Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  In the evenings, sitting by the fire with Brant, telling stories, he watched the other men. They too stole looks at the women, and stole caresses too. He knew they would begin to choose one another very soon.

  Therefore one afternoon he sent Ap Min off into the forest to gather mushrooms and followed her. When they were far enough away from the others that no one would witness his humiliation if she refused him, he went up behind her and embraced her. She knew at once what he wanted. Saying nothing, she pulled up her ragged skirt, put her back to a wych elm’s trunk, and let him in. It was unexpectedly difficult, because she was so pregnant. When he was done, he leaned against her, drained and shaking, and she stroked his hair and whispered something to him in her old language.

  “Don’t talk that way,” he said. He sat down on the leaf-drift beside her. With a tug on her skirt he drew her down next to him.

  She sat there a while, her head down, smiling. He knew her in a special way now, and yet she seemed even more secret to him; he would never possess her wholly. Absorbed in her, he studied her face, her profile to him. She had never seemed pretty to him before, but now the hollow of her cheek and the redness of her mouth were wonderful to him. He took her hand and pressed her palm to his face.

  “Moloquin,” she said, “what are you doing with me?”

  “You wanted me to do it,” he said. “You cannot say I forced you.”

  She smiled at him. She looked on him differently now. She looked him in the eyes now, with an easy, familiar gaze. Suddenly he realized that as he had possessed her, so now she possessed him: that was enough to make him move a little away from her.

  She watched him calmly, her arms around her belly. She said, “No, you did not force me. But I have wanted you for a long time now, and you have never come to me before.” She shook her head. “You need a wife, Moloquin, but I am not the woman for you.”

  She got up and went to find mushrooms, and Moloquin went back to the work with his axe. He thought all afternoon about what he had done.

  The act itself was wonderful. To hold her, to fit together with her, filled him with a dizzying sense of space and room, as if with the ejaculation he burst beyond his skin and flooded into her and into worlds beyond her.

  Now when he struck down the trees with his axe, with each blow he thought of sex; in the afterglow, everything he did seemed an extension of the act of sex.

  But the glow faded, and next he sought out Wahela.

  He did what he had done with Ap Min: he sent her away on an errand, going upstream to look for crayfish, and he made sure that her children were with the other women. Then he went after Wahela.

  When he closed with her it was the same at first as it had been with Ap Min. She knew at once what he wanted, and by the sudden flush of her cheek and the bright flash of her eyes he knew she was willing, but she led him off on a chase through the trees, running in short dashes from tree to tree, shrieking in mock fear when he came close. She led him straight away from the others. When she finally sprawled down before him on the forest floor, he was hot as a fire.

  From then on it bore little resemblance to sex with Ap Min. Wahela bounded and bucked together with him; she bit him and scratched his shoulders. When he held her down under him she writhed like a captive. When he was done, she came at him again, her lust barely diminished. He spent the whole afternoon with her under the trees, and hardly spoke to her at all.

  When they were walking back to the clearing, she began to talk.

  “Will you marry me, then?” she said.

  He did not want to talk about that, or even think about it: there were two more women he wanted first. When he said nothing, she grew angry.

  “So. You put me on my back and now you will not marry me, is that it?”

  “Wahela,” he said, “you’d have done the same for any man.”

  “What!” She flashed her magnificent dark eyes at him. “Well then, see if you have it again.” With a flounce of her hips she ran past him and into the hut.

  After that he set about having Shateel—Taella awed him somehow, with her grey hair and her shrewd looks; she reminded him of Karelia. So he sent Shateel off next, and followed her. He found her sitting in the grass by the foot of a sycamore tree, peeling the fallen bark with her fingernails.

  His success with the other women had made him bold. He went straight to Shateel and put out his hands to her, expecting her to accept him at once, but instead he got a cold look from her.

  “So,” she said. “You think to have me too, like the others. I thought so, but I did not want to believe it.”

  He squatted down before her. Instantly he wanted her more than anything else in the world. Her hair was the color of flax, but her eyes were dark and wide, and her mouth was like a red flower, full of sweetness. He put his hand on her arm and she shook him off.

  “Shateel,” he said, “don’t you want me at all?” It seemed amazing to him that anyone would refuse such a pleasure, when it could be had so simply and easily.

  She said, “Leave me alone, Moloquin.”

  He seized hold of her, meaning to force himself on her and expecting her to fight him; instead she lay limply in his arms and turned her face away. She said, “I was the wife of Ladon’s son, you know, and now I am carrying a child of his. What do you think of that?”

  He let her go and sat back on his heels, staring at her: he saw no sign that she was pregnant. Finally he said, “Well, Ladon’s son is not here, is he? You are not his wife anymore.”

  “I am no man’s wife now, Moloquin,” she said. She got up and started away, back to the camp. He stayed where he was, thinking over what had happened; he was beginning to believe himself a fool in matters such as this.

