Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  He passed his hand over his eyes, remembering how the women had wept in the middle of their fields. He himself had not understood. He had thought, as most of the People did, that in the rafters of the roundhouse was enough food to last them all for many winters.

  “But there was nothing. There were only empty baskets, sacks stuffed with straw. He had given it all away to Harus Kum, to get the blue beads.”

  “What did the women do?”

  “They cursed Ladon.” Ladon’s son sank his head down between his shoulders. “And me they cursed also. They did not know what part I had in it. Had they known—”

  A surge of guilt rose in his throat and stopped his voice. He lifted his face toward Moloquin.

  “You must save us. We have done evil, the spirits have condemned us. Only you can bring us back to the path of life again.”

  Moloquin turned his face away. “Sleep. We have far to go tomorrow.” He pulled his coat around him. Ladon’s son searched the features of the other man a long while, hoping for some sign that Moloquin would soften, but Moloquin’s face was hard as stone. After a while, they both lay down and gave themselves to sleep.

  When Moloquin came to the village of Ladon’s People, it was like a village of the dead.

  There were no dogs any more to bark. There were no pigs any more, nor any goats; all had been eaten. There were no songs any more, nor any dances, nor the busy sounds of work. In all the village the only noise was the whimpering and crying of the children.

  The People sat in the sun and stared into the empty air; and some of those who sat there were already dead. The boys of the boys’ band sat near their mothers; they did not run and chase one another and play their games in the old gardens by the river. The women sat with their children, their hands in their laps; they did not go any more to the gardens on the high ground, nor did they weave or make pots, or put wood on the dead fires in the hearths.

  The men sat in the yard of the roundhouse; they did not dance, or work with their masks, or make tools. They sat where they were and did nothing, and their bodies were like the trees of the dead of winter that had no leaves on them, but only the gaunt and brittle branches.

  Moloquin came through the village, looking around him with every step, and his heart quaked in his breast. It seemed to him that they were already enveloped in death, that they could not see him who was not of their company, who was alive. He felt that he moved invisibly through their midst.

  He went by the circle of the old women, and there he saw the sampo, silent on its center post, and around it the old women sat like lumps of clay. They looked dead, except, when he looked closely at them, he saw in their eyes the last little flicker of life, trembling with weakness, and soon to go out.

  He went on, and he came to the roundhouse.

  When the men saw him there they struggled to rise. Some were strong enough to stand, and they stood up, and the others who could not stand stretched up their arms, and their brothers helped them stand to greet their new chief. At the sight of them Moloquin struggled to keep himself from weeping. He had seen them when they were his enemies, when they were strong and full of life, when they cursed him and stoned him, and he wished they were the same now as they had been, even if they should have been his enemies again.

  He went into the roundhouse; he went through the roundhouse, until he came to the bed where Ladon lay, there at the center of the roundhouse, under the hole in the roof that let the light in, at the foot of the tree called North Star.

  Moloquin went down on one knee beside the bed. Ladon lay there like a corpse; his body had shrunk down around him like a pile of dead leaves. Only, when Moloquin knelt down beside him, the dying man opened his eyes and saw him, and he opened his mouth and spoke.

  “Moloquin,” he said. “You have come.”

  “Yes,” said Moloquin.

  “I knew you would come,” said Ladon, his voice barely above a whisper. “I have something to say to you before I die.”

  “Speak it,” said Moloquin.

  “The old women have named you the chief,” said Ladon.

  “Is that what you would say to me?”

  “No. It is this: that Ael and I—”

  The dying man sighed, and his eyes shut; Moloquin went stiff all through him, every muscle tensing. He forced himself still, to wait, and eventually Ladon opened his eyes again.

  “Ael had many men,” he whispered. “Or so I thought. But now that I am lying here and soon must go among those who went before me, I have been thinking, and I do not remember now that I knew certainly that she had many men. Perhaps I only thought that to excuse what I did with her.”

