Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  She would not say what it was she wished, as if to say it would be a betrayal. Shateel hugged her arms around her, fighting against tears.

  Wahela had found her daughter; she dragged the child toward the other women, scolding her fiercely. The child wept all down her face. Impulsively Shateel knelt down to console her, and saw the chubby fists full of half-chewed green.

  “What is this?” She gripped the baby’s hand. “Taella, what has she been eating?” There leapt into her mind the fear that the little girl was poisoned.

  Taella leaned down. Looking up into the round faces bending over her, the little girl raised her hands and opened them.

  Shateel gasped. She looked up from Taella to Wahela and turned her gaze back to the child, whose hand now Wahela held, spreading the little fingers. There on the palm were the remains of an immature bean pod.

  “Where did you find this?” Taella asked. “Child, tell us.”

  Shateel took a scrap of the green pod and sniffed it. It smelled delicious, familiar, like home. Quickly she followed the other women, who followed the child, who ran across the meadow to the far side.

  Here the ancient streambank curved around to meet the water again. The bank was half-buried under what seemed at first to be merely dirt, overgrown with creepers and briars. A young tree grew up out of it, and around the bottom of the tree, wound around and around the trunk, was a great bean plant.

  Wahela shouted. Taella flung up her arms and clambered up the soft heap of rubble and embraced the tree itself. Shateel went nearer, smiling. Even from here she could see the pink and white flowers, the young pods hanging among the great heart-shaped leaves.

  How had they missed seeing it? Because they were afraid of the forest, afraid to go far from the hut. The child had found it, and they lifted her up and hugged her and kissed her until she began to cry.

  The strange woman Ap Min went near the plant and put out her hand to pick a pod from it, and Taella caught her hand. “No,” she said, and shook her head. She turned to the others. “Save it—for seed. We will let it mature.”

  She dropped on her knees then and began to tear away the thick layer of green vines and brambles over the ground, heedless that she scratched her hands on the sharp thorns. Shateel saw what she was doing and went to help, and Ap Min helped also. They dug away the screening vines from the top of the heap, down to the dirt, and there almost at once they found a piece of an old pot.

  Taella sat back on her heels, laughing, and Shateel dug with furious energy into the soft earth. She broke her nails on the dirt and went to find a piece of bark to dig with. When she came back, Taella was passing the piece of broken pottery to Wahela and saying, “This was her midden. She threw everything here. Look around, perhaps we will find something else that is useful.”

  Shateel was still digging away at the pile; the earth was full of half-rotted nutshells. Whoever had left this here had done it long ago. It was startling that the beanstalk still grew here.

  Taella said, “There has been a woman here, and she grew beans. She knew this place. She worked this land. Surely her spirit is here somewhere and will help us learn to do what we must to live here.”

  The women all drew together and hugged one another; it was as if, when they embraced, the unknown woman took form in their midst. A few moments later, digging, Shateel uncovered the butt end of a long stick; when she dug it out, Taella proclaimed that once it had been a rake handle.

  The midden heap produced no new treasures. It had done enough. The women took courage; they went into the forest to find the wood to make tools, and as they did so found more things to eat. They divided up the meadow into gardens, one for each of them, and began to break down the grass with their feet and peel the bark off the low shrubs springing up everywhere in the meadow. They felt this place was theirs; they knew they belonged here, and it no longer frightened them, even though they were hungry.

  Ap Min had never before been among women like this.

  All her life she had been a slave. From her first years she had done what Harus Kum told her to do, dodging his blows and kicks and curses, and later enduring his use of her sex; she had taken for granted that she was a low, worthless creature, that only men had any power. In all her life she had known just two other women—her mother, who had died when she was young, and the other female slave at Harus Kum’s stockade, both dull and exhausted from their brutal labors, stoop-shouldered and misused. It had never occurred to her that women walked upright, or laughed, or did as they pleased.

