But…”The Book which was lost”? Had the Book of Micah ever been
“lost”? Ellery could not remember. It seemed unlikely, for surely…
“The Book of Micah,” Ellery said to the Teacher.
In the night, in the doorway of the holy house, the old man turned to Ellery, and the yellow glow on the far wall turned his eyes to flame. But it was only an effect of the lamp. For the Teacher said in a puzzled way,
“Micah? No. Mk’h.”
Ellery gave it up (for now, he told himself, but only for now). And he said, “This great trouble, Teacher. Is it written what kind of trouble it will be?” He swallowed, feeling childish. “A crime, perhaps?” He might have touched the old man with a red-hot iron. Agitation rippled over the ancient face as if a stone had been thrown into a pond. “A crime?” he cried. “A crime in Quenan? There has been no crime among us, Elroi, for half a century!”
Concerning doctrine or prophecy one might doubt, but Ellery could muster no reason for rejecting the patriarch’s testimony on a matter of yea-or-nay fact involving his own Valley. Yet how was it possible for a community of men, women, and children to exist which had known no crime for almost two generations? Since the days of ― who had been President then? ― Harrison, was it, the stern and bearded Presbyterian warrior who had been a general in the Civil War? Or walrus-mustached Cleveland, whose Vice-President was a man named Adlai E. Stevenson? No matter; it was another world, an American time and way of life as different as in Byzantium under the Paleologi ― while here in Quenan, life must have been exactly as today… and in all that time ― no crime?
“If there has been no crime in Quenan in half a century, Teacher,” Ellery said carefully, “then surely I may infer that half a century ago there was a crime?”
“Yes.”
“Would you tell me about it?”
The old man, tall against his taller staff, stood looking past Ellery at the ghost of a cottonwood tree, but not as if he were seeing it.
“Belyar was the Weaver then, and he had finished weaving ten bolts of cloth for the Storesman’s shelves. But first Belyar cut from each bolt an arm-long length and concealed the ten lengths in his house, and he made for himself new garments out of them. The Storesman observed this, and examined the bolts, and he saw that they were not of the usual lengths; and he questioned him.
“Belyar was silent. This the Storesman reported to me, and I ― when the Weaver again would not answer ― I reported it to the Crownsil. It was a hard time. Much was considered. But at last a search was ordered; and in the presence of witnesses the Superintendent searched the Weaver’s quarters and found scraps of the newly made cloth hidden in the bed, for the foolish man had not been able to part with even the scraps. And Belyar was tried by the Crownsil and he was declared guilty. Belyar’s beard was brown and, as he worked much in the weaving shed out of the sun, his skin was very pale.”
The sudden intrusion of this bit of description made Ellery start. He looked closely at the old man and thought he understood. That through-seeing gaze was looking at events happening again, happening now.
“He then confessed. ‘The washing goes slowly,’ Belyar said. ‘And it is hateful to me to wear clothes which are not fresh and clean. I took what is mine by right. For it was the work of my own hands.’ “ The heretic. One in fifty years!
“The Crownsil found him guilty, but it might not pass sentence. That heavy duty is the task of the Teacher. It was from my lips, then, that Belyar the Weaver heard his punishment for breaking the law of the community. I declared that he be given a piece of silver, and food and water sufficient for two days’ sustenance, and that he be then driven into the desert, never to return on pain of death.”
A piece of silver? It was the first mention of money Ellery had heard in Quenan.
“Never to return on pain of death, Teacher?” he said. “And was not the decree ― sending Belyar into the desert with food and water for only two days ― tantamount to sentence of death?”
“That is as it may be.” The old man’s face was set in stone. Then it softened. “It was within my power to decree Belyar’s death directly. Yet in my weakness I found that I could not. Such a thing had not happened in my lifetime.”