  Moloquin clenched his teeth. He clenched his fist on his knee. He said nothing.

  “Maybe I was the only one who lay with her,” Ladon whispered. “Maybe I am your father, Moloquin.”

  “No,” Moloquin said.

  “Maybe,” said Ladon, and he smiled, and his eyes closed again; he lay there as if he were dead already.

  Moloquin got up. He was trembling all over, and his mind boiled in a wild passion of feelings, of rage and shame and fear, and of blind hatred. He walked straight out through the old echoing roundhouse, with its rafters full of empty baskets and its shadows full of ghosts.

  He went into the yard of the roundhouse where the men sat close around their fire, and he bent down and took a burning brand from the fire. He faced the men with their hollow faces and their sunken eyes and said, “Whatever you have inside that you want, you must get it out now.”

  Ladon’s son came to him and said, “What are you going to do?”

  Moloquin stared at him, hating him for his father’s sake. He said, “This roundhouse is full of evil. It must be destroyed.”

  “My father—”

  “Ladon is dead,” Moloquin said, and turned his back on Ladon’s son.

  The other men obeyed him. They went into the roundhouse and came out again, each with his mask, a few tools, a blanket, a coat, some beads, some feathers, a flute, bits of rock. Some of them brought out the baskets that held what was left of their food—a few handfuls of meal, some roots, some herbs. None questioned Moloquin. Ladon’s son himself went in and came out again with a bundle wrapped in a blanket. When they had all gotten what they wished out of the roundhouse, Moloquin lifted the burning torch in his hand and set the roof on fire.

  The flames leapt quickly up across the whole roof and crept down the sides of the roundhouse; within a moment the whole building was blazing. Moloquin stepped back, and the other men all stepped back as well, their arms up to protect them against the heat. The women had come in from the longhouses, to see what was done, and they put out their hands and warmed themselves at the heat of the fire.

  The baskets with what remained of their food stood by the fence, and some of the People crept to them. They bent over the baskets and put their hands into the meal and licked the raw meal from their fingers. When some dribbled into the dirt they bent to lick it up out of the dirt. The others hesitated only long enough to see that Moloquin was not stopping this, and then they too went to the food baskets and crowded in close to get as much as they could.

  Moloquin stood watching them, his mind in black turmoil. Ladon’s son came to him.

  “They will eat it all,” he said. “We shall all starve if they eat everything now, we shall be dead within days.”

  “Let them,” Moloquin said, and he turned and walked away.

  He went up across the plain to the Pillar of the Sky. Behind him the plume of smoke from the blazing roundhouse climbed into the pale clouds, carrying the stench of Ladon up to Heaven.

  He walked into the Pillar of the Sky as if into the embrace of a lover. The grass was full of bones. When he climbed over the embankment, a great horde of crows flapped up into the air, so dense a cloud of them that they cast a deep shadow over the circle of collapsing sto
nes. Moloquin walked down into the middle of the place, and he lay down and wept.

  He had never wondered who his father was. In his loyalty to Ael he had needed no father. He had always assumed, deep in his mind, that, however she had come to be pregnant with him, she had been blameless. Now he knew she had done something foul, something worse than foul, to get him.

  He wept until his eyes were empty; exhausted, he lay still. Then the air darkened; a deep shadow formed over him, and the crows dropped down into the grass, flopping and black, and waddled to the corpses lying in the grass, and drove their beaks like daggers into the raw flesh, tearing up chunks of the flesh of the dead.

  Moloquin gave a hoarse cry. He sprang to his feet and ran forward, waving his arms, and before his onslaught the crows scattered up into the sky again, squawking and ugly.

  He saw now how full the place was. Some of the bodies were sitting up, propped against stones; they had walked here, in their extremity, walked here to die, perhaps to save some of the food for others, perhaps merely to end their own suffering. Others, the little ones, the children, lay carefully covered up under piles of green boughs, yet still the carrion birds had reached them, torn out their eyes, pierced the skin with their beaks, and opened their bodies for the feast.

