Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  On the day following they had the ceremony of the Giving of the Power of Ladon.

  For this rite all the women put on their best garments and dressed their children as gorgeously as they were able and lined them up by order of age. The men also put on their masks and their ceremonial clothes and took their drums, and all the People assembled together outside the roundhouse, and they took down some of the wall around the yard, removing the mats from the uprights of the wall, so that all the People could be in one crowd, together, facing Ladon.

  There in the door of the roundhouse Ladon sat on his pile of bearskins and fox skins, and the men stood on either side of him with their drums. First the men danced, making three interconnecting rings that circled the roundhouse, and with the beating of their drums and their singing and their dance they evoked the whole of the Overworld to pay witness to what went on here.

  Then the women came before him, beginning with the headwomen, and set before him their harvest.

  For this purpose the women made special baskets, which seemed deep and wide but were really worked in with withies to be shallow, and the woman spread a thin layer of unmilled grain on the top, so that it seemed the whole basket was full. She brought him beans as well in such baskets. She brought him jugs of honey, but the jugs were plugged just below the neck, so that a little honey would fill up many jugs, and seem a great deal; and she brought cheeses, in a great pile, but the top only was real cheese, and the bottom ones were of wood.

  Thus each woman strove to bring before Ladon the greatest amount of all the People, but in truth what she could do in these ways was limited by the number of baskets and jugs she could make. When she had offered up so much show to Ladon, what was left over of her harvest went quietly into the roundhouse in ordinary baskets.

  After each of the women had made her offering to Ladon, they prepared a great feast. The men in a hunting rite slaughtered some of the pigs, and these were roasted; the women milled grain, and formed it into flat cakes, and cooked them. There was also fruit gathered from the forest, and honey that had fermented, although that was known to be a favorite food of the spirits and was drunk only very sparingly by wise people, so that there would be enough for the ancestors.

  And the ancestors came to the feast. All the food was piled up on a mat of bark on the step of the roundhouse, and all the People ate of it, and since no one with proper manners would take the last bite of anything, and there was so much food that everyone could eat his fill and still there would be more, the fact that when they were done all the food was gone proved that the spirits had come and eaten also, and had accepted the People, their harvest, and their feast. Thus Ladon, who was at the center of it all, acquired more power.

  Also proof of the presence of spirits was the general levity of the crowd. No one would have drunk too much of the honey-liquor, and yet nearly all the men and most of the women seemed drunk, and danced and played like children with one another; some even went off into the quiet behind the roundhouse and coupled there, although they usually found, too late, that their quiet place concealed a number of small, loud children.

  Karelia told a few stories, but it was hard to tell stories to drunks, and after a little while she ceased and went around the place, amusing herself with other people’s antics. Moloquin was nowhere to be found. She paused by the table of leaves where the roast pigs were laid out, and stooped and took a big piece of the crisp fat, and then when she rose she found herself face to face with Ladon.

  Her back tingled. Like a deer in the forest coming face to face with a wolf she trembled with the urge to flight, but his fierce unfaltering gaze held her fast.

  “Opa-Ladon-on,” she said, her voice like a feather in her throat. “Mighty is he.”

  Unblinking, he fixed her with his gaze. He said, “You have given me much offense, woman.”

  After the ceremony, in the presence of the ancestors, he was full of power; he gave it off like a radiance. She raised her hand between them, as a shield.

  “Ladon,” she whispered, “let me go.”

  “Aaaah.”

  He crept nearer, massive, shimmering—capable, she knew, of destroying her with one hand, or with one word, if he knew that word. She felt his enmity like a pressure in her chest that would not let her breathe.

  Then she found the word to use against him. The name that threatened him, the power that turned him human again.

  “Ael,” she said.

  He stopped in his slow serpentine advance.

  “Ael, not I, is weaving your destiny together,” Karelia said; she took heart, and her force bloomed as his faded. “It is Ael, not old Karelia, whom you must hate, Ladon-on.”

  His eyes were hot and bright now, but his strength was baffled. He moved in fits and jerks, the fluid strength gone from his limbs. Karelia straightened, triumphant, her heart beating hard with the knowledge of victory, and she thrust her hand out toward him.

  “Ael will destroy you, Ladon!”

  “Ah!”

  He seized hold of her hand. He tightened his grip until the small bones crunched and she cried out in pain. His face twisted with the effort of his grip. Then abruptly he let her go, turned and was gone.

  She sank down where she was, her hand in her lap. The hand throbbed and ached all the way up to her elbow. She raised her head. Night was on them, night hovered all around them, driven up into the sky by the fires and the noise, but covering them all nonetheless. She shivered.

  He was not beaten. She had brought Moloquin here, she had forced Ladon to accept his presence, she had put a stone into his belly, but she had not beaten him. He was only waiting.

  That understanding filled her with a churning fear. Suddenly she had to see Moloquin, to know that he was well. Rising to her feet, she plunged away, into the dark turmoil of the celebration, looking for her son.

