She went up from the meadow a little, away to the clearing above, where the People had their gardens. There she sat down on an old stump. The moon was rising through the trees, and the wind swept cold and sharp among the branches; far away a wolf howled, a quiver of warning passed over her, a foreboding older than she, older even than the People, old as the world itself.
Before her lay the garden, given over now to the winter snow, to the foragings of night creatures. It was a small enough enterprise anyway, this garden. Because of Hems’ forge and the riches that poured forth from it, the Forest People received much of their food from other places, other gardens, the labor of unknown hands. Their own soil, dense and hard to work, mattered little to them. Yet once this place had been the heart of the village. Moloquin himself had cut down these trees, and Shateel had cleared away and burned away the brush so the gardens could be planted: the work they had done here remained here, part of them both remained here.
Part of Another remained here. Before Moloquin cut the trees, before he even led his People into this place, Another had lived here. Another had planted and harvested, fit herself into the endless cycle of the turning year and sustained herself by the tilled earth and the summer sun. Ael had been here first.
Since Shateel had been sent away to this place, whenever her heart had sickened with her exile, she had come here and fixed her mind on Ael, the Woman Alone, and Ael had healed up her wounds.
Not her wounds, this time.
She thought of him as Dehra had spoken of him, raging and wild in the place where his soul lived most intensely. Driving away the crows, driving away his People. Driving away Dehra. Was there not something desperate in that? He had known long before that Dehra sought her mother.
She remembered him as he cut down the dead trees, a young man, overflowing with story and ambition, his strength seeming endless, his vigor enough to enliven a whole People. When he came to her wanting her among his women, with what a silly pride she had denied him! She smiled now to think of it—how she had denied him.
She would not deny him again what he needed.
The moon had risen above the trees. Full and round, its face eaten by corruption, its light a vehicle for madness, it rode the night into the dawning. Off to the north, did he rage still? Did he struggle still to keep the crows away—to hold back death? Before her, the garden lay in the wintry grip of death, but the spring would come, and the green life would shoot up through the straw and the dry stalks. She rose and turned her back on this, and turned her face to the west; she turned her face again toward Moloquin.
They brought the great stone down from the Old Camp, and among those who labored at the ropes was Bahedyr.
Moloquin set him at the back of the lines that dragged the stone, where the dust was thickest; the other men were moved up to the front of the line, to give them some relief, but Bahedyr struggled always in the dirtiest and most punishing place in the line, and if he slowed, Moloquin was there, ordering him beaten with ropes. Moloquin himself travelled along in his litter off to one side of the stone, where he could rest his gaze on the sufferings of the man who had betrayed him and slain Wahela. Thus, day by day, the great cracked stone came to the Pillar of the Sky.
Midwinter came. Barakal stood before the West Watcher and saw the sun rise over the stone to the east, and all the People came to the Pillar of the Sky and the men danced, and the women made a feast, and all through Midwinter’s Night, with bonfires and feasting, dances and music, they waited for the sun. Moloquin sat at the middle of it, hunched down in his litter, his face turned away.
The People danced and feasted through the night, and when the dawn came, they lay sleeping, their bodies scattered like corpses through the Pillar of the Sky. Moloquin alone watched the sun rise, a white ghost climbing through the fog, her rays creeping over the earth to cast the shadows of the gateways over the ground around him. He sat as he had all through the night, slumped beneath his litter, his head sunk down on his chest.
He heard someone coming toward him, but he expected Barakal, whose life it was to watch the heavens, coming to see the sun rise. Therefore he did not look up until the newcomer stopped before him.
He raised his eyes; he looked long into the face of Shateel, who stood before him.
“What are you doing here?” he said at last.
“You called me,” she said calmly. “Didn’t you?”
“I called no one,” he said.
She shrugged her shoulders. “Perhaps I misunderstood.” She was smaller than he remembered, spare, brown from the sun, her face seamed and creased with the wear of her years; her eyes met his without fear or favor. She said, “I heard that Wahela is dead. I came because I am your wife, and it is not good for you to be alone.”
He turned his head away. There was something in the gesture of a wounded animal, trying to avoid more blows. Shateel watched him closely, amazed at the change in him. She remembered wondering once if anything would ever surprise him again. Now she wondered if anything would ever again move him.
His great head swayed toward her; he said, “Come with me, Shateel.” Heavily he arose from his litter and walked down out of the Pillar of the Sky, down toward his roundhouse, and she followed him.
As he walked, he said, over his shoulder, “Did you bring that daughter of yours?”
“No. She stayed behind, in the Forest Village.”
“Good. She is nothing but trouble.”
“You have given her nothing but trouble!” She trotted a few steps to catch up with him. They walked in through the village, empty save for the dogs and the goats, all the People being at the Pillar of the Sky. The dogs skulked away from Moloquin as he passed by. Shateel looked around her at the little huts, thinking with surprise how much like the Forest Village it was—as if to be Moloquin’s People they had to do everything the same. They went by the great mill and she stared at that. Then they came to the roundhouse.
