And on the Eighth Day (4 page)

Ellery came to himself. The old man had risen and taken Ellery’s hand in his; and in his odd eyes there was something like excitement (though not exactly that) and something less than concern (though almost that). And he said to Ellery, quite intelligibly, “The time of plowing is over, the days of waiting are at an end.”

Ellery searched his memory. “Was the old hermit quoting something? No, nothing Ellery could recognize. And where was the younger hermit?

“The time of the threshing of the harvest is here, and the great trouble is soon to come upon us.”

No, Ellery decided, nothing he was familiar with.

“Art thou the first?”

The question rang in Ellery’s ears.

“The first?” he repeated foolishly.

“The first. He who comes to us in the time of our great trouble, and prepares the way for the second. Praised be the Wor’d.”

No doubt about it now—some sort of slight pause in
Wor’d
. But what could it all mean? He could only look into those unfathomable eyes and repeat, “The second?”

The old man nodded slowly. “The second shall be first, and the first shall be second. It is written thus. We thank thee, O Wor’d.”

Had the statement been uttered by another man, Ellery might have passed it off as gibberish, a paraphrase of some imagined Scripture. But this man—“the old, old, very old man”—this man compelled respect. Almost he compelled belief.

“Who are you?” Ellery asked.

“Truly thou knowest me,” the prophetic mouth smiled gravely. “I am the Teacher.”

“And the name of this place?”

A silence, briefly. Then, “I had forgotten that you are a stranger here, even though your coming is a sign that the Wor’d is sure to follow. The place where we stand goes by the name of Crucible Hill, and below us is the Valley of Quenan. This name you know, seeing that it is your own. And what you are cannot be hidden from you.” He bowed.

My God, Ellery thought, he’s mistaken me for someone else, someone he’s been waiting for. A tragicomedy of coincidence, based on nothing more substantial than a similarity of sounds. But whom has he mistaken me for? On hearing my name, Ellery, he prostrated himself in humblest reverence, thinking I had said “
Elroï
,” or “
Elroy
”—“
thou, God, seest me
.” He took me for …

Ellery could not bring himself to believe it.

Through the giddiness he fought against, he heard the old man—“the Teacher”—saying, “My people do not know the mystery that is to be; they do not know the trouble which is coming upon them, nor how to save themselves when the hailstorm dashes the crop to the earth. They have lived as children. What will they do when the fire rages?”

His grip on Ellery’s hand tightened. “Come,” he said, “come and abide with us.”

Ellery heard his voice asking from far away, “For how long?”

And said the old man, “Until thy work is done.”

Tucking his staff under his arm, the other hand still hidden by his robe (holding the trumpet?—had there been a trumpet?), he gently drew Ellery forward and began to walk him down the inner slope of the hill.

And Ellery stepped into another world. It was so startling that almost he cried out. One moment he had been in a desert of sand and naked rock, the next he was descending into a land green and fat with trees and grass and growing crops. In the basin formed by the circle of hills the soil had been terraced; plow ridges ran along the natural contours of the land. In the twilight’s hush he heard the pleasant sound of water trickling, and when he turned in the direction of the sound he saw a rivulet emerging from underground and obediently following the course laid out for it. Plainly some master hand had directed with love and skill this conversion of the desert, so that no grain of earth, no drop of water, should go to waste.

And now, far down the slope, he noticed for the first time a settlement. There were enough houses to constitute a village—fifty of them, he estimated, most of them small, a very few larger, and all of the simplest construction. And then an evening breeze came up, and he heard faint voices; and the breeze brought with it a scent of smoke, which he could see rising in slow spirals from the houses.

It was the odor of burning sagebrush.

They were halfway down the slope when the sun set abruptly behind the western shoulder of the hill.

A great shadow fell quickly over the valley of—what had the old man called it?—Quenan.

Ellery shivered.

April 3

T
HE EYE HAD BEEN
looking at Ellery unblinking for a long time before he could bring himself to consider it. His attention once directed at it, it ceased to be an eye and became—obviously—a knothole.