  Now here were women who walked with their heads high, with light springy steps, who laughed and got angry and sang and argued, women who of their own will had left their families to follow Moloquin.

  She knew she was one of them; had she not followed Moloquin too?

  Of course she could not understand their language. She was trying, she knew some words already, and Hems was teaching her more. She followed them from place to place in the meadow, doing whatever they did, watching their lips move as they spoke, watching their hands as they worked, watching the quick flow of their passions over their faces. The first time one of them turned to her and touched her, Ap Min wept.

  Mostly they ignored her. They could not speak to her either. They were busy with other things. The tallest, with her flashing dark eyes, was forever calling her children, scolding them or chasing them. Ap Min watched these children, amazed at their agility and their audacity. The little boy climbed trees and brought down a birds’ nest, full of little squawking fledglings—his mother cruelly killed them at once, cooked them on a little fire, and fed her children with them. Ap Min put her hand on her belly, where her own baby moved.

  She had not thought much of it. From the first moment she knew she was pregnant she had thought only that Harus Kum would make her drink the potion; it had not come much into her mind that she would bear a child, a little being, another life.

  She wished Moloquin would come back, or Hems, so that she had someone to talk to.

  She followed the fair-headed woman down to the stream, and washed her hands even as Shateel did. Shateel’s hands were filthy from digging in the dirt where they had found the beanstalk. Ap Min’s hands were clean, but she washed them anyway. The water was cold and clear; she could see down to the bottom, where the sand lay in ripples. She could see her face reflected in its surface. She sat leaning over the stream studying her face, lost in herself, for a long while, and did not notice that Shateel had gone.

  When she saw that, she did not go off at once to find the others. She sat on the bank, feeling the baby move within her; she struggled to understand what was happening to her, but she could not. She had always known before what would happen; each day was the same, really, and each act had its warnings and its results—she had always known when Harus Kum would want her body, she could tell it almost by his footstep when he was lusty.

  Now there were no reliable signs. What did it mean, that a leaf floated by her? What did it mean, that the wind blew? She looked across the stream, into the deep forest on the far side, swampy and dank, the trees coated with grey-green moss. A bird was singing somewhere, and another answered. Abruptly, from the water before her, something leapt into the air.

  She sprang up. Her whole body began to tremble; she imagined monsters, although the stream went smoothly on before her. Whirling, she ran back to the hut and crawled inside, into its warm dark shelter.

  Shateel walked along the stream, where in the shallows tall reeds grew; she thought she might be able to make baskets from them, and as she walked she gathered them by the armful. When she took them back to the hut, Moloquin was there, searching around the outside of the shelter.

  Seeing her, he wheeled toward her, his face fretted with bad temper. “Did you and the others clean out the hut?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  It made her uneasy to talk to him; she had trouble meeting his eyes.
She busied herself laying the reeds down in heaps on the ground by the door.

  “Did you find anything of use? There were tools here, when we lived here—we took nothing away, some may still be left. Are you listening to me?”

  “Yes.” She looked up, brushing back her hair with one hand. “No—we found nothing, not even a stone. Except—”

  “What?” He seized her wrist and held her.

  “We found a beanstalk. We found a midden heap, and there is a—”

  “Where?”

  She pointed to the far side of the meadow, and he strode off toward the midden. She sat down with the reeds and slit a few stems lengthwise with her thumbnail, to see how strong the fibers were.

  In a few moments he was back. “How well did you clean the place? Did you not find anything—not a pot or an old basket?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing. Maybe she had a storehouse.”

  He stared at her a moment, lifted his head and swept his gaze around the clearing. She watched him covertly as she sorted the reeds into two piles. Abruptly he plunged away through the door of the hut.

  She got up and went after him, curious. Inside the hut, the air was dank and dim, and she stood for a moment, just within the door, unable to make out much. Her eyes cleared a little, and she saw him prowling along the clay wall at the back, feeling over it with his hands.

