Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  “He’s just a woods-sprite,” someone else muttered. “I don’t believe he is even a real human being.”

  “Kill him,” Mishol said. “Kill him, and Ladon will put us at the very front of the procession when we go to the Great Gathering.”

  Some of the men were nodding in agreement. Mishol got up onto his feet. “I will fetch a club,” he said, and started around.

  “Wait,” Fergolin cried. He put out one hand to hold Mishol back. “What are you talking of? This is murder! The People do not raise their hands against one another.”

  “He is not one of us!”

  “But he is. He is the son of the chief’s sister. And that’s why you want to kill him—” Fergolin leapt toward this knowledge as toward a safe landing—“Not because he isn’t one of us, but because he is.”

  “Besides,” said old Brant, who had been silent until now, “Karelia has taken him under her wing.”

  At the mention of that name the men’s faces cleared of their fierce resolve, and even Mishol, with a grunt, turned forward and settled down in his place. Fergolin wondered how Brant knew this, but it fitted with what Grela had told him—he saw again, as she had told it, Karelia leaping and waving her fists and shouting at them for scaring her pet away. He laughed at the thought, and a few of the other men laughed too, not knowing why, but because Fergolin was respected.

  “What Karelia wishes, she will have,” said someone in the back. “And I for one will not get in her way.”

  “Or into her stories,” said another man, and made a quick gesture with his fingers, to ward off evil.

  “Still, just because he is Ael’s son—”

  “He is nothing,” said Mishol, loudly. “He shall never be other than nothing, and I shall not trouble myself with nothing.” He got up and went into the roundhouse.

  In the longhouses, each woman had her own hearth, a ring of stones for her fire, a larger ring for her living space. Now, in the evening, every hearth was noisy with children, warm with the cooking fire, steamy with the smells of dinner.

  Every hearth but Karelia’s, where she sat alone.

  She put sticks into her fire. Near her was a pot of clay with a broth ready to be heated, and a flat basket full of cakes made of grain, but she could not bring herself to cook anything. It seemed too much work just to feed one old woman. Even her hunger seemed to belong to someone else.

  She poked the fire with another stick. When she had married the first time, she had thought she would bear many children, but there had been none. Soon she quarreled with her husband and they separated.

  It was his fault, she had thought. His fault she bore no children. So she married again.

  That second one she had never loved, but he had a powerful body, long strong legs, and whenever they had gone into the little room together the whole longhouse quaked. No babies came of it. Then she had not minded so much, because she was a storywoman, and the stories were children enough, and anyhow she fought with her husband whenever they were not in the little room together. Even there they fought sometimes, even as their bodies thrust and stroked together. When he died suddenly some people had said she had killed him, working him into a story and causing his death first in her mind and then in fact.

  After that she had gone a long while without a man, and needing none, since any man she wanted she could lure to her and enjoy for a moment and not have to worry about other times.

  The women around the sampo buzzed about her; the men watched her with an unhealthy intensity. All the People came to her for stories; she could turn a whole crowd to stones, silent and still, while she spun a new world around them in her words and gestures.

  She still had that. Even now, especially now perhaps, as she sat lonely by her hearth, if she lifted her head, and began to speak, and put her hands before her in the air, then they would come and cluster around her and listen, their eyes bright. Then they were her children.

  When she was silent she had no one. Soon she would be silent forever, a spirit of the air, a creature of the Overworld, where all was known already and so there was no need for stories.

  She poked at the fire, thinking of Moloquin, and she told herself she would go tomorrow, walk the long way up to the Pillar of the Sky, and tell him stories all day long.

  She could go and live with him. Leave the People and live with him.

  Once before she had done that. When she married for a third time, her husband was a man of another village, and she had told everyone here that she would go to his village to be with him because she was sick of them all. But they had not gone to his village; they had gone off and lived together, alone, in the west; he made a hut of withies and brush, she toiled dawn to dark in a garden, they slept together every night, they were enough for each other. Him she loved, and him she had only for that one season, because when the winter came he sickened and he died, her husband, and she had gone back to the People.

  Thinking of him again, she lowered her chin to her chest, and tears filled her eyes. All her life seemed wasted, a dry leaf, after that one green season of love.

  So, wrapped in her memories, Karelia sat by the fire, the stick in her hand, and heard nothing of the bustle around her, the buoyant cries of the children, the laughter, the sounds of cooking and of eating, the crunch of feet and the crackle of the fire; she heard nothing at all, until suddenly there was nothing to hear: all the longhouse fell into an utter silence.

  At that she lifted her head, surprised, and looked around.

  In silence, in stillness, the People stood beside their hearths and stared. In silence, in stillness, there came down the middle of the longhouse a creature hidden in a mass of cloth.

  It was Moloquin. Moloquin. He had taken the clothes she had brought and swaddled himself in them, only his long bare legs showing; even his head was covered up, his eyes peeping out through an opening. Slowly, fearfully, he was coming down the longhouse, looking for her.

