Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  “My old mother,” he said, “said no word of thanks.”

  “She was angry.”

  “Is that why she die?”

  Karelia’s eyebrows rose; she smiled at him, pleased again with his quick wits. “Yes, probably. Yes.”

  “Give me—” he waved his hand at her.

  She gave him the leather sling she had brought, and showed him how to put the wood into it. He went off again, to find more, and she sat by the sling, listening uneasily to the forest sounds, the twittering of the birds like free souls in the air, the unquiet rustle of the brush, and the wind. Moloquin worked hard, finding good dead wood, breaking it up with stones or his hands, or slamming the limbs against the oak trunk, and soon the sling was full.

  He put the sling up on his shoulders and they went back toward the village. As they walked, Moloquin began to sing.

  It was not a true song, but a wordless undulating tone. Karelia enjoyed it; she listened gratefully to it, ignoring the screeches and calls and whispers of the forest around her, and kept close by him. He had some power in him, she guessed, that let him move freely through a place so dense with spirits as this. That was why he had been able to take shelter in the Pillar of the Sky. She had been right to take him in. He was Ael’s son, and had the favor of Heaven. She lifted her head, pleased with herself, keeping very close to Moloquin.

  Moloquin went into the forest three more times that day, and brought out firewood on his back. The first three loads he stacked up in the longhouse, as Karelia told him, but the last, she said, he was to take to the roundhouse.

  “You go with me,” he said.

  “No, no,” she said. “You go there. Take the wood in through the gate; you will see a great pile of wood inside the yard. Put your wood there.”

  “I no want to.”

  “Moloquin,” she said, with the great air of patience she often assumed, “you are here, but you are not here, to many of the People. You must show them your worth.”

  “I bring wood here,” he said. “Ladon there. Ladon hate me.”

  “Moloquin,” she said, her patience something leaner, “if Ladon burns just one stick of wood you have brought, he will have accepted you and can no longer harm you. Now, do as I say; remember, I am your mother now.”

  What she said made some sense to him, and he knew, also, that like Ael she would only get angry with him if he defied her; he could not endure her anger. He loaded up a sling of wood onto his back and went down toward the roundhouse.

  He had never been so close to Ladon’s place before. On its high ground by the river it seemed to grow up from the heart of the earth. For a long while he stood outside the gate in the wall around it, gathering his courage, but in the end it was his curiosity that drove him through the gate.

  The wall was made of tree trunks. Inside, the yard was wide and level, of pounded earth swept clean, and full of men, sitting on the ground, some busy with small tasks, others idle and talking. They all stared at him when he came in. He lowered his head a little and lugged his wood toward the heap against the inside of the wall.

  The roundhouse also was made of great trees. Massive and erect, they supported other trees, split in half and laid down over the tops of the uprights. It was so wonderful to see this that he hesitated, gawking at it, the wood still balanced on his back, and all the stares of the men on him. The size and strength of the roundhouse reminded him of the forest. He stroked the huge trunks with his eyes, pleased with the symmetry of their structure.

  Coming back to himself, he let the sling slip down, and began to stack up the wood he had brought. The wood already heaped there lay disorderly and he knew it would rot if left like that; he set his wood in neat rows and then began to stack the other wood also. Every few seconds he stole another glance at the roundhouse.

  A shriek from behind him brought him wheeling around, his spine tingling. In the doorway of the roundhouse stood Ladon’s son.

  “Cur! Filth!” Ladon’s son rushed forward, and Moloquin, warned, ran a few steps toward the gate in the wall; but the gate was closer to his enemy than it was to him, and when he saw Ladon’s son stoop for a stone on the ground, Moloquin whirled and ran back toward the wood.

  He thought to climb the wall; he was scrambling up over the heap of wood when the stone hit him in the head. All his sense left him for a moment. In a dizzy blackness he fell, and it seemed that he fell down forever, struggling for his soul back.

