Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  The red-yellow light flickered across the grass, leapt and flashed over the trees that leaned down around them. In the center of the little glade, a woman knelt, sobbing, her hair disheveled and dirty, shiny streaks of tears striping her face. The other women bent over her, crooning to her.

  “They took me!” The kneeling woman shrieked; she flung her arms out, pointing around her, pointing toward her attackers. “They used me for a wife! See—” She pulled up her clothes; before Moloquin turned his face away he saw, vivid in the torchlight, the white arches of her thighs, slimed and bloody. “They had me for a wife—”

  At the sight of her abused body, the other women gave up their voices in a screech that turned Moloquin cold. He backed away, aware suddenly of being a man in a place where men had done evil, of having that between his legs that they would find evil, of having evil lust in him against all women; suddenly his heart was pounding enough to sicken him. He sidled swiftly away into the brush that clogged the stream banks, while in the glade the women closed on the two men they had caught.

  Until now the men had been silent, but as the women laid their hands on them, their voices went up in a howl of terror. Moloquin cried out to hear it. His belly heaved. Turning, he clawed his way through the brush, desperate to get away. Behind him the hoarse cry of the men broke off abruptly, as if their throats were stopped. He struggled through the brush that held him fast, that kept him prisoner, within their reach. From the glade, there came only the grunts and triumphant roars of the women, the pounding of their feet on flesh, the crunch of bone. With the strength of terror, Moloquin broke free of the clinging underbrush and fled away.

  The two men who had attacked the woman in the glade were from Harus Kum’s camp. As soon as they knew this, the women of the People, with their headwomen leading them, went up to the place where the outlander had his camp, and they sat themselves down all around it, sat down so close no one could come in or out through the wall of their bodies, and they faced Harus Kum, and they sent for Ladon.

  The women were pitched high as flutes, wild and unmanaged; some sat weeping on the ground, with their sisters around them, and others sat in tight-gathered groups, talking earnestly one to the other, and others strode back and forth glaring toward Harus Kum and crying strange encouragements. Their babies caught their fever with their milk, or through their skins from the very air, so that the whole great swarm of women was overhung with mindless wails. In their midst sat the headwomen, packed tightly together, a cluster of grey heads.

  Going toward them with Karelia, Moloquin saw them massive as stones, their action slow and irrevocable, their passion slow and malevolent; he imagined himself crushed beneath them, ground to pieces in the mill of their rage.

  He kept close by Karelia. She picked a course through the stirring, noisy flock of the women, while Moloquin with her sitting mats and a jug of water clung hard to her heels. The headwomen had chosen a place directly below the gate into Harus Kum’s enclosure, on the flat ground, and had made a little fire, although in the high sun of the day the flames were invisible, a mere flickering of the air.

  At this fire, among the others, sat Joba, and when Karelia came into their midst, her words went first to Joba, and her voice was bitter.

  “So you have made your bed with Ladon, have you? You will soon regret marrying your daughter to his son, I promise you.”

  Joba lifted her head; in the tucks and creases and laps of her face her eyes gleamed, small and full of malice. She glared past Karelia at Moloquin.

  “What is he doing here? Send him away, Karelia—get rid of him!”

  Karelia turned her eyes toward Moloquin, and without a word between them, he put down his armload of sticks and mats and went away. He walked up over the side of the hill, toward Harus Kum’s enclosure; as he passed by, looking in, he saw the little huddled band of men there, ducked down behind the brush fence, each hand clutching an axe or a knife. He did not pause; he went on across the slope toward the open ground beyond, where he could see Grub sitting under a tree. Those men in there, clinging to their weapons, would not stand a moment against the women. He felt sorry for them, but he had to get away from here. There was Grub, waiting for him; for the first time, he saw himself and Grub as souls in common, united in their maleness. He went down over the shoulder of the hill, down to meet Grub, and escaped into the quiet of the wilderness.

