Pillar of the Sky Page 4

  He said, “Go, my son. Go do what boys do, and be glad, because when you are chief, all the cares and weighty woes of the People will fall on you, and you will have peace never again.”

  “Yes, Opa-Ladon-on.” The boy made gestures of respect with his hands, and bowed his head, which let him linger; the boys’ band was boring. He watched his father’s face for some sign that he might stay, but Ladon was clearly going somewhere else and pushed at him with his hand.

  “Go.”

  Ladon went away through the roundhouse, stopping at the edge of his central place to put on his bearskin coat, although the day was warm. It was always cool inside the roundhouse.

  He had built this place himself—not with his own hands, but with the hands bestowed on him by his destiny. The trees were enormous, the biggest he could find, a tribute to the size and power of his People, and only the year before they had gone through it all and replaced some that were rotting away in the ground. As he walked through it he touched the trunks, and he was unsure whether he gave them of his affection for them or they supplied some of their strength to him.

  In the yard, where many of the men sat readying themselves and their gear for the deer-hunt dances, he stopped and looked around him. As soon as they saw him the men raised their heads and stared at him; no more work was done; they waited with joyous faces for his command to fall on them. But the one whom Ladon sought was not here, and he went out of the yard and around the outside of the wall, down to the river.

  Here the river turned a wide curve through the low rolling downs; on the inside of the curve the land rose up a little, and on this height stood the roundhouse. The river cut down through the heavy soil and into the chalk below. The exposed chalk was a fine place to mine flint, and there many of the men were gathered, watching one of their number knock the edges off a new knife. But the one Ladon sought was not there either, and he went on.

  Now he was running out of places to seek and he turned toward the village and his steps slowed. He disliked going among the women. He thought if they had favors to ask of him or pleasures to give him they should come to him. When he went down the little slope toward the four longhouses inside their fence of rolled brush he felt smaller and more ordinary than he knew himself to be. The fact that they could deny him was a canker in his heart.

  Going toward the longhouses reminded him of his sister, Ael.

  He stopped. She had gone away and he had thought her finished but somehow she had come back.

  He had always hated his sister. Tall she had been, older than he, always better than he was. When he was a little boy she had struck him, taunted him, and outdone him—that was the worst of it, that was why they had all hated Ael, because she had outdone all of them. Women’s work, men’s pleasures, she had done them all, with the same arrogant condescending grace and ease. When they would not give her a bow, she went off into the forest and found wood and made one. When they would not let her play with the boys’ band, she dashed in among them, stole the pig-skull they were playing with and carried it off at arm’s length over her head, laughing, all the boys running at her heels like a pack of slaves, and she had hidden the trophy deep in the forest, where no one would find it.

  When the women told her to weed the fields, she would not, but found her own plot, raised her own vetch and onions. Girls were supposed to wear only the brown colors of the earth. Ael had taken her garments out and found some berry, some root, some bark that dyed them red, brighter even than the orange-yellows allowed the headwomen of the kindreds.

  And now, defying every hope and rule, she had brought forth a son, Moloquin, who was trampling on Ladon’s dreams.

  He remembered the horror that swept through the village on that day, when those mourning one of their dead had come flying back from the place of the dead, screaming that she was there. Then it had been easy; it had taken almost no sign from him at all, to set the whole People against the orphan. Somehow Moloquin survived. It was Ael, Ladon knew, Ael who guided him, Ael who protected him, Ael who went on ruining her brother’s life.

  He stopped, midway between the roundhouse and the longhouses, unwilling to go farther.

  It was the old women who did this to him. His mind made the jump from Ael’s wickedness to the general wickedness of all women, and the headwomen in particular.

  They sat there, monstrous in their shapeless fat, their woven clothes, and said, “This is the way it has always been done.” They had raised him, Ladon, to his high seat, and when he was dead, they would raise another. They gave him everything. All the great store of grain and beans and cheese that filled up the rafters of his roundhouse came from the work of the women, and this they gave to Ladon, and Ladon gave it to those who needed it, and so the People lived, but it was not Ladon who had the power; he might have been anyone, any fool, any beast with a male’s part. He was only the hands that lavished all that wealth on others. The real power was with the women.

  He knew himself great, Ladon, knew himself remarkable beyond all men, deserving of power; but the power that he had mocked him.

  It had not always been so. They pretended that it had been thus forever, but the men knew and he suspected that the women knew also that, long ago, in the first years, the men had ruled. Before the women learned to grub and hack at the earth, the men had been the true masters. The great hunting societies had provided the meat and the hides, the bone and antlers, the strength and ferocity, and the women had been properly humble and grateful and had done as they were told. (Perhaps, he thought, with the malice of impotence, that was why they were so good at grubbing the earth, because they had learned to submit.)

  It was shameful and degrading to work as they did, to tear the dirt, to labor over seeds and seedlings, to thresh and winnow. No man would do it. It was low work but it fed them, and for the sake of their full bellies the People had turned from the true way, from the vault of Heaven and the honor of the trail, the lives of heroes.

