Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  In the light, all the People cheered Moloquin, but in the dark, their voices changed.

  Shateel sat on the embankment in the darkness of the late twilight, and around her she heard her People murmuring.

  “Why is he not here? There is none to lead the dances, none to command the readings of the stars.”

  “They read the stars anyway. The dances—”

  “We have no chief to give praise and homage to, no chief to show off our greatness. The northern villages are laughing at us.”

  “Yet things go well for us. The harvest will be fat this year again.”

  “That is Shateel’s doing. We have not seen Moloquin in over a year.”

  “See how his woman goes about the place, handsome as a chief! We are being ruled over by women.”

  And the People of the northern villages came among Shateel’s People and taunted them, saying, “You are a village of women! Where have your men been, all year long?”

  “They work at the Pillar of the Sky, with Moloquin.”

  “Where is your chief?”

  “At the Pillar of the Sky.”

  “Pssst! You are a village of nothing but women.”

  Now Shateel imagined that the world was a tight-woven basket, formed of the interlocking lives of the People; but Moloquin stood alone. He had opened a hole in the basket, through which the whole world could dribble away. She had avoided the New Village, because Wahela was often there; she had expected that Moloquin would come to her when he wished. Now she knew that he would never leave the Pillar of the Sky. She would have to go to him. Returning to her hearth where her daughter slept inside her blankets, Shateel made ready to go over the plain to her husband.

  While the People were at the Gathering, Moloquin slept in the Pillar of the Sky, in the hollow under the North Watcher. He woke in the dawn light and went down to the New Village and washed himself in the pond and ate in the door of the roundhouse. The days were long and empty. Sometimes he went onto the downs and hunted for the bustards, whose nestlings were now learning to fly, but he found himself no longer lithe and quick enough to catch them, even with nets, and he got his food out of the roundhouse, like any other man of the People.

  Most of the day he spent at the Pillar of the Sky, digging a hole for the next upright, although the work before him now was to raise up the beam to the top of the two stones that already stood there. In his mind he performed the task over and over, and in his mind it was easy, yet when he was done, the stone lay on the ground, the two uprights held nothing into the sky.

  He was digging the new hole when the first of the People came back from the Gathering: Ruak, grumbling as usual, and some of his followers from the Salmon Leap Society. He tramped through the Pillar of the Sky, grunted a welcome to his chief, and passed on to the roundhouse just beyond the embankment to stow away his belongings. After him came the others in a steady trickle.

  It was almost sundown when the People came back, too late to begin any work. When they had put away their things they all came together in the middle of the village, built a fire, and welcomed themselves home with a feast. Afterward, the men danced, and the women shared gossip, sitting in the fireglow, their children sleeping in their laps.

  Moloquin went into the roundhouse, and Wahela followed him.

  She said, “You should have come to the Gathering. There were things said there you ought to have heard.”

  “Ah? What?”

  She shrugged, coy, her dark eyes pretending to look elsewhere, and her hips swaying. “Had you been there, no one would have dared speak them.”

  “Wahela,” he said, “this is a riddle. Come sit down beside me and let me make you welcome.”

  He was sitting on a pile of fur at the center of the roundhouse, his back to the post North Star; by his feet a turtle shell of pig’s fat, burning at a little twisted wick, cast its light all around him. Wahela, her hips swaying, her eyes elsewhere, moved slowly around him, circling him without approaching him, and her voice was languid and idle.

  She said, “They whispered against you. The northern villages especially do not love you, Moloquin. They spoke in the ears of the others that they should cast you out.”

  Her words struck him like thrown stones; he started to his feet, and made himself sit down again. In the light of the lamp her face was indefinite of expression, her long eyes enigmatic, and the smooth gestures of her hands told him more than anything she said.

  She said, “If you came to the Gathering, and dressed yourself and all those around you in the treasure—”

  At the mention of the treasure he could not keep still. He got up and walked away through the roundhouse, to the door. Wahela followed him, murmuring, her skirts hissing together like a garment of snakes. In the door to the roundhouse, he stood with his back to her, and looked out through the little yard to the center of the village, where the men were dancing.

  “Who spoke against me?”

  “The northern villages. They say we are ruled by women! They never see you. If you walked among them, with all your power, with the treasure gleaming around you—”

  “Who else?”

  “Shateel’s People have no love for you.”

  He nodded once, believing that. They hated him for Rulon’s sake, or so he thought, having no real knowledge of how they regarded him. Now here came someone, walking up from the great fire, a tall, stooped man with feathers in his hair.

  It was Ladon’s son. He greeted Moloquin with a smile, and Moloquin put out his hands to him, glad for one who would not burn him with his tongue.

  “Welcome home, brother,” he said, and took Ladon’s son by the hands.

  “I am glad to be home,” said Ladon’s son. “Perhaps next year I shall make my Gathering with you, Moloquin-on. It is too far to the Turnings- of-the-Year, and nothing of importance happens there.”

  The two men sat down together on the ground just outside the roundhouse. Although the summer was at its height, the air was chill and damp; a mist drove by above their heads, above the tops of the roundhouse posts, showing mainly as a blankness of the night sky. Wahela lingered in the doorway.

