Moloquin watched them a moment longer, pleased. He saw their ardor and their success at the Pillar of the Sky as signs that what he did was right. Brant had died, but everything Brant had known was kept somehow at the Pillar of the Sky, and so in a way Brant had not died at all. Like the green plant in the springtime that was reborn, he was reborn at the Pillar of the Sky.
For another reason he was relieved that Fergolin and Barakal would not be at the Gathering. He knew Fergolin’s mind; Fergolin would not like what Moloquin intended to do among the People. And he wanted Barakal kept free of it. Everything was going very well now. He turned to Bahedyr again, and putting out his hand he asked for another sip of the beer.
In the morning, the four of them went out again to the Pillar of the Sky, to the gigantic work they were unequal to.
The sun was rising. The great gateways stood there on the grass, reaching toward Heaven. Moloquin walked among them, leaned against them, pressed his hands to them; he thought again and again of Karelia, and of the story of the Broken Mill.
Someone walked up over the embankment and came down into the sacred precinct.
Fergolin called out, and the newcomer swerved toward the North Watcher. It was a man of the New Village, a son of Grela’s, whose boy’s name had been Sickle; now he was a tall dish-faced man, whom Moloquin had hardly noticed before. He went to Fergolin and said, “I will help you, Opa-on.”
Moloquin overheard him; he went up beside the youth, while Fergolin smiled at the son of his wife.
“You will! Well, there is little we can do in such numbers.”
Moloquin said, “Why did you change your mind?”
The young man turned, his head bowed. “I had a dream,” he said. “I will help.” As if to prove it, he went to the Watcher, which lay on the ground with the ropes veiling it and the levers stuck under its head, and he heaved by himself at the stone.
Fergolin said, under his breath, “My People are a great People. Let Heaven see this!” His eyes were shining.
Moloquin stood silent. One more would do no good, but if one had changed his mind, others might also. He turned to Fergolin.
“Go down to the New Village and see—”
“Wait,” Fergolin said, and put his hand on Moloquin’s arm.
He was looking away, over Moloquin’s shoulder, and Moloquin turned to see what he saw.
There were more coming. One by one, two by two, they were coming up from the direction of the New Village. They hung their heads as they entered the holy place. They muttered their greetings to their chief; they would not raise their heads to look at the gateways. Their fear hung on them like a snake’s half-shed skin. Yet they came.
That day and the next, with all the men there to help, they set the North Watcher in its place. The day after that, Moloquin took them all down to the New Village, to make ready for the Gathering.
Wahela was delighted with the prospect of the Gathering. She gave no thought to Moloquin’s decision, except to congratulate herself on talking him into it.
She made ready her dress of red and blue and yellow, made of cloth Moloquin had gotten from the traders in the west, with its long fluttering sleeves and its skirt that swept the grass as she walked. She made ready her hair combs of wood and shell. She made ready her long strands of blue beads to wear to the Gathering.
On the day before they were to leave, Moloquin came, and he called all the People together at the roundhouse. Then he went into the roundhouse, and he came out with a box made of a section of a cedar log, hollowed out, covered with a lid of bark.
He took the lid off and he turned the box over on top of a hide, and out of the box fell a shower of such brightness and beauty that all the People gasped.
There were anklets and bracelets, necklaces and pins, made of fine worked copper and bronze and decorated with pieces of shell and blue beads. There were belts of links of copper; there were strands and strands of beads; there was a great collar of beads and copper. With this treasure at his feet, Moloquin went among his People, and he put ornaments on all of them.
He gave the women pins—he gave to old Grela a necklace—and he put beads around the necks of the children, and he gave the boys of the boys’ band necklaces of copper. He brought the men before him, one by one, and he covered them with anklets and bracelets and belts. Then he himself put on the collar of beads and copper, and he took his bronze axe in his hand.
He stood before his People, and they all gazed on him, with the sun shining over him, and they felt the weight of the treasure on them, and they rejoiced.
“Opa-Moloquin-on,” they cried, “who has made us great!”
He let them sing and rejoice, he let them praise him, and when they were still again, he raised his hands.
He said, “We go now to the Gathering, where there are many who have despised us. Now we shall show them that they have been wrong, blind, and foolish. We shall go among them, and they shall fall down on their faces before us, and if they do not—”
He bit off his words, and his gaze passed slowly from one to the next of the People, and although he spoke no more, each one heard what he intended. They put their hands to their new beauty, and stroked it, and the magic of the ornaments flowed into the People. They felt themselves strong; they knew themselves invulnerable. Strutting with their knowledge, filled up to brimming with their power, they went away to the Gathering, and Moloquin walked at their head, his axe in his belt.
The people of the northern villages kept herds of oxen, and they used the hides for their clothes, and the horns of the oxen were a special emblem for them, which was why the chiefs of their villages all wore masks with horns. They made music with the horns sometimes also, and when they reached the Gathering, the blasting of the horns could be heard all over the plain, all over the Turnings-of-the-Year.
