Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  “So I came back here,” Dehra said. “Here at least I can—”

  Her voice broke off. She looked away.

  “Here you can fight Moloquin,” Shateel said mildly.

  Dehra nodded, her eyes downcast. Swiftly she brought her burning gaze back to her mother.

  “He is the root of it, Ana. If he is destroyed—”

  Shateel put her hand over Dehra’s mouth. “Don’t speak of that.”

  “What!” Dehra thrust angrily at Shateel’s hand. “You are his again, are you? He sent you away, now he lets you come back, and you are so grateful you will be his creature—”

  Shateel slapped her. Dehra recoiled, dark with anger, and the two women stared at each other. Shateel said, “You do not understand—”

  “I understand,” Dehra said. She got to her feet. “You are no more my mother.” Stiff-backed, she walked away, out of the roundhouse yard. Shateel lowered her head. The snow fell around her, melting as it fell.

  Ael, she thought, are you here now, can you hear me? Her heart was sick with confusion. Behind her was Moloquin, rotten with evil as a corpse full of worms; before her was Dehra, drawn to the evil, thinking herself good for being drawn to the evil. How could she stand between the two of them—between them and their destiny? She pulled her shawl over her head and covered her face from the cold, the snow, and the light.

  Moloquin woke, and found himself alone. Beside him the bed was cold where Shateel had lain. He rose and went away through the roundhouse to find her.

  Although he dared not tell her, he needed her. In all the terrible things that had happened to him the only good thing was that Shateel had come to him, come to him, at last, of her own wish. Through her eyes he could see himself a whole man again, a man worthy of being loved, or merely of being. Yet he dared not tell her this, for fear of the power it gave her over him. Instead he went through the roundhouse with a thunderous frown on his face, and when he found her outside in the yard, sitting in the new-fallen snow, he berated her like a master scolding a green novice.

  “What are you doing here? Are you not my wife? Come inside, be where I am.”

  She raised her face to him; he saw she was unhappy, and an enveloping fear came over him: if she was unhappy, would she not go? He got hold of her arm and pulled her up onto her feet.

  “Come inside. You are my wife! For my sake, at least, show some pride in what you are.”

  He dragged her inside and made her sit down, and the people of the roundhouse brought them beer and seed-cakes and honey, unmilled grain steeped in broth until the kernels popped open, soft and white. Moloquin kept Shateel close by him, where he could touch her whenever he wished, only by raising his hand; he never took his eyes from her.

  “What were you doing out there in the snow? Can you not see it is snowing? Even the dogs and the pigs know to come inside when the snow falls.”

  She said, “Will you go to the Pillar of the Sky today?”

  “I will.” He took a cake of seeds and honey and broke it in half, and laid one half on her knee. “If any other comes, it will surprise me. We cannot work in the snow. Eat.”

  He wanted her to come sit behind him, as Wahela had done, and comfort him with her hands, comb his hair, pick the lice out of his hair, wind the curls around her fingers, but he did not know how to ask for that. Instead he shot words at her.

  “Why did that daughter of yours come back? You said she was gone.”

  “I don’t know,” Shateel said. “I am very low over it, husband, she ought not to have come. She hates you.”

  He grunted. “She does not concern me. She is only a stupid girl, what can she do to me?”

  “I don’t know,” Shateel said. “I know nothing of this place, except that I know nothing of it. I will go to the New Village later, if you will let me.”

  He looked sharply at her; on his tongue the words waited: will you come back? His gaze lingered over her face. She had been beautiful once, or at least he remembered her beautiful; now in the lines and sags of her face something else drew him. As he looked on her, she smiled at him, and he thought, There is nothing in me she does not know.

  That soothed him. He reached out his arms to her and drew her close to him, set her down before him like a child, and stroked her hair. He was awkward at this, his fingers too stiff, too thick and rough with callus, so that the threads of her hair clung to his fingers. She sighed. Trusting and warm, she moved against him, pressing her back to his belly, her head to his shoulder. He put his arms around her and buried his face in her hair.

