Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  He drew closer. The hairs on his shoulders and back stood up. Many men were creeping up the trail from the bottom.

  He whirled. His litter-bearers slept by the fire, in the lee of the bank, their heads buried in their blankets. He ran in among them, stooped, shook them awake, whispered, “Get up! Get up—we are being attacked,” and ran on, toward the steep trail down to the foot of the hill where the great band of men waited. Before he could shout, Bahedyr and his men burst up over the far side of the hill.

  They made no outcry, gave no warning; they rushed in on Moloquin’s camp with their spears thrusting, and while Moloquin’s litter-bearers were still groping for their senses, still caught in their blankets, they struck and slew them. Moloquin shouted; furious, he roared at them. His axe was in his belt, and he drew it out, and as they came at him, crouching, their spears aimed at his belly, he rushed at them with a cry of rage that drove them back like children.

  “On, on,” Bahedyr shrieked. “Kill him—” He himself cocked back his arm and let his spear fly.

  Moloquin saw the weapon hurled; he crouched down, and the spear passed over him. He lashed out around him with his axe. In the dark he dared not pause even to see who it was he struck. He felt more than saw the bodies whirling around him. In swift lunges he fought his way across the Old Camp; they fled before him, but they struck at him from behind, and he took wounds as he went, his legs slashed, his back torn, until he reached the old standing stone.

  There he put his back to the stone, and he faced his attackers, and as they came at him he struck blow for blow with them. A spear came flying toward him and he dodged it and the stone shattered it. Bahedyr shouted, “All at once! Go at him all at once!”

  Then from behind them all, the great mass of men that Moloquin had brought and hidden at the foot of the hill came charging up onto the Old Camp. They fell on Bahedyr and his men from the rear, and swiftly they subdued them.

  Moloquin lowered his hands. He saw that the attack was over, that Bahedyr himself was captured and most of his men dead or dying. Now suddenly Moloquin felt the pain in his back and his legs, the throbbing in his lungs and the pounding of his heart, and now also, for the first time, he thought of Wahela.

  He cried her name. He dropped his axe. Running from the stone, he went in through the crowd, pushing men out of his way, careless of them all, until he came to the litter.

  In it Wahela lay, as she had lain when he left her, wrapped in her blankets, her head to one side, her eyes closed. She had never wakened. When he put his hand on her body he felt the wet sticky warmth of the blood that soaked her blanket. She was dead.

  Barakal stooped and dug away the earth and grass at his feet; beneath was a round plaque of chalk.

  He had noticed these before. Fergolin had pointed them out to him. Someone had dug a hole here and filled it up again with chalk, so that when the dirt and grass were cleared away, a disk of chalk showed against the darker ground around it. He rose, paced off five steps farther, knelt down, and dug around in the dirt, and found another of the chalk-filled holes.

  Evenly spaced, the holes ran in a circle all around the Pillar of the Sky, just inside the bank. He had walked the whole ring now, found all the holes, even the ones that lay in the ditches and the rubble around the Four Watchers, whose positions the ring of holes intersected. Slowly he walked once more around the circle, his head lowered, trying to force answers from this symmetry.

  He ignored the extraneous sounds of the world around him: nothing mattered to him but the world in his mind, peopled with chalk-filled holes and upright stones and wandering stars.

  Then Dehra burst into the Pillar of the Sky.

  She came at a run, gasping for breath. Seeing him, she rushed toward him, jarring him out of his concentration, and he turned on her with a frown.

  “What is it now?”

  “Your mother.” She gripped his hand. “Your mother is dead, Barakal.”

  “My mother,” he said. His fingers closed on Dehra’s; he looked around him. “My mother is dead? Where is she? What happened to her?”

  Dehra led him forward, toward the two entry stones. As they approached, he could see out through the gap in the bank, down the plain a little way, and now he could hear the wailing of pipes and the pounding of the drums, and he went faster, brushing past Dehra. He swallowed hard.

