Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  From the stream the other men were coming, their bodies shining with wet; Hems reached the roundhouse first, flipping back his long damp hair with his hand. “What is it?”

  Moloquin said, “Ap Min is bearing her baby, she is having some trouble with it. Come.” He ran away into the forest with Wahela.

  Ap Min lay on her side in the deep mast under the hazelnut tree. Her belly heaved in rhythmic convulsions. Shateel knelt beside her, pressing her hand between her two palms, while Ap Min screamed.

  “I am dying—I am dying—”

  Taella knelt between Ap Min’s feet, forcing her knees apart, and stuck her fingers into the laboring woman’s vagina. “I can feel something. I think it’s the baby’s foot.”

  “A foot,” Shateel said blankly. “Then it’s being born, it’s all right, everything will be all right. Won’t it?” Her voice cracked. She wanted to cry. Inside her own body, another baby churned and thrashed, ready to do this to her. Ap Min shrieked again, and from her vagina another gush of water and blood spurted, splashing Shateel’s clothes. Shateel turned away, scrabbled off on all fours, and was sick into the crust of rotting nutshells.

  “It’s bad,” Taella said, “when the foot comes first it’s bad. Ap Min, you must try to push the baby out. Now, try.”

  “It hurts—oh!” Another great wave passed down the girl’s body, and Ap Min twisted and heaved and grunted, lifting herself up off the ground on heels and shoulders, her face turning red, her eyes squeezed shut; she screamed and screamed until the forest rang with it.

  Shateel said, “I can’t bear this.” She was weeping all down her cheeks.

  “Be quiet,” Taella said. “Nothing is happening to you. Hold her hand. Come on, we must help her, somehow—oh, I wish I had learned something of midwiving. My mother told me something once about this—”

  Through the trees now came a man running; it was Hems, all but naked, and after him came the other men in a stream. Hems flung himself down beside Ap Min and caught her hand. “Ah, look at her, how she suffers—” he thumped his fist on the ground. When the next wave of pain took her and she began to shriek, he lay face down beside her on the ground and shrieked too.

  Taella struck him between the shoulder blades. “You fool! Get up— we must do something.”

  “Here comes Wahela,” Shateel said. “And Moloquin.”

  When she saw Moloquin coming, her fluttering heart steadied; she wiped the tears quickly from her cheeks, so that he would not know she had been crying.

  Moloquin knelt down in the dirt beside Ap Min and stooped over her to kiss her forehead. Even she seemed calmer now that he was there. He took her hand and held it against his cheek.

  “Moloquin,” she whispered. “I am dying—”

  “No,” he said. He swung his gaze toward the other women. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s backwards,” Taella said. “The baby. It is coming out backwards, but it isn’t moving, it’s stuck.”

  “What is to be done?” He looked expectantly into each of their faces, and Shateel’s face grew hot; she was ashamed of not being able to answer him. “Don’t you know?” he cried. “How can you be women and not know?”

  “I’ve seen babies born,” Taella said. “It’s not something I enjoy, I have never learned the craft. Most of the time nothing is necessary. I’ve never seen one born backwards.”

  She put her hand against Ap Min’s oozing vagina again and poked her fingers inside, and when she did the poor creature writhed and shrieked, and Hems writhed and shrieked also beside her. Moloquin stroked her face absently with his hand, his eyes on Taella.

  “That’s a foot,” Taella said. “I’m sure it’s a foot.”

  “Pull it out,” Moloquin said.

  “You’ll kill it.”

  Shateel gritted her teeth together. She remembered something she had heard once, long before—that Rulon her brother had been born backwards, that he had been drawn forth by the hand of a midwife. She said nothing, afraid of being called on to act. Moloquin was glaring at them all, as if they had caused this, and now suddenly he shoved Taella to one side and moved between Ap Min’s knees.

  “I will do it.”

  He leaned over Ap Min; there was a look of terror on the girl’s face, and she whispered, “Don’t hurt my baby.”

