And on the Eighth Day (21 page)

The mask before him was the mask of tragedy. The change wrought in the short time since he had last seen the boy was horrifying. The eyes were cloudy and deep-sunken, the bloodless lips down-twisted, twitching; the whole young head seemed skeletal.

“You do not understand, Elroï.” The Successor’s voice, the Teacher’s words.

“Then make me understand! Because otherwise I will have no choice but to bring in authorities from the outside world to save your Teacher’s life. And that will mean the end of Quenan.”

Over and over again, the boy wrung his hands. “I know everything you have told me,” he cried. “I would do as you ask—oh, Elroï, you would not have to ask! But I am helpless. Why do you think I remained silent at the trial? I could not speak because the Teacher forbade it! He forbids it still, and I dare not disobey him.”

“Why, Successor?
Why
can’t you disobey him? What would happen to you if you did?” Ellery demanded.

The young head rolled from side to side, in agony. “I do not know what would happen, Elroï. It does not matter what would happen. It is as if you were to ask me, What would happen were you to raise your arms and fly to the stars? You do not understand. I cannot do it. I have never in my life disobeyed the Teacher and I cannot disobey him now!”

Ellery stared at the tragic mask, and suddenly he understood. The Successor was like the next-to-last Emperor of China, the nephew of the wicked Empress Dowager, imprisoned at her command when he tried to reform the corrupt practices of her regency. In prison he was visited by officials secretly in sympathy with his cause. Let the Son of Heaven but give the word, they said, and loyal troops would liberate him and place the “Old Buddha” herself in confinement. But the Emperor shook his head. It was impossible, he said. How could one raise one’s hand against a venerable ancestor? And he died a prisoner still, held fast by bars far stronger than the bars of his cell.

I cannot do it. I cannot disobey him.

The words rang in Ellery’s ears until they filled the night.

He remembered the dark lane flowing past him. He remembered the path moving like water under his feet. He remembered the noise in his ears, like a howling wind.

But he did not remember stumbling to his pallet and falling on it; he did not remember the new dawn creeping up from behind Crucible Hill.

He knew only darkness.

April 7

W
HEN HE OPENED HIS
eyes there were no shadows, but the great hush that hung over the Valley was not the usual noontime quiet. It was the silence of a ghost town, or rather of a town or a
Mary Celeste
suddenly abandoned by its human beings.

Then an ass brayed, and another; a bellow burst from the chest of a bull; dogs began to howl, as if something dreadful were about to happen.

Or was happening.

Or had happened?
With a cry, Ellery jumped out of bed. But then he remembered. It was not to be until sundown.

But … the silence? Had all Quenan fled into the desert rather than stay to witness?

He was still in his stale and rumpled clothes. The sleep had not refreshed him; and the sun pouring through the window did not wash away the ache in his bones.

He went out into the lane. No one was in sight, and he walked through the village. Here and there, through an open window, he caught a glimpse of movement; once he saw a distant someone—the Waterman?—working in a field.
The mills are to turn, and the dry fields burn.
No, the people of Quenan had not left their Valley. They simply could not bear to look upon it on this day, as if the hills themselves were due to depart with the departing sun. Most of them had withdrawn into their houses and shut the doors.

Great must be their grief.

And great was the silence which hung over the Valley of the Shadow, and all that endless afternoon Ellery wrestled with his problem and found no answer to it

The choices always seemed to come down to three:

He could let the events take their course, bowing to the will of the Teacher.

He could tell the truth to the community. But in that case, the Teacher had said, he would deny it, and the people would believe him and not Ellery; and Ellery knew that this was so.

He could go for help to prevent the sentence’s being carried out. But then Quenan itself would die.

Talk about Hobson!

Ellery walked the tree-lined lanes, climbed the green terrace of the hills, picked his way along the immaculate furrows of the fields. No one appeared to speak or even wave to him. Twice he headed in the direction of the only figures he laid eyes on in his wanderings, but when he reached the place no one was there. He could not bring himself to knock on any door.

