Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  She said, “Why did you not come to me, when you arrived? I waited for you half the night.”

  He looked away. A shadow fell across his face. “I was—I had—other work.”

  “Also, you know I will not keep silent if I see wrong done.”

  He rounded on her, his eyes fierce. His words came at her like bolts of fire. “I cannot do wrong, Shateel! I am the soul of my People. They have no power save to do that which I wish of them.”

  “Yet I say that you do wrong.”

  His steady stare cooled. He looked down at her as if from a great distance.

  “Why have you become my enemy, wife? Has standing in my place in this village given you a man’s belly?” With one hand he waved at her. “Go.”

  “Moloquin,” she said, amazed. “You must hear me, at least.”

  “I will hear nothing from an enemy. Go.” He turned his head aside.

  “I am not your enemy,” she said.

  “Go!”

  She lingered a moment longer, and a gnawing doubt crept into her soul. Was he right—had she gotten beyond herself, doing a man’s work in the village? Perhaps he was right. She turned and crept away, out from beneath his roof of cloth and tassels, out to the sunlight again.

  Eilik, who with his twin brother was chief of the most northern village, went with the other men of the Bear Skull Society to the Turnings-of-the-Year, and there they watched the sun rise in her appointed place. He raised his voice with the others in greeting to the sun, but his mind was elsewhere.

  Like the others of the northern peoples he had paid little heed to Moloquin, except to mock the strangeness of his ways. He had kept his herds and ordered his People, listened to his headwomen, performed the obediences of the calendar; what some other chief did somewhere else had mattered nothing to him. The Mill would take care of Moloquin.

  Now he came here and found the whole place overturned. The platform where the chiefs had once sat at the center of the world and looked out over everything was now a laughingstock, and no one led the dances; worst of all, Moloquin’s People went everywhere in such an array of wealth that Eilik himself was miserable with envy.

  His uncle had been chief when Ladon was chief of the southern village, and Eilik remembered how Ladon’s few strings of blue beads had made him first among them all—a few strings of beads! Now the least of Moloquin’s men wore ornaments as potent as any chief’s. No one knew where they had all come from. There was some rumor that Moloquin found them in the womb of the earth, but Eilik did not believe that. Nor did he believe what others said, that the metal came in thunderbolts from the sky, because he had seen many thunderbolts, but he had never seen any metal before.

  At Turnings-of-the-Year, with all the others of the Bear Skull around him, he said the sacred words. He put on his mask, with the great horns of the oxen crowning it, and with the mask on he ate and drank, and so his ancestors witnessed the lives of the People; so the People continued on, from the distant beginning to the unknowable end. In his mask, carrying the three red-feathered arrows that were the emblems of his power, he walked to the High Hill and climbed the path, his feet stepping where the feet of every man before him stepped, making the earth new again, bringing the past alive again.

  Yet it all seemed nothing, without beads and ornaments of shining bronze.

  His brother Muon said, “Leave it alone. Soon we shall go back home, and take the herds away to the summer pastures, and you can forget about Moloquin.”

  Eilik grunted at him, angry. Everything that happened these days made him angry.

  He went with a crowd of his men through the Gathering, and as he walked his men beat their drums and waved their arms to call attention to his passage. Everyone turned and looked, and some bent low to give him respect. Not enough gave him respect. He lifted his feet high, and held his shoulders back, his chin in the air, the ox horns waving in the air, and drew all eyes, but in their looks he saw less than he wanted. He thought their eyes said, If you are great, why have you no beads, no copper, no bronze?

  Then before him he saw a man who did have beads and copper ornaments, and this man was not even a chief.

  He stopped. He had been crossing the main part of the Gathering, the low ground, where the hearth-fires were thick, and the children ran here and there and the women sat in knots talking. Ahead of him was an old stump. On it sat a man of Moloquin’s People, eating from a bowl of glazed clay.