  Wahela sat with her children while they ate and talked to them and cleaned up after them; she had put down a little ring of stones around her part of the hut, to keep the Others off, and she usually brought some coals in from the fire to warm the place while the children ate their supper and lay down for sleep. Her son fell asleep right away, but the little girl was fretful, wanted to be nursed and held, and kept Wahela there long after the others of the People had finished eating and begun their evening chores.

  Moloquin came in last and sat down by the door. He always slept by the door, between his People and the night.

  Wahela watched him from the corner of her eye. She had told him she would have no more to do with him, but whenever she saw him she longed to be close to him.

  He wanted only sex. Men like that could not be trusted.

  Now he sat there by the door, his shoulders slumped, his back bent, looking too tired even to lie down for sleep. Once, as she rocked and nursed and murmured to her daughter, Shateel came into the hut and had to ask him to move; when she spoke to him he got up and went out of the hut, and Shateel herself blushed and frowned and shook her head. Wahela knew at once that something had happened between them, and as she knew Shateel, she could guess what it was.

  When he returned a few minutes later and took up his post again by the door, Wahela laid down her daughter in her bed and went to Moloquin.

  “Here,” she said, sitting down beside him. “You look tired.”

  She stroked his shoulders, pressing down with the palms of her hands, and he sighed and lifted his head. His muscles were knotty under her fingers. She loved touching him. His hair was matted with dried sweat and she began to comb it with her fingers.

  “Wait,” she said. “I will get my comb.”

  “If you want to,” he said stiffly, and would not look at her.

  She went back to her hearth and found the wooden comb. Sitting behind him again, she picked and combed his hair clean, cracking the lice between her fingernails. He said nothing to her, but when she glanced at his face, his eyes were closed, his mouth slack and sensuous. She did not look to see if Shateel was watching.

  His beard w
as growing down over his chest, a mat of thick black curls, and she combed that also. Still he said nothing to her. She reminded herself that he had done much for her, that they all relied on him, and that a chief deserved to be cared for like this. When she was done, she took the comb and got up to go back to her hearth.

  “Wahela,” he said, and opened his eyes.

  She paused. He put out his hand and tugged on her skirt, and she sat down in front of him, and there while all the People watched and murmured he combed her long dark hair until every strand lay straight. That night her children slept in the ring of her stones, but she and Moloquin lay in one another’s arms by the door.

  Moloquin felled the oak trees in the new clearing, cut up the branches for firewood and trimmed the trunks to make the posts for the wall of his roundhouse. Brant showed him how to cut a knob in the top of each post, to fit into a hole in the beam and so keep the structure solid. Bohodon and Hems and Kayon dug the holes. Brant used his rope to measure each trunk, and determined how deep each hole should be so that all the posts were level along the top.

  The summer was sweeping toward its climax. There was food everywhere, the trees were heavy with fruit and nuts, the herbs and roots of the edible plants were ready to pick and dry and store, the forest teemed with game. Soon there would be nothing but cold and snow. The People worked frantically to gather in all they could before the winter reached them. The leaves of the great sycamore were already turning color; the wind at night was cold enough to make the children cry.

  Brant showed them how to raise each post into its position. They looped rope around the huge grey trunk, and two men pulled and two men pushed until the butt end slid down into its place with a thud that shook the earth. While it swayed and tottered above them they ran madly around it throwing everything they could find into the hole to steady the trunk, and then filled it up with dirt and rocks from the streambed. Twice, in the beginning, the posts simply fell over.

  Brant sat and watched them and made more rope, twisting the heavy fibers of hemp plants until they kinked and then stretching them from tree to tree. He said, “It is easier to do this out in the open. There is chalk under the soil, and holes dug in chalk will hold anything.”

  Moloquin sat beside him, exhausted. They had spent the day raising two posts, one of which had fallen over. The other men had gone down to the stream to wash. The roundhouse stood like a skeleton at the far end of the clearing; although only half-begun, with three out of the eight posts in place, it already pleased Moloquin with its shape, its suggestion of order.

  He said, “Someday we will build something very like this at the Pillar of the Sky.”

  To his surprise the old man frowned at him. “Nothing can be built at the Pillar of the Sky!”

  “I shall build something.”

  “I tell you, that is folly, that way is ruin, Moloquin. Nothing can stand there.”

  Moloquin kept silent, but he was disappointed in the old man. He lowered his eyes. The roundhouse no longer pleased him. A cold evil tugged at his heart; he wondered for the first time if he would ever see what he had dreamed at the Pillar of the Sky.

  The old man was watching him keenly, his fingers busy with the rope. Suddenly he said, “There is something I must ask of you, Moloquin.”

  “Ask,” said Moloquin, his voice rasping; he was still angry at Brant, whom he had taken for his ally.

  “I wish to marry,” said Brant. “If you mean all of us to live together in the roundhouse, I for one do not intend to be that near to women and not have the comfort of one.”

  Moloquin said, “Marry, then.” He smiled at the old man, grateful for this proof of the vigor of his People.