Late in the afternoon he found himself drawn back to the Holy Congregation House. The Teacher was alone there, sitting on a stool. He greeted Ellery with the familiar gesture of benediction and indicated the bench. Ellery sank onto it. The old man seemed completely at peace.

“Teacher,” said Ellery, “I beg you to reconsider.”

“Very well,” the patriarch said calmly.

Ellery’s heart jumped. “Then you will tell them the truth?” he cried.

For a moment the old man said nothing; then: “I have reconsidered, Elroï, as you asked. I find no reason to change that which is written. I will say no more to the people, nor will you.”

The sun began to set. The people seemed to come from everywhere—houses, barns, fields, trees, shadows—springing up like the reapings of the dragon’s teeth. They came from everywhere and became one, a sluggish beast of many heads sluggishly moving along.

And Ellery became one with them.

He saw the Teacher, tall among the many, the throng making way for him with sighs and moans as he moved slowly through, his right hand describing the ritual blessing.

And so Quenan came to the place; and when the crowds parted and Ellery saw what it was that their bodies had concealed, lying on the earth, he almost cried out with relief and joy.

How could he have been so blind as to take literally what was intended as a symbol only? What he was witnessing was a parallel to the rites of the Penitentes of the New Mexico mountains—the Brotherhood of the Light, as they called themselves—who yearly re-enacted the great passion of their religion and chose one of their number for the central role. Performed in secret places, intended as a purging of sin, the mystery stopped short of the taking of life, although its principal suffered torments enough.

He wondered how the isolated community of Quenan had learned of these remarkable rites. Or had they developed a similar rite independently, altering, as it were, the ancient prompt-book? For what he was now witnessing …

The Teacher lay down in the place prepared for him.

There was now not even a sigh.

So might the ancient Egyptians have stood at the annual re-enactment of the death of Osiris—knowing it was drama, yet not-knowing, too, with one part of themselves believing it to be a real thing, happening before their eyes.

And the Superintendent stepped forth from among them, holding a vessel of some sort in his cupped hands. And all breath was stopped, even the breath of the wind.

The Superintendent tenderly lifted the Teacher’s head with his left hand, and held the vessel to the ancient lips with his right, and then departed from him. The Teacher lay perfectly still. The sun set then, plunging the scene in blood, reddening the palms of the recumbent patriarch. All at once a soft spring breeze arose, and the grasses whispered in alarm …

Ellery awoke to a great anger. To allow himself to be so cozened and bewitched! The Teacher and his puppets had succeeded in infecting him with the disease of their fantasies, making him believe that the real was unreal and the unreal real. But he was cured. What had seemed an experience of pathos and profound tragedy was simply a distasteful demonstration of bumpkin fanaticism. The old man was a natural-born actor, and soon the lesser actors in this primitive drama would be stepping forward to perform their silly roles, too. Well, he had had enough of the nonsense! It was time to call a halt.

A woman nearby began to wail, rocking back and forth. Another woman—ah, the Weaver!—took up the lament. The children began to cry in a frightened way. (They had been coached, too!) And then the man …

Ellery raised his arms high and shouted, “This has gone far enough!” and strode over to where the old man lay with arms outstretched to the darkening skies; and Ellery dropped to one knee, and reached out his hand to shake the thin shoulder.

But the hand remained in midair.

Out of the jumble in Ellery’s head an orderly thought took shape: I have been following the wrong prompt-book, too. The laws of Quenan are not the laws of Rome. The drink was not the symbolic preliminary to carrying out the symbolic sentence; it
was
the sentence, and there was nothing symbolic about it.

The Teacher had not been acting after all. His face was at peace still, but it was not the same peace; in the manner prescribed by the laws of Quenan—as it was written that it must be, and as it was done, feet together, arms outstretched, in holy symmetry—the Teacher lay dead.

April 8

A
ND ELLERY WEPT.

