“Yes, Moloquin. It is Moloquin, Karelia’s son. Ael’s son. Moloquin.”
And now Joba did understand. She gathered her limbs in against her body and kept still.
He walked into their midst and squatted down by the fire and put out his hands over it, and his black eyes went from one woman to the next, with no respect, no reverence at all. He was so tall he looked thin but his body was laid over with smooth well-shaped muscle, his arms bulging hard between elbow and shoulder, and his neck fit down into a great roll of muscle like a cap across his shoulders. His hair was black and shaggy. In his belt he carried some tool, wrapped in deerskin, but he wore no ornaments at all. He was the barest man Joba had ever seen.
He said, “I want my mother. Where is Karelia?”
Grela was still on her feet. In a low voice, she said, “Moloquin, we thought you were dead. Better for you at this moment perhaps that you were dead. Karelia lives no more.”
His mouth fell open a little. His eyes changed. Bright and hard before, now they glazed over, brighter yet, no longer hard.
He said, “What happened to her?”
“She died of the fevers.” Grela now looked from one woman to the next, and faced him again. “Come with me, I shall tell it all to you, but we shall not inflict this again on these others, who loved Karelia as well as you did.”
“Never,” he said, and his voice caught. “Never.”
Grela walked away from the fire. “Come with me.” She held out her hand to him, and his head swiveled, following her path, but he did not rise, not at once. She went on nonetheless, with measured steps, moving away from him, her arm still reaching back toward him and her head bowed down.
He turned to the two who had come with him. “Stay here,” he said, and he got up all in a rush and hurried after Grela.
The two he left behind hesitated a moment. The man smiled diffidently at the women, and with several gestures of deference and respect he lowered himself down where Moloquin had been. The other women shifted away from him, and he called over to the pregnant woman and spoke to her in some outlandish gibberish, and she sat down close beside him. They all stared into the fire.
Grela told Moloquin how Karelia had died—how she had fought against Ladon with her stories, and how the fever took her away.
“Then we took her up to the Pillar of the Sky,” Grela said. “When the crows had picked away her flesh, and freed her spirit, we put her bones into the tomb.”
She stopped to face him. They had walked down by the stream, to be away from all the others. She had expected him to burst forth in grief, and had wanted some solitude to protect his dignity, but he said nothing. He looked down at her, much taller than she remembered, a man now, and one whose mere look made her hair stand on end.
He said, “Ladon killed her.”
“Moloquin. Everyone must die. Not every death is someone’s fault. In truth, though, when she thought you were dead, she lost her interest in living on.”
“Oh. Oh—”
Now he seemed to mourn; he groaned, and his head swayed from side to side. His fists rose between them, and he thumped his thighs with them, and beat his chest. She put out her hand and pushed his hands gently to his side again. Where had he been? Time enough to learn that.
“Ladon killed her,” he said.
“You should not have gone off and left her.”
His gaze swung around toward her again. Hard again. The tears that had blurred his eyes now trickled down his cheeks.
“Ladon sold me. Sold me to the trader Harus Kum. Sold me to haul a sledge and pound rocks.”
“Ah.”
She glanced back over her shoulder, back toward the Gathering.
“Did you help her?” Moloquin asked. His voice was raw. “Did you sit with her, and confront Ladon over it? Did you do anything but watch? The lot of you! Did you do anything but stand and watch her die? Or was it as it was when he drove my mother Ael into the forest, and you stood and watched?”
“Moloquin,” she said, startled; she had not thought of it before in this way.
“Where is Ladon now?” he said.
“He is—” seeing the risk in this, she paused, her eyes on him pensive. She wondered what Ladon would do against Moloquin.
“Where is he?”
“By the Turnings-of-the-Year,” she said. “With the other chiefs.” Fergolin was there also, her husband, and all the other men. Surely Moloquin would not challenge the whole manhood of the People.
For a moment he stood there looking down on her, and she wondered again what had happened to him. His hand went to his belt, to the tool, wrapped in hide, whose ashwood handle jutted down past his hip. Turning on his heel, he walked off, going back toward the fire where he had left his companions.
Grela followed him at a little distance, unwilling to speak to him any further. There was something unsettling about him, but there had always been. He was different, alien, perhaps evil. He reached the fire ahead of her and led his companions away, toward the embankment of the Turnings-of-the-Year. Grela went in among the other women.
“Come quickly,” she said.
“Where?” The younger and more spry among them were already getting to their feet.
“Moloquin is going to find Ladon,” Grela said. “Come on, we have to see what happens.”
Now they were all hurrying. She walked away through the camp, calling to the others.
Fergolin was standing inside the smaller of the rings of stones, surrounded in turn by a ring of boys: the novices of the Bear Skull. The sun would not set for a long while yet, but he wanted these boys to be ready when it did.
He said, “During the spring and fall, the sun’s point of rising and setting moves very quickly and obviously along the horizon. But as Midsummer’s Day approaches, that day on which she rises and sets most to the north, the point of rising and setting moves very slightly. It is very difficult to discern the difference from day to day.”
