Pillar of the Sky
Page 36
He touched the bronze head of the axe, and they leaned forward to see it, and they murmured, amazed with it.
“I made this,” he said. “I drew out the dust of the earth and warmed it until it became what you see here, and there is such a power in this stuff that you have never dreamed of. You saw how I brought Ladon and the chiefs down with it, at the Gathering, when I called my People forth. With this in my hand Rulon can do me no harm. Now hear me. We shall go into the forest and cut branches, and shape them, and those of you with stonecraft, can make us tips for spears and we shall make spears. When we are ready we shall go to Rulon and teach him how to treat his brothers.”
The three young men directly before him let out a yell, and one called, “Teach us, Opa-Moloquin!”
Moloquin nodded, pleased. He looked from one to the next, and saw all the men ready to do his bidding.
“Between Heaven and earth there are no People like Moloquin’s People. Good. Go get ready, and tonight when you dance you must think of fighting, and overcoming other men. Only, say nothing to the women, do you understand?”
“Yes, Opa-Moloquin,” they said, and they got up and with many gestures of obeisance they left him. With one hand he held back Ladon’s son among them.
The fair man sank down beside him. Moloquin looked long at him, frowning, seeing nothing of Ladon in this soft, pale man.
He said, “You must go to my village in the forest. Tell them that I am deep in this matter here. Tell Bahedyr to come and bring his spear. Tell Hems to come.”
“May I talk to Shateel?” Ladon’s son asked.
Moloquin gave him a pitying look. “You may talk. I cannot say she will listen.” He put the cover on his axe.
Ladon’s son went through the forest with the lightness and swiftness of a red deer, and the nearer he got to Shateel, the more eager was his soul to see her.
When he had come before, she had hardly looked at him, but then Moloquin had been there. This time Ladon’s son would speak to her, and through her to the baby curled in her belly, and he knew he would bring her home again to him.
After two days’ walking, he reached the little village where Moloquin’s first roundhouse stood. He came from the forest into the clearing in the middle of the day, when the women were sitting in the sun, scraping a deerskin, and the two little children were skidding stones off the ice of the stream; the men were nowhere to be seen.
Shateel knelt in the circle of the women, but she did no work. In her arms she held a bundle wrapped in a rabbitskin, and while the other women saw Ladon’s son immediately, Shateel did not, because her whole being seemed focused on the bundle in the rabbitskin.
Ladon’s son came out of the forest, and the oldest of the women stood up and faced him. Then Shateel saw him also.
Her face grew pale. She glanced around her at the others, and she raised the baby against her breast and gripped it tighter in her arms.
Ladon’s son walked toward them, his hand out. He said, “Do I find a welcome at the fires of my People?”
“Your People,” said Taella, skeptically. “When he left here, he was saying that he would never accept you.”
Shateel said, “Where is Moloquin?”
At that the heart of Ladon’s son sank a little. He drew nearer to the fire, and the women made him dutiful gestures of respect and welcome, and a robust red-cheeked woman he did not know got up and brought him a mat to sit on and a bowl of grain and broth. He busied himself with the food. Now that he was so near to Shateel, he could not raise his gaze to her face. He stirred up the hot broth until the grain swelled, and looked around him at the clearing, clean and orderly in the pale winter sunlight, the great pile of wood near the door into the roundhouse, the deerhides stretched on racks of bent willow branches hanging on the outside of the roundhouse.
“You are doing well here,” he said.
“Moloquin brought us here,” said Taella. “He knew what he was doing. He is our chief—have your People won him away from us?”
“He has not deserted you,” said Ladon’s son. He looked around again for the men. “I have messages for Bahedyr and Hems—he wants them to join him.”
“Where?” Taella said.
“What is he doing?” said the red-cheeked woman, her eyes bright.
Now Ladon’s son managed to slide a glance at Shateel, and found her staring at him; the heat rose in his neck and cheeks. He ate some of the porridge in his bowl. Remembering what Moloquin had told him, he gave himself over to the story of what had become of them in Rulon’s Village.
They listened with glowing eyes. When Ladon’s son spoke of Moloquin coming before Rulon as a suppliant and the honorable and excellent words he had spoken, they sighed and smiled to one another; when he told them Rulon’s response, they gasped, and the red-cheeked woman thumped the ground with her fist.
Then he told them how Moloquin had gathered up on his own back all the food he could lift, as if he carried his whole People on his own poor back, and staggered out of Rulon’s Village. The women leaned toward him, intent, their lips parted. He told them of the stoning, the insults, the humiliations that Moloquin had endured, and they cried out in rage.
Shateel shook her head; she raised the hem of her heavy coat over her face, and said, “I am ashamed of my brother. Rulon is no more my brother. I am ashamed, ashamed.” When she lowered her garment, tears streaked her face.
Now Ladon’s son told them how Moloquin had brought back his great burden of food, and how the People had come to meet him and borne him away to the village and named him their chief. The faces of the women were round with satisfaction, and they looked at one another and smiled and nodded. But when Ladon’s son told them that Moloquin had taken the men into the forest to make weapons, all their looks stilled.