  In this year the red traveler in the night sky, which like all the others generally trended into the west, began to course to the east. This had happened before. The People believed that it turned its path because of anger and pride, and to protect themselves and to lure it back to the proper way, they performed ceremonies of worship and honor toward the red star. Because the circling of the traveler coincided with the passage of the sun into the star-gateway, where the two great stars Boy and Girl stood before the burning white scar that lay across the sky, the duty of leading the ceremonies fell to the masters of the Bear Skull Society.

  Fergolin therefore was deeply involved in these mysteries. With his novices and his assistants he went away down the river until he was outside the village, and built a little hut of withies and made a fire inside, and sweated himself. On the way back to the village, a time when reality was so clear and exact it seemed to him he knew all things, he found a snakeskin hanging on a blade of grass, and he took this carefully and rolled it around his finger, to put into his amulet bag.

  Then with his mask in both hands, his skin still shining and tender from the sweating so that the real world penetrated him through and through, he went before Ladon, to consult with him about the proper day for the ceremony. Standing before Ladon, he placed his mask over his chest so that the spirit to whom the mask gave a face could hear and see what went on.

  Ladon stood before his fur-covered high seat, his mask before him, and listened to Fergolin recite the formal request for permission to conduct the ceremony.

  “I hear and I will provide what my people require of me,” Ladon said, in the ritual way. “I shall sit under the stars tonight and allow the holy radiance to descend on me. I shall have the wishes of the Overworld made known to me.”

  Fergolin thanked him with many bows, using words taught him in his boyhood, and backed away from the presence of the chief; but then he came up to Ladon again. Although the rituals had to be done exactly, with no variance of word or gesture, the actual performance of some of the details was done “under the straw,�
�� as the People said of things done privately. Therefore Fergolin came back with his head turned to one side and his hand over the face of his mask.

  Ladon sat down again on his bearskin. His belly lapped his belt and rested on his knees. The sunlight coming in through the hole in the roof glistened blue-black highlights on the thick hair that covered Ladon’s shoulders. He turned the face of his mask to the ground.

  “Do it tomorrow,” Ladon said. “If we start at dawn, it will be daylight enough.”

  “I hope so,” Fergolin said. It was very bad to be caught in the middle of a ceremony when the sun went down. “It is very near the equinox.” He seemed to hesitate.

  Ladon looked beyond him. “Yes? What is it?”

  Fergolin glanced over his shoulder; another man stood there, waiting to be acknowledged.

  “Opa-Ladon, Moloquin is here.”

  “Hunh,” Ladon said, as if the wind had been driven out of him by a sharp poke in the belly. He glanced at Fergolin who remained where he was, being hot with curiosity over this whole business.

  “I’ll see him later,” Ladon said, and then shook himself, as if changing his mind meant changing all his body too. “No. Send him to me.”

  Fergolin drew off to one side. He saw that Ladon stooped for his mask and put it carefully away beside his high seat, but Fergolin turned his own mask so that it looked out at the world.

  Moloquin came. His dense black hair was braided and he wore a piece of cloth wrapped around his body, imitating the clothes men wore, although those garments of course were of animal skins. Karelia had been at work on him. Yet he still looked ragged and dirty somehow, as if the forest still claimed him; it seemed, to Fergolin, that he could as well have grown leaves on his head as hair.

  And, Fergolin saw with great amazement, he looked like Ladon.

  The chief spoke in his deep voice of power. “You are the boy Moloquin, who came out of the forest.”

  “I am the Unwanted One,” said the boy.

  “You are the son of Ana-Karelia-el.”

  Fergolin stiffened, seeing what Ladon meant to do, and he turned toward Moloquin, expecting he knew not what—some insistence on his identity as Ael’s son, the chief’s sister’s son—but the boy spoke without pause, and with no force.

  He said, “I am Karelia’s son.”

  Fergolin breathed a long sigh, drawing both their looks, and Ladon smiled at him. “Go, Fergolin-on, my honored man.”

  Then Fergolin knew that what he had seen was to be talked over with the other men. He made gestures of respect to Ladon and went out of the roundhouse.

  Once, halfway to the door, he paused and looked back; the sunlight coming down through the roof showered on the chief and the tall black- haired fosterling who faced him. They were not speaking, merely staring at each other. Fergolin thought, This will not go as Ladon wishes, and a cold feeling crept up his spine. More things to discuss with the other men. He went off to find company.

  Ladon said, “You have been fetching wood for the village. Is that true?”

  “Yes, Ladon,” said the boy.

  “Call me Opa-Ladon,” said the chief sharply. “Opa-Ladon-on, mighty is he.”

  “Yes,” said Moloquin.

  The chief lolled on the side of his seat. He had expected more from Moloquin, defiance, threats, accusations; this bland obedient face before him could not be dangerous. He did not even look like Ael. And he had named Karelia as his mother, there in front of Fergolin.

  “You are a good gatherer of wood,” Ladon said. “Therefore it is my wish that you go into the forest and gather wood, and fill up my woodlot with wood for the fires of the roundhouse. And when you have done all that, you will come to me again and I shall have more tasks for you.”

  He watched Moloquin’s eyes as he spoke, expecting a betraying flash of anger, but Moloquin only nodded. “Yes, Opa-Ladon-on, mighty is he,” and started away. A few steps off, he turned and looked back. “May I go now?”

