One

AEL’S SON

The sun was rising. Mother of all things, she sent her foreguard on first, to light the sky, and make the earth ready, and at her first warm touch, all life awoke. The birds began to sing and twitter and cry in the high grass, in the trees scattered here and there over the sunken slopes and hollowed hillsides, in the gardens of the People, in the thatches of the longhouses. The little brown river mice darted out of their lairs along the bank, and the goats rose, bleating, from their beds of straw, and went to wait by the withy gate to be milked. The doors of the longhouses opened, and the People came out, to stretch and yawn in the blessed sunlight, and the great door of the roundhouse itself was thrown open, although mighty Ladon was not there; yet the roundhouse held enough of his power without his presence.

In the thickets along the river, the band of boys stirred; quicker than the grown-ups, because they had less to do, the boys scurried out over the world, looking for something to eat. While their mothers in the longhouses were still yawning over the morning fire, the boys ranged up through the People’s gardens, looking for birds and snakes, and scattered along the edge of the forest to find wild berries.

Leader of the boys’ band was Ladon’s son, and he was tall and fair, his body handsomely smoothed and sleeked with a layer of fat, his clothes lovingly made by all the women of the People. He carried a big stick in his hand, and struck any boy with it who came too close to him, and shouted orders to them, and whatever they found, they brought him half.

As it was with his father, so it was with Ladon’s son; each boy fought to bring him more than any other boy, and he hardly had to lift his hand to get what he wanted.

Now the sun was up. Her kind and giving light lay over the land of the People, the broad uneven ground that lay between the forest on the east and the broken hills to the west. This was female land, lying wide and rich under the grass, not flat, but given to swollen low hills rising gently into the sun, and swales and soft subsiding places where the sun reached only at midday. The pines and piney shrubs that had once covered all this ground now were giving way, as the climate grew drier, as the marshes filled in, to open grassland where the soil lay over stubborn chalk, to oaks and ash where the land was more hospitable to deep-rooted trees, but to the People these were changes so slow and friendly that they remarked them only in stories.

In the sunlight the women left the longhouses, and climbed up the slope toward the gardens. It was now midsummer, a little past the Great Gathering, and in the irregular patches that the women worked, the crops stood tall and green: barley, with heavy heads, and vetch that they staked up, so that the mice would not eat the developing pods, and onions bulging out of the soil. The women carried their tools with them, picks of deer antler, rakes of wood with flint teeth, hoes made of shell. The little children carried the baskets.

From the forest’s edge, Ladon’s son could look out and see all this industry, as if from above; he did not look for his mother among the bowing forms in the gardens. He was half a man already, and uninterested in low labor. Instead, he led his band in a straggle along the margin of the forest, looking half the while for berries, and the other half for Moloquin.

The other boys knew what to do. They charged here and there, to reach a clump of brambles first and pick the ripe fruit, and some even ventured a little into the forest, giving brave yells and stamping their feet on the ground, looking here and there for their enemy. Ladon’s son strolled along eating a handful of fruit. It was past the time for the little red berries called mother’s kisses, too soon still for the fat purple thorny ones called bear-blood-drops, and he grimaced over the sour stuff he had been given and cast them down. The next boy who dared bring him green fruit he would thump with his stick.

Then: “Moloquin! Moloquin!”

He sprang high into the air at the shout. Ahead of him, where the oak trees pressed in upon the brow of a hill, the boys were racing toward a small spring marked by thickets, and as they ran, they yelled. Many of them brandished sticks. Ladon’s son broke into a gallop after them.

He yelled with them; he waved his stick over his head. All converged on the thicket. Just before they reached it, a brown naked boy burst out of the cover and ran away from them.

The halloos and whistles of the boys’ band doubled. Many of them heaved their weapons at Moloquin before they were near enough to have a chance of hitting him, and untouched, the woods’ orphan darted away into the high grass and suddenly vanished. Like the open-nesting bustards he could disappear at will. Ladon’s son, panting, led the others in a broad range across the slope where he had seen Moloquin last.

They slowed to a walk, puzzled. Ladon’s son poked with his stick at the ground, banged with his stick on a tuft of brambles, and looked up toward the forest looming above him to his right. The forest was dangerous, evil, and dark; part of the reason they all hated Moloquin was that he had come from the forest, and lived there still, when he was not haunting the places of the People. Ladon’s son hated Moloquin for other reasons, too, and because his father had told him to hate Moloquin. Ladon’s son did ever what his father told him. Now with his stick he went methodically along the curved uneven slope, prodding at hiding places, until abruptly the ground some paces before him seemed to explode, and the skinny brown boy sprang up from nowhere out of the grass and raced away, his tangle of black hair bouncing.

“Hiiyyaaah!”

The boys’ band raced after him. Once again they threw sticks and stones after him, never hitting him. Moloquin led them off in a straight dash along the rising ground below the forest; here the grass was shorter and drier, and there was no place to hide, and the prey settled into a long hard run. Ladon’s son with the rest of his band hung doggedly on the track. The stick grew heavy in his hand, but he dared not drop it: the stick meant his power to him. The breath in his lungs began to burn. Before him Moloquin ran always out of reach. When Ladon’s son put on a burst of speed, Moloquin ran faster, as if he could see out of the back of his head; he never looked behind him, but ran with pumping arms and high-thrusting knees. When Ladon’s son slowed down, tired, Moloquin too slowed, keeping the distance even between them.

They never caught Moloquin, however hard they chased him, and now, out of breath, his legs hurting, Ladon’s son saw, ahead of them all, the ancient embankment and toppling stones of the dead place, and he stopped.

The boys stopped with him. No one wanted to go any closer to the place of the dead, and while Moloquin ran on toward it, they shouted and threw things and laughed at his folly.

“The spirits will suck his blood out,” said Ladon’s son, and the other boys clustered around him, loud with agreement, with new versions of this prediction.

“The spirits will eat his flesh!” “The spirits will gnaw on his bones!”

“Let’s go home,” said Ladon’s son. “We should take the goats to grass, and maybe there will be some cheese for us.” He laid his stick over his shoulder, feeling very jaunty at driving Moloquin away again. “He won’t dare come near us anymore.” He strutted a few steps, although his legs were tired.

The boys fought to get close to him. The littlest, the newcomers to the band, were shoved away to the edge, and the biggest and strongest took up stations close by Ladon’s son. In this pack they went down the sun-drenched slope, back toward the gardens where their mothers worked, to take the goats out to grass.

Young Moloquin knew no father. His mother had died of the bloody cough in the winter before he found the village. No one of the People cared for him, and Ladon hated him. All that they did not use themselves the People gave to Ladon; therefore Moloquin got nothing.

He stood at the top of the embankment and watched the boys’ band go. They hated him, always chased him, occasionally got near enough to hurt him, but he longed for them; they gave him his only company. Today’s chase had gone by too quickly for him. He stood on the embankment and yelled and waved his arms, but they ignored him, if they even saw him. He realized that he had come here too swiftly; they were afraid of this place, he was safe here, but alone here also.

He turned around and went down the inner wall of the bank. It was a vast circle of upthrown earth and chalk, not a complete ring, but broken to the northwest and to the east, as if to let people in, but the People almost never came in here. They came here only to leave their dead in the grass within the bank. Even now there were two bodies lying near the foot of the tall stone at the far side of the circle—one an old woman, the other a baby. The crows were picking on them, bold, careless of Moloquin’s presence. He walked across the grass, going in between two of the standing stones, to his favorite place, the big rough stone at the north end; he slept in the hollow at its foot.

He loved this place. He felt none of the horror here that the People did. It was his own little world, round as the world was, bounded by the horizon of the top of the bank. There were no people, aside from the two dead ones, but there were the stones, several of them standing here and there, and a great many of them in a ring. The ring-stones were falling over and some lay buried in the grass. Above was only the brilliant, blazing sky.

He loved this place because his mother was here. She had died here. When he needed her he came here and she always answered him.

Sitting in the hollow at the foot of the big stone, he shut his eyes, thinking of his mother, and his heart grew soft and sore. Tall she had been, or seemed, to a child, her long hair hanging to her waist, her voice like a blast of the winter cold when she was angry, her arms like the warmth of the sun when she was kind to him. When she died he had been terrified, as if the world itself would end.

Blood burst from her lips whenever she coughed. They had been deep in the forest, far away from here. She said, “Take me as I tell you,” and he had struggled to carry her weight, and she had leaned on sticks and against trees, and like that, bit by bit, they crept through the forest and came at last to the grassland’s edge. Her body then so lean and bony he could see every rib. He wept as he half-carried her, half-dragged her along. Her voice drove him on, rasping and bubbling. “Keep going. Fail me, I’ll kill you, boy, I will take you with me. Keep going, stupid weakling.” At last he had pulled her into the circle of the bank, and there, exhausted, they both sank down into the high grass.

And there she died; he had seen the spirit pass away out of her, rise up from her like the dew rising in a vapor out of the grass when the sun shone on it. He clung to her, he called her back, he shook her. She would not come back to him. He dared not leave her. All his short life she had ruled him, fed him, taught him, beaten him when he was wrong, loved him when he was good; without her he knew nothing.

He chased the crows away from her; he sat by her for days, although his stomach grew taut and painful and his throat burned with thirst, he clung close to his mother. Then, one day, the first people he had ever seen other than her came into the circle.

There were six of them, carrying a seventh among them: another corpse. As they came they sang, and waved leafy branches around them, and one had a little pot of coals that gave off a sickly smoke. They entered the embankment through the northwestern opening and carried the body slowly into the center, laid it down, and put the leafy branches over it, all the while singing, and then they saw him.

And her. It was she who sent them screaming away. It was the sight of his mother who drove them with shrieks and howls away to the top of the bank, there to turn, to look again, and double their outcry. They ran away, and he followed them; they ran all the way down through the grassland, and he went after them, and there for the first time he saw Ladon’s Village.

When he saw it he stopped in his tracks and stared, amazed, and joyous. Four great huts lay there, inside a fence of brush, huts much bigger than the one he and his mother had lived in, and the yards around them were full of people. Children like him, women like his mother, many many people, talking together, working, laughing, touching one another, breathing warm into one another’s eyes, eyes meeting eyes, hugging one another, and his skin itched, longing for that, for closeness, protection, the welcome of his own kind. But when he went forward, gladly, toward them, his arms outstretched, hungry and wanting, they drove him away.

Now he lived along the edge of the village, shivering in the cold, stealing whatever he could find. In the summers he found fruit and roots and eggs to eat. Often he suckled the village goats while the goatherds were dozing in the sun.

In the winter he froze, sleeping in hollow logs, under drifts of leaves. He grew quick and lean, hollow-bellied, ready of hearing and sight, and hungry. Not merely for food. He watched the People every day, as often as he could, memorizing faces, overhearing words, drawing all he could from them in spite of their hate. They were his kind. Yet he was different; he was alone.

It was the Month of Low Water. In the village, the women carried water up from the river in their best baskets to give their plants to drink; the boys of the boys’ band foraged up and down the river bank, looking for the chunks of flint that sometimes turned up in the chalk—these flints they took proudly to the roundhouse, to the men who worked stone. But these men were gone. With all the men of the People of Ladon’s Village, they were used to spending this time along the northern river, fasting and sweating themselves and talking with the spirits whose world this really was.

Now they were returning, spilling down over the plain in a great disorderly swarm. In their midst, Ladon himself swept along in his litter, carried on the shoulders of a succession of lesser men. Wolf tails hung from the rails of the litter, and bearskin covered it, black and glossy, as old as the lineage of the man who sat thereon, Ladon, the greatest chief of all the People.

He was a huge squat man, in the prime of his life, his belly rolled deep in fat. His hair was black as the bearskin. On his shoulders and chest the black hair grew thick as a pelt, an emblem of his splendor.

The other men fought to be close to him. They yearned for the favor of a single glance. If he spoke to them, they bragged to anyone who would listen of this sign of honor. If he frowned, they wilted like a plant that had been pulled up. Whenever the bearers of the litter tired, Ladon called for a change of hands, and then everybody fought for a place at the poles.

One alone did not. One alone was not a vessel for the mysterious power of the male, and she was fool enough not to care. Karelia, headwoman of the kindred of the chief, had chosen to go with the men on their sacred way. She was the greatest of the storywomen of her people, and so made herself available to interpret the dreams and sickness and other encounters with the Overworld that the men might make in the course of their purification. Also as the headwoman of Ladon’s kindred she considered it her duty to keep him under her eye.

She walked along by herself, off to one side of Ladon. Over her head and shoulders she wore a shawl, woven of the plucked wool of the goats, dyed brown and light brown and yellow with colors made of the skins of onions. She was a little, stooped woman, with a round face, her eyes merry, her voice sharp, her mouth habitually smiling. Her steps were short and quick, so that she seemed to scurry like a little brown mouse over the springing green of the world.

Although she and Ladon paid no outward heed to each other, there was between them a continual irritable awareness; they disliked each other. Ladon thought her too curious and too outspoken. Karelia knew him to be a danger to all the People.

What that danger was had begun to press upon her through the course of the purification rites. Over and over, she had seen how Ladon spoke to the men of his son, and wrung promises from them that his son should be the chief when Ladon died; over and over, the men, under this pressure, and being often in the way of spirits, came to her with dreams in which, disguised, she saw Ladon’s ambition rise to tower over the world.

Ladon was the chief. His power was great above all others in the village; all that the People did, they brought to him, and he gave to them whatever they needed, so that those who were old or orphaned or weak or sick or stupid still managed. But he was chief by the will of the head- women, the old women who sat around the mill and knew everything: they made the chief, and when Ladon died they would make the next chief, not Ladon himself. If they did not—

She felt the past, the ways of the People, as a deep and well-ordered space behind her; before her was an emptiness, a horror, that must be formed and shaped like the past. If Ladon overturned the ways of the People, everything might fly apart, the world crumble.

It was more than that.

The power of the chief was a blood-power; it dwelled in his family, but it descended from layer to layer of the family not through the fathers, whose seed was invisible, whose fecundity was ambiguous, but through the women. They kept the gardens. They did the work. They bore the babies. They and they alone conferred power: by election to the chief, and through the chief’s closest female relatives, to the next generation of the family. When she saw this in her mind she saw a passage of time and order so well knit together nothing could pick it apart.

When she imagined that the power might jump from Ladon to his son, she saw an abyss, and the power fell into the abyss and was gone, and the People fell in after it and were gone as well. And now, over the green rolling hills, here came Ladon’s son himself.

The men all cheered his coming. All loved Ladon’s son. Tall and golden, he ran lightly toward his father with his arms upraised, and after him came the band of boys, a stream of half-children, calling and waving.

The whole great forward flow of the men stopped. Leaning down from his litter, Ladon greeted his son with the gladness of a man face to face with his immortality.

Karelia went closer; the other men gave way to her, deferring to her, but Ladon saw her not. Ladon bent over the far side of the litter and wrung his son’s hands and smiled into his face.

“Tell me what has happened, my dear boy.”

“Nothing.” Ladon’s son shrugged, his face clear and open as the sky, and as empty of thoughts. “We have waited for you, Opa-Ladon.”

“Are the fields growing? Are the women happy?”

“I suppose.” The boy lifted one shoulder and let it sag again. All the interest in his leadership came from his father. He raised his smiling handsome face. “We chased Moloquin, nearly every day.”

At that Ladon grunted. He straightened up in the litter, his face bound into a frown, and then he saw Karelia and his gaze sharpened. He and the old storywoman stared at each other a moment. She drew her shawl closer around her, her eyes narrow. Finally, simultaneously, they looked away.

The procession began again, with Ladon’s son walking along beside the litter, the men near him speaking to him fondly, ignoring their own sons who leapt and ran around them, noisy as crows. Karelia drifted out to the edge of the swarm.

Ladon’s son. They had tried to give him a name—all the boys had milk-names, of course, that their mothers gave them, but when they left their mothers and went to the boys’ band, they got new names. But nothing had stuck to Ladon’s son. They had tried several but no one had remembered them. When the People looked on this tall fair boy they saw only one thing, and that was what they called him.

When they saw that other one, they knew only one thing, and that was what they called him: Moloquin, the Unwanted One. But that had become a name, somehow; the accent fell on the first syllable, as in all men’s names, not on the middle one, as it would have done had the phrase been simply a description of him. Moloquin had a name, however unkind it was.

Moloquin. She rolled it around in her mind, and as she considered it, the thought grew round and real to her: here was a way to deal with Ladon.

She hugged her shawl to herself. Casting an eye toward Heaven, she marked that there was still much daylight left—here in the deep of the summer, the sky held the light a long, long while after the sun withdrew—and she knew where to find Moloquin. She had time and knowledge, and no reason to fail. Quietly she slipped away from the horde of the men and went off toward the northeast.

Moloquin had spent the day ranging over the summery downlands, looking for something to eat, and had found nothing; he made a good cast of a stone at a bustard, but missed, as he usually did, and in the river he nearly caught a fish, diving down under the water and slowly, slowly creeping up on the grey shape hanging motionless in a pool under the bank, and then slipping his hands up, slowly, slowly, his lungs ready to burst, his lips shut against the tell-tale bubbles, but at the last instant with a flick of its tail the river-monster fled away. Now he went up over the rising land toward his place, and his body was tired and his heart was very low.

Halfway to his cold home, he passed close enough to the village to hear the singing and the drums and pipes, and to see the leaping fires. The men had come back, and the People rejoiced.

Locked out in the dark, he stood a moment and watched, and hated them, even as he longed for them; he saw how they touched one another, how they leaned together, body to body, and from some deep memory arose the feeling of being close to another, the shared warmth, the encircling arms, the safety. He hated them for denying him that, and he longed to have it again with them, that company, that value. Slowly he dragged himself on toward the cold stones.

When he trudged up over the embankment and looked down on the grassy circle he knew at once that someone else was there.

He did not see her at first. He did not smell or hear her. Yet he knew some other person occupied this place, his place, and the hairs on his back stood up, and his lips pulled back from his teeth in a growl. Crouched down a little, his hands fisted at his sides, he prowled in through the leaning stones.

“Here I am,” said the calm voice, and he started up, his skin tingling; she was just to one side of him. In the failing light he had missed her utterly. He wheeled around, trying to look fierce.

She sat there at the foot of his stone, in the hollow he had made for himself, and she smiled at him. He knew her at once: Karelia, storyteller, whom the little children ran after, begging for words.

“What are you doing here?” he cried. “This is my place. Go away.”

He did not know all the right words, he made up some of them as he spoke. With his hands he swept at the air, to show her what he meant.

She did not move. She sat there cross-legged, as the women sat, her body formless in its enshrouding cloth, her hair the color of milkweed down. In the gathering dusk he could make out only the shape of her face. She raised one hand to him and said, “Come sit by me, and let us make a fire, I am very cold.”

He frowned. He was not cold, and he seldom made fires, although his mother had taught him how. He stood uncertainly on the balls of his feet, ready to run or to leap on her. Storywoman. He had seen the others clustered tight around her while she talked, and although he had never been able to creep near enough to hear her voice, even from a distance the gestures of her hands and the look of her face in the firelight were compelling as an image. Now, abruptly, she leaned forward, and a spark glowed inside the round of her hands.

He sighed. The light spread up over her face, warming the old seamed skin, the deep eyes, and the curl of her mouth. Without any will of his own, he went forward, and sat down before her, sharing the light with her.

She nursed the sparks in the tinder, milking it gently with her hands to spread the fire through the tinder, and then she laid down the nursling in a little pile of twigs, and from beside her she took more wood and added that. He saw that she had gathered much wood, and made all ready for a fire; she must have waited here for a long while, and it came to him that she had waited here for him. That astonished him. He was used to spending his attention on the People; it was a new thing to have anyone pay him any witness in return.

The fire grew bolder and warmer, and sprang up through the peaked sticks she put together above it. In her eyes were tiny little fires. She said, “Are you hungry, boy?”

“I—”

He stopped, aware of how little he knew of words, and ashamed. His gaze fell to the flames. She reached behind her and brought forward a flat covered basket, with a rope for carrying over the shoulder, and opened it.

“Eat.” She held out her hand, on it a piece of something.

An old memory twinged. He took the thing from her hand and bit into it, and it was soft and flavorful. Once before he had eaten this. From his mother. Crouched by the fire with his feet under him, he ate it all.

She ate, her jaws moving contentedly, her gaze steadily on Moloquin. He wanted more, but he would not ask, and instead he locked his arms around his knees and watched her.

“Take another,” she said, and he did, and ate it in a single gulp.

At that she smiled, and when she smiled her face was so lively and full of kindness that he had to smile too, and suddenly she was reaching across the fire, touching him, her hand warm on his arm. The touch was a shock; he jumped a little, and then was still, tensed, his arm burning where her hand rested on it. Seeing his discomfort, she drew back.

She said, “Boy, have you a name?”

“Moloquin,” he said.

“No—the name your mother gave you.”

“Moloquin,” he said.

“No, no. Your mother, Ael, did she not call you something?”

“Ael,” he said, catching the strange word.

“Ael, your mother.”

All at once he realized what she meant, and the meaning of it broke on him, a flash like the lightning flash in his mind. He said “My mother. Ael. That was her name. My mother was Ael.”

He began to cry. Since her death he had not felt so near to her as he did now, when this stranger, this old woman, gave him what he had never had: his mother’s name.

“Ael,” he said, and threw his head back, his face raised toward Heaven, and he shouted, “Ael! Ael!”

The stones resounded; the vaulted sky itself boomed back his voice. He put his face into his hands and cried until he was empty.

At last he raised his head. She was watching him, the little old woman, magic in her eyes and in her mind, names and words and stories. He lunged across the fire at her and gripped her with both hands.

“My mother,” he said, his throat thick. “My mother. My mother gone. Mother dead.”

In his grip she was light as a husk. She laughed, half-smothered. “Moloquin,” she said, “let me go.” Her arms went around him, briefly, and tightened, and for a moment he was pressed against her, body to body, so close they were one body, warmth and life together. She said again, muffled, “Let me go,” and he did.

He sat back. The cool air swept around him; he felt his skin all over, his boundary, his end, and was more lonely than he had ever been, even when his mother died. Once again he lowered his head and sobbed.

Karelia said, “Moloquin, did she tell you anything? Your mother?”

“She told me—” he crept nearer the fire, and turned his gaze from Karelia’s face that scorched his inner eyes, turned his look to the blind and empty fire. “She told me, when I—she dead, I should go—that way.” He waved toward the west. “Not go that way.” He waved southward, toward the village of the People. Like bile in his throat there rose into his mind his first real understanding that she had meant him never to find the People. Maybe she had been right. He struggled with that; the words were not enough, the idea flittered away from him into the dark. He stared into the many-colored flames. “She hate me,” he said, and covered his face with his hands. “She leave me.”

“Moloquin,” she said, and laid her fingers on his arm again. More used to the touch, he was at once calmed and steadied, and when she urged him closer to her he came to her, and she made him sit down by her. She said, “Did she tell you any stories?”

“Stories,” he said, tentatively. His gaze searched her face. Her skin was wrinkled as an old apple.

She smiled at him. In a low, soft voice, she began, “In the beginning, everything was covered with ice, and nothing moved or breathed thereon. Then the Sun rose, and shone forth on the ice, and from the rising mist the first living being collected in the air, neither man nor woman, child nor adult, the creature of the Sun.”

As she spoke, her hands moved, and she shaped out of the air that which inhabited the story; he saw the Sun rise, the mist climb up from the ice, and the first creature form from it; he forgot to breathe, or to wonder, but only listened.