  On his arms he wore rings of metal, and on his ankles; around his neck he wore loops and loops of beads. Beside him, tipped up against the stump, was a spear with a three-pronged tip of bronze.

  Eilik went slowly forward, his head lowered, his teeth clenched. The man on the stump saw him but ignored him. Instead of giving Eilik the respect he deserved, this man went on eating.

  Before the stump, Eilik paused. He said loudly, “I see here one who has no propriety.”

  The man on the stump glanced at him. “I see there a man who has no wealth.” With a grin, he dipped his fingers into the bowl and scooped up a gob of meal.

  Eilik gave a yell. Backing up two steps, he turned to the men on either side of him and said, “Put this impudent fool on his face before me.”

  His men sprang forward. The man on the stump leapt to his feet, snatching his spear into his hand as he rose; Eilik’s men seized him by the clothes to drag him down, but Moloquin’s man roared and struck out with the butt end of his spear, fending off their hands.

  All around them, a cry went up, and people came running. Eilik shouted to his men, “Bring him down! Kill him! Kill him!” He leapt into the air and beat the air with his fists. His men were struggling to reach Moloquin’s man, perched up on the stump, but from this high point the man with the spear could hold off all who came at him. Then Eilik stooped and took a stone from the ground, and he threw it at the man on the stump.

  The stone caught the other man square in the face, and he staggered, and in an instant Eilik’s men had brought him down off the stump. Eilik shouted, triumphant. A moment later a rush of bodies from behind him knocked him flat.

  He shouted, but he was flat on the ground, and above him the crowd closed like a pool of water above a drowning man. He struggled to rise. Someone was standing on his thigh. A blow glanced off his head and his horns fell into the dirt. He got to his hands and feet, buffeted on all sides, and took an elbow in the chin.

  “Stop! Stop!”

  A woman’s voice. Used from infancy to heeding women’s voices, he fell still, shying back, and so did all the other men. For a moment, across a stretch of dust, he faced the man with the spear, the blood a bright streak down his face, but then a dozen women forced themselves in between them.

  “Stop!” First among the women, the headwoman Shateel ran forward, her arms out. “What are you doing? Opa-Eilik-on—” she paused before him, stooped, and lifted up his horned cap. “What demon has infected you? What work is this for a chief?”

  “That fool there, that misfit outcast would not bow to me, Ana-Shateel-el.”

  “Shateel,” the spearman shouted, hoarsely. “He struck me, Shateel—he drew my blood!”

  He charged forward, his arms milling, and the women closed on him, held him back, as he roared and brandished his spear, and by weight of their numbers made him helpless.

  “Eilik,” he shouted, over their heads, as their arms bound him. “I will come for you tonight—Eilik—run and hide—Eilik—”

  More women were crowding in between the two bands of men, forcing them apart. Eilik bellowed, “I will be ready, impudent one!” Shateel gave him a single white-eyed glare, but the surge of bodies was carrying her away from him. He could explain nothing to her. His back itched. His jaw hurt where the elbow had struck him. Since his boyhood in the boy’s band no one had struck him. He was a chief, the center of his People. He had no bronze, no beads. With the horns in his hand, he turned and
went away, his head down, surrounded by the men of his village.

  With the other women Shateel stayed by the stump until all the men had gone off elsewhere, until there was no more chance of fighting.

  The sun had gone behind clouds. The day was cool and the wind was blowing hard from the east; soon it would rain. In the evening the stargazers would see nothing but the angry face of the night. Even now a few drops sailed upon the wind.

  Around her, the other women talked in low voices of the fighting; Joba came to her and took her by the arm.

  “This is very bad,” said the old woman. “We should all go home, before it comes to worse.”

  “How could it be worse?” Shateel asked, a little wildly.

  Joba shook her head. “I remember once, when I was a young girl, when two chiefs wanted the same wife, they fought all through the Gathering and there was blood spilled and thereafter one of the villages would not even come to the Gathering until the other chief died. Do you want that here?”

