He went in the late afternoon, some days after the arrival of the trader from the west. They had seated a lintel on top of the outer circle that day, and the whole village was rejoicing. The men were gathered in the roundhouse yard with their drums and masks, making ready to dance, and the women hurried around bringing food for a feast. Barakal went in through their midst to the roundhouse.
Taller than most of them, he moved through them like an alien being, as strange in his own way as the trader. He was long and slim, with muscles flat and soft, because he did no arduous work. His days were sleeping, his nights watching the stars; he was pale where all the others were tanned brown as the earth that sustained them. Many who saw him bowed as he passed, although he did not notice.
He came into the center of the roundhouse, and there he found his father and the trader Buras Ram.
Around them stood piles of baskets and leather sacks filled to the top and sewn shut. Barakal hung back, watching the two men, wondering, and slowly he came to see that Moloquin was giving all these goods away to the trader.
He looked hard at the goods; unskilled at such things, yet he saw that all these baskets and sacks were filled with the harvest of the gardens. His stomach tightened with alarm. He, who did not work, depended utterly on the produce of the gardens. In another moment he realized that they all depended on it, that this was their true wealth, and here Moloquin was giving it away.
As he stood there, his mother came up beside him.
“Ana-Wahela,” he said, and turned to her, and his breath caught in his throat. “Ana!”
Her face was bruised black all along the left side. Her eye was swollen shut. He laid his hands on her, his mouth ajar.
“What happened to you?”
Her swollen lips moved; her voice was too low for him to hear, and she had to repeat it.
“I fell,” she said.
He knew she was lying. He turned toward Moloquin again, and his mind brimmed with indignant anger.
He stepped forward, long-striding, breaking away from his mother. He marched up to Moloquin and in a voice that reached out through the whole roundhouse, he said, “Opa-Moloquin, why are you giving away all the wealth of the People for the sake of a few rocks?”
Moloquin straightened, facing him; Buras Ram gawked at him. Moloquin met his son’s eyes. For a long time they stared at each other, while all around them was the intense silence of many listening ears. Then Moloquin turned away.
“Go, Barakal.”
“Opa-on—”
The chief whirled, his eyes gleaming. “Go!”
Barakal stood where he was, forming more words, but his mother caught his arm. “Come. Come away, please.”
“Ana, he—”
“Oh, Barakal, come—” her face was white with fear. She cast a look of terror in Moloquin’s direction. “Come away!”
Now others whispered to him from the darkness, “Go—go, before he is angered—go—” their hands caught him. They were pulling him away. He had not asked yet about Shateel. They were removing him before he could ask. He thought of the sacks and sacks of food, the harvest of the women, the patient labor of the women, gone to feed strangers. He had not asked about Dehra’s mother. His shoulders slumped. He let them take him away.
When he reached his little hut again, she said, “Did he tell you anything?”
“No.” He sat down heavily in the darkness of his hut, brooding on what he had seen in his father’s house.
“I told you,” she said. “He is a wicked man, there is no use in dealing with him.”
“He is not,” Barakal said, but his words were mere breath. He remembered his mother’s bruised face. He remembered the voices in the roundhouse, whispering to him to flee. He thought, I have been like a baby, sheltered in the womb, here at the Pillar of the Sky.
It was that time of the year when the sun was in decline, when the dark and the cold grew every day more intense and dominant. Buras Ram left, his slaves groaning under their burden of the People’s goods. Several days later, in the morning, some of the People fell sick.
They died before nightfall. A fever parched them, their bowels opened, and they could neither eat nor drink without vomiting. Their kindred took their bodies to the Pillar of the Sky, and the next day many more were sick.
The men worked no more at the Pillar of the Sky. Bahedyr and his men left in a hurry for the north. The first to die were a man and a woman of Moloquin’s Village, but in the New Village, only a short distance away, the people were soon falling sick as well, and dying as quickly.
Ladon’s son fell sick.