April 9

T
HE DAY WAS WELL
along when Ellery left the house he had occupied during his stay in Quenan. The day before, he had not left it at all. Now, standing on the doorsill and looking about, though the flowers still bloomed and the leaves hung green he felt even more strongly that this was a place of the dead. Not a soul was to be seen, not a sound to be heard. He stepped out into the lane.

The public buildings, as he passed, seemed hollow ruins; the little houses, earth-stained artifacts of a long-crumbled past. It was just as well, he thought, that the people had crept into their holes. It meant that he didn’t have to say good-bye to anyone (and suppose one of them raised a hand in blessing and said, “The Wor’d go with you”?—it would be too much to bear). No, it was time to go, and the sooner and more quietly the better. A week and a day “out of time, out of space” were enough for a mere mortal.

Still, as Ellery strolled through the silent hamlet, he could not help remembering with pleasure the previous strolls, the open faces of the Quenanites, the brown-skinned children offering him flowers shyly … Here loomed a tree he had grown fond of, there shone a familiar splotch of ochre on a wall. Had it been a mere week or so that he had been here? It felt more as if in his own flesh he had made the trek across the burning sands with the founding fathers of Quenan.

He came for the last time to the Holy Congregation House. There hung the bell, unmoved. He scanned the familiar legend on it:

From Earth’s gross ores my Tongue’s set free

To sound the Hours upon the Sea

Yes, the hills walling Quenan, together with the Valley, might be likened to a ship, the surrounding desert the sea—a ship forever becalmed under a cloudless sky, yet always with some creak of calamity impending.

Should he go into the holy house? The Teacher was not there. Why bother? Yet the Teacher
was
there. He was in every crack and cranny. Well, why not bid farewell to a ghost?

Ellery went in.

The holy house seemed empty, although the Successor must be in his chambers. The Successor? He had already succeeded! The Teacher was dead; long live the Teacher. What thoughts must be going through the boy’s mind? And what must he be feeling? Grief? Guilt? Remorse? Terror? Well, whatever they were, he would have to wrestle with them alone.

Through the silent conventicle he went, and paused at the door of the forbidden room. He turned, not realizing at first that he was looking for the old man to ask permission to enter. Almost he sensed the prophet’s presence. But only almost. He turned back to the door. The sense of violation, of desecration, was still strong, and he had to force himself to try the door. It was unlocked (
O temporal O mores!
), and he went in.

Nothing was changed in the sanquetum. The eternal lamp still burned; how, being eternal, could it not? And the silence was here as always. The light thinned and thickened, thinned and thickened; but then the shadows which had been set to dancing by the opening of the door settled down; and all at once Ellery had the most absurd feeling that the old Teacher was with him in the little room, not merely in spirit but in body also … and the rich voice, blessing him …

He shook himself back to reality (and
now
what was real?) and stared into the old glass-front china closet, the “arque” the old man had bought to house the mysterious “book which was lost.” On its top shelf still stood the two columns of coins, fifteen Carson City dollars in one, fifteen Carson City dollars in the other … thirty pieces of silver indeed. The old Teacher’s father could hardly have dreamed, when he accepted the store of silver dollars to become a treasure for Quenan, that he was enshrining a curse. A curse that would lie silently, “hidden in the urn,” for seventy years, and then unloose a passion that would doom his begotten son.

Ellery almost reached out to steal those terrible coins and scatter them in the desert.

But he could not bring himself to touch them.

But the book, the open book on the lower shelf in its black-letter German type—that was something else. About the book he would have to take action, fitting action, or he would never sleep soundly again.

He opened the glass door of the arque and lifted the volume out as if it were alive. He could not run the risk of letting someone—the Successor; no, the new Teacher—see him taking it away; so he tucked it under one arm securely between his shirt and his jacket, and buttoned the jacket, and felt the book burn his flesh. And he left the sanquetum forever.

He was about to shut the sanquetum door when a great thought struck him. Why not leave it open?
Fiat Lux
…
Mehr Licht!
Let the shadows die.

He left it open.