  In the afternoon the snow stopped, and Moloquin went to the Pillar of the Sky. Shateel walked across the slope and down to the New Village, looking for some of the women she had known; she thought if she could talk to them she would understand better the mood of the People, and she could see how the power of the women would work, for or against Moloquin.

  The New Village lay on an eastern-trending slope just beyond the Pillar of the Sky from Moloquin’s Village. Its two longhouses were lined up side by side, with the roundhouse before their front doors, so that they all shared the same yard. A brush fence surrounded all of this, but outside the fence there were other houses, small and round, with roofs of thatch and sod.

  She went into the yard, where a little herd of goats was gathered, protected from the snow; two young women were bringing them armloads of dry grass to eat. Shateel watched them a moment, reluctant to interfere with their work, and looked around her for some place where the women gathered—the sampo, or a loom, or a pot-making wheel.

  There was nothing. She guessed that the women took their grain to the great mill in Moloquin’s Village; certainly they had no sampo of their own. Nor was there any of the bustle and shared labor of women that she had known from her own village, where the women did everything together. Here, except for the goats, the women feeding them, and two old dogs asleep in the shelter of the fence, the yard was empty.

  She thought it was the cold; certainly the cold kept the men inside the roundhouse. She went into the longhouse on her left.

  Usually, even in the coldest weather, the longhouses were warm from the fires of the women, warm from the people living under one roof. When she went into this longhouse the cold air struck her face, and she recoiled from the smell of rot and age and abandonment. Shocked, she stopped still on the threshold. This longhouse was almost deserted.

  The hearths still lined either side, marked out with rings and low walls of stone, but most of the spaces were empty of belongings and people, and the ashes were cold as the snow. She went slowly down the length of the old building. The roof was breaking and the cold wind blasted in through it, sweeping the whole place, whirling the ashes in their beds. She went by a hearth where someone slept wrapped in a blanket, buried away inside the blanket so well she could not make out if it were a man or a woman, and in a sudden rush of uncontrolled imagination she thought it was a corpse, the corpse of this village, and her skin went rough and she broke into a run to get away from it.

  There at the far end of the longhouse was a fire, and she stumbled toward it, toward the warmth, the cheery crackle, and the people gathered around it. But when she reached it, all the people there were men.

  They stared up at her, startled at her appearance. She stood at the entrance to the hearth and stared back. There were many of them, all young, shaggy, dirty, and their hearth was dirty, smelling bad of old food, of stale beer, and littered with blankets and bones and pots. She looked around at them, and saw that among them was Sickle, the young man whose duty it had been to guard Bahedyr at the Pillar of the Sky.

  She said, “What are you doing here? Where are the women?”

  Sickle stood up. He was lean and rough, and for an instant she was afraid of him: she stiffened, hardening herself against him, but he made no move toward her and eventually he sat down again.

  He said, “You ar
e Shateel, the old man’s wife.”

  “I am that,” she said slowly, amazed. “Is that how you speak of your chief—the old man?”

  “Opa-Moloquin-on,” Sickle said quickly, and glanced at the others around him, and suddenly they were all snickering and giggling, their heads bowed together, sharing their amusement, and with their hands they made elaborate, mocking gestures of respect. Shateel’s temper climbed; she fought the urge to scold them into proper humility and docility, but she forced herself to be cold, to see this without passion: this was why she had come here, to see how the People fared, and now she was seeing it.

  “Where are the women?” she said.

  “In the other longhouse,” said Sickle. “The ones who have not gone off with their husbands.”

  “With their husbands,” Shateel said.

  Another of the young men wiped his nose between his fingers, rubbed his hand on his thigh, and spat into the fire. “Most of the married women live with their husbands now. They go off outside the village and make their own huts and have their own gardens, and that way the men can see that the women do their work and don’t have other men, you see.”