When word came of this to Moloquin, he went out of his own village and over the hill to the New Village. He came in his litter, all jingling and shining with copper ornament, carried on the shoulders of a dozen men. He proceeded down through the middle of the New Village to the roundhouse, and all who saw him followed after.
In the yard of the roundhouse Moloquin ordered the litter set down, and on foot and alone he went into the roundhouse.
As he walked in through the semi-darkness toward the light at the center, he shed his heavy bearskin cloak, and he stripped off the copper wristbands and armbands that he wore, and he let them drop to the ground as he passed. When he came to Ladon’s son he wore nothing but his loincloth.
Ladon’s son lay on a bed of straw mats and heavy blankets. The center hole in the roundhouse roof was above him, but not directly above: he lay behind the shaft of light that pierced down to the floor of the roundhouse. He was awake. When he saw Moloquin he strove to raise his hand in greeting.
“I knew you would come,” he said.
Moloquin squatted down beside him. “How does it go with you, my brother?” he said.
“Moloquin, I am dying,” whispered the other man.
That seemed likely from his looks. His body was drying and cracking like a lump of clay in the blaze of the fever; the bones of his face showed through the skin. All around him was a stench that turned the stomach.
“Perhaps there is something to be done,” Moloquin said.
“I am dying, and soon. But, my brother, there is this I must tell you, and there is something I must ask of you.”
“Do it,” Moloquin said.
Ladon’s son fastened his gaze on him. “When my father was the chief, he struggled with Karelia, you know, and in the strife between them she died. But before she died she said that if a son of Ladon’s should ever rule the People then the world would surely come to an end.”
His breath failed him; he shut his eyes. Moloquin lowered his head. He could not bear to look on this man who had been so handsome and who now was shriveled and black as a rotting walnut, and the name of Karelia was like a rock in his belly.
Ladon’s son spoke again. “Now I have this to ask you, my brother: Are you that man?”
Moloquin raised his eyes to the face of the dying man; he looked deep into the face of Ladon’s son, the flesh already appearing to rot, and a shudder passed through him. For a moment he thought it was Karelia herself who spoke to him from the world beyond death, and a terrible yearning overcame him, a longing for these people he had lost.
He said, “Karelia knew much, my brother. More even than she supposed. But what will become of us no one knows.”
Ladon’s son sighed, and he lay still a while. Moloquin was sunk down in gloomy memory, but presently he stirred himself, found a jug of water, and bathed the dying man’s face. The heat from his body was horrible to feel. Moloquin pressed the damp cloth to his brother’s lips. He could feel the flutter of the soul there, waiting there, ready.
“Shall I take you to the Pillar of the Sky?” Moloquin asked.
“That is where I belong.”
Moloquin lifted him up, and he was light as an old bone. He bore him away out of the roundhouse and laid him in the litter, and the chieftain hims
elf walked before the litter that carried Ladon’s son away to the Pillar of the Sky.
All the people of the New Village who could still walk were gathered at the gate into the roundhouse yard. When they saw that Ladon’s son was leaving them, they cried out in one voice, mourning and frightened, and many burst into tears. Moloquin led the litter in through their midst.
They stepped aside for him, making room for him: all but one. One blocked his way, although those around her tried to pull her away.
“Moloquin,” she cried. “Moloquin, this is your doing! You have brought this down on us—”
Before she could say more, a great outcry rose from the crowd. “Who is that?” “Silence!” “Get her out of the way!” From behind Moloquin someone threw a stone at her. “Get away!”
Dehra raised one hand; her face was white, and she looked frightened suddenly. From either side of her came volleys of stones and clods of earth, striking the ground around her, glancing off her shoulder and her thigh.
Moloquin strode forward; she shrank back from him, but he got her by the arm and held her close to him, and the People cried out and no one threw stones. He glared around him at them, and their voices faded away and they seemed to crouch down under his stare, making themselves smaller, inoffensive, tame.