“I see evil in this,” Taella said. “There is great evil waiting to be worked.”
Then the fourth woman, a little brown creature Ladon’s son had never seen before, and who had not yet spoken, raised her head, and said, “What Moloquin does cannot be evil. He wants my man to go with him, and I am glad that I have a man who will go and serve him well. Hems was the first to follow Moloquin, and I was the second, and we shall never turn our feet out of the path he has set for us.”
Taella and the red-cheeked woman took hold of this brown creature’s hands, and squeezed them, and smiled on her. Shateel alone still frowned.
“Has he spoken to you of all he intends? No. Moloquin will tell no one what he means. He will speak only of what he expects of each of us. Does no one dare to ask him what he means to do?”
“He suffered for our sake,” said Ladon’s son. It surprised him to find himself defending Moloquin.
“The kindreds of the People do not fight one another,” said Shateel. “Not since the first man and the first woman came into this holy land have the kindreds risen up against one another and shed their common blood.”
“We must have food to live. He will seize what is necessary for us to live. If they do not fight us—” Ladon’s son saw now a way through this— “if they had done what is right, which is to feed us who are hungry, when they have so much, then no evil would fall on them.”
“Better to starve,” said Shateel flatly, and she got up, and with her baby in her arms she went into the roundhouse.
The other women stared after her. The red-cheeked woman muttered under her breath, “She is too serious in her new work, is Shateel.”
“What is her new work?” Ladon’s son asked.
Taella took the bowl out of his hands and filled it again from a pot on the fire. “Moloquin gave her the task of the chief while he is gone.”
“Now she thinks she is better than we are,” said the red-cheeked woman.
“She has always thought that,” said Taella, and laughed.
The brown woman, the wife of Hems, said quietly, “She has done it
well. I speak nothing against her, or any other work of Moloquin’s.”
“She is not Moloquin’s,” Ladon’s son burst out. “She was my wife.”
They goggled at him; they had forgotten that. Taella gave him back his bowl, but he put it down. His heart was beating violently. He got up and went after Shateel, into the roundhouse.
It was tiny, built on a single turning of posts; it would have fit entirely into that part of his father’s roundhouse that Ladon had kept for himself. Just inside the door he met the warmth and darkness, pleasant after the cold outside, and he stood letting his eyes get used to the light and breathing in the warm smells of hearths and hides and people. Then Shateel’s voice came from the gloom.
“I am here,” she said, in a rough-edged voice. “You may come to me.”
He went toward her voice, and found her at the back of the roundhouse, by a hearth of stones. She was kneeling on a straw mat, her baby before her on top of its rabbitskin, while she wiped up its mess.
It was a girl child. Ladon’s son sat down hard beside Shateel, his breath going out of him as if he had been poked.
“Shateel,” he said. “What is her name?”
“Dehra,” Shateel said, proudly.
“She is very beautiful.”
“Tell me of Moloquin,” she said. “What does he mean to do to my brother and his People?”
“I don’t want to talk about Moloquin. I want to ask you about coming back to me.”
She bowed her head. With a handful of dry grass she swabbed the baby’s tiny backside. The little thing let out a wail, small as itself, and the mother crooned to it, and Ladon’s son suddenly had the feeling of being a world away from them, shut out.
He looked down at his hands, his heart breaking. He knew now she did not love him at all anymore.
She dressed the baby up again, packing its loincloth with the white fluff of milkweed and thistles, and bundled it up again in the rabbitskin. Lifting her daughter in her arms, she faced Ladon’s son.
“What did you want to say to me?”
He looked long into her face. She had never seemed so beautiful to him before. Above her large dark eyes the eyebrows were straight and thick; her chin was stubborn as a man’s. He knew she was lost to him. He put out his hand to her.
“Let me help you stand.”
She took his hand and he drew her up onto her feet. She said, “I am going with you.”
“What!”
“I am going with you to Moloquin. He cannot bring such a terrible thing on the People, and perhaps I can change his mind. Or perhaps I can change Rulon’s mind. Something must be done.”
She threw the end of her coat up over her shoulder, covering the baby, and went out of the roundhouse. Calling to the little boy who played on the stream’s ice, she sent him to find Hems and Bahedyr.
“There is no need to hurry,” Ladon’s son told her. “Moloquin will take time, to make weapons, to let the other men eat and regain their strength.”
She hardly glanced at him. What he said seemed light as a moth-wing to her, and as of much interest. He put his hand on her arm.
“Do you love Moloquin?” he asked, in a low voice.
She faced him, her expression schooled to a smooth guilelessness. “Everyone loves Moloquin,” she said. She walked away from him, very straight, back to the fire.
Shateel had last seen the village of Ladon’s People when it was thriving and happy. When she came on it now, for the first time since she had left it at midsummer, it was so changed that she sat down where she was and stared at it.
The men who had come with her, Hems, Bahedyr with his spear, and Ladon’s son, stopped and waited restlessly by her for a while. Wahela had come with her also; Wahela stood with her hand shading her eyes, looking all around them.
