Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  “Live with you.”

  “In the village. In the longhouse, at my hearth.”

  He swallowed, his throat moving up and down, his gaze steady on her. He said nothing.

  “I have no children,” she said. She lowered her eyes. “I need—I want—”

  He put out his hand and touched her, and her throat stopped up. Their eyes met. He laid his hands on her shoulders and awkwardly leaned toward her, embracing her, and she shut her eyes and put her head down on his shoulder.

  He said, “Tell me a story.”

  “No. First, I—” she pulled apart from him; turning to her bundle, she spread it open. “You must have some clothes. I brought these, we shall make you some clothes from them.” She shook out her old coat, full of holes, and ragged along the edges. She had brought an awl stuck into a piece of bark, and a ball of yarn. Moloquin fingered the cloth.

  “What I need this for?”

  “Because you must have clothes.”

  “Not here,” he said.

  “To live in the village.”

  “I not live in the village.”

  “But I want you to come and live with me.”

  “I not—”

  He sprang up, so quickly that she shrank back in terror from the sudden movement; he wheeled around, dancing away from the stone. Karelia put out her hand to him. “Wait!” But he was gone. A flash of legs, a torrent of black hair, he bounded away and was gone over the top of the bank.

  Brant came toward her, leaning on his stick, his teeth showing in the midst of his sparse beard. He said, “Another lover, Ana-Karelia.”

  Humiliated, furious, she sank down into the grass and glared at him. “You old fool, get away from me. Go away!”

  “Ladon is right, he should not be here.”

  “Oh? Why not? Because of the dead? Because of the spirits? Then why have they not sickened him? Sent him foul dreams? Haunted him out of this place? He is safe here.”

  Brant said, “Come, we will walk back to the village together.”

  She remained still, her lips pressed firmly together; she was furious with him, the more so because Moloquin had refused her.

  The old man moved away, leaning on his stick. “Come along, Ana-Karelia,” he called, over his shoulder, “Come away, he will not be back. Not this day.”

  Slowly she got to her feet. The bundle lay there on the grass, opened and scattered, and she began to gather it up; then, impulsively, she collected the cloth and the awl and the yarn and stuffed it into the back of the hollow under the North Watcher. “Wait, Brant, you fool,” she called. The sun was going down. Quickly she went after the old man, to walk back down to the village.

  Karelia did not come back. Moloquin found the bundle of cloth in the hollow under the stone, and he spread out each piece carefully and smoothed it with his hands, absorbed in the pattern of the crossing threads. It felt strange, too, not like animal hide: thinner, more flexible. Finally he rolled it all up into a ball once more and stuffed it back into the hollow.

  He waited for a whole day by the stones, but still she did not come.

  Something was wrong with him. Before he first met Karelia he had been content to live as he did now, seeking food, sleeping under the stone, engaging in his daily contest with the boys’ band, and that had seemed enough, or at least all he was likely to have. Then Karelia had come, and told him stories, and now he was lonely all the time.

  He wondered whether it was Karelia he missed, or the stories. She touched him; no one else had touched him since his mother died. He remembered the feel of her hands on his skin, how warm and light, and the smell of her near him, and other things: over and over he thought of one time when he had glanced at her and seen her looking down, how the long grey hair had lain across her cheek, how soft and downy was the skin just below her half-closed eye. He could not say what it was, but the memory made his fingers tingle, longing to touch her, to be touched.

  He told himself the stories she had told him, over and over, trying to repeat each word as she had, each gesture. It was not the same.

  He lay on the grass between two leaning stones and stared up at the sky, figured with clouds. His mother had taught him how to make nets to catch fish and birds, how to choose good nuts from bad, how to make fires, how to skin rabbits. She had told him nothing of where he had come from, or why, or what he should do, except to keep his cutting stones sharp.

  When he looked into a still pool, sometimes, on a bright day, the water seemed impenetrable. All he saw was his own face and the glare of the sun. If he moved, so that his body shaded the water from the sun, then he could see down, below the surface, see the fish, the deep water, the bottom of the river. The stories were like that for him; they showed him what lay underneath.