  He smiled at her. “Good. Don’t think of yourself, think of the baby.”

  But when he slid his hand into her body she writhed and screamed, and he sat back.

  “My hand is too big.”

  Shateel said, “Taella, do it.”

  “No. Not I.”

  Moloquin turned to Shateel. “You do it.”

  Shateel swallowed hard, remembering the story about her brother, and looked down at her hands. She did have small hands. She moved closer to Ap Min, and Moloquin shuffled out of her way.

  Ap Min watched her over the huge mound of her belly; another pain seized her, and she stiffened all over, her head straining back, her body arching up off the ground.

  “Ap Min!” Moloquin called. “Be calm.” He touched Shateel’s shoulder. “Do it.”

  Shateel bit her lip; she slid her fingers inside the slick red vagina. At first she could feel nothing but the wet walls inside. Fearful, she pushed inward, harder, and touched something at the end of the passage.

  But the moment was past; the pain was fading, and Ap Min’s convulsive labor slowed. Hems crawled around behind her and held her head and shoulders against his chest.

  Moloquin knelt behind Shateel. “Get ready. Here comes the next pain.”

  Ap Min was tensing all over, her body locked in a fierce combat with itself. Shateel slid her whole hand into the stretching slippery opening. Now she could feel the little object at the end of the passage well enough to pull it, and as Ap Min screamed and strained and thrashed she gave a gentle tug, and felt the tiny foot move.

  “Pull,” Moloquin cried.

  Shateel drew on the baby’s foot, and as Ap Min screamed and heaved it was as if some force pushed as Shateel pulled, and smooth and slippery the whole leg came down, the foot almost out of the vagina. Shateel gasped. Abruptly she was calm, intense, concentrated on this one moment and this one act. A wonderful power surged through her. She felt the life force trembling in her grasp. She reached up past the first leg, felt for another and could not find it, but without hesitation or doubt she grasped the little thigh, and waited. When Ap Min clenched and writhed again and screamed again, Shateel pulled, and again the unknown, unknowable power of life itself pushed the baby along after her drawing hand, and the whole leg came out into the world and part of the backside, tiny, ludicrously cloven, white as ash. Then everything stopped.

  “Good,” Moloquin cried, and stroked her shoulder roughly. “Here comes another.”

  Ap Min screamed; Shateel pulled, but the force was gone. The head was stuck and would not move. She clenched her jaws together. A trickle of cold fear invaded her confidence. For an instant she wanted to pull hard, although Ap Min was not ready yet, and she fought the impulse, her mind roiled and unsteady; she told herself, Wait, wait, and shut her eyes.

  With her eyes shut, all her attention focused on her hand, and she slid it up the channel, past the little body, and felt the shoulder. Now again Ap Min grunted and strained and shrieked, and Shateel felt the pushing against her fingers, and the little head slipped sideways. She guided it gently around and suddenly it slipped free and she felt the whole skull against her palm, and such a wild joyous power sprang down her arm from this touch that she opened her mouth and sang forth her overflowing feeling.

  Moloquin struck her again on the shoulder in his strange caress and he sang also. Ap Min groaned. When the next pain came, she heaved and her body jerked and the baby slid out another few inches, and Shateel drew it slowly forth, singing, until the newborn one lay on her knees, still connected to its mother by its twi
sted blue and white cord, its body waxy and grey.

  Then it opened its mouth and cried, and its whole body turned pink and rosy as a sunrise. Shateel turned it over in her lap and saw that it was cloven all the way.

  “A girl,” she said. “A girl, Ap Min, a daughter.”

  Ap Min began to laugh. With a grunt and a thrust of her body she expelled the rest of the twisted blue and white cord, and attached to the end, a great flapping mass of dark flesh, like an enormous clot of blood. Shateel stared at it.

  “What’s that?”

  Wahela laughed. She bent down between Shateel and Ap Min’s raised knee, took the cord up casually to her mouth and bit through it. A dribble of blood leaked from the end. “This is the moon’s baby.” She lifted the fleshy mass in her hands. “We have to bury it quickly, or the baby will sicken and die.”