  “Go,” said Ladon.

  The boy left. Ladon watched him go, pleased with himself. There was nothing to fear from this one. He was stupid, even as the People thought, and knew nothing of power or truth, honor, pride and the fitness of things: would he have accepted such a mean and contemptible duty otherwise? He was dark and thin, no match for Ladon’s son, with his splendid sunlit hair and handsome face. And Fergolin had heard him deny his mother. It was enough, once the others saw him doing work no man would touch. Ladon smiled to himself, victorious at last over both Ael and Karelia.

  At dawn the men put on their masks and took their feathered spears and made two long rows inside the roundhouse, each man standing beside the rooftree of his society, so that they formed two long living spirals under the roof. Then as the sun rose they went slowly forth from the roundhouse.

  It was the work of the Salmon Kindred to make music, and so each man of that kindred carried a little drum on his belt, and as they danced they thumped the drum with their hands. The men of the Oak Tree Kindred chanted the rituals of honor to the red travelling star, whose other names were the Circling Star and the Left Eye.

  They bent their steps, two long ropes of men, in ever-widening spirals through the village, through the abandoned fields of weeds and goats along the river, up through the newly harvested gardens where the stubble of the grain stood brown in the rows. Here the women stood among their crops and covered their faces with their hands, because this was men’s doings- Even the children were silent, even the babies. The tump-tump of the drums was like the beating of the heart of the People.

  The sun climbed into the sky as they danced and beat down on them with her long fierce arms; perhaps jealous of the honor shown the night travelers. The men kept their pace. They wound their way up through the highest fields, where still many trees grew, their bark stripped off all around the bottom; here one day the women would grow grain and beans. At the very edge of the forest, the first pairs of men turned and faced the village, and as the others climbed up beside them, they spread out, until at last the chain of men circled the whole village. Then at the height of the day they ate, and gave food to the masks so that the spirits ate, and they sprinkled meal around the edge of the village, and spoke the rituals of safe-keeping.

  Down in the fields, the women bent to their work. There were still beans to pick, and onions and other roots, and so, while the men contended with the Overworld and made peace with the spirits, the women worked like brutes as if nothing was happening.

  At last the drums began again. In two long chains the men danced down through the fields again, chanting and bowing. The sun drifted downwards through the sky and the men followed the prescribed spiraling path down toward the roundhouse. They circled the longhouses and blessed them and one by one they went into the roundhouse.

  The sun set. Night came, and in the sky, among all the lights of Heaven, the two eyes of the Overworld shone forth: the Right Eye, blue-white and bright and true, above the western horizon, and the Left Eye, red and sullen and false, circling back off its path, straying away from its forward course, signaling error and pain and destruction to the earth below. The People slept, safe inside the spiraling lines of the ritual, safe inside their houses.

  Winter came. Nothing grew any more. The women sat in the longhouses when the weather was foul and made baskets and wove cloth and listened to Karelia’s stories.

  Moloquin went into the forest every day, to gather firewood; he even went when the weather was evil, when the snow flew, when the icy fogs hung from the trees, because he could not bear the heat and the noise of the longhouse. He had always lived in the forest during the winter. Now it was different; when he was hungry and could find nothing else, he could go down the slope to his mother, and she fed him. If he were lonely, too, he could go to her. And there was another, now, who made him less lonely.

  The boy Grub, younger than Moloquin, slight and unc
ertain and wretched, trailed after him wherever he went, around the village and now into the woods. Now when the boys’ band teased Moloquin, they jeered at Grub also. Moloquin sometimes wished Grub would go away, but there was no place for him. His mother refused him and the boys’ band made him miserable. So Grub followed Moloquin everywhere, and whenever Moloquin found something in the forest to eat, he fed Grub, too.

  Grub was afraid of everything in the forest; he saw demons in every tree, felt eyes watching him, screamed at every bird call. With his fingers he made signs against evil spirits. He would eat nothing without washing it first; he drank only from rushing streams. When he saw Moloquin doing none of this, he called him indignant names and with a solemn face threatened to tell Ladon’s son.

  When he saw that Moloquin still did no ritual, and went around the forest as boldly as any beast, he himself did less. But he would not go ahead of Moloquin, not a single step; he always followed after him.

  Moloquin had gathered up most of the good wood near the village, and every day he had to go deeper and deeper into the forest to find more. When he found a dead tree or a windfall, he stayed there until he had the wood all broken up, and then for a few days he and Grub travelled back and forth carrying the wood. Moloquin carried most of it, but he made Grub bring some, every time, although the little boy whined and complained.

  With Grub walking on his heels, he went deep into the forest, following a faint deer trail down through stands of sycamore and maple. The ground was crusted with old snow, crystalline with age, and drilled through from the constant dripping off the branches overhead. At the foot of a slope darkened with pine trees they came out onto a meadow, waist-high in dead grass; once a grove of maples had stood here, but now all the trees were dead, standing white and naked in the stark winter sunlight.

  This was strange enough to stop Moloquin in his tracks, and Grub pressed against him, saying, “Let’s go back.”