  It seemed to him that he had always known that what he saw was only a surface; all that was important lay beneath.

  Now Karelia would not come, and without Karelia he had no stories, and as the day wore by without her he grew restless and unhappy to the point of tears. Abruptly, almost without being aware of it, he was on his feet and running.

  It was afternoon now. In the gardens of the village the women were bent over their work, their hoes hacking at the earth. He ran down toward them, keeping to the higher ground above the longhouses and far away from the roundhouse. His eyes searched the world for signs of the boys’ band, but they were nowhere in sight. Then, at the edge of the worked land, he stopped.

  Once this uneven hillside had been covered with trees; their charred stumps still studded the gardens, and the women grew flowers around them, stored their tools in the hollows, sat on the flat tops. Down there, in among all the stooped figures that bobbed and swayed rhythmically in their work, one sat upon a stump, one whom Moloquin could name at any distance: Karelia, telling stories.

  A swarm of smaller children sat around her; the women in their gardens listened as they worked. Only Moloquin could not hear, Moloquin, stranded forever at the edge of the world.

  A flash of hatred whitened his mind. She was giving his stories to someone else, his stories.

  He started down there, his feet leaving the tall rough grass for the dust of the path. No one saw him. Karelia sat on the stump with her head bowed a little so that her long grey hair hung down, and the wind lifted it; he saw her shape the air between her hands, bringing meaning from nothing. Each foot lower than the one before, he went down the path toward her.

  “Moloquin!”

  He stopped in his tracks, every hair standing on end. The shout came from one of the women, and at that sound, everyone in the gardens turned and stared at him. He felt their looks like cold rain on his skin, but Karelia was there, and she had seen him.

  She stood up. With both arms she called him in, her mouth round with his name. All around her stood the hostile People, but she in their midst summoned him, and he took another step toward her. Thinking of stories, thinking of the warmth of her embrace. Another step followed the first. Then, abruptly, a stone flew through the air toward him.

  He wheeled. The stone never came near him, but he was gone anyway, running for the woods, while behind him they screamed and whistled, they threw stones and clods of earth, they hooted and sneered at him, they raced slavering at his heels.

  In the margin of the forest, under a poplar tree, he stopped and looked back.

  They had not chased him; in fact, none of them even shouted, and he wondered if he had not heard them shout and whistle with the ears of memory that had heard it so often before. Now they simply watched him go, and in their midst, Karelia jumped and waved her arms and yelled furiously around her.

  Moloquin went away into the forest.

  Karelia settled down onto the stump again, out of breath, her eyes on the trees where Moloquin had gone. The crowd of little children at her feet goggled up at her, their mouths ajar; probably they had never seen he
r rage before. She wiped her rheumy eyes with her fingers.

  The women had gone back to their work. None among them would confess to having thrown the stone at Moloquin, they all went on as if nothing had happened. Karelia sank down, brooding, her chin on her chest; she stole another look at the forest.

  He had tried to come to her. Now, perhaps, the People would know that Karelia took an interest in him and they might leave him alone. Would he come back again?

  She got to her feet, thinking of walking to the Pillar of the Sky again, but at the thought of the distance, her heart quaked. After the last time she had slept almost a whole day.

  She was old. She had known that before, of course, but until now it had not interfered with her. She had gone everywhere, walked to the river with the men, done as she chose; now she could not, because she was old. Getting up off the stump, she went down the long winding path, in between the ripening gardens, down toward the longhouse.

  The women and their children lived in the longhouses. Sometimes the men lived there too, but usually the men preferred the roundhouse with its comradeship and Ladon’s generosity. When the married men wished the experience of their wives, they went into the longhouses, and there at the back, in the wall, was a little hole that led into a small dark room, and there the men united with their wives.

  In the little room with her husband, Grela, the sister of Tishka, said, “What do you make of Karelia? Isn’t it a scandal?”

