Pillar of the Sky Page 8

  “Once Abadon went roaming, and he came into a strange country, and there he slew a white deer. But the deer was the pet of the wife of the North Star, and when Abadon slew it he fell at once under her spell, and could neither move nor speak without her will.

  “The wife of the North Star took him to her longhouse, and there forced him to work for her. She made him hoe up her garden, and plant, but Abadon did not sow the seeds she gave him, but planted pebbles instead, and so nothing grew. She forced him to haul water, and send him with a bucket to the river, but at the river he drank up the water and pissed it into the bucket, and so the water was foul to her.

  “Then she ordered him to make a great mill for her, and taught him spells to use, and lent him a magic hammer, and with her spells and her hammer and the commands she gave him, he fashioned a wonderful mill, so well made that it turned at the lightest touch, and the top stone was covered with a pattern of many lights, and the mill was the most beautiful of the works of men and spirits. It turned by night and day, and ground out goodness and peace, enough for the whole world.

  “And when it was done the wife of the North Star set Abadon free, and she gave him the hammer for his payment, and sent him away.

  “Abadon did not go. In the night when the North Star’s wife was asleep he came back into her longhouse, and he stole the mill and bore it away.

  “Now the North Star saw him go, and cast his beams on him, and Abadon was struck so sore that he stumbled, and he dropped the mill into the sea. And the mill broke. The cover of many lights fell off the center post and the bottom stone cracked. Now the mill grinds out nothing but salt and sand, that fills up the depths of the sea. But Abadon went on to his home and dwelt there.”

  She sat still, and the tears spilled down her cheeks. Moloquin put his finger to her face and traced the long wet fall.

  “Why do you weep?”

  “I weep for the breaking of the mill,” she said, “that let evil into the world.”

  She wiped her cheeks with her hand. Moloquin was watching her steadily, his face no longer twisted by his own dissatisfactions, but clear and open, and the eyes deep-seeing. He said, “Why did you tell me that story?”

  “Because we are here,” she said.

  “What is this place, Ana? Who made this place?”

  “No one made this place.” She shook her head, her gaze drawn upward again, following the invisible course of power from the center of the circle to the sky. “It has been here since the beginning, and will be here until the end. The lore is forbidden to any but the masters of the Green Bough, whose task it is to care for it, and I do believe that they themselves know very little. It is a place of great power, a gateway between worlds. And I can say no more than that.”

  Moloquin put out one hand toward the ring of stones. “How did these stones come to be here?”

  She was still staring up at the sky. Tired, she said, “That is a mistake. Some few fathers’ years ago, there was a Green Bough master who was chief also, and the village was then of a very great size; he thought to put a ring of stones here to rival the stones at Turnings-of-the-Year.”

  “Where is that?”

  “You will see,” she said, “when we all go there, at the Midsummer Gathering. Now I must go back, my child—will you go with me?”

  “My mother,” he said, and smiled at her; his eyes looked tired, like an old man’s. “My mother, I stay here, I think a while here, and come back in morning-time.”

  “You will come back,” she said, uneasy. “Won’t you? Ladon’s son will not hurt you.”

  “Ana,” he said, “I fear nothing of Ladon’s son. I fear me, that I may hurt him. Go. I come tomorrow again home.”

  Still she lingered, unwilling to go far from him, to lose sight of him; what he had said made no impression on her at first. Finally she rose up—night was coming, and she was afraid to be alone in the dark—and he stood and embraced her. Something in that reassured her, and she took heart to leave him.

  Moloquin sat down again with his back to the stone and raised his head toward the sky. His head hurt a little but he ignored that.

  The story of the broken mill, which drove Karelia to tears, lifted him to a triumphant exultation. He knew at once what the story meant. The world was not supposed to be as it was; therefore he saw no more need to compress himself into its ways. He could go if he wished, or he could stay if he wished, and he could do as he pleased.

  Around him the quiet ground inside the bank was slowly filling up with shadows. He pressed his back to the stone, enjoying the solidarity and strength, and went through the story again in his mind.