The boys were looking half-asleep. In the back, one nudged his neighbor, and there were giggles. Fergolin ignored these.
“Therefore it is often necessary to count the days after the sun passes a certain point until she returns again. Then take half that number, to find the exact day of Midsummer.”
He stopped. They were not listening to him; they were looking away, past him, straining to see. He turned.
A man was striding down the embankment from the direction of the women’s camp—a tall, black-haired man who walked with the springy step of a hunter. In one hand he carried something wrapped in hide. Fergolin lost his breath. He blinked to clear his eyes, startled and amazed.
It was Moloquin. Or once he had been Moloquin, this man.
“What is it, master?” one of the boys said, and another said, “Who is that man?”
Fergolin ignored them. He leapt up onto his feet as Moloquin went past him, and as Moloquin went by, he pulled the deer hide cover from the tool he held in his hand, and like the sun coming out from behind a cloud, the massy red-gold head of the axe shone forth.
Fergolin saw where Moloquin was going. He followed after, keeping his distance, going toward the place at the far end of the larger of the rings, where Ladon and the other chiefs were sitting on the platform. After him the novices rushed, and from all sides others came to swell the crowd, all following after Moloquin.
Ladon was sitting on a great rug of hides stitched together, with the other chiefs around him. Their men hurried back and forth bringing them drink and food and sometimes just offering deference and respect, to give honor and receive it. Rulon sat there boasting of the industry of his women, who were raising up the greatest harvest ever grown in the whole world; two of the other men were tossing a pair of knucklebones, and the oldest of the chiefs had fallen asleep.
In truth Ladon had no wish to speak to any of them. He was pleased with himse
lf.
Rulon had not challenged him this year. When the chiefs came to the Turnings-of-the-Year, all had given way to Ladon. All had cried his name aloud from the first moment; he was greatest of them all, and all accepted that.
He fingered the beads around his neck, the outward signs of his power, and smiled. Harus Kum had not arrived at the Gathering. If he never came again, then no one else would ever have these beads, or the wonderful anklets and bracelets and belt that Ladon also wore: no one would ever attain such a power as he. And when he died, he would give these emblems to his son, and no one would stand against his son either.
He had achieved his greatest purpose. He sat on the platform, a man fulfilled in all things, greatest chief of his People, and the little problem of the village was nothing but the shadow of a bird’s wing across the full radiant glory of the sun.
He had tried to keep the women from moving their longhouses, but they had not obeyed him. Maybe now they would listen, when they saw how great he was, or he could perhaps force them to bring the longhouses back where they belonged. He had no intention of moving his roundhouse.
He had never moved a village. His uncle had brought the People to their present place by the river when Ladon himself had been only a little boy named Twig, playing with a chestnut in the dust of the yard. He remembered nothing but the excitement of packing up, and the tiresome long walk to the new place.
He meant to stay where he was. His roundhouse was among the oldest of all the People’s places, and all the while he had lived there he had done well. If he moved, then he opened himself to unpredictable dangers—the malice of spirits, the possibility of choosing an unlucky site. The women had cleared new gardens higher on the slope above the river, and although the extra work meant they had planted late, yet he had watched carefully to see that every ritual was properly performed, and the seed had all sprouted well.
His storerooms were nearly empty. He had given all his stores to Harus Kum, when the trader brought him the magic ornaments he wore now, the emblems of his power, and the last harvest that had not been good. That was another reason to be glad that Harus Kum was not here, because Ladon had nothing to give to him.
This year’s harvest would fill up the storerooms again; he would be rich again, and no one would know how many of the baskets now were empty, how many of the jugs held only water.
“Ladon!” someone shouted.
He ignored that. People were always calling his name. He turned his mind to thoughts of Karelia, whom he meant to revenge himself upon, now that his power was secure.
Her bones were laid in the round tomb east of the village. If he took them out and scattered them, then in little pieces would Karelia walk around the Overworld, a mock for every other spirit.
“Ladon! Ladon!”
He raised his head, annoyed; his name should now be wreathed in compliments and expressions of respect, not offered bare as an old bone to the world. The press of the bodies around the platform loosened, and the level of noise dropped. Someone was coming toward him.
All around him people fell silent. Rulon left off his boasting, and the other men put aside their knucklebones. Ladon frowned. Before him, the crowd was pushing back to either side, leaving a long open space like an avenue, and at the far end of it stood someone tall and shaggy like an animal.
“Moloquin,” Ladon said, and all through his body the nerves jumped and quivered.
“Ladon,” Moloquin cried, and strode up toward him, and Ladon sat slumped on the platform and watched him come. With a lurch in his guts, he saw that all the bank around the standing stones was black with people watching. The whole of the People had come to witness this.
“Ladon,” his sister’s son cried again. “You killed my mother, Ladon, twice over. You are old and evil and powerless and doomed.”
At that he raised his arm, and from all the watching crowd there went up a yell of amazement. In his hand Moloquin held a great axe, and the head was all of shining, magic stuff, like the matter of the sun.
“So,” Ladon said, in a steady voice. “You have borrowed some stick of Harus Kum’s and come to get your revenge, hah, Moloquin?”