  Ap Min was saying, “My baby, my baby,” in a breathless tired voice full of exultation, and Shateel reluctantly laid the baby on her mother’s breast. Everyone else was standing around staring at the newborn, and now Hems said suddenly, “It’s cold,” and reached out his hand to Moloquin. “Let me have your shirt.”

  Moloquin pulled off his shirt and gave it to him. Hems crouched by Ap Min and wrapped her and the baby in the garment, and stayed hovering near her, his arms around her, his cheek near her cheek. Ap Min, her face shining, helped the baby take the nipple, and cupped the tiny head in her palm, fingering its dark hair.

  “Can I—might I name it Moloquin?”

  Shateel sat down cross-legged, still amazed at what she herself had done; she wondered why nobody else seemed to think she had done anything wonderful.

  Taella said, “It would be unlucky, to name her for someone who is already alive; his power would suck the life away from her. Anyway, his name means what it means, and you don’t want to name her that, do you?”

  “Oh.” Ap Min looked down at the baby; suddenly she turned to Hems. “You name her. You know the names of the People.”

  Hems beamed at her and leaned protectively over her. Everyone else was crowding around the baby. Shateel got up. After all that she had done, Ap Min who had done nothing but scream now had everyone’s eyes on her. Shateel told herself that it was enough to have felt that life force, she did not need the praises of the others. She got to her feet, and now she marked, surprised, that Moloquin had gone, although everyone else was still gathered around the baby. She went away through the forest to the stream to drink the cool clear water.

  With all the posts of the roundhouse set into the ground and proven straight, they dressed the crosspieces. Bohodon, in his wood-gathering, had found a number of stones he thought would make good tools, and he sat with Brant and Moloquin by the streambank and tried to fashion a chisel out of flint, so that they could cut holes in the beams.

  Brant sat quietly watching and never spoke, but Moloquin leaned over Bohodon’s shoulder, asking him questions, and as he worked and got nowhere, began to berate him and demand that he do better. Bohodon grew red in the face. Stubbornly he worked at the flint, trying to ignore Moloquin, trying to remember how the blows were struck that knocked clean chips off the edge of the stone.

  “Oh,” he said suddenly. “I need a piece of antler, that’s what it is.”

  “What! All this while you have not even had the right tools?” Moloquin cried, and Bohodon sprang up and wheeled toward him.

  “You do it, if you can do it better!” He flung the stone down and strode away across the clearing.

  Moloquin shouted, “Go then—run away! You are useless, you are nothing!” He sat down on the stream’s gravel bar and took the stone in his hand.

  He bashed at it a few times with another stone, and the core broke uselessly in half. Brant laughed.

  Moloquin twisted to glare at him. “Are you laughing at me?”

  Brant looked the other way. He said, “Perhaps we can use the axe.”

  They went up to the clearing; as they passed by the place where the new gardens would be, where the women had begun to rake the cut brush into piles, Bohodon came past them, going in the other direction, his face black with bad temper. He said nothing to either of the other men, but walked straight back toward the stream. Moloquin cast a bitter look after him. He and Brant set to work with the axe, cutting holes in the ends of each beam to fit the knobs on the posts.

  Bohodon sat all that day by the stream, banging rocks together. If he made anything of use, he did not show it to Moloquin.

  The beams were trunks split lengthwise, so that one side was flat and the other curved. When the time came to lift them up onto the posts, everyone had to help, even Wahela’s children.

  They dragged each of the crossbeams into position on the ground just outside the two posts on which it would rest, and they put it on its round side, to make it easier to tip and roll it back and forth. Then with long sticks they pried one end up off the ground, and the women and children hurried to shove logs underneath. Rolling the trunk from side to side, they worked the logs well under the beam, adding more and more as they could, until at last they had gotten more than half the beam up onto a row of small logs. Then as many of the People as could get on leapt onto the high end of the beam, and the other end rocked up off the ground.