Aye, tear her tattered ensign down
—

“That’s enough of that nonsense!” he said firmly, sitting up. His sudden movement sent the worn clean quilt sliding to the floor—a journey of no great distance, he learned immediately, since he had been sleeping on sheepskins spread over a tick stuffed with hay and corn shucks. The smell of all three was plain. He was not in some primitive motor court after all.

And with that, he remembered.

As had happened before and was to happen again, he got up believing he was fully rested; the ache in his bones he attributed to his having slept without a mattress or bedsprings.

He automatically looked around for a shower but there was none; he saw no sign of plumbing. The crude cottage had three small rooms, sparingly equipped with furniture as primitive and unpainted as the cottage itself. But all the wood glowed with a patina that gave off a definite odor. Ellery sniffed at a chair. Beeswax …

On one of the tables lay a lump of homemade soap, a length of clean cloth evidently intended as a towel, and a salt-glazed water pitcher and bowl and cup. The pitcher was full. His luggage was neatly stacked in a corner of the room.

He took a sponge bath, gasping, then got into clean clothes. He brushed his teeth, combed his hair. Shaving … no hot water …

From the door came the rap of wood on wood. “Come in,” Ellery said. He braced himself.

The Teacher entered. In one hand was his staff, in the other a basket. “Bless the Wor’d for the blessing of your coming,” the old man said sonorously; and then he smiled. Ellery’s answering smile was partly directed to himself for indulging a conceit: what could the old man’s burden be but the fairy-tale basket of goodies? To his astonishment, that was what it proved to be—napkin covering and all.

“Commonly I dine alone,” the Teacher said. “And it may be that you will sometimes wish to eat with the community in the dining hall. This first meal, however, I wish us to share, and here.”

There was a fruit juice strange to Ellery (later he learned that it was a blend of mulberry and cactus pear); its flavor was bland and respectful of a nervous morning stomach. There was a platter of cornmeal pancakes with butter and syrup—probably sorghum or sorgo. Ellery missed his coffee, but the milk (it was ewe’s milk, very rich) was warming and the gourd of herb tea, hot and sweetened with honey, made an interesting substitute.

Except for the old man’s whispered prayers as he washed his hands and ate and drank, the meal proceeded in silence.

“Are you content with this food?” the Teacher asked

“Yes,” said Ellery. “I am content.”

“Blessed be the Wor’d, and we are thankful … We may now go.” He brushed the table clean of crumbs, repacked the basket, and rose.

Puddles of sunlight lay along the tree-lined lane which they followed to a building of gray stone: A murmur of childish voices became audible as they approached. Small rooms, each containing a table and two benches, opened off the main hall where the children were assembled. Of course, Ellery thought, without surprise: he is the Teacher—this must be the school.

The smallest children sat up front on the lowest benches; girls sat on one side, boys on the other. They rose as the Teacher confronted them. Row on row of shyly smiling, grave, or respectfully curious faces—all sun-tanned, all clean, all devoid of apathy or insolence—row on row to the teen-agers at the rear. Ellery saw each face clearly, and each face was clear.

“My children,” said the Teacher. “Let us bless the Wor’d.”

No head was bowed, no eye closed, no word spoken. An intense silence settled over the room. Dust motes, dancing in the sunbeams from the unglazed windows, seemed to move more slowly. A bird lifted up its song not far off.

“This is a great thing,” the Teacher said. “You have all been guests in one another’s houses. Now there is a guest among us who is a guest of all, of all Quenan. His coming is a gift to us of the greatest importance. I will tell you now only that it has been foretold. What he is to do, you will all witness. To the Wor’d, our thanks for sending him. This is today’s lesson. We shall keep today as a holiday. You may go home now; you may put on your holiday robes, you may play or study or help your parents as you wish. Now, go. Blessed is the Wor’d.”

He passed among them, touching the head of one, the shoulder of another, lightly patting a cheek or an arm. The children looked wonderingly at Ellery, but they did not speak to him. The boys were dressed in the fashion of Storicai, the old man’s companion at the End-of-the-World Store—collarless shirt and “clam-digger” pants; the girls wore long one-piece dresses. All were barefoot. Presently he was to see them emerge from their houses like figures in a Biblical painting, yet with no hint of masquerade; some carried flowers.