  There on the plain a great swarm of people were dancing toward the Pillar of the Sky. They came in no real order, but singly and in masses, spread out across the irregular plain toward the west and north. The wind broke up their voices, so that sometimes their wails battered his ears, and sometimes he could hear nothing at all.

  First of them all was Moloquin.

  He carried his axe in one hand. Around his shoulders he wore his bearskin coat, and the wild rumpled curls of his hair and beard flowed over the animal’s hide so that he himself seemed a great black bear. After him the litter swayed along, borne on the backs of many men, like a little boat on a stormy water.

  In that litter Wahela lay. Barakal let out a low cry. He plunged forward, running down out of the Pillar of the Sky, running to his mother.

  The litter-bearers shifted away to let him near. One hand on the side- pole of the furniture, he went along with it, leaning into it, and saw in it his mother, and she was dead, and he saw the blood that covered her.

  “What happened to her? Why did she die?”

  The men around the litter murmured; one said, “See there?” and Barakal looked where he pointed.

  After the litter came a tight swarm of men, all bearing spears or clubs or slings. In their midst, held fast in their midst, Bahedyr walked, with his arms bound and a rope around his neck, his head bowed, and as he walked, the men with him struck him, spat on him, and cursed him.

  Barakal wheeled; he ran on past the litter, ahead of it, and came to Moloquin.

  “Opa-on,” he said. “What happened?”

  Moloquin’s head swiveled toward him. All around his face, through the curly black hair of his head and beard, the grey wound in streaks and swirls. His eyes blazed.

  “Boy,” he said, “trust no one. Have faith in no one. Make no one great. Give no one power. Watch ever, ever at your back.”

  Barakal’s jaw fell open; he saw the tears glittering in his father’s eyes, and heard the rasp of terror and grief in his father’s voice. He stopped where he was. Moloquin walked on past him. Past him they bore the litter where his mother lay. Past him Bahedyr was led, and his men. Slowly Barakal followed after them, into the Pillar of the Sky.

  They laid Wahela down before the Great Gateway, and they covered her with grass and branches, but when the crows descended in a swarm to do their work, Moloquin rushed at them and drove them away.

  He raged up and down through the Pillar of the Sky. His People drew back to the bank, and many left to go to their homes, but many more stayed. They sat down on the bank, close together for the comfort and the warmth, and watched Moloquin.

  He was exhausted, but his fury would not let him rest. Whenever he moved away from Wahela, the great fluttering mass of the crows would swoop down, and he came back, shouting, waving his arms, to drive them up again into the air. They hovered overhead, darkening the sun, waiting. Beneath them, Moloquin wept and raged.

  As he strode up and down here, as he passed through the stones, he saw the places where Fergolin had lain, and Ruak, where Grela and Ladon’s son had lain, he thought of Karelia who had lain here, and of that other whose name he no longer allowed himself to think, who had lain here, whose coming here to die had brought him to the People, and it seemed to him that this whole place was filled with the spirits of those he trusted, and who had gone from him. When he raised his eyes to the living who surrounded him he saw nothing but strangers and enemies. All those he had loved had passed through the Pillar of the Sky into the heart of the universe. Now Wahela would follow them, but he
could not bear to let her go.

  He saw Dehra, standing by the East Watcher, and he lunged at her, savage.

  “Do you blame me for this, too? Am I the cause of her death also? Go! Go from me! Your mother is in the Forest Village, little fool. Go to her, before I send you on with Wahela!”

  Dehra’s eyes widened, white all around; she glanced away from him to Barakal, and whirled and ran.

  Barakal was next; Moloquin strode to him, and shouted, “What have your stars and your circles to tell you of this? If all is made of perfect circles as you say, what turning brought this on me? Why did you not read the stars and warn me?”

  The youth lowered his eyes. Moloquin rushed away, because the crows were descending again, and at his approach they clattered up again into the air, beating the air with their wings, a dirty black cloud hovering in the sky over Wahela.