He went on to say that only strict obedience to their laws kept them a community, and that once the Weaver had broken the law he could not be permitted to remain in Quenan; there was no room for one whose continuing presence would ever remind the people of his awful act in stealing from his brothers. Nor could he be sent out into the world, for fear that he might bring the world down upon them. Thus banishment to the desert and almost certain death.
“He did not come back, or try to come back? Was his body never found?”
The old man sighed. “He was not seen or heard of again. And since his banishment there has been no crime in Quenan.” And he fell silent.
What had become of the pale-skinned thief? Did he stagger about the desert until he fell and died of hunger and thirst, to be covered by the shifting sands? Or had some Indian or desert rat killed him for the sake of his silver piece? It was even possible that he had been found in time by a ranchero, or that by some miracle of good fortune and hardihood he had made his way to one of the cities of the plain or the seacoast. And there he would have taken up his life ― in the era of the Beef Trust and the Sugar Trust and the Robber Barons; in the days when “that dirty little coward that shot Mister Howard” was entertaining the customers of his Leadville gambling hell with the tale of how he, Robert Ford, had put a bullet from an improved Colt .45 clean through the head of “Mister Howard” ― Jesse James; when every Western town was rimmed with cribs offering raw sex for sale along with rotgut whisky… How long would Belyar and his piece of silver have survived in such a civilization? How could life in the Garden of Eden have prepared him for it?
Death directly, Ellery mused, would have been far more merciful. But the old man could not have known that.
And…”there has been no crime in Quenan” since.
That was something to think about!
“Then what is this great trouble which is written?” Ellery asked.
“I do not know,” said the Teacher. “It is not written what it is, only that it will come.” And he sighed again, heavily. “Until your coming, Elroi, I had thought it might be fire, a flood, or a shaking of the earth, or drought, or a plague of locusts, or a great sickness. Now, with your talk of crime… Can it be? I ask, can it be the evil of man of which it is written?
“My heart is sore,” the old man went on, staring into the darkness.
“For, ask myself what I will, I cannot think of a crime to come so great as to be in the Book. What sin can occur in Quenan?” he cried. “Here there is no cause for envy or for greed. Even the thieving of Belyar the Weaver could not occur today, for our storehouse bursts with the fruits of our toil; so that, should a man wish for more than the common allotment, he has but to ask for it and it is given him freely. Hate? There is no hate in Quenan; if there were, surely the Teacher would know it. Adultery? In all our days not even an accusation of such has been brought against any man or woman among us. Slander? False pride? False witness? I tell you, these cannot be in Quenan.
“For we do not wait to obey our laws, we run to do so with joyous feet.
Corruption? What should I, or the Successor, or the Superintendent, or any of the Crownsil or the people generally, be corrupted with, and to what purpose? What one has, all have. And as bribery cannot be, so extortion cannot be. Here in Quenan, authority is not abused, trust is not broken, uncleanliness does not outlast the moment; and we are so slow to anger that the cause for it would wither before ever the anger came.
“My heart is troubled, Elroi, that you should suspect us of a capacity for crime.’’
The majestic voice ceased, and once again the little noises of the night intruded. Ellery shook his head in the darkness. It was too good to be true. He wanted to accept it, but he could not. Why hadn’t the Teache
r mentioned the greatest crime of all? he thought as the old man reached past him, shut the door of the Holy Congregation House, then took his arm and urged him gently onto the hardpacked earth of the village street.
Was it that the very notion was foreign to him and his community, so that it would never even cross his mind? As, for example, the concept of war was so foreign to the Eskimo culture that the people of the farthest North had no word for it in their vocabulary?
“And yet,” the Teacher said in the lowest register of his deep voice,
“and yet you are here, Elroi, and for a purpose. That which has been written for all the days to come I may know not; but this I know ― that which will be, will be. Blessed be the Wor’d for your coming. I am thankful even so.”
The water from the rivulet stopped splashing in the darkness somewhere, began again farther away, an irrigation ditch had been shut off, and another opened. He sensed that the Teacher was walking him back to the house where he had been lodged during the first night.
