Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  Placidly, their tails switching, now and then stopping to eat a mouthful of grass, they watched the stags battle, and unlike the stags, they paid heed to the rest of the world also. Long before Moloquin wanted them to, the first doe spied the men in their cautious approach.

  Moloquin hissed between his teeth and stood still; he was careful not to look straight at the deer, but stared away into the forest. He could hear Brant breathing, just behind him, and one of the other men moved, crunching a twig underfoot, but the whole band kept as still as they could. One after another, the does raised their heads and looked toward the men. There was a long moment when the stags paused in their clashing.

  The little boy coughed. Instantly the does fled away into the trees.

  “Now,” Moloquin screamed, and he ran after them, bounding over the clumps of sumac and the brambles; as he ran, he shouted and waved his arms, driving the does on ahead of him. The stags struggled apart and bellowed, and one stood its ground a moment while the other charged away; after an instant’s wild-eyed look, the second stag raced away also.

  They all turned to go uphill, as Moloquin had known they would. He raced to cut them off, shouting his lungs raw, his men following in a noisy stream. Two of the does burst by them, their tails high, but most of the herd wheeled around and plunged back toward the ford, and there the dense underbrush and the close-packed trees stopped them.

  Screaming, the men raced up almost on the heels of the panicking herd. Bohodon stopped, set himself, and hurled his spear; the little boy Laughter threw his stones. The deer wheeled and fled in all directions, crashing through the brush, the horns of the stags striking the trees. Then abruptly they were gone, the only remainder of them the fading sound of their flight through the forest, a rustle of brush, a crack of wood.

  Baffled, the men milled around at the ford; they had killed nothing, nor even wounded one enough to be able to track it down. Moloquin waded into the stream up to his thighs and bent and splashed cold water onto his face and arms. Bohodon picked up his spear and examined the tip, as if he would find blood on it. He and the other men stared at Moloquin, frowning, wondering, Moloquin thought, if he were truly a chief after all. In silence, in a single file, he led them home again.

  A few days later he tried again. He had seen Brant make the rope, stretching it between trees, and that had given him an idea; he took all Brant’s rope, and he and the men spent much of a day running the rope from tree to tree along the ford, until the whole narrow space along the streambank was netted with rope. Then he spread out his band of men along the ford, each man hiding in the brush, and they waited.

  All through the afternoon and into the evening they waited, but the deer did not come.

  They came back the next day also and waited, hiding, keeping silent in the brush, their weapons by their hands, waiting, waiting. At last in the late evening, with the air heavy and grey and smoky with mist, the deer came to the ford. An old doe led them. Head down, feet light, she brought the herd slowly toward the water, and as she reached the water, Moloquin shouted and the men sprang up.

  The deer wheeled around, their white tails flashing in the dusk, and bolted up the stream, into the nets of rope. The trees echoed with the shouts of the men. The deer hurtled through the brush ahead of them, bounding over fallen trees; when they hit the nets of rope, they floundered backwards, kicking and thrashing, and the men dashed in among them. Moloquin, in their midst, could see nothing but the blurred wild lashing of the trees and the close bodies of deer heaving around him. He struck with his axe and hit nothing. A deer bolted past him so close her shoulder struck him, her hoof grazed his thigh. He went down on his back in the water; when he rose, the wild racket was fading, and in the brush around him, none leapt and yelled and beat at the branches save his own men. The deer were gone.

  Heavily he got to his feet. His thigh was bleeding where the deer had kicked him. His men stood around him with accusing faces in the twilight. His head bowed down, he went away toward the hut, hoping that they would follow him.

  In the morning they went back to retrieve Brant’s rope. None of the men spoke much to Moloquin, who was brooding on his failure. While they were coiling up the rope, Laughter found two sticks like the horns of deer, and holding them to his head, he made a playful run at old Brant.

  The old man whooped. He caught up a stick from the ground and pretended to strike at the boy with his horns, and laughing they dashed up and down the meadow, the boy snorting and pawing the ground and waving his horns and the old man feigning the blows of a hunter.

  Moloquin coiled the rope, pretending not to notice this, but the other men joined in. They took sticks from the ground and threw them at Laughter with his horns, and when the boy was hit, and cried, Hems took his stick-horns and put them on his head, and pretended to be the deer.

  All the morning long, they did this. In the end, none played so hard as Bohodon, who cast his spear time after time at the deer, and never seemed to tire of it. When Hems left off at last, and lay down in the sun, Bohodon went off with his spear and threw it at trees and stones.

  They carried the rope home again. Moloquin walked with his head down. They needed meat for the winter, meat to be dried and smoked; he had hoped to take several of the deer, but now he saw that some spirit protected the deer and would not suffer their deaths.

  He thought of making some effort to speak to this spirit, but he knew no ritual for it. He went to Brant, and said, “Is there a dance for hunting the deer?”

  Brant was sitting by the fire in the hut, young Laughter on his knee, picking through the child’s hair. “There is a dance for the hunting of the red deer. I do not know what magic you might need for the fallow deer, like these.”