He said, “I am going to the Pillar of the Sky.” Letting go of Dehra, he pushed her away to one side and led the litter out of the village, up the hill, toward the place of the dead.
Ladon’s son died as the sun went down. Moloquin was with him. When he knew that the soul had gone, he went off to the ditch where tall grasses grew and plucked up handfuls of the grass, and returning to the body he covered it with the straw, because there was nothing green left.
He sat there a long while afterward, his head hunched down between his shoulders, his mind inward.
Around him the crows clucked and chuckled happily over their feast. The bodies of the People lay mostly in the finished part of the Pillar of the Sky; Ladon’s son had died sitting up against an upright of the Great Gateway, and Moloquin moved away from him, to let the crows at him. The night settled down around him. He felt the tremendous stones around him like two jaws closing on him.
Through the grass came the wind, winnowing through the long blades, sniffing like a beast around the stones and the bodies of the dead. A mist drifted across the tops of the stones, burying the crossbeam of the Great Gateway, hanging like moss from the lintels of the outer circle.
There seemed others here too, close invisible swarms, the ancestors, come to welcome the newly dead. Moloquin lifted his head.
I did this for you, he thought. I meant no evil. I meant to preserve the People, dead and alive, for ever and ever.
The death of Ladon’s son had reached deep into his belly and uprooted half his past. His life had been bound up with the life of Ladon’s son for so long, the dark and the pale, the favored and the unfavored, the power and the denial of power; it seemed impossible that Ladon’s son could die and Moloquin still live.
He heard a voice, and for a moment thought he heard the spirits around him speaking with a real tongue, but then he saw that it was Barakal.
The young man came up through the place, carrying a staff which he used in the dark to find his way. Walking in through the western gap in the embankment, he paused before each body as he passed and peered closely at it, murmured some charm, and went on. He had not seen Moloquin there, and, thinking of Dehra whom he knew to be Barakal’s friend, Moloquin was unwilling to speak to him. He watched the youth go past the outer circle, toward the East Watcher.
What would he see there? No stars tonight, no light of the moon would pierce through the fog that pressed closer and denser around the stones of the Pillar of the Sky. Or perhaps he came here merely from habit, the way a dog did, when she who fed it had moved her hearth, and yet the dog went still to the old hearth.
That, too, was Moloquin’s doing. When Brant died, none knew the old lore, but the lore had been somewhat preserved in this place, and because Moloquin had brought them here, Fergolin and now Barakal had recovered it.
That deed astonished Moloquin more than any other, and as he thought over it, the power that it suggested, his burden of grief and guilt eased. He raised his head, feeling stronger.
Someone else was coming. The crows cawed and cackled and fluttered away. Moloquin gathered himself, readying himself to deal with living people, and in through the unfinished side of the circle came Bahedyr.
“Ho,” Moloquin said, surprised. He stood up. Bahedyr carried a torch in one hand, his spear in the other; three or four of his men trailed after him.
Bahedyr walked up to him, smiling. “I greet you, Opa-Moloquin-on.” He held his hand out, palm up.
Moloquin mouthed some words to him, his eyes sharp. “What do you here?”
“I have brought you good news,” Bahedyr said. His voice was strange, high, piercing, jovial, a false note somewhere in it. “We have found another stone, big enough for the upright circle.”
“Ah,” said Moloquin. “Where? Bring it.”
“You must come and see it. There is a crack in it, perhaps you will not want it.”
“Bring it,” Moloquin said. “If it does not break in the passage, it will stand.”
“You must come and tell me if it is worthy,” Bahedyr said stubbornly.
Moloquin gazed at him a while, sorting through this in his mind; if there were a crack in the stone, there was a crack also in this smooth insistence of Bahedyr’s, and he was wary.
“Where is this stone?”
“At the Old Camp.”
“Hunh.” Moloquin grunted, half-turning away. He knew that stone; huge, unworked and ugly, it belonged, like the Old Camp, to a time before the People came. “Why should we take that one, but not the stones from Turnings-of-the-Year?”