  He went down on his knees. The passions that drove him could not overcome the weakness of his body. Like a fire that had burned high and was now exhausted he sank down to the ground, and when next the great swarm of the crows settled down toward their due and necessary feast, Moloquin let them have her.

  Shateel said, “Ap Min, I shall do it.”

  Ap Min gave her a grateful look and held out the baby to her. Beside her, her eldest daughter, Elela, tossed her head and pouted and shrugged one shoulder.

  “She should do it anyway, Ana—is she not our servant?”

  Ap Min ignored her. Like most of the people of the Forest Village she let Elela do as the girl pleased. Stooping, the older woman settled herself before the lump of clay she was about to shape, and Shateel, sitting down on the far side of the wheel from her, cradled the baby in her lap and used both hands to turn the round of wood on which the clay rested.

  As she did so, she raised her eyes toward Elela, still standing behind her mother, and said, “I am not your servant. I am no one’s servant.”

  Ap Min gave her a quick glance. Dipping her hands into a bronze bowl of water, she leaned over the clay and smoothed its surface as it turned into an even rotundity.

  Elela looked away, watching Shateel from the corner of her eye. The girl was fat as an old woman; Hems adored her, and would allow no unpleasantness to fall on her; he called her the Root of the Village. Therefore she did whatever came into her mind, which usually was nothing, and considered all others beneath her.

  Now she said, “It is true, though, that you were sent here for disobeying Moloquin.”

  “No, that is not true,” Shateel said evenly.

  “You lie,” Elela said.

  Shateel held her tongue. Deep in her belly a hot anger began to burn, but she kept herself still. It did no good to answer Elela, who was forever seeking arguments with her. She lowered her gaze to the hands of Ap Min, now drawing the clay upward, one thumb inside the lip to hollow it out. As with one hand Ap Min formed the vessel she slid the other down into the wet soft lips of the clay, to open up the inside, and Shateel remembered how she had slipped her own hand inside Ap Min’s vagina, to draw forth the baby who had grown up to be Elela, and she turned her head away.

  They sat doing this in the sun outside the roundhouse, where Hems lived with his wife and his many children. The other families of the Forest Village lived in a second roundhouse, across the clearing, past the forge. The winter had stripped the trees and the sun flooded down around them, too feeble to warm them. Hems himself was in his forge, off to one side of the roundhouse. Shateel wondered what he was doing: he had ceased hammering some time before, all was silence now from that place.

  Shateel herself had no hearth. On Moloquin’s orders, she was allowed no place of her own to live, but had to go from one family to the next, asking for shelter and food, doing whatever work they asked of her in return.

  Elela snorted at her. Languid, bearing her great belly and enormous hams like marks of pride, she strolled away through the meadow, a fat, useless, arrogant girl. Ap Min sighed.

  “I cannot guess what will become of her when she marries.”

  Shateel turned the wheel. The baby lying in her lap thrust up his tiny fists and gurgled, and she shifted him a little, his head resting on her knee, his legs across her other thigh. She did not think Elela would ever marry. Already she was well beyond the age of marriage, and none of the youths here had put on the red feather for her; nor did the Forest People go to the other villages where husbands might be found for her. She hoped Elela did not marry.

  She said, mildly, “You should take her in hand, Ap Min.”

  Ap Min laughed. “Oh, no. Hems would never allow it.”

  “Hems is not her mother.”

  Shateel did not add: nor her father, either.

  Ap Min shrugged. Her face was clear and round as a full moon. Her eyes rested on the clay she shaped. “Hems is master here.” She said that to any suggestion that she herself ought to do what was right; she left such things to Hems, and Hems did what was easy for him.

  Ap Min’s hands with the clay were deft and swift. One pot after another she made, and set on a slab of wood beside her. The baby whimpered to be fed, and the two women left their task. Ap Min opened her clothes and gave the child the breast, and Shateel carried the pots away to the far side of the village, where they had made a little kiln of bricks.