  Moloquin lowered his gaze to the fire. He felt his ignorance as a great void around him, into which all the People might fall, doomed by his failures. Outside, far off, a howl rose from the belly of the night, climbing higher and higher to a long lonely wail. The wolves also hunted. The wolves did better than he did. The wolves would survive. He put his head down on his knees, staring into the fire.

  Bohodon cooked the tip of his spear in the fire, to make it harder, and went out into the forest and threw the spear at everything he saw that moved. He hit nothing, killed nothing. Then Moloquin came with his wild voice and furious looks and drove him away to find firewood.

  As he searched for wood—he had to go farther and farther from the new village, the area immediately around it being cleared now of good wood—he searched for other things, for pieces of flint and for dropped antlers, to make a better spear.

  In the evenings, when the rest of them sat like women with the women and wove mats of reeds for the walls of the roundhouse, Bohodon sat by the fire and smashed rocks together. Slowly he was recovering something of the craft that the masters of his society had tried to teach him. He had never been able to memorize even one of the many chants necessary to work magic into the stone, but he got the knack of striking the flint at exactly the right angle to knock chips off the edge, and finally he managed to make a stone tip for his spear.

  He lashed it on with cords cut from a deerhide, but the first time he cast it into the woods at a rabbit, the tip fell off and he lost it.

  So he began over again, making a new tip, although now the rains of autumn lashed the People, and it was cold and there was no game in the forest to hunt anyway. He made another spearhead, and this time he notched the end of his stick and stuck the butt end of the point down into it, bound it with strips of rawhide and soaked it good and long in the stream. When the hide dried out it shrank down around the tip so tight the hardest blow would not move it. He took the spear out to the woods and cast it at trees and shadows and the sky, and the spearpoint stayed fastened, and the spear itself felt good in his hand, light and strong and balanced, like part of his arm.

  Moloquin came to him and said, “Put that down and come help us.” />
  Bohodon faced him, his spear in his hands, and said, “No.”

  Moloquin smiled at him, not a pleasant smile, not the way he smiled at the women, and said, “Put that down and come help us.”

  “No,” said Bohodon again, and raised his spear.

  Moloquin raised his axe and struck, and the spear fell in two pieces. Moloquin smiled still. “Come help us,” he said, in the same voice, and when Bohodon bent, aghast, for the pieces of his spear, Moloquin’s foot was on them.

  Hanging his head, he trudged away to join the others. His heart was cankered like a rotten walnut. He went back later to find his spear point but it was gone.

  While the rain streamed down over them, and they struggled to raise the last crossbeam to the top of the roundhouse, he told himself that he would kill Moloquin for this.

  This beam, being the last, was the hardest to put into place. The rain made everything slippery. Wahela’s children sat near the great post North Star and cried, and some of the women cried, too, from effort and exhaustion and despair. They struggled the massive split trunk higher and higher on its cradle of logs, and halfway up the log structure broke and the crossbeam tumbled down.

  Screaming, the People scattered away from it. In its fall the trunk like a live thing thrashed this way and that, bumping off other logs and teetering sideways and crashing at last to the ground. They crept in closer to look at it, the rain pouring down their faces.

  Moloquin said, “Come, we must try it again.”

  The women wailed; Bohodon and the other men backed off, shaking their heads. Moloquin looked from one to the next, calm, his hair plastered to his head and his beard to his chest. His axe was in his belt but he did not draw it out to threaten them. Instead he spread out his arms and gathered them in together, close together where the warmth of their bodies surrounded them, and with his head down among their heads he told them a story.

  He told them about Abadon, how he drank from a magic spring and was turned into an oak tree. He could neither move nor cry out, but the tree swayed and trembled with his suffering, and all its leaves shed like tears from the branches. Abadon could do nothing but endure this, until at last, in the spring, when the leaves grew again and the birds came and the sun warmed everything, Rael, the Birdwoman, heard the groans and sighs of the oak tree, and she cut down the tree and freed Abadon.

  As they listened, they took heart, and they went back to the work again. They built another cradle of logs and lifted up the beam, and with ropes they pulled and tugged, and with poles they pushed and shoved, and at last the beam rolled onto its place.

  One end of it would not fit down into the space, but lay up on the beam next to it. Moloquin climbed up on top of the structure and stood there, balanced on the back of the beam in the rain, and with his axe he hewed at the beam until it fit down into its place.

  In haste they bound the mats to the walls and laid sticks from the outside to the top of the center post and stretched mats over that. They cut dry grass and branches and piled them onto the roof, criss-crossing the layers back and forth to make it strong against the snow and the rain. The rain soaked them; Brant fell sick and sat on the ground coughing and hanging his head, but no one had time for him. They were all working to make the roundhouse snug and dry and they paid no heed to Brant. Taella his wife brought him a few mats to lie on and a blanket to cover him, and she sat with him for a while, but the others called to her to help them and she left him to work with the others. They piled up leaves and grass against the outside of the roundhouse until the wall was thick as a man was tall; they cut branches to weave through the holes in the mats. When that was done, they hurried to the hut down by the stream, and began to move all their belongings into the new roundhouse, and at last, on the first day when the rain stopped, they went into the roundhouse and the women laid out their hearths, and the men poked smoke holes in the roof and made mats to cover them when the storms blew.