“The Moon was jealous, because he could create nothing, and he slew the Sun’s darling, and tore it into pieces. Then the Sun mourned her creature. She took up the body, and laid it out on the ground, and from the flesh made the world, of the bones the hills, of the hair the forests, of the blood the rivers. Looking on this world, the Sun rejoiced, and from the joy in her heart, she drew forth another being, as perfect as the first, unborn and undying, neither man nor woman, child or adult.

“Again the Moon grew jealous, and seized the feet of the Sun’s new being, and the Sun held it by the arms, and they contested back and forth over it, until the being was pulled apart into two. And these two were the first man and the first woman, and they went forth into the world and made their home there.”

He saw all this brought from nothing by the words she spoke, and by the forms her hands made. The words sank into him like drops of rain into dry earth.

“Now again the Moon grew jealous, and he waged a war against the Sun, and seized her and swallowed her whole. But the man and the woman saw what was happening to their divine mother, and they went up on a hilltop, very close to the Moon, and shouted and threw stones at him, until he disgorged the Sun, which rolled away safely across the sky once more. And the man and the woman rejoiced together, and the Sun shone on them, and they were blessed, and many were their children, and from each of their daughters came a kindred of the People, and so the whole world was inhabited.”

Moloquin said, “The Moon and the Sun, I saw them together.”

She nodded. “Yes, last winter. The Moon is evil. Sometimes he will try to devour the Sun, but she always escapes.”

He said, “Where am I come from?”

Her face turned toward the fire, and her hands fell into her lap. It was as if she shut herself against him. The Moon swallowed her. She said, “I am not entirely sure I should tell you. What did your mother say to you?”

“She tell me what I tell you. Not to go that way. To go that way.”

“No, I mean—about you. About her—why she—” she faced him again, her eyes wide. “She told you nothing.”

His mouth moved; no sounds came out. He had run out of words. The story had filled him with new words, with space for the pictures of words, space for more stories. He tugged on her arm. “Tell me another.”

She laughed. Raising her head, she looked up into the sky, and said, “To be truthful, boy, I am minded to spend the night here. It is very late, the moon is rising, it is a long, cold and fearful way to my own hearth.” She put her hands down on the ground beside her, and she began to get up, carefully, bit by bit.

She was going. He flung out his hands toward her, terrified of losing her. “Stay here. Oh, please—” in a blind agony he went back to what he had done with his mother; he thrust out both hands to her and wept and cried, “Mama, Mama, please—”

She seized his wrists; she shook him roughly. “Now! Be still! Hah!” She shouted into his face and shook him hard and smacked him sharply on the cheek with her flattened hand. “Moloquin!”

He stopped, gasping, reassured; his mother had done exactly the same with him, whenever he cried.

She said, “Will you go down there with me?”

He leapt up, eager, delighted. “I go with you.”

At that she laughed; she laughed like the bustard’s high screechy cackle. They put the fire out and he took her basket for her and they went up out of that place and walked along toward the village, going down through a fold in the grassy slope. In the distance the fire in the center of the village was bright as blood.

Karelia kept close by him; often she turned and cast her look all around her, peering sharply into the darkness like someone poking a stick into a hole. She came hardly to Moloquin’s chin. As they walked he tried out the story again in his mind. Like food in his belly, the story made his mind fat. If all the People came from those first two, then was he one of the People? He had tried to ask Karelia but she had turned away from him.

That was the bad part about having: it made not-having worse.

He wondered what it was that he had. Touching someone else, that made his skin hurt sometimes, sometimes thrilled him. Touching Karelia. In the space inside that the story had made, there was room now for other stories, like: she came once, looking for me, she may come again. She came looking for me, why?

Why?

Of all words, that was the hammer, breaking everything open.

Beside him she was looking around her again, and now abruptly she lunged toward him, banging into him, clutching at his arm. He wheeled around. Her panic caught him a little; he was ready for an enemy, his hands fisted.

Nothing but the moon, just beginning to appear over a crest of the horizon. Karelia caught hold of his arm and pulled him.

“Come. Run.”

Obediently he broke into a trot beside her; she ran with blind feet, stumbling and tripping on the grass, and he grasped her arm and held her and kept her upright. The moon was mounting steadily into the sky, its body withered and blemished.

They reached the brush wall around the village and he stopped. The sounds of the People reached him. His skin prickled up as if ants crawled all over him.

“Come,” Karelia said, and tugged his arm.

He shook his head. “No. I go home. I go back.”

She grunted. In the shelter of the village, she had forgotten her terror of the rising moon. She said, “Good-by, then. I will see you again soon.”

She walked away. He almost started after her, but then a shout from within the high-mounded thorny barrier, higher than his head, and a wild thunder of drums reminded him of the band of boys, and of the other People, and he felt small and naked and helpless again. He turned and went back into the night.

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 than 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.

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 grunted; 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 Moloquin. 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.”

“Live with you.”

“In the village. In the longhouse, at my hearth.”

He swallowed, his throat moving up and down, his gaze steady on her. He said nothing.

“I have no children,” she said. She lowered her eyes. “I need—I want—”

He put out his hand and touched her, and her throat stopped up. Their eyes met. He laid his hands on her shoulders and awkwardly leaned toward her, embracing her, and she shut her eyes and put her head down on his shoulder.

He said, “Tell me a story.”

“No. First, I—” she pulled apart from him; turning to her bundle, she spread it open. “You must have some clothes. I brought these, we shall make you some clothes from them.” She shook out her old coat, full of holes, and ragged along the edges. She had brought an awl stuck into a piece of bark, and a ball of yarn. Moloquin fingered the cloth.

“What I need this for?”

“Because you must have clothes.”

“Not here,” he said.

“To live in the village.”

“I not live in the village.”

“But I want you to come and live with me.”

“I not—”

He sprang up, so quickly that she shrank back in terror from the sudden movement; he wheeled around, dancing away from the stone. Karelia put out her hand to him. “Wait!” But he was gone. A flash of legs, a torrent of black hair, he bounded away and was gone over the top of the bank.

Brant came toward her, leaning on his stick, his teeth showing in the midst of his sparse beard. He said, “Another lover, Ana-Karelia.”

Humiliated, furious, she sank down into the grass and glared at him. “You old fool, get away from me. Go away!”

“Ladon is right, he should not be here.”

“Oh? Why not? Because of the dead? Because of the spirits? Then why have they not sickened him? Sent him foul dreams? Haunted him out of this place? He is safe here.”

Brant said, “Come, we will walk back to the village together.”

She remained still, her lips pressed firmly together; she was furious with him, the more so because Moloquin had refused her.

The old man moved away, leaning on his stick. “Come along, Ana-Karelia,” he called, over his shoulder, “Come away, he will not be back. Not this day.”

Slowly she got to her feet. The bundle lay there on the grass, opened and scattered, and she began to gather it up; then, impulsively, she collected the cloth and the awl and the yarn and stuffed it into the back of the hollow under the North Watcher. “Wait, Brant, you fool,” she called. The sun was going down. Quickly she went after the old man, to walk back down to the village.

Karelia did not come back. Moloquin found the bundle of cloth in the hollow under the stone, and he spread out each piece carefully and smoothed it with his hands, absorbed in the pattern of the crossing threads. It felt strange, too, not like animal hide: thinner, more flexible. Finally he rolled it all up into a ball once more and stuffed it back into the hollow.

He waited for a whole day by the stones, but still she did not come.

Something was wrong with him. Before he first met Karelia he had been content to live as he did now, seeking food, sleeping under the stone, engaging in his daily contest with the boys’ band, and that had seemed enough, or at least all he was likely to have. Then Karelia had come, and told him stories, and now he was lonely all the time.

He wondered whether it was Karelia he missed, or the stories. She touched him; no one else had touched him since his mother died. He remembered the feel of her hands on his skin, how warm and light, and the smell of her near him, and other things: over and over he thought of one time when he had glanced at her and seen her looking down, how the long grey hair had lain across her cheek, how soft and downy was the skin just below her half-closed eye. He could not say what it was, but the memory made his fingers tingle, longing to touch her, to be touched.

He told himself the stories she had told him, over and over, trying to repeat each word as she had, each gesture. It was not the same.

He lay on the grass between two leaning stones and stared up at the sky, figured with clouds. His mother had taught him how to make nets to catch fish and birds, how to choose good nuts from bad, how to make fires, how to skin rabbits. She had told him nothing of where he had come from, or why, or what he should do, except to keep his cutting stones sharp.

When he looked into a still pool, sometimes, on a bright day, the water seemed impenetrable. All he saw was his own face and the glare of the sun. If he moved, so that his body shaded the water from the sun, then he could see down, below the surface, see the fish, the deep water, the bottom of the river. The stories were like that for him; they showed him what lay underneath.

It seemed to him that he had always known that what he saw was only a surface; all that was important lay beneath.

Now Karelia would not come, and without Karelia he had no stories, and as the day wore by without her he grew restless and unhappy to the point of tears. Abruptly, almost without being aware of it, he was on his feet and running.

It was afternoon now. In the gardens of the village the women were bent over their work, their hoes hacking at the earth. He ran down toward them, keeping to the higher ground above the longhouses and far away from the roundhouse. His eyes searched the world for signs of the boys’ band, but they were nowhere in sight. Then, at the edge of the worked land, he stopped.

Once this uneven hillside had been covered with trees; their charred stumps still studded the gardens, and the women grew flowers around them, stored their tools in the hollows, sat on the flat tops. Down there, in among all the stooped figures that bobbed and swayed rhythmically in their work, one sat upon a stump, one whom Moloquin could name at any distance: Karelia, telling stories.

A swarm of smaller children sat around her; the women in their gardens listened as they worked. Only Moloquin could not hear, Moloquin, stranded forever at the edge of the world.

A flash of hatred whitened his mind. She was giving his stories to someone else, his stories.

He started down there, his feet leaving the tall rough grass for the dust of the path. No one saw him. Karelia sat on the stump with her head bowed a little so that her long grey hair hung down, and the wind lifted it; he saw her shape the air between her hands, bringing meaning from nothing. Each foot lower than the one before, he went down the path toward her.

“Moloquin!”

He stopped in his tracks, every hair standing on end. The shout came from one of the women, and at that sound, everyone in the gardens turned and stared at him. He felt their looks like cold rain on his skin, but Karelia was there, and she had seen him.

She stood up. With both arms she called him in, her mouth round with his name. All around her stood the hostile People, but she in their midst summoned him, and he took another step toward her. Thinking of stories, thinking of the warmth of her embrace. Another step followed the first. Then, abruptly, a stone flew through the air toward him.

He wheeled. The stone never came near him, but he was gone anyway, running for the woods, while behind him they screamed and whistled, they threw stones and clods of earth, they hooted and sneered at him, they raced slavering at his heels.

In the margin of the forest, under a poplar tree, he stopped and looked back.

They had not chased him; in fact, none of them even shouted, and he wondered if he had not heard them shout and whistle with the ears of memory that had heard it so often before. Now they simply watched him go, and in their midst, Karelia jumped and waved her arms and yelled furiously around her.

Moloquin went away into the forest.

Karelia settled down onto the stump again, out of breath, her eyes on the trees where Moloquin had gone. The crowd of little children at her feet goggled up at her, their mouths ajar; probably they had never seen her rage before. She wiped her rheumy eyes with her fingers.

The women had gone back to their work. None among them would confess to having thrown the stone at Moloquin, they all went on as if nothing had happened. Karelia sank down, brooding, her chin on her chest; she stole another look at the forest.

He had tried to come to her. Now, perhaps, the People would know that Karelia took an interest in him and they might leave him alone. Would he come back again?

She got to her feet, thinking of walking to the Pillar of the Sky again, but at the thought of the distance, her heart quaked. After the last time she had slept almost a whole day.

She was old. She had known that before, of course, but until now it had not interfered with her. She had gone everywhere, walked to the river with the men, done as she chose; now she could not, because she was old. Getting up off the stump, she went down the long winding path, in between the ripening gardens, down toward the longhouse.

The women and their children lived in the longhouses. Sometimes the men lived there too, but usually the men preferred the roundhouse with its comradeship and Ladon’s generosity. When the married men wished the experience of their wives, they went into the longhouses, and there at the back, in the wall, was a little hole that led into a small dark room, and there the men united with their wives.

In the little room with her husband, Grela, the sister of Tishka, said, “What do you make of Karelia? Isn’t it a scandal?”

Her husband lay on his back on the mats, sated. He muttered something behind the arm he had flung over his face.

“She will regret it. He is a fool, a thief, a naked thing. And she thinks to teach her stories to him!” Grela laughed. She was jealous of Karelia, who always seemed to get exactly what she wanted, and who had gone from being the scandal of the village to headwoman of the Red Deer without even talking it over with anyone. Grela talked to everyone about everything that concerned her. Now she remembered, a little late, what Karelia had told them around the sampo, that she suspected Ladon of trying to steal power, and it occurred to her that her sister, Tishka the Wise, would probably not want her to tell all this to Fergolin, who being a man would be on Ladon’s side.

He was a man, too, and she reached out and closed her hand over his male part and squeezed, and he groaned. Grela laughed.

“Yesterday he tried to sit down with the other children while she was telling stories in the fields, and when someone threw a stone at him, Karelia was furious, it was funny, you should have seen how she jumped and shouted, her face got red as a berry.”

Fergolin put his hand over hers, still soft on his softening penis, and caressed himself with her palm; he rolled onto his side. “Grela,” he said, “I understand nothing of this. What is this about Karelia?”

“Oh, she’s got this notion she will take Moloquin in.”

“Moloquin. You mean that woods-sprite?”

“He’s not a sprite, he’s a dirty little naked fool.” Still, what he had said struck some spark; she turned to him. “Do you think it is true what folk say, that Ael got pregnant by a spirit of the forest?”

“Ael,” said Fergolin, yawning. “Who is Ael, now, river-tongued one? You know, Grela, you talk too much.” But he was smiling at her.

“Ael, you know,” she said, crossly; it often surprised her how different was a man’s mind than a woman’s. “Ladon’s sister, the mother of Moloquin.”

“She’s dead, Grela.” He sat up, drawing his knees up, his arms around them. “What is this about Moloquin and Karelia? She wants to take in Moloquin? And Moloquin is the son of Ladon’s sister?”

“She is only making him bolder and bolder. He would have sat right down with the other children! We shall have to drive him away again, before he steals everything.”

Fergolin said nothing for a moment. Close beside her in the dimness he gave off the warmth and the mysterious odor of the male. She moved closer to him, snuggling into his shoulder, and he put his arm around her.

“Grela,” he said, and put a kiss to her forehead. “You are a river, my wife, running fast and deep, but it takes a fine fisherman to draw forth much in the way of substance from you.”

“Fergolin,” she said, injured.

He was going. Getting his feet under him, he pulled on his long shirt and wrapped his belt around his middle. Crouched in the low room, he embraced her, reaching down between her thighs to give a painful and yet pleasurable tug to her woman’s part. “Good-by, fat one.”

She giggled, pleased at the compliment, and he went out. Grela stayed to neaten up the room.

Fergolin, Grela’s husband, was of the Lineage of the Salmon and a master of the Bear Skull Society. Although he enjoyed being married to Grela, he passed his days at the roundhouse with the other men, where he could be of importance to Ladon; therefore he saw little of his wife, or indeed, of any woman. Except for the delightful uses of one another’s bodies, he saw no way that men and women could share their lives, each being the opposite of the other, and he usually paid no attention to what he heard when he was with Grela, especially as she talked so much.

What she had let slip to him that morning, however, took a very forward place in his mind for the rest of the day. He was not a man of deep questions. When Moloquin had first appeared some few winters before, Fergolin had not wondered much where he had come from. Moloquin was not one of the People and therefore had no relationship to him except as an annoyance and a distraction.

Now he knew better. Moloquin was one of the People after all, the son of Ael, the sister-son of the chief.

He spoke of this to one or two of the other men, as they lingered in the yard outside the roundhouse door, waiting to be given some task to perform for their chief’s sake.

“Ael,” said one, blankly.

“I had forgotten that Ladon had a sister,” said the other, who was Mishol, a member of the Bear Skull but not a master. “There is a bad story about her, I do not remember what it is.”

At this moment Ladon’s own son came out of the roundhouse, straightened after passing through the door, and stood blinking in the bright sunlight. Fergolin turned to him, smiling, and poked him affectionately in the ribs.

“Well, mighty hunter, are you going forth to slay the ring-tusked boar?”

The other men laughed, but there was some love in their mirth; they all liked Ladon’s son. The boy blushed. His skin was so fair that the color showed all along his throat and cheeks, like a girl’s.

“I know I shall never wield the short spear as well as you, Fergolin-on.”

Fergolin barked with amusement; with all the other men, he hunted four times a year, but he slew nothing. Ladon’s son, with many gestures of respect, was going away toward the gate and the men watched him go.

“He shall be a good chief,” said Mishol.

Fergolin said nothing. He was one of Ladon’s ring-brothers, and with the rest had sworn on oath in favor of Ladon’s son, but he did not believe that the boy would ever be the chief. He spoke well, but too well, saying always what would flatter the listener; he looked well, but too well, seeking always for admiration and love. Fergolin looked down at his hands. If Moloquin was indeed Ael’s son, then he saw trouble for Ladon and his schemes.

Mishol took a knife from his belt, shaved a splinter from a stick of wood, and used it to clean his teeth. He said, “If I were Ladon, I would slay this woods-puppy.”

Fergolin’s head jerked up; he felt a sudden stab of guilt, as if his inner thought had goaded Mishol to this remark. Sharply he said, “He is a child, and one of us.”

“Don’t be so upright, Fergolin,” Mishol said roughly. “There is no one to protect him, and Ladon would smile on those who did it.”

A few other men drifted closer, seeing them argue, and sat together in the sun; some were whittling, some picking through their hair and their friends’ hair for lice and fleas. Mishol looked around at them, frowning—he was a big man, muscular and raw-throated.

“Well?” he said loudly. “Shall we do what is in our chief’s heart?”

“Do what?” asked one who had not heard the whole conversation.

“He is a child,” Fergolin said stubbornly. “And one of us. The Overworld looks down and will see what is done to one of the People—”

He caught a sudden, alarming, transcendent sense of himself as another person; he knew he was being watched. The souls of his ancestors watched him. Desperately he wanted to do that which would please them. He made a sign, surreptitiously, to summon their help. Mishol was still looking around him for support.

“I say, we should do what the chief would wish of us.”

“Moloquin is just a thief,” said another man. “He has no father and no mother, either, now—he is not one of the village. Perhaps Mishol is right. We could catch him and kill him, and Ladon would give us all greatly from his roundhouse.”

“The chief’s will is the will of Heaven,” piped up little Sarbon and banged his thighs for emphasis.

Fergolin bit his lower lip; was that true, should he do as the others did—as the others spoke of doing? He glanced around him, looking for some answer in the faces of his fellows, but they showed him nothing; they sat there with dull looks, humming, or cracking lice, and the will of Heaven did not shine through their eyes. Old Brant came in, a little nearer Fergolin, and sat down.

“Who is this boy, anyway?” asked one at the back of the group.

“An enemy of our chief,” Mishol bawled. “What else must you know?”

“He is Ael’s son,” said Fergolin. “The son of Ladon’s sister.”

That met a round of blank faces. “Ladon. Did he have a sister?” Sarbon, however, pulled on his lip, frowning.

“Ael? Oh, I remember her. That time, when we were playing with a pig’s head, she stole it away, don’t you remember?” He turned toward Fergolin who had joined the boys’ band at the same time as he. “Don’t you remember?”

Now Fergolin did remember; his mind leapt back into the past, when the most important thing in his life had been doing well in the sight of the other boys—vividly he saw before him a long, lithe figure, long black hair streaming, holding up in mockery a mangled bloody skull.

“He’s just a woods-sprite,” someone else muttered. “I don’t believe he is even a real human being.”

“Kill him,” Mishol said. “Kill him, and Ladon will put us at the very front of the procession when we go to the Great Gathering.”

Some of the men were nodding in agreement. Mishol got up onto his feet. “I will fetch a club,” he said, and started around.

“Wait,” Fergolin cried. He put out one hand to hold Mishol back. “What are you talking of? This is murder! The People do not raise their hands against one another.”

“He is not one of us!”

“But he is. He is the son of the chief’s sister. And that’s why you want to kill him—” Fergolin leapt toward this knowledge as toward a safe landing—“Not because he isn’t one of us, but because he is.”

“Besides,” said old Brant, who had been silent until now, “Karelia has taken him under her wing.”

At the mention of that name the men’s faces cleared of their fierce resolve, and even Mishol, with a grunt, turned forward and settled down in his place. Fergolin wondered how Brant knew this, but it fitted with what Grela had told him—he saw again, as she had told it, Karelia leaping and waving her fists and shouting at them for scaring her pet away. He laughed at the thought, and a few of the other men laughed too, not knowing why, but because Fergolin was respected.

“What Karelia wishes, she will have,” said someone in the back. “And I for one will not get in her way.”

“Or into her stories,” said another man, and made a quick gesture with his fingers, to ward off evil.

“Still, just because he is Ael’s son—”

“He is nothing,” said Mishol, loudly. “He shall never be other than nothing, and I shall not trouble myself with nothing.” He got up and went into the roundhouse.

In the longhouses, each woman had her own hearth, a ring of stones for her fire, a larger ring for her living space. Now, in the evening, every hearth was noisy with children, warm with the cooking fire, steamy with the smells of dinner.

Every hearth but Karelia’s, where she sat alone.

She put sticks into her fire. Near her was a pot of clay with a broth ready to be heated, and a flat basket full of cakes made of grain, but she could not bring herself to cook anything. It seemed too much work just to feed one old woman. Even her hunger seemed to belong to someone else.

She poked the fire with another stick. When she had married the first time, she had thought she would bear many children, but there had been none. Soon she quarreled with her husband and they separated.

It was his fault, she had thought. His fault she bore no children. So she married again.

That second one she had never loved, but he had a powerful body, long strong legs, and whenever they had gone into the little room together the whole longhouse quaked. No babies came of it. Then she had not minded so much, because she was a storywoman, and the stories were children enough, and anyhow she fought with her husband whenever they were not in the little room together. Even there they fought sometimes, even as their bodies thrust and stroked together. When he died suddenly some people had said she had killed him, working him into a story and causing his death first in her mind and then in fact.

After that she had gone a long while without a man, and needing none, since any man she wanted she could lure to her and enjoy for a moment and not have to worry about other times.

The women around the sampo buzzed about her; the men watched her with an unhealthy intensity. All the People came to her for stories; she could turn a whole crowd to stones, silent and still, while she spun a new world around them in her words and gestures.

She still had that. Even now, especially now perhaps, as she sat lonely by her hearth, if she lifted her head, and began to speak, and put her hands before her in the air, then they would come and cluster around her and listen, their eyes bright. Then they were her children.

When she was silent she had no one. Soon she would be silent forever, a spirit of the air, a creature of the Overworld, where all was known already and so there was no need for stories.

She poked at the fire, thinking of Moloquin, and she told herself she would go tomorrow, walk the long way up to the Pillar of the Sky, and tell him stories all day long.

She could go and live with him. Leave the People and live with him.

