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Pillar of the Sky
A Novel of Stonehenge
Cecelia Holland
Author’s Note
For an object as old and as famous as Stonehenge is, surprisingly little is known about it. Certainly nothing is known of its meaning and value to the peoples who made it, over a period of a thousand years, first digging up the ground to build a circular embankment, then, in fits and starts, digging holes, into which they sometimes set stones. We have a good idea of where the stones stood; we know pretty much where they came from; we can explain how Neolithic farmers, without the wheel, without beasts of burden, without practical metal tools, could do the work. Yet even in these simple physical facts there is much doubt.
So, scoured of meaning, Stonehenge takes whatever we bring to it and gives us back ourselves. Religious people take it for a temple; astronomers use it as an observatory. In the nineteenth century a railroad man even wanted to turn it into a train station. Being a storyteller, I see it as a piece of story, in an age when stories were the greatest power that people could bring to deal with the whirling universe around them, an era that is on us still.
One
AEL’S SON
The sun was rising. Mother of all things, she sent her foreguard on first, to light the sky, and make the earth ready, and at her first warm touch, all life awoke. The birds began to sing and twitter and cry in the high grass, in the trees scattered here and there over the sunken slopes and hollowed hillsides, in the gardens of the People, in the thatches of the longhouses. The little brown river mice darted out of their lairs along the bank, and the goats rose, bleating, from their beds of straw, and went to wait by the withy gate to be milked. The doors of the longhouses opened, and the People came out, to stretch and yawn in the blessed sunlight, and the great door of the roundhouse itself was thrown open, although mighty Ladon was not there; yet the roundhouse held enough of his power without his presence.
In the thickets along the river, the band of boys stirred; quicker than the grown-ups, because they had less to do, the boys scurried out over the world, looking for something to eat. While their mothers in the longhouses were still yawning over the morning fire, the boys ranged up through the People’s gardens, looking for birds and snakes, and scattered along the edge of the forest to find wild berries.
Leader of the boys’ band was Ladon’s son, and he was tall and fair, his body handsomely smoothed and sleeked with a layer of fat, his clothes lovingly made by all the women of the People. He carried a big stick in his hand, and struck any boy with it who came too close to him, and shouted orders to them, and whatever they found, they brought him half.
As it was with his father, so it was with Ladon’s son; each boy fought to bring him more than any other boy, and he hardly had to lift his hand to get what he wanted.
Now the sun was up. Her kind and giving light lay over the land of the People, the broad uneven ground that lay between the forest on the east and the broken hills to the west. This was female land, lying wide and rich under the grass, not flat, but given to swollen low hills rising gently into the sun, and swales and soft subsiding places where the sun reached only at midday. The pines and piney shrubs that had once covered all this ground now were giving way, as the climate grew drier, as the marshes filled in, to open grassland where the soil lay over stubborn chalk, to oaks and ash where the land was more hospitable to deep-rooted trees, but to the People these were changes so slow and friendly that they remarked them only in stories.
In the sunlight the women left the longhouses, and climbed up the slope toward the gardens. It was now midsummer, a little past the Great Gathering, and in the irregular patches that the women worked, the crops stood tall and green: barley, with heavy heads, and vetch that they staked up, so that the mice would not eat the developing pods, and onions bulging out of the soil. The women carried their tools with them, picks of deer antler, rakes of wood with flint teeth, hoes made of shell. The little children carried the baskets.
From the forest’s edge, Ladon’s son could look out and see all this industry, as if from above; he did not look for his mother among the bowing forms in the gardens. He was half a man already, and uninterested in low labor. Instead, he led his band in a straggle along the margin of the forest, looking half the while for berries, and the other half for Moloquin.
The other boys knew what to do. They charged here and there, to reach a clump of brambles first and pick the ripe fruit, and some even ventured a little into the forest, giving brave yells and stamping their feet on the ground, looking here and there for their enemy. Ladon’s son strolled along eating a handful of fruit. It was past the time for the little red berries called mother’s kisses, too soon still for the fat purple thorny ones called bear-blood-drops, and he grimaced over the sour stuff he had been given and cast them down. The next boy who dared bring him green fruit he would thump with his stick.
Then: “Moloquin! Moloquin!”
He sprang high into the air at the shout. Ahead of him, where the oak trees pressed in upon the brow of a hill, the boys were racing toward a small spring marked by thickets, and as they ran, they yelled. Many of them brandished sticks. Ladon’s son broke into a gallop after them.
He yelled with them; he waved his stick over his head. All converged on the thicket. Just before they reached it, a brown naked boy burst out of the cover and ran away from them.
The halloos and whistles of the boys’ band doubled. Many of them heaved their weapons at Moloquin before they were near enough to have a chance of hitting him, and untouched, the woods’ orphan darted away into the high grass and suddenly vanished. Like the open-nesting bustards he could disappear at will. Ladon’s son, panting, led the others in a broad range across the slope where he had seen Moloquin last.