“How many years, Teacher, has Quenan been here?” he asked.
“To the number of three generations.”
“And you are very old. Can you remember when the community was founded?”
The Teacher was silent. When he spoke, his voice seemed faint.
“Tomorrow is another day, Elroi. This is your house. The Wor’d sustain you.”
Ellery half imagined that there was a very slight tremor in the old man’s powerful handclasp.
Later, lying on his pallet, Ellery heard a frog in some ditch lift up its voice. Weedit, weedit. And then another, and another, and another. Weedit, weedit, weedit… Not more than half awake, Ellery thought of frog spawn, silent in still waters; then of tadpoles, still silent; then the swift ascension to the land, the swarming, the crawling, the croaking… and at the last a voice, a human voice, saying something stubbornly.
Nevertheless, this voice said, fading as Ellery sank into sleep, the world does move…
III TUESDAY
April 4
ELLERY WAS FINISHING HIS breakfast in the communal dining room when the interruption came. (In spite of stern intentions he had overslept, and he was alone in the building except for the commissary staff, who were quietly cleaning up around him. He had tossed on the pallet all night and regretted having neglected to take one of the red capsules from the little bottle in his grip. Also, he missed coffee. Herb tea might be wonderfully healthful, but it did nothing for the taut Queen nerves.) The interruption came in the form of an excited voice.
“Quenan!”
The young man washing a nearby table top looked up, startled; then at Ellery, awed; then away.
“Quenan!” The voice was nearer. “Elroi’ ― ”
The Successor burst into the dining hall, his angelic face alight, the long hair tumbling into the curls of his young beard. “There is a message for you ― ” For a moment Ellery fancied that someone from outside had tracked him down ― the mere possibility made him recoil. But then the Successor said, “ ― from the Teacher. He asks that you come at once to the holy house!” And the young man ran out.
Ellery jumped up and hurried out after him. But the young Successor was speeding off in another direction, evidently on some task or errand, and Ellery made his way quickly to the Holy Congregation House. Here, just as he was about to open the door, he remembered the taboo, and he took hold of the bellrope instead and pulled it twice. And waited.
Butterflies danced between the world of light and the world of shade.
The sound of wood being chopped came to him: ka-thuh-thunk, ka-thuh-thunk. And the rich green smell of earth and water and plants.
Just as the door of the holy house opened, a little boy rode by astride the pinbones of a young donkey, intent on the dancing butterflies.
“Teacher ― ” Ellery said.
And ― ”Teacher,” said the little boy.
And ― ”Blessed be the Wor’d,” the Teacher said, to both. His eagle’s face softened as he looked at the child, and he raised his hand in a graceful gesture of benignity. “Walk in beauty,” the Navajo says in farewell. This old man walked in beauty.
The little boy smiled with delight. Then he spied Ellery, and the smile wavered. “Blessed be the Wor’d,” the child lisped hastily, and with uplifted hand made the same gesture.
“Come,” the old man said to Ellery. And he shut the door.
This time they did not sit at the table or pause at the Successor’s empty rooms. The Teacher led Ellery to the only door of his own room.
The light shed by the lamp over the sanquetum door in the main meeting room penetrated to the Teacher’s chamber, with its few stark furnishings, and by itself would have served dimly to illuminate it; but the chamber contained its own arrangements for light. These were three tall, very narrow windows, scarcely more than slits a few inches wide, one set in the far wall opposite the door, the other two in the walls to the side. Through each of these slit-windows a plinth of sunlight entered, to meet in the exact center of the room at the bed standing there, so that the bed itself was bathed in sun. (And now Ellery realized that three walls admitting sunlight meant three outside walls; the Teacher’s room was architecturally a wing of the building, exactly balanced on the other side by a wing housing the Successor’s two smaller rooms.)