  Ladon meant to recapture that truth. He meant to seize power for his son and break the circle of the old women’s endless custom. He meant to make them see that Ladon in himself was mighty, enough to pass on his power to his son.

  Now, halfway between the roundhouse and the longhouses, he raised his fist toward the old women and swore to destroy them, Karelia, Tishka, all of them. But he cared not to face them today, and he turned and on his heavy legs stumped back toward the roundhouse.

  When he came in through the door, that man whom he had sought was there—Brant, the old master of the Green Bough Society. Ladon summoned him; and they went into the roundhouse together, the chief first, the old man trailing after.

  Brant had taken Ladon on his knee as a boy, and Ladon remembered then that his hair had been white. He walked with a bent back, a stooped head, and knees bent, and in spite of his age, no one paid much heed to his words because he belonged to an unlucky society. Therefore, perhaps, Brant said nothing much to anybody.

  Ladon took his place in the sunlight at the center of the roundhouse. The old man stood before him, in one hand still a flint knife and in the other a piece of wood.

  “You have been lax, old man,” Ladon said. “It is the responsibility of the Society of the Green Bough to keep the Pillar of the Sky, and even now it is defiled.”

  Brant shuffled the knife into the same hand that held the wood; with the hand thus freed, he wiped his nose. He said, “I wait for the words of Opa-Ladon-on.”

  “The woods-puppy, Moloquin, even now impudently lives in the place where only the dead may rest.”

  Brant said quietly, “I have heard that, Opa-Ladon-on.”

  “Then why have you done nothing about it?”

  “I shall, Opa-Ladon-on.”

  “Go.”

  Brant turned and trudged away. Ladon’s lips twisted in annoyance. There was no fire in the old man, no power at all; how would he serve against such as Ael? Ladon grunte
d; he got up and went into the back of the roundhouse, to find something to eat.

  Karelia was beginning to see unexpected problems in this. She walked along the path toward the place of the dead, her bundle on her back, and although she was tired she could not go slowly, because already the sun was lowering in the sky. She could not keep on walking out so far from the village every day; she was too old.

  She hated that. Too old. She had spent her youth with a wild profligacy, confident that her vitality would always overflow, but now age was sinking its teeth into her, and she looked back on those wild days with a bitter longing: if she had that life again, she would do differently.

  No you would not, she thought to herself. You did what you wanted.

  At that she laughed. That was at the heart of herself, that she had always done what she wanted: and she was still doing it now, what she wanted, and so she defied age. Her steps came quicker, lighter over the grass.

  But there were problems.

  First of all, Moloquin was old enough—past old enough, in fact—when his mother would have chased him away from her hearth and out of the long-house, and he would have gone off to join the boys’ band, living in the thickets by the river, fighting, running, learning who was leader and who was follower—making ready for his manhood. At the very time when Karelia meant to take him in, she should by custom have been throwing him out.

  That was easy. It was usual for mothers to keep their foolish children close to them, even past their maturity. Moloquin spoke so clumsily that the People would think him a fool—already, they considered him hopelessly backward—and by that reasoning Karelia could keep him until he was a greybeard.

  She knew he was no fool. She saw it in his looks, in his awkward questions—in the naked fact that he had lived so long alone, against the enmity of Ladon and the others.

  Another problem: she had no clothes for him.

  Had he been her own true son she would have gone to Ladon and asked for hides and been given hides, and then she would have made him a shirt and a coat, and he would have been dressed. But if she went to Ladon now, he would give her nothing. So she had taken her own clothes, the brown woven things she had worn before she became headwoman, and that was in the bundle that she carried on her back. If he wore woven clothes like a girl, it would only help the People’s acceptance of him as a harmless fool.

  But she could not go on climbing this slope every day. She had to bring him down into the village.

  She reached the embankment and walked around the outer edge, on the lip of the ditch, until she reached an entry. Her legs were tired. Going into the grassy circle sheltered from the wind by the bank and made populous by the tilting stones, she let the bundle drop into the grass and looked around her.

  He wasn’t there. Disappointed, she roamed from one stone to the next, avoiding the bones strewn in the grass. But Moloquin was nowhere.

  She sat down in the grass, drained of strength. The thought of the long way back now stood before her like an impossible task. As she settled down, the great flock of crows that always overhung this placed settled too, the fat black bodies dropping to the earth, the slippery flap of their wings and their ugly voices noisy in this place of stillness. There were no dead here now, nothing but bones. She watched a little crowd of the crows rush to Moloquin’s usual place, under the North Watcher, to hunt for leavings.

  They knew him, those great monstrous birds, knew him well.

  She sat still, her hands in her lap, and thought over a story she was trying to remember. Her craft had come to her early—even as a little girl she had told stories, made up out of her own head, and ever since she had collected every tale she heard into her head, so that now it was a stuffed pack, like the bundle of rags she had brought for Moloquin. She thought she knew every story the People had ever told, and a few more perhaps. She knew stories she had never heard from any other; they rose in her brain like vapors from the swamps, that burst like small suns in the air. She thought she could remember everything, but once in a while, as if from deep deep down in some unfished pool, a sentence rose, a gesture, a name, and when she cast her attention upon it and drew it up, there followed after a long golden rush of a story, wonderful as a dream.

