And on the Eighth Day (14 page)

The misery of man is great upon him
…

He dressed and carried his toilet kit to the rear of the communal kitchen for hot water and he washed and shaved and stumbled into the dining room. The first shift of the people were at breakfast, a few speaking in low tones, most speaking not at all. At Ellery’s entrance all speech stopped.

Some looked at him shyly; others with awe—the unfamiliar man and the unfamiliar crime; must they not be connected, to be dreaded equally? Others regarded him with faces full of adoration: had not the Teacher said that the Guest’s coming was foretold? And still others showed him unchanged countenances, accepting and respectful.

But no one ventured to talk to him.

Ellery ate and drank what was set before him, conscious mainly that it was hot and filling.

He returned to his room to dispose of his toilet kit and consider his course.

For a time he wrote in his notebook.

Then he put it away and went out to do what had to be done.

Ellery could hardly remember the time when he had not been struck by the recurrence of the great and famous across the shifting planes of space-time. In his boyhood, he recalled, it had been Roman statuary coming to life. Mr. Tobias, who taught him civics, might have been the fraternal twin of Scipio Africanus. Father O’Toole, of the Roman Catholic church around the corner, might have stepped but of Nero’s toga only the night before. Patrolman Isador Rosen, Inspector Queen’s partner when both were pounding a beat, was a dead ringer for Julius Caesar.

And so it went, in cycles, or perhaps Ellery was only cyclically aware of it: Queen Victoria would sell him a ticket to the movie; Whistler’s Mother sat opposite him on the bus; Beethoven delivered the laundry; Ivan the Terrible leaned over the bar and asked, “Wottle it be?”; Robert E. Lee offered to draw his picture for a dollar on a Greenwich Village sidewalk.

Such a cycle was evidently in motion now. Winston Churchill had placed the porridge (if it was porridge) before him at breakfast. Marie Dressier had removed the empty bowl. And here was Bernard Shaw, with dried slip on his beard, explaining how he made pottery. It gave Ellery the queerest feeling as he stared at the wheels and the kilns and watched the author of
Mrs. Warren’s Profession
strew a handful of salt inside one of the kilns to give the tiles that were firing there a simple glaze.

Ellery took the shard he had found in the sanquetum from his pocket. “You don’t use salt to produce this purple glaze, do you?”

“Oh, no,” said non-Shaw, the Potter. “Different process altogether. For prayer jars, I mean.”

“Then this came from a prayer jar?”

The Potter nodded. The smile that had graced his bearded face while he was discussing his work died.

“Yesterday a prayer jar was broken. The prayer jars are holy, for they contain the things of the Wor’d and they stand in the sanquetum, the forbidden room in the Holy Congregation House. The last time one was broken was the day the earth shook. There are never more than four—the two in the sanquetum, and two spare ones that are kept packed in wool and straw to protect them. They are not easily made, nor often … Yesterday one broke. For others the earth did not shake, perhaps. But it shook for me when I heard and saw, and it has not stopped shaking.”

The Potter’s workshop was stifling in the heat from the kiln. How must it feel to meet murder for the first time? “The broken jar has been deplaced in the sanquetum, then?”

“Yes.” Someone broke into song not far off, and stopped abruptly after the first few notes. As if suddenly reminded, or suddenly remembering. “The Teacher came and asked me for a new one.”

“Did he tell you why?”

The tufted white brows drew together, and the deep voice deepened. “He told me that the time of great trouble had come. I wondered, for I had seen no sign. And he asked for another prayer jar. So I understood that the shattering of the one to be replaced must be the sign. Not until later, when there was great running about and crying out, did I learn that Storicai the Statesman had himself been shattered. For is not each man,” he sighed, “also a vessel of the Wor’d?”

“When did he come, the Teacher, to ask for a replacement jar for the forbidden room?” Ellery managed to ask.

“Yesterday. In the afternoon.”

Like all his people, the Potter did not think of time in exact terms. But there was a clock in the shop, an old wooden one with a pendulum and weights (used, the Potter explained, in calculating the work of the kilns), and there was his record of the Teacher’s requisition. As near as they could, they settled the time of the Teacher’s visit at 4:30.

Ten minutes after the murder.