He walked straight ahead into the roundhouse, but Shateel stopped. There on the threshold of the roundhouse was Bahedyr, staked to the ground, so that any who went in or out had to tread on him, and as Moloquin went in, he stepped full on Bahedyr, and the bound man groaned. He was the color of the dust, and Moloquin paid no more heed to him than to the dust, even when he groaned.
Shateel stepped across him and went into the roundhouse. She followed Moloquin to the center of it, and they sat down together.
“Why have you done that?” she said, and nodded toward the doorway. “Because of Wahela?”
“Wahela is dead,” Moloquin told her. He drew forth a basket with a lid and opened it up. “Here, see this.”
He reached into the basket and gathered up a handful of ornaments, clinking and jingling, and raised them before her eyes. She gasped. The metal shone like the sun in the light of the sun, shone with a seductive glow, and she put out her hand and touched it, expecting warmth. It was cold and hard like stone. She let the mass of metal slide back into the basket.
She turned her eyes toward Moloquin again. “And why have you done as you do to Bahedyr?”
“I raised him up,” Moloquin said. “Now I make him lower than the dogs in the village.”
“Your power is great,” she said.
“All the People obey me,” he said. “They do as I wish of them, they come when I call, and go when I dismiss them. Whatever they do, they bring to me, and I decide who shall have and who shall not have.”
“Greater than any other is Opa-Moloquin-on,” she said.
“From across the sea men bring me riches,” he said. “Even across the sea they know my name and bow their heads to hear it.”
“Most great is Opa-Moloquin-on.”
“Why do you mock me?” he cried, and wheeled toward her, his fist raised.
“I do not mock you, Moloquin. I hear what you say to me.”
He looked long into her face, and
she saw in his face something she had never seen before, nor ever expected to see in him: she saw that Moloquin was afraid.
She said, “What torments you, husband?”
“Ah, wife.”
He lowered his head, and his shoulders rounded. With his two hands he picked up the lid and set it on the basket, and then suddenly, violently, he thrust the thing away from him.
He said, “I cannot sleep, Shateel. I look around me and see none that I know, only strangers, even my own children are strangers to me, and if they are strangers, then they may be my enemies, and I dare not trust them. If I sleep, they may come and stab me as I lie there. I dare eat only what has been tasted first by another, I go nowhere without many men around me, and yet even those, I fear.”
He pressed his fists to his eyes, and he gave his head a shake, his hair tossing.
“Perhaps you were right, Shateel. Perhaps I am an evil man, and a scourge of my People.”
“I said not that you are evil, but that you did evil, which is different, Moloquin.”
“Perhaps.” His hands dropped into his lap. “I know nothing certainly any more. I cannot make sense of it any more, it is too tangled together. All I know is the Pillar of the Sky. That is certain, that is what I must do, and so I do it.”
“It is magnificent,” she said. “It makes me tremble to see it.”
“I hate it,” he said. “I hate it and yet I must be there, I ache to go there when I am away, but I hate it, it has eaten up all that I loved, and soon, I know, it will eat me.”
She lowered her head. She had seen him, sitting there in his litter, in the center of the Pillar of the Sky, and he had seemed small and frail in the midst of his creation, small and old and frail among the towering stones. She considered what he had told her, the words pouring forth from him like blood from a wound, and she saw where the wound was, and there was no healing for such a wound as this.
She said, “Tell me a story, Moloquin.”
“I cannot.”
“Ah?”
“I have no more stories, Shateel. The stories came from Karelia, and she has deserted me. She has not been with me since I broke the sampo.” He shook his head. “I turned away from Ael, and now Karelia has turned away from me.” He struck with his hand at the basket. “I have nothing left but this, and the Pillar of the Sky.”
Then Shateel understood him, and she knew why Bahedyr lay staked to the threshold. She drew closer to her husband, and he leaned toward her; he put his arm around her, and she laid her head on his shoulder, but he turned his head away, even as he held her tight against him, he turned his head away from her, into the darkness.
Barakal did not go into the Pillar of the Sky during the days of midwinter, except to watch the sun rise, which was his inescapable task; he could not bear to be among so many people. But when the celebration was over, and the people gone, he went up to the place, and he slept there at the foot of the Great Gateway all through the afternoon, so that he would be awake when the stars appeared.
The first few nights were overcast. The mist seemed to ooze up out of the land and rise through Heaven in columns and tendrils, and it covered the sky with an opaque veil. But on the fifth night the wind rose a little, coming out of the north, and blew away the fogs.
He sat there through the night, watching as one family of stars after another climbed up over the horizon and whirled away toward the west, and so he was there, watching and ready, when the gateway stars rose, and there between them was a star he had never seen before.
When he saw it he lost his breath, astonished. Fergolin, his master, had told him that new stars came sometimes and always meant some grave trouble for the People, but Barakal had not been ready for this. The star was magnificent, brighter even than the Great Traveler, and it gave off fiery rays of red and green and yellow. It seemed to him that he could see it slowly revolve in its place between the two gateway stars, there at the edge of Heaven, and he knelt down beneath it and spoke to it with his head bowed, telling it of its beauty, and asking to be allowed insight into its message.