  He yelled as he pulled at the wall with his hands, and a great piece of it came free and fell forward to the floor of the hut, breaking into chunks of mud and reed mat. Where it had lain up against the bank there was now a large opening. Moloquin reached into it and drew forth a stick, which he threw behind him, and an old antler.

  Shateel cried out and went forward to his side. “That is a pick. See—” she leaned forward to take the antler away from him. Brittle with age, the horn smelled of clay. A piece of wood still jutted from the butt end of it, the remnants of its handle.

  Next Moloquin pulled a pile of trash out of the opening—rotten reeds and other fibers that collapsed to rubble when he touched them. Shateel watched him sift through the moldy garbage, crumbling it all between his fingers.

  He gathered up a shapeless pile of debris, smelling of rot; a sliver of stone fell from it to the floor, and Shateel stooped for it. “An awl,” she said. “And look!” She dove into the opening and pulled out a beaked pot of fired clay.

  The stopper was still in place; the pot was half full of honey. As he tore into the mound of rubbish left in the opening in the wall, Shateel sniffed the pot and dipped her finger into the sweet stuff. It was strong enough to make her head whirl.

  “Nothing of any use,” Moloquin said. He got up, wiping his filthy hands on his thighs, and went out of the hut.

  Shateel stayed where she was, kneeling in the midst of the rubble of the storeroom. She put out her hand and lifted a little of it and let it trickle away into dust. What had this been here, a basket? And there surely was the last rotten fibers of some sort of cloth. A woman had lived here, a woman by herself had lived here, and had worked, raised her son, alone, free, a world in herself. Shateel longed to know more about her. She longed suddenly to be more like her. Here in this place her presence shimmered in the air like a white radiance. Impulsively she knelt down and pressed her lips to the place where the stranger had walked.

  Bohodon had gone straight off into the forest, intending to walk away from these fools and from Moloquin and never come back. They were no different than all the rest of the People; they wanted only to abuse him and force work out of him, caring nothing for his soul. He hated them all. Most of all he hated Moloquin.

  He tramped off through the trees, moving aimlessly away, kicking at the wood and the leaves that covered the ground. The land turned abruptly marshy and he dragged his feet out of the black muck and climbed higher, hurting himself on buried stones and sticks; at the top of the ridge, he stumbled out through a row of birch trees into a patch of sunny meadow, and at the far end of it saw three deer.

  They stood watching him, their heads turned over their shoulders; he froze where he was, his skin tingling with excitement, and thought to creep closer to them, but as soon as he moved his foot, they flung up their tails and bounded away.

  He followed after them, but saw no more sign of them. Now he wandered away through the trees, his mind turned inward to survey his troubles. His belly grumbled. He was thirsty but he could not find the stream. Abruptly he realized he was lost.

  At that, he panicked; he broke into a run back the way he had come and tripped and fell on his face. Lying on the ground he cast wild looks around him and saw nothing familiar. Slowly he got up, struggling with his fear which threatened to send him off again in a blind run. The trees around him leaned in closer, menacing and evil. He could hear something moving in the brush nearby. A rank smell reached his nostrils.

  He stumbled away through the woods, striving to keep mastery over himself. If he walked straight ahead, surely he would come to some landmark he recognized, and he forced himself to walk straight, but after only a few strides he began to feel the heavy presence of the trees again, the unseen eyes around him, and the terror in his mind overcame him and drove him in a wild dash down a slope and into a swamp. He was in muck to his knees before he could stop.

  He scrambled out of the swamp, stood on the edge, and put his face up to the sky. He made himself calm again, although his heart thundered. He made himself realize that nobody would care if he did not come back; no one would come looking for him. He had to save himself.

  He had no idea how to do that. Grimly he trudged forward, trying to keep a straight course, and as he went he looked keenly around him, noticing for the first time how the trees grew, how the land was shaped, which way the wind came from, where the sun was, and at last, after what seemed a whole day’s walk, he found a stream.