  “It is Taella I wish to marry,” Brant said. “I shall ask her.” He rose, groaning as his knees straightened, and went off across the clearing toward where the women sat, storing away nuts in baskets made of bark and reeds.

  Moloquin knew little of the rites of weddings. To marry Brant and Taella together, he took what he could remember from the few weddings he had seen and filled the spaces with other things, from stories and from his own heart. He braided together a rope of grass and filled a turtle shell with water and he made a little fire in the middle of the half-finished roundhouse.

  Seven of the nine posts had been set now. The center post, taller than the others, and the four major points of the circle, north, south, east and west, had gone up first. He brought Taella and Brant together before the center post, which Brant called the North Star, and the rest of the People stood in a ring around them all. In their arms they held the last flowers of the summer, white day-star and yellow sundrops and red and blue fleetwood. The women sang in low voices, swaying from side to side, their eyes shining.

  Moloquin took Taella’s hand and Brant’s and put them together, and he bound them together with the rope of grass.

  “Now,” he said, “you are married together, like the vine and the elm tree.”

  He made them walk past the fire, Taella on his left and Brant on his right, so that their bound hands passed above the flames, and he said, “Let nothing separate you; the fire that destroys all things shall not separate you.”

  He gave them the shell of water to drink from, Brant holding it to Taella’s lips, and Taella holding it to Brant’s, and Moloquin said, “You shall nourish each other in all ways, nor shall you deny one another anything.”

  Then he raised his hand over them. “You are married,” and he backed away, leaving them standing there alone in the middle of the circle.

  “Kiss! Kiss!” Wahela cried, boisterous, and flung a flower at them. Someone laughed, but Brant leaned forward and Taella put her hands to her new husband’s shoulders and they kissed. Around them the others stretched out and caught hands with one another and began to dance. As they whirled around the new pairing, they flung flowers on them, and Wahela shouted, “Kiss! Kiss again! Brant, she is yours now, do as you wish with her! Taella—”

  Brant stiffened, but Taella caught his clothes with both hands; a broad smile broke across her face. Flower petals lay on her long grey braids. As the People whirled and sang around them, Taella pulled and tugged on him, whispered to him, and drew him down on the ground. There in front of everybody they coupled, while the flowers pelted them and the People danced and laughed and sang and called advice and amazement at the prowess of an old man.

  Moloquin moved away from them. He had not expected this but he saw that it was good: they had made the marriage, in their fornication, better than he had with his uncertain rites. But the sight of a man and a woman joining filled him with a lust so strong it made him sick. He backed away into the forest. The little fire was going out and evening was settling over the camp. In the blue twilight his People were only shapes that writhed and whirled like drifting smoke. He turned to go.

  All the posts of the roundhouse had names, and some of them had more than one; each had other things about it that were important. Brant tried to explain this to the other men, but only Moloquin seemed to pay attention.

  Brant said, “This one is Belly-of-the-Black-Wind,” and laid his hand on the post at the north point of the circle. He said a few other names, savoring the music and the meaning. “Light-Bow, and The-Way-Home. When someone dies in the roundhouse, we must open the wall here and take the body out this way, because this is the beginning of the path of the soul to Heaven.”

  They had raised all the posts now; they had come to the hardest part of the building. Brant said, “Now we must raise the beams. We could wait until next summer—we could put up sticks, to hold the roof for the winter.”

  Moloquin said, “We must finish it now—if we flinch from the work we shall never do it.”

  “We haven’t enough men.”

  Moloquin watched him a moment, his face pensive. “What are you afraid of, Brant?”

  “I don’t think—I—” Brant drew a deep breath. “I do
n’t know. Perhaps I am getting too old. Something about this place bothers me.”

  “Tell me what you feel.”

  Brant shook his head; he did not know what it was that he felt, he knew only that the thought of raising up the roof beams cast him down to the depths of his soul. He thought suddenly, I shall die here. He pressed his hands to his face.

  “What is it?” Moloquin said. “Tell me! If you feel this place is unlucky, tell me now, it is senseless to keep working on it.”

  Brant looked around him; the posts around him stood up straight and true, their trunks, the bark peeled away, grey with weathering. Whatever he felt here, it was not that the place was unlucky, and he said so.

  “Then we shall finish it,” Moloquin said.

  “I shall not see it finished,” Brant said. “I—I—” then from the woods came a long screech of terror.

  Both men leapt to their feet, wheeling toward the forest. Out of the deep of the trees came Wahela, her great black eyes wide and her hair streaming.

  “Ap Min! Her baby is coming—”

  From across the clearing, Shateel leapt up and ran into the forest, going back the way Wahela had come.

  Wahela ran up to Moloquin and seized his hand. “Come—you must hurry—”

  “Where is she?”

  “In the forest, by the hazelnut grove. We were gathering nuts—”

  “Isn’t Taella with her?” Brant asked. “She ought to know something of midwifery.”

  “No—she says she doesn’t know enough—the baby won’t come, it is stuck.” Wahela clutched at Moloquin’s hand. “Please, you must come, hurry, please—”