  Harus Kum kept up a steady monotone of curses. Crouching in the shelter of the brush fence, the remaining three slaves pressed close against him, he listened to the women’s wild uproar and his skin turned cold. He had been mad to come here, mad to have anything to do with these savages.

  He cursed the women; he cursed Ladon, for being chief over such women and not keeping them properly controlled; he cursed the two slaves who had stolen away from the safety of their fort and never come back again. He could guess at what they had done. It seemed fair enough to him—if these women insisted on going about so openly, how could a man be blamed for wanting them? But he himself would never want such women, fat, ugly, furious women, and as he thought that, from the mass of angry women that surrounded him a yell began, and grew louder and more undulating as he listened, until his hair stood on end.

  He lifted his head cautiously until he could see over the brush fence, and a gusty sigh escaped him. “Ah! At last.” He stood up, stooping a little, in case these madwomen should still attack, but down there, at the edge of the swarm, was Ladon’s litter, swaying on the shoulders of many men, and a great crowd of other men paraded after it, in lines that reached away into the Gathering. Harus Kum watched the litter borne in through the midst of the women, going toward a spot at the foot of the slope directly below where Harus Kum now stood peering out, and he straightened, relaxing, seeing a way to escape from this with his life.

  Ladon was exhausted. He had danced all night at the High Hill, and then, lying on the ground this morning, his mask by his side, the women’s message had come to him, and at first he had thought, Let them do it. He knew what they would do, if he did nothing. He had no such love for Harus Kum that he leapt up at once to go save him. It irked him, also, that the women should expect him to come running to do their will.

  But as he lay there on the grass of the High Hill, his mask beside him, a witness, he considered that letting the women do as they would gave them some greatness, and that they took this greatness away from him. He roused himself, groaning, and called for his litter, and called all the men up from their fatigue and their emptiness after the great ritual, and slowly they went back to the west, back to the Gathering.

  From a lifetime of dealing with them he knew what to expect, and so he was unsurprised when, coming among the headwomen, he was at once set upon and reviled and shouted at as if he had done the evil, not some strangers. He lay back in his litter, listening to all this, and waved to his men to set down the poles and stand back.

  Joba and Tishka pressed on him from both sides. “You brought these outlanders here! You are responsible for what has been done!”

  Ladon raised one hand, palm out. “I did nothing. I did not bring him—”

  “You encouraged it! You and your blue beads—”

  He collected himself. They were hysterical; the chief evidence of it was that they were speaking to him in the low tongue of women and children, not in the elevated language with which men and women were supposed to address one another, and now he raised himself up, squaring his shoulders, and gave them all such a lofty look of disapproval that they quieted.

  They stood around him, a pack of old women, shapeless masses within their woven clothes, their hands broken and knotted from working the earth. From their midst, now, Karelia stepped forward.

  She spoke in a mocking voice, sharp as a bird’s, using the most formal and elaborate phrases available to a mind overstocked with words.

  She said, “Opa-Ladon-on, mighty, mighty, mighty! Let Heaven look down upon
the great Son of the People! Let Heaven guide him ever in his judgment! Let someone guide him ever in his judgment, mighty one, mighty Ladon, whose judgment has been most false and most awful for the People! You let them stay here, Opa-Ladon-on, mighty is he, mighty above all men, you let them come here, and now they have seized one of us, they have tried to steal away her belly and plant their own seed therein, to make her a mere vessel for their continuance. Now what shall mighty, mighty, mighty Ladon do to redress this evil?”

  The other women growled, and someone murmured, “She speaks with the tongue of Heaven itself!”

  Ladon folded his arms over his chest and looked all around him, looking at each one of them; it helped him to confront them if he saw them each as a separate female and not as the great and terrifying crowd they could become. Finally he brought his gaze forward again, to Karelia, to Joba and Tishka who stood on either hand, and said, “Bring me the wicked ones.”

  At once all the women pointed up the hill toward Harus Kum. “There he is!”