  Her husband lay on his back on the mats, sated. He muttered something behind the arm he had flung over his face.

  “She will regret it. He is a fool, a thief, a naked thing. And she thinks to teach her stories to him!” Grela laughed. She was jealous of Karelia, who always seemed to get exactly what she wanted, and who had gone from being the scandal of the village to headwoman of the Red Deer without even talking it over with anyone. Grela talked to everyone about everything that concerned her. Now she remembered, a little late, what Karelia had told them around the sampo, that she suspected Ladon of trying to steal power, and it occurred to her that her sister, Tishka the Wise, would probably not want her to tell all this to Fergolin, who being a man would be on Ladon’s side.

  He was a man, too, and she reached out and closed her hand over his male part and squeezed, and he groaned. Grela laughed.

  “Yesterday he tried to sit down with the other children while she was telling stories in the fields, and when someone threw a stone at him, Karelia was furious, it was funny, you should have seen how she jumped and shouted, her face got red as a berry.”

  Fergolin put his hand over hers, still soft on his softening penis, and caressed himself with her palm; he rolled onto his side. “Grela,” he said, “I understand nothing of this. What is this about Karelia?”

  “Oh, she’s got this notion she will take Moloquin in.”

  “Moloquin. You mean that woods-sprite?”

  “He’s not a sprite, he’s a dirty little naked fool.” Still, what he had said struck some spark; she turned to him. “Do you think it is true what folk say, that Ael got pregnant by a spirit of the forest?”

  “Ael,” said Fergolin, yawning. “Who is Ael, now, river-tongued one? You know, Grela, you talk too much.” But he was smiling at her.

  “Ael, you know,” she said, crossly; it often surprised her how different was a man’s mind than a woman’s. “Ladon’s sister, the mother of Moloquin.”

  “She’s dead, Grela.” He sat up, drawing his knees up, his arms around them. “What is this about Moloquin and Karelia? She wants to take in Moloquin? And Moloquin is the son of Ladon’s sister?”

  “She is only making him bolder and bolder. He would have sat right down with the other children! We shall have to drive him away again, before he steals everything.”

  Fergolin said nothing for a moment. Close beside her in the dimness he gave off the warmth and the mysterious odor of the male. She moved closer to him, snuggling into his shoulder, and he put his arm around her.

  “Grela,” he said, and put a kiss to her forehead. “You are a river, my wife, running fast and deep, but it takes a fine fisherman to draw forth much in the way of substance from you.”

  “Fergolin,” she said, injured.

  He was going. Getting his feet under him, he pulled on his long shirt and wrapped his belt around his middle. Crouched in the low room, he embraced her, reaching down between her thighs to give a painful and yet pleasurable tug to her woman’s part. “Good-by, fat one.”

  She giggled, pleased at the compliment, and he went out. Grela stayed to neaten up the room.

  Fergolin, Grela’s husband, was of the Lineage of the Salmon and a master of the Bear Skull Society. Although he enjoyed being married to Grela, he passed his days at the roundhouse with the other men, where he could be of importance to Ladon; therefore he saw little of his wife, or indeed, of any woman. Except for the delightful uses of one another’s bodies, he saw no way that men and women could share their lives, each being the opposite of the other, and he usually paid no attention to what he heard when he was with Grela, especially as she talked so much.

  What she had let slip to him that morning, however, took a very forward place in his mind for the rest of the day. He was not a man of deep questions. When Moloquin had first appeared some few winters before, Fergolin had not wondered much where he had come from. Moloquin was not one of the People and therefore had no relationship to him except as an annoyance and a distraction.

  Now he knew better. Moloquin was one of the People after all, the son of Ael, the sister-son of the chief.

  He spoke of this to one or two of the other men, as they lingered in the yard outside the roundhouse door, waiting to be given some task to perform for their chief’s sake.

  “Ael,” said one, blankly.