Shateel heard them, and came out to watch them. Dehra came with her. They went down from their village and across the circles of stones, and stood on top of the embankment and looked across the Gathering and saw the People of Mithom and Barlok and the twin brothers Eilik and Muon entering the Gathering in a great array, with the blasting of horns.
Dehra covered her ears with her hands. A scrawny, sharp-eyed girl, she had already gotten a name for being too quick to speak.
She said, “The noise hurts my ears, Ana-el.”
Shateel laughed. “It is their way, to make a great noise and raise the dust and do nothing.”
In long parades the men of the largest northern village entered the Gathering. They wore their masks and their horns, and carried drums and staffs. They danced as they came into the Gathering. All around, the people who were already there—the People of Shateel’s Village—stood and watched, and some clapped their hands in rhythm, and some called out to the newcomers.
Shateel said, “Come, we shall go make ready to bring our hearth here.” She turned to go.
“Ana-el,” Dehra said. “Look!”
Shateel cast another glance into the broad scene before her: the fires, the scattered People, the twining ropes of dancers. “Come,” she said, “I shall need your help.”
“No, no, Ana-el, look! Look there!”
Shateel turned again, impatient, and saw only the Gathering as it had been before, although now the dancers had come to the place where they would make a camp, and were settling in little circles around it. She opened her mouth to speak to Dehra again, and a flash of the sun caught her eye.
She looked at the far edge of the Gathering, and her voice stuck in her throat.
Dehra said, “Ana-el, look!”
All around the Gathering, others had seen what Dehra had seen; others were turning, and as they turned and saw, they hushed, they stilled, they stood as they were and watched. Now down from the horizon came rows of a People, walking together in ranks.
The sun shone on them as if on her most favored children
. The sun struck them from such beams of light that it hurt to look on them. They chimed as they walked. There were many of them, rank on rank, that came up over the top of the slope and walked down toward the Gathering, all gleaming and glowing with the fire of the sun, and at their head walked one on whom the sun shone brightest of all.
Now from the Gathering there went up a single cry, a shout of amazement and awe, and the cry took the sound of power and of magic. They shouted, “Moloquin!”
“Ana-el,” said Dehra. “It is Moloquin. He has come to the Gathering! His People have come to the Gathering!”
“Yes,” said Shateel, and she was amazed.
She knew what had happened at the Pillar of the Sky; when the men of her village came back, the word of Ruak’s death had passed through the whole place like a cold wind. She had known then that Moloquin would meet this challenge too, as he had all the others. This she had not foreseen.
She touched Dehra’s arm. “Go to the village, make our hearth ready.”
“Ana-el!”
“Do as I say,” said Shateel.
Sickle had walked to the Gathering with his mother, Grela, carrying her camp goods for her. She was annoyed with him; she wanted the long walk to harangue him, because although he was well grown, of an age to marry, he had not yet entered a society. All the way up to the Turnings-of-the-Year, she told him of the necessity of becoming at least a novice, preferably a Bear Skull novice, so that he would have a high place among the men.
He said, “Moloquin is not a master.”
“Moloquin is the Green Bough master. Join the Green Bough Society, then.”
“What Green Bough Society? There is none, they do no dances, they have no place in the roundhouse—”
She said, furious, “Then join another!”
“Why?”
“You must have a place among the men!” She struck at him. “I am the headwoman of my kindred, and I will not have the other women laughing at me behind my back because my son is a wastrel.”
“I am not a wastrel. I have been helping raise the stones at the Pillar of the Sky. That is my society.”
“That is something else,” she said, and would hear no more of his notion that because he had the Pillar of the Sky, and Moloquin for his master, he did not need a society.
Yet he had said it to her, and in saying it, he gave words to something he had felt for a long while. As they entered the Gathering, all shining with their copper, and he among the others strutted and showed off his excellence, he said that over and over in his mind: I am of the Green Bough, and Moloquin is my master.
With one or two of his friends, he paraded up through the Gathering, waving his arms to display the copper bracelets he wore. Walking in among the scattered fires of the People, he drew the long envious looks of many of those he passed. Other young men joined him. It felt good to be among so many others, to be one of those who wore copper, and the young men joined arms and swaggered along through the Gathering. As they came up toward the western flank of the embankment around the Turnings-of-the-Year, they encountered some youths of one of the northern villages, sitting in a circle with their masks.
“Ho, ho,” Sickle shouted. “See the cattle-boys playing with their wooden faces!”
He made a face of his own at them. The boy on his left dug an elbow into his ribs and hissed into his ear.
“Don’t say things like that! You’ll offend his ancestors, who may be yours too, you know.”
Sickle grunted. He puffed his chest out. “I wear the emblems of my people—Moloquin’s People! Let lowlings make their emblems of wood—” he waggled his arm, shining with its copper bracelet.
The young men from the north hooted and jeered, and the two groups faced one another, shouting insults. Off in the direction of the Gathering some girls were passing, and stopped to watch. Sickle jumped forward, where they could see him, and paced up and down, waving his arms with the copper bracelets so that they caught the light.
“Cattle-boys! Horned ones! Make your fires out of dung!”