The Teacher’s chamber was the room of a cenobite. Its narrow trestle bed was of wood covered by sewn sheepskins ― its mattress ― with a single thin blanket neatly spread out. To each side of the head of the cot stood a small square table; two rude chests occupied the midpoints of the two facing side-walls; a stool in one corner was identical with a stool in the corner diagonally opposite. The room itself was square.
And so it was easy, in this room of perfect balance, to sense that something was out of balance. Something jangled in this orderly structure, something was off-key.
Key… Ellery’s eye leaped, just anticipating the Teacher’s pointing finger, to the top of the left-hand table. On it, to one side and near a corner, lay a bracelet of some dull metal; and attached to the bracelet was a single key.
“Someone moved the key last night,” the Teacher murmured. He saw that Ellery was puzzled, and he said, “For someone to enter my room without my knowledge ― Elroi, this is a grave matter.”
“How can you be sure,” Ellery asked, “that the key was moved?” The old man explained. Each night after saying his prayers he took off the bracelet and placed it in the exact center of the table top. “Symmetry,” he said, “is a way of life with me, Elroi. I hold it the purest of esthetic forms.”
This startled Ellery, who had seen no evidence of esthetic devotion in the village: beauty, yes, but unrealized. Euclid alone looked on beauty bare…
“ ― and when I awoke this morning, I found the bracelet where you see it now ― not centered on the table, but near a corner. By this I know that someone entered my room as I slept. And what is far more serious ― ”
“ ― must have entered the holy house without ringing the bell, by stealth?” The Teacher nodded, fixing Ellery with his prophet’s eyes.
“This is not necessarily so, Teacher,” Ellery said.
“How not? Though it is true that I am the lightest of light sleepers.
Still, the bracelet has been moved. I can hardly count the years I have slept here, and nothing like this has happened before. Is it a sign? A warning?”
Ellery looked around, studied each of the slat-thin windows in turn.
“No one could have come through one of these,” he said, “not even the smallest child. But someone could have reached through… with a fishing rod ― No,” seeing the incomprehension on the old face, “no fishing rod here. All right ― a pole, then, a long stick of some sort. With it, someone could have lifted the bracelet from the table, pulled it through the window, and later returned it the same way.”
“But why?” asked the Teacher, in the same troubled way.
Ellery picked up the key. It was crudely fashioned fr
om the same dull metal as the bracelet. It looked rough and pitted, but it felt smooth ― too smooth. Partly on impulse, partly because he had felt this smoothness on keys before, Ellery lifted it to his nose. That wild, pungent odor ―
“Do you keep bees here?” he asked.
“Yes, although not many. We save most of the honey for the sick. And the wax ― ”
“Just so,” said Ellery. “The wax.”
Someone had taken a wax impression of the key during the night. And someone had fashioned, or was even now engaged in fashioning, a duplicate key ― to what?
“This is the key to the sanquetum, the forbidden room. It is the only key, and I alone may have it, for I alone may enter. Not even the Successor may accompany me,” the old man said. “Or have I told you that?”
They were silent. Voices faded down the lane, died away. A far-off cowbell sounded; an ass; the woodcutters broke their own silence: ka-thuh -thunk, ka-thuh- thunk. Somewhere children sang a simple song of a few pure notes. With such treasure as this, what was there to conceal in the sanquetum?
Ellery asked the question.
The old man sat down on one of his stools. Elbow on knee, hand on forehead, he pondered. At last he rose, beckoning Ellery to follow. They went out into the meeting room and stood together beneath the lamp burning over the locked door.
“It would be permitted for you to enter,” said the Teacher, with some difficulty.
“Oh, no,” Ellery said, very quickly.
“If you are here to open the Way, you may surely open this door.” But Ellery could not bring himself to the act. Whatever strange error had mistaken him for their Guest, to take advantage of it by setting foot in the holy of holies would desecrate it.
And on the Eighth Day Page 6