As Ellery turned to leave, the Potter said, “I have known that the great trouble of which we have been told would come upon us in my lifetime, if I lived the full measure of my years.”

Ellery stopped, surprised. “How did you know that, Potter?”

The man raised his hand, encrusted with slip—the mixture of ground clay and water with which he worked—and pointed upward.

“Those machines that fly through the sky,” he said. “For three years now they have come and gone in increasing numbers. Surely this is the sign of the great trouble that has befallen Quenan?”

“It is a sign of the great trouble that has befallen the world,” Ellery said.

The Potter’s beard rested on his broad chest. “Blessed be the Wor’d,” he muttered. “In time of trouble, as in time of peace.”

The stench of singed hoof, which he had not encountered since he was a boy, greeted Ellery at his next stop. So did the more recently familiar smell of fresh sawdust. Ulysses S. Grant was just finishing the job of shoeing a fat gray jenny.

“Blessed be the Wor’d,” General Grant said. “I am the Carpentersmith.” He slapped the she-ass on the rump, and she trotted away.
The ox knoweth his crib, and the ass his master’s stall
…

Ellery returned the greeting, and for a moment no one said anything more. The apprentice folded up the bellows and went shyly about other tasks. The firebed dimmed slowly from orange-red to ashy gray. Grant reincarnate picked up a piece of wood—a wagon tongue or whippletree, Ellery guessed—and began carefully to pry off a piece of metal.

“Though my hands are busy,” the man said, “my ears are not.”

“Do you make the keys?”

The Carpentersmith paused to consider. Then, stooping to his work again, he said, “When keys are required I make them. But few are required because we have few locks. The feed bin must have a lock because some of our beasts are clever and otherwise would pry open the latches with their teeth and eat more than is good for them.”

“What else is kept locked and so requires a key?”

They were not many. The small quantity of Valley-made black powder, kept on hand for blasting stumps and rocks (the Carpentersmith seemed to have no idea that the powder could be put to other uses), was locked against the children and animals. The store of charqui, or jerked beef (the wind- and sun-dried “jerky” of the Southwest), was also stored under lock and key against the occasional coyote that, emboldened by hunger in a poor hunting season, slunk into Quenan. And the house of the lackwit gnome who tended the cemetery had a lock—the only dwelling in the village so equipped—because of fears to which the little man could give no name: “But none wish to dispute with him, and whom does it harm?”

And, yes. Ah, yes.

The sanquetum.

The calloused hands still and it seemed to Ellery that the Carpentersmith’s eyes formed tears.

The sanquetum. “When did you last make a key to the sanquetum?”

“I have never made one,” the man mumbled.

“Then who—?”

“The sanquetum key in the Teacher’s keeping was made by Smuel, who was Carpentersmith a very long time ago.”

There was no help for it; he had to ask: “Could a key be made without your knowledge? Say, in the dead of night?”

The Carpentersmith straightened, and before he answered he deposited in a bin the strip of metal he had detached from the piece of wood.

“Guest,” he said courteously, “I am not Carpentersmith by right, but by skill and preference. Anyone is free at any time to come here and work. Whether I am here or not; my work often takes me elsewhere in the Valley. You ask, ‘Could a key be made without my knowledge?’ And I answer, ‘Why should it not be? Why must I know it?’ ”

Ellery sighed. This was another world, with another set of values. The primitive Polynesians were horrified that the masters of European ships should flog their sailors for, to them, the perfectly natural act of swimming ashore without leave to find women; yet they themselves matter-of-factly stole everything from the ships that was not tied down, and were bewildered at the savage resentment their thievery aroused.

“Let me put it this way,” Ellery said patiently. “Did Storicai work in this shop recently? Could the Storesman have made a key?”

With equal patience the Carpentersmith said, “Guest, I have known Storicai all my life. He was often here, for he was Storesman. I was often at the storehouse, for I am Carpentersmith. For Storicai to be here was as common a sight as to see a bird roost in a tree. He could have made a hundred keys and I need not have known it.

“But”—Grant’s broad shoulders sagged—“he will be here never more. All men must cease, blessed be the Wor’d; we come into the place left for us by others, we go from here that others may come after us. But no one in Quenan has ever ceased as Storicai ceased, and when I think of this I am sorely troubled, Guest, sorely.”

