Pillar of the Sky Read online

  “You,” she said. “And be sure you go well upstream, so the water is clear.”

  Still he lingered, amazed she wanted him to work, and her ill temper burst and she flung a stick at him from Moloquin’s pile. He bounded away like a rabbit, the jug in his hand, but she saw he did not go upstream, but went to the nearest place, where everybody else was, and the water was roiled to the color of the earth.

  Moloquin came back, his arms full of stones. “Ana,” he said, in a low voice, “there are too many people here.” He squatted down and put the stones in a ring at Karelia’s feet.

  “What is this, my brave boy, afraid of nothing?” She put out her hand to touch him, smiling, and he paused in his work to let her pick a bit of dead leaf out of his shaggy black hair. “Keep close by me. Pretend to be stupid and foolish, and then no one will mind if you act strangely and say strange things.” She looked around for Grub, who was still by the river, and faced Moloquin again. “In fact, say nothing at all.”

  That was because he would not change his speech for them. He had learned to talk sensibly, in the year he had been with Karelia, but he still spoke like a child to children, or like the women, in plain undecorated words. She thought it was because he spent so little time with men that he would not learn the speech of men.

  She said, “Hold, now, here come strangers.”

  She meant that they were strangers to him; they were no strangers to her. She put out her hands, calling to them.

  “Joba. Halla. Forgive me for not getting up to greet you, but my legs are still somewhere over the Dead River. Come sit down.”

  The newcomers took her hands and wrung them; Joba, hugely fat, her long loose hair streaked with grey and white like streaks of stars through the night sky, bent down to press a kiss to Karelia’s face.

  “Heaven has taken pity on us, we are friends together again.” She sat down on Karelia’s right hand and shook her head. “It has been an evil winter, my old sister.”

  “Now the summer is here,” Karelia said, and clutched tight the hand of Halla, younger than the other, with light brown hair, and a broad smile, who sat down on her left. “There is no evil in the world that does not pass away with the turnings of the year. I will have something to offer you in a moment, when my boy here has made the fire, and his lazy friend has brought the water.”

  In their midst, Moloquin was setting the sticks together for a fire; he did not look up. Grub came back with the jug.

  Karelia tasted of the water and spat it out. “The next time,” she said, with a glare at Grub, “I shall send Moloquin. Go off now, I have no use for you if you will not obey me.”

  Grub drew away a little; she did not mark where he went, once he was out of her reach. Instead she fussed with her sitting mat and the backrest, trying to get comfortable. Moloquin had the fire going—they had brought a coal from the village—and now he came around behind her and, wordless, he helped her arrange herself.

  The two strange women watched all this with eyes sharp as the eyes of a brown thrush hopping in a bush and looking out for snakes. Karelia laid her hands in her lap.

  “I hope you have many stories, Karelia-el,” said Joba.

  Karelia laughed. “With every moon another egg cracks open in my mind. But it is you, Joba-el, who needs our sympathy. Tell me how Mashod died.”

  “Oh, him.” Joba discarded her dead brother with a scornful wave of her hand. “Let him lie. He turned grey and he died, just after the Feasting. No, no, it is Rulon who brings me sorrow now.”

  Rulon was her son. Karelia murmured, “Fortunate the mother who sees her son grow to manhood.”

  “Yes—fortunate,” said Joba sharply. “He is still a green boy, is my Rulon, still a little worm, but he thinks now he is a star in the sky. He remembers how Mashod was, and does not know that Mashod was mostly empty bluff. There will be trouble tomorrow, I am warning you.”

  Karelia snorted, scratched her lip, and peered again into the jug, to see if the water had cleared. The fire leapt up bright and warm, and she was hungry. Moloquin squatted beside her in silence, watching everything from beneath his dark brows.

  “Ladon will manage,” Karelia said. “He has been chief long enough to have learned the necessities of power, and if as you say Rulon is still trapped in his illusions—”

  “He thinks he ought to walk first into the circle.”