They slowed to a walk, puzzled. Ladon’s son poked with his stick at the ground, banged with his stick on a tuft of brambles, and looked up toward the forest looming above him to his right. The forest was dangerous, evil, and dark; part of the reason they all hated Moloquin was that he had come from the forest, and lived there still, when he was not haunting the places of the People. Ladon’s son hated Moloquin for other reasons, too, and because his father had told him to hate Moloquin. Ladon’s son did ever what his father told him. Now with his stick he went methodically along the curved uneven slope, prodding at hiding places, until abruptly the ground some paces before him seemed to explode, and the skinny brown boy sprang up from nowhere out of the grass and raced away, his tangle of black hair bouncing.
“Hiiyyaaah!”
The boys’ band raced after him. Once again they threw sticks and stones after him, never hitting him. Moloquin led them off in a straight dash along the rising ground below the forest; here the grass was shorter and drier, and there was no place to hide, and the prey settled into a long hard run. Ladon’s son with the rest of his band hung doggedly on the track. The stick grew heavy in his hand, but he dared not drop it: the stick meant his power to him. The breath in his lungs began to burn. Before him Moloquin ran always out of reach. When Ladon’s son put on a burst of speed, Moloquin ran faster, as if he could see out of the back of his head; he never looked behind him, but ran with pumping arms and high-thrusting knees. When Ladon’s son slowed down, tired, Moloquin too slowed, keeping the distance even between them.
They never caught Moloquin, however hard they chased him, and now, out of breath, his legs hurting, Ladon’s son saw, ahead of them all, the ancient embankment and toppling stones of the
dead place, and he stopped.
The boys stopped with him. No one wanted to go any closer to the place of the dead, and while Moloquin ran on toward it, they shouted and threw things and laughed at his folly.
“The spirits will suck his blood out,” said Ladon’s son, and the other boys clustered around him, loud with agreement, with new versions of this prediction.
“The spirits will eat his flesh!” “The spirits will gnaw on his bones!”
“Let’s go home,” said Ladon’s son. “We should take the goats to grass, and maybe there will be some cheese for us.” He laid his stick over his shoulder, feeling very jaunty at driving Moloquin away again. “He won’t dare come near us anymore.” He strutted a few steps, although his legs were tired.
The boys fought to get close to him. The littlest, the newcomers to the band, were shoved away to the edge, and the biggest and strongest took up stations close by Ladon’s son. In this pack they went down the sun-drenched slope, back toward the gardens where their mothers worked, to take the goats out to grass.
Young Moloquin knew no father. His mother had died of the bloody cough in the winter before he found the village. No one of the People cared for him, and Ladon hated him. All that they did not use themselves the People gave to Ladon; therefore Moloquin got nothing.
He stood at the top of the embankment and watched the boys’ band go. They hated him, always chased him, occasionally got near enough to hurt him, but he longed for them; they gave him his only company. Today’s chase had gone by too quickly for him. He stood on the embankment and yelled and waved his arms, but they ignored him, if they even saw him. He realized that he had come here too swiftly; they were afraid of this place, he was safe here, but alone here also.
He turned around and went down the inner wall of the bank. It was a vast circle of upthrown earth and chalk, not a complete ring, but broken to the northwest and to the east, as if to let people in, but the People almost never came in here. They came here only to leave their dead in the grass within the bank. Even now there were two bodies lying near the foot of the tall stone at the far side of the circle—one an old woman, the other a baby. The crows were picking on them, bold, careless of Moloquin’s presence. He walked across the grass, going in between two of the standing stones, to his favorite place, the big rough stone at the north end; he slept in the hollow at its foot.
He loved this place. He felt none of the horror here that the People did. It was his own little world, round as the world was, bounded by the horizon of the top of the bank. There were no people, aside from the two dead ones, but there were the stones, several of them standing here and there, and a great many of them in a ring. The ring-stones were falling over and some lay buried in the grass. Above was only the brilliant, blazing sky.
He loved this place because his mother was here. She had died here. When he needed her he came here and she always answered him.
Sitting in the hollow at the foot of the big stone, he shut his eyes, thinking of his mother, and his heart grew soft and sore. Tall she had been, or seemed, to a child, her long hair hanging to her waist, her voice like a blast of the winter cold when she was angry, her arms like the warmth of the sun when she was kind to him. When she died he had been terrified, as if the world itself would end.
Blood burst from her lips whenever she coughed. They had been deep in the forest, far away from here. She said, “Take me as I tell you,” and he had struggled to carry her weight, and she had leaned on sticks and against trees, and like that, bit by bit, they crept through the forest and came at last to the grassland’s edge. Her body then so lean and bony he could see every rib. He wept as he half-carried her, half-dragged her along. Her voice drove him on, rasping and bubbling. “Keep going. Fail me, I’ll kill you, boy, I will take you with me. Keep going, stupid weakling.” At last he had pulled her into the circle of the bank, and there, exhausted, they both sank down into the high grass.
