Pillar of the Sky Read online

  Inside the brush fence of the village, there were four longhouses, built of withies and woven mats and poles; all their doorways faced the east wind. In the yard the women had a mill, for grinding their grain and nuts and beans into meal; it was a flat stone with a hole in the middle, and a stout stick stood up in the hole, and another flat stone fitted down onto the top of the stick. They poured the grain into a hole in the top stone, and turned it around and around, and the meal came out the edges.

  The old women sat around the mill and turned it, and ground the grain into meal, and as they turned the mill they sang.

  Sam-po, sam-po

  La li la la li li la

  With the sampo all the world is fed

  Karelia went among them and sat down there among them, in the yard in the middle of the longhouses. The mill groaned as it turned. The women who sat around it were the elders, the headwomen, and their sisters. They turned the mill with their great broad dirt-colored feet. With their hands they did other work, making baskets, or plucking the wool of the goats, and they talked, and their talk was like the turning of the mill: they ground out everything that happened to the People into its meanings.

  When Karelia sat down into their midst, she cast a handful of grain into the mill, and she cast her words into the midst of the women.

  “Oh, oh, my bones are aching, it will be a harsh winter certainly.”

  She had brought along a mat to sit on, and a frame of sticks with another mat to lean her back against. A little girl from her longhouse had carried them for her and now laid them out for her. Karelia smiled, and the child went away. Karelia settled herself down.

  All around her sat the old women, with their busy hands. Karelia had little to do with baskets, or the making of clay pots, or the tilling of soil; her craft had set her free from that. Still, she envied them their business. They sat so close together that they touched, and made a circle around the mill, all touching. Fat with age, their bodies massive and paunchy from bearing children, their hair powdery white and grey, they all seemed the same, closer than sisters. They shared their lives totally, from their first breath to the last, so that it was all the same life; there was no boundary between them.

  In their midst, Karelia was alone. Her craft set her apart. Her freedom set her apart. And cursed her, some said; she knew that. Married three times, yet she had borne no children, and now her womb was withered as her face, and when she died, while all the People would mourn, no daughter would remain in the world to connect her still with life.

  She looked from face to face, and said, “I have been long in the company of men and now again I sit among my own, and I am grateful.”

  “Oh, Karelia,” said Tishka, who was the headwoman of the Oak Tree Kindred, and the most powerful woman in the village. “As sorely as you may have missed us, we missed you all the more. No stories! No stories at all, for the whole coming and going of the moon.”

  She shook her head, and all the others shook their heads too. Their hands flew back and forth, building up the rounds of reeds into baskets.

  “Yet it was necessary,” Karelia said. “I have learned that which it makes me tremble to tell to you.”

  At that, many of the hands faltered, and the grey heads lifted, and all eyes looked from Karelia to Tishka. For a moment the Oak Tree head-woman sat rigid, her face deeply graven and her eyes hard, but then she worked her mouth into a laugh, loud and forced, and around her all the other women laughed too.

  “Karelia, you are given to exaggeration. It is a secret of your art, to give alarms.”

  “I give no alarms,” Karelia said, stiff. She disliked their unity against her; she wanted to shake them all separately and say, “Listen to me with your own ears, not Tishka’s.”

  She said, “Oh? Then if I speak the name of Ladon, you will not shiver?”

  “Ladon. Ladon is our chief.”

  “Great is Ladon, Opa-Ladon,” one of the women murmured, and the others laughed, all touching.

  “He is our chief,” said Tishka, “and a great chief too. He forces all the other chiefs to yield to him, and he makes us great among all the People, and he divides up the harvest so that we all have what we need. What is there to make us shiver about Ladon?”

  Karelia lowered her gaze to the mill, rumbling and groaning as it turned, the meal slipping from the stones. A little silence fell, and again the women sang the song of the mill.