  Halla, silent until now, gave a soft cackle. “I do not know which distresses her more,” she said to Karelia, “that Rulon should get his way, or that he should have his comeuppance. Who is this boy here?”

  “He is a little fool whom I have taken into my care,” Karelia said. “Pay no heed to him.”

  Joba was prodding mournfully at the fire with a stick. “They say a woman gains peace with age, but it is not so. Be glad you have no children, Karelia. My daughter also gives me no pleasure. It is a mournful life we have here, a well of sorrow.”

  Halla laughed at her. “Oh, let us all weep great tears for Joba, who suffers so much—weep, I say, weep all!”

  Joba shot her an angry look and Karelia joined in the gentle laughter of the other woman; Joba had ever been fond of lamenting. The fire was leaping brightly upward now, warm enough to push them all back a little, and Karelia reached for the jug again.

  “No,” Moloquin said, and took it from her. “I shall fetch you good water, my mother.” He poured the water out on the ground and went off upstream of the little river.

  “Good,” said Halla comfortably, folding her legs under her, and her long skirt over her knees. “Now tell us who he really is, Karelia.”

  “Who?”

  “Karelia! That boy. Who is he? He called you ‘mother.’ And fool he is not, or I am no judge of faces.”

  Karelia smiled at her. “He is Ael’s son.”

  “Ael,” said the two together, uncomprehending.

  “Yes—Ael. The sister of Ladon, whom he drove away into the forest, long ago, when she became pregnant with no husband. Don’t you remember?”

  In the fiery glow Joba’s face was round and flat like the moon; her eyes widened round as the moon. Halla said, “I remember the scandal, I think—I did not associate it with Ladon.”

  “It was before Ladon became the chief. The year before. You did not know him then.”

  Joba said, “But then where did this one come from?”

  “He came out of the forest,” Karelia said.

  Joba rolled her eyes up toward Heaven. Halla sat back, staring at Karelia, and released another of her long ringing peals of laughter.

  “Oh, oh. I see something deeper here than a pail of water.” She turned to Joba. “Set Ladon on Rulon, you see, and set this boy on Ladon—that’s how it works.”

  With a little private mutter, Joba leaned toward the fire, her eyes half-shut. “You’re a fool, Karelia. You’re better off without children, mark me, they are nothing but toil and disappointment.”

  Moloquin came back; he had the jug full of clear water, and now Karelia busied herself making a broth for the women to drink. The boy sat down quietly behind her and watched everything that went on.

  While the broth simmered, Halla said, “Harus Kum has come back again.”

  “Harus Kum?” Karelia bent her brows together, trying to remember the face that went with the outlandish name.

  “The stranger,” Joba said. “The bead-and-trouble-bringer.”

  “Oh.” Karelia saw, in her mind’s eye, a tall man with a long face, made longer by a curly beard. “How many folk has he with him?”

  “Three or four.”

  “I see no harm in him. He has come before to the Gathering, he is favored of Ladon, who always gives him gifts.”

  Halla said, “His ways are strange. He carries a great long whip in his belt and I have seen him use it on his own folk. And he gives the chiefs very odd and potent gifts, full of mag
ic, and the men go wild over them.”

  “I don’t see why you worry,” Karelia said.

  “What need have we for blue beads? And if there is no need, why should the men lust after them so much?”

  At her choice of words the other two women began to laugh, and they poked Halla and made all the usual jokes about lust and the needs of men and the probability of blue beads ever rivaling women. Beside Karelia Moloquin listened with a face that shone. He reached forward suddenly and put sticks into the fire, making a pattern of them in the flames, as Karelia had taught him.

  Then suddenly Joba’s hand shot out and caught his wrist.

  He startled from head to foot, like a tiny baby. Karelia saw how he stiffened. Yet he did not draw back or try to free himself, but turned his head and stared into Joba’s face, and for the space of two breaths the boy and the old woman gazed deeply into one another’s eyes.

  She let him go. She sat back, her head sinking into her rolls of chin and her eyes unblinking.

  “Go,” she said.