  This little hut-shaped oven was another of the things Hems had brought back with him from the tin mines. Shateel set the pots down before the kiln, knelt at the opening into the bottom, and pulled out the bricks that shut it up. There was a stack of wood waiting by the kiln and she filled up the lower level with branches and twigs and went to the nearest house to beg some coals.

  When she came back to the kiln, the coals in a little pot in her hand, there was a hail from the forest. She turned to see who was coming, and from the house behind her one of the men stepped, to see also, and Ap Min by the door of the roundhouse turned, and so when the girl walked out of the forest it was into the attention of many.

  The girl came down the path from the north. She wore a long coat of woven stuff, but it was all tattered, and she wore no shoes and carried only a sack on her shoulder. Shateel took a step toward her, frowning, drawn to her even before she saw who it was, and then suddenly she knew who it was, and she dropped the pot of coals.

  “Dehra.”

  She went forward, her arms out. The girl hesitated, blinking in the sunlight, her gaze moving slowly from the roundhouse on her right through the rest of the village; at last her gaze fell on Shateel, and she came forward with a rush into her mother’s arms.

  In the roundhouse, sitting before Hems’ fire, with a pot of broth before her, Dehra spilled out her story.

  The Forest People sat around her and listened without speaking. Even when she told them of the fever that had swept through the two villages by the Pillar of the Sky, no one said anything, although the women drew their children closer and the men put their arms around their wives. But when she told them that Bahedyr had slain Wahela, and had tried to slay Moloquin himself, a shudder passed through them all.

  Dehra spoke of Moloquin’s rage on the Pillar of the Sky, and how he had ordered her away, and she leaned toward her mother who sat beside her, and Shateel held her close. The others looked at one another, still gripped by what they had just heard, and Hems gave a sudden shake of his head.

  “He should never have left us,” Hems said. “He should have stayed here, with us, where he belonged.”

  One or two of the others nodded, murmuring in agreement, and Ap Min covered her face with her hands. Shateel held her own child in her arms, her face against Dehra’s lank hair, and as the others began to move about on their own business, she drew Dehra away down to the stream where they could speak without being watched or overheard.

  She bathed her face and hands in the icy water, and watched as Dehra did so also. Dehra was thin even for her, who had always been thin, and her face was drawn
and wild in its looks, watchful and angry.

  She said, “I have been searching for you since the Bloody Gathering. I thought you were dead.”

  Shateel laughed. Her hands and face tingled from the cold water. “I am alive, my child, as any soul between Heaven and earth. But what has become of you? Why did you go to the Pillar of the Sky?”

  “Looking for you. And to fight against Moloquin! He is evil, Ana, he has drawn such evil on us—”

  The girl broke off; she beat the ground with her fists. Shateel put out her hand to her.

  “Tell me of my own People.”

  Dehra wiped her fingers over her face. “Ana-Joba-el is dead.”

  “Ah.”

  “And Ladon’s son is dead, in the fever.”

  Shateel looked sharply at her; she saw that Dehra knew Ladon’s son only as the headman of Moloquin’s People, and she lowered her eyes again. She thought of Ladon’s son with an unexpected wrench of the heart. Dehra was staring at her.

  “How have you done here, Mother? Have you suffered much?”

  “I have suffered nothing,” said Shateel.

  “But you have been alone here. These People shun you, I have seen it.”

  “They were told to shun me. They have worn the thing into a habit. I have suffered nothing.” Shateel gathered herself up; night was coming, the early winter night, and she had to find some place for her and her daughter to sleep. She remembered the pots she was to fire, and thought of finding food for the evening meal; the commonplaces of life crowded in around her, and yet the center of her mind was struggling with a larger problem, and she got up absentmindedly to do the immediate tasks.

  Dehra was tired; as soon as Kayon accepted them into his hearth for the night, the girl fell asleep. Shateel did the work that was set before her in return for her night’s shelter, and in the deepening cold and dark of the night, she went out of the hut and walked away into the forest.