  Ladon’s son said, “What has she told you?”

  “That the People speak against me,” Moloquin said.

  “They do,” Ladon’s son said. “Those who know you not. Glad I am that I am no chief, Moloquin-on.”

  “It would be worse,” Moloquin said, with a laugh, “if those who know me spoke against me.”

  “Many more there are who do not know you. I would fear their ignorance rather than trust in the knowledge of the rest of us.”

  Moloquin laughed again, but it was a false sound, and he hunched his shoulders against the cold. He turned his mind from the unquiet of his People. “Tomorrow we shall begin to raise the beam.”

  Ladon’s son nodded. He picked at the ground between his feet. “Ruak came back?”

  “Yes, and his novices.”

  “That’s good. He might as well have gone home to his own village.”

  A cold tide of foreboding swept over Moloquin; he saw how the whispers and murmurs of the People could take the Pillar of the Sky from him, and the urge swelled in him to go there, to begin the work now, at once, in the dark, while the men were still here. He caught himself; it was foolish to give himself to panic. Then up toward the roundhouse came Bahedyr.

  “Did Bahedyr find a wife?”

  Wahela laughed. “Several,” she said, and flung up her arm and greeted the hero. “When will you marry, Bahedyr-on?”

  The man grunted at her, obviously tired and a little drunk, and went straight into the roundhouse, not noticing Moloquin there. Moloquin watched him go, relieved. The People might grumble and murmur, but surely they would not rush to marry off their daughters to Bahedyr if they hated Bahedyr’s chief.

  “If you would bring forth the treas
ure,” Wahela began again, and he wheeled toward her.

  “Wahela, hold your tongue. I have had quiet here, these past few days, and have learned to like it.”

  Her eyes glittered at him. She said, “If you would give less of yourself to the Pillar of the Sky, and more to me—”

  He surged to his feet; she recognized his mood and backed away, but he pursued her, walking straight at her, so that she had to scurry away from him in a rush. Whirling, she ran away toward the fires.

  Moloquin turned back to Ladon’s son. “Did anything else occur that I should know about?”

  Ladon’s son got up and stretched. “We watched the stars. Fergolin can tell you that better than I.”

  “Are you not of the Bear Skull?”

  “I am, but I have never mastered it. They say—Fergolin told me that some close passage of star to star portends—something.” He shrugged, smiling, apologetic, a soft pale man. “Ask Fergolin.”

  Moloquin turned toward the fires; down there, they were dancing again. He thought of Wahela among them, dancing. Fergolin was probably there, and he started his feet in that direction, but instead of joining his People, he turned aside, and climbed up the slope to the Pillar of the Sky.

  Shateel had walked across the downs to the Pillar of the Sky, not with the general flood of Moloquin’s People but by herself. When she came to the edge of the village and saw the fire burning and heard the drums and the pipes and saw that the men were dancing, she stopped and could not bring herself to go in. Instead she went up the slope, to where the embankment of the Pillar of the Sky rose up into the darkness, and the mist curled around the two new stones.

  The stones amazed her. They were bigger than anything at the Turnings-of-the-Year, and unlike the Turnings-of-the-Year, this place had been much different the last time she saw it, so the newness of the stones and the fact of their placement was a marvel to her. It was easy to believe that the Turnings-of-the-Year had always been there, but this place certainly had been made by men, and by the ordinary men she knew.

  There were two corpses lying in the grass at the center of the circle, and she avoided them. She stood between the two new stones and looked up at their tops; the night mist dragged over them, curling around the stone edges like smoke. The stones were perfectly alike. She laid her hand on one, stroking it, feeling the great strength in it.

  “Shateel.”

  The voice came from behind her, so suddenly that she jumped. It was Moloquin; he came up beside her and looked into her face.

  “What are you doing here? Have you come to tell me evil news?”

  She faced him, her hands still trembling from the fright of his voice coming suddenly out of the darkness.

  “Evil news? Is that how you think of me, husband? Is that why you never come to me?”

  He said, “I have heard from Ladon’s son and—others—that the People spoke against me at the Gathering.”

  She lifted her face toward the top of the two stones, bathed in the mist. It was cold here, and she shivered.

  “Yes—they made noises of discontent. I think they always do. It is the way of people to be discontented with the chiefs, that way they seem to themselves like chiefs. At the Turnings-of-the-Year, when the other chiefs appeared, it was not Mithom’s name the People shouted, nor Barlok’s, it was yours.”

  “Mine,” he said, surprised.

  She wrapped her arms around her against the cold. “They shouted for you—had you been there, none would have walked before you. That is something, isn’t it?”

  He said, “Are you cold?”

  “You should come to the Gathering,” she said. “You should honor the ways of your People, if you wish them to honor you. This is what I have come here to tell you, Moloquin.”

  He put his arm around her and drew her close to him, into the warmth of his body. “Come here—there is a place here where you will be warm.”