  Taella went back to her husband and said, “Come inside, we shall make a fire and get you warm.”

  Brant lay on his back, his arms over his face, and coughed. Taella ran to find Moloquin.

  When Moloquin came over to him, Shateel had joined Taella, and the two women had covered him with mats and hides until he looked like a little hill, but when Moloquin put his hand to the old man’s face his skin was cold as a stone.

  “Do not take me into the roundhouse,” he said. “You will only have to break down the wall again, to get me out,” and Moloquin understood what he meant.

  Taella said, “We can make him a potion, he will get well.” Her face was furrowed with worry; her gaze darted from Brant to Moloquin and back to Brant. She laid one hand to her husband’s face. “When you are warm you will feel better.”

  Brant said, “I will never be warm.” He looked at Moloquin beside him and said, “Tell me a story.”

  “What story?”

  “Tell me—” Brant ran out of breath. There was blood on his lips.

  Shateel came over to the two men, and she sank down on her knees. “Is he going to be well?” she asked, in a low voice.

  Moloquin said nothing to her. He watched the old man’s face, thinking that if Brant had stayed with Ladon’s People, the old Green Bough master might not now be dying.

  He thought of telling the story about Abadon’s imprisonment in the oak tree, but instead a tale long unspoken rose to his lips.

  “Once there was a child who loved the Sun more than a man loves a woman, or a woman loves her baby, or a chief loves his People. And the Child longed to go to her. Therefore one day he found a beam of sunlight and he began to climb.

  “The sunbeam rose up through the branches of a tree. As the Child climbed, the tree said: ‘Go back! Go back, little one, before you fall.’

  “But the Child said, ‘I shall not fall. My mother the Sun shall bear me on her light and I shall not fall.’ He climbed higher, but that same day a man with an axe came and chopped down the tree, and the tree fell.

  “And the Child climbed higher. And he came on a bird, floating in the air, and the bird said, ‘Go back, little one, before you fall.’

  “But the Child said, ‘I shall not fall. The Sun my mother shall bear me up on her light and I shall not fall.’ And he climbed higher.

  “But that same day a man came by with a sling, and cast a stone at the bird and struck it, and the bird fell to the earth and was dead as a stone.

  “The Child climbed higher still, and came to a cloud. The cloud said, ‘Go back, little one, before you fall.’

  “But the Child said, ‘I shall not fall. The Sun my mother shall bear me up on her light, and I shall not fall.’ And he climbed higher.

  “And that same day, the cloud passed too near the earth, and the earth reached up and caught it, and drew down all its rain, and the cloud fell to the earth as rain, and was no more.

  “And the Child climbed higher and higher. Now the Sun was going down, and she said, ‘Child, I go to my rest. But I shall put you in the sky so that you will not fall, but shall share the sky with me.’

  “And she took the Child up on her light, and she fixed him to the sky with a little bit of her light, and he shone there as a star forever more.”

  Moloquin fell still; he sat there a long while, his eyes unseeing. The two women waited, Shateel watching Moloquin, Taella stroking her husband’s face.

  After a certain time had passed, she said, “He is dead, Moloquin.”

  Moloquin turned his face toward her. For a long while he stared at her, unable to speak; beside him in a case of unliving flesh lay all the lore of the Pillar of the Sky, lost and gone forever more. At last he struggled back to the surface of time and he gathered the old man up in his arms.

  “I will be gone a while,” he said. “You must watch over the People.”

  Taella said, “I am going with you.”

  She foll
owed him away into the forest. Shateel followed them for several steps.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To the Pillar of the Sky,” said Moloquin, and he went off into the forest. Taella ran a few steps to catch up with him, and they disappeared among the trees.

  Shateel stood watching them leave and shivered all over. Turning, she looked down at the bed where Brant had died, the poor pile of mats and little hides, and she fell to weeping. She gathered up the squirrel hides and pressed her face to them and wept.

  Wahela came to her, her head twisted to watch where Moloquin had gone. “Where is he going? What is wrong with Brant?”

  “Brant is dead,” Shateel said. “While we were working, he fell sick, and no one cared for him, and now he is dead.”

  As she spoke, the horror of that overcame her; she felt that somehow they had abandoned Brant, that had they kept him in their attentions they might have drawn him along with them in the stream of life. Wahela took her hands, clutching the blankets.

  “Come, girl, he was an old man, and old men die. Young men also.”

  Shateel wept the harder, thinking of the story of the Child that climbed to the Sun, and as she did so, inside her body she felt the first movement of her baby.

  “Oh,” she said. She laid her hand on her body.

  Wahela laid her arm around her. “Come into the roundhouse. You will see how wonderful it is. We shall lay out your hearth.”

  Shateel allowed herself to be led along a few steps, then suddenly remembering what Moloquin had said to her, she stopped and raised her head.

  “He went to the Pillar of the Sky.”

  “What?”

  “He took Brant away to the Pillar of the Sky. He will be gone for days.”

  Wahela’s eyes widened; she turned her head to look the way Moloquin had gone, and her arm tightened around Shateel. “I shall take care of you.”