Once before she had done that. When she married for a third time, her husband was a man of another village, and she had told everyone here that she would go to his village to be with him because she was sick of them all. But they had not gone to his village; they had gone off and lived together, alone, in the west; he made a hut of withies and brush, she toiled dawn to dark in a garden, they slept together every night, they were enough for each other. Him she loved, and him she had only for that one season, because when the winter came he sickened and he died, her husband, and she had gone back to the People.

Thinking of him again, she lowered her chin to her chest, and tears filled her eyes. All her life seemed wasted, a dry leaf, after that one green season of love.

So, wrapped in her memories, Karelia sat by the fire, the stick in her hand, and heard nothing of the bustle around her, the buoyant cries of the children, the laughter, the sounds of cooking and of eating, the crunch of feet and the crackle of the fire; she heard nothing at all, until suddenly there was nothing to hear: all the longhouse fell into an utter silence.

At that she lifted her head, surprised, and looked around.

In silence, in stillness, the People stood beside their hearths and stared. In silence, in stillness, there came down the middle of the longhouse a creature hidden in a mass of cloth.

It was Moloquin. Moloquin. He had taken the clothes she had brought and swaddled himself in them, only his long bare legs showing; even his head was covered up, his eyes peeping out through an opening. Slowly, fearfully, he was coming down the longhouse, looking for her.

She got up. Her heart swelled great as the longhouse; she could not keep her joy within, but opened her mouth and gave it off as a sigh. She stretched out her arms, and he ran into her embrace, a warm, living child, and she brought him tight against her breast, as close as her husbands had been, pressed her face to his wild earth-smelling hair. She led him to her hearth, and sat him down, and there, for the first time, she cooked food for him over her own fire.

Karelia taught him how to wash himself in the morning, and what to eat and how. She said it was important not to shit anywhere inside the brush fence around the longhouses, and took him off to the ditch where all the People shit, but Moloquin could not bear the smell and went away a lot farther, to be by himself when he emptied his bowels. She told him how to put on clothes she gave him; she told him how to start a fire in the proper way, so that the spirits would agree to let it burn. All these things were very boring to Moloquin.

He sat by the fire in the longhouse and looked around him at the other people. They were nearly all women with their children. The spaces where they lived, each family to its own hearth, were divided from one another only by the air, a line of stones, and the knowledge of separation. Karelia had told him not to stare, to keep his eyes downcast, but Moloquin disobeyed her.

He let his hair hang down over his face and he looked through it, so that no one would see him watching them.

He saw the women across the way make a loom of two pieces of wood and weave cloth on it, and he longed to go closer and watch the threads pass in and out of one another. The order in that pleased him. He liked also the colors that they used. A few of the children came up around him and called him names, but he ignored them. There were no boys in the longhouse that came near his size and age; the girls who were his age stayed close by their mothers; all the children who came to Moloquin were little things, their bellies still fat in front of them, their cheeks round and pink, and although they lisped insults at him he wanted to pick them up and squeeze them and make them laugh, as he saw them laugh with their mothers.

When he felt no one watching him, he got up and moved away around the longhouse, seeing everything. It was like stalking animals. When he saw that his presence and movement alarmed them, he stopped and sank down on his heels and was still, hardly even breathing, until they lost interest in him and looked elsewhere; then he got up and went off again.

In such a way he soon knew all the longhouse, even the little room at the end, with its delicious and provocative smells. Coming up the long side of the place once more, he happened on a lump of clay.

The wet mass of the clay was on a mat before a hearth where a low fire still burned; the woman had gone off somewhere. Moloquin squatted down by the clay. He had seen mud like this before. The People made pots of it. He had dug up such gooey mud himself out of the riverbank, and he knew how it felt. He knew also that he should leave this mud alone, but as he remembered how the mud felt, oozing through his fingers, and remembered also how he had seen other people shaping it, the temptation overwhelmed him and he reached out and took a handful.

The feel of it swiftly absorbed him. Sitting flat on his hams, he squeezed and rolled it between his palms. It would take any shape he could give it, and he began to form it into a ball, and twisted part away and saw a nose, a mouth, an ear—he gathered up more of the clay and patted it and pounded it, enjoying his power over it. The earthy smell reminded him of the riverbank and he tasted a little of it and thought of the river and wound and coiled the clay into a wild shape.

It was too easy, though: it made no resistance to him, and would be anything he wished; he found this disappointing.

Still he loved the handling of it, the sensation of the clay giving way to his strength. But while he sat there contentedly molding the clay, the woman who owned it came back.

She shrieked. Her shriek was his first warning that she had found him at this business, and he leapt up, ducking by instinct. She struck him like a bear-mother defending her cub, her hands open, her nails ripping at him. He backed up, trying to get away from her, and tripped over a stone and fell.

After that he merely rolled into a ball and let her beat him and scream at him. She did him no harm, but his soul sank into a cold despair; he would never like being with these people.

Now here came Karelia to save him. He lowered his arms and got up, and Karelia put her hand on his shoulder and gave him a little shake.

“Now see what you’ve done. Didn’t I tell you to stay by the hearth and wait for me?”

Moloquin muttered under his breath. He let his hair hang down over his face, to hide his eyes, while he glared from Karelia to the other woman, whose fury still glowed like a red blaze in her face. She struck at him again and missed. Karelia led him away.

“You must never touch a woman’s belongings like that,” Karelia said. “She meant that clay for some purpose, don’t you understand? Now it is wasted.”

“Wasted,” he said, surprised. They had come back to her hearth; he sat down by the little fire, and saying the words she had told him he put new wood on it. “Why?” Looking over his shoulder he saw the woman taking the lump of clay away.

“It is woman’s work,” Karelia said. “No man may be allowed to handle such things. The spirit of them is driven out by a man’s hands.”

“No spirit is in it,” he said. He remembered how the clay had yielded unresisting to his hands. “There no soul in it at all.”

“Moloquin, you must obey me, or you will be ruined.”

“I want to go away, then,” he said, and she slapped him.

“Never say that again.”

He held his tongue. His anger seethed in him like water boiling in a pot; he wondered if the spirit of the hearth had somehow gotten into his belly and set his insides on fire. He pressed his hand to his belly. Everything he did, Karelia told him, he had to do in certain ways, to avoid offending spirits, or to attract the benevolent aid of spirits; there seemed nothing he could do freely.

“You cannot live, except with us,” Karelia said to him. She gathered up the clutter of pots and baskets around her hearth, tipped out the garbage and thrust everything off to one side; although she acted very busy, he noticed, all she did was shuffle things from one place to another, and he laughed, his mood lifting.

“I live enough before,” he said, forgetting the worst.

“Because some spirit protected you. Perhaps it was Ael, your mother. In any case, she has given you to me to care for, and you must obey me as if I were she.”

He thought of going away, back to his place of stones, and lowered his head. She fussed around a while longer, making the space neat by shoving everything indiscriminately out to the edges. At last she said, “Now, come with me—I have work to do, and will need your help.”

“Why?” Moloquin got to his feet.

“I am going to find wood.”

He went after her down the longhouse to the door; all around him the hostile stares of the People were like walls of thorns. Karelia led him outside, into the sun, and he breathed deep, his chest expanding, standing straight—as if, before, he could only stoop. In front of him his new mother stood, almost a head shorter than he, her face sharp, scanning the village.

“Now,” she said, turning toward him, and put her hand on his arm. “Let us go and find wood for the fire.”

At a little trot she took him away up the slope, toward the forest. He fell in beside her, needing only to walk fast to keep up with her. They made their way between the long winding strips of the gardens where the women were at work with their hoes and rakes, digging out the weeds from between their plants. Someone was singing nearby, and the others joined in sometimes, so that it was like question-and-answer; the voices fit smoothly together, filling all the song’s spaces. As they passed the top edge of the worked ground, he saw some people off to his right a little way, digging up a hole in the ground.

“What are they doing over there?”

She hardly glanced that way. “We will harvest soon,” she said. “They are digging a pit to thresh the grain in.”

“Thresh.”

Into his mind leapt the memory of his mother, gathering her sheaves of grain into bundles, shouting at him to thresh, to thresh—she had struck him, furious, when he dropped them. There had been no hole in the ground. He struggled to remember. All he remembered was the force of her blow, the knowledge that he had done wrong and drawn her anger. Craning his neck, he watched the people digging until he and Karelia were into the close quarters of the forest.

Of course Karelia was not used to gathering wood for herself. As the headwoman of the Red Deer Kindred, she had a dozen younger, stronger hands eager to do such work for her. But she wanted to give Moloquin a task; she knew that work would make him acceptable to the others, and that bringing wood into the village would put a value on him.

They followed a dusty path through the brambles of ripening berries at the edge of the forest, and wound a way back deeper into the trees. She stopped, unsure, here where the sun was so far away, and looked around her.

“What you want here?” Moloquin asked. “You want to burn?”

“Yes. Do you know where we can find some?”

He took her away through the oak trees. Now it was he who led. She followed close after him, her ears straining at the alien sounds of the wood, her eyes caught by swift little movements on either side. He took her to a great oak tree, clutching the earth in its knobbed roots, spreading its branches around it, driving off all other growth.

“Here,” he said, and leapt up, and caught a low-hanging branch. As she watched, amazed, he swung himself nimbly up into the tree and climbed away into the leaves. As he disappeared among the green and brown tangles of the tree she imagined that he grew wings like a bird. She backed up a few steps, her head back, trying to make him out in the dense treetop but all she saw was the wild waving of a branch here and there as he stepped on it.

His voice came from the leaves. “Watch—be careful.” With a rending crash a dead branch fell down through the lower levels, tearing off smaller twigs and limbs, and thudded to the earth a little way from Karelia.

She approached it cautiously. The bark had all been worn away and the wood shone. Moloquin dropped to the ground beside her.

“Here,” he said, and held out a little bird’s nest to her.

“What do I want with that?” She shied from it, her temper short in this alien place.

For answer, he took the nest and plopped it onto her head, and burst out laughing.

Karelia snarled at him; she snatched the nest out of her hair, watching, him giggle and prance before her. She realized how she looked, and had to laugh also. She nodded to the branch.

“This is good wood, Moloquin, but it is too large.”

He shrugged. “No care.” He dragged the branch around until it rested with one end up against the oak trunk, and then he jumped on the middle. Nothing happened; the branch was very solid. He took up another branch off the ground and hit the first one, but the club was rotten and broke. Still he did not give up; Karelia watched him, her hands at her sides, as he searched the area around him, found a large stone, and pried it out of the ground. He could barely lift it; groaning he hoisted it up over his head, and drove it down on the branch.

The wood cracked with a sharp report. Crowing, Moloquin pounced on it and tore the branch to pieces with his hands, banging the pieces on the stone when they would not yield to his strength.

“Now,” he said, panting, “is some spirit needed to thank?”

Karelia smiled at him. “I suppose there is. Tree-lore is not women’s lore. The branch was dead already, the tree will not mind that we have taken it.”

“My old mother,” he said, “said no word of thanks.”

“She was angry.”

“Is that why she die?”

Karelia’s eyebrows rose; she smiled at him, pleased again with his quick wits. “Yes, probably. Yes.”

“Give me—” he waved his hand at her.

She gave him the leather sling she had brought, and showed him how to put the wood into it. He went off again, to find more, and she sat by the sling, listening uneasily to the forest sounds, the twittering of the birds like free souls in the air, the unquiet rustle of the brush, and the wind. Moloquin worked hard, finding good dead wood, breaking it up with stones or his hands, or slamming the limbs against the oak trunk, and soon the sling was full.

He put the sling up on his shoulders and they went back toward the village. As they walked, Moloquin began to sing.

It was not a true song, but a wordless undulating tone. Karelia enjoyed it; she listened gratefully to it, ignoring the screeches and calls and whispers of the forest around her, and kept close by him. He had some power in him, she guessed, that let him move freely through a place so dense with spirits as this. That was why he had been able to take shelter in the Pillar of the Sky. She had been right to take him in. He was Ael’s son, and had the favor of Heaven. She lifted her head, pleased with herself, keeping very close to Moloquin.

Moloquin went into the forest three more times that day, and brought out firewood on his back. The first three loads he stacked up in the longhouse, as Karelia told him, but the last, she said, he was to take to the roundhouse.

“You go with me,” he said.

“No, no,” she said. “You go there. Take the wood in through the gate; you will see a great pile of wood inside the yard. Put your wood there.”

“I no want to.”

“Moloquin,” she said, with the great air of patience she often assumed, “you are here, but you are not here, to many of the People. You must show them your worth.”

“I bring wood here,” he said. “Ladon there. Ladon hate me.”

“Moloquin,” she said, her patience something leaner, “if Ladon burns just one stick of wood you have brought, he will have accepted you and can no longer harm you. Now, do as I say; remember, I am your mother now.”

What she said made some sense to him, and he knew, also, that like Ael she would only get angry with him if he defied her; he could not endure her anger. He loaded up a sling of wood onto his back and went down toward the roundhouse.

He had never been so close to Ladon’s place before. On its high ground by the river it seemed to grow up from the heart of the earth. For a long while he stood outside the gate in the wall around it, gathering his courage, but in the end it was his curiosity that drove him through the gate.

The wall was made of tree trunks. Inside, the yard was wide and level, of pounded earth swept clean, and full of men, sitting on the ground, some busy with small tasks, others idle and talking. They all stared at him when he came in. He lowered his head a little and lugged his wood toward the heap against the inside of the wall.

The roundhouse also was made of great trees. Massive and erect, they supported other trees, split in half and laid down over the tops of the uprights. It was so wonderful to see this that he hesitated, gawking at it, the wood still balanced on his back, and all the stares of the men on him. The size and strength of the roundhouse reminded him of the forest. He stroked the huge trunks with his eyes, pleased with the symmetry of their structure.

Coming back to himself, he let the sling slip down, and began to stack up the wood he had brought. The wood already heaped there lay disorderly and he knew it would rot if left like that; he set his wood in neat rows and then began to stack the other wood also. Every few seconds he stole another glance at the roundhouse.

A shriek from behind him brought him wheeling around, his spine tingling. In the doorway of the roundhouse stood Ladon’s son.

“Cur! Filth!” Ladon’s son rushed forward, and Moloquin, warned, ran a few steps toward the gate in the wall; but the gate was closer to his enemy than it was to him, and when he saw Ladon’s son stoop for a stone on the ground, Moloquin whirled and ran back toward the wood.

He thought to climb the wall; he was scrambling up over the heap of wood when the stone hit him in the head. All his sense left him for a moment. In a dizzy blackness he fell, and it seemed that he fell down forever, struggling for his soul back.

He lay on the ground, panting, and heard other shouts, other feet pounding toward him. In a panic he fought to rise, but his body was in another power than his; nothing would obey him. Hands fell on him. He lashed out, sobbing between his teeth.

“Hold!”

Someone held him, but not with angry hands; someone held him close and wrapped arms around him to protect him. He kept still, tense.

“What are you doing?” shouted the man who held him. “What business is this?”

Moloquin pulled, and the grip on his arms eased; he backed away, his left eye full of blood. The man who had held him now got between him and Ladon’s son and seized Ladon’s son by the arm and shook him.

“What business is this? A true man does not set upon another like that, does not strike the first blow against one who is unarmed. I am amazed at you, chief’s son—I thought you understood the bearing of a man of the People.”

“Fergolin,” Ladon’s son cried. “He is not one of us.”

Moloquin wiped his face. There was a swelling on the top of his forehead, and it dribbled blood down into his hair. The other men were gathering close around him. He lowered his head, feeling cramped. He could not breathe here without breathing of their air.

Fergolin was still shouting at Ladon’s son, shaking him, and some of the other men joined him in the scolding; Ladon’s son turned away, red-faced. Now Fergolin swung around, saw Moloquin again, and knelt beside him.

“Let me look at this.” He touched Moloquin’s head. “Can you hear me well? Is your vision clear?”

Moloquin recoiled from him. “Leave me alone!” He glared at Fergolin as if he had thrown the stone. “I hate you. I hate all of you!” He leapt up to his feet and sprinted out of the roundhouse yard.

Fergolin stood staring after Moloquin, who had disappeared out the gate. Blood smeared the Bear Skull master’s fingertips. Impulsively he raised his hand to his lips and tasted of the blood, as if he might find answers in that.

The other men stood close around him, their faces taut. Ladon’s son was still among them, but as Fergolin turned, seeking him, the boy slipped out of the pack and ran away into the roundhouse.

“He will tell Ladon,” said one of the other men.

“Let him,” said Fergolin, surprised. “I have the right of it—you saw. Ladon cannot do but what is right.”

“But—Moloquin—”

They looked at one another, but no one spoke; they all felt this to be a dangerous and subtle matter, and it was not getting any easier as it went on. At last Fergolin said, “I think this will all come to a bad end.” He wondered where Moloquin had run to, probably to Karelia, who was protecting him. He was too old for the longhouses. At his age boys were ready to enter a society and begin their lifetimes of learning and study, obedience and memory.

Moloquin was supposed to be too stupid to have any capacity for such things. He had not seemed stupid to Fergolin. It would have been a relief if he had been stupid. Fergolin raised his fingertips again, to sniff the drying blood.

“You disobeyed me!”

“Opa-Ladon-on—” his son quivered at the feet of the chief. “I threw a stone at him. I have done it before—you told me to do it before—”

Ladon struck him again, furious, raining several blows down on his son’s bowed trembling back. It was Karelia who had done this, and it was Karelia he wished he could strike down.

Finally, with a kick at his son’s bottom, the chief walked away through the roundhouse. Many openings in the thatch let in the light but it was still dim and shadowy below the roof. Each of the societies had its own section; most of the men were gone now, off on their daily rituals and duties. He wished Fergolin had been off somewhere when Moloquin came in.

With firewood. That was her doing, the serpent-hearted woman, sending the brat here with a load of firewood, making him important, forcing the men to see him, to accept him. Putting him out of Ladon’s reach.

I am the chief, he thought. When one is hungry, he comes to me. When one is cold, he comes to me. I give everything to them, food, shelter, everything. Then why have I no power?

Why did she have such power? From the place of the dead, she reached back into his life and trifled with his plans, balked his resolution, made nothing of his dreams. She whom he had always hated: Ael, his sister.

It was Karelia now, but somehow Ael had invaded Karelia’s mind and brought this from her. Always before, Karelia had been an annoyance, with her keen understanding, her vast story-lore, her willingness to speak up at bad moments, but she had never done anything like this.

As if she stood before him he remembered Ael, as tall as he was, thin and hard from the grueling work of women, her black hair hanging down over her shoulders. She should have married. She should have married that first summer, when her body first bled, but she had refused. Untamable Ael. Walking in the woods with her bow, killing beasts for their meat and hide, growing a crop richer than any other, as if the plants sprang up from the drops of her sweat. She had done everything alone. She had mocked them all, and so they had all hated her, and when Ladon attacked her, they had done nothing. Turned their backs and not even watched her go.

He had thought he was finished with her, then, when she went away into the forest.

His stomach turned. She was here now, with him, mocking him again; he could almost smell the female odor of her body.

That frightened him, that smell, or the memory of that smell; it reminded him of what he and Ael had done, that one time. That was forbidden absolutely, and if the People ever learned of it—

Maybe that was why his sister was haunting him now. He put his hands over his face, sick with guilt.

Outside the men were talking, and he could hear Fergolin’s voice, arguing perhaps: Fergolin questioned everything, not from the perverse delight of an Ael, but with the fearful concern of one who needed always to be right. Ladon drew nearer to the wall, to overhear what the men were saying, and realized that they knew that Moloquin was Ael’s son, a piece of truth he had known was common among the women but not the men. Slowly Ladon’s mind settled. He was still the chief, and if the women somehow managed to thwart him, they had been thwarting men from the beginning; it was no special weakness of his.

He gathered himself. Moloquin was a green boy, Karelia old and held in dread rather than love; he would prevail over them. Lifting his shoulders, he expanded his chest with a deep breath and felt immediately more confident. He went out to the yard.

“Opa-Ladon-on!” The men had been squatting by the roundhouse wall, debating. They sprang up to their feet, spreading their open palms toward him in respect. “Mighty is he! Opa-Ladon-on!”

He raised his hand, palm out, to greet them, scanned them quickly, and with gestures and a few words he scattered them, sending this one here and that one there, until none remained but Fergolin. Then Ladon nodded to the Bear Skull master to follow him and went over to the outer wall, where the wood was piled in a disorderly heap.

Fergolin came up to his shoulder and stood there. At a gesture from Ladon, he set about straightening the heap of wood.

“My son was rude to you, I believe,” Ladon said.

Fergolin stacked arm-length pieces of oak and ash. He straightened to speak to his chief, and met his eyes.

“The boy is young, Opa-on, and still unrestrained. I hope I did not trespass in showing him the proper way.”

“No, I thank you for taking such a responsibility on yourself.” Ladon indicated the wood with one hand. “Are we now to be supplied every day? This has been a problem all spring, the wood.”

“I don’t know, Opa-on. It was Moloquin who brought it here.”

Ladon stooped to pick up a long chunk of the wood. It was sound, old oak and ash, well dried out, and broken into proper lengths. He had wanted to be disappointed. Now he had to say, “Yes, excellent, a well-done task. I shall see him when he returns.”

“Opa-on? You mean Moloquin?”

“I mean Moloquin,” said Ladon, and went back into the roundhouse.

Karelia walked up the gentle slope, through the waist-high flowering grasses, the wind behind her, and before her, at the top of the long run of the world, the vast embankment and toppling stones of the Pillar of the Sky. She was looking for Moloquin. When the word had reached her that he had run away, she had immediately bent her steps here; she supposed he might have gone back to the forest, but if he had, she would never find him.

The story of his flight had come to her from mouth to mouth, girls and women, and she trusted none of what the last mouth had told her—that he had fought with Ladon’s son and run away bleeding and defeated. Her stomach was queasy with uncertainty and bewilderment. What was happening now over Moloquin had begun with her, and she was eaten up with doubt of her deed.

The grass shivered in the wind; hordes of grasshoppers bounded out of her path, their arching leaps approaching flight; butterflies flitted off over the tops of the bending grass. Off to one side, a bustard suddenly sprang out of a hollow and raced away on its long legs, its heavy body balanced between its outstretched wings. The wind was rising, its roar merry in her ears, tangling up her legs in her own garment, and harrying fat grey clouds through the sky.

She stopped, caught at the center of this: the joyous tumult of the Overworld. Raising her head, she let the wind bless her face with its cool caress. Everything was moving, the whole world, all in its harmony. She turned around, her arms out, whirling around and around, to make her own wind, to spin the mean human sense out of her head, and stopped, and with her mind a blur she felt all through herself the surging rhythm of the world-as-one.

The thrill faded. That was the flaw in being human: the need always to stop the flow and study it. She plodded on, tired now, her soul burdened with her questions of herself.

The place of humankind in the world was so small, so minor, that to fools it must seem that people could do as they wish, without harm to any but themselves. Karelia knew better. A lifetime of stories had taught her that everything mattered. Now she imagined consequences to what she had done that could tear the world to tatters.

She should have left Moloquin as he was, and let Ladon spin his own destruction. Was it not said that all true crimes carried with them their own punishment? Yet she had meddled.

She reached the ditch outside the bank and stopped, tired, breathless, an old woman faced with more than she wanted to do. The ditch was too deep, the bank too high. Slowly she began to walk around the other edge, toward the way in, but then a strange sound reached her that froze her in her steps.

A quavering low wail, it rose from within the dead place, a demon’s voice. But she had heard it before. She forced her thumping heart to calm. It was Moloquin, singing.