“Revenge.”
Moloquin lifted the axe and swung it, and the head whistled in the air. It struck the platform’s edge and broke the wood down before it with a crunch. The chiefs yelled. Undignified as boys, they sprang down from the platform to the ground, leaving Ladon alone there.
“I need take no revenge on you, Ladon,” Moloquin cried, and he raised up his axe again and with another great stroke he hewed at the center post supporting the platform. “Your doom is inevitable. You and everyone who stays with you—”
He struck the post again, and the wood gave way. The platform sagged. Ladon flung his arms out, determined not to be thrown down.
“Old and wicked and doomed!” Moloquin shouted. “The best of you died when my mother Karelia died! I, Moloquin, who made this—”
He turned in a circle, his arm uplifted, the axe extended high over his head into the blazing sunlight.
“I, Moloquin, have come to damn you all!”
He whirled around again and struck the post again, and the post broke entirely in half. The platform collapsed. Ladon slid forward, scrabbling with his hands for some hold to stop his fall, and he went down into the dust at Moloquin’s feet.
He looked up, dazed and terrified. Above him the tall young man stood with his wonderful axe, and Ladon put up his hand to shield himself. Moloquin raised the axe above his head.
The crowd hushed. No one moved. No one came to help Ladon. As they had watched and waited while Karelia died, so they watched and waited now for Ladon to die.
Moloquin lowered the axe. He said, “Live on, old man, as my gift.”
Then he stepped by Ladon, and with the great axe he hewed down the platform of the chiefs, and left it a pile of rubble on the ground. In the middle of it, he turned.
“Now I will go and make my own village, where men and women can live in justice and honor. Any who wishes for life as it should be may come with me now, and the rest of you—”
He spat on Ladon, cowering at his feet.
“The rest of you can rot with Ladon!”
He spun around again, and again he struck with his axe at the pile of wood. Then he strode away, straight to the east, and those in his path stepped hurriedly out of his way. Behind him, unnoticed until now, went another man, and a woman well along with child. They walked away between two standing stones, away to the east.
Now from all over the crowd others broke free of the mass and plunged away after Moloquin. Not many: two or three at first, and then a few more, and then, to Ladon’s surprise, old Brant, the Green Bough master. Then for a while, no one. In a dead silence the People stood and watched as Moloquin climbed the bank and went over the top and disappeared, and after him the little train of his followers, one by one, vanished also to the east.
Then: “Wait! Wait!”
From the pack of women on the bank one girl burst free. She ran down through the stones, still calling after Moloquin to wait, and behind Ladon his own son gasped and started forward.
Ladon whirled and raised one hand, and the other men seized his son and held him fast.
“Shateel,” cried his son. “Shateel—”
But she was gone, running up and over the bank, vanishing after Moloquin.
Moloquin walked a long way from the Turnings-of-the-Year before he turned and looked back. What he saw then surprised him, and he faced forward again and walked faster.
A whole band of people were following him, not merely Hems and Ap Min, but Brant, the Old Green Bough master, and some women, one with little children, and two young men. They were following him away from their hearths and their chiefs, and they would expect him to be their chief now; whenever they had need, they would come to him.
He h
ad not intended this to happen when he spoke his proud words before Ladon. The words had come unbidden to his lips, as if some other spoke with his mouth.
Ael had spoken through him. Ael and Karelia had used him to achieve their revenge, and now—
He walked at his best long-striding pace, as if he might leave them behind, and he went down over the Dead River, the deep-cleft valley, and found a twisting way up the scarp on the far side. Still all the people followed after him. At last in the evening, as the sun was going down, there ahead of him on the plain appeared, like a ring of teeth, the Pillar of the Sky.
When he saw it his heart leapt within his breast, and he broke into a run. He forgot the people coming after him and ran up the long slope, slippery with grass. A flock of bustards lumbered heavily out of his path. The crows fluttered up in a thick black cloud into the air. He ran over the embankment and walked down into his sacred place.
Entering it was like going back into his youth, back to the first time he had come here, when Ael had brought him here. She had leaned on him, coughing and falling, the blood running down her chin when she coughed; she had been so thin and frail—most of her body had already died—that at the end he had been able to lift her up and carry her in among the stones.
He stood in the middle of the circle and turned slowly around once. The wind bent the long grass down, sighing and whispering, and blew around the sad circle of collapsing stones, and over by the two taller stones that marked the northern edge a few fat crows settled down hungrily toward a half-picked body.
Here Karelia had lain, at the last.
He knew she was here yet. He could feel her presence here, and Ael’s presence, and if they remained, here where their bodies had dissolved, then all the rest remained also, all the generations of the People, incorporeal in their house of wind. Had he failed them already, when he led their children out of the safety of the villages?
He dropped to his knees, laying his axe down before him. The head was bent and battered from its work at Ladon’s platform. They all thought it was wonderful, but he knew what it was, a man-made thing, and a failure. He put his face down into the grass, and from the great soreness and fear in his heart he spoke to Karelia and Ael.
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