“Witchcraft!” Stroban cried out, rising to his feet, his face flushed. “It’s still her fault!”
“No!” the Defender said with sudden strength, whirling round, his robe flying, his arm outstretched. “A man delayed mending his barn until the post was seriously weakened. It is a tragedy. It is not a crime.” He looked to the Judge, raising his eyes to the high seat, the dark runes carried in the wood. “My lord, I ask that you pronounce Anaya innocent of this poor man’s death, free these people of the fear of sorcery, and allow them to grieve for their loss without fear or blame. She did not threaten him, she warned him. And tragically, he did not listen. If he had done, we should not be here today mourning him, seeing witchcraft where there is only jealousy.”
Stroban looked desperately at the Judge, and saw a man filtered by the details of the law and unable to see the greater spirit of it, a man who understood loss but not love. He was a small man, who could in the end become a hollow man.
Enella looked at the Judge and saw a man who kept to the safe path, always, wherever it led, upward or down, and there was an emptiness in it that nothing would fill.
Korah saw what she had recognized before, only this time it was not for an instant. It would always be there, whether she looked at it or not.
The Prosecutor was angry. He saw a Judge whose arrogance had allowed him to lose control of the court. He did not know how it had happened, or why victory had inexplicably become defeat.
Timour and the Defender both saw an upsurge of optimism. Hope had come out of nowhere, and vanquished the error and despair.
The Judge pronounced Anaya innocent. The court was dismissed and people poured out into the dark, gulping the sweet air, leaving the room empty except for Anaya and the Judge.
He moved his right hand very slightly, just two fingers from the surface of the bench. The chains fell away. She stood free, rubbing her wrists and stretching her aching shoulders.
“You did well,” he said quietly. He was smiling.
“I doubted,” she answered. It was a confession.
“Of course you did,” he agreed, and as he spoke his face changed, it became wiser, stronger, passion and laughter burned in it, and an indescribable gentleness. “If it were easy, it would be worth little. You have not yet perfected faith. Do not expect so much of yourself. For lessons learned hastily or without pain are worthless.”
“Will they understand?” she asked.
“That they were the ones on trial, and that the judgement was your own? Oh yes. In time. Whether they will pay the cost of change is another thing. But there is love, and there is hope. We are far from the end.” His cloak shimmered and began to dissolve. She could no longer see his shoulders, only his strong, slender hands and his face. “Now I have another charge for you.”
She looked at him, at the white fire around him. All she could distinguish was his smile, and his voice, and a great peace shone within her. “Yes?”
The Angel of the Lord by Melville Davisson Post
I always thought my father took a long chance, but somebody had to take it and certainly I was the one least likely to be suspected. It was a wild country. There were no banks. We had to pay for the cattle, and somebody had to carry the money. My father and my uncle were always being watched. My father was right, I think.
“Abner,” he said, “I’m going to send Martin. No one will ever suppose that we would trust this money to a child.”
My uncle drummed on the table and rapped his heels on the floor. He was a bachelor, stern and silent. But he could talk… and when he did, he began at the beginning and you heard him through; and what he said-well, he stood behind it.
“To stop Martin,” my father went on, “would be only to lose the money; but to stop you would be to get somebody killed.”
I knew what my father meant. He meant that no one would undertake to rob Abner until after he had shot him to death.
I ought to say a word about my Uncle Abner. He was one of those austere, deeply religious men who were the product of the Reformation. He always carried a Bible in his pocket, and he read it where he pleased. Once the crowd at Roy’s Tavern tried to make sport of him when he got his book out by the fire; but they never tried it again. When the fight was over Abner paid Roy eighteen silver dollars for the broken chairs and the table-and he was the only man in the tavern who could ride a horse. Abner belonged to the church militant, and his God was a warlord.
So that is how they came to send me. The money was in greenbacks in packages. They wrapped it up in newspaper and put it into a pair of saddlebags, and I set out. I was about nine years old. No, it was not as bad as you think. I could ride a horse all day when I was nine years old-most any kind of a horse. I was tough as whit’-leather, and I knew the country I was going into. You must not picture a little boy rolling a hoop in the park.
It was an afternoon in early autumn. The clay roads froze in the night; they thawed out in the day and they were a bit sticky. I was to stop at Roy’s Tavern, south of the river, and go on in the morning. Now and then I passed some cattle driver, but no one overtook me on the road until almost sundown; then I heard a horse behind me and a man came up. I knew him. He was a cattleman named Dix. He had once been a shipper, but he had come in for a good deal of bad luck. His partner, Alkire, had absconded with a big sum of money due the grazers. This had ruined Dix; he had given up his land, which wasn’t very much, to the grazers. After that he had gone over the mountain to his people, got together a pretty big sum of money and bought a large tract of grazing land. Foreign claimants had sued him in the courts on some old title, and he had lost the whole tract and the money that he had paid for it. He had married a remote cousin of ours, and he had always lived on her lands, adjoining those of my Uncle Abner.
Dix seemed surprised to see me on the road.
“So it’s you, Martin,” he said; “I thought Abner would be going into the upcountry.”
One gets to be a pretty cunning youngster, even at this age, and I told no one what I was about.
“Father wants the cattle over the river to run a month,” I returned easily, “and I’m going up there to give his orders to the grazers.”
He looked me over, then he rapped the saddlebags with his knuckles. “You carry a good deal of baggage, my lad.”
I laughed. “Horse feed,” I said. “You know my father! A horse must be fed at dinnertime, but a man can go till he gets it.”
One was always glad of any company on the road, and we fell into an idle talk. Dix said he was going out into the Ten Mile country; and I have always thought that was, in fact, his intention. The road turned south about a mile our side of the tavern. I never liked Dix; he was of an apologetic manner, with a cunning, irresolute face.
A little later a man passed us at a gallop. He was a drover named Marks, who lived beyond my Uncle Abner, and he was riding hard to get in before night. He hailed us, but he did not stop; we got a shower of mud and Dix cursed him. I have never seen a more evil face. I suppose it was because Dix usually had a grin about his mouth, and when that sort of face gets twisted there’s nothing like it.
After that he was silent. He rode with his head down and his fingers plucking at his jaw, like a man in some perplexity. At the crossroads he stopped and sat for some time in the saddle, looking before him I left him there, but at the bridge he overtook me. He said he had concluded to get some supper and go on after that.
Roy’s Tavern consisted of a single big room, with a loft above it for sleeping quarters. A narrow covered way connected this room with the house in which Roy and his family lived. We used to hang our saddles on wooden pegs in this covered way. I have seen that wall so hung with saddles that you could not find a place for another stirrup. But tonight Dix and I were alone in the tavern. He looked cunningly at me when I took the saddlebags with me into the big room and when I went with them up the ladder into the loft. But he said nothing-in fact, he had scarcely spoken. It was cold; the road had begun to freeze when we got in. Roy had lighted a big fire. I left Dix before it. I did not take off my clothes, because Roy’s beds were mattresses of wheat straw covered with heifer skins-good enough for summer but pretty cold on such a night, even with the heavy, hand-woven coverlet in big white and black checks.