He knew at once he should take this news to Moloquin, but the star gripped him; he watched it all the rest of the night, seeing how it stood near the other stars. When the dawn came, and the great star faded with the rest, he struggled to his feet, exhausted.
On slow feet he went down toward Moloquin’s Village, to carry his news to the chieftain of the People, but halfway between the Pillar of the Sky and the roundhouse of his father Barakal stopped. There before him, on the gradually declining slope, the village was coming awake in the dawn. Already the dogs ran sniffing and snorting over the midden heap. The first smoke trailed up into the sky like a smudge of dirt. He could hear sleepy voices; he saw an uneven train of people wandering away to the ditch to relieve themselves. All their smells and sounds, all their untidy comings and goings repulsed him. His mind was full of the new star, full of its purity and order; against the perfect order of the sky, this low, disgusting, human confusion was meaningless, distracting, and degrading. He turned and went back to the Pillar of the Sky, back where he belonged.
Some few days later the work began again at the Pillar of the Sky.
Half the men set about smoothing the stone; the others began to dig the hole for it, and Moloquin got some of them also to dig a hole in the entry, between the two old stones there. He showed more interest in this hole than in the one that would receive the stone, leaning over it, and dropping things into it.
In the midafternoon he sent for Sickle, who was guarding Bahedyr, to bring the prisoner to the Pillar of the Sky. Shateel was there also by then, and many other people, and they all stood watching as Bahedyr was dragged into the place of the dead.
He himself was half the way to death. He could barely keep on his feet; Sickle had to carry him as he walked, one arm under Bahedyr’s shoulders, and the one-time hero’s head slumped down, his hair matted and knotted with dust. When he was led forth, all the other People shrank back from him. There were a few angry cries, but most of the People turned away, full of pity and fear, until Moloquin said, “Put him in the hole.”
Then they all watched. Even Shateel drew closer to see what Moloquin would do to the man who had betrayed him.
Sickle and another man dragged Bahedyr to the edge of the hole and pushed him in; as soon as they let go of him, Bahedyr sank down to the bottom of the hole, and no one could see him. Moloquin said, “Make him stand up.”
The two men standing by the hole hesitated a moment, looking down past their feet, until Sickle gathered his courage and jumped down beside Bahedyr. He pulled the condemned man up onto his feet and held him, and their two heads showed above the ground. Moloquin walked up and down past them, his hands on his hips.
“You and you.” He pointed to men near the hole. “Fill the dirt in around him. Sickle, hold him until the dirt holds him.”
At that, a gasp went up from the crowd. The two men looked one another in the face and turned and went slowly away for tools. In the hole, Sickle lifted his head, his eyes ringed with white.
Shateel started forward, one hand raised toward her husband, but before she could speak, another spoke. Another came out of the crowd, and shouted, “Moloquin! What evil do you now?”
His head swiveled toward this one; his face showed no surprise, only an implacable purpose. When he saw who had spoken, he turned to Shateel.
“I thought you said she was gone.”
Shateel stood where she was, midway between him and Dehra who had come out of the crowd, and stood alone now, her hands made into fists before her, her face dark with rage. Shateel said, “She said she would not come back. Yet perhaps it is best. What you are doing is horrible.”
He heard that; he looked from her to Dehra and back to her, and he began to laugh; the sound of his laugh made Shateel turn her head away, her lips pressed together. She went forward, past him, to t
he edge of the hole, where Bahedyr slumped in the arms of Sickle, his eyes barely open.
Yet he was aware of her. His lips moved a little, and when she crouched by the side of the hole she heard him say, “Help me, Shateel.”
She looked into his face, masked with dust; she looked over his shoulder into Sickle’s face, and saw another mask there, a look of bland obedience. In Sickle’s face she saw a warning. She stood up.
“Moloquin,” she said, “for my sake, do not do this.”
He stood as he had when Dehra first stepped forward, in the open between Bahedyr’s hole and the hole being dug for the stone from the Old Camp; his head was sunk down, his eyes gleaming, his gaze travelling from Bahedyr to Dehra and back again. Shateel went straight to him.
“Do not do it,” she said, low. “You bring some evil on us, do not do it!”
As she spoke she put her hand on his chest. He looked down at her for a long while, took her hand and thrust it away. Now the men had come back with their shovels, and were preparing to scoop the dirt into the hole around Bahedyr, to bury him alive, but Moloquin said, “No. Take him back.” With a gesture of his arm he waved them all away, and he turned and went into the middle of the Pillar of the Sky, where his litter sat, and he went into the litter and stayed there, all the rest of the day.
Dehra said, “I could not stay there, Ana-el—it is no different there than here.”
She and Shateel sat in a corner of the roundhouse yard. A cold rain had begun to fall, lightly at first, and mixed with grains of snow.
Dehra said, “Hems is no other than Moloquin. He told me to carry wood, to haul water, in return for my food and shelter, and when I went to build my own hearth, to make my own place, he sent his children to tear it apart.”
Her voice trembled. In her eyes Shateel saw tears of anger, tears of shame. She put out her hand and touched her child’s cheek, thinking at the same time, She is a child no more.
Pillar of the Sky Page 61