  Sam-po, sam-po,

  Li la li la li li la

  All things flow from the Mill

  The Mill turns and turns

  Li la li la la la la la

  Nothing escapes, nothing is unfulfilled

  “I am unfulfilled,” said Karelia, loudly.

  “You!” Their faces turned on her like a dozen suns, wide with astonishment. “You, who do exactly as you please!” One of them snorted.

  “Pagh,” Karelia said. “I know what you think—but for the virtue of my sister, I should not be here at all.”

  Karelia’s older sister had been headwoman of the Red Deer Kindred, while Karelia went about doing as she wished; then her sister died suddenly and Karelia found herself raised up all at once to be headwoman, to the astonishment of everyone.

  She said, “I have no children. I have no one to pass my stories on to, and I am not long for this life, I know that. I need someone to give my stories to, or they will be lost.”

  A little ripple of excitement passed through the close-packed women. Tishka’s sister, Grela, not even old yet, had the boldness to lean forward and say, “Karelia, Ana-Karelia, my oldest daughter is a fine talker—”

  “Hush,” Tishka said to her, in a harsh voice. “What would you do— would you thrust your brat on her? Do you think to make your child any greater than she is? What a nose you have! Keep it close to your face, Grela, or it will get caught in something.”

  The other women laughed heartily at that; they loved to see someone else chastised. Karelia sat there with her hands in her lap, watching them. Her heart was full of black temper toward them. They sat here with their mill and their baskets and their full bellies, and gave no thought to larger things.

  “In any case,” she said, when the red-faced Grela had mumbled her apologies and accepted her humiliation and fit herself back into the close circle of the women—“in any case,” Karelia said, “I have found one I believe to be marked for my work.”

  “Ah,” said Tishka, smiling. “And tell us now who she is.”

  “He,” said Karelia, steadily. “It is Moloquin.”

  “Moloquin!”

  The name burst from them like an irresistible roar of laughter. They stared at her and their mouths opened and a flood of hilarity came out. Karelia sat letting it rush over her. In her lap her hands twitched.

  “Moloquin,” Tishka said, her mirth subsiding. She lifted up the goats’ wool she was working on; with a thorny stick she was combing the hairs straight, and the white wool glistened in the sun. “Karelia, you cannot expect us to believe you.”

  “He is Ael’s son,” said another, Taella, the quietest of them, eldest daughter of the Salmon headwoman. “He is Ael’s son, Karelia.”

  Karelia said nothing.

  “You cannot mean us to accept Ael’s son.”

  “I have no children of my own,” Karelia said.

  Her gaze moved, leaving these infuriating women, looking away out of the village. Out there, outside the brush fence on the high ground by the river, was the roundhouse with its peaked roof of thatch, its walls of wood and mud-daub. Most of the men were there now, preparing for the ceremony of hunting the deer. Karelia wondered with an acid humor why they did not actually go out and hunt down the deer, instead of performing the three-day-long ceremony that exhausted them all and brought nothing to the cooking fires, but even she, who doubted everything, knew well how important were these ceremonies, more important th
an mere food.

  Food for the soul. The ceremonies connected the People with the rest of life, the deer and the forest, and the ancestral spirits who had taught the skills of hunting- and forest-lore to the People, and who remained always in the same place where they had walked in life and whose benevolence had to be maintained. She watched the mill turn. The sun-warmed meal smelled deliciously of nuts. The women, by their ceaseless drudgery in the fields, brought food into the village; the men, by their unwavering devotion to ceremony, maintained the eternal order.

  Now Ladon wanted to disturb the order; his schemes and ambition would overturn everything. She lifted her head again, to face Tishka.

  “Ladon means his son to follow him to the high seat,” she said.

  Tishka grunted at her. Seventeen children had she borne; eight of them still lived. Her hands were knotted and warped with her years, and her eyes watered. At the center of this disintegration her will was immovable.

  “He cannot,” she said. “Ladon’s power ends with him. We shall choose who follows him.”

  “The power would go to the son of his sister,” said Karelia. “But he has no sister—not any more.”