  She got up. Her heart swelled great as the longhouse; she could not keep her joy within, but opened her mouth and gave it off as a sigh. She stretched out her arms, and he ran into her embrace, a warm, living child, and she brought him tight against her breast, as close as her husbands had been, pressed her face to his wild earth-smelling hair. She led him to her hearth, and sat him down, and there, for the first time, she cooked food for him over her own fire.

  Karelia taught him how to wash himself in the morning, and what to eat and how. She said it was important not to shit anywhere inside the brush fence around the longhouses, and took him off to the ditch where all the People shit, but Moloquin could not bear the smell and went away a lot farther, to be by himself when he emptied his bowels. She told him how to put on clothes she gave him; she told him how to start a fire in the proper way, so that the spirits would agree to let it burn. All these things were very boring to Moloquin.

  He sat by the fire in the longhouse and looked around him at the other people. They were nearly all women with their children. The spaces where they lived, each family to its own hearth, were divided from one another only by the air, a line of stones, and the knowledge of separation. Karelia had told him not to stare, to keep his eyes downcast, but Moloquin disobeyed her.

  He let his hair hang down over his face and he looked through it, so that no one would see him watching them.

  He saw the women across the way make a loom of two pieces of wood and weave cloth on it, and he longed to go closer and watch the threads pass in and out of one another. The order in that pleased him. He liked also the colors that they used. A few of the children came up around him and called him names, but he ignored them. There were no boys in the longhouse that came near his size and age; the girls who were his age stayed close by their mothers; all the children who came to Moloquin were little things, their bellies still fat in front of them, their cheeks round and pink, and although they lisped insults at him he wanted to p
ick them up and squeeze them and make them laugh, as he saw them laugh with their mothers.

  When he felt no one watching him, he got up and moved away around the longhouse, seeing everything. It was like stalking animals. When he saw that his presence and movement alarmed them, he stopped and sank down on his heels and was still, hardly even breathing, until they lost interest in him and looked elsewhere; then he got up and went off again.

  In such a way he soon knew all the longhouse, even the little room at the end, with its delicious and provocative smells. Coming up the long side of the place once more, he happened on a lump of clay.

  The wet mass of the clay was on a mat before a hearth where a low fire still burned; the woman had gone off somewhere. Moloquin squatted down by the clay. He had seen mud like this before. The People made pots of it. He had dug up such gooey mud himself out of the riverbank, and he knew how it felt. He knew also that he should leave this mud alone, but as he remembered how the mud felt, oozing through his fingers, and remembered also how he had seen other people shaping it, the temptation overwhelmed him and he reached out and took a handful.

  The feel of it swiftly absorbed him. Sitting flat on his hams, he squeezed and rolled it between his palms. It would take any shape he could give it, and he began to form it into a ball, and twisted part away and saw a nose, a mouth, an ear—he gathered up more of the clay and patted it and pounded it, enjoying his power over it. The earthy smell reminded him of the riverbank and he tasted a little of it and thought of the river and wound and coiled the clay into a wild shape.

  It was too easy, though: it made no resistance to him, and would be anything he wished; he found this disappointing.

  Still he loved the handling of it, the sensation of the clay giving way to his strength. But while he sat there contentedly molding the clay, the woman who owned it came back.

  She shrieked. Her shriek was his first warning that she had found him at this business, and he leapt up, ducking by instinct. She struck him like a bear-mother defending her cub, her hands open, her nails ripping at him. He backed up, trying to get away from her, and tripped over a stone and fell.

  After that he merely rolled into a ball and let her beat him and scream at him. She did him no harm, but his soul sank into a cold despair; he would never like being with these people.

  Now here came Karelia to save him. He lowered his arms and got up, and Karelia put her hand on his shoulder and gave him a little shake.

  “Now see what you’ve done. Didn’t I tell you to stay by the hearth and wait for me?”

  Moloquin muttered under his breath. He let his hair hang down over his face, to hide his eyes, while he glared from Karelia to the other woman, whose fury still glowed like a red blaze in her face. She struck at him again and missed. Karelia led him away.

  “You must never touch a woman’s belongings like that,” Karelia said. “She meant that clay for some purpose, don’t you understand? Now it is wasted.”

  “Wasted,” he said, surprised. They had come back to her hearth; he sat down by the little fire, and saying the words she had told him he put new wood on it. “Why?” Looking over his shoulder he saw the woman taking the lump of clay away.

  “It is woman’s work,” Karelia said. “No man may be allowed to handle such things. The spirit of them is driven out by a man’s hands.”

  “No spirit is in it,” he said. He remembered how the clay had yielded unresisting to his hands. “There no soul in it at all.”

  “Moloquin, you must obey me, or you will be ruined.”

  “I want to go away, then,” he said, and she slapped him.

  “Never say that again.”

  He held his tongue. His anger seethed in him like water boiling in a pot; he wondered if the spirit of the hearth had somehow gotten into his belly and set his insides on fire. He pressed his hand to his belly. Everything he did, Karelia told him, he had to do in certain ways, to avoid offending spirits, or to attract the benevolent aid of spirits; there seemed nothing he could do freely.