  “What must we do, then?”

  Joba said, “We must talk to Grela. If she calls her People away, the Gathering will end, all this will end, too, I hope.” Joba sighed. She had been ill often lately and looked worn and tired today. “You must talk to her. She may heed you.”

  “Grela has never liked me.”

  “It is not liking you that will move her, but the truth of your words, Shateel. There, good, they are by the sampo. There we can talk openly.”

  They walked across the low flat ground of the Gathering, weaving a path around the hearths on the ground, speaking to everyone they saw, because everyone they saw was friend or kindred in some way. At last they came to the hearths of Moloquin’s People. The old women had brought their sampo to the Gathering, to grind their grain, and there before it sat Grela, and some other women, their fingers busy with their weaving, their mouths busy with their talk.

  Shateel and her mother sat down among them; Grela turned to her. “So. Here you are; I have expected you for some while now, surely you are come to make glum talk of all this quarrelling among the men.”

  Shateel looked into Grela’s face, seeing the broad cheeks, the small shrewd eyes, the merry mouth of one who thought she dealt with ordinary trouble. Leaning forward, the younger woman gave a turn to the mill.

  “It is all doings of Moloquin,” she said.

  “Moloquin,” said several of the women, Grela among them. “It was not Moloquin who attacked Bahedyr.”

  “The other people are jealous of us,” Grela said. “That is no problem of ours. I do not see why we should suffer for their failures.”

  “I say we should all go home,” another woman said. “Right now, and wait until next year, for the next Gathering, then everyone shall have forgotten their problems.”

  “Ah,” Shateel said, “will you not heed me? This is not a tangle of threads, blown here by the wind—this is a whole cloth, and we are the loom, and Moloquin is the weaver!”

  Grela turned on her. “Why do you accuse him, who is your own husband? He is our chief, and he has been a great chief. It is the northern chief—Eilik! He is to blame!”

  Joba put out her hand and gripped Shateel by the arm, and Shateel kept still, although her cheeks burned. Now Grela leaned toward the other women, and said, “It is Eilik who makes the trouble.” She turned the sampo around, calling the Mill to witness.

  Another woman cried, “Yet it is only man’s trouble—why make so much of it? Let them bang themselves on the heads now and then, if they wish. What has that to do with us?”

  Many of the others began to talk in the same way; they shared stories of the quarrelling among the men, funny stories, some of them, how a group of boys from the New Village had wound a strand of blue beads around a pig’s neck and paraded it on a rope through the Gathering, declaring even their pigs finer than the northern chiefs; that did not end as a funny story, since all the boys had been beaten bloody. In their midst the sampo chattered and turned in its endless song. Shateel listened with her head down, wondering why they saw only these small bits of the piece and not the whole design.

  Then she sensed someone behind her, and she raised her head, and turning she looked behind her.

  There squatting on his heels behind her was Moloquin, listening to what the women said. His axe was in his belt, but he wore no other ornaments or signs of power.

  Shateel said, “What are you doing here? You have no business here.”

  At the sound of her voice, all the other women hushed; they turned toward him, and many gasped to see him there. He gave Shateel a long cold look, but when he spoke his voice was warm with praises, and given to Grela.

  “Ana-Grela-el, mighty is she! Her mind is deep, she keeps well the memory of how I have served my People—how when they were starving, I gave myself to feed them, I saved them from death.”

  Shateel stiffened. She had never before heard him speak in the elevated language used among men and between men and women. She swung to face the other women, and her words rang out.

  “You hear Moloquin. Now I shall speak to you, but I shall use the simple tongue of women and children, not the language of indirections, misunderstandings, and lies. He is a man. He does not belong here, shadowing our minds and swaying our decisions. Send him away, that we may deal with the troubles he has brought on us.”