  When she let drop those words, they fell into a silence that no one chose to end. Tishka was staring at her. New lines appeared at the corners of Tishka’s mouth and in her forehead, and her eyes were sharp and damp. She saw now where Karelia was leading her.

  Karelia looked down at the mill; she put out her hand and pushed the stone in its course.

  Sam-po, sam-po

  Li la li li la la la li

  Turning, turning, ever turning

  All falls as it must

  Sam-po, sam-po

  World with no beginning

  World with no end

  La li li la la li li la

  Sam-po, sam-po

  “How do you know what Ladon intends, Ana-Karelia?” Tishka asked.

  “Ana-Tishka,” Karelia said, and for emphasis she spun out all the terms of respect possible, “Ana-Tishka-el, great is she, great among the People! While we were at the river, while the men fasted and sweated themselves, I saw how Ladon went among them. He spoke to them ever of his son—how strong and fair the boy is—”

  “He is very fair,” one of the younger women murmured.

  “He gathered up his ring-brothers and gave each of them a duty toward his son.”

  “He is permitted that. This is man’s business, Karelia—”

  “Over and over, he bound them to his son, with promises and threats.”

  “The words of men are the chaff that the wind blows off the threshing floors,” said Tishka in a harsh voice. “The deeds of men are the grain that falls to the earth and remains.”

  “They came to me, many of them, with dreams in which Ladon’s son sat on the litter.”

  “And what did you tell them?”

  “I told them nothing.”

  “Nothing! They must have liked that.”

  The women murmured to one another.

  Karelia said, “I told them nothing. I do not sully my craft with such things—I do not lower myself to the interpretation of false dreams.”

  Tishka smiled at her. Between the two headwomen there flowed a certain understanding.

  In a low voice, Grela said, “You will choose the chief. The headwomen. It is the way.”

  “Yes?” Karelia said, impatiently; she resented having to lead them along one foot after the other through this. “And whom shall we choose? There is no sister-son among the People—Ladon saw to that.”

  “Ladon is not old, or weak, or dim of mind. It will be many many turnings of the mill before he falls.”

  “In that time Ladon will have planted this seed so well and tended it so well that it shall grow into a plant that overshadows us all.”

  Tishka said, “Ladon did not remove his sister.”

  “Did he not? He drove her away!”

  “Ael left,” Tishka said, her voice rising, harsh and angry and fearful. “She went away as much as he drove her away—she was willful, and would not be ruled; she scorned us all, our ways, our hearths, her own People. Ladon did not drive her away. “

  “Did he not?” Karelia said; she lowered her voice, knowing the power of soft, soft words to grip all ears. “Yet it has worked well for him, has it not?”

  Tishka licked her lips. With her crooked, dirt-brown fingers she wiped her eyes. She turned a little away, saying nothing. Nor would she speak again today on this subject. Karelia sat back. In the silence, in Tishka’s turning away, there was now an empty space among the People, like an unraveled place in the web: a good place for an unwanted one.

  “Well,” said Grela, with a twitch, as if she were wakening from a dream, “this is all wind still, is it not? Ladon will not die for some time. The choice need not be made now. By the time he lies among the stones, there will be other choices possible.”

  Sam-po, sam-po

  La li la li la la la

  No one turns the sam-po

  The sampo turns itself

  “Tell us a story, Ana-Karelia. You burden our minds with this weighty stuff that may not even be real; now you must send our cares elsewhere with a story.”

  She nodded. Settling herself on her mat, she sat still a while, letting the words well up within her, letting the tale come as it would, while the mill rolled and rolled at the center of things.

  Ladon’s son went down to the roundhouse; with his head bowed in humility he passed through the gate in the wall around it, and crossed the yard. The men sat there in the sun, making ready their masks and cloaks, their leggings of deer-hide, their crowns of antlers, their magic arrows and their spears. Many who saw him spoke to him, and he answered with every gesture of respect and kept his eyes averted, out of deference to the manhood he had not yet attained.