The baby Dehra cried, and Shateel gave it her breast, her eyes all the while on the plain where the village had been.
Once it had covered the ground between the edge of the forest, just behind her, and the river. The gardens had thronged with women at their work; the flat ground where the longhouses stood had been noisy with children, and by the river, the great roundhouse had stood vast and important under its peaked roof. Now the gardens were empty. Thistles and brambles alone grew there, brown skeletons of weeds with thorns like claws, and high brown grass. Of the four longhouses, one was gone completely, and one was collapsing, its walls broken and buckling, and its roof caved in. The roundhouse was a heap of blown ash.
The men went on, Wahela trailing after them, and after a few moments Shateel too rose and went on down into the dying village. Around the yard of the two remaining longhouses, people were sitting listlessly in the sun. They were thin as dead leaves that had lost all their substance and were now only twigs and veins, and they seemed to have no will anymore, no motion of their own. Shateel could not look them in the eyes, not while her fat and lively baby kicked within her arms, not while she herself was fat and lively. Then, as she stood in the dust of the yard, she heard the voice of the sampo.
It came from the yard of the other longhouse. She went around the corner, and there she saw the old women sitting around the mill which clattered and turned happily as ever, although now it ground nothing but the words of the old women. Shateel went closer, and sat down behind them, and listened.
Sam-po, sam-po,
La li la la li li la
The Mill turns, the Mill grinds
La li la la li li la
When the sampo stops, the world ends.
La li la la la
The old women, who had seemed to her as changeless as mountains, had suffered much. Tishka was gone; now Grela sat in her place. Fat she once had been, but now Grela’s skin hung empty and slack from her bones. Next to her sat one who had been robust when Shateel left, and who now dozed, exhausted, her chin on her chest, and the other women around the sampo were no better than this. They seemed not to have seen Shateel, but when they spoke, they spoke of those things which she was most anxious to know.
“Where is Moloquin? Why has he been gone so long? We are nearly out of food again.”
“Where did he take the men?”
“He fed us. He put food into the mouths of our children. Whatever he does I will accept.”
“I like this very little. Perhaps it would be better if we did all die.”
“He is Ael’s son, our rightful chief. We shall do as he tells us, as he wishes of us, as long as he is our chief.”
“But where has he taken the men?”
La li la li la la la
Sam-po, sam-po
The Mill turns, the Mill grinds
La li la li la li li
The hardest nut, the softest grain
Sam-po, sam-po
The sampo grinds them all the same
Shateel crept closer; she leaned forward, and she cast her words into their midst.
“Where is Moloquin? How did he save you?”
“He brought us food from Rulon’s Village. Some say he bore it away on his back, the whole of Rulon’s store, by magic. Some say he stole the whole of Rulon’s store by magic.”
“And now where has he gone?”
“Into the forest, to make magic.”
“What does he intend?”
“We do not know. He saved us once; he will save us again, if we have faith. Yet he is Ael’s son. He is our chief, but he is Ael’s son, and like Ael he cares nothing for our ways.”
“We must have faith in him. Karelia—”
At that name, all voices died; all the women looked at one another, and they bowed their heads at last. “What of Karelia?” asked Shateel.
Sam-po, sam-po
La li la la li li la
What is living may fall silent
What is dead may sometimes speak
La li la la li li l
a
Sam-po, sam-po
“Karelia said that he would save us. Karelia said that he would be our chief.”
Grela raised her head; the loose skin of her face hung down like a collar over her neck.
“In dreams we saw Karelia and heard her words. She told us to seek out Moloquin. We did so, and he brought us food. He has great power, great magic, and we must give ourselves into his hands.”
“Yet he has taken away the men,” Shateel said. “And you are full of fears, anyone can see that, full of dread.”
“We are weak. Moloquin is strong. We must submit to him.”
“Submit,” Shateel cried. “What word is this for the head women of the People?”
Now for the first time they faced her, and they did so all at once, as if they were one creature. Their faces had shrunk beneath the skin, and they seemed to look out from deep inside. They said nothing to her, but in their faces she saw that they had already yielded themselves to Moloquin.
Then Dehra cried, inside Shateel’s coat, and the women in one breath cooed and sighed, and they reached out and drew Shateel into their midst. She uncovered the baby and showed her to them, and they bent over Dehra and crooned to her, and passed her from one set of great sagging starving arms to the next, and their faces warmed with smiles. Shateel sat among them, seeing the lively joy of the baby, and the death creeping over the women: their hair falling out, their teeth rotting, their skin scaling and flaking. They bent over the baby, with all her future before her, and their voices were gentle and soft. Shateel put out her hand and turned the mill around once more.
Sam-po, sam-po
The People plan, the People dream
La li la la li li la
The sampo only turns and turns
La li la la li li la
The People’s plans and dreams are dust
The sampo turns and turns
La li la li la la la
Sam-po, sam-po
Bahedyr spoke to one of the boys of the village, and learned something of where Moloquin had gone; with Hems he walked off toward the forest, and Wahela followed.