Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  She felt the past, the ways of the People, as a deep and well-ordered space behind her; before her was an emptiness, a horror, that must be formed and shaped like the past. If Ladon overturned the ways of the People, everything might fly apart, the world crumble.

  It was more than that.

  The power of the chief was a blood-power; it dwelled in his family, but it descended from layer to layer of the family not through the fathers, whose seed was invisible, whose fecundity was ambiguous, but through the women. They kept the gardens. They did the work. They bore the babies. They and they alone conferred power: by election to the chief, and through the chief’s closest female relatives, to the next generation of the family. When she saw this in her mind she saw a passage of time and order so well knit together nothing could pick it apart.

  When she imagined that the power might jump from Ladon to his son, she saw an abyss, and the power fell into the abyss and was gone, and the People fell in after it and were gone as well. And now, over the green rolling hills, here came Ladon’s son himself.

  The men all cheered his coming. All loved Ladon’s son. Tall and golden, he ran lightly toward his father with his arms upraised, and after him came the band of boys, a stream of half-children, calling and waving.

  The whole great forward flow of the men stopped. Leaning down from his litter, Ladon greeted his son with the gladness of a man face to face with his immortality.

  Karelia went closer; the other men gave way to her, deferring to her, but Ladon saw her not. Ladon bent over the far side of the litter and wrung his son’s hands and smiled into his face.

  “Tell me what has happened, my dear boy.”

  “Nothing.” Ladon’s son shrugged, his face clear and open as the sky, and as empty of thoughts. “We have waited for you, Opa-Ladon.”

  “Are the fields growing? Are the women happy?”

  “I suppose.” The boy lifted one shoulder and let it sag again. All the interest in his leadership came from his father. He raised his smiling handsome face. “We chased Moloquin, nearly every day.”

  At that Ladon grunted. He straightened up in the litter, his face bound into a frown, and then he saw Karelia and his gaze sharpened. He and the old storywoman stared at each other a moment. She drew her shawl closer around her, her eyes narrow. Finally, simultaneously, they looked away.

  The procession began again, with Ladon’s son walking along beside the litter, the men near him speaking to him fondly, ignoring their own sons who leapt and ran around them, noisy as crows. Karelia drifted out to the edge of the swarm.

  Ladon’s son. They had tried to give him a name—all the boys had milk-names, of course, that their mothers gave them, but when they left their mothers and went to the boys’ band, they got new names. But nothing had stuck to Ladon’s son. They had tried several but no one had remembered them. When the People looked on this tall fair boy they saw only one thing, and that was what they called him.

  When they saw that other one, they knew only one thing, and that was what they called him: Moloquin, the Unwanted One. But that had become a name, somehow; the accent fell on the first syllable, as in all men’s names, not on the middle one, as it would have done had the phrase been simply a description of him. Moloquin had a name, however unkind it was.

  Moloquin. She rolled it around in her mind, and as she considered it, the thought grew round and real to her: here was a way to deal with Ladon.

  She hugged her shawl to herself. Casting an eye toward Heaven, she marked that there was still much daylight left—here in the deep of the summer, the sky held the light a long, long while after the sun withdrew—and she knew where to find Moloquin. She had time and knowledge, and no reason to fail. Quietly she slipped away from the horde of the men and went off toward the northeast.

  Moloquin had spent the day ranging over the summery downlands, looking for something to eat, and had found nothing; he made a good cast of a stone at a bustard, but missed, as he usually did, and in the river he nearly caught a fish, diving down under the water and slowly, slowly creeping up on the grey shape hanging motionless in a pool under the bank, and then slipping his hands up, slowly, slowly, his lungs ready to burst, his lips shut against the tell-tale bubbles, but at the last instant with a flick of its tail the river-monster fled away. Now he went up over the rising land toward his place, and his body was tired and his heart was very low.

  Halfway to his cold home, he passed close enough to the village to hear the singing and the drums and pipes, and to see the leaping fires. The men had come back, and the People rejoiced.

  Locked out in the dark, he stood a moment and watched, and hated them, even as he longed for them; he saw how they touched one another, how they leaned together, body to body, and from some deep memory arose the feeling of being close to another, the shared warmth, the encircling arms, the safety. He hated them for denying him that, and he longed to have it again with them, that company, that value. Slowly he dragged himself on toward the cold stones.

  When he trudged up over the embankment and looked down on the grassy circle he knew at once that someone else was there.

  He did not see her at first. He did not smell or hear her. Yet he knew some other person occupied this place, his place, and the hairs on his back stood up, and his lips pulled back from his teeth in a growl. Crouched down a little, his hands fisted at his sides, he prowled in through the leaning stones.

  “Here I am,” said the calm voice, and he started up, his skin tingling; she was just to one side of him. In the failing light he had missed her utterly. He wheeled around, trying to look fierce.

  She sat there at the foot of his stone, in the hollow he had made for himself, and she smiled at him. He knew her at once: Karelia, storyteller, whom the little children ran after, begging for words.

  “What are you doing here?” he cried. “This is my place. Go away.”

  He did not know all the right words, he made up some of them as he spoke. With his hands he swept at the air, to show her what he meant.