  Thus Brant had passed from this world into the next one, and with him, all the ageless lore of the Pillar of the Sky, gone forever beyond the mind of man: a thousand generations of patient learning, gone.

  Here Karelia had lain, with her stories.

  Soon they would all lie here; soon the last would walk up the long slope to take their places here, among the dead, at the gateway into the Overworld. When they were gone, there would be no more.

  No more. Their laughter, their hopes, their quarrels, their hatreds: no more. Their lore, their stories, their skills, their understanding, all the meaning of their lives: no more.

  Brant and Karelia remained here still, alive in the memory of the People. Even Ael, the outcast, had come here in the end, to join her soul with the souls of her People, and even she they remembered, kept alive in their minds. Without the living People to sustain them, the spirits would vanish, scattered into the heartless depth of eternity.

  Now, sitting there, while the crows hovered angrily above him, he saw how small his own passions were, how light and empty. Here was the real horror, that the strivings and learning of a whole People were about to be swept from the world; very soon it would be as if none of them had ever lived at all.

  Around him the circular space murmured with the wind; surely all the spirits of the People crowded here today, gathering in the dead, and mourning the living. He turned, his eyes struggling to make them out in the air—to see Karelia again, and Ael—and as he did, his heart grew strong, and his soul rebelled against their fate.

  He would not let them die. Whatever they had done to him, they were his People. He would save them if he could, or go with them into oblivion. A trace of dark smoke still towered into the air above the village. He went out of the Pillar of the Sky and walked down toward that monument of smoke, to take up his destiny.

  Ladon’s son struggled along through dry grass to his waist, his breath short; there was a sharp pain under his ribs on the left side, and he pressed his hand to it. When he came at last to the top of the slope, he said, “This is useless, Moloquin—Rulon will give us nothing.”

  “They must have good food,” said Moloquin, without pausing in his swinging stride. They went down the long rolling slope toward the river. For the best part of the day they had been following the river north, sometimes walking within sight of it and sometimes swerving over hilltops to avoid the marshes and the dense brush along the banks. Ladon’s son was weak with hunger and often thought he could go no further.

  Now he sank down onto his knees, the pain unbearable under his ribs, and called, “Leave me here. I must rest.”

  Moloquin came back to him through the whispering grass. “It is not so much farther now. Come along.”

  Ladon’s son sat down, his legs folded under him, and leaned on one arm; he thought, looking down at the brown surface of the river, that it would not be so hard to sit here and to die quietly here in the open, with the river rolling by. His mother, dead many years now, had told him once that the river was one of the pathways to Heaven, and perhaps it was true. Moloquin took him by the arm.

  “Come, get up, you are not dead yet. You ate well yesterday, didn’t you?”

  They had all eaten well yesterday, some had eaten until they were sick, and vomited the food on the ground, and lapped it up again like brutes, their tongues stroking the dust. Still, five more had died in the night, huddled on the ground near the ashes of the roundhouse.

  “I cannot—I cannot—”

  Moloquin pulled him onto his feet and held him there. “What a weakling you are. Keep going, or I will take my axe to you. What would Shateel think of you if she saw you crying like a baby?”

  At that, Ladon’s son stiffened his knees and tried to get himself upright again. His legs gave way. Moloquin grunted in his chest and effortlessly hoisted him up on to his shoulders.

  “You are a baby,” he said, and set out, walking lightly and easily under the weight of a grown man. “A fool, brother, and a weakling, and that is why you must do as I say and have no say of your own.”

  “Put me down,” said Ladon’s son, amazed. He hung over Moloquin’s shoulder, his feet and his head bobbing at the level of Moloquin’s waist. “Put me down—I will walk.”