  They put more logs under this end, and began the whole process over again, prying up one end, bracing it with logs, working the logs underneath until the beam could be tipped up horizontal, and building up the logs under that end.

  As the beam rose into the air, supported on a cradle of logs many layers high, they tied ropes around it, and they prayed to it and cursed it, because the beam swayed and rolled treacherously, and several times it seemed ready to plunge off its mountings. As they learned the work and gained some confidence in the method, they worked faster.

  When they had finally raised it to the level of the posts, they hooked more ropes around it, and again they cursed and prayed because the trunk would not move, it would not roll over, and they pulled the ropes and the trunk moved and fell crashing back down to the earth and lay there, almost exactly where it had been before they began.

  The women all cried. The men stood staring at the ruins of their labors, and that day they worked no more.

  The day after they began again. Twice more the beam fell before they got it up again to the level of the posts. When at last they had raised it up high enough, Moloquin went to the hut and brought back his bronze axe and laid it between the two posts, in the middle, so that it would be under the beam when it was in place. He called all the people together, and they threw ropes around the beam and used long poles to guide it, and slowly, fearfully, they began to move the beam over.

  Moloquin began to sing as he worked; he sang the Song of the Sampo, and the women joined in.

  Sam-po, sam-po

  La li la li la la li la

  The Mill turns, the Mill grinds

  The People come and go

  La li la la li li la

  Sam-po, sam-po

  Slowly the beam rolled up onto its edge, and it hung there, stiff against the poles, resisting the ropes; as they strained to move it, they sang, and now the men sang also.

  Sam-po, sam-po La li la la li li la

  Into the Mill must all things fall

  Between Heaven and earth all things must lie

  La li la la li li la

  As they sang together, their strength worked together also, and the beam rolled over and landed on the posts with a thud.

  On the next day they raised two more of the beams, and the day after that, three.

  While they were working on the roundhouse, there was no one gathering food, and the season was turning; inexorably the Mill of Heaven was wheeling over them, and the year was sinking toward its close. Moloquin took the men off to hunt the fallow deer.

  This was the time when the stags fought for the does, and the deer were bo
lder than usual. There was a small herd that ranged the whole area, although they had begun avoiding the places where the People lived and worked; when the People first arrived in the clearing Moloquin had seen the deer several times a day sometimes but now he saw them rarely, and only when he went looking for them. Moloquin led the other four men and Wahela’s little boy, whom everybody called Laughter, away through the countryside, toward the ford where the deer often watered in the evening.

  The forest was changing with the approach of winter. Now the sycamore trees and the lindens were dropping their leaves and letting in the pale sunlight like a rain; only the great oaks clung stubbornly to their foliage, the last to die. The racket of the birds and the chittering of insects had vanished into a stillness like the pause between breaths. The men walked beneath a sky tracked with clouds like the ripples in a stream, and the wind was sharp with the north cold. Here and there on the trees they passed were scraps of velvet from the horns of the stags, and once they heard the bellowing of two stags challenging one another.

  Each of the men had brought some weapon. Moloquin took his axe; Hems and Kayon had slings, which they had learned to use to bring down small game during the summer; Brant had a club that looked stronger than he was. The little boy had his hands full of stones, and Bohodon had cut himself a long thin spear of elm wood.

  As they drew nearer the ford, the sounds of the competing stags rang out through the trees—the battering and clashing of their horns, and the thunder of their snorting breath. The little boy walked as close to Brant as he could, fearful, and the other men kept close together too. Moloquin went on before them all, crouching down, trying to pad his footfalls; he led them up into the top of the broad meadow by the ford.

  From the hillside above he looked down, and there in the open he could see all the deer. The stags were fighting almost in the ford. Their enormous antlers were tangled together, and they leaned their heads into each other and wrenched back and forth, snorting great blasts from their nostrils and twisting their antlers, each trying to throw the other down. Up in the high grass between Moloquin and the stags were the does, grazing in the last of the sunlight.