  She sat with her eyes closed, and the stories came swiftly around her—the names of heroes, the deeds of people that unlocked the world’s hidden places. To Karelia nothing was more real than this, these presences summoned from her mind and this space between her and the world.

  Abruptly the flock of crows, all cackling and stepping around her, gave out a racket that packed up her ears, and they rose in a black fluttering mass into the air. She stood up, expecting Moloquin.

  It was not the boy. It was an old man who walked in through the opening in the bank, white-haired and bent, leaning on a walking staff. It was Brant, the Green Bough master.

  Karelia started back, away from him, toward the shelter of a half-fallen stone. He saw her; he raised his head.

  “Ana-Karelia,” he said, and let go his staff and sat down. “What is this? What wakens here, after so long a sleep, that suddenly the dead place is a place for the living once again?” He shook his head; he looked exhausted. “This is too long a walk for me, Ana-Karelia.”

  She went up to him and sat down by his side. “What brings you here, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Surely Ladon sent you.”

  “Ladon.”

  The old man trembled, giving off some soft fluttery noise; alarmed, she leaned toward him, her hand on his back, thinking he might be ill, but then she saw that he was laughing.

  “Ah, Brant,” she said. “What amuses you? You old stick.” Instead of stroking his back, she struck it and got up again. What would he say about Moloquin? She had to get him away before the boy came.

  “Karelia,” he said, and looked at her. “Do you remember when we were little? You and I wore the grass ring, do you remember that?”

  “You old stick,” she said, affectionately. It was true; she had forgotten it, for all these years, that in their childhood she and this old fool had been sweethearts. She scanned the horizon for Moloquin.

  “Why did Ladon send you here?”

  “Because he is a fool.” Brant lay down in the grass.

  “Then why did you come?”

  “I like it here.”

  “Ah, you old—” she sighed. Would Moloquin never come?

  “He sent me to drive away this woods-pup,” said Brant. “And I suspect, since I find you here, that you too take an interest in this homeless child, and I find that amusing. I am too old to find much interesting, you know.”

  “Why then don’t you stay here, and die, and let the crows eat you?” She walked restlessly around in the grass, as if to prove that she had more life left in her than he did.

  “Is it because of Ladon that you strive so?” the old man said. “Ladon strives, and so you see some danger, and you strive against him, is that it? You are both deluded.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that Ladon’s thoughts are large only to him. Nothing will come of them. If you strive against him, then you make his ambition larger yet, but if you let him go on, then all will fall away when he dies, fall away into nothing.”

  “Brant, you are mad.”

  He said no more; she looked, and saw that his eyes were closed. He was asleep in the grass. She stood a moment watching him, and then turned her eyes up, toward the great whirling cloud of crows suspended in the air above the Pillar of the Sky. They might think him dead, and drop down and eat him up, and no one would ever know the difference. Certainly not Brant.

  She went away toward her bundle, intending to go back to the village; she would seek Moloquin here another time. But when she stooped to pick up the rags, a long low hiss reached her ears from off to her left, and she froze.

  It was Mol
oquin. He sat beside the northernmost stone, where his home was, watching her.

  She straightened, amazed. How long had he been there? She was sure he had not been there when she came. With the bundle in her hand she went to him and he moved aside and let her into the hollow at the foot of the stone.

  “I surprise you,” he said, and smiled at her.

  “Yes,” she said, and she smiled back. She felt a warm flush of affection for him. Ever since she had left him the night before, she had been thinking of him, but only in the large matter of her struggle against Ladon; now he was here, real again, a child, and all the rest seemed unimportant. She plunged her hand into her bundle and took out a bean cake, a little bowl of meal and a jug of goat’s milk.

  He took them, but not hungrily. He said, “I eat, just now. Before I come here.”

  “What could you find by yourself to eat?”

  “Nuts. Berries.” He shrugged one shoulder, his eyes wide. “I catched a bustard.”

  At that her eyes widened; she almost doubted him. The bustards were impossible even to approach. “How did you do that?”

  “I maked a—” he formed something in the air. She watched his hands, intrigued; he seemed to have the storyteller’s talent for gesture. “From grass. Put it over the nest. Wait. The bird comes, I close the—”

  “Net,” she said.

  “Net,” he said, and smiled. “Net net net net net.”

  She stared at him. What Brant had told her was seeping down into her mind. She thought, He does well enough outside the village. Am I wrong to want to bring him within? She thought, suddenly, Is Brant right? Will it all work out by itself, if I leave things alone? There flooded into her thoughts a sense of the power of reality, that fed on faith alone.

  “I have no faith,” she said aloud, and Moloquin’s eyebrows went up. She said, “I want you to come and live with me, Moloquin.”