  She let him guide her across the great flat grassy circle of the holy place; he did not avoid the bodies rotting in the grass, but stepped right past them, and took her into the shelter of the North Watcher. There, down out of the wind, a little hollow accepted them both, and he kept his arm about her, and she was warm again.

  She said, “The stones are wonderful.” She was sleepy suddenly, after the long walk. She laid her head against his shoulder.

  He said in a low voice, “They shall be greater than any other.”

  “Did Ruak come back?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you should not worry about the loyalty of the People to you.”

  He turned to her, drawing her closer against him, and his hands passed in rough caresses over her body and her face. He said, “I want more than loyalty, Shateel.” He pressed his face into the hollow of her throat.

  They lay down together, in the hollow under the North Watcher. She was ready for him, after more than a year without him; they made the first dance together under the stone; as she held him and groaned and raised her hips to meet him, she looked up and saw the stone, and she imagined that it was this stone that thrust and worked within her body; when they shouted together, their juices mingling, their voices rang off the stone.

  They could not cling together forever. The heat past, they fell apart into separate beings again. The cool air swept in around her. Sad, she turned her face toward the rough dark surface of the stone behind her.

  He said, “Here Karelia told me the first stories I ever heard.”

  His voice trembled. She turned her face toward him again.

  “Tell me a story,” she said.

  He opened his mouth, and the tales poured forth, one after another. He told her first the Beginning, how the world was all ice, and the Sun with her warmth raised up the world from cold and death, and how the Moon struggled over it. He told her how Abadon stole the Mill of Heaven and broke it. He told her how Rael the Birdwoman made a pact with the red deer, that she would give the deer a soul if the deer would steal some of the fire of Heaven and bring it to the People.

  As he spoke, all that he told her appeared before her in the dark air; it was as if she had never heard these stories before. She drew nearer to him, and he put his arm around her, and his voice murmured into her ear.

  He told her, “It was here that Brant told me that the world is orderly.”

  That was no story, and yet it meant what a story meant to Moloquin. She could see nothing of his face in the dark. His voice came to her across the darkness, as if from the other side of the world.

  He said, “Karelia lay here, and Brant lay here, and Ael also lay here, and would that Ladon had lain here also, because then he might have gone on to Heaven. Would that I had never slain him. Now he keeps me company, he presses himself against me like a lover, he dwells ever in the corners of my mind, ready to leap out. Oh, that I had let him die, and let them bring him here, to find his way to Heaven.”

  She held her tongue, although the idea that he had killed Ladon made her shiver all over with horror. As if from the far side of the world, his voice came to her, a rush of words, a torrent from his mind.

  “I will never be free of him now. He haunts me now, forever. I see him in me whenever I see my weakness, whenever I see that I may fail here, I see Ladon in me, swollen fat with ambitions he had not the power to fulfill, an ordinary little man caught in a web of dreams.”

  He had his arms around her, and now she circled him with her arms, put her face against his throat and kissed him. Still she said nothing; she thought that any words from her would stop up this flood of demons pouring forth from him.

  “Already two full years have gone by,” he said, “two years, and all I have raised up are these two stones. My life is falling away; I shall never do it all, time fights against me, and my People fight against me, and other things—the treasure—all these things steal my mind from my work.”

  “W
hat treasure?”

  He moved against her, his skin sliding against hers. He turned and crushed her against him, and hungrily he mouthed her cheek, her ear, her throat and her breast, and again, there under the stone, they performed the magic that made life from life.

  He slept. She lay in the warmth of his body, her head against him, and sensed around them the unquiet spirits of those he had spoken of—the old storywoman, Karelia, whom Shateel remembered only as a huddled figure in Ladon’s dooryard, dying as she spoke, every word a figure of power. Ladon himself, whose soul had wrapped itself around the cords and fibers of Moloquin’s heart. Ael, the woman alone.

  He would not speak of her. She had marked that, before, that Ael had come to occupy a place in his mind that he dared not enter any more. Yet in Shateel’s mind she grew more alive every time she thought of her: Ael, who had gone into the forest, and lived by herself, and needed neither man nor woman.

  So it was she slept; and in her sleep she saw Ael, taller than the stones, standing in the grass and mist of the Pillar of the Sky, the People small and humble around her feet, her hair the floating clouds of Heaven.

  In the morning they went to the New Village and sat around the fire by the roundhouse and ate. The men were coming to and from the roundhouse, noisy with their business, and each who came greeted Moloquin as he passed. Wahela was nowhere to be seen. Shateel sat by the fire eating honey cakes and drinking a broth of herbs; she saw how the men came to Moloquin and how he sent them off on this errand and that, but told each one to come to the Pillar of the Sky as soon as everything else was done.

  She saw how he itched to go back to his work, how he turned his eyes constantly in that direction.

  She said, “Moloquin, I have spoken with the women of my village about the baskets—you said they must bring their harvest to me in baskets all of the same size, and they will not do it.”

  He squatted by the fire, eating the last of a handful of seeds. “The harvest baskets are a trick, an empty rivalry. Why do they cling to such things?” He rinsed his mouth with a sip of the broth and spat it out. “We cannot measure the grain if they bring it in different baskets.”