She went to the opening in the bank and entered into the holy place. The day was fading away and the grassy bowl within the bank was nearly full of shadows. At first she could make out only the stones in their slow collapse, but the tuneless howl of the song went on, full of anger and sorrow, and following it she found Moloquin.

He sat beside the northernmost stone, called the North Watcher, his back to the rock, his legs tucked under him. He had cast off all his new clothes and pulled the orderly braids out of his hair. A streak of dried blood painted his cheek and jaw. Seeing Karelia, he paid no heed to her and went on with his song. Karelia sat down beside him and waited.

He sang a while longer, but the sound had changed, strained and false; with her there beside him he became aware of himself, and of the limits of himself. He fell still. His head sank down, his hair lying over his cheek. Karelia said nothing.

The embankment shut out all the world. There seemed nothing of the earth but this small round, with its great stones to prop up the sky. Overhead the clouds raced by in the grip of the whistling air. By the ancient stone, the boy and the old woman sat together in silence.

Finally he turned to her and said, “Why did you come here? Why can you not leave me alone?”

“You are my son,” she said.

“I am not your son! I am—I am Ael’s son.”

“Without me, you did not even know her name,” she said.

He had no answer to that. She looked on him with sympathy, wishing she could put her arm around him, but she knew he would fight against her. She raised her face again toward the rushing sky. High above them, among the turbulent clouds, a dark speck moved, a bird, or an eye of the spirits, watching what happened here. She felt again the cold dread of this place, the aching memory, the promise of catastrophe.

He said, “I hate him, Karelia. I want to kill him.”

“What happened between you?”

“He throwed—threw a rock at me.”

Karelia waited; when he said no more, she asked, “And you?”

“I runned away. Or I killed him, Karelia, as if he were a lizard or a fat frog.”

She thought, He is not afraid then, and was pleased with him. Now she lifted her arm and put it around his shoulders, and he drew close to her, his skin cold. She leaned her cheek against his hair.

“You were happy before. I should have left you alone.”

He said nothing for a moment, his face close to hers, his eyes shut. At last he said, “Tell me a story.”

That pleased her; she tightened her grip on him, and looked around her, waiting for the proper tale to climb up to the surface of her mind. Almost at once the words reached her lips, and she let go of him, to have her hands free.

“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.

He had dropped the pouch, and the jug of bean broth was still there; Grub dropped to his knees beside them and plunged his hand into the pouch. There was nothing left but a few grains. He wet his fingers and picked up the last of the meal and licked it away. He turned the jug over his open mouth and a few drops fell on his tongue. Slowly, because even such a little amount of meal was too dry to eat easily, he swallowed the bit in his hand. He turned the jug over again and waited patiently until one final drop formed on the lip and fell, and then he went after the boys’ band.

In the middle of the fields near the forest’s edge, the People had dug a pit and set in it a floor of stones, to thresh their grain on. There were no stones in the ground around the village, so the stones were brought from another place and kept in the roundhouse from year to year. They were hard, flat, bright-colored stones like the ones of which the sampo was made, broken into chunks that could be handled, and set down edge to edge into the ground. The women built fires on the floor and fed them with oak wood; when the fires died down to coals and embers they swept off the ashes, leaving the stone floor clean and very hot.

The women had been harvesting their grain for several days, gathering the stalks and binding them into bundles. They surrounded the floor in a ring, each with her sheaf of grain, and her children waiting to bring her more, and beat the bundles of stalks on the stone floor.

This knocked the grain loose. Before long the floor was beginning to disappear under a layer of seeds, and the aroma went up of toasting grain, warm and dry and delicious. When the grains were toasted, the inedible chaff that encased them cracked and fell off by itself, and when the grain was winnowed the chaff blew away, and nothing was left but the sweet and nourishing seed, already cooked a little.

The women worked ceaselessly at the threshing; as they swayed and swung with their bundles of grain they seemed to be dancing, although women were generally forbidden to dance. The children ran back and forth between their mothers and the piles of harvest grain, taking away the emptied stalks and bringing new bundles, and the older girls now leaned in past their mothers and swept the toasted and threshed grain into baskets.

They could not all work at once, of course, and the crowds of women waiting for a chance to thresh their harvests gathered a little way away, and there Karelia sat, and told stories.

Grela, the sister of the headwoman Tishka, worked with the first group of women over the floor, and she could see directly across the floor and beyond the other workers to where Karelia sat. She worked as hard as she could to be done with it, so that she could join the others; she loved hearing Karelia, who knew more stories of Abadon than anyone else.

Abadon was a favorite of Grela’s, and had been since she was a little girl. Aware as she was of what was expected of her, she herself would never fall to the level of such tricks as Abadon was always playing, but it was a joy nonetheless to hear them done.

Grela swung the sheaves of wheat in great full strokes, dashing the heads of seeds on the floor, and a simple delight filled her: the rhythmic work satisfied her, and soon she would hear stories. There seemed room for little more happiness in her moment. She stepped back, to let her older daughter sweep a pile of grain into a basket; the inside of the basket was worked with the many-pointed star which was Grela’s own sign. Waiting for room, the mother wiped her face on her forearm and looked across the floor toward Karelia again, wondering what tale she was telling—besides her endless Abadon cycle, Karelia had an abundance of stories of Rael the Birdwoman, and so many other stories that Grela knew no one who had heard them all. Then as she stood there she saw Moloquin coming.

He was carrying wood down from the forest, wood for the threshing floor; he was stooped under the weight of the sling on his back, and looked like a monstrous animal. Grela glanced to either side of her.

None other had noticed him. She hesitated, unsure what to do—after all, he came and went through the longhouses; why should he not be allowed here? But there were no other men here. She looked at him again, frowning, her mind struggling with this messiness.

It was woman’s work, to thresh, and like all their works they preferred it done away from the men. But here was Moloquin, laying down the wood, and in truth the threshing floor would be cold by midafternoon, and would need to be fired again. Grela looked with piercing eyes to see that Moloquin was properly clothed—the first impression of many of the women was that he went about naked, and would leap on the girls. He wore a belt, a cloth drawn through it, down the back, between his legs, up over the front, all properly modest although only little boys wore woven cloth. He was piling the wood up, and no one else seemed to care that he was there. Now he was going away again. He was a fool, everyone said, and she remembered the strange child of old Riskel, with his funny misshapen little face and stubby fingers and stupid speech, whom everyone had loved, who had stayed with his mother until she died and then with her sister until he died, still a boy to them all, although he was full grown.

That was what Moloquin was. Pleased, Grela slipped him away into the same memory, there with Riskel’s child, and now there was no confusion any more, everything belonged where it was. Everything had happened before. She took a sheaf of wheat from her elder daughter and turned to lash the stone floor with it.

Grub thought, It isn’t fair.

He had meant to stay with the boys’ band and avoid the women, but Ladon’s son made that impossible. He got them to herd the swine and the goats together into the lush meadows at the lip of the forest, and then he himself, and all the older boys, stole away down to where Karelia sat in the middle of a great mob. So all the other boys went too, and there Grub was again, in the middle of the women, looking for his mother.

He saw her at last, from a distance, and dared not go any closer. She was nursing his little brother again, cuddling him, crooning to him, allowing him the whole use of her breast. Grub turned away, his eyes scalded.

Then he saw Moloquin, coming down from the forest with his load of wood, and his resentment flared up. He thought, It isn’t fair, and went after Moloquin, keeping his distance, staying out of range, but determined to follow him.

At first there was no place to go. Moloquin put down his wood, and instead of dumping it in a heap, he squatted down and stacked it neatly in crisscross rows. Grub drew a little nearer, watching his hands. Behind him, the crowd around Karelia gave up a great shout of delight, and many whistled and pounded their hands together in applause.

Moloquin turned his head, looking that way; by chance his interest led him to look straight in Grub’s direction, and for an instant their eyes met. Grub lowered his gaze at once, and his skin crawled uncomfortably. When he looked back, Moloquin was getting up, the sling over his shoulder, moving away toward the woods.

Grub went after him; he supposed he might find some berries to eat on the way, although everything this close to the threshing floor would long since have been eaten up. He kept his distance from Moloquin, but he kept him well within sight, because although he was a little afraid of Moloquin, he was much more afraid of the forest.

Moloquin was glad to be back in the forest. At the edge of the trees he broke into a run, and for a while he merely ran among the trees, leaping over fallen branches and brush and slapping the trunks of the oaks and lindens as he passed. He knew that one of the other boys was following him but he paid no heed to that. He ran down to the edge of the river, where the bank overhung the stream, and throwing aside the loincloth Karelia had given him he leapt into the slow-moving water.

Diving down to the bottom, he groped through the stones and mud, chasing frogs off toward the green depths, and nearly caught a wedge-shaped bug; he liked those for the way they crunched between his teeth, but this one escaped.

He slithered out onto the riverbank again and walked along the river a little way, picking such berries that he found, eating lily shoots and a few snails he broke out of their shells and washed—snails were always full of dirt. While he lay on his back on the riverbank, he noticed again that the other boy was nearby.

This was a little fair-haired boy, crouched down in the brush as if he were hiding from Moloquin, and therefore Moloquin said nothing to him.

Karelia had listened to his dream about the Pillar of the Sky and had said nothing to him about it, but he could see by the flash of her eyes and the little smile she gave him that the dream was important. He liked to think about it whenever he could. The vision of the Pillar of the Sky, completed, its great gateways open to the Sun and huger than any man, gave him the same intense satisfaction as he got from learning new things well. In his mind he saw the enormous stones, he even felt them, their hardness and smoothness, and especially their great weight and strength, that no man could move.

Nothing so clearly and exactly seen could exist only in his dream. The great gateways were real somewhere, and somehow he would make them be real in the place where they were meant to stand: he, Moloquin.

Behind him the little boy coughed and rustled the brush and sighed, and his stomach rumbled. He was hungry, with all this wealth of food around him. Moloquin got up and went to his work, looking for wood.

Grub saw, amazed, that Moloquin ate bits of the forest, and his neck prickled up. He felt deeply uneasy just being beneath the trees, where the sun reached him only in stray tendrils. The thorny and impenetrable underbrush caught at him with its million fingers and he knew that the rustlings and crunchings around him were the sounds of ferocious beasts; he dared not even think about the demons and spirits behind every branch.

Moloquin belonged here. The forest fed him. The wild chaotic brambles parted to let him through and then closed over to block Grub’s passage. The forest gave Moloquin wood as well; he went straight to an oak tree and gathered up the smaller branches, breaking them to good lengths with chunks of wood.

He worked like a woman. Grub curled up at the foot of a bushy tree to watch and was amused. Moloquin never paused in his business. His stack of wood grew higher and rounder as the sun ascended. How did he imagine he would get all this back to the village? Grub would have laughed, but he was too hungry, and a little afraid of what Moloquin would do if he found him there.

When the sun reached the summit of the sky, so that her long fingers touched the floor of the forest, Moloquin stopped in his scurrying and rushing around; he came over toward Grub but seemed not to see him, and climbed up into the tree beside him, up to the high branches.

There he stayed a long time. Unable to see him now, Grub stopped thinking about Moloquin and instead thought of his mother.

He knew he should not want to stay with his mother. He knew he was supposed to go with the other boys, to follow Ladon’s son in the boys’ band, to learn the ways of men. In a few years he would enter one of the societies—the Bear Skull, he dearly wanted to be a novice of the Bear Skull, because that was the greatest of all—and carve his mask.

He should be thinking about that. He should be struggling with the other boys for a place in their midst, and not merely stand waiting at the edge, the last, always the last, always the least. But he wanted his mother. When he thought of his mother nothing else mattered except that he was far away from her, and tears welled into his eyes.

Something hard bounced off his knee. He looked around, startled, and something small and hard struck the tip of his nose and sailed away into the brush. He looked up.

There, high above his head, Moloquin sat among the green leaves of the tree, one knee crooked over a branch. Grub shivered, drawing back—surrounded by the sunlit green, Moloquin looked like a demon of the wood. As he stared upward, Moloquin put something small and red into his mouth and spat out another hard pit that fell down through the air and plopped into Grub’s lap.

Grub leapt up, furious and ashamed. “I hate you,” he shouted, and cast about him for stones to throw, but Moloquin was well out of reach of his arm. Coolly the boy in the treetop laughed down at him, picking the fruit from the top of the tree and eating it. Grub howled with rage. He bounced up and down below the tree, but Moloquin was not cowed at all.

The pile of firewood was still there in the clearing. Grub ran to it and threw the branches around, strewing them all over the open ground, but this also was useless against Moloquin, who laughed at him all the while. Grub ran away, back toward the village, furious.

As he neared the margin of the forest, his steps slowed. Out there the women were working, the other boys were herding the goats and swine, there was no place for him. He imagined the village as a great net, and through it he, Grub, fell like a little fish between the lines.

He was hungry. He wished he could do what Moloquin did and eat whatever he found. He kicked at the ground around him, turning over rotten sticks and tearing up bits of vine and brush, but he found nothing to eat, only a few green berries, a fat horrible worm, and some mushrooms.

At last he came on a plant that he had seen Moloquin eat. The thin white stalks were crunchy and sweet; they burned his tongue a little, but they felt good in his stomach. Feeling better, he went back into the forest to find Moloquin again, and see what else he ate.

In the afternoon Karelia stopped telling stories; her throat was sore and her tongue stiff. The people clamored and begged and caught at her clothes to keep her there but she rose up out of their midst and went away, going toward the threshing floor; when she looked back, someone else had sat down on the stump where the storyteller sat and was trying to spin words.

Karelia walked around a while, stretching her aging limbs. She stood by the threshing floor and watched as the women beat the sheaves of grain until the seeds flew; when they lay on the hot floor and the chaff cracked, the seeds sometimes bounced high, like grasshoppers. The smell was delicious. It was hard not to reach out and take a handful of the toasted seeds lying on the threshing floor. Karelia sat down to watch a while longer. There was something comforting and fortifying in the sight of this work, done since time began, since the People began, since Rael the Birdwoman brought them knowledge of seeds. The mothers, whose gardens they were, stood tall and gracefully swaying all around the edge of the threshing floor, and when they bent to strike the grain on the stone they seemed like the growing grain itself, that bent and swayed in the wind. Between them their daughters pressed forward, their hands ready with baskets and with rakes and sweeps of wood to scoop the threshed grain away; when their mothers rose up, these girls pushed forward, and so there was an intense unceasing rhythm to their work, a completeness that left no room for trouble.

Karelia drifted away, higher on the slope, toward the edge of the forest, and there she saw the boys’ band which had brought out the swine from the village to forage under the oak trees; the boys sat in a row on the slope, looking down toward the village, a row of solemn little men. She feinted toward them, as if she would walk through their midst, and they shrank back from her; with a laugh she went on her way.

She was thinking of Moloquin’s dream. He had told it to her in a rush of excited words, still troublesome to him although he learned how to speak better every day, and she had made him tell it twice, to be sure she heard everything, although she had said nothing to him about it. There was really nothing she could say. The dream of the stone gates was obvious in its potency and force. It was a message from the Overworld, first to him, to give him his destiny, but also to her, to Karelia, because she had taken him in: the dream showed her what creature Moloquin was.

Not an ordinary child. Around him there appeared now, to her whose eyes had been schooled, showers of light, and images of greatness—trees, stars, and standing stones. She began to see details of his power, whenever she placed her mind in the service of the Overworld, and carefully she noted these, to give to him when the moment came.

The others knew nothing of this. To the women, he was still Ael’s son, and they despised him for his mother’s sake. To the men, she hoped, he was just another boy.

What he was to Ladon, she could only guess. She hoped he saw the boy as harmless; she hoped he would forget him. Her heart knew better than that. Her heart warned her ever against Ladon.

She saw her son coming through the forest, carrying firewood on his back, and she smiled, pleased with him. The work would degrade him in the eyes of the village but in Karelia’s eyes it made him stronger. Although now he was bent over double under the weight of the wood, yet she knew one day he would stand in the gateway between Heaven and earth. Now he carried firewood, but one day he would bear his People on his shoulders, and when he did, he would make dust of Ladon and his power.

She spoke of this to no one. Sometimes she herself, wakening at night or sitting by the fire, wondered if her expectations of him were not merely the wraiths of an old woman’s declining soul. At such times she needed only to look at him to know better.

The other children crept closer to her hearth, sat around outside the ring of stones that marked the edge of her living space, and listened to her stories. She told how the red deer flew up close to the Sun and caught fire in its antlers to take to the People. But as the deer leapt toward the earth, a bit of the fire fell out of the bowl of its antlers and rolled down its back, and that was why on the back of the red deer there was a long black burn mark ever after.

She taught him all the old rites for dealing with fire, rites that the People no longer used very often, preferring to take a bit of fire from a living hearth to start a new one rather than cause the flame to be born of cold and death. He listened to her with his eyes wide, hearing everything. Sometimes she asked him to repeat a story to her, and he did so, reciting each word as she had told it to him, repeating the pitch and force of her voice, even the gestures of her hands.

Every day he gathered wood for the fires that heated the threshing floor, and he alone did this, all the others seeing that he did so well there was no need for any other to do the tedious work. Then on the eighteenth day, the threshing was done.

On the day following they had the ceremony of the Giving of the Power of Ladon.

For this rite all the women put on their best garments and dressed their children as gorgeously as they were able and lined them up by order of age. The men also put on their masks and their ceremonial clothes and took their drums, and all the People assembled together outside the roundhouse, and they took down some of the wall around the yard, removing the mats from the uprights of the wall, so that all the People could be in one crowd, together, facing Ladon.

There in the door of the roundhouse Ladon sat on his pile of bearskins and fox skins, and the men stood on either side of him with their drums. First the men danced, making three interconnecting rings that circled the roundhouse, and with the beating of their drums and their singing and their dance they evoked the whole of the Overworld to pay witness to what went on here.

Then the women came before him, beginning with the headwomen, and set before him their harvest.

For this purpose the women made special baskets, which seemed deep and wide but were really worked in with withies to be shallow, and the woman spread a thin layer of unmilled grain on the top, so that it seemed the whole basket was full. She brought him beans as well in such baskets. She brought him jugs of honey, but the jugs were plugged just below the neck, so that a little honey would fill up many jugs, and seem a great deal; and she brought cheeses, in a great pile, but the top only was real cheese, and the bottom ones were of wood.

Thus each woman strove to bring before Ladon the greatest amount of all the People, but in truth what she could do in these ways was limited by the number of baskets and jugs she could make. When she had offered up so much show to Ladon, what was left over of her harvest went quietly into the roundhouse in ordinary baskets.

After each of the women had made her offering to Ladon, they prepared a great feast. The men in a hunting rite slaughtered some of the pigs, and these were roasted; the women milled grain, and formed it into flat cakes, and cooked them. There was also fruit gathered from the forest, and honey that had fermented, although that was known to be a favorite food of the spirits and was drunk only very sparingly by wise people, so that there would be enough for the ancestors.

And the ancestors came to the feast. All the food was piled up on a mat of bark on the step of the roundhouse, and all the People ate of it, and since no one with proper manners would take the last bite of anything, and there was so much food that everyone could eat his fill and still there would be more, the fact that when they were done all the food was gone proved that the spirits had come and eaten also, and had accepted the People, their harvest, and their feast. Thus Ladon, who was at the center of it all, acquired more power.

Also proof of the presence of spirits was the general levity of the crowd. No one would have drunk too much of the honey-liquor, and yet nearly all the men and most of the women seemed drunk, and danced and played like children with one another; some even went off into the quiet behind the roundhouse and coupled there, although they usually found, too late, that their quiet place concealed a number of small, loud children.

Karelia told a few stories, but it was hard to tell stories to drunks, and after a little while she ceased and went around the place, amusing herself with other people’s antics. Moloquin was nowhere to be found. She paused by the table of leaves where the roast pigs were laid out, and stooped and took a big piece of the crisp fat, and then when she rose she found herself face to face with Ladon.

Her back tingled. Like a deer in the forest coming face to face with a wolf she trembled with the urge to flight, but his fierce unfaltering gaze held her fast.

“Opa-Ladon-on,” she said, her voice like a feather in her throat. “Mighty is he.”

Unblinking, he fixed her with his gaze. He said, “You have given me much offense, woman.”

After the ceremony, in the presence of the ancestors, he was full of power; he gave it off like a radiance. She raised her hand between them, as a shield.

“Ladon,” she whispered, “let me go.”

“Aaaah.”

He crept nearer, massive, shimmering—capable, she knew, of destroying her with one hand, or with one word, if he knew that word. She felt his enmity like a pressure in her chest that would not let her breathe.

Then she found the word to use against him. The name that threatened him, the power that turned him human again.

“Ael,” she said.

He stopped in his slow serpentine advance.

“Ael, not I, is weaving your destiny together,” Karelia said; she took heart, and her force bloomed as his faded. “It is Ael, not old Karelia, whom you must hate, Ladon-on.”

His eyes were hot and bright now, but his strength was baffled. He moved in fits and jerks, the fluid strength gone from his limbs. Karelia straightened, triumphant, her heart beating hard with the knowledge of victory, and she thrust her hand out toward him.

“Ael will destroy you, Ladon!”

“Ah!”

He seized hold of her hand. He tightened his grip until the small bones crunched and she cried out in pain. His face twisted with the effort of his grip. Then abruptly he let her go, turned and was gone.

She sank down where she was, her hand in her lap. The hand throbbed and ached all the way up to her elbow. She raised her head. Night was on them, night hovered all around them, driven up into the sky by the fires and the noise, but covering them all nonetheless. She shivered.

He was not beaten. She had brought Moloquin here, she had forced Ladon to accept his presence, she had put a stone into his belly, but she had not beaten him. He was only waiting.

That understanding filled her with a churning fear. Suddenly she had to see Moloquin, to know that he was well. Rising to her feet, she plunged away, into the dark turmoil of the celebration, looking for her son.

In this year the red traveler in the night sky, which like all the others generally trended into the west, began to course to the east. This had happened before. The People believed that it turned its path because of anger and pride, and to protect themselves and to lure it back to the proper way, they performed ceremonies of worship and honor toward the red star. Because the circling of the traveler coincided with the passage of the sun into the star-gateway, where the two great stars Boy and Girl stood before the burning white scar that lay across the sky, the duty of leading the ceremonies fell to the masters of the Bear Skull Society.

Fergolin therefore was deeply involved in these mysteries. With his novices and his assistants he went away down the river until he was outside the village, and built a little hut of withies and made a fire inside, and sweated himself. On the way back to the village, a time when reality was so clear and exact it seemed to him he knew all things, he found a snakeskin hanging on a blade of grass, and he took this carefully and rolled it around his finger, to put into his amulet bag.

Then with his mask in both hands, his skin still shining and tender from the sweating so that the real world penetrated him through and through, he went before Ladon, to consult with him about the proper day for the ceremony. Standing before Ladon, he placed his mask over his chest so that the spirit to whom the mask gave a face could hear and see what went on.

Ladon stood before his fur-covered high seat, his mask before him, and listened to Fergolin recite the formal request for permission to conduct the ceremony.

“I hear and I will provide what my people require of me,” Ladon said, in the ritual way. “I shall sit under the stars tonight and allow the holy radiance to descend on me. I shall have the wishes of the Overworld made known to me.”

Fergolin thanked him with many bows, using words taught him in his boyhood, and backed away from the presence of the chief; but then he came up to Ladon again. Although the rituals had to be done exactly, with no variance of word or gesture, the actual performance of some of the details was done “under the straw,” as the People said of things done privately. Therefore Fergolin came back with his head turned to one side and his hand over the face of his mask.