  It told him so much—why he loved it here, the still silent unchanging center of the whirl of all change. Here, for the last time, the world was whole.

  He thought of his mother Ael, who had brought him here. There had been no still solid center with her—Ael with her wild moods, sometimes laughing and singing and leading him into a game that he, still chubby-legged, clump-fingered, could not help losing, and sometimes she had been sobbing and full of rage, driving him into a corner of their shelter, not speaking to him for days and days. He had adored her. He still loved her with a passion as strong as hunger or thirst.

  He had thought, at first, that the People would be like her—that if he could only do the right things, their blows would change to caresses, they would take him in.

  But they were less than Ael. They were mean and weak. She had left them because they were unworthy of her. She had left him for the same reason.

  Karelia was not like the others.

  Maybe his mother had not abandoned him. Maybe she had given him to Karelia to care for. Karelia had found him here, where Ael had left him, and Karelia told him stories, and the stories gave him what he had never had before: a way of knowing.

  He told himself all her stories again, trying to repeat each word as she had: it gave him a feeling of power to bring them up out of his memory. He shut his eyes, to see the stories better, and he fell asleep.

  He woke up wide-eyed, his whole body quivering, as if someone had shouted his name. The night lay over him. Raising his head, he looked up, and saw above him what he had seen a thousand thousand times, and never seen before: the slow-turning, everlasting mill, with its many lights, tilted steeply away from the earth, its edge a white blaze across the sky.

  He lay down, his eyes turned toward the stars, and again he slept.

  He dreamt of his mother, of Karelia, of the whirling stars. He dreamt he stood on the open land, and before him was the embankment of the Pillar of the Sky, but instead of the sad untidy circle of stones, he saw within the circle of the bank a wonderful ring of great uprights, each twice as tall as a man, topped by flat lintels, like the trees of Ladon’s roundhouse. Inside, rising above the outer ring, were five gates, the last higher than the two before, those two higher than the first two, rising up toward Heaven. He heard Karelia’s voice saying, “This is the gateway between worlds.” Then from the center of the rings of stones a whirling light rose into Heaven, and around the light the mill of Heaven turned right again, and the world was as it was supposed to be, full of goodness and peace.

  Then he saw that the whirling light was Moloquin himself, stretched tall as the space between Heaven and earth, and at his feet knelt Ladon’s son, and begged for mercy. Moloquin himself would have been merciful, but all his power was gathered in the whirl of light. As he looked down, the stones became men, who seized Ladon’s son and ground him to dust.

  Then he woke up, and it was dawn.

  He sat. The dream gripped him so that he trembled; he stared wildly around him, amazed, seeing the colossal gateways gone, the blazing stream of light no more. There was only the grass, waving a little in the breeze of the new day. The tired old stones hung in their sad decline, midway to the earth.

  He cried out, disappointed, and covered his face with
his hands and wept. It was cruel, to send him such a vision and then take it all away. His whole body rebelled against it. He hated Ael, for giving him life and for giving him dreams.

  Karelia would know what it meant. He set off at once at a run toward her longhouse.

  When Moloquin stole into the longhouse, the women were all busy at their morning tasks, feeding their children and getting ready to go out to the fields, and in all the uproar of activity no one noticed his arrival but the boy Grub, who had slept most of the night on the threshold of the door and who still lingered there as the sun rose.

  Moloquin stepped right over him; Grub shrank down, hoping not to be noticed. When the other boy was past him, going down the longhouse toward Karelia’s hearth, Grub sat up. Moloquin was much older than Grub was and it was unfair that he could still come and go as he wished to his mother’s hearth, and Grub trailed after him a little, envious, wondering how he kept his place here.