  Silently the boy rose and went off. Joba did not move.

  Halla and Karelia waited a while, expecting some speech of her, but when she said nothing, Halla coughed and struck her knee with her hand.

  “Now, now, Joba, can you not ride up on the top of life and not be continually sinking down into its depths? What is it now?”

  “I don’t know,” Joba said and lifted her head, and to Karelia’s amazement there were tears gleaming in the seams and folds of the other woman’s face. “He walked out of the forest, you say? Oh, Karelia.” She shook her head. With her forefinger she wiped off the drops of her tears from beneath her eyes. “Oh, Karelia, tell us a story, tell us a long story, that we may forget ourselves in.”

  Over the plain to the north of Rulon’s Village stood the stone circles called Turnings-of-the-Year. They were not true circles, but egg-shapes, one inside the other, and why they were made so was secret lore of the Bear Skull Society. Taller than any man, some of them twice as tall as the tallest man, the stones took two forms, alternating around the circle: one stone was straight up and down, and the next was pointed at the top and wider in the middle.

  The unenlightened thought these shapes represented the male and the female, but this was not true. In the doings of the Bear Skull they used the one set of stones one year and the other set the next.

  Within the larger of the two circles, but not inside the smaller, was a platform made of tree trunks, shaped like the litters in which chiefs travelled. Before the sun rose, on the first day of the Gathering, this upraised seat was covered over with bearskins and deerskins, and all around it stood feathered lances. The People had roused themselves in the night and come to stand all around the great bank outside the ring.

  In the eastern end of it, they left a space, a walkway through their midst, where the rising sun could shine into the rings of the stones and spread her blessed rays over the platform and the men who would sit on it.

  Those men had not appeared yet, and it was the matter of who would go first to the platform that filled every mouth.

  “Ladon!” some called, and the men beat their drums and waved their lances, and the women shook their hands above their heads. “Ladon!”

  “Rulon!” others called. “Rulon!” And sent up a mighty drumming.

  “Barlok! Barlok!”

  “Mithom!”

  “Ladon! Ladon!”

  “Rulon!”

  “Barlok!”

  “Rulon! Rulon!”

  Other voices called for other chiefs, but those were the smaller villages and their voices could not match the thunderous shouts of the People of Ladon and the People of Rulon, and one by one the other names were drowned out. And when their names sank into the shouts for Ladon and Rulon, the people of those other villages chose which of the two they would shout for, and added their voices to the combat.

  Now the sun was coming up. The sky was absolutely cloudless, the air already warm and shimmering and the People full of vitality and hope. Their voices rang off the stones.

  “Ladon! Ladon!”

  “Rulon!”

  Now here came the lesser chiefs, Barlok, an old man leaning on two younger men, his bearskin robe dragging in the dust at his heels. He came to the opening of the ring and drew back and stood to one side. Now here came Mithom also, to take up his place opposite, and two other, lesser chiefs came down over the bank and down and there each chose one side or the other and stood there waiting. All the while, the People shouted the two names, and there seemed no difference between them.

  At last Rulon came over the bank.

  He was young, and beautiful in his youth. His hair was braided and knotted and he wore a robe of bearskin and he carried a lance in one hand, trimmed with feathers dyed red and blue and yellow. In his right hand, held up aloft, he bore the club that was his village’s special pride: it was said no man but a chief could lift it. Teeth of flint covered the round head of it, and in the long shaft were set bits of quartz and amber.

  When the People saw him coming, his beauty overwhelmed them, and all of them opened their throats and let his name climb to the sky.

  “Rulon! Rulon! Rulon!”

  At that he seemed to stand even taller. At the very gateway to the throne he stood swollen with pride, his name surrounding him like a magic cloud and the great club held at arm’s length over his head.

  “Rulon! Rulon!”

  There seemed no doubt. The throne was before him. He took a step toward it, and the crowd suddenly hushed.

  “Rulon!”

  That was one voice. One voice alone, that boomed over the Turnings-of-the-Year, and held Rulon fast in his tracks.