“Go haul stone,” one of the northern boys cried, and his friends joined in, a sudden clamor of whining voices. “You don’t even have a mask! What society are you in, anyway?”
“The Green Bough,” Sickle cried, and swelled with pride. “Moloquin is my master!”
“Moloquin is a fool,” one of the other boys cried, and Sickle stooped down, picked up a stone, and threw it.
At once all the others were throwing stones. The girls screamed and cheered, urging them on, while moving back so that no stones would strike them. Sickle scurried up the embankment, scrabbling in the grass for things to throw. Straightening on the height, his hands full of stones, he looked around and saw a swarm of women, coming purposefully toward the fighting below him. Whirling, he ran away, down the bank, across the ditch, and off through the Turnings-of-the-Year.
Hems had made a new point for Bahedyr’s spear at the forge at the Forest Village, a point of shining bronze. It was softer than a stone point, and would not take an edge, but Hems had worked it into a splendid three-forked shape, and it shone.
Bahedyr carried it with him as he walked through the Gathering, and everyone turned to see.
He wore also the anklets and bracelets that Moloquin had given him, over the years, rewards for the deeds Bahedyr had done in his chief’s behalf, and he wore a long coat of woven stuff, and as he walked, he drew all eyes.
Some admired him—the women, especially, he thought, admired him very much. Others, the men, the men of other villages who did not know his strength and ferocity, were envious, and they looked insults at him, and murmured to one another about him. He actually heard no insults; he saw them in the way a man looked at him, or even in the way a man did not look at him.
Moloquin said to him, “They do not know you. If they did, would they dare to treat you like an ordinary man? You should show them what you really are.”
Moloquin was at the Turnings-of-the-Year, where he had entered first of all the chiefs to an acclaim that shook the clouds. He had refused to sit on the platform with the other chiefs and instead had caused his People to make a separate place for him, a roof of cloth, supported on four slender poles, and held fast with cords staked to the ground at the corners. Then, because there Moloquin sat upon the ground, he would not let the other chiefs sit on the platform at all.
Instead, the other chiefs sat under the platform, and Moloquin sat under his roof of cloth that rose and fell on the wind like a piece of the sky, and all those who came there to ask favors and to give reverence went to Moloquin on their hands and knees.
This did not sit well with many of the People, especially the Peoples of the northern villages, and they clustered together around their fires and talked about it, and the more they talked, the more they decided that Moloquin had gone too far.
They said, “He came that year and chopped the platform down and said he was going away forever, didn’t he? Why is he back here now, then?”
Moloquin’s People paraded in their bronze and their beads. Shateel’s People, seeing them, said, “We are Moloquin’s People also.” All the men who had worked at the Pillar of the Sky knew the New Villagers well, and so had friends among them, and before the first day of the Gathering was out, most of Shateel’s People were staying around the hearths of Moloquin’s People.
Shateel saw this, and she saw also that Moloquin himself did not come out from beneath his roof of cloth. No one ever saw him except the few who went back and forth from the roof of cloth, and yet everybody in the whole Gathering talked of no one else.
That night, when the men came together to dance at the Turnings-of-the-Year, there were several fights between the men of the northern villages and the men of Moloquin’s People, and in the morning, hearing of this, Shateel went to Moloquin.
He sat at the center of the great ring of standing stones,
under the soft flutter of the cloth; Wahela had come and tied tassels of wool and feathers to the edge of it, so that the wind turned it all constantly. In the shade of it, Moloquin sat on piles of furs and woven cloth, his back against a backprop such as storytellers used. Behind him was Bahedyr and another man with a spear.
Shateel went in under the roof of cloth and stood before him. “Husband,” she said, “you are lax in your favor to me. Have I done you some ill, that you do not come to me?”
He said, “You are the most excellent of wives, Shateel.”
“Yet you are not pleased to see me,” she said, and she sat down before him. She raised her eyes to Bahedyr, standing at her husband’s shoulder, and she said, “Go, now, and watch that Wahela does not disturb us.”
The other spearman looked startled, his eyes pale with surprise in the shadow, and Bahedyr did not move. Moloquin’s eyes never left Shateel’s face. He said, “My wife has spoken to you, Bahedyr.”
At once the two men left. Shateel sighed; there was in Moloquin’s way something that gave her confidence, and she thought, I will make him see what he is doing, and he will stop.
She said, “You did not dance, last night.”
“I do not dance at all, wife,” he said, and smiled at her.
“Perhaps you should! Perhaps you should do many more of the things a chief is supposed to do.”
“Pagh,” he said, and spat to his left. “What does a chief do? He struts and poses, he wears his beads and feathers. The doings of little men, gone within a day. What I am doing now at the Pillar of the Sky will stand forever. Those who are my People know this, they have seen the signs, they have been tested and have passed the test. I am leading them to Heaven. The wise ones know it. They know these other fools are only envious of us.”
As he spoke, he shifted his weight, he seemed ever about to rise, but there was no room for him to rise here. She saw how this space cramped and confined him, how he longed to move around, as he did usually, restless and active, and yet he stayed here; and this more than his words struck to her heart. She saw now that he meant everything he did here.
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