  The other women leaned together, a solid wall of their bodies, in their center the turning, turning mill. Beside Shateel, her mother put out her hand again to take hold of her wrist, but it was to Grela that Joba looked, and to Grela that Shateel also looked, and all the other women too.

  Grela said, “Moloquin has sat at the mill before, when he was with Karelia. There is nothing wrong in that. Let him be here, if he wishes. I have no quarrel with him. Only you, Shateel, have a quarrel with him, as the whole People knows, so great a quarrel that in all your years of marriage you have never made a child together.”

  The other women murmured, and among them some laughed, covering their mouths with their hands, their eyes bright. Shateel lowered her eyes, her face hot with shame. She could not bring herself to argue further with Grela. When she raised her head at last, Moloquin was gone.

  Wahela said, “It is raining. They will not dance long tonight, I think.”

  She turned from the front of the shelter, smiling; when the sun went down, she had to withdraw from the Gathering, and so she was glad that the rain would keep all others under cover also. If she could not be the center of whatever went on she wanted nothing to happen at all. She moved away from the front of the lean-to, where the air was chilly and damp, back toward the fire.

  Moloquin had caused this building to be put up so that he would have some place to go to, away from the eyes of the crowd, when the sun went down; it stood on the far side of the Gathering from the High Hill, away on the slowly rising slope that led to the west, and it had some special meaning for him because he himself had chosen it—he had gone looking for some low place in the ground, a little away from the stream, and had commanded his People to build his shelter there. The shelter itself was nothing but a wall of mats and poles, tipped at an angle, the sides filled in with brush and leafy boughs.

  All around it those men stood who were Moloquin’s trusted followers, Bahedyr and Ladon’s son chief among them, those men who had proven they would do anything their chief asked of them. They stood with their spears, a circle of men like the circles of standing stones, and at their center Moloquin paced up and down, his head ducked to keep from striking the sloping roof of his shelter.

  He said, “Let them dance all they wish. Let Eilik dance, if he wishes.”

  Bahedyr grunted. “I would put my spear through his chest, let him dance that way.”

  The other men all rumbled forth their agreement, and they shifted and moved in the darkness, staying close together in a pack. Moloquin said, “Eilik will step wrong soon
enough. Keep careful. There is that rising here that could crush the whole herd of you, if you let yourselves be lulled.”

  He moved constantly through the little space under the lean-to, stooping, straightening, bending, his hands out to touch the walls; it was his own dance, Wahela thought, the greater dance. She went to him; it delighted her to go to him, before all these men who quaked at his least displeasure, and lay hands on him as she did now, stroking his hair and beard, and picking imaginary flecks of dust from his shirt. She let her hands rest at last on his arms and looked up into his face.

  “Sit down, let us eat. I myself shall serve you.”

  He smiled at her. “I am flattered, Most High One.”

  She tossed her head at him. “Does it displease you that I take pride in myself?”

  “Serve me then, Wahela.” He went into the back of the lean-to where it was warmest, and sat down.

  Wahela did not intend to serve him with her own hands, of course. She went out to the front of the shelter, out to the rain, and called to the women out there.

  Several of them had made their hearths near Moloquin’s shelter. They huddled in the steady rain, unprotected from the skies, like animals with their tails to the wind, like lumps of earth in the twilit downpour. At her beckon, the nearest to her rose and brought in bowls and baskets and Wahela gave them commands, to go here and there, to set this dish down and to move that one, while Moloquin sat at the back of the shelter, his head lowered, and said nothing.

  Only he lifted his head once toward the men with their spears, and at his nod they all left.

  When the women had served them, Wahela sat down beside him, and they ate together. Wahela talked to him about the Gathering, giving him scraps of news from the hearths she had visited. If he heeded her she saw no sign of it, but she knew if she did not speak, there would be silence between them. He ate everything she fed him—now and then, she lifted a morsel to his lips with her own fingers—but he was thinking deeply; as she talked, she thought her words bounced off him as the rain bounced off the top of the lean-to.