  Shateel looked around them again, seeing now that many of these young men were boys still, boys from the boys’ band, and she realized that they were the bachelors: they should have lived in the roundhouse, with their societies, but now the societies were failing even as the sampo had failed. Swiftly she guessed at the reason: Moloquin belonged to no society. Moloquin lived together with his women, and the men chose to do what he did, they took their wives away from the other women, as Moloquin had done with Wahela.

  She turned and swept the longhouse with her eyes. Was it the same roof as the one she had lived under, when she was the wife of Ladon’s son? If they moved their villages, the women had been used to taking the old roof. Perhaps this roof had sheltered many longhouses, back through the generations; perhaps this was the first roof ever made over a longhouse, and now it would be the last. Falling in, letting in the cold wind, collapsing into the dead fires. The women were gone. Without the sampo, they had no common center for their lives; separated from each other, isolated from one another, what power did they have? Only to follow their husbands, to obey their husbands.

  Standing there, the cold wind roaring past her, she felt the wind sweeping away the whole world around her, leaving her like a star alone in the center of the void. Quickly she went away down the longhouse and out into the real world.

  Sickle thought, Moloquin is just a man. I could do as well as he.

  But when he went to the roundhouse of the chief, or into the Pillar of the Sky, intending to face Moloquin like a man, to stand eye to eye with him and defy his orders, something went soft in his belly. When, face to face, Moloquin told him, Do this, Sickle bowed his head and meekly did it.

  It was magic, as the women said. It was magic that gave Moloquin his ascendency over them all, the magic in his great bronze axe, in his arm bands and belts and collars of metal, the magic in all his accoutrements. Not Moloquin himself.

  If another man wore the armbands and the belts and the collars, if another man took the great axe into his hand, then another man—any other man—could rule over the People.

  Sickle knew that if he ruled the People he would do no evil. He would rule justly and well. None would wish to harm him, but if one did, then Sickle would not stretch him out on the ground and walk on him, nor dig holes and threaten to bury him. Sickle would be merciful, if he were the chief.

  He spoke of this to his friends, the young men who lived with him in the half-deserted longhouse, and they agreed with him. Dehra was right: Moloquin was evil.

  He went up to the chieftain’s roundhouse in the evening, to guard Bahedyr, which was his duty. As he went he played with the idea that this time he would tell Moloquin face to face to show some mercy for the prisoner—to show some heart: they were of the same People, after all, he and Bahedyr.

  He knew if the other men saw him speaking so to Moloquin, they would look on him with awe and respect. He imagined their wide eyes, their amazement at his courage. He saw himself standing before Moloquin, tall and straight, speaking in a clear voice, with words that left no questions behind.

  But when he went into the yard, the chieftain was there, just getting down from his litter. The sun had come out after the snow and shone hot and bright on the ornamented litter, the tinkling bronze tassels and the ribbons. Moloquin climbed slowly out of the deep well of the seat. Sickle stood before him, ready to confront him, but as the chieftain left the litter, he seemed to grow taller. He moved slowly, ponderously, every move an emblem of his confidence; when he straightened, his great head wreathed and framed in greying black curls, he seemed to Sickle to stand as tall as the Great Gateway at the Pillar of the Sky, and the young man’s voice froze in his throat. When Moloquin’s gaze fell on him, he bowed his head to avoid that look, that awful attention.

  Moloquin said, “Where is my wife?”

  Someone else answered him. Sickle stood with his head bowed, his eyes averted, as the chieftain passed by him; his heart pounded, for fear that even without words between them Moloquin would know his mind. As the heavy footsteps passed him by, as the earth grew still again after Moloquin’s passage, he was overcome with relief.

  He went into the roundhouse, his face turned away from the other people, lest anyone should see he was afraid of Moloquin.

  Dehra was not afraid of him, but Dehra was mad: everyone knew that. Some ancestral demon had taken possession of her. She wandered here and there through the two villages, telling everybody how evil Moloquin was, and the people threw stones at her sometimes, or merely laughed at her, and the children made fun of her to her face. Sickle did not want that for himself. He went into the second circle of the roundhouse, where the grain of the harvest was stored in great baskets, and where Bahedyr lay, bound hand and foot, and staked to the ground.