  The roundhouse was built of the trunks of trees, set spaced apart in circles one inside the next; the outermost supported the walls, and the inner circles, each one higher than the one outside it, raised up the roof toward its peak. Through gaps in the thatch the sunlight fell in shafts, and the trunks of the trees made a little forest. The floor was littered with the men’s gear, thrown here and there without order; in the rafters, in baskets and sacks, were the hoarded goods of the People.

  Ladon’s son loved the roundhouse. In less than two years, he would come here to live, a novice in the tutelage of one of the masters; he loved to think ahead to that time, when he would be a man, full of power. As he passed he reached out his hands to touch the great trunks, polished of their bark, white in the sunlight. Ahead, in the light that fell through the hole at the peak of the roof, his father sat.

  The chief wore only his loincloth. His great belly under its glossy black hair lay down on his thighs as he bent forward, his mask in his hands, cutting and shaping the hard wood. His son’s steps slowed even more as he approached.

  Ladon’s fingers were long and shapely and he used the blade of flint with a deft precision, nicking away the wood, carving the mask with magical symbols that he had learned in his latest purification. The golden wood of the mask had been smoothed and oiled and worn into a deep mysterious luster. Bits of stones decorated it: flint teeth, agate in the nose and on the cheekbones. A row of amber beads studded the forehead. Ladon had first cut it from the living tree in the year he became a man; with every passing year he made it more complex, he worked more of his knowledge and power into it.

  Now he said, without looking up, “Yes, little boy, you may come to your loving father.”

  His son went forward and knelt down beside him. His awed gaze remained on the mask. He longed to touch it, but the one time he had tried, when he was still a nursling, Ladon had beaten him senseless.

  He said, “My father, you were long at the river.”

  “The work of the sacred way consumes the days,
my son.”

  “While you were gone, I obeyed your words to me. I kept watch over the People, and I remember everything that I saw; you may ask me anything, and I shall know the answer,”

  Ladon turned now and smiled at him. “Really? Then you know who has worked well in her gardens, and who has not.”

  “Oh, they have all worked very well, Opa-Ladon-on.”

  “And you know who has given birth and who has not?”

  “While you were gone, only the swine have given birth, Opa-Ladon-on.”

  “And you know who has brought me my due, and who has withheld it?”

  The boy’s eyes widened in surprise; rapidly he hurried through his memory, wondering what Ladon meant. “Surely no one dares to withhold from Ladon what is Ladon’s due.”

  An explosive sound left his father’s lips, half grunt and half laughter. Ladon looked down at the mask in his hands. With one forefinger he whisked away a splinter of wood from the surface. “Whoever has done so shall suffer, my son.”

  His son stood a while watching; Ladon seemed to do nothing, and yet he gave off a sort of radiance of strength, his thoughts so strong they threatened to become visible. Uncertainly the boy said, “We have chased Moloquin every day, my father.”

  “So you said, but you have not chased him away entirely, my son. I am not displeased with you over it, but I am not pleased, either.”

  “But, my father, he runs to the place of the dead, and I—I—the other boys will not go in, I cannot make them.”

  “The dead place!”

  “The—” Ladon’s son feared even the name; his lips stiffened so that he could barely pronounce it. “The Pillar of the Sky.”

  “What a fool. How does he live? Someone must be helping him. Who feeds him? Why does he not die?” Ladon glared at the boy beside him. “Who feeds him? Learn that for me, One-who-knows-everything.”

  “No one, Opa-Ladon. Sometimes he steals food, but no one—”

  “Be quiet.”

  Ladon’s son bit his lips, ashamed, his tongue an enemy in his mouth. His father rose, ponderous, frowning, and went out of the light a moment. When he came back his hands were empty, the mask gone. The frown was gone also, and Ladon faced his son with the same impassive looks he gave all the rest of the world.