  “Ah,” Ladon said, “and you say that Harus Kum the outlander seized a woman and—”

  Here he paused, and cleared his throat, because the high language had no words for the deed they claimed of Harus Kum and his men. He let the pause speak for him.

  “Yes, yes,” they said. “You brought them here, Opa-Ladon-on—”

  “And how do you know that Harus Kum did this evil, this monstrous wickedness?”

  “We saw it done,” Joba said, and as she spoke, she swelled up with anger, her eyes glinting.

  “And where are the men who did it?” Ladon asked.

  “Ah!” Tishka smiled at him, her teeth showing. “Nowhere between Heaven and earth, I tell you that much.”

  “Then you have slain Harus Kum yourself?”

  That bemused them. He smiled, knowing himself too clever for them, pleased with his cunning, until Karelia stepped forward and began to speak to him.

  “Ladon,” she said, and she used the low tongue, the speech of women to children or one another, which no one had used toward Ladon since he reached his manhood. “Ladon,” she said, “give us no more dances, no more games. Go up there and get him away, forever and ever, or we shall do it ourselves.”

  He felt his face grow hot and red. His fists clenched. Small, she was, frail as a little bird; he could crush her with a blow, and yet she dared to speak to him with such contempt, she dared give orders to him.

  Nor had he any choice save to obey. If he refused, they would do as she threatened; they would remove Harus Kum themselves, finally and horribly.

  He turned to his litter. With a last, long, cold look at Karelia, he sat down in the litter and called to his bearers, and they took him up on their shoulders, and went up the hill toward Harus Kum.

  The trader sat on his heels, his back to the fence, his eyes hollow, his mouth set. He said, “I swear to you, Opa-Ladon, I swear on my balls.” He put his hand down between his legs. “I did nothing.”

  Ladon swept his gaze around the enclosure. Certainly there were fewer men here than before. He relaxed; he slouched in his litter, fatigue heavy in his muscles, and stared at Harus Kum; he had just begun to realize that there was meat in this for him.

  He said, “Where then are your other men, Harus Kum?”

  “I don’t know. They must have crept away—they have not come back. Maybe—maybe they ran away.”

  Ladon shook his head slowly from side to side, his eyes fixed on Harus Kum. “The women have dealt with them.”

  “Ah? Are they alive?”

  “As they will deal with you,” Ladon said, “if I do not save you from it.”

  “They are dead,” Harus Kum said. He beat his fists on his knees. A swarm of words in his own tongue flew from his lips. He tramped around the little space, his hands thrashing the air. Ladon watched, patient, reclining in his litter as if on a bed.

  Through the corner of his eye, he saw one of Harus Kum’s men lick his lips; he guessed they were thirsty, with the women between them and water. He raised one hand, saying, “Fetch water for these sufferers,” and behind him there was a bustle of several feet as his men fought to do his bidding.

  He smiled at Harus Kum. He said, “So. We haggled before over peas and beans, Harus Kum, now will we haggle over blood and bones as well?”

  The trader heaved up a sigh, the air slipping between his clenched teeth; his eyes shone. He nodded his head. “I shall give to mighty Ladon what is Ladon’s due.”

  He went to the little round hut in the middle of the enclosure, and disappeared into it. Ladon’s man came back with a tall two-mouthed jug of water. At a nod from Ladon, he gave the jug to the nearest of Harus Kum’s men, who seized it with trembling hands and spilled half of it in drinking; the other men crowded around, their cupped palms catching a few drops of the overflow. Harus Kum came back.

  He saw the men drinking and his steps hesitated an instant, but with a shrug he put aside such minor things as thirst and came to Ladon, and before Ladon he knelt down. In his hands he held a bundle of cloth. He spread this open on the dirt, and laid out on the cloth some objects.

  While he arranged them his body shadowed them from the sun, but then he sat back, and the sunlight struck them. Behind Ladon, someone gasped, Ladon himself sat up straight, his gaze fastened to the blazing beauty before him.

  “Aaaaah.”

