And on the Eighth Day

by Queen, Ellery

  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: go 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 was about to play.

  His to present, his to accuse, his to prosecute. Elroi 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 Elroi, hazy with fatigue, misted over with sorrow, he paid no attention to it. )

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

  For the Superintendent had risen. “We are assembled,” his flat, dry, uninfected 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 heart 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 over-riding 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 fore-court 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 o
ccurred, 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 now 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.

  “He committed a sin,” the Miller repeated, knuckling his head.

  “Thank you,” said Ellery, and the big man went heavily back to his place. “Waterman?”

  The Waterman rose and came forward. He was tall and young and sleek and graceful, walking with a glide; but his chief feature was wetness.

  His clothing showed more damp than dry and his darkly bearded face and quick brown hands shone with moisture in the candlelight. He made Ellery think of a salamander.

  “Yesterday afternoon,” the Waterman answered Ellery’s question, “I set out to clean the well across from the holy house. While I was in the well I heard the bell outside the holy house ring, and I started to climb up to ask whoever it was to lend me a hand in hauling up the bucket. But I slipped, and this made me slow. I heard the bellringer ― I suppose now it must have been the Miller ― I heard him go away. Then I heard someone else coming. I lifted my head above the housing of the well, and I saw…

  “ He stopped to wipe his slick forehead with his slick hand.

  “And you saw what, Waterman?” Ellery asked.

  “It is as the Miller said. I saw Storicai go into the holy house. He did not ring the bell. He was not admitted by the Teacher.” Ellery glanced at the patriarch. The old man might have been alone in the long room, wrapped in an impenetrable silence. A great calm covered his face; his eyes, burning in the reflected light of the many candles, seemed fixed on something far away, a vision to which the stone walls of the holy house were no impediment.

  Ellery felt the stirring of wonder. It was as if the Teacher did not care.

  Could he actually be indifferent to the purpose of this unprecedented proceeding? Or was it resignation?

  “Waterman, what was the time when you observed Storicai enter the Holy Congregation House unlawfully?”

  “It was about a quarter past the hour of four, Guest.”

  “Do you say this because that was the time fixed by the Miller, or because you knew of your own knowledge?”

  “I knew of my own knowledge,” the Waterman said quietly, “from the slant of the shadow made by the sun in the well.”

  “You may return to your place, Waterman.” Ellery waited until the tall salamander had glided back to his seat on the bench. Then he addressed the motionless figures around the table. “It will be seen, then, that the Storesman is placed at the scene of his killing, by the testimony of the Miller and the Waterman, at a quarter past the hour of four. How long after he entered the holy house was he killed? Five minutes. This I know because the Storesman was wearing on his wrist a timepiece belonging to me, which I had lent him for the duration of my visit to Quenan. This timepiece, called a wrist watch, was broken by a blow of the hammer during the killing as Storicai flung up his hand to protect himself.”

  He took the wrist watch out of his pocket and held it up. “As you see, the hands stopped at twenty minutes past the hour of four ― as I said, five minutes after the Storesman entered the holy house.” When he was satisfied that all had seen the position of the hands, he pocketed the watch and said, “I summon the Growther.” The Growther, or Grower, was middle-age. He was long in the body, like a cornstalk; and the skin under his fingernails was black from lifelong rooting in the earth. He spoke haltingly, in an eerie voice, as a plant might speak if it could be taught words.

  Yesterday afternoon, the Growther said, he had visited the sick Slave.

  He had been with the Slave a quarter of an hour, praying with him and telling him of the crops. He had left the Slave’s house when the Teacher arrived. He knew that the time he had come was three o’clock and the time he had left was a quarter past three because of the clock in the Slave’s house.

  And the Growther said, “Did you know, Guest, that inside the slave’s clock lives a little bird? At one time the bird would come out and call the hours. But it has not called the hours for a very long time.”

  “I did not know that, Growther,” said Ellery gravely. “Thank you. And now, will the Herder come forward?”

  The Herder was a knotty oldster with a great spreading beard. He squinted from under his bird’s-nest brows as if into the sun, his skin was like the skin of a long-dried apricot. Try as Ellery would, he got nothing out of the whiskered mouth but bleats and grunts.

  “What did you do yesterday afternoon, Herder?”

  Bleat.

  “Did you not visit the Slave’s house?”

  Grunt, accompanied by a nod.

  “When did you step into the Slave’s house?”

  Grunt.

  “Did you get there at four o’cloc
k, or later?”

  Bleat, untranslatable.

  “Oh, all right,” said Ellery. “Yesterday I understood you to say that you got there a bit before a quarter past four. Is that so?” Nod.

  “You found the Teacher there when you arrived?” Nod.

  “And the Teacher left the Slave’s house at your coming?” Nod.

  “Immediately at your coming?”

  Grunt, bleat, nod-nod.

  “Thank you, that will be all.” Ellery turned to the Teacher. “Can the Slave be brought here now?”

  He saw now that, for all his distant look, the patriarch was attending the proceedings. For he nodded at once to the Successor, who hurried from the holy house. They must have had the Slave all ready to be brought in, because the door opened again a bare two minutes later to reveal the young Successor, sweating. He said something, and the Miller and the Waterman rose at once and stepped outside. They returned immediately carrying the Slave. Someone ― perhaps the Carpentersmith ― had rigged up a sort of reclining chair to which had been fixed two poles, making a crude palanquin; and in it half lay the ailing man.The Successor swiftly indicated the spot near the foot of the table where the litter should be set down; the Miller and the Waterman set it down precisely there; then all three returned to their places.

  The Slave looked as old as the Teacher was but did not look. He looked like the southwestern hills ― black-brown-red of skin with dry gullies for wrinkles over a skeleton of calcified bones, moribund as the desert itself. Only the Slave’s eyes were alive ― shining-black as a bird’s eyes, and as unwinking. And this Slave, who was no longer slave, had the massive dignity of his blood; yes, and curiosity, too. The bird’s eyes took in everything before they settled on Ellery’s face.

  “I thank you,” said his echo of a voice; and Ellery knew that the whispering tones were giving him thanks for having him brought to the Holy Congregation House for his last Crownsil meeting. “And now I am ready.”

  “I will not tire you” ― he had started to say “Slave,” but the word had stuck in his throat ― ”for my questions are few,” and Ellery quickly drew from the ancient man the story of his visitors of the day before, and confirmation of the times they had arrived at and departed from his house ― the Growther, the Teacher, the Herder.