  Was it the stream that flowed by the camp of his People? He flung himself down on his belly and drank from it until his empty belly was taut. Then, as he sat up, he heard the rhythmic crack and stroke of an axe cutting wood.

  Relief washed over him, loosening every muscle; for an instant his quivering legs threatened to drop him to the ground. The sound of the axe came from downstream. He started that way, remembered he was supposed to be gathering wood, and picked up a few little twigs. At the next turning of the stream, he came into the upper end of the meadow, near the hut.

  The women were all gathered at the center of the meadow, sitting in a circle, pounding something in their midst. Bohodon filled his lungs to call out, but at that moment he saw Hems and Kayon approaching from the other direction, and he saw how Kayon held triumphantly aloft a pair of stupid skinny squirrels.

  They would make much of him for that. Bohodon drew back, his lips twisting in a grimace of distaste. He himself was bringing only a few sticks. He turned and went back into the forest, to gather a decent armload of wood.

  The stone axe was old and clumsy and it needed a new edge. Moloquin went back across the stream, to the grove of dead oak trees, and he took up the work there where his mother had left it, felling the dead trees in the great clearing, so that there would be room for the women’s gardens in the spring. Brant, the old Green Bough master, came to help him. It was Brant who first suggested to him that they build a roundhouse at the north end of the clearing, where the giant sycamore tree grew out of the bank.

  “The lore of the Pillar of the Sky,” he said, “that is building-lore.”

  He showed Moloquin how to choose the ground, how to lay out a circle on it, using a length of rope and a stake to mark the center, and he showed him how to use the rope also to find the perfect crossings of the circle’s diameter. The circle thus divided into fours, Brant showed him how with ropes to divide it into twice-fours.

  “This is big enough for now,” Brant said. “There are only the four of us.”

  “There are the women,” Moloquin said.

>   “The women,” Brant said, surprised. “But they will have their long- houses.”

  Moloquin leaned on the axe. “No. I mean them to live with us. I don’t want any of this separation between us and them.”

  Brant said, “The women have always lived in their longhouses. The men have always—”

  “Brant,” Moloquin said, “I mean to do this as I have told you. We shall all live together. We shall all be one People. The women shall live in the roundhouse with the rest of us.”

  The old man’s face twisted with doubt. He looked around him, as if the roundhouse already stood here, and shook his head.

  “The roundhouse is made for men. All the rituals and the lore belong to men. I cannot see how—”

  “I can see it,” Moloquin said, and would hear no more.

  So they made the circle larger, and marked the positions of each of the great posts that would form the wall and hold up the roof; Brant went out to watch the night sky and made sure that everything was lined up properly. As the summer slid on, Moloquin found the proper trees to use for the posts and felled them with his axe and trimmed them, while all around him the others worked frantically to pile away a store of food against the coming of winter.

  They had no grain, but the forest around them was bountiful with other things: nuts and roots, and game. Hems and his new follower Kayon fished and snared rabbits and squirrels. The women gathered acorns in the oak wood as Moloquin felled trees.

  He could hear their voices; they teased Ap Min often about her enormous belly, as the girl grew slowly apt in the speech of the People, and told her how awful it was to bear children. Through the dusty sunlight he caught glimpses of them among the far-standing trees of the oak wood. Often he paused and rested a little between strokes of the axe, and sent his gaze after one or another of the women to watch.

  They tormented him. He could not keep his mind from them, and his penis seemed constantly hard; he was ashamed that they might notice and tried to avoid them when he could, but always they were there, with their wonderful soft bodies, their smiles, their uninhibited laughter, their kindness to one another, their smells, their soft hair. He wanted to choose a wife from among them, but he could not decide which. He wanted them all, even Ap Min and old Taella, even Wahela’s still-stumbling baby girl. Leading them here, caring for them every day, being so close to them had filled him with a possessive affection for them. Little by little he was coming to the notion that they belonged to him and he ought to have them all.