"Well, Ben, you know that murder is almost unheard of in Gardenland. Can you tell us, then, why you found it necessary to push Lee?"
"Who?" The hateful name was already slipping out of his mind, nothing was left there again but Nan; and the less he saw of her - not because they were forcibly kept apart, but because she was staying away from him by her own choice - the more he craved for her, his ache pressing in his head like million years of geological layers.
"You pushed him off the cliff," one of his five interrogators added in a soft, throaty voice. Ben shuddered, that much the voice sounded like Nan's, and he raised his heavy-lidded eyes to look at her.
She was the youngest of the five - about his own age - and nothing like Nan, being much more handsome, tall and graceful, her head covered with a mass of copper curly hair, her eyes deep gray and her nose straight. Still, in spite of the seriousness shown in her eyes, a faint, sympathetic smile hovered on her finely curved lips, and he was not sure whether she was laughing at him or showing him favor. Her name, he remembered, was Ada, but he knew nothing else about her.
"Off the cliff?" he asked, hesitantly.
"You did, didn't you?" asked a short, dark, heavily built man whose voice was as low a bass as could be imagined.
"I don't know," Ben said, frankly, not trying to defend himself, just wondering; "I don't remember."
All he knew and remembered was, that from the first moment he had met That Man he wanted to push him, that pestering poet, off a cliff and out of his life. There was no question about it, because That Man - barely a man at that, a mere youngster in age, appearance and behavior - had caused Nan to change so much, he hardly knew how to talk to her any more, and they had been friends and lovers since childhood!
"Ben," Lilit spoke now, in her low, vibrating voice which could be heard at a great distance even when close to a whisper, and which could penetrate your heart like a knife through butter. Lilit, who was a public figure known to anyone in Gardenland, was a dark, tiny woman with black, slanting eyes and an ageless smooth skin. And she was a member of the High Council.
"Ben," she said, as if answering his innermost thoughts, "how long have you known Nan?"
Nan... she had been the axis of his life for so many years... "We were children..." he murmured.
"But not exactly together? You did not belong to the same Peer group, did you?"
"She was a year younger than me. We became friends the first year she started school."
"And you loved her?"