  “I had forgotten that Ladon had a sister,” said the other, who was Mishol, a member of the Bear Skull but not a master. “There is a bad story about her, I do not remember what it is.”

  At this moment Ladon’s own son came out of the roundhouse, straightened after passing through the door, and stood blinking in the bright sunlight. Fergolin turned to him, smiling, and poked him affectionately in the ribs.

  “Well, mighty hunter, are you going forth to slay the ring-tusked boar?”

  The other men laughed, but there was some love in their mirth; they all liked Ladon’s son. The boy blushed. His skin was so fair that the color showed all along his throat and cheeks, like a girl’s.

  “I know I shall never wield the short spear as well as you, Fergolin-on.”

  Fergolin barked with amusement; with all the other men, he hunted four times a year, but he slew nothing. Ladon’s son, with many gestures of respect, was going away toward the gate and the men watched him go.

  “He shall be a good chief,” said Mishol.

  Fergolin said nothing. He was one of Ladon’s ring-brothers, and with the rest had sworn on oath in favor of Ladon’s son, but he did not believe that the boy would ever be the chief. He spoke well, but too well, saying always what would flatter the listener; he looked well, but too well, seeking always for admiration and love. Fergolin looked down at his hands. If Moloquin was indeed Ael’s son, then he saw trouble for Ladon and his schemes.

  Mishol took a knife from his belt, shaved a splinter from a stick of wood, and used it to clean his teeth. He said, “If I were Ladon, I would slay this woods-puppy.”

  Fergolin’s head jerked up; he felt a sudden stab of guilt, as if his inner thought had goaded Mishol to this remark. Sharply he said, “He is a child, and one of us.”

  “Don’t be so upright, Fergolin,” Mishol said roughly. “There is no one to protect him, and Ladon would smile on those who did it.”

  A few other men drifted closer, seeing them argue, and sat together in the sun; some were whittling, some picking through their hair and their friends’ hair for lice and fleas. Mishol lo
oked around at them, frowning—he was a big man, muscular and raw-throated.

  “Well?” he said loudly. “Shall we do what is in our chief’s heart?”

  “Do what?” asked one who had not heard the whole conversation.

  “He is a child,” Fergolin said stubbornly. “And one of us. The Overworld looks down and will see what is done to one of the People—”

  He caught a sudden, alarming, transcendent sense of himself as another person; he knew he was being watched. The souls of his ancestors watched him. Desperately he wanted to do that which would please them. He made a sign, surreptitiously, to summon their help. Mishol was still looking around him for support.

  “I say, we should do what the chief would wish of us.”

  “Moloquin is just a thief,” said another man. “He has no father and no mother, either, now—he is not one of the village. Perhaps Mishol is right. We could catch him and kill him, and Ladon would give us all greatly from his roundhouse.”

  “The chief’s will is the will of Heaven,” piped up little Sarbon and banged his thighs for emphasis.

  Fergolin bit his lower lip; was that true, should he do as the others did—as the others spoke of doing? He glanced around him, looking for some answer in the faces of his fellows, but they showed him nothing; they sat there with dull looks, humming, or cracking lice, and the will of Heaven did not shine through their eyes. Old Brant came in, a little nearer Fergolin, and sat down.

  “Who is this boy, anyway?” asked one at the back of the group.

  “An enemy of our chief,” Mishol bawled. “What else must you know?”

  “He is Ael’s son,” said Fergolin. “The son of Ladon’s sister.”

  That met a round of blank faces. “Ladon. Did he have a sister?” Sarbon, however, pulled on his lip, frowning.

  “Ael? Oh, I remember her. That time, when we were playing with a pig’s head, she stole it away, don’t you remember?” He turned toward Fergolin who had joined the boys’ band at the same time as he. “Don’t you remember?”

  Now Fergolin did remember; his mind leapt back into the past, when the most important thing in his life had been doing well in the sight of the other boys—vividly he saw before him a long, lithe figure, long black hair streaming, holding up in mockery a mangled bloody skull.