  The prisoner was stirring, but he was not awake: perhaps the same demon who drove Dehra now tormented him. He lay writhing in his bonds, murmuring, “Water. Bring me water.” Sickle went off to another part of the roundhouse and brought a little bronze cup of water to him.

  He sat there in the dark, holding Bahedyr’s head up with one hand and with the other feeding him water by the sip. Doing this aroused in him a certain tenderness toward the prisoner. Sickle had been caring for this man regularly, had kept him alive, giving him food and water—for what? So that Moloquin could kill him when Moloquin chose? And make nothing of Sickle’s work and Sickle’s power?

  Bahedyr drank the water, and his soul came back to him a little: he whispered, “Ah, in the name of my ancestors, let me die.”

  “Be still,” Sickle said, and laid him down again on the ground. “Be still. The night is coming, wait until then, be still.”

  Barakal said, “Watch there. Soon it will rise. The horizon is clear tonight—it will appear tonight surely.”

  His voice rang with his excitement. Dehra shifted a little, moving closer to him; the night was cold and the wind was gathering force as the stars began to appear. She tipped her head back, looking up past the looming beams of the gateways, into the center of Heaven, trying to remember the names of the stars.

  He knew them all. Even as she looked, he was leaning back beside her, his arm extended, his finger picking out each little fire as it blazed alive in the deepening sky. “Vendra,” he said, “the Smokehole of the Sky. When she rides upon the height of the sky, the equinox is coming. And there, Umulon, Squirrel-Killer, the Damned Man, whose light is sick and well by turns. You see tonight he is well, and his light shines bright, but other times you can barely see him, and when that is so, it means there is sin and error among the People.”

  “There is sin and error now among the People,” she said, and glared at Umulon who would not confirm her convictions. From the left, suddenly, there was a loud crack.


  “What is that?” she cried, startled.

  Barakal put his arm around her. “Have no fear of it. It is a stone popping. I have heard it often—at first it frightened me, too, but then one day I was here when the workmen were trimming a stone with fire and with water, and I heard the stone pop then.”

  The pride in his voice annoyed her: he was so pleased with his own understanding. His arm around her was too tight, a confine; warm as it was, still a bond.

  She said, loudly, “There is sin and error now among the People, why does Umulon not shrink away?”

  “Perhaps what you see as sin Umulon does not.”

  “Bah!” She got up. Better to keep warm by moving up and down here than by submitting to Barakal’s embraces. “You know as well as I that Moloquin has—”

  “No. No, I do not know that Moloquin has done anything.” Barakal thrust at her, sweeping at her with his arm. “You are in my way, Dehra!”

  She turned, looking behind her, out through the space between the upright stones. He was sitting so that the gap in the outer ring framed the horizon; he would see his new star rise directly over the hole that waited for the stone from the Old Camp. Across the hole that waited for Bahedyr.

  She moved a little, her gaze sharp; the horizon was still pale from the late passage of the day, and no stars appeared above it. She walked away a little, in among the ring of silent stones, and paused and looked up.

  In among the stones like this, looking up at the monstrous stones, she wondered at herself. Moloquin had done this: soon Moloquin would raise another stone, and close the ring. Then he would bury Bahedyr, and all his other enemies also, perhaps—she had a sudden vision of a third ring, outside the ring of stones, a ring of people, buried upright, their souls forever bound to this place, guardians of it, forever. She shuddered. It was cold.

  “There!” Barakal leapt to his feet and pointed.

  She turned, her eyes seeking the horizon. A low cry escaped her lips. The horizon was the color of the inside of a mussel shell. The rough line of the edge of the earth was black against it, but in one notch of this line a new light blazed, so brilliant she thought at first it was a fire lit on the hilltop.