  She did not move. She sat there cross-legged, as the women sat, her body formless in its enshrouding cloth, her hair the color of milkweed down. In the gathering dusk he could make out only the shape of her face. She raised one hand to him and said, “Come sit by me, and let us make a fire, I am very cold.”

  He frowned. He was not cold, and he seldom made fires, although his mother had taught him how. He stood uncertainly on the balls of his feet, ready to run or to leap on her. Storywoman. He had seen the others clustered tight around her while she talked, and although he had never been able to creep near enough to hear her voice, even from a distance the gestures of her hands and the look of her face in the firelight were compelling as an image. Now, abruptly, she leaned forward, and a spark glowed inside the round of her hands.

  He sighed. The light spread up over her face, warming the old seamed skin, the deep eyes, and the curl of her mouth. Without any will of his own, he went forward, and sat down before her, sharing the light with her.

  She nursed the sparks in the tinder, milking it gently with her hands to spread the fire through the tinder, and then she laid down the nursling in a little pile of twigs, and from beside her she took more wood and added that. He saw that she had gathered much wood, and made all ready for a fire; she must have waited here for a long while, and it came to him that she had waited here for him. That astonished him. He was used to spending his attention on the People; it was a new thing to have anyone pay him any witness in return.

  The fire grew bolder and warmer, and sprang up through the peaked sticks she put together above it. In her eyes were tiny little fires. She said, “Are you hungry, boy?”

  “I—”

  He stopped, aware of how little he knew of words, and ashamed. His gaze fell to the flames. She reached behind her and brought forward a flat covered basket, with a rope for carrying over the shoulder, and opened it.


  “Eat.” She held out her hand, on it a piece of something.

  An old memory twinged. He took the thing from her hand and bit into it, and it was soft and flavorful. Once before he had eaten this. From his mother. Crouched by the fire with his feet under him, he ate it all.

  She ate, her jaws moving contentedly, her gaze steadily on Moloquin. He wanted more, but he would not ask, and instead he locked his arms around his knees and watched her.

  “Take another,” she said, and he did, and ate it in a single gulp.

  At that she smiled, and when she smiled her face was so lively and full of kindness that he had to smile too, and suddenly she was reaching across the fire, touching him, her hand warm on his arm. The touch was a shock; he jumped a little, and then was still, tensed, his arm burning where her hand rested on it. Seeing his discomfort, she drew back.

  She said, “Boy, have you a name?”

  “Moloquin,” he said.

  “No—the name your mother gave you.”

  “Moloquin,” he said.

  “No, no. Your mother, Ael, did she not call you something?”

  “Ael,” he said, catching the strange word.

  “Ael, your mother.”

  All at once he realized what she meant, and the meaning of it broke on him, a flash like the lightning flash in his mind. He said “My mother. Ael. That was her name. My mother was Ael.”

  He began to cry. Since her death he had not felt so near to her as he did now, when this stranger, this old woman, gave him what he had never had: his mother’s name.

  “Ael,” he said, and threw his head back, his face raised toward Heaven, and he shouted, “Ael! Ael!”

  The stones resounded; the vaulted sky itself boomed back his voice. He put his face into his hands and cried until he was empty.

  At last he raised his head. She was watching him, the little old woman, magic in her eyes and in her mind, names and words and stories. He lunged across the fire at her and gripped her with both hands.

  “My mother,” he said, his throat thick. “My mother. My mother gone. Mother dead.”

  In his grip she was light as a husk. She laughed, half-smothered. “Moloquin,” she said, “let me go.” Her arms went around him, briefly, and tightened, and for a moment he was pressed against her, body to body, so close they were one body, warmth and life together. She said again, muffled, “Let me go,” and he did.

  He sat back. The cool air swept around him; he felt his skin all over, his boundary, his end, and was more lonely than he had ever been, even when his mother died. Once again he lowered his head and sobbed.

  Karelia said, “Moloquin, did she tell you anything? Your mother?”

  “She told me—” he crept nearer the fire, and turned his gaze from Karelia’s face that scorched his inner eyes, turned his look to the blind and empty fire. “She told me, when I—she dead, I should go—that way.” He waved toward the west. “Not go that way.” He waved southward, toward the village of the People. Like bile in his throat there rose into his mind his first real understanding that she had meant him never to find the People. Maybe she had been right. He struggled with that; the words were not enough, the idea flittered away from him into the dark. He stared into the many-colored flames. “She hate me,” he said, and covered his face with his hands. “She leave me.”

  “Moloquin,” she said, and laid her fingers on his arm again. More used to the touch, he was at once calmed and steadied, and when she urged him closer to her he came to her, and she made him sit down by her. She said, “Did she tell you any stories?”

  “Stories,” he said, tentatively. His gaze searched her face. Her skin was wrinkled as an old apple.

  She smiled at him. In a low, soft voice, she began, “In the beginning, everything was covered with ice, and nothing moved or breathed thereon. Then the Sun rose, and shone forth on the ice, and from the rising mist the first living being collected in the air, neither man nor woman, child nor adult, the creature of the Sun.”