  Now down the embankment Ladon came.

  No one called his name. Many raised their hands before them, as if to shield themselves from a radiance. Even Rulon turned to face him. Huge he was, slow as a great bear in his steps, and if any marked the wooden wedges tied to his feet, which made his steps so slow and swaying, none thought any the less of his height. His robe was decorated with feathers and bits of amber; in his hands he carried a lance and a drum, and around his neck, in circles and circles that clinked when he moved, he wore masses of blue beads.

  He came slowly up before Rulon and stood there, towering over the younger man, face to face in the gateway to the throne.

  “Ladon!” the People roared.

  Rulon lifted up the great club over his head as high as it would go, and shook it.

  “Rulon,” the cry rose, and then like a thunder: “Ladon!”

  Ladon did nothing. The rising sun struck the coils of beads that covered his chest and showered him with light. Again Rulon raised the club over his head, and again this drew his name from the crowd, but that name seemed a whisper compared to the roar of Ladon’s.

  And now for a third time, Rulon put the club high up to the sky. The crowd hushed. He held the club at arm’s length, struggling visibly with the weight; but the crowd was still, and no one called his name. When at last he could bear the weight no more, he lowered his arm, and then the voice of the crowd broke over him like a storm.

  “Ladon! Ladon! Ladon!”

  Rulon seemed to shrink. The club fell to his feet. His shoulders slumped down. Ladon faced him a moment longer, drawing all the savor from this victory, and turned, and in his swaying majestic walk he crossed the flat grass to the platform, turned, and with his upraised arms summoned his men out of the crowd. They rushed on him; lifting him up bodily, they placed him on the bearskins, and all the People bowed down before him. The rising sun shone full on him. Raised above all others, he looked over the world, and he knew that it was his.

  Joba could not say what she had seen in the face of the strange boy in Karelia’s camp, but it oppressed her.

  She saw her son Rulon humiliated at the entry to the Turnings-of-the-Year
; that gave her a certain grim satisfaction, because no chief was ever as great as Rulon had wanted to be from the moment he first took the club into his hands. She was not close to her son and she mistrusted all men anyway.

  Still, her mood was very low. She sat by her hearth in the old longhouse, knowing there was work to be done and unable to stir herself to do it. Nearby her sat her daughter, Shateel, combing her hair, and the young woman’s idleness stung Joba to bitter words.

  “What! Is the store so much in the roundhouse that we need work no more? Get up, girl, and go to your work. Go!”

  “Mother, it is the Gathering,” Shateel said. “No one works at the Gathering.”

  She drew the wooden comb slowly through her long fair hair. Joba admitted to herself that her daughter was the most beautiful girl of all the People; she had the looks of a young doe, smooth and soft, unused and unproven, with all her life before her. Joba felt the weight of her past dragging on her like a stone that would haul her down into death. She knew her life was nearly over. Her soul was sick.

  Out of this pit of unhappiness she turned on her daughter again.

  “Can you not at least get up, so that I might make the hearth straight? If you will not help your poor old mother—”

  At this she noticed a stranger coming down the length of the longhouse and she shut her mouth; it would not do to show rancor before someone of another village. Quickly she put her hearth in order, stepping past Shateel to do so.

  The girl did not move to let her mother by. She held out a tress of her long hair to admire the sheen. If she saw the stranger coming she did not show it, even when he stopped before Joba’s hearth.

  At that, the older woman stood up and faced him, and made a broad gesture of welcome with both hands.

  “Come into my hearth, stranger, and let me do honor to my ancestors and yours here: come in.”

  “Good greeting, Joba,” said the stranger, smiling, “in the name of our common ancestors, because we are not utterly unknown to one another, although you do not remember your poor kinsman. I am Fergolin, of the Oak Tree and the Bear Skull.”

  “Fergolin,” Joba said. “Shateel, bring a mat for our kinsman. Yes, enter, Opa-Fergolin-on, my great-grandmother’s great-grandson.”