  That took him to the edge of his own mother’s hearth, and he stood there a moment, looking in over the ring of the stones. His mother sat by the fire, nursing the new baby in her arms. His oldest sister hurried around trying to put shirts on the other two children; their breakfast of cheese and grain and broth was strewn half-eaten all around the place. Grub felt himself unnoticed in the middle of all this bustle; he sank down on his hams, and reached one hand inside the ring of stones, in toward a bit of the cheese, his eyes steadily on his mother.

  “Now, Grub.”

  She hardly raised her voice, but he felt the weight of her disapproval like a blow across his face. She frowned at him.

  “Go away,” she said. “Go find the other boys, and learn how to do what they all do. This comes to all boys, my son, and now it’s come to you—be brave, go and master it. Get away, I cannot feed you any more.”

  “Mama,” he cried, his eyes filling up with tears, and stretched his arms toward her.

  “Mama, Mama,” his sister said, jeering, and waggled her head at him, and stuck out her tongue.

  His mother slapped her. But her looks were no kinder toward Grub, and she shook her head at him and shooed him off with her free hand.

  “Go away. How will you ever learn to be a man, hanging around in the longhouse all day? Go on! Go on! I don’t want to see you here again.”

  At that moment the baby at her breast cried, and she turned to it with a finality, a whole attention, that locked him out; there was nothing for her now but the baby. He stood there a moment watching her. She was so beautiful, more beautiful than any other mother, more beautiful than the women in stories, and she did not love him any more. Once she had loved him as she loved the baby now, his little brother, but she did not love him any more. He turned and went away, dragging his feet, consumed with unhappiness.

  Moloquin sat at Karelia’s hearth eating a bowl of meal and broth and talking; he talked even as he chewed, so that food sprayed out of his mouth. He was an idiot, as they all said, and that was why he could stay forever in the longhouse.

  Grub went out the door. The sun was well up; all around him, the women spilled out of the longhouses and filled the yard inside the brush fence with their excitement, gathering their tools, talking with friends, stooping by the sampo to throw a lucky handful of grain into the hole in the top, and drawing the kindly looks of the fat old women there—today was threshing day; Grub had been out to the north fields to see the great floor of stones, set into the ground in the midst of the ripe grain. It was nothing to do with him.

  Like a ghost, ignored or unseen altogether, he drifted through the midst of the excited women, out the gate in the brush fence, and away toward the river. He was hungry, and he knew nothing of finding food. Always before his mother had fed him. He waded through the high grass, still damp from the night dew, spooking mice and little birds ahead of him, but even the crickets were too fast for him to catch. Half in tears, he reached the bank of the river and sat down on it.

  Here the river curled around, cutting deep down through the matted layers of grass, grass roots, dead grass, and dirt, down to the grey chalk underneath. On the far side was a broad stretch of flat ground, where once the women had planted gardens, but which was now overgrown with weeds, higher than a boy’s head, nettles and thistles and brambles with thorns like knives. Threaded through this dense coarse green were the trails of the boys, burrows in the overgrowth like the tunnels of rabbits. Grub slipped down from this bank into the river and waded and swam across it.

  All the paths on the far side led to one place. Here, deep inside the impenetrable jungle of weeds, was a clearing, and here the boys had struggled to raise up a shelter like their parents’; they had put up sticks, and tried to lash bundles of straw over them for a roof, but it was not so good a piece of work as the grown-ups did, and through the great gaping holes in the roof the sunlight streamed in, or the rain. Underneath was only the beaten ground, divided up naturally by the up-arching roots and rotten stumps of an old wood.

  When Grub came in, all the boys were gathered into the center of this shelter, where the fire burned. Ladon’s son stood there on top of a stone, measuring out handfuls of grain to each of the boys by turn. He wore only a little squirrel-skin over his private parts and most of the other boys were similarly nearly naked. Grub went to the back of the waiting crowd.

  Those nearest him hissed and pushed at him, crowding him off, making him stand last in line. He was the newest of them, the last one to leave his mother, and they never let him forget. “Mama’s baby,” one murmured, and giggled, and from the others rose up a little chorus of cries in falsetto: “Mama! Mama!” and some nasty laughter. He shivered, not from cold.