  As she spoke, her hands moved, and she shaped out of the air that which inhabited the story; he saw the Sun rise, the mist climb up from the ice, and the first creature form from it; he forgot to breathe, or to wonder, but only listened.

  “The Moon was jealous, because he could create nothing, and he slew the Sun’s darling, and tore it into pieces. Then the Sun mourned her creature. She took up the body, and laid it out on the ground, and from the flesh made the world, of the bones the hills, of the hair the forests, of the blood the rivers. Looking on this world, the Sun rejoiced, and from the joy in her heart, she drew forth another being, as perfect as the first, unborn and undying, neither man nor woman, child or adult.

  “Again the Moon grew jealous, and seized the feet of the Sun’s new being, and the Sun held it by the arms, and they contested back and forth over it, until the being was pulled apart into two. And these two were the first man and the first woman, and they went forth into the world and made their home there.”

  He saw all this brought from nothing by the words she spoke, and by the forms her hands made. The words sank into him like drops of rain into dry earth.

  “Now again the Moon grew jealous, and he waged a war against the Sun, and seized her and swallowed her whole. But the man and the woman saw what was happening to their divine mother, and they went up on a hilltop, very close to the Moon, and shouted and threw stones at him, until he disgorged the Sun, which rolled away safely across the sky once more. And the man and the woman rejoiced together, and the Sun shone on them, and they were blessed, and many were their children, and from each of their daughters came a kindred of the People, and so the whole world was inhabited.”

  Moloquin said, “The Moon and the Sun, I saw them together.”

  She nodded. “Yes, last winter. The Moon is evil. Sometimes he will try to devour the Sun, but she always escapes.”

  He said, “Where am I come from?”

  Her face turned toward the fire, and her hands fell into her lap. It was as if she shut herself against him. The Moon swallowed her. She said, “I am not entirely sure I should tell you. What did your mother say to you?”

  “She tell me what I tell you. Not to go that way. To go that way.”

  “No, I mean—about you. About her—why she—” she faced him again, her eyes wide. “She told you nothing.”

  His mouth moved; no sounds came out. He had run out of words. The story had filled him with new words, with space for the pictures of words, space for more stories. He tugged on her arm. “Tell me another.”

  She laughed. Raising her head, she looked up into the sky, and said, “To be truthful, boy, I am minded to spend the night here. It is very late, the moon is rising, it is a long, cold and fearful way to my own hearth.” She put her hands down on the ground beside her, and she began to get up, carefully, bit by bit.

  She was going. He flung out his hands toward her, terrified of losing her. “Stay here. Oh, please—” in a blind agony he went back to what he had done with his mother; he thrust out both hands to her and wept and cried, “Mama, Mama, please—”

  She seized his wrists; she shook him roughly. “Now! Be still! Hah!” She shouted into his face and shook him hard and smacked him sharply on the cheek with her flattened hand. “Moloquin!”

  He stopped, gasping, reassured; his mother had done exactly the same with him, whenever he cried.

  She said, “Will you go down there with me?”

  He leapt up, eager, delighted. “I go with you.”

  At that she laughed; she laughed like the bustard’s high screechy cackle. They put the fire out and he took her basket for her and they went up out of that place and walked along toward the village, going down through a fold in the grassy slope. In the distance the fire in the center of the village was bright as blood.

  Karelia kept close by him; often she turned and cast her look all
around her, peering sharply into the darkness like someone poking a stick into a hole. She came hardly to Moloquin’s chin. As they walked he tried out the story again in his mind. Like food in his belly, the story made his mind fat. If all the People came from those first two, then was he one of the People? He had tried to ask Karelia but she had turned away from him.

  That was the bad part about having: it made not-having worse.

  He wondered what it was that he had. Touching someone else, that made his skin hurt sometimes, sometimes thrilled him. Touching Karelia. In the space inside that the story had made, there was room now for other stories, like: she came once, looking for me, she may come again. She came looking for me, why?

  Why?

  Of all words, that was the hammer, breaking everything open.

  Beside him she was looking around her again, and now abruptly she lunged toward him, banging into him, clutching at his arm. He wheeled around. Her panic caught him a little; he was ready for an enemy, his hands fisted.

  Nothing but the moon, just beginning to appear over a crest of the horizon. Karelia caught hold of his arm and pulled him.

  “Come. Run.”

  Obediently he broke into a trot beside her; she ran with blind feet, stumbling and tripping on the grass, and he grasped her arm and held her and kept her upright. The moon was mounting steadily into the sky, its body withered and blemished.

  They reached the brush wall around the village and he stopped. The sounds of the People reached him. His skin prickled up as if ants crawled all over him.

  “Come,” Karelia said, and tugged his arm.

  He shook his head. “No. I go home. I go back.”

  She grunted. In the shelter of the village, she had forgotten her terror of the rising moon. She said, “Good-by, then. I will see you again soon.”

  She walked away. He almost started after her, but then a shout from within the high-mounded thorny barrier, higher than his head, and a wild thunder of drums reminded him of the band of boys, and of the other People, and he felt small and naked and helpless again. He turned and went back into the night.