Ellery produced a glassine envelope in which he was keeping the metal button he had pried from the dead Storesman’s hand. “Have you seen this button before, Carpentersmith?”

“That is the Teacher’s,” the man said slowly. He hesitated. “Most use buttons of bone or wood. Those of us on the Crownsil, also the Successor and the Superintendent, wear buttons of horn. Only the Teacher wears buttons of metal.” He pointed to the curious symbol on the button, and even as he did so Ellery recognized it as the capital letter
N
, done in the Quenanite script that so resembled the Chancery hand of a century before and six thousand miles’ distance. “This
N
,” said the Carpentersmith, “means
fifty
. It is a sacred number, and only the Teacher may use it.” He hesitated again, and then he said timidly, “Guest, should you not return it to him?”

But Ellery was already out the door.

They were making wool blankets in the weaving shed, and the bitter, musty odor of the sheep hung like a fog. The Weaver paused at her loom, shifting a bit in her harness. She was a big woman, and of course, given a cigar, she could have passed anywhere for Amy Lowell.

Her voice was soft and rich. Yes, she did tailoring as well as weaving. Yes, the Teacher had come to her yesterday afternoon. He had said that a button was missing from his robe—not that he needed to tell her, she said, with a sad smile; she had observed it at once. She had sewn another one on then and there. She kept a supply of his metal buttons on hand at all times.

“What time was this, Weaver?” Ellery asked. He felt mean in the presence of this warmly glowing personality.

“Time?” She paused. “How curious that you should ask, Guest I take little note of time. Weaving, sewing—you know, they are not like boiling milk. When my heart is light, the shuttle flies. When my heart is heavy—as it is now—the loom is heavy, too, and the work goes slowly.

“Yesterday, when the Teacher came, I was thinking little of time. For I was working on a new pattern—may I show it to you?”

The wool she had used was the color of the desert, and against this background she had woven, in black wool, a bird. Ellery squinted at it, trying to decide whether its subtle distortion was inherent in its design or a result of his tired eyes. Then, quite suddenly, he made it out. What had been woven was not the bird itself, but its shadow on the sandy ground. The illusion was startling.

“Did you do this?” he exclaimed, entranced.

“Do you like it,” the woman murmured. “I am glad. Yes, it is my own. I am weaving this for my—for the Teacher’s use.”

The slip of the tongue told him that she was one of the old man’s wives. For some reason, indefinable, the pulse in his neck thickened and began to throb.

“But the time,” Ellery muttered. “You don’t know what time it was?”

“I was not thinking of time,” the rich voice said. “But the Teacher asked me. So I went and looked. I have a watch, an old gold one that was mine from my father, who had it from his. Inside this watch is written a thing which none of us here understands, not even the Teacher. It says, ‘
From the Men of the 17th. Vera Cruz, Cerro Gordo, Monterrey. 1848.
’ ”

Ellery closed his eyes. It seemed too much, somehow, this disgraceful echo of the past. “It refers,” he said, choosing his words with care, “to an expedition made a generation before this colony was founded. Groups of men went to Mexico, a country to the south. I suppose that someone in your family—your father’s grandfather, perhaps—must have been in charge of one of those groups, called the 17th. Afterward, the men of his group gave him the watch as a remembrance … The other words are the names of places in Mexico.”

The Weaver nodded. “I am glad to know at last,” she said, with shining eyes. “They must have loved him greatly to give him so rare a gift. Thank you for telling me. And now to answer your own question. The Teacher asked me the time. And by the watch the time was fifteen minutes before the hour of five.”

“One more question, Weaver. Did the Teacher have a prayer jar with him?”

No. No, he did not. Once more her face saddened.

It was not till later that Ellery knew he had misunderstood the reason for her sadness.

The spring accents of the morning were sharp in his nostrils as he walked along the shaded lane. The acacia was in blossom, white and sweet. Here and there bobbed roses, all small; he could identify none of them. Varieties, he thought, so long out of favor in the cultivated world as to be virtually extinct. As, for that matter, was so much else from the lovely past.

And Ellery pondered painfully, as he walked, on the Teacher’s odd behavior. Surely a man with something to conceal would not have gone openly to the Potter for a replacement prayer jar so soon after the shattering of the old one? Or to the Weaver to have a new button sewn on his tunic?