or an Orthodox synagogue during silent prayer, or a mosque during that first moment while the faithful await the imam’s invocation. And then it became a silence exceeding any of these, a silence so intense that he could not detect the slightest flutter of an eyelid or a nostril. It was as if they had all yielded to a yoga-like trance from which nothing but the last trumpet call would ever rouse them.

For a moment Ellery felt like those Gauls who, walking gingerly through the Rome they had just broken into, observed with an awe not so far from terror the white-bearded senators sitting so severely calm, so without movement, that the barbarians could only believe them to be demigods or statues …

He came to himself, the truth revealed. For slowly, gradually, as he stood there in that frozen room, with its utterly still company, the annoyance and restlessness and doubt seeped out of him, and the cloudy murk seemed to thin and lighten. And so Ellery came to understand the purpose of this time of concentrated quiet. It brought calm and peace into the room, and into the minds and hearts of all seated here.

Whereupon, once more, the Superintendent rose; but the Teacher, whose strange eyes were fixed on Ellery’s face, did not look the Superintendent’s way.

“Guest,” the official said in a very different voice, the voice of man, not rote, “do you now tell us of the things you have learned and of the things you would have us do. And we shall listen, and we shall reflect, and we shall judge.”

And he took his seat once more.

Ellery faced the robed figures around the long table with a great composure and tranquillity. (Not until later did he realize that this overriding feeling had been self-induced by something very like autohypnosis, serving not to dispel but to mask his extreme fatigue. He was feeling the illusive warmth of a man blissfully freezing to death.)

“Murder,” he began, and immediately paused. Had a shudder run through them at the word—never before uttered in this room, the forecourt to a shrine dedicated to peace and love? Or had it been his imagination?

“Let me first tell you what murder is,” Ellery said. “The life of a man was recently taken in this room” (and was there the slightest shift of every eye to the place on the floor where a new grass mat concealed the spilled blood, or had he—again—imagined it?) “and this man whose life was taken had not been charged with any crime, he had not been tried and convicted and sentenced to his death in the manner prescribed by law. The taking of human life without sanction or due process—that is murder. Storicai the Storesman was murdered.”

They were grimly, violently still.

“Now before the facts of a murder can be ascribed to any person, there are three things which must be demonstrated to link the person accused or suspected with the crime.

“These three things are called opportunity, and means, and motive.”

They did not yet understand, but they would. Ellery went on deliberately.

“Opportunity,” he said, holding up a finger. “This is to say, when death results from a physical attack on the person of the victim—such as the slaying of the Storesman with a hammer—there must be evidence that the person accused or suspected was in fact present on the scene of the murder at or about the time it occurred, or that he
could
have been present.

“Means.” Ellery held up a second finger. “This is to say, there must be evidence that the person accused or suspected had possession of, or had access to, the weapon with which the murder was committed.

“Motive.” He held up a third finger. “This is to say, that it can be shown that the person accused or suspected had a reason for wishing to take the life of the victim.”

He paused. Their faces were impassive but intent; whether they yet understood him it was too soon to judge.

“I shall try to prove opportunity first,” Ellery said. “Will the Miller come forward and sit in this place?” He indicated a stool he had asked the Successor to put near the head of the table.

The Miller rose from the long bench and came forward. He was an oak of a man, gnarly, with a vast spread of shoulder. Flour dusted his reddish beard and rusty eyebrows. He breathed heavily as he sat down on the stool.

“What happened yesterday, Miller, when you had finished grinding?” Ellery asked him gently.

The man raised huge hands and rubbed them into his temples, as if they were millstones with which he would grind out the answers. In the loud voice of one accustomed to making himself heard above the splash of the millrace, the rasp of the stones, and the clatter of the sails, he said, “The first of the new flour,” and stopped. “What about the first of the new flour?” The man looked surprised. “It was ready,” he explained, as to a child. “I had sacked the first of the new flour. In a white sack, according to the way. Being the first of the new flour, it must be blessed. So I heaved it up on my shoulder”—he demonstrated awkwardly—“and I carried it here to the holy house for the Teacher to bless it.”

“What time was that?”

Time? Just before 4:15. How did he know? He had observed the water clock as he left his mill.

“Very well. Now what did you do, Miller, when you carried the first sack of the new flour to the Holy Congregation House?”

The Miller started at him. “Why, I rang the bell, what else? But there was no answer, so of course I couldn’t go in. With the Teacher not here—or surely he would have come to the door?—I had no reason to stay. I started to walk back to the mill.”

“Started to?”

The Miller explained that he had walked only a short distance and had just turned into the trees when he heard footsteps and looked around. It was Storicai the Storesman, hurrying toward the holy house. “I was going to call out to him not to bother, that the Teacher was not there to answer the bell, but before I could speak Storicai was at the door, looking all round like—like—”

“As if he did not wish to be seen?”

The Miller, who was not perspiring, nodded his gratitude. “That is so, Guest.”

“Did Storicai see you?”

“I don’t think so. I was in the shadows of the trees.”

The shadows.
The flaxen wicks smoldered. Wax ran down the candles and formed huge weepers. The shadows writhed.

“And what did Storicai do then, Miller?”

The man looked from face to face. His voice became hoarse, trembling on the brink of a shout. The Storesman had committed a sin. He had pulled open the door of the holy house without ringing the bell and he had entered without waiting to be admitted—in fact, when the Teacher had not been there to admit him.