At that, Bahedyr’s face clouded and he struggled with thought. Moloquin grew more wary of this when he saw that Bahedyr had no ready answer, but then the spearman brightened. He said, “Because it is closer.”
Moloquin raised his eyebrows. “I shall go see it, then.”
“When?” Bahedyr asked.
The chieftain looked long on him before he answered. At last he said, “When the sickness has passed. I will not leave my People while this evil still devours them.”
Bahedyr nodded, accepting that. “We shall go. There is no sickness in our villages, only here.”
Moloquin grunted at him, angry, hearing something that he did not want to hear. “Now go, I am here because my brother has died. Go. I will go to the Old Camp when the time comes.”
Bahedyr bowed very low, sweeping the ground with his spear in the one hand, his torch in the other, and backed away. Moloquin heard him murmur to the others as they walked out of the Pillar of the Sky. The chieftain turned away, his mood dark.
In the morning, Moloquin sent the men of his village and those of the New Village also to sweat themselves, and when they were purified, he bade them dance for three days and three nights around the two villages, to frighten away the sickness that was eating up the People. He himself went every day from one hearth to the next, talking to the living, seeing who had died, and making sure that the bodies were carried away to the Pillar of the Sky. The People saw him and took heart from his courage.
They saw also that he himself never fell sick, although he walked through the midst of the evil. Therefore they knew that Dehra had been wrong, and Moloquin was not the cause of their suffering.
After the dancing, the sickness began to pass; it gave up its grip on the young and the old, and many who fell sick recovered. When at last there were no more of his People in the power of the disease, Moloquin prepared to go to the Old Camp, to see the stone that Bahedyr had found.
He was still suspicious of this and so he did not send to tell Bahedyr that he was going there; he did not want the
spearman to know. Also he gathered up a large number of his men and told them to follow after him at a little distance, and to wait for him at the foot of the lofty hill where the Old Camp was. Then he got into his litter, and he took Wahela in beside him, and on the shoulders of as many men as could crowd around the litter and carry it, he proceeded west over the wintry slopes to the Old Camp.
The Old Camp stood on top of a steep-sided treeless hill at the narrow end of the valley where the Dead River lay. Moloquin reached it at sundown. Because the trail was so steep, he dismounted from the litter, and let the men carry Wahela up by herself. He walked along in front of them, out of breath, his legs aching: he thought to himself, I am an old man, and he knew he would take this stone, however cracked and ugly it was. By the time he reached the top of the hill, his sides were bursting with his burning breath, and his legs and back throbbed.
He walked out across the top of the hill, and saw that on the far side was a gentler way down; they could ease the stone down that way. The Old Camp itself was just an embankment with a deep ditch inside. The stone stood near one end of it.
He went close to it. The sun was sinking, but from this height the red blaze still hung above the horizon. He stopped and looked out over the valley below, swooping away from him in an opening wedge, its floor massed full of brush and low trees, the swampy pond at the far end glistening in the last light of the day.
From here he could see back almost as far as the Pillar of the Sky. The view held him a moment, drew him out of himself, and he stood there, empty, and let the sight flow into him.
Wahela called, “Are we to spend the night here, Moloquin?”
He turned toward her, where she sat in the litter. “Yes. You can get down.” He went toward the standing stone.
Big enough, and ugly. It was the same kind of stone that he had been using all along, the surface dimmed by lichens and mosses. A deep crack ran down one face of it, crossing from one top corner to the other side, about half the way down. He laid one hand on it. It was surprisingly warm.
They made a fire inside the embankment, ate what they had brought, and went to sleep. Wahela slept in the litter, but Moloquin was restless and could not lose himself, and he got up and walked around the Old Camp a little, looking out through the darkness over the valley. As he walked back toward his fire and his woman, he heard noises coming from the side of the hill, from the easier trail.
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