  He stretched his hand forth and touched the nearest of the ornaments, a heavy curved band. It shone so in the sun he expected it to be warm, but the stuff was cold, hard and cold as stone.

  “What is this?”

  Harus Kum said, “Such jewels as great men use to decorate themselves.” His voice was too casual. He took up the curved band, and slipped it onto his wrist. From the cloth he took another such, for the other wrist, and a long rope of oblong disks, linked together, he fastened around his neck, and the men cried out to see him dressed in flashing, gleaming shapes, like pieces of the sun.

  Ladon rejoiced; he said, “Yet that is not enough, Harus Kum.”

  The trader stared at him, tight-jawed. One by one, he took off the pieces he wore and laid them down again on the cloth. He said, “There is more.”

  “Here?” Ladon asked, swiftly.

  “No, no.” Harus Kum worked his stiff lips into a smile. “Where I can put hands to them. But I must have other things in return.”

  “I offer you your life, Harus Kum.”

  “I need food. What I said to you the other day, that I need. Now I need men, also—two men, to help me get it all back to my home.” The trader squatted down behind the wonderful ornaments. “Give me what I ask, and I shall give you such that you will not think yourself diminished by the bargain.”

  Ladon set his teeth together, his eyes on the little pieces of shining stuff. What was it? No stone he had ever seen could be shaped like that, or polished to such a shine. Surely some wonderful magic took this supple and amazing form. He told himself he had known all along that Harus Kum had some hidden power; had it been calling him, Ladon, its true master?

  Even now it called him, the rest of the treasure, from within the little brush hut. He knew, as certainly as he knew his own thoughts, that the rest of Harus Kum’s hoard was right there, within easy reach, and if he let the women have these outlanders, then he, Ladon, could take it all.

  He balanced that against the fact that if he let the women do violence to these men, the women would have much more than a treasure, the women would have awakened another power against which the shining pretties before him would be of no use at all.

  And he could have them. Harus Kum was offering him all of it, in return for that which Ladon could very readily supply. The women wanted these men gone; Ladon would send them away. Harus Kum wanted food; Ladon would send him away to Ladon’s own village, and there they could find plenty of food.

  Harus Kum wanted men, and t
here were two young men Ladon wanted himself rid of.

  This all fit together, like the egg inside its shell, so perfectly that Ladon lost himself a moment in contemplation of it. Harus Kum, waiting, turned at last to the jug of water, and holding it high drained the last few drops onto his tongue. Ladon raised one hand; from behind him a man sprang forward to take the jug and hurry away to fill it up again.

  Ladon said, “The favor of Heaven, that makes all things possible, has fallen on both of us today, Harus Kum.”

  The trader blinked at him, perhaps not understanding; deep lines engraved his face, and he looked tired. Ladon smiled at him.

  “Make ready to leave this place at once. I shall go find you a suitable guide, and prepare your way among the women.”

  Harus Kum’s eyes shut. He bowed his head down, one hand on his breast. “Mighty is Ladon, mighty.” His voice quivered with weariness and relief. Ladon summoned his bearers with a nod and was swiftly carried away.

  Joba said, “You must stand still, Shateel, and let me put your hair up, or you shall never be married.”

  The girl made a face at her. Joba held the long rope of her daughter’s hair in her hands, putting it up with pins of bone and wood; around them the other women worked to weave flowers together into a garland for the young bride. Shateel would not be still. Ever her feet moved; ever her head turned, looking away, looking toward Ladon’s camp. Joba struck her lightly with the flat of her hand.

  “Now be still, or—”

  “How dare you!” Shateel cried, her face dark, and returned the slap with a slap of her own, aimed fair at her mother’s cheek.

  Joba gasped; all the other women froze, staring. Joba straightened slowly to her feet. The girl stood there, ruddy-cheeked now, her great eyes swimming with bad temper. Her mother’s eyes met hers for a long moment.

  After a while, Shateel gave way; she looked down. Slowly, Joba went back to her labors, but now her hands shook. She thought, She has already left me.