And there she died; he had seen the spirit pass away out of her, rise up from her like the dew rising in a vapor out of the grass when the sun shone on it. He clung to her, he called her back, he shook her. She would not come back to him. He dared not leave her. All his short life she had ruled him, fed him, taught him, beaten him when he was wrong, loved him when he was good; without her he knew nothing.
He chased the crows away from her; he sat by her for days, although his stomach grew taut and painful and his throat burned with thirst, he clung close to his mother. Then, one day, the first people he had ever seen other than her came into the circle.
There were six of them, carrying a seventh among them: another corpse. As they came they sang, and waved leafy branches around them, and one had a little pot of coals that gave off a sickly smoke. They entered the embankment through the northwestern opening and carried the body slowly into the center, laid it down, and put the leafy branches over it, all the while singing, and then they saw him.
And her. It was she who sent them screaming away. It was the sight of his mother who drove them with shrieks and howls away to the top of the bank, there to turn, to look again, and double their outcry. They ran away, and he followed them; they ran all the way down through the grassland, and he went after them, and there for the first time he saw Ladon’s Village.
When he saw it he stopped in his tracks and stared, amazed, and joyous. Four great huts lay there, inside a fence of brush, huts much bigger than the one he and his mother had lived in, and the yards around them were full of people. Children like him, women like his mother, many many people, talking together, working, laughing, touching one another, breathing warm into one another’s eyes, eyes meeting eyes, hugging one another, and his skin itched, longing for that, for closeness, protection, the welcome of his own kind. But when he went forward, gladly, toward them, his arms outstretched, hungry and wanting, they drove him away.
Now he lived along the edge of the village, shivering in the cold, stealing whatever he could find. In the summers he found fruit and roots and eggs to eat. Often he suckled the village goats while the goatherds were dozing in the sun.
In the winter he froze, sleeping in hollow logs, under drifts of leaves. He grew quick and lean, hollow-bellied, ready of hearing and sight, and hungry. Not merely for food. He watched the People every day, as often as he could, memorizing faces, overhearing words, drawing all he could from them in spite of their hate. They were his kind. Yet he was different; he was alone.
It was the Month of Low Water. In the village, the women carried water up from the river in their best baskets to give their plants to drink; the boys of the boys’ band foraged up and down the river bank, looking for the chunks of flint that sometimes turned up in the chalk—these flints they took proudly to the roundhouse, to the men who worked stone. But these men were gone. With all the men of the People of Ladon’s Village, they were used to spending this time along the northern river, fasting and sweating themselves and talking with the spirits whose world this really was.
Now they were returning, spilling down over the plain in a great disorderly swarm. In their midst, Ladon himself swept along in his litter, carried on the shoulders of a succession of lesser men. Wolf tails hung from the rails of the litter, and bearskin covered it, black and glossy, as old as the lineage of the man who sat thereon, Ladon, the greatest chief of all the People.
He was a huge squat man, in the prime of his life, his belly rolled deep in fat. His hair was black as the bearskin. On his shoulders and chest the black hair grew thick as a pelt, an emblem of his splendor.
The other men fought to be close to him. They yearned for the favor of a single glance. If he spoke to them, they bragged to anyone who would listen of this sign of honor. If he frowned, they wilted like a plant that had been pulled up. Whenever the bearers of the litter tired, Ladon called for a change of hands, and then everybody fought for a place at the poles.
One alone did not. One alone was not a vessel for the m
ysterious power of the male, and she was fool enough not to care. Karelia, headwoman of the kindred of the chief, had chosen to go with the men on their sacred way. She was the greatest of the storywomen of her people, and so made herself available to interpret the dreams and sickness and other encounters with the Overworld that the men might make in the course of their purification. Also as the headwoman of Ladon’s kindred she considered it her duty to keep him under her eye.
She walked along by herself, off to one side of Ladon. Over her head and shoulders she wore a shawl, woven of the plucked wool of the goats, dyed brown and light brown and yellow with colors made of the skins of onions. She was a little, stooped woman, with a round face, her eyes merry, her voice sharp, her mouth habitually smiling. Her steps were short and quick, so that she seemed to scurry like a little brown mouse over the springing green of the world.
Although she and Ladon paid no outward heed to each other, there was between them a continual irritable awareness; they disliked each other. Ladon thought her too curious and too outspoken. Karelia knew him to be a danger to all the People.
What that danger was had begun to press upon her through the course of the purification rites. Over and over, she had seen how Ladon spoke to the men of his son, and wrung promises from them that his son should be the chief when Ladon died; over and over, the men, under this pressure, and being often in the way of spirits, came to her with dreams in which, disguised, she saw Ladon’s ambition rise to tower over the world.
Ladon was the chief. His power was great above all others in the village; all that the People did, they brought to him, and he gave to them whatever they needed, so that those who were old or orphaned or weak or sick or stupid still managed. But he was chief by the will of the head- women, the old women who sat around the mill and knew everything: they made the chief, and when Ladon died they would make the next chief, not Ladon himself. If they did not—
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