Ladon sat down again on his bearskin. His belly lapped his belt and rested on his knees. The sunlight coming in through the hole in the roof glistened blue-black highlights on the thick hair that covered Ladon’s shoulders. He turned the face of his mask to the ground.

“Do it tomorrow,” Ladon said. “If we start at dawn, it will be daylight enough.”

“I hope so,” Fergolin said. It was very bad to be caught in the middle of a ceremony when the sun went down. “It is very near the equinox.” He seemed to hesitate.

Ladon looked beyond him. “Yes? What is it?”

Fergolin glanced over his shoulder; another man stood there, waiting to be acknowledged.

“Opa-Ladon, Moloquin is here.”

“Hunh,” Ladon said, as if the wind had been driven out of him by a sharp poke in the belly. He glanced at Fergolin who remained where he was, being hot with curiosity over this whole business.

“I’ll see him later,” Ladon said, and then shook himself, as if changing his mind meant changing all his body too. “No. Send him to me.”

Fergolin drew off to one side. He saw that Ladon stooped for his mask and put it carefully away beside his high seat, but Fergolin turned his own mask so that it looked out at the world.

Moloquin came. His dense black hair was braided and he wore a piece of cloth wrapped around his body, imitating the clothes men wore, although those garments of course were of animal skins. Karelia had been at work on him. Yet he still looked ragged and dirty somehow, as if the forest still claimed him; it seemed, to Fergolin, that he could as well have grown leaves on his head as hair.

And, Fergolin saw with great amazement, he looked like Ladon.

The chief spoke in his deep voice of power. “You are the boy Moloquin, who came out of the forest.”

“I am the Unwanted One,” said the boy.

“You are the son of Ana-Karelia-el.”

Fergolin stiffened, seeing what Ladon meant to do, and he turned toward Moloquin, expecting he knew not what—some insistence on his identity as Ael’s son, the chief’s sister’s son—but the boy spoke without pause, and with no force.

He said, “I am Karelia’s son.”

Fergolin breathed a long sigh, drawing both their looks, and Ladon smiled at him. “Go, Fergolin-on, my honored man.”

Then Fergolin knew that what he had seen was to be talked over with the other men. He made gestures of respect to Ladon and went out of the roundhouse.

Once, halfway to the door, he paused and looked back; the sunlight coming down through the roof showered on the chief and the tall black- haired fosterling who faced him. They were not speaking, merely staring at each other. Fergolin thought, This will not go as Ladon wishes, and a cold feeling crept up his spine. More things to discuss with the other men. He went off to find company.

Ladon said, “You have been fetching wood for the village. Is that true?”

“Yes, Ladon,” said the boy.

“Call me Opa-Ladon,” said the chief sharply. “Opa-Ladon-on, mighty is he.”

“Yes,” said Moloquin.

The chief lolled on the side of his seat. He had expected more from Moloquin, defiance, threats, accusations; this bland obedient face before him could not be dangerous. He did not even look like Ael. And he had named Karelia as his mother, there in front of Fergolin.

“You are a good gatherer of wood,” Ladon said. “Therefore it is my wish that you go into the forest and gather wood, and fill up my woodlot with wood for the fires of the roundhouse. And when you have done all that, you will come to me again and I shall have more tasks for you.”

He watched Moloquin’s eyes as he spoke, expecting a betraying flash of anger, but Moloquin only nodded. “Yes, Opa-Ladon-on, mighty is he,” and started away. A few steps off, he turned and looked back. “May I go now?”

“Go,” said Ladon.

The boy left. Ladon watched him go, pleased with himself. There was nothing to fear from this one. He was stupid, even as the People thought, and knew nothing of power or truth, honor, pride and the fitness of things: would he have accepted such a mean and contemptible duty otherwise? He was dark and thin, no match for Ladon’s son, with his splendid sunlit hair and handsome face. And Fergolin had heard him deny his mother. It was enough, once the others saw him doing work no man would touch. Ladon smiled to himself, victorious at last over both Ael and Karelia.

At dawn the men put on their masks and took their feathered spears and made two long rows inside the roundhouse, each man standing beside the rooftree of his society, so that they formed two long living spirals under the roof. Then as the sun rose they went slowly forth from the roundhouse.

It was the work of the Salmon Kindred to make music, and so each man of that kindred carried a little drum on his belt, and as they danced they thumped the drum with their hands. The men of the Oak Tree Kindred chanted the rituals of honor to the red travelling star, whose other names were the Circling Star and the Left Eye.

They bent their steps, two long ropes of men, in ever-widening spirals through the village, through the abandoned fields of weeds and goats along the river, up through the newly harvested gardens where the stubble of the grain stood brown in the rows. Here the women stood among their crops and covered their faces with their hands, because this was men’s doings- Even the children were silent, even the babies. The tump-tump of the drums was like the beating of the heart of the People.

The sun climbed into the sky as they danced and beat down on them with her long fierce arms; perhaps jealous of the honor shown the night travelers. The men kept their pace. They wound their way up through the highest fields, where still many trees grew, their bark stripped off all around the bottom; here one day the women would grow grain and beans. At the very edge of the forest, the first pairs of men turned and faced the village, and as the others climbed up beside them, they spread out, until at last the chain of men circled the whole village. Then at the height of the day they ate, and gave food to the masks so that the spirits ate, and they sprinkled meal around the edge of the village, and spoke the rituals of safe-keeping.

Down in the fields, the women bent to their work. There were still beans to pick, and onions and other roots, and so, while the men contended with the Overworld and made peace with the spirits, the women worked like brutes as if nothing was happening.

At last the drums began again. In two long chains the men danced down through the fields again, chanting and bowing. The sun drifted downwards through the sky and the men followed the prescribed spiraling path down toward the roundhouse. They circled the longhouses and blessed them and one by one they went into the roundhouse.

The sun set. Night came, and in the sky, among all the lights of Heaven, the two eyes of the Overworld shone forth: the Right Eye, blue-white and bright and true, above the western horizon, and the Left Eye, red and sullen and false, circling back off its path, straying away from its forward course, signaling error and pain and destruction to the earth below. The People slept, safe inside the spiraling lines of the ritual, safe inside their houses.

Winter came. Nothing grew any more. The women sat in the longhouses when the weather was foul and made baskets and wove cloth and listened to Karelia’s stories.

Moloquin went into the forest every day, to gather firewood; he even went when the weather was evil, when the snow flew, when the icy fogs hung from the trees, because he could not bear the heat and the noise of the longhouse. He had always lived in the forest during the winter. Now it was different; when he was hungry and could find nothing else, he could go down the slope to his mother, and she fed him. If he were lonely, too, he could go to her. And there was another, now, who made him less lonely.

The boy Grub, younger than Moloquin, slight and uncertain and wretched, trailed after him wherever he went, around the village and now into the woods. Now when the boys’ band teased Moloquin, they jeered at Grub also. Moloquin sometimes wished Grub would go away, but there was no place for him. His mother refused him and the boys’ band made him miserable. So Grub followed Moloquin everywhere, and whenever Moloquin found something in the forest to eat, he fed Grub, too.

Grub was afraid of everything in the forest; he saw demons in every tree, felt eyes watching him, screamed at every bird call. With his fingers he made signs against evil spirits. He would eat nothing without washing it first; he drank only from rushing streams. When he saw Moloquin doing none of this, he called him indignant names and with a solemn face threatened to tell Ladon’s son.

When he saw that Moloquin still did no ritual, and went around the forest as boldly as any beast, he himself did less. But he would not go ahead of Moloquin, not a single step; he always followed after him.

Moloquin had gathered up most of the good wood near the village, and every day he had to go deeper and deeper into the forest to find more. When he found a dead tree or a windfall, he stayed there until he had the wood all broken up, and then for a few days he and Grub travelled back and forth carrying the wood. Moloquin carried most of it, but he made Grub bring some, every time, although the little boy whined and complained.

With Grub walking on his heels, he went deep into the forest, following a faint deer trail down through stands of sycamore and maple. The ground was crusted with old snow, crystalline with age, and drilled through from the constant dripping off the branches overhead. At the foot of a slope darkened with pine trees they came out onto a meadow, waist-high in dead grass; once a grove of maples had stood here, but now all the trees were dead, standing white and naked in the stark winter sunlight.

This was strange enough to stop Moloquin in his tracks, and Grub pressed against him, saying, “Let’s go back.”

Moloquin pushed him away. Something stirred in him, some old memory, like a pull on him. He took a hesitant step forward, and Grub seized him again.

“Let’s go back. I want to go back—”

“Ah, you always want to go back. Go by yourself.” Moloquin pushed him away and ran off across the meadow, the grass bending and breaking away from him.

Straight ahead of him, a little stream ran along the edge of the meadow, turned below the foot of the hill and ran on, and he knew if he went around the turn, that he would find another meadow like this, beside the stream, and there, a sort of house—something—

But when he went around the hill the stream ran left, not right, and there was no meadow. He stopped again, hardly noticing Grub who panted up behind him, crying to go home. Moloquin moved away from him a little, looking around him.

Along this stream—somewhere—

His memory showed him flashes of it, like a salmon leaping. His old mother. She had peeled away the bark of the trees, she had lived here, somewhere.

But not here. Grub was pulling on him again. She was not here. When he realized that, it was with surprise he had ever thought she was. Grub was tugging on him, frantic. He looked around him again, longingly, at the trees, the stream that turned the wrong way, and saw again in his memory a broad sunny bench beside a stream near such a place as the dead grove, and a little house.

Not here. A nameless longing filled him, a numb hollow sense of loss. Grub’s hand urged him away. He turned and let the little boy lead him back toward the living People.

In the deep of the winter, old Brant went up the long slope to the Pillar of the Sky. He was supposed to take his novices and apprentice masters, but none of them showed him any sign of interest in the holy place, and so he went alone.

He could see the place from far off, by the circling cloud of crows above it. His legs were tired; he stopped once or twice to rest, and each time his gaze went to the whirling black mass of the birds in the air.

They were alarmed. They wanted to settle down into the dead ground—there was flesh there, he knew of two deaths in the village since the end of summer—and yet whenever they descended, something below scared them and they whirled up again, the air noisy with their wings and cries. So there was someone there, or something.

He drove himself on. His duties today were necessary and important. And he had no enemies: he was afraid of nothing but the righteously angered spirits of his ancestors. It was curiosity that pushed him faster.

As he reached the bank, a cold rain began to fail, and he stopped and put down the bundle he carried, opened it up, and took out his long coat of deerskin. Now the crows were filling the sky with their din, the black blades of their wings, annoyed with him too. Safe inside his coat, he went through the bank.

It was Moloquin who kept the crows in the sky. Brant smiled to himself; he had suspected that.

Moloquin sat there by the North Watcher, his arms draped over his raised knees. He seemed unsurprised at Brant’s appearance, and the old man went a few steps toward him, stopped, and turned, to give the place a long searching look.

The grass was dead and brown. At the far end of the sacred precinct, in between two of the tilting stones, lay the dead. The little boy, who had been his mother’s delight, was covered over with cut boughs of a fir tree, and probably the old woman’s body had been covered too, once, but the crows had been at it and the flesh was exposed and bloody and ragged. The great circle enclosed them all, dead and living, in its ring of power; even the rain, coming sharper and colder now, was a blessing here. Brant turned toward Moloquin again.

The boy rose up and came toward him. “Karelia said you would be here,” he said. “I will go if you wish.”

Brant shook his head, smiling. “The rite is happier for the presence of the People.” He laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder and was surprised at the hard muscle he felt under Moloquin’s thin woven coat. “Would you like to help me?”

At that Moloquin’s face shone; he said nothing, but moved closer to Brant, and the old man again put out his hand and touched him. They went together around the place, walking in a circle around the outside of the standing stones.

As he walked, Brant let go a little of his knowledge, like the bird in the tale who dropped seeds from his beak to lead the People to safety. He said, “It is the circles that are great in all the places of standing stones, the circles are complete and hold the world inside them. Therefore if a master comes to a circle he may sit in the middle and yet see all the world. All the world that matters.”

A few steps on, he said, “In the circles the ancestors have given us certain messages.”

And yet a few steps on, he said, “The year also is a circle, and it is here that the circle of the year and the circle of the world may be seen together as one thing.”

Moloquin said, “I don’t understand.”

Brant glanced sharply at him. He could not remember that he had ever spoken with Moloquin before; he had heard that the boy’s use of speech was curt and undecorated, but to be addressed by one so young without the honorifics his age alone had earned made the old man a little angry. He pressed his lips together and kept walking. Moloquin kept pace with him. Brant looked up at the sky; he wondered if the setting of the sun would even be visible with this rain.

“If I cannot see what I must see tonight,” he said, “I shall have to stay the night here.”

“What must—”

Moloquin stopped, his eyes lowered, and Brant waited a moment for him to continue but he did not. Brant thought, He has learned not to annoy people. He touched Moloquin’s arm again.

“I must see the sun set. I will show you where we will stand to watch. If we do not see it set then we must watch tomorrow morning for the sun to rise, and if that too cannot be seen we must stay another day. Are you ready for that?”

“I will stay until you say we have seen enough,” said Moloquin.

“Good,” Brant said. “Now, come here, I will tell you what we must do.”

They went around to the eastern side of the circle, where there stood two more stones, set far apart, just inside the bank, the South and the East Watchers. Brant led the boy to the South Watcher and said, “Here. You must stand here, and look to the horizon, and tell me what you see.”

Moloquin stood with his back to the stone and looked west, and he said, “I see nothing.”

“Wait.”

Brant went back to the East Watcher and stood before it, his back to it, and waited. The rain fell steadily, not hard, but cold and uncomfortable. Brant began to shiver inside his skin coat; he wondered how Moloquin did, wrapped in cloth. Nothing happened for a long while. He began to think it was impossible today, and he would have to spend the night here. With Moloquin to keep him company it would be pleasant to stay away from the village for a while. He had brought food with him, bean cakes, and a little jug of broth. There was nothing around here to build a fire with, but they would keep warm somehow. He remembered once seeing Moloquin asleep under the North Watcher. That would be snug for two people, but warm enough.

He thought, with a certain grim enjoyment, that this waiting would be a true test of Moloquin; if he did belong to this place, then he would wait a lifetime. Perversely Brant hoped for a colder, harder rain, a longer wait, a true test.

The crows wheeled and dropped, circling lower and lower over their dinner; the rain suddenly became a deluge, a driving knife-edged downpour that blurred the shapes even of the faltering stones of the central ring. Brant sighed. Shutting his eyes, he let the rain sluice down his face. He was too old to do this. His bones hurt when it rained. He knew that sometime soon he himself would lie in the grass, his body imperfectly shielded from the assaults of the crows and his spirit whirling through the air with the rest of the People, the true People, the Overworld.

That was to be wished for, the culmination of life, to be accepted into the true and eternal world, and yet old Brant shrank from it. When he conceived of himself dead, and all the rest of life going on without him, it was such a sense of loss that his mind froze with fear; he could feel nothing but the sickening fear of not-being any more.

That was weakness. Sternly he told himself that all beings died and that death was the passageway into the real world, but in his mind that passageway was a dark twisting tunnel into nothing, and this world of life and change and sun and wind and tears and laughter was precious beyond any power.

Suddenly Moloquin cried, “Master!”

Brant jerked his head up, his eyes open—he thought for an instant he had been dozing, caught deep inside himself like that—and raised his face into the rain. The downpour was lessening. He straightened, turning his eyes to the west, and a low cry broke from his lips.

There, away to the west, he saw, first, the next stone, with Moloquin beside it; Brant was about to call to him to move in front of the stone again, when Moloquin suddenly turned, grasped the stone, which was nearly head and shoulders taller than he, and scrambled up onto the top of it. Brant choked off his words, his gaze going beyond the stone, beyond the bank whose upper edge coincided with the top of the stone, to the far horizon.

The storm was breaking. The rain was over. Above the world lay a roof of cloud, grey and heavy like slabs of stone laid from edge to edge of the world, but there in the west now the roof of cloud stood above the world a little, and the sun was falling beneath it. The sun slid down below the cloud slabs, and her lower edge touched the horizon, and her upper edge touched the cloud roof, and her light shone across the world, a blast of horizontal light that blazed across the whole wet world like a purifying ray. The stones glittered with it; the wild whirling crows shone black with it. Brant flung his arms up over his head and shouted for joy.

Slowly the sun sank down below the edge of the world. Moloquin sprang down from the stone and ran to the old man.

“What happened? Was it what you came to see?”

Brant nodded. The sun had set just to the right of the stone, which meant that a few days would see the end of the steady shortening of the days and lengthening of the nights that oppressed everyone during the failing of the year. He sat down on his hams and looked up at Moloquin and smiled.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, we have seen the mystery.”

Moloquin sat down before him. “Will you tell me?”

Brant shrugged. He could tell the boy nothing he did not know already, it seemed to him. He said, “You know that as the summer wanes, the days grow shorter.”

Moloquin nodded.

“From the first the People have known that. All beings know that, birds observe it in their travels, and even mice dig burrows to spend the winter in, when the light begins to fail. For a long while it was believed that the light would fail utterly, save for the actions of the People in calling forth the sun again, but now we know better. The light fails, and as it does, the point of the sunset moves along the edge of the world to the west, day by day. But when it reaches this point—” He nodded to the line of the two stones— “Then the sun turns, and goes back eastward again, and the light comes back again, every day. Not so fast at first.”

Moloquin said nothing. His eyes were fixed on the old man’s face.

“And this is the mystery,” Brant said. Although the rain was beginning again, he was relaxed now, relaxed and happy, as after sex. He fingered the dead grass around him. The crows were dropping to the ground near the corpses, and he plucked up a small stone and threw it at them, to no effect: they were used to him now. He faced Moloquin again.

“This is the mystery, and it is a very plain one, Moloquin. It is that the world is orderly. It does everything in circles. When we know enough, and fit it all together, everything is a circle.”

Moloquin stared at him a moment; Brant thought, disappointed, He does not see, but then the boy smiled at him.

“Yes,” he said. “I like that. Yes.”

Brant grunted at him. “I am overwhelmed that you are pleased, Moloquin. I am sure your opinion even now is the talk of the Overworld.”

Still he smiled at Moloquin, who had proven himself today, although he probably did not know it. Brant got his feet under him.

“We shall go back now. I can tell Ladon now that we may have the Midwinter Feasting.”

Moloquin stood, and the two went back together, going out through the gap in the bank directly opposite them. Brant walked side by side with the boy; in his mind he was sifting through what he had learned today. Moloquin was rough and untutored in the skills of men, but he belonged here, in this place. Brant had despaired of finding a true vessel into which to transfer his own mastery before he went on to the Overworld. Now he had one. Even Moloquin’s strangeness worked for him here: the People expected a Green Bough master to be a little odd. Brant put his arm around the boy’s shoulders. He pretended not to notice the half-smile that Moloquin gave him, the amusement in the boy’s eyes. They went on down to the village.

The winter wore on, but as Brant had said, every day when the sun rose she lifted her head up a little to the east of where she had risen the day before, and she stayed in the sky a little longer each day. Soon the earth warmed to her caresses. At the equinox, there was a violent storm of snow and sleet and hail, as if the winter were loath to give up his supremacy, but in the days following, the sky was blue and the wind warm, and the women knew it was time to go back to their gardens, to make them ready for the spring planting.

The men held a great ritual hunt, spending several days away from the village; they took many of the older boys with them, because soon these boys would be chosen into a society and the men wanted to look them over first. Moloquin did not go.

Steadily the sun climbed higher and higher into the sky, until she blazed forth as queen of Heaven, ruling all but a little corner of the night. Then a runner came from the village to the north, calling all the People to the Great Gathering at the place called Turnings-of-the-Year; and while he was in Ladon’s roundhouse he let go another piece of news—that Mashod, the chief of the largest village to the north, had died during the winter, and his successor had been chosen: his sister’s son, Rulon.

The People went away to the Great Gathering. From the longhouses the women set forth in disorderly crowds, talking amongst themselves, carrying their babies, their baskets of meal and dried beans and cheese, their strings of dried salmon and smoked salmon and smoked pig. With them, in no special place, walked the headwomen of the People, looking the same as all the others, except for their bright clothes.

The men went off with great ceremony. They placed Ladon on his chair and bore him three times around the roundhouse, chanting the ritual song, and in long rows, each man in the proper order, they set their masks at their belts, and their drums and lances. Thus, as in everything, the men and women went separately, their paths crossing often, but never travelling together.

They walked up over the high arch of the downs, and into the hills to the north of them. Here the rolling land suddenly dropped off in steep cliffs down to a marshy stinking lowland, which they called the Dead River, although there was no river there. Away to the west, at the low end of the long narrow valley, was a pond; on top of the blunt hill above it appeared a round embankment with a standing stone, an ancient place, belonging to those who had lived in this place before the People came, which they called the Old Camp.

Here the valley was narrow, and the People chose this way across to the far side. The old paths, worn into the hillsides, were washed so slick and sheer with the winter storms that they had to make new paths to the top. From there, they had only a little way to go across open ground, following old trails between the slumping hills and sinks and treeless ridges, until they came to the Gathering.

Moloquin walked along beside Karelia, with Grub just behind them, pretending to be by himself. As they approached the Gathering, the sun was going down and the air was dim; the fires of the People spread out across the plain before them like blossoms in the dark. There were so many fires that Moloquin drew closer to Karelia and slipped his hand under her arm, and she looked quickly up at him and smiled.

Ladon’s was not the only village of the People; here at the sacred place called Turnings-of-the-Year was another, whose chief was Rulon, newly raised to the honor. This lay on a broad flat plain where several springs burst forth, sending many little streams away to the east, to the river. As the day went on more people came, from other villages, and all around Rulon’s village these people laid out their camps under the sky, each staying with those of his own people, so that the hearths spread out in clumps around Rulon’s village in the center.

Rulon’s was a much smaller village than Ladon’s, having but two longhouses; the roundhouse was tremendous.

Karelia said, “Once this was the greatest village of the People, but things change.”

“Where are their gardens?” Moloquin asked.

She shrugged. “Over there, perhaps.” She waved vaguely to the south. “This village has been here a while; they must have to walk long to reach their work.”

She led him to the camp where Ladon’s People were making their hearths, and they chose a place to build a fire. Moloquin had been picking up wood as they moved up here from their own village, and he dumped it down in a big heap and went off to find stones for a hearth.

Karelia sighed, glad to be done walking; her legs ached. She had brought half her home along on her back: mats for sitting and sleeping on, a basket and a pot to cook in, and a jug for water. She put down a mat to sit on and arranged another on a frame of sticks to lean her back against, and pointed to the jug.

“Grub,” she said, “take that and fetch us some water.”

The little boy’s mouth fell open. “Me, Ana-Karelia?”

“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 magic, 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.”

He came inside the spacious circle of Joba’s hearth; Shateel brought him one of the best mats to sit on, woven of reeds, with a design set into it of red and yellow. Before he sat, he stooped and put a bit of wood on the cold fire, and he took a handful of meal from a pouch on his belt and sprinkled it over the ground before the two women.

“Heaven protect and exalt you, Joba-el, greatest of women, daughter of the daughter of the daughter of my ancestor.”

Joba’s mood was much uplifted; she enjoyed nothing more than a discussion of genealogy, and to match her memory against a kinsman’s. Besides, from the elaborate ceremony Fergolin was offering, he had important business with them. She arranged herself on a mat with due attention to the amenities, and sent Shateel to fetch clean water to share with their guest.