  Up above everyone else, standing on his stone, Ladon’s son went on giving out handfuls of milled grain from a pouch; at his feet, Grub knew, from the only previous time that he had managed to reach the front of the line, was a jug full of bean broth to mix into the meal, but to do that a boy had to have a vessel of some kind, and Grub had nothing. The older boys all had a dish, some had carved themselves bowls of wood, others used flat stones, and still others just used leaves, but Grub knew nothing yet of any of this, and none of the others would help him. He stood miserably in the line, thinking of his mother who had given him everything, everything he needed even before he asked for it, up until three days ago.

  He had to eat. His stomach was throbbing with hunger; it felt flattened against his back, and he put his palm on it, expecting to feel the lumps of his spine through it; now at least he was drawing nearer to Ladon’s son, and could overhear him talking.

  “All the women shall be at the threshing,” he was saying. “If we take the goats and the swine up to the edge of the forest there, we can go too.”

  “I’ll take the swine,” said one of the three big boys who were his best helpers.

  “Good. Then I shall bring the goats, I and Kolon.”

  Grub was now only one boy away from the food, and his mouth watered; he could smell the toasted barley, he could imagine the taste of the savory broth, thick with crushed beans and onion. Over his head they spoke to one another, just like grown-ups.

  “Don’t let the pigs get away this time.”

  “That wasn’t I, that was some other. I know how to herd pigs, chief’s son.”

  “Don’t call me that,” Ladon’s son cried; Grub glanced at him, surprised. There was no one left to be fed save him, and he stood forward, holding out his hands, cupped together.

  “Please,” he said, and his stomach growled.

  “Don’t ever call me that again!” Ladon’s son was shouting. He ignored the little boy before him; in his hand, the pouch of meal sagged, all but empty. “Call me Hawk-Feather, because I am above all of you.” He swept his look around the boys’ band. “Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, yes,” they shouted. “We hear you.”

  “Please,” Grub whispered, holding out his hands.

 
Still Ladon’s son paid him no heed at all. Still frowning, his chin thrust out, he scanned his followers with a look truly like a hawk’s. Grub’s belly was cramped with hunger and he reached out and touched the leader’s arm.

  Ladon’s son struck disdainfully at him. “Leave me alone.”

  “I am hungry.”

  The son of the chief looked down, down at him, and his lip curled. “Have you brought me anything? I remember no gifts from you, no pieces of flint, no eggs or fledglings, no bright-colored feathers.”

  “I will bring you something,” Grub cried.

  “Pagh.” The boy turned away. The other boys shouted to him, jubilant.

  “Hawk-Feather! Hawk-Feather!”

  “What about Moloquin?” asked one of the big boys.

  At that a sort of hush fell, and the boys waited, intent on Ladon’s son.

  “I threw a stone at him yesterday,” said Ladon’s son. “He may not come back at all.”

  Grub leapt into the air. “I saw him! I saw him this morning!” He clapped his hands together, delighted.

  Ladon’s son jerked his gaze toward the little boy at his feet. “Saw him. Where?”

  “At the hearth of Karelia. He was eating. He looked so funny, he spat food when he talked.” Grub laughed.

  Ladon’s son laughed also, and all the other boys laughed. Grub felt good suddenly; he looked around him, pleased to be in the middle, to have everyone know he had given Ladon’s son a gift. And now he would receive food. Triumphant, he turned, his hands out-stretched, cupped together.

  The son of the chief was watching him, a small smile on his lips; slowly he put his hand into the pouch, and slowly drew it forth, heaped with meal. Grub’s lips parted; he stepped closer, his hands rising. Then Ladon’s son let the meal fall from a great height over Grub’s hands, and the food showered down, some of it landing in the bowl of the boy’s hands but most of it blown away.

  Grub cried out. Ladon’s son laughed, and all the other boys laughed. “Come on,” said Hawk-Feather, and he went away, and the others all went with him in a great disorderly mass.