  “You cannot live, except with us,” Karelia said to him. She gathered up the clutter of pots and baskets around her hearth, tipped out the garbage and thrust everything off to one side; although she acted very busy, he noticed, all she did was shuffle things from one place to another, and he laughed, his mood lifting.

  “I live enough before,” he said, forgetting the worst.

  “Because some spirit protected you. Perhaps it was Ael, your mother. In any case, she has given you to me to care for, and you must obey me as if I were she.”

  He thought of going away, back to his place of stones, and lowered his head. She fussed around a while longer, making the space neat by shoving everything indiscriminately out to the edges. At last she said, “Now, come with me—I have work to do, and will need your help.”

  “Why?” Moloquin got to his feet.

  “I am going to find wood.”

  He went after her down the longhouse to the door; all around him the hostile stares of the People were like walls of thorns. Karelia led him outside, into the sun, and he breathed deep, his chest expanding, standing straight—as if, before, he could only stoop. In front of him his new mother stood, almost a head shorter than he, her face sharp, scanning the village.

  “Now,” she said, turning toward him, and put her hand on his arm. “Let us go and find wood for the fire.”

  At a little trot she took him away up the slope, toward the forest. He fell in beside her, needing only to walk fast to keep up with her. They made their way between the long winding strips of the gardens where the women were at work with their hoes and rakes, digging out the weeds from between their plants. Someone was singing nearby, and the others joined in sometimes, so that it was like question-and-answer; the voices fit smoothly together, filling all the song’s spaces. As they passed the top edge of the worked ground, he saw some people off to his right a little way, digging up a hole in the ground.

  “What are they doing over there?”

  She hardly glanced that way. “We will harvest soon,” she said. “They are digging a pit to thresh the grain in.”

  “Thresh.”

  Into his mind leapt the memory of his mother, gathering her sheaves of grain into bundles, shouting at him to thresh, to thresh—she had struck him, furious, when he dropped them. There had been no hole in the ground. He struggled to remember. All he remembered was the force of her blow, the knowledge that he had done wrong and drawn her anger. Craning his neck, he watched the people digging until he and Karelia were into the close quarters of the forest.

  Of course Karelia was not used to gathering wood for herself. As the headwoman of the Red Deer Kindred, she had a dozen younger, stronger hands eager to do such work for her. But she wanted to give Moloquin a task; she knew that work would make him acceptable to the others, and that bringing wood into the village would put a value on him.

  They followed a dusty path through the brambles of ripening berries at the edge of the forest, and wound a way back deeper into the trees. She stopped, unsure, here where the sun was so far away, and looked around her.

  “What you want here?” Moloquin asked. “You want to burn?”

  “Yes. Do you know where we can find some?”

  He took her away through the oak trees. Now it was he who led. She followed close after him, her ears straining at the alien sounds of the wood, her eyes caught by swift little movements on either side. He took her to a great oak tree, clutching the earth in its knobbed roots, spreading its branches around it, driving off all other growth.

  “Here,” he said, and leapt up, and caught a low-hanging branch. As she watched, amazed, he swung himself nimbly up into the tree and climbed away into the leaves. As he disappeared among the green and brown tangles of the tree she imagined that he grew wings like a bird. She backed up a few steps, her head back, trying to make him out in the dense treetop b
ut all she saw was the wild waving of a branch here and there as he stepped on it.

  His voice came from the leaves. “Watch—be careful.” With a rending crash a dead branch fell down through the lower levels, tearing off smaller twigs and limbs, and thudded to the earth a little way from Karelia.

  She approached it cautiously. The bark had all been worn away and the wood shone. Moloquin dropped to the ground beside her.

  “Here,” he said, and held out a little bird’s nest to her.

  “What do I want with that?” She shied from it, her temper short in this alien place.

  For answer, he took the nest and plopped it onto her head, and burst out laughing.

  Karelia snarled at him; she snatched the nest out of her hair, watching, him giggle and prance before her. She realized how she looked, and had to laugh also. She nodded to the branch.

  “This is good wood, Moloquin, but it is too large.”

  He shrugged. “No care.” He dragged the branch around until it rested with one end up against the oak trunk, and then he jumped on the middle. Nothing happened; the branch was very solid. He took up another branch off the ground and hit the first one, but the club was rotten and broke. Still he did not give up; Karelia watched him, her hands at her sides, as he searched the area around him, found a large stone, and pried it out of the ground. He could barely lift it; groaning he hoisted it up over his head, and drove it down on the branch.

  The wood cracked with a sharp report. Crowing, Moloquin pounced on it and tore the branch to pieces with his hands, banging the pieces on the stone when they would not yield to his strength.

  “Now,” he said, panting, “is some spirit needed to thank?”

  Karelia smiled at him. “I suppose there is. Tree-lore is not women’s lore. The branch was dead already, the tree will not mind that we have taken it.”