For once the girl was obedient; as she went off, supple of body and pliant of manner, Fergolin watched her keenly, and Joba knew that it was her daughter who had enticed this kinsman here.

She said, “Take a mother’s blessing, Fergolin, for your first meat—long has it been since I heard news of the village of great Opa-Ladon.”

“We have no news, Joba-el—all goes as it should among us. We heard of Mashod’s dying with heavy hearts, and souls that wept.”

“The earth trembles when a chief such as Mashod goes into the Overworld,” Joba said. She had hated her brother, as everyone knew, but it was only prudent to speak well of one in a position to do mischief.

Shateel came back with fresh water, and the two women brewed a tea of herbs for Fergolin, and served him in a fine painted jug, and gave him cakes and nutmeats to eat, arranged in several baskets, to show off their handicraft. Fergolin put out a hand to take a bean cake from one of the shallow baskets, then withdrew his hand.

“What excellent work is this! I dare not touch it, for fear of disturbing the beauty.”

Joba straightened, puffed up with pride, and glanced sideways at her daughter. “My child is a novice at the work of women’s hands.”

Shateel sat down behind her mother and a little to one side, and was still; Joba glanced at her once, hoping to see her interested, but the girl was staring off into the empty air, and curling a tress of her hair around her finger. Joba sniffed, annoyed.

Fergolin was saying, “Never have I tasted such an excellent cake, Joba-el, and the manner of serving it is a greater pleasure yet.” He went on in the same way, making extravagant praises and tasting everything, while Joba sat enjoying the compliments; she knew where he was heading. She stole another look at Shateel but the girl was half-asleep.

“As women,” Joba said, “we have only one wish, which is to serve men, Fergolin-on.”

They bowed together over this falsehood, and Fergolin sat back, his hands on his stomach.

“You have made me replete, most excellent of mothers.”

Joba spread her hands. “Forgive my poor resources—I can only hope that my delight in offering them makes up for their plain poverty.”

“No other hearth among all the People rivals yours, Ana-Joba-el.”

“Heaven takes pity on a poor old woman and her humble family.”

“Heaven itself would delight at your hearth, most wonderful Joba-el.”

“I am utterly beguiled by your kindness, Opa-Fergolin-on.”

They went on this way for some time, each one trying to outdo the other in lavish compliments, while Shateel nodded in the shadows. Then at last, Fergolin put his hands down on his knees, and came to his point.

“Ana-Joba-el, who has everything, whose wealth is limitless, will you hear the plea of one who comes to ask a favor of you?”

“What poor possession of mine could I offer to a kinsman?”

“Not I, but one who fears even to come before you in person to ask.”

“If my eye cannot see, yet my ear can hear.”

“It is for Ladon that I speak first, Ana-Joba-el, and for his son, who comes of age this year and who is tall and strong as an oak tree, the joy of all his village, and who will enter into manhood alone, unless there is one who would deign take his hand and become his mate.”

“Ah.”

“Well is it known that at your hearth there is one whose beauty rivals that of Heaven in the glory of the stars, and whose accomplishments are the envy of all.”

Joba sneaked another look at Shateel, and saw, pleased, that the girl was watching them with a new interest. She said, “I have indeed a daughter, Fergolin-on.”

“A daughter!” Fergolin shook his head. He avoided looking at Shateel; rote praises tumbled from his lips. “Such plain words to describe one whose beauty and womanly skill already overwhelm the whole world!”

He went on like that for a while, and Joba smiled, delighting in the flow of compliments; beside her, Shateel crept a little closer, and leaned forward.

“As for Ladon’s son,” Fergolin said, “I have watched over him from his babyhood, and for fear of arousing the jealousy of the Overworld, I cannot praise him overmuch, but I make assurances to you that such a match as we propose will bring together two of equal lineage, equal beauty, and equal skill.”

Also, Joba thought, she is the sister of the chief, and her son will be a chief. She smiled at Fergolin, but her simple pleasure in this was curdling a little. She remembered Karelia’s boy. There was more to this than a husband for her daughter; a little late now, she considered Ladon’s place in this. For the first time, she turned and stared full at her daughter.

Fergolin said, “Let me take to him who waits with a pining heart the only words that can salve the ache of love.”

Joba now regretted indulging herself in the warmth of his compliments; she wished she had kept a cool mind and wondered if she had gone too far to back out. But Shateel looked eager. She crept a little closer.

“Ladon’s son? Is he not the tall boy, the fair-headed one?”

“As handsome as a red deer when the leaves turn,” said Fergolin. “Manly beyond his years. He will enter the Bear Skull, and someday, perhaps, he himself will be a chief.”

“What?” Joba said, blankly. “How can that be?”

Shateel murmured, “I saw him yesterday, with his father—he is very fine-looking.”

Joba turned on Fergolin. “A chief! How can he become a chief?”

Fergolin colored up in his face, and a pleading look shone forth from his eyes. Certainly Ladon had told him what to say. He spoke in a low voice. “Who can tell the things to come? He is fit to sit above any village of the People.”

“He is not—”

Joba stopped; she had been about to say, He is not the son of the chief’s sister, but then she remembered who was the son of the chief’s sister, and she saw suddenly how tangled this was becoming. She would have to talk to Karelia. Her daughter plucked at her arm.

“Mother. I would like to be married, and he is very fair.”

“The words of the daughter of Joba will ravish his heart, and bind them together forever,” Fergolin said.

Joba pressed her lips together. She should not have let Fergolin get as far as this—among the People, if a proposal was even entertained to the point of being spoken, then the acceptance was all but certain—and she reproved herself for indulging in pretty speeches. Shateel was whispering to her, pushing her, urging her to agree. Still Joba held back. Fergolin smiled at her, not the ready, gentle smile of one wearing his own face, but a stiff-lipped grimace like the expression of a mask. Joba thought, They will use my daughter to make his son great.

It was too late now to say no. And they would live here, anyway, in Joba’s village; she told herself that here they would be out of Ladon’s reach. He was a handsome boy, she had seen him herself.

Even so, she could not bring herself to say yes. Instead, she said, “They are both young yet. Perhaps—if Ladon wills—we might wait a year.”

Fergolin’s smile was wooden. He did not like that. “I shall convey your answer to my chief and to him who waits with a wounded heart.”

He gave them more compliments, all sounding the same, and with due addresses he left them. Joba sank down into a brooding posture, her hands in her lap.

“Mother!” Shateel pulled on her arm. “Mother, why did you not say yes? How can you do this? Now he will ask some other!”

“He will ask no other,” said Joba, in a harsh voice. “What a fool, Shateel! It is you he must have.”

At that the girl smiled and preened herself and seemed content now to wait a little. Joba turned her head away. She saw little hope for a match made for Ladon’s purposes. Again and again her mind turned to Karelia and Karelia’s strange new campfellow. What had she seen in the boy’s face? She hardly remembered now; all that came to mind was the memory of his wide black eyes.

He came out of the forest. Ladon had got rid of him, but he had come back again, come out of the forest, and in those bold black eyes she had seen ruin.

All the more reason, perhaps, for Joba now to give Ladon power.

Shateel said softly, “I shall be married! Mother, let me go to my friends.”

“Go,” Joba said.

The girl went off, light-footed, knowing nothing. All she knew was her own will. Joba thought again of Rulon, struggling to hold the great ceremonial club aloft, while no one called his name. She trembled for her children.

They would live here, in her village; she would keep watch on them, and how could Ladon fulfill his plans when his son would be in another village entirely? Slowly she got up, collecting the baskets and jugs, crowding out her dark thoughts with the business of the day, but still, in a corner of her mind, she was afraid.

“The paints,” said Harus Kum. “That’s what they like, the bright colors. Give me lots of the paints.”

The slave Tor came silently at his heels; they went through the enclosure the trader had made, when he came here, to keep his goods and his slaves separate from the savages. Inside the little fence of rolled brush, the other slaves squatted in the sun, waiting to be given work to do, and guarding the leather sacks and baskets in the center of the enclosure. When Harus Kum came in, the three slaves all shrank back, avoiding even his look.

The slave Tor, on his knees, opened the first of the bulging leather sacks and plunged his hand in, and took out some clay pots full of pigment. The clay pots were made with a plug on top of the stoppers and a matching recess in the bottom, so that several pots could be stacked up together, and Tor took apart one stack, opened each pot to see what color it held, and set it down on the ground beside him. Harus Kum paced up and down, looking around him, over the fence, toward the great sprawling camp of the savages.

In a few moments he would go down there and come face to face with the kings of these people, men who, he knew, would as soon trample him to death as let him go, men whose help would make his work here easier, men he dared not trust. He had been coming here every year now for three years, since he had learned of the Gathering, and he was beginning to understand the ways of these savages—at first, he had thought to come here and trade!—but he always felt in danger here, and that made him restless and bad-tempered.

He thumped Tor on the back with his fist, to hurry him up. “Get the cloth, too. Give them that.”

The slave reached into the sack and pulled out a smaller sack. “What of this, master?”

“Not yet. Put them back.” Those were for Ladon alone, if things went well.

The slave fumbled through the leather sacks, accumulating goods that Harus Kum could spread before the savage kings: dyes and cloth, tiny jars of sweet-smelling oil, beads and pins of shell-light, small things, easily carried over long distances. When he had it all together, it did not seem enough. He glanced at the leather sacks again, knowing what lay buried in their depths, tempted to give just a little away.

If they knew, would they not attack him? He was alone here, with only a handful of stupid cow-like slaves who would not even defend themselves. He turned away from the sacks with their hidden wonders. Tor was squatting down beside the array of gifts, doing nothing, and Harus Kum fetched him a kick on the bottom that knocked the slave face first into the dust.

“Put it in a basket.” He tramped away, toward the little two-sided shelter at the back of the enclosure, to get his coat.

A few moments later, wearing his best clothes, his hair and beard combed and oiled, he and Tor left their little fort. Tor carried a basket with the gifts for the kings. Harus Kum walked ahead of him, his head high, his shoulders back, his chest thrust forward, each stride a strut. As he left the relative safety of his enclosure, he strutted all the more. All around the enclosure, in the grass, the savages waited in packs, huddling in the grass, staring at him, peering into his place. One good rush from the bunch of them would take it all, and Harus Kum knew himself in hideous danger. With high steps and an arrogant bearing he made his way down the slope and across the disorder of the camp, toward the stone circles.

Here in the center, the kings all sat on a wooden high seat piled up with furs. The wind whirled the feathers on the lances stuck in the earth all around them, the sun beat down on them, sitting there in an attitude of swinish pomp. As Harus Kum approached the place, whole masses of people began to close in around him, following him, moving ahead of him toward the throne, all faces turned toward him. When he came at last to the feet of the kings, the whole Gathering was there, they filled up the whole great space within the ring of stones.

There were too many of them, they made his skin crawl, the dirty brutes. He went to the edge of the platform, and said, “Hail to the kings of the People of the Stones!”

He spoke their language a little. Enough, anyway, to do what he had to do.

Before him in a semi-circle sat five or six men, hideously painted, dressed in skins and feathers. One was so old he dozed, the front of his coat dappled with drool. Others glanced at him incuriously, scratching themselves, yawning. In their midst, the greatest of them, Ladon the Mighty, leaned forward, his eyes fixed on Harus Kum.

“I, Opa-Ladon-on, welcome the outlander.”

One of the other kings, a younger man, now leaned forward and stared at Harus Kum and turned to frown at Ladon. Harus Kum did not know him. The only one of these men whose name he knew was Ladon; he prided himself on his understanding of these savages, that he had swiftly realized that Ladon was pre-eminent among them, the only one worth dealing with. Even now, Harus Kum was pleased to see, he wore the coils of blue beads that Harus Kum had given him the year before.

The younger man was staring from Ladon to the trader, his face dark. Harus Kum said, “I have brought tokens of my respect and gratitude to the kings of the People of the Stones.” With a gesture he brought Tor forward with the basket.

The kings all moved suddenly, leaning over to see—even the old man, knocked from his dozing. Tor held the basket, and one by one Harus Kum removed the small treasures and placed them on the thick furs at the kings’ feet.

“Ah!”

At once, they reached for the goods; like children, if two of them seized the same thing, they struggled with each other for possession of it. Only Ladon sat motionless in their center, saying nothing, showing no interest in the pretties before him. The young man wrestled a pot of color away from another of the kings and turned the little jar over and over in his hands, even sniffing at it, trying to find the way in; when at last he pulled the stopper out, he had the jar upside down, and a shower of blue dye ran down over his lap.

The other kings laughed heartily at him, and the young man went red. He flung the jar down and brushed fitfully at the specks of blue on his clothes. Harus Kum watched the lovely color disappear into the dust; he remembered the hard work that had derived this tiny bit of blue from the rocks of the earth, which the wind now drifted away.

The young man twisted toward Ladon. “Opa-Ladon-on, mighty is he! Mighty before all the People! Mighty with the help of an Outlander, who gives him blue beads, hah, Ladon, is that it? Is this where you got the blue beads?”

The other kings stirred, round-eyed, staring at the young man, and one reached out and laid a hand on the youth’s shoulder as if to calm him, but the young man thrust him off. His gaze was fast on Ladon. “Tell us, Opa-Ladon-on, mighty, mighty, mighty. Tell us where you found the blue beads!”

Ladon ignored him. The other men glanced from one to the other of them and turned their attention to their prizes. The young man’s words hung unanswered in the air, and like the flecks of blue, the wind wafted them away. Harus Kum bowed and spoke words of honor and praise to the kings, backing up, leaving them. As he left, however, he lingered there a moment by the gigantic stones, listening to the mutter of the crowd, and so he learned that Ladon’s young rival was named Rulon.

Harus Kum was taller than any of the People, thin as a willow slip, with a brown beard that covered his chest. His clothes too were strange, a long shirt of woven stuff that reached to his knees, his legs wrapped in more cloth. Crouched just beyond the fence, Moloquin watched him roar and rant through his camp, shouting in his rattling harsh language at the others, and from the way these others scurried away from him and took the blows he dealt around him, Moloquin supposed much about the relationships among these strangers.

There were no women in Harus Kum’s camp; the underlings did all the work, carrying wood and water, tending the fires, even cooking and cleaning up. To see them better, Moloquin pulled some of the brush out of the fence, but when he did this a slave came running at him, yelling, brandishing a stick, and Moloquin backed hastily away.

The brush fence was built around the top of a little hill. Halfway down the slope, Moloquin squatted down in the grass and went on watching.

Presently, behind him, he heard the grass rustle, and he knew Grub was there.

“Moloquin,” said the little boy. “Have you anything to eat?”

Moloquin shook his head. “Go to Karelia.” Grub’s constant preoccupation with eating annoyed him. He fastened all his attention on Harus Kum’s camp.

The tall man was going somewhere. Yesterday he had taken gifts to all the chiefs, which had become the main subject of discussion at every camp in the Gathering. The little objects had gone from hand to hand, admired and criticized; Karelia had shown him some of the cloth, smooth as worn bone to the touch, supple as the wind, before she passed it on to Joba. Surely, all the people said, Harus Kum was a magician to have such wonderful things, and it was a mark of the power of the chiefs of the People that such a great magician should bow to them and give them treasure.

Now Harus Kum was making himself ready again, putting on a long tunic of red, smoothing his hair and beard with his fingers. The balding man who had carried his basket of gifts to the chiefs in the Turnings-of-the-Year was standing ready at the way out, carrying another basket.

Moloquin thought of the beads, the great strings of blue beads that had taken Ladon first of all the chiefs into the stone circles. There had been no beads among the gifts Harus Kum had offered to the chiefs the day before, but the blue color, the blue that Rulon had scattered into the dust, that was the same color as the beads, and Moloquin, like Rulon, knew where Ladon had gotten his power.

Beside him, Grub whispered, “Are you going to the dancing tonight?”

“Dancing,” Moloquin said blankly. Only the societies danced.

“Tonight.” Grub edged closer to him; their arms touched. “The girls dance. The men are all gone, or will be: tonight they go to the High Hill, to dance the True Way of Seeking Honor.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Moloquin said, his gaze returning to Harus Kum.

Grub sighed. “I can’t go,” he said. “I am too young.” He put his head down on his updrawn knees. “Ladon’s son won’t let me.”

“He won’t.” Moloquin swiveled his attention toward the younger boy. “Do you want to go?”

“Oh, yes! The girls will dance, and they say, if one of them likes you, you can dance with her, and then afterward—”

He put his hand over his mouth, his eyes round. Moloquin laughed.

“Then you shall go,” he said. “I shall go with you.”

“Oh,” said Grub, pleased, and he moved up close to Moloquin, pressing his side to Moloquin’s.

“Look at him,” Moloquin said, nodding toward Harus Kum. “He is pretty as a horned buck. Will he dance?”

“Him,” Grub said scornfully. “He is not one of the People. What can he know about the way of seeking honor?”

Moloquin settled his chin in his hands. Harus Kum was coming toward the opening in his enclosure, his underling behind him with a covered basket.

Grub tugged on his arm. “Come with me, we will go find something to eat, and then watch the Bear Skull masters line up the stars.”

“I want to watch this. Besides, the sun is up; there are no stars.”

“They do magic to call them forth, with the stones of the circles. Don’t you want to be in the Bear Skull Society? You have to show them you are ready, or they will not choose you.”

“They won’t choose me,” Moloquin said. “And I am not for them.”

“What do you mean?” Grub leaned toward him, his eyes bright. “Have you already been chosen?”

Moloquin did not answer. He remembered the midwinter sunset, how he had watched the sun above the stones at the Pillar of the Sky; surely that meant something? Was he not now a member of the Green Bough, belonging to the Pillar of the Sky? Yet Brant had never spoken to him again since that evening.

He had shared some of the lore. He had given Moloquin the heart of the lore, the mystery, the promise of order.

“Aren’t you hungry?” Grub asked, astonished. He was always hungry.

“I want to see—”

Now Harus Kum was finally emerging from his fort, the man behind him with the basket. He caught sight of Moloquin, sunk down there in the grass, and bellowed, and by the way he glared at the boys, Moloquin knew it was time to run. Even now more of the trader’s men were rushing out the gate in the brush fence. Moloquin went swiftly away through the trampled grass.

Ladon was resting; before him lay a whole night’s dancing, the most intricate and taxing dance of the whole year’s cycle, and he had been sleeping nearly all day on the platform in the sun. But to meet Harus Kum he left the platform and the other chiefs, telling them he had matters to attend to in his own camp, and he went into the middle of his camp and had his men put feathered lances there to mark his high seat.

In the midst of the lances, with his men all around him, he waited for Harus Kum. When the trader came, he gestured to the men around him, and they all turned their backs, so that what Harus Kum and Ladon could say would be between the two of them alone.

Harus Kum had brought a big basket with him, and he set it down beside him when he sat on the ground before Ladon. Smiling, smooth, the outlander spoke words of greeting to him, but Ladon was impatient; he longed to come to the center of all this, and his fingers tapped on his thigh, his eyes shifted from side to side.

At last, Harus Kum opened his basket, and he drew forth strand after strand of the blue beads and laid them down before the chief. The blue was very pretty against the black of the bearskin. Ladon pushed at them with his foot.

“I want more,” he said.

Had he been speaking with one of his own People he would have sheathed his remark in many words, but Harus Kum understood only the simplest of language.

The trader turned the basket over, and spilled all the beads in a mound onto the bearskin. Ladon kicked fretfully at them.

“I want more,” he said again.

Harus Kum made a sound in his throat. At the corners of his mouth, small lines appeared. When he spoke it was in a louder voice than necessary.

“Great is mighty Ladon! Ladon, who has so much, whose wealth is the wonder of all the world—”

His words sounded like a chant, like words spoken to the beat of a drum. Ladon glanced at the blue beads. Heaps of beads like this had won him power over all the People, but Rulon now knew where they had come from; the power was chancy, always chancy, and he had to have more. Just to keep his place he had to have more and more. He raised his gaze to Harus Kum; the trader was like a blank stone, like a chunk of raw flint: if Ladon handled him the right way, would he not show the beauties hidden away within him?

He said, again, “I want more.”

Abruptly Harus Kum thrust his face toward him, all the pretty phrases gone. “Then give me more!”

Ladon grunted. Now at least they had broken through the skin of the business. “What do you want of me, then, outlander?”

“I want grain,” Harus Kum said. “Cheese. Honey. Onions.” He did not add, I need food to keep me and mine, so that we can use our strength and time for other things than finding food.

The broad face of the chief showed nothing of his feelings. Only, he raised his head a little, looking down his nose at Harus Kum.

“What will you give me, if I give you what you wish?”

Harus Kum licked his lips. There was that in his packs that might serve, but he disliked giving such as that into the hands of these savages. He hemmed a little.

“I have excellent dyes, and much cloth. I can get much more cloth, too—”

“No!” Ladon slashed the air with his hand. “Cloth—colors—we have that. I want—I want—”

As he spoke, the high feeling seemed to swell him like a toad; Harus Kum felt himself threatened, and he slid backwards a little, away from the savage. He said, without thinking, “Perhaps Rulon will help me, for the sake of the beads.”

At that, Ladon reared up. His face was dark with temper. His eyes glittered with malice. His great arms milled the air in furious slashes.

“Hear me, outlander. Even you should understand this. Rulon is nothing. What does he have? Two longhouses! He can give you nothing! Nothing! I—only I can give you what you want, and if you go to Rulon, I shall see you never leave this place at all! Do you understand me? Only I can help you!”

Harus Kum’s head sank down between his shoulders; he regretted speaking of Rulon; he should have gone to Rulon behind Ladon’s back.

“And I will help you,” Ladon said, in a calmer voice. “But you must give me more than a few beads.”

Harus Kum’s heart jumped; at least Ladon was offering him what he needed. He thought again of the secrets in his packs, but again he shied from giving those things to mere savages.

He said, “I shall bring you more. Tomorrow.” In the meantime, he would think of something else to offer.

“Good,” Ladon said. His rage left him, and with it his noble bearing; he sank down again, his eyes half-shut. “Go. Tomorrow we shall speak again.”

Harus Kum bubbled over with compliments and praises. With a gesture he got Tor to collect the basket and the rejected beads. Ladon now seemed asleep, his eyes drooping, his vast body slumped down on the bearskin. Bowing and murmuring, Harus Kum went away.

In the deep twilight, without a drum, without flutes, without a voice to summon them, the girls of the People gathered at the Turnings-of-the-Year.

No one knew how this had started. The elders of the People frowned on it and some tried to prevent it, keeping their daughters in, threatening and complaining. Still from the beginning of time the girls had come here, on this day, and gathered inside the rings, and danced.

Shateel had done it before. This time when she came into the ring and clasped hands with the other girls, it was different, because this was the last Midsummer’s Night that she would be unmarried.

That thought blazed in her mind like a star. Soon she would be married, and her long fretful dissatisfying childhood would be over: she would be a woman, and have a woman’s power and a woman’s joys.

The other girls all knew. She wore her hair now in a long plait with flowers twined in it, and flowers wrapped together into a garland around her waist, and so everyone knew that soon she would be married. Therefore they said nothing to her. They belonged still to the green unfulfilled world of childhood, but Shateel stood on the threshold of her own life.

She clasped a hand on either side and swayed back and forth in the dance, smiling to herself. Soon she would be her mother’s equal, no longer to be chided and scolded and ordered around; soon she would have a man of her own.