Ellery walked with his guide through the village, accepting with wonder the occasional flower offered to him, even by the older boys.

“Do you have many visitors—guests—from outside?” Ellery asked. And found himself adding, “Teacher?”

“None,” said the Teacher.

“None? In the past, surely—?”

“In the past, none. You are the first—as it is written. We know little of the outside, and the outside knows nothing of us.”

The light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not
.

Ellery observed the village with mounting excitement.

Nestled in their patches of garden, the weathered little cottages were bare of ornamentation except for vines, which had been allowed to overrun the walls. The natural wood had turned silvery gray and yellow-brown, with an occasional splash of ochre; the green of the vines and plants and the multicolors of the flowers completed a chromatic harmony that brought peace to the eye. And for contrast there was the rough and random stone of the few larger, public buildings.

Visually the dwellings had a curious vitality, as if they too had grown out of the earth. And here was a lesson, Ellery thought, for architects. It was as if art (or artfulness) was not so much frowned on here as unheard of. There was an artless beauty about it, an innocence, a natural functionalism that, when he thought of the mathematical
Bauhaus
-style urban boxes or Le Corbusier’s machines for living, made him wince.

There was no paving. There was no electricity. There were no telephone lines. Barns and farmland and pasture revealed no combustion-engine equipment; even the plows were mostly of wood. And yet everything was lush and teeming. It was hard to remember that beyond the circle of the hills—Crucible Hill, had the old man said?—lay all but lifeless desert.

And the people …

Now and then a woman came out on her doorstep to greet the Teacher respectfully, a respect tinged with something remotely like uneasiness, as if the newness and wonder of the guest had suddenly overshadowed everything. Or a man on his way to the fields, or returning—feet stained with earth, hoe on shoulder, gourd of water in hand—would greet the Teacher; and again the eyes would dart to the newcomer, and away, and back again.

Except for the children, free on their holiday, everyone was busied with some task; yet there was no air of drudgery, none of the tension or depression so often produced by industrial work. Everyone Ellery saw seemed happy and at peace.

In spite of an occasional browsing animal, the un-paved streets were remarkably clean, a phenomenon presently explained when they came upon the village’s department of sanitation. It consisted of one very old man and one very young woman, who were raking the dirt of the lanes with whisklike implements and carefully depositing each twig and turd and leaf in a donkey cart

The wonder in their eyes as they glanced at Ellery, and then hastily away, was as deep in the very old man as in the very young woman.

It was a wonder not confined to the people of Quenan. Ellery himself was filled with it. Here, indeed, was the Peaceable Kingdom.

Or so it seemed.

“Here we must stop awhile,” said the Teacher, pausing before a large building, barn-size and barn-simple. The heat of the day had increased, and it was a relief to rest. This building had fewer windows than the school, and it was cool inside. Blinking in the dimness after the dazzling sun, Ellery located a bench and sat down.

They were evidently in a sort of central warehouse or supply depot. Shelves ranged the walls and divided the interior into sections; there were bins and compartments and drawers. Bunches of herbs hung drying and dried, wreaths of chili peppers, ropes of red onions glowing like embers in the half-light; white corn, and yellow corn, and Indian corn with kernels of every color from black to lavender; sacks of meal, dried beans in greater variety than Ellery had ever seen outside a Mexican or Puerto Rican grocery. He saw wheels of cheeses, bales of wool, dirt-brown on the outside and creamy white on the shorn underside; hanks of yarn, huge spools of thread, bolts of cloth, tools, parts of looms and spinning wheels, bundles of wax candles hanging by looped wicks, kegs of nails, packets of bone needles, heaps of horn combs, buttons, wooden spools, earthernware, seeds, even crocks of preserves.

It was a primitive cornucopia, a rude horn of plenty; and there was a counter of sorts behind which stood the man Storicai, who had been with the Teacher at Otto Schmidt’s store. He greeted Ellery solemnly, his glance slipping past as if to see whether the guest had not, perhaps, come to the storehouse in that strange vehicle which had so fascinated him outside Schmidt’s that day …