And on the Eighth Day (7 page)

for the pasture and for the sunlight on the pasture, we bless the Wor’d. may our hands work well and our feet walk well, in the pasture, and in coming, and in going, let us not lift up our voices in anger when we work or when we walk, not against brother, not against beast or bird, think on the Wor’d who keeps our voices from anger.

“I see,” Ellery murmured. “I see …”

The prayers were written on small lengths of paper, each sewn with thread to the next until a considerable scroll was formed, and the whole rolled up and tied with a soft cord. There were no capital letters in the written text—this caught his attention at once—except the W of Wor’d … Yes, definitely a W. Did this mean that he had been wrong in thinking “Wor’d” was a corruption of “Lord”? Or had a simple pronunciation change come to reflect itself in the spelling? Or did the break in the word—indicated in the written form by an apostrophe, in the oral form by a just perceptible pause—trace to a missing or dropped letter? And if so, did “Wor’d” stand for “World”?

Language, accents, attitudes, forms … So many things in Quenan (the name itself!) tantalized with their almost-differences. It was … yes, it was exactly like a dream, in which the powerless dreamer never quite grasped (while wholly grasping) the phantom realities of the experience.

Ellery looked up from the scroll. When he and the Teacher had sat down, what sunlight penetrated to the interior of the Holy Congregation House had come through the eastern windows. Now it was slanting through the western windows.

“It is no longer my custom to eat the midday meal,” the Teacher said presently. “The people have finished theirs, but there is always enough for one more. Will you come now and eat? I will remain with you.”

“I’m sorry that I’ve missed joining with the people.” Ellery rose, feeling hunger. And, as always these days, weariness.

“There will be a time.” The Teacher rose, too, and smiled. It seemed to Ellery a sad smile.

They paused outside the door. Ellery blinked and sneezed in the bright afternoon.

“This is the bell?” he asked. “The bell which must be rung and answered before entering the holy house?”

The Teacher nodded. The bell was perhaps a foot high. It was discolored with age, its surface scarred inside as well as out; the rim, where the clapper touched it, was worn very thin. It hung about chest-high; and by peering closely Ellery could see that two legends ran along its lip. One read:

17
The Foundary Bell Lane Whitechapel
21

and the other:

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

To sound the Hours upon the Sea

An English-made ship’s bell dating from the reign of Queen Anne! When this bell had been cast, the King James Bible was a mere century old; Shakespeare had walked the crooked streets of London during the childhood of some very old man; George Washington’s birth was twenty years in the future. Through what perilous seas forlorn had the bell sounded its note through the centuries? And how (most marvelous of all) had it come here, to Quenan, in the American desert?

Ellery asked the Teacher, but the patriarch shook his head. As it was, so had it been. He did not know.

And, duly, Ellery marveled and went on to feed his stomach. The communal dining hall was like a barn with many windows, full of light and air and hearty smells. The food was simple and filling—a vegetable soup, chili and pinto beans, steamed corn with butter, stewed fruit, and another variety of herb tea. A young married couple waited on them; apparently this was a rotational duty. Wide-eyed, reserved, yet shyly expectant, with proper deference toward the Teacher, they gave most of their attention to the guest, the outsider. The only outsider they had ever seen.

Throughout Ellery’s meal the Teacher prayed silently. When Ellery was finished, the Teacher led him outside; and for the remainder of the afternoon—until the shadows inundated the land and the windows began to sprout candles—the old man conducted him about the Valley, answering Ellery’s questions. Up and down the inner rim of Crucible Hill they went, surveying the cultivated fields, greeting the people at their toil. Ellery was fascinated. He had never seen so many different shades of green in a state of nature. And everything was aromatic with growing things and sagebrush smoke—the wood of the sagebrush was brought in from the desert hills, the Teacher told him, to feed the fires of Quenan …

The dream quality intensified; in one day the world outside had become invisible in the mists, and the mists themselves had almost been forgotten. It was as if Quenan and all that it contained, including himself,
were
the world. (Had Adam and Eve known the nature of their Garden until they were cast out of it?)

On his curious sublevel the old Ellery kept musing. Where were art, and music, and literature, and science in this capsule in space-time? They were not here. But also not here—so far as he could tell—were discontent, and hatred, and vice, and greed, and war. The truth, it seemed to him, was that here in the lost valley, under the leadership of the all-wise patriarch, existed an earthly Eden whose simple guides were love of neighbors, obedience to the law, humility, mercy, and kindness.

And, above all, faith in the Wor’d.

It was late that night when Ellery finally voiced the question he had struggled with from the beginning.

They stood in the open doorway of the Holy Congregation House, with the soft uproar of the night in their ears. A sweet odor rose from the damp earth, resting from the day. The small glow of the lamp over the sanquetum door shone behind them in the quiet building. “You are troubled, Elroï,” the Teacher said. “Yes,” said Ellery. “Yes … It seems so long ago that we met. But it was only yesterday, at sunset, on the crest of the hill.”

The Teacher nodded. His remarkable eyes pierced the darkness as if it were not there.

“You spoke then as if you had been expecting me, Teacher.”

“That is so.”

“But how could you have known I was coming? I didn’t know it myself. I had no idea I was going to take the wrong turn—” The Teacher said, “It was written.” So might a priest of the Toltec have answered Cortés, thought Ellery; and instantly wondered why the thought had come to him. Cortés, whose armor glittered like the sun god whose return had been predicted. Cortés, who had brought to the faithful of Quetzalcoatl only death and destruction. Ellery stirred. “You spoke, Teacher,” he said cautiously (was it out of some atavistic fear that he might unleash evil merely by speaking of it?), you spoke of a great trouble that would befall your Valley and your people. And you said that I was sent to prepare—”

“To prepare the way. Yes. And to glorify the Wor’d.”

“But what trouble, Teacher? And where is it written?”

The patriarch’s eyes rested on him. “In the Book of Mk’h.”

“I beg your pardon?” Ellery said. “The Book of what?”

“The Book of Mk’h,” the Teacher said. “The Book which was lost.”

A little drawer opened somewhere in Ellery’s head: the fact that the Book was lost and not is lost was noted and filed away. “Mk’h …” he said. “May I ask how that word is spelled, Teacher?”

The old man spelled it, having some difficulty with the hesitation sign. “Mk’h,” he said again, stressing the hesitation.

“Mk’h.” Ellery repeated. “What does it mean, Teacher?”

The patriarch said simply, “I do not know.”

“I see.” How could the old man not know? “In what language is it, Teacher?”

The old man said, “Neither do I know that.”

This was awkward. And Ellery bent to the task, examining the mystery. Mk’h … Could it be, he thought suddenly, some pristine or even aborted form of Micah? The Book of Micah! Sixth of the books of the Minor Prophets in the Old Testament … Micah, who had prophesied that
out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old
…
And this man shall be the peace
…! 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, Elroï, 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.