The girls swayed from side to side in their circle, broke the grip of hands to turn, swung back, and caught hands again. Some clapped and some sang. Slowly they found a rhythm, and their feet fell into step with it; here and there a bit of a song made itself felt, and their voices picked it up. Like the winddrift of thistledown that gathered in a sheltered place, so the bits and pieces of their ritual formed together by accident and chance.

Now the boys were coming.

Shateel kept her eyes shut. As she stepped from side to side, she let her body follow, curving, bending back and forth, and her knees bent with each step, dipping down. Her hair began to fall out of its plait; she felt the soft touch on her cheek, and her head fell forward a little and her hair swung around her. She swayed and twisted, stooped and straightened, turned and turned, and all the while she saw nothing but the promise of her wedding day to come.

But now the boys were there.

The boys gathered on the bank outside the rings of stone. They stood there watching the girls in their dance, and now and then one of them would slip down to the ditch, cross over, and try to join the circles of the girls. The girls would not accept them. Laughing, they slapped at the outstretched hands and pushed the boys away. Only, now and then, they pushed the boys forward, not back—into the circles, not away to the ditch, and then they danced around the boy in the center of the circle, laughing and kicking out at him.

So, slowly, as the night went on, more and more of the boys got inside. There they too made a ring, joining hands; they faced out, and the girls faced in. Shateel opened her eyes at last, and saw before her a strange boy’s face.

She shivered. Somehow she had expected to see the face of her betrothed. She shut her eyes again, but the dance had left her behind; she had to look to see where she was. Opening her eyes, she found him there before her again, that same boy, dark as her betrothed was fair, thin and raw as he was sleek.

They danced face to face, step to step, while impatiently she waited for the rings to turn, to bring her to her beloved. The rings would not turn; still she was face to face with the strange dark boy, with his impudent stare. She kicked at him, and whirled away, putting her back to him.

Even so, for a long moment, she seemed to see his face in the dark air before her.

The dance turned her forward again, and to her relief, he was gone. The ring of boys was circling past her. She and the girls stepped sideways, bending, swaying, turning to their right, as the boys on the inside turned the other way, and they passed by her swiftly now, never looking at her. Then there he was, her betrothed, Ladon’s son, smiling at her. In his hair was the red feather, that meant he sought a wife.

They had not met yet. They were not supposed to meet until their hands were joined together before the chiefs. But she knew him, and he knew her, and she stretched her hands toward him, glad, and he took her hands in his own and they went away from the circles, out past the stones, out to the ditch.

“Shateel,” he said, once, breathlessly.

She smiled at him. He was handsome with his yellow hair, his smooth body, and she wanted all the other girls to see her with him and envy her. She put her arms around him, to keep him close to her. Soon, soon, she thought, and then: why not now? They went over the ditch together, saying nothing to each other. With their hands clasped together there was nothing that needed to be said. Climbing up over the bank, they went down the far side, toward the protection of the trees along the little stream, and there, in the grass, she made her own ritual with Ladon’s son, and passed by her own rites into womanhood.

Moloquin danced only one round, facing the girls, until the crowd inside the stone circle made him uneasy, and he went away, up over the bank, through the half-deserted camp to Karelia’s fire. The dancing made him tremble all over, even his insides seemed to tremble, to go on quivering long after his feet stopped dancing.

Karelia said, “What did you see there?”

“Girls,” he said, and was at once so ashamed that he buried his head in his arms. Karelia touched his hair.

“My boy,” she said, stroking him. “My silly boy. Will you marry soon, and leave me behind?”

“I will never leave you,” Moloquin said, and put his arm around her waist and held her tight. When he shut his eyes and held her against him, some overpowering memory took new life from the touch, from the warmth and closeness of her body, a memory of belonging. He turned his face against her body, his eyes shut.

He said, “Tell me a story,” and Karelia told him a tale of Rael the Birdwoman, who learned the speech of animals and trees, and could understand the murmuring of streams and the cry of the wind. Moloquin sat within the circle of her arm, his gaze on the fire, longing for such an understanding as Rael’s; in the red flames he thought he saw faces, eyes, and flowing hair, and into his mind leapt the memory of the girls at Turnings-of-the-Year, their hair, their faces, their shining eyes. His belly churned with a new hunger. Eat their eyes, their hair, their soft mouths. Soft against his cheek the arm of his mother Karelia. He stroked his cheek against her arm, lazy, the story flowing into his ears. Beneath the whisper of her voice, he thought he heard the wind cry, as Rael heard it, full of words.

He startled, sitting up. There was a voice out there, screaming in the wind.

“Ana, do you hear that?”

“What?” Karelia lifted her head; she had been lost in her story, she blinked and looked around her like one awakening from deep sleep.

“That.” Moloquin sprang up, every hair on his body standing on end, as again the wind brought a thready screech of terror to his ears. “Someone—”

Karelia gasped. She had heard it too. She scrambled to her feet and with a loud voice, a bellow that amazed him, she shouted to the women at the nearby fires.

“Come! Help—help—”

She started toward the screaming. Moloquin kept by her, his hand on her arm, uncertain, and she turned to him.

“Go—go quickly—some evil is there—”

He burst into a run, cutting between fires, in the direction of the screams, and she and the other women labored after him.

Now the screams came louder, more distant, and there were words in them. Out there someone—a woman—was shrieking for help. Moloquin lengthened his stride. At the edge of the camp was a line of willow trees, choking a little streambed, and he fought his way through this dense cover, splashed over the stream, and came into a grove of close-growing trees.

The women crashed through the brush after him. Before him, under the dark branches, bodies thrashed and wrestled on the ground.

“Help! Help me—”

She who screamed was tangled up with some others on the ground before him. He raced toward her, and as he approached, two men parted themselves from the thrashing close-clutched bodies and wheeled to run. Moloquin flung himself on the nearer of them and bore him down under him, and an instant later, the women ran into the glade.

They howled. The screaming that had drawn them disappeared into a general uproar. Moloquin got up, and the man he had dragged down scrambled to his feet and tried to run, but the women were on him at once. In the darkness Moloquin could see nothing clearly. He backed away, panting; he saw the man he had stopped vanish into a crowd of women, who set to beating him with their fists, kicking him as he fell. Then Karelia came into the glade, and she had a torch in one hand.

The red-yellow light flickered across the grass, leapt and flashed over the trees that leaned down around them. In the center of the little glade, a woman knelt, sobbing, her hair disheveled and dirty, shiny streaks of tears striping her face. The other women bent over her, crooning to her.

“They took me!” The kneeling woman shrieked; she flung her arms out, pointing around her, pointing toward her attackers. “They used me for a wife! See—” She pulled up her clothes; before Moloquin turned his face away he saw, vivid in the torchlight, the white arches of her thighs, slimed and bloody. “They had me for a wife—”

At the sight of her abused body, the other women gave up their voices in a screech that turned Moloquin cold. He backed away, aware suddenly of being a man in a place where men had done evil, of having that between his legs that they would find evil, of having evil lust in him against all women; suddenly his heart was pounding enough to sicken him. He sidled swiftly away into the brush that clogged the stream banks, while in the glade the women closed on the two men they had caught.

Until now the men had been silent, but as the women laid their hands on them, their voices went up in a howl of terror. Moloquin cried out to hear it. His belly heaved. Turning, he clawed his way through the brush, desperate to get away. Behind him the hoarse cry of the men broke off abruptly, as if their throats were stopped. He struggled through the brush that held him fast, that kept him prisoner, within their reach. From the glade, there came only the grunts and triumphant roars of the women, the pounding of their feet on flesh, the crunch of bone. With the strength of terror, Moloquin broke free of the clinging underbrush and fled away.

The two men who had attacked the woman in the glade were from Harus Kum’s camp. As soon as they knew this, the women of the People, with their headwomen leading them, went up to the place where the outlander had his camp, and they sat themselves down all around it, sat down so close no one could come in or out through the wall of their bodies, and they faced Harus Kum, and they sent for Ladon.

The women were pitched high as flutes, wild and unmanaged; some sat weeping on the ground, with their sisters around them, and others sat in tight-gathered groups, talking earnestly one to the other, and others strode back and forth glaring toward Harus Kum and crying strange encouragements. Their babies caught their fever with their milk, or through their skins from the very air, so that the whole great swarm of women was overhung with mindless wails. In their midst sat the headwomen, packed tightly together, a cluster of grey heads.

Going toward them with Karelia, Moloquin saw them massive as stones, their action slow and irrevocable, their passion slow and malevolent; he imagined himself crushed beneath them, ground to pieces in the mill of their rage.

He kept close by Karelia. She picked a course through the stirring, noisy flock of the women, while Moloquin with her sitting mats and a jug of water clung hard to her heels. The headwomen had chosen a place directly below the gate into Harus Kum’s enclosure, on the flat ground, and had made a little fire, although in the high sun of the day the flames were invisible, a mere flickering of the air.

At this fire, among the others, sat Joba, and when Karelia came into their midst, her words went first to Joba, and her voice was bitter.

“So you have made your bed with Ladon, have you? You will soon regret marrying your daughter to his son, I promise you.”

Joba lifted her head; in the tucks and creases and laps of her face her eyes gleamed, small and full of malice. She glared past Karelia at Moloquin.

“What is he doing here? Send him away, Karelia—get rid of him!”

Karelia turned her eyes toward Moloquin, and without a word between them, he put down his armload of sticks and mats and went away. He walked up over the side of the hill, toward Harus Kum’s enclosure; as he passed by, looking in, he saw the little huddled band of men there, ducked down behind the brush fence, each hand clutching an axe or a knife. He did not pause; he went on across the slope toward the open ground beyond, where he could see Grub sitting under a tree. Those men in there, clinging to their weapons, would not stand a moment against the women. He felt sorry for them, but he had to get away from here. There was Grub, waiting for him; for the first time, he saw himself and Grub as souls in common, united in their maleness. He went down over the shoulder of the hill, down to meet Grub, and escaped into the quiet of the wilderness.

Harus Kum kept up a steady monotone of curses. Crouching in the shelter of the brush fence, the remaining three slaves pressed close against him, he listened to the women’s wild uproar and his skin turned cold. He had been mad to come here, mad to have anything to do with these savages.

He cursed the women; he cursed Ladon, for being chief over such women and not keeping them properly controlled; he cursed the two slaves who had stolen away from the safety of their fort and never come back again. He could guess at what they had done. It seemed fair enough to him—if these women insisted on going about so openly, how could a man be blamed for wanting them? But he himself would never want such women, fat, ugly, furious women, and as he thought that, from the mass of angry women that surrounded him a yell began, and grew louder and more undulating as he listened, until his hair stood on end.

He lifted his head cautiously until he could see over the brush fence, and a gusty sigh escaped him. “Ah! At last.” He stood up, stooping a little, in case these madwomen should still attack, but down there, at the edge of the swarm, was Ladon’s litter, swaying on the shoulders of many men, and a great crowd of other men paraded after it, in lines that reached away into the Gathering. Harus Kum watched the litter borne in through the midst of the women, going toward a spot at the foot of the slope directly below where Harus Kum now stood peering out, and he straightened, relaxing, seeing a way to escape from this with his life.

Ladon was exhausted. He had danced all night at the High Hill, and then, lying on the ground this morning, his mask by his side, the women’s message had come to him, and at first he had thought, Let them do it. He knew what they would do, if he did nothing. He had no such love for Harus Kum that he leapt up at once to go save him. It irked him, also, that the women should expect him to come running to do their will.

But as he lay there on the grass of the High Hill, his mask beside him, a witness, he considered that letting the women do as they would gave them some greatness, and that they took this greatness away from him. He roused himself, groaning, and called for his litter, and called all the men up from their fatigue and their emptiness after the great ritual, and slowly they went back to the west, back to the Gathering.

From a lifetime of dealing with them he knew what to expect, and so he was unsurprised when, coming among the headwomen, he was at once set upon and reviled and shouted at as if he had done the evil, not some strangers. He lay back in his litter, listening to all this, and waved to his men to set down the poles and stand back.

Joba and Tishka pressed on him from both sides. “You brought these outlanders here! You are responsible for what has been done!”

Ladon raised one hand, palm out. “I did nothing. I did not bring him—”

“You encouraged it! You and your blue beads—”

He collected himself. They were hysterical; the chief evidence of it was that they were speaking to him in the low tongue of women and children, not in the elevated language with which men and women were supposed to address one another, and now he raised himself up, squaring his shoulders, and gave them all such a lofty look of disapproval that they quieted.

They stood around him, a pack of old women, shapeless masses within their woven clothes, their hands broken and knotted from working the earth. From their midst, now, Karelia stepped forward.

She spoke in a mocking voice, sharp as a bird’s, using the most formal and elaborate phrases available to a mind overstocked with words.

She said, “Opa-Ladon-on, mighty, mighty, mighty! Let Heaven look down upon the great Son of the People! Let Heaven guide him ever in his judgment! Let someone guide him ever in his judgment, mighty one, mighty Ladon, whose judgment has been most false and most awful for the People! You let them stay here, Opa-Ladon-on, mighty is he, mighty above all men, you let them come here, and now they have seized one of us, they have tried to steal away her belly and plant their own seed therein, to make her a mere vessel for their continuance. Now what shall mighty, mighty, mighty Ladon do to redress this evil?”

The other women growled, and someone murmured, “She speaks with the tongue of Heaven itself!”

Ladon folded his arms over his chest and looked all around him, looking at each one of them; it helped him to confront them if he saw them each as a separate female and not as the great and terrifying crowd they could become. Finally he brought his gaze forward again, to Karelia, to Joba and Tishka who stood on either hand, and said, “Bring me the wicked ones.”

At once all the women pointed up the hill toward Harus Kum. “There he is!”

“Ah,” Ladon said, “and you say that Harus Kum the outlander seized a woman and—”

Here he paused, and cleared his throat, because the high language had no words for the deed they claimed of Harus Kum and his men. He let the pause speak for him.

“Yes, yes,” they said. “You brought them here, Opa-Ladon-on—”

“And how do you know that Harus Kum did this evil, this monstrous wickedness?”

“We saw it done,” Joba said, and as she spoke, she swelled up with anger, her eyes glinting.

“And where are the men who did it?” Ladon asked.

“Ah!” Tishka smiled at him, her teeth showing. “Nowhere between Heaven and earth, I tell you that much.”

“Then you have slain Harus Kum yourself?”

That bemused them. He smiled, knowing himself too clever for them, pleased with his cunning, until Karelia stepped forward and began to speak to him.

“Ladon,” she said, and she used the low tongue, the speech of women to children or one another, which no one had used toward Ladon since he reached his manhood. “Ladon,” she said, “give us no more dances, no more games. Go up there and get him away, forever and ever, or we shall do it ourselves.”

He felt his face grow hot and red. His fists clenched. Small, she was, frail as a little bird; he could crush her with a blow, and yet she dared to speak to him with such contempt, she dared give orders to him.

Nor had he any choice save to obey. If he refused, they would do as she threatened; they would remove Harus Kum themselves, finally and horribly.

He turned to his litter. With a last, long, cold look at Karelia, he sat down in the litter and called to his bearers, and they took him up on their shoulders, and went up the hill toward Harus Kum.

The trader sat on his heels, his back to the fence, his eyes hollow, his mouth set. He said, “I swear to you, Opa-Ladon, I swear on my balls.” He put his hand down between his legs. “I did nothing.”

Ladon swept his gaze around the enclosure. Certainly there were fewer men here than before. He relaxed; he slouched in his litter, fatigue heavy in his muscles, and stared at Harus Kum; he had just begun to realize that there was meat in this for him.

He said, “Where then are your other men, Harus Kum?”

“I don’t know. They must have crept away—they have not come back. Maybe—maybe they ran away.”

Ladon shook his head slowly from side to side, his eyes fixed on Harus Kum. “The women have dealt with them.”

“Ah? Are they alive?”

“As they will deal with you,” Ladon said, “if I do not save you from it.”

“They are dead,” Harus Kum said. He beat his fists on his knees. A swarm of words in his own tongue flew from his lips. He tramped around the little space, his hands thrashing the air. Ladon watched, patient, reclining in his litter as if on a bed.

Through the corner of his eye, he saw one of Harus Kum’s men lick his lips; he guessed they were thirsty, with the women between them and water. He raised one hand, saying, “Fetch water for these sufferers,” and behind him there was a bustle of several feet as his men fought to do his bidding.

He smiled at Harus Kum. He said, “So. We haggled before over peas and beans, Harus Kum, now will we haggle over blood and bones as well?”

The trader heaved up a sigh, the air slipping between his clenched teeth; his eyes shone. He nodded his head. “I shall give to mighty Ladon what is Ladon’s due.”

He went to the little round hut in the middle of the enclosure, and disappeared into it. Ladon’s man came back with a tall two-mouthed jug of water. At a nod from Ladon, he gave the jug to the nearest of Harus Kum’s men, who seized it with trembling hands and spilled half of it in drinking; the other men crowded around, their cupped palms catching a few drops of the overflow. Harus Kum came back.

He saw the men drinking and his steps hesitated an instant, but with a shrug he put aside such minor things as thirst and came to Ladon, and before Ladon he knelt down. In his hands he held a bundle of cloth. He spread this open on the dirt, and laid out on the cloth some objects.

While he arranged them his body shadowed them from the sun, but then he sat back, and the sunlight struck them. Behind Ladon, someone gasped, Ladon himself sat up straight, his gaze fastened to the blazing beauty before him.

“Aaaaah.”

He stretched his hand forth and touched the nearest of the ornaments, a heavy curved band. It shone so in the sun he expected it to be warm, but the stuff was cold, hard and cold as stone.

“What is this?”

Harus Kum said, “Such jewels as great men use to decorate themselves.” His voice was too casual. He took up the curved band, and slipped it onto his wrist. From the cloth he took another such, for the other wrist, and a long rope of oblong disks, linked together, he fastened around his neck, and the men cried out to see him dressed in flashing, gleaming shapes, like pieces of the sun.

Ladon rejoiced; he said, “Yet that is not enough, Harus Kum.”

The trader stared at him, tight-jawed. One by one, he took off the pieces he wore and laid them down again on the cloth. He said, “There is more.”

“Here?” Ladon asked, swiftly.

“No, no.” Harus Kum worked his stiff lips into a smile. “Where I can put hands to them. But I must have other things in return.”

“I offer you your life, Harus Kum.”

“I need food. What I said to you the other day, that I need. Now I need men, also—two men, to help me get it all back to my home.” The trader squatted down behind the wonderful ornaments. “Give me what I ask, and I shall give you such that you will not think yourself diminished by the bargain.”

Ladon set his teeth together, his eyes on the little pieces of shining stuff. What was it? No stone he had ever seen could be shaped like that, or polished to such a shine. Surely some wonderful magic took this supple and amazing form. He told himself he had known all along that Harus Kum had some hidden power; had it been calling him, Ladon, its true master?

Even now it called him, the rest of the treasure, from within the little brush hut. He knew, as certainly as he knew his own thoughts, that the rest of Harus Kum’s hoard was right there, within easy reach, and if he let the women have these outlanders, then he, Ladon, could take it all.

He balanced that against the fact that if he let the women do violence to these men, the women would have much more than a treasure, the women would have awakened another power against which the shining pretties before him would be of no use at all.

And he could have them. Harus Kum was offering him all of it, in return for that which Ladon could very readily supply. The women wanted these men gone; Ladon would send them away. Harus Kum wanted food; Ladon would send him away to Ladon’s own village, and there they could find plenty of food.

Harus Kum wanted men, and there were two young men Ladon wanted himself rid of.

This all fit together, like the egg inside its shell, so perfectly that Ladon lost himself a moment in contemplation of it. Harus Kum, waiting, turned at last to the jug of water, and holding it high drained the last few drops onto his tongue. Ladon raised one hand; from behind him a man sprang forward to take the jug and hurry away to fill it up again.

Ladon said, “The favor of Heaven, that makes all things possible, has fallen on both of us today, Harus Kum.”

The trader blinked at him, perhaps not understanding; deep lines engraved his face, and he looked tired. Ladon smiled at him.

“Make ready to leave this place at once. I shall go find you a suitable guide, and prepare your way among the women.”

Harus Kum’s eyes shut. He bowed his head down, one hand on his breast. “Mighty is Ladon, mighty.” His voice quivered with weariness and relief. Ladon summoned his bearers with a nod and was swiftly carried away.

Joba said, “You must stand still, Shateel, and let me put your hair up, or you shall never be married.”

The girl made a face at her. Joba held the long rope of her daughter’s hair in her hands, putting it up with pins of bone and wood; around them the other women worked to weave flowers together into a garland for the young bride. Shateel would not be still. Ever her feet moved; ever her head turned, looking away, looking toward Ladon’s camp. Joba struck her lightly with the flat of her hand.

“Now be still, or—”

“How dare you!” Shateel cried, her face dark, and returned the slap with a slap of her own, aimed fair at her mother’s cheek.

Joba gasped; all the other women froze, staring. Joba straightened slowly to her feet. The girl stood there, ruddy-cheeked now, her great eyes swimming with bad temper. Her mother’s eyes met hers for a long moment.

After a while, Shateel gave way; she looked down. Slowly, Joba went back to her labors, but now her hands shook. She thought, She has already left me.

Her hands were full of pins. For a moment, fussing with the girl’s hair, she could not remember exactly what she had been doing. Her mind seethed, full of unfocussed alarms.

“Here comes the bride-leader,” said one of the other women.

Joba looked up, surprised: he was early, the ceremony could not take place until afternoon. Yet he had indeed come. Fergolin stood near the entrance to Joba’s hearth, smiling.

“Wait here,” she said to Shateel, and got up, brushing off her clothes. Circling the other women at their work, she went to Fergolin.

“What is the matter? We are still very busy, Fergolin-on.”

“I came with this gift from the young husband.”

He held out a piece of deerskin, folded over. She opened it up, curious, and let out a low gasp. Inside, neatly rolled up, was a strand of blue beads.

“Oh.” Joba drew back. She had just seen Harus Kum and his men taken by force out of the Gathering; now she was face to face with him again, coiled like a serpent, insinuating himself into this marriage of her daughter. She put out her hand to push the beads away. Before she could touch them, her daughter reached her side.

“I shall take them.” Shateel’s hand closed over the beads; she gave her mother a long level stare.

Fergolin said, “Ana-Joba-el, most excellent mother of such a bride, you must know now that because of the difficulty this morning, there is some trouble with the wedding ceremony.”

Joba’s head rose. “What?” she said, harsh.

“Because of the matter of Harus Kum, great Opa-Ladon-on must make an unusual request of you.”

“I am listening to it.”

“Harus Kum was not easily dealt with, as you may imagine. Ladon, mighty is he, took the greatest care in dealing with him. To make certain that Harus Kum did indeed leave the Gathering, he put in escort of him his most trusted man, his own son, the bridegroom.”

Shateel said, “Then where is he now?” Her voice was sharp.

Fergolin never looked at her; his gaze remained steadily on Joba’s, as he said, “It is Ladon’s wish that the wedding be done in his village, after the Gathering, when his son returns from his task.”

“Is he in danger?” Shateel cried.

Joba was staring fixedly at Fergolin, her mind troubled. Her uneasiness was mounting. The marriage of her daughter had become a contest, somehow, a contest with Ladon, a struggle for control of her daughter. Suddenly she saw the wedding like a pit before her, a trap toward which they were dragging her. She turned and seized the blue beads from Shateel and flung them to the ground.