  Abruptly he was swung around onto his feet again, and his head spun a little; now he wondered for an instant why Moloquin had called him brother, and wanted to ask but dared not. Already Moloquin was walking away, and Ladon’s son followed him, trying to keep up, his hand to his side.

  They went on, following the river north, and came to a place where the course of the stream bent a little to the east. There was an island in the middle of the stream and on it three old twisted willow trees dragged their branches in the water, like old women netting fish. Now Ladon’s son stopped and turned west and pointed.

  “There. That way is the High Hill—the Mount of Heaven, Abadon’s High Seat. Rulon’s roundhouse is just below it.”

  They went off along a well-worn path in the meadow grass, and as they came closer to the place where Rulon lived with his People, they crossed more paths, and saw some children playing in the lee of a long wedge-shaped hill. Coming down between that hill and another long lump of ground, they passed by a group of three standing stones, and then saw before them the High Hill.

  It rose up from the flat plain, high and smooth, as evenly shaped as a woman’s breast. On the top were three more standing stones, and all around the foot of the hill, set up against the base and lying in the grass, were stones, of the same deep-colored stuff as the stories at Turnings-of- the-Year, some two and three times as tall as a man.

  This place throve, as Ladon’s Village had once thrived. Here many people worked. There were strips of cleared ground around the foot of the hill, and in them women cut down brush and burned tree-stumps, to make ready for the spring planting, and on the slope of the hill a little flock of goats grazed, watched over by little boys. As Moloquin and Ladon’s son came around the foot of the hill, they nearly walked on some cloth, spread out to bleach in the sun, and a woman shouted to them to change their course.

  Moloquin paid no heed to any of this. With Ladon’s son at his heels, he went around the foot of the High Hill, looking for Rulon’s roundhouse.

  At last they saw the brush fence, and above it, three thatched roofs. When they went into the village through the gap in the fence, the sun was going down. Ladon’s son could smell meat broth cooking somewhere. He heard a sampo clattering and chattering at its work. They went in between the two longhouses, with their doors facing east, just as many of Rulon’s People were crowding indoors, with armloads of firewood, with baskets
and bowls, to begin the evening meal.

  When Ladon’s son saw this, all the things of the village—the women at their work, the men dressed in feathers and furs, the children fat and happy—his heart quaked, longing for this life again for himself. He hung his head, thinking of the evil that he and his People had done to bring ruin on them; in his heart he promised never to do wickedness again.

  They reached the roundhouse, and standing before the door, Moloquin called out Rulon’s name.

  One of the men of the village came to the door. He scowled at Moloquin and Ladon’s son and said, “What do you want, strangers?”

  “We are not strangers,” Moloquin said, “but of your own kind. We are of Ladon’s Village, or that which once was Ladon’s Village, and I have come to see Rulon.”

  The man squared himself in the doorway, his hands on his hips. His gaze went over Moloquin’s shoulder to Ladon’s son and back again. All around the yard now others of Rulon’s People came to hear what was being said.

  “I know that one,” said the man in the doorway. “He is the son of Ladon, who could not keep Shateel happy and whose village is cursed now. You I do not know. Who are you, with your uncouth speech and your ugly looks?”

  “I am Moloquin,” said that one. “Ladon is dead now, and I am the chief of my People. I want to talk to Rulon.”

  “Moloquin,” said the man in the doorway, in a jeering tone. “You are unwanted here, Unwanted One.”

  Ladon’s son saw Moloquin put his hand to his belt, to the axe at his belt, and he sucked in his breath; but Moloquin’s fingers only played along the ashwood handle of the weapon. The man in the doorway snarled at him.

  “Your People are cursed. Great wrong you did, and now great wrong must fall on you, to repay you. That is what Rulon says.”

  “Let me hear that from Rulon,” Moloquin said mildly.

  From behind him now came the voices of the crowd. “Stone them! Drive them away—back to their hovels!” “Let them suffer!” “Go away, wicked ones—cursed ones.” “They will pollute our village with their evil!”