  He lay on the ground, panting, and heard other shouts, other feet pounding toward him. In a panic he fought to rise, but his body was in another power than his; nothing would obey him. Hands fell on him. He lashed out, sobbing between his teeth.

  “Hold!”

  Someone held him, but not with angry hands; someone held him close and wrapped arms around him to protect him. He kept still, tense.

  “What are you doing?” shouted the man who held him. “What business is this?”

  Moloquin pulled, and the grip on his arms eased; he backed away, his left eye full of blood. The man who had held him now got between him and Ladon’s son and seized Ladon’s son by the arm and shook him.

  “What business is this? A true man does not set upon another like that, does not strike the first blow against one who is unarmed. I am amazed at you, chief’s son—I thought you understood the bearing of a man of the People.”

  “Fergolin,” Ladon’s son cried. “He is not one of us.”

  Moloquin wiped his face. There was a swelling on the top of his forehead, and it dribbled blood down into his hair. The other men were gathering close around him. He lowered his head, feeling cramped. He could not breathe here without breathing of their air.

  Fergolin was still shouting at Ladon’s son, shaking him, and some of the other men joined him in the scolding; Ladon’s son turned away, red-faced. Now Fergolin swung around, saw Moloquin again, and knelt beside him.

  “Let me look at this.” He touched Moloquin’s head. “Can you hear me well? Is your vision clear?”

  Moloquin recoiled from him. “Leave me alone!” He glared at Fergolin as if he had thrown the stone. “I hate you. I hate all of you!” He leapt up to his feet and sprinted out of the roundhouse yard.

  Fergolin stood staring after Moloquin, who had disappeared out the gate. Blood smeared the Bear Skull master’s fingertips. Impulsively he raised his hand to his lips and tasted of the blood, as if he might find answers in that.

  The other men stood close around him, their faces taut. Ladon’s son was still among them, but as Fergolin turned, seeking him, the boy slipped out of the pack and ran away into the roundhouse.

  “He will tell Ladon,” said one of the other men.

  “Let him,” said Fergolin, surprised. “I have the right of it—you saw. Ladon cannot do but what is right.”

  “But—Moloquin—”

  They looked at one another, but no one spoke; they all felt this to be a dangerous and subtle matter, and it was not getting any easier as it went on. At last Fergolin said, “I think this will all come to a bad end.” He wondered where Moloquin had run to, probably to Karelia, who was protecting him. He was too old for the longhouses. At his age boys were ready to enter a society and begin their lifetimes of learning and study, obedience and memory.

  Moloquin was supposed to be too stupid to have any capacity for such things. He had not seemed stupid to Fergolin. It would have been a relief if he had been stupid. Fergolin raised his fingertips again, to sniff the drying blood.

  “You disobeyed me!”

  “Opa-Ladon-on—” his son quivered at the feet of the chief. “I threw a stone at him. I have done it before—you told me to do it before—”

  Ladon struck him again, furious, raining several blows down on his son’s bowed trembling back. It was Karelia who had done this, and it was Karelia he wished he could strike down.

  Finally, with a kick a
t his son’s bottom, the chief walked away through the roundhouse. Many openings in the thatch let in the light but it was still dim and shadowy below the roof. Each of the societies had its own section; most of the men were gone now, off on their daily rituals and duties. He wished Fergolin had been off somewhere when Moloquin came in.

  With firewood. That was her doing, the serpent-hearted woman, sending the brat here with a load of firewood, making him important, forcing the men to see him, to accept him. Putting him out of Ladon’s reach.

  I am the chief, he thought. When one is hungry, he comes to me. When one is cold, he comes to me. I give everything to them, food, shelter, everything. Then why have I no power?

  Why did she have such power? From the place of the dead, she reached back into his life and trifled with his plans, balked his resolution, made nothing of his dreams. She whom he had always hated: Ael, his sister.

  It was Karelia now, but somehow Ael had invaded Karelia’s mind and brought this from her. Always before, Karelia had been an annoyance, with her keen understanding, her vast story-lore, her willingness to speak up at bad moments, but she had never done anything like this.

  As if she stood before him he remembered Ael, as tall as he was, thin and hard from the grueling work of women, her black hair hanging down over her shoulders. She should have married. She should have married that first summer, when her body first bled, but she had refused. Untamable Ael. Walking in the woods with her bow, killing beasts for their meat and hide, growing a crop richer than any other, as if the plants sprang up from the drops of her sweat. She had done everything alone. She had mocked them all, and so they had all hated her, and when Ladon attacked her, they had done nothing. Turned their backs and not even watched her go.

  He had thought he was finished with her, then, when she went away into the forest.

  His stomach turned. She was here now, with him, mocking him again; he could almost smell the female odor of her body.

  That frightened him, that smell, or the memory of that smell; it reminded him of what he and Ael had done, that one time. That was forbidden absolutely, and if the People ever learned of it—

  Maybe that was why his sister was haunting him now. He put his hands over his face, sick with guilt.

  Outside the men were talking, and he could hear Fergolin’s voice, arguing perhaps: Fergolin questioned everything, not from the perverse delight of an Ael, but with the fearful concern of one who needed always to be right. Ladon drew nearer to the wall, to overhear what the men were saying, and realized that they knew that Moloquin was Ael’s son, a piece of truth he had known was common among the women but not the men. Slowly Ladon’s mind settled. He was still the chief, and if the women somehow managed to thwart him, they had been thwarting men from the beginning; it was no special weakness of his.

  He gathered himself. Moloquin was a green boy, Karelia old and held in dread rather than love; he would prevail over them. Lifting his shoulders, he expanded his chest with a deep breath and felt immediately more confident. He went out to the yard.

  “Opa-Ladon-on!” The men had been squatting by the roundhouse wall, debating. They sprang up to their feet, spreading their open palms toward him in respect. “Mighty is he! Opa-Ladon-on!”

  He raised his hand, palm out, to greet them, scanned them quickly, and with gestures and a few words he scattered them, sending this one here and that one there, until none remained but Fergolin. Then Ladon nodded to the Bear Skull master to follow him and went over to the outer wall, where the wood was piled in a disorderly heap.

  Fergolin came up to his shoulder and stood there. At a gesture from Ladon, he set about straightening the heap of wood.

  “My son was rude to you, I believe,” Ladon said.

  Fergolin stacked arm-length pieces of oak and ash. He straightened to speak to his chief, and met his eyes.

  “The boy is young, Opa-on, and still unrestrained. I hope I did not trespass in showing him the proper way.”

  “No, I thank you for taking such a responsibility on yourself.” Ladon indicated the wood with one hand. “Are we now to be supplied every day? This has been a problem all spring, the wood.”

  “I don’t know, Opa-on. It was Moloquin who brought it here.”

  Ladon stooped to pick up a long chunk of the wood. It was sound, old oak and ash, well dried out, and broken into proper lengths. He had wanted to be disappointed. Now he had to say, “Yes, excellent, a well-done task. I shall see him when he returns.”

  “Opa-on? You mean Moloquin?”

  “I mean Moloquin,” said Ladon, and went back into the roundhouse.

  Karelia walked up the gentle slope, through the waist-high flowering grasses, the wind behind her, and before her, at the top of the long run of the world, the vast embankment and toppling stones of the Pillar of the Sky. She was looking for Moloquin. When the word had reached her that he had run away, she had immediately bent her steps here; she supposed he might have gone back to the forest, but if he had, she would never find him.

  The story of his flight had come to her from mouth to mouth, girls and women, and she trusted none of what the last mouth had told her—that he had fought with Ladon’s son and run away bleeding and defeated. Her stomach was queasy with uncertainty and bewilderment. What was happening now over Moloquin had begun with her, and she was eaten up with doubt of her deed.

  The grass shivered in the wind; hordes of grasshoppers bounded out of her path, their arching leaps approaching flight; butterflies flitted off over the tops of the bending grass. Off to one side, a bustard suddenly sprang out of a hollow and raced away on its long legs, its heavy body balanced between its outstretched wings. The wind was rising, its roar merry in her ears, tangling up her legs in her own garment, and harrying fat grey clouds through the sky.

  She stopped, caught at the center of this: the joyous tumult of the Overworld. Raising her head, she let the wind bless her face with its cool caress. Everything was moving, the whole world, all in its harmony. She turned around, her arms out, whirling around and around, to make her own wind, to spin the mean human sense out of her head, and stopped, and with her mind a blur she felt all through herself the surging rhythm of the world-as-one.

  The thrill faded. That was the flaw in being human: the need always to stop the flow and study it. She plodded on, tired now, her soul burdened with her questions of herself.

  The place of humankind in the world was so small, so minor, that to fools it must seem that people could do as they wish, without harm to any but themselves. Karelia knew better. A lifetime of stories had taught her that everything mattered. Now she imagined consequences to what she had done that could tear the world to tatters.

  She should have left Moloquin as he was, and let Ladon spin his own destruction. Was it not said that all true crimes carried with them their own punishment? Yet she had meddled.

  She reached the ditch outside the bank and stopped, tired, breathless, an old woman faced with more than she wanted to do. The ditch was too deep, the bank too high. Slowly she began to walk around the other edge, toward the way in, but then a strange sound reached her that froze her in her steps.

  A quavering low wail, it rose from within the dead place, a demon’s voice. But she had heard it before. She forced her thumping heart to calm. It was Moloquin, singing.

  She went to the opening in the bank and entered into the holy place. The day was fading away and the grassy bowl within the bank was nearly full of shadows. At first she could make out only the stones in their slow collapse, but the tuneless howl of the song went on, full of anger and sorrow, and following it she found Moloquin.

  He sat beside the northernmost stone, called the North Watcher, his back to the rock, his legs tucked under him. He had cast off all his new clothes and pulled the orderly braids out of his hair. A streak of dried blood painted his cheek and jaw. Seeing Karelia, he paid no heed to her and went on with
his song. Karelia sat down beside him and waited.

  He sang a while longer, but the sound had changed, strained and false; with her there beside him he became aware of himself, and of the limits of himself. He fell still. His head sank down, his hair lying over his cheek. Karelia said nothing.

  The embankment shut out all the world. There seemed nothing of the earth but this small round, with its great stones to prop up the sky. Overhead the clouds raced by in the grip of the whistling air. By the ancient stone, the boy and the old woman sat together in silence.

  Finally he turned to her and said, “Why did you come here? Why can you not leave me alone?”

  “You are my son,” she said.

  “I am not your son! I am—I am Ael’s son.”

  “Without me, you did not even know her name,” she said.

  He had no answer to that. She looked on him with sympathy, wishing she could put her arm around him, but she knew he would fight against her. She raised her face again toward the rushing sky. High above them, among the turbulent clouds, a dark speck moved, a bird, or an eye of the spirits, watching what happened here. She felt again the cold dread of this place, the aching memory, the promise of catastrophe.

  He said, “I hate him, Karelia. I want to kill him.”

  “What happened between you?”

  “He throwed—threw a rock at me.”

  Karelia waited; when he said no more, she asked, “And you?”

  “I runned away. Or I killed him, Karelia, as if he were a lizard or a fat frog.”

  She thought, He is not afraid then, and was pleased with him. Now she lifted her arm and put it around his shoulders, and he drew close to her, his skin cold. She leaned her cheek against his hair.

  “You were happy before. I should have left you alone.”

  He said nothing for a moment, his face close to hers, his eyes shut. At last he said, “Tell me a story.”

  That pleased her; she tightened her grip on him, and looked around her, waiting for the proper tale to climb up to the surface of her mind. Almost at once the words reached her lips, and she let go of him, to have her hands free.