“No. I shall not agree. Once she goes there, will he let her come back here again? He will insist on staying there, and she will stay with him. No.”

“Ana,” Shateel cried. “I shall go wherever he wishes.” She faced Fergolin; it was to Fergolin she offered her words, as if her mother no longer mattered.

Fergolin said, mildly, “It was your desire, among the others, that Harus Kum be removed, Ana-Joba-el. By your own deed, you have made the wedding impossible here, since the bridegroom is gone on a task of your devising.”

Shateel wheeled toward her. “You made this happen!”

Joba seized her by the wrists. “You are a fool. Do not take Ladon’s side against me. You are not married yet. Until he takes your hand, you are my child, and I shall bid you as I see fit.”

Shateel hardly let her finish. The color high in her cheeks, her hair slipping out of its plaits, she faced Joba and struck at her mother with her words.

“I am no child any more, Ana. I have been with him who is my husband. We need no words of the elders. I shall go with him wherever he wishes, I am his wife now, and he is my husband.”

With a wrench of her arms, she freed her wrists from her mother’s grasp and turning her back on Joba, she stooped and took the string of blue beads from the ground and put them around her neck.

Joba stood there staring at her; there was nothing more to be said. Her mind flew back over the years, back to the baby Shateel had been, nuzzling at her breast, and she saw the little girl, learning to walk and to talk, secure under her mother’s watchful gaze; she saw the older child, struggling for mastery of her crafts, her mother ever guiding, ever protecting, ever loving. Now her daughter stood with her back to her and said that she had broken away and was glad to be going. Joba lowered her head. All the others in the longhouse had witnessed her humiliation. Slowly she went back to her fire and sat down and pulled her shawl up over her head. And there she sat, for all the rest of the day.

Most of the People avoided Harus Kum’s camp now that it was abandoned, but Karelia insisted on going there, and so Moloquin took her. He watched her grope and poke around the little brush hut and the fence, pick a few threads of cloth from a bramble and straighten the fibers in her hand, sniff at a wet patch on the ground.

“What are you doing?” he said. “Why can I not go? I have wood to carry, and Grub and I found a place where we can swim.”

She stood, crooked with her years, her face sharp. “I am wondering if Ladon did as he said he did with Harus Kum.”

“How can you discover that by searching here?” Moloquin stirred, restless; the day was turning warm and sultry, and he looked away to the west, where the stream curled around. Out there, they had found a deep pool, delicious in the summer’s heat. “Why can you not leave Ladon alone?”

“Bah.” She whirled toward him, suddenly furious. “Listen to me, boy. You are the son of Ladon’s sister, and therefore I dare not trust Ladon, ever.”

“Karelia—” he gave her a strange sideways look, and drew closer to her. “Can I not be only your son? Why must I always be set against Ladon?”

She glared at him, the heat of her temper rising like a blast against him. “Curse you! No!”

His eyes flashed. “You care nothing for me. You hate Ladon, and so you harbor me, for the sake of Ladon.”

“Hah.” She swung her arm around and smacked him on the face.

He took the blow without flinching, but his eyes were hot and dark with fury. He said nothing more to her but his gaze remained long on her, full of rage and warnings. She trembled; she wanted to throw her arms around him, to destroy the sudden breach between them, but her pride held her fast, and he would not yield to her without some sign. Abruptly he turned and ran out of Harus Kum’s abandoned camp, down onto the flat ground, and she saw him turn to the west, toward the stream and the open ground, where Grub was waiting for him.

Karelia let out her breath in a rush of wind. She felt old and stupid and empty. She sank down on her hams on the ground, her eyes full of tears.

She was a fool. He was right—she wanted to thwart Ladon, and so she placed this boy against him; yet now it was the boy who mattered to her. She lifted up her face toward the sky.

When he came back she would beg his forgiveness. When he came back, she would tell him that she loved him. She would call him her son.

She would never again use him against Ladon, when he came back. She huddled down in the place of the outlanders, the smell and feel of the outlanders all around her, and longed for him to come back.

Ladon’s son knew where Moloquin was. He had seen the other youth the day before, gathering wood along the stream; as Moloquin collected the wood, he left it in heaps to be taken back later, and so it was easy to follow him, going along the stream from one pile of wood to the next.

He wished it had been harder to find Moloquin. He wished his father had not set this task on him.

Harus Kum walked along just behind him, his arms swinging. The other three men followed close behind him. They had left their goods a little way to the south, on the way to Ladon’s village, when they walked off from the Gathering; Ladon had told his son to take the men straight away, so that all who saw them leave would think they were going away at once, and forever. So Ladon’s son had led them away, burdened down with their packs, the men groaning under the weight, going straight into the west, and only when he came into the rougher, hilly ground well west of the Gathering did Ladon’s son swing around and move south, and turning eastward again cut the well-worn track that led south to Ladon’s Village.

There they left the packs. Harus Kum gave orders to his men in their unpleasant language, and with coils of rope and clubs of wood they started north again.

Once or twice the trader tried to speak to Ladon’s son, but he pretended not to understand. The trader smelled strange, and the evil business in the camp the night before had cast a sinister shadow over him in the eyes of Ladon’s son, but even more than that, the young man was loathe to speak much about what they were doing. He tried not to think about it.

Instead he thought about Shateel, his new wife.

Since the night of the dancing, when he had lain between her legs, she had filled his mind. Every moment he was away from her he felt her slipping away from him, gone to some other man, doing that with some other man. Now they weren’t even to be married until Ladon’s People returned to their own village, and if her mother refused to let Shateel go there, would she ever be his wife? Yet she had given herself to him, that night; surely she had been his wife then.

He should be with her now, and not here, helping to destroy one of his own People.

He told himself he hated Moloquin. His father hated Moloquin. Everybody hated Moloquin.

They walked along the bank of the stream until the brush and low trees that sprouted there grew so thick together they could not pass, and then cut around to the outside, wading through thick grass. When they cleared the extremity of the copse of brush, he saw, away ahead of them, two figures, one running happily along before, the other bowed under a weight of wood, and his heart sank.

They were his own People, and he was giving them to Harus Kum.

His steps dragged. But now Harus Kum had seen them, and in a crisp voice was giving orders to his slaves. Ladon’s son trudged along behind them now, as the three outlanders advanced in a rush, spreading apart to cut off the two boys’ line of escape. Up there, ahead of them, Moloquin dropped the wood to the ground.

Ladon’s son opened his mouth to shout a warning, but no words came. He thought of his father, who had ordered him to do this, and could think of no power high enough to countermand him. Instead he broke into a trot, to keep up with Harus Kum.

Up there, now, Moloquin was pushing Grub away, waving him off, shouting to him to run. He wore nothing but a loin cloth; he had used his shirt as a sling to carry wood. Harus Kum and his men closed swiftly on them, their arms out. Grub hesitated, unwilling to leave his friend, and Moloquin stooped and picked up a long branch. Harus Kum roared. Snatching out his whip from his belt, he snaked it loose, stopped before the boy with his feet planted, and brandished the whip.

“Drop it,” he shouted. “Drop it, now!”

Grub clung to Moloquin’s back. “What do they want?”

Ladon’s son reached the others, panting a little; the three slaves sidled around to hold Moloquin between them. The boy backed off, one hand on Grub behind him, the other raising up his club toward Harus Kum.

“What is this? What do you want?”

Hams Kum gave a flick of his wrist, and the whip undulated through the grass like a snake, and the tip licked up into the air once, only a step from Moloquin’s foot.

“Your chief has sold you to me! Come now, or I will punish you.”

Grub whined. He pressed ever closer to Moloquin who now circled his arm around him, protecting him like a mother. The club he still held, raised up between him and Harus Kum.

“I am not Ladon’s thing, to give away,” he said. “Nor is this boy—let him go, at least.”

Harus Kum raised his arm, and the whip laughed out, coiling in the air. Moloquin flinched back, but he could not avoid the whip; it wrapped itself around and around him and Grub together, and the little boy cried out, and Moloquin dropped his club. Bound tight in the whip, he bit his lips together, his face dead white, and his eyes brimming with pain.

Harus Kum walked up to them, still bound tight in his whip, and ran his hands over them as if they were beasts.

“These two look no stronger than a few reeds lashed together. What promises Ladon makes!” He spat. “Well, they will have to do.”

“Let Grub go,” Moloquin said.

Harus Kum unwrapped the whip from around them, and the two slaves closed in on them with the rope, and bound them, hand to hand, and ankle to ankle. Moloquin stood still. Around his chest the whip-marks stood up from his skin in long red welts.

He said, “Let me say good-by to my mother.”

Harus Kum struck him full in the face. “Keep silent, unless I speak to you! You have no mother, boy, you have no People, all you have is my whip and my hand over you.”

At that Moloquin howled; he lunged forward, all wrapped in his bonds, flinging himself bodily forward, not at Harus Kum but at Ladon’s son, behind him. The three slaves seized him. Ladon’s son flung up his clenched fists, all his nerves prickling up.

“Let him go,” he cried. “I shall fight him—”

“Coward,” Moloquin cried. “Coward—”

Harus Kum stepped in between the two of them, raised the butt of his whip, and calmly struck Moloquin over the head, so that he fell down senseless. Ladon’s son lowered his hands, his heart pounding.

“I am not a coward. I would have fought against him—”

Harus Kum grunted at him. “Come, let us bind him up, and then hurry. Ladon your father said that you would take us to his village, and there help us get the stores he promised us.”

“Yes,” said Ladon’s son. “I know where everything is.”

He could not take his eyes from Moloquin, lying half-dead on the ground; he thought, He need not have struck him down, I would have beaten him if we fought. He remembered all the other times he and Moloquin had fought, the stones thrown, the angry words; and had he not always come out the winner then? He made his feet move, circling the body on the ground. South lay Ladon’s Village. South he led Harus Kum.

When the sun went down Moloquin still had not come back, and Karelia got up and went off to find him. At first she looked among the hearths of the People, thinking in his anger he might have gone to another fire when the evening approached, but she found only the other women, giving their children the evening meal. Most of the People were making ready to leave the Gathering, and the great sprawl of the camp was a jumble of packed belongings and garbage. Everyone was distracted and tired and when she asked after her son she got curt, uninterested replies—no one had seen him or Grub.

She worked her way back through the disorder toward Rulon’s Village. The sky was full of a rushing wind and the stars were appearing in the dusk. As she walked aimlessly along, she came on Fergolin, the Bear Skull master, sitting with a circle of young men before him—the new members of the society, whom he would be teaching the rudiments of star-lore. Around his neck Fergolin wore several strands of the beads that the foreigner Harus Kum had brought, and around his head was a band of painted leather.

“Have you seen my son Moloquin?” she asked.

“Moloquin,” one of the boys murmured, and there was laughter. “She wants Moloquin.”

Fergolin said, “I have not, Ana-Karelia.”

The boys were still giggling together, and with a glance he silenced them. Karelia loitered, hearing something sinister in their laughter. She wondered if it were merely the joke, the play on Moloquin’s name, that made them laugh, or if they knew some evil had fallen on him. Finally she went away.

She went to the edge of the camp, by the stream, and looked out across the plain. From here it rose toward the horizon, not evenly, but in rises and hollows, rumpled like the surface of a lake under the wind, and the wind curried the grass, blowing in waves away from her. The darkness crept over it, crowded with spirits and demons. Her fear of the dark, of being out there alone, held her still a moment, but her back was already to the camp, and she could see a heap of wood, out there, waiting to be gathered in. She knew he was out there.

Slowly she went forth onto the empty plain. The wind wrapped itself around her and howled joyously into her ears. Her feet padded over the grass. Out there a night bird was singing, its brilliant ringing song raising the hackles on her neck. She went forward along the stream’s edge, following the stacks of wood he had made.

Once she paused and looked back, and there behind her she saw the yellow glow of the fires of the People, driving the darkness away, and the black arch of the sky overhead. Her skin was cold and tingling with alarm. Something plopped into the stream beside her and she jumped.

Moloquin, she thought, Moloquin, if I find you I shall never speak of Ladon again, I shall call you my son forever, Moloquin, let me find you.

From one stack of wood to the next she trudged on, and then, in the middle of the grass, a little way from the stream, she came on his shirt, half-covered with wood.

He had not stacked this pile. The shirt lay crumpled under it as if he had cast everything down at once. She drew the cloth free of the sticks. The grass here was all trampled. She knelt down, feeling the ground with her hands, and lowered her head down and sniffed the earth.

She could smell him. He had lain here. And now her fingers wiped something slimy from the grass, and a dampness that she lifted to her nose, and tasted on her tongue, and knew for Moloquin’s blood.

She howled. She knew now something dreadful had happened to him. With the shirt clutched in her arms, she ran here and there in short dashes, looking for him, and gathering up her courage she stopped once or twice and called his name into the dark.

He was gone. Her ears knew it, in the silences that answered her, and her belly knew it, hollow with an emptiness that would never be filled up again. He was gone. She had lost him.

She sank down to the ground and put her face against his shirt and cried for him and for herself. The shirt smelled of him. She sniffed it all over, wiped her tears on it, and inspected it all over for signs of blood. There was no blood on the shirt, but when she went back to where she had found it, the moon rising behind her, she found the blood on the grass again.

She stood there, calling his name recklessly now, uncaring what demon might be drawn to her voice. She stumbled away to the west, shouting. One of her shoes came off and she did not turn to pick it up but hurried on, half-shod, her eyes hurting from poking their look into dark shadows and far-off places. Her head hurt. Exhausted, she stopped a while, his shirt on her lap, and was surprised into sleep. She dreamt she saw him, running through the sky, dressed like Abadon in stars, but he was going away from her and did not heed her call.

Waking, she went on again, in the deep night, going back toward the camp, calling and calling. Her feet throbbed and her throat was sore and painfully tight. At dawn, finally, she reached her hearth again.

Empty. The ashes cold, the wood half-burned. She spread out Moloquin’s shirt on the ground. Her hands trembled. With handfuls of straw and clothing and other things from her camp, she filled out the shirt as if there were a man inside it and ran her hands over it, saying prayers, pleading with Heaven to keep him safe. When that was done, she picked herself up and walked heavily across the camp toward Ladon’s platform.

The men were making ready to go. The litter waited there before the platform, all the men competing for a place nearest it, to be one of those who bore Ladon away. Karelia pushed through them, jabbing them with her elbows, kicking out with her feet, and barged in under the platform.

There Ladon sat on his bed of furs, eating from a painted pot. She went up before him and stood there, planted on her feet.

“You took my son from me, Ladon.”

He raised his head, his face bland as cream, his eyes unfocussed. “What do you mean, Ana-Karelia-el?”

“I want my son back!”

“I know nothing of the unwanted one,” said Ladon smoothly.

She began to weep. Her fingers twitched; she wanted to tear him into pieces, chew him to bits. “I want my son back!”

“He has many enemies. No one cares about him but you. I did nothing to him.”

“You killed my son,” she cried, and the tears ran down her face and splashed on the ground at his feet.

He tried to laugh. His cheeks above the glossy black of his beard were red as the red clay. His eyes slithered from side to side, seeking a way past her. Around the outside of the platform his men pressed close to listen and to watch. He said, “I know nothing of this, old woman. Go.”

“You killed my son.”

“Go,” said Ladon, and stood up, throwing out his chest, and putting his hands on his hips.

She stared at him a while through the image-shattering film of her tears. “Yes,” she said. “I will go. For now. But you, Ladon, you will suffer for this. I swear it to you. You killed my son and you will suffer.”

She turned and went out of the shade of the platform. Behind her, she heard Ladon try to laugh, but the cracked sound fell into the silence like a stone. Karelia went off by herself, to find her own way home.

Fergolin had a leather pouch full of small regularly shaped stones, which he used to teach his novices; he sat with them in the dust in the yard of Ladon’s roundhouse and put the stones in circles in the shape of the Turnings-of-the-Year, and the young men crowded around him to see.

“From each of these stones,” he said, pointing to the western edge of the ring, “we may look forth across one of these other stones—” he pointed to the eastern edge—“and then to the horizon, on Midsummer’s Eve, and there see a certain star rising. A Bear Skull master knows every sighting line and every star, and if new things appear there, he remembers them and adds them to his knowledge.”

This last Midsummer’s Eve, the old traveler, called Father-of-Time, whose life from one beginning to the next was as long as a man’s life, had risen with the great red star whose hearth was on the Midsummer’s Eve horizon, the fixed star named Seeds-of-Fire. What this portended made Fergolin uneasy. The old traveler was one of his special responsibilities. He had followed its course now since he had entered the society, and seen it wander exactly halfway across the sky. In its strange turnings and loops it encircled many of the most crucial of the fixed stars. When it rose side by side with the hot glare of Seeds-of-Fire it had spoken directly to Fergolin’s heart, and the message made him tremble.

“My old master,” he said, speaking to the boys, but also to himself, “gave me a priceless gift; he had seen the old traveler find its entire way through Heaven. He told me star by star how it passed. I hope one of you will prove worthy to have such knowledge of me.”

The faces that watched him were slack and empty of understanding. The newness of their novitiate had faded and now they were faced with the long dull task of memorizing the groundwork of the Bear Skull lore. Fergolin knew none of them would be equal to the task. They had no fire in them, no passion for the stars; their hearts were lumps of earth. Perhaps it was as well. In his own heart the starry speck that fastened him to the sky now throbbed with a warning message. His gaze fell to the tiny circles of stones in the dust before him.

“There are five travelers,” he said, watching the little stones. “Two are hard to miss in the sky—the white traveler, that stands forever in the pathway of the sun, either before or behind her, never far from her, the Right Eye, the Blessed One, the Starmother, the Womb-of-Heaven, she is one, The other is the great traveler, so bright that when he stands among the stars the eye is taken there as if on wings. He is named the Drum of Heaven, White Rider, and the Boat-of-Souls.”

He did not look up to see the boredom in their faces. He loved this lore. The names echoed up to him from the bottom of memory, not merely his mere lifetime’s memory, but that of the whole People. When he rehearsed this knowledge, he was one with the first father, and his unborn sons’ sons’ sons’ sons were one with him. He could not bear to see this gift offered to those who cared nothing for it.

“Two more of the travelers are easy to find—the red one—hot and angry, the Left Eye, the Wicked One, the Breaker of Peace, the Tears-of-Mothers, and the old traveler, Father-of-Time. The fifth is rarely seen. It is a gift of the Overworld to their favorites—a gift and a charge, a sign of benevolence and a call to great duty. This is the swift one, Foot-of-the-Sun, who lives in her house, and never leaves, save to stand at the door and look out, and tell her all he sees.”

He stopped. The bored inattention of his pupils had become an active distraction; they were all looking around behind him, craning their necks to see. He turned.

Karelia was coming into the roundhouse yard.

Fergolin straightened, peering closely at her, as she crossed the roundhouse yard, set down her mat of reeds and her backrest of withies and cloth, and took her place right beside the door into the roundhouse, as if she meant to be there a long while. She faced him. Her seamed, pouchy little squirrel’s face was unreadable.

Fergolin gawked at her; the boys all gawked at her; everyone else who was there stood silently watching her. When she knew that she had them all waiting, she said, “I am here to tell a story.”

Fergolin stood up, alarmed. “Ana-Karelia-el, do—”

Her voice rose up over his, her words loud and clear and strong with rage. “I am here to tell a story of a man who in his overreaching pride struck at the center of the order of things, destroyed his sister, and killed her son, his own heir.”

Fergolin lost his breath. This was going to be bad. Already the novices were inching away from him over toward Karelia, and from the other parts of the yard more men were coming, curious, drawn, to sit down at her feet. Fergolin shuddered. In his heart the little speck of the star stabbed him with its pulsing warning pain. He went into the roundhouse to tell Ladon what was happening.

Karelia sat in the heat of the sun, her voice cracked and dry from long use, and the story spun itself steadily forth, coming from the deeps, unwilled, driven up by the fury and cold grief in her heart. She had always been able to grip her listeners with her words, with the power of her voice and the grace of her gestures, and now as she sat in the midst of them and told one story after another, swaying a little as she spoke, her hands shaping and reshaping the air before her, the whole village gathered to hear, and no one moved, not even to turn his head away.

She was telling every story she knew that related to this crime of Ladon’s. She told stories of the murder of sons, of brothers, and of nephews, stories of the enmity between uncle and nephew, between sister and brother, between man and woman. She told about the structure of the world, the relationships between the parts of it, women’s duties and men’s privileges, women’s rule and men’s envy, women’s power and men’s prestige. Some stories she told she had forgotten she knew, and others she had never told before, but they all came forth now, each word rising as she needed it.

Ladon’s son and his new wife sat before her and listened and the young man wept. When his wife saw that, she turned away, her face twisted with disgust, but she was a stranger here, and had nowhere else to go, and so she sat there beside her husband, and her face was turned away, and his tears fell like poison between them.

Brant came and sat before her and listened, and raised up his face toward Heaven, and she saw there his anguish, his despair, that he had lost one who might have carried on the lore of the Pillar of the Sky.

Every mother with a son sat before her and as she spoke they lost their sons also, and mourned with her. And every man before her knew himself a son, who was lost, and whose mother mourned, and whose father had betrayed him and cut the link that bound him to the world.

Ladon did not come. Ladon never came.

When the night fell she stopped speaking, but she did not move, she was too exhausted to move. The People went away into their longhouses and the roundhouse and left her alone there, and she leaned back against her rest and watched the night close over her and waited for the light to come and loosen her tongue.

Then in the darkness from all around her came soft padding feet, and dishes of food for her, which they left at the edge of her mat, and bent down and touched their lips to her mat, and left. Then she knew that what she did was sacred.

There was no comfort in it for her, because Moloquin was no more. She ate only a little before her belly closed up against the food that she could not share with him. She drank only enough to moisten her lips before her throat refused to drink what he could not drink. When she slept, it was to dream of him.

In the morning she began again, and the People filled up the roundhouse yard to hear her. She told stories of Abadon, how he defied the order of things, and was invariably punished. Three times in a row she told the story of the breaking of the Mill of Heaven, whereby Abadon in his folly caused the whole world to fall into error and change.

Still Ladon did not come. She did not call for him by name. She merely told stories. Once, in the space between the stories, she began to chant the mill song.

Sam-po, sam-po

La li la la li li la

The Mill turns, the Mill grinds

Nothing escapes the Mill of Heaven

La li la la li li la

Sam-po, sam-po

The women all around the crowd lifted their voices and sang it with her, and their voices were harsh and cracked like the crows who ate the flesh of the dead, and all eyes turned toward the roundhouse. Yet Ladon remained invisible.

Karelia was tired. Her throat hurt, and her chest hurt. She went on with her stories and the People listened to her, and when darkness fell Karelia remained where she was, and they brought her food to sustain her. All night long, under the stars, she waited, and knew that inside the roundhouse, Ladon also waited, for the coming of the light, for the assault to begin again.

A few days after the return from the Gathering, the sickness began. It struck without pity, children, adults, old people, and carried them off in a few days, scorched with fever and crying from pain and delirium. It raged through the whole camp, taking away one or two from each hearth, and sometimes all those at a hearth, so that in the longhouses some places were cold and empty, and some tenanted only by the sick and dying.

There were some who said this was another gift of Harus Kum, that the trader had set a curse on them. The women especially spoke of the evil potency of the blue beads that Harus Kum had given to Ladon. But Ladon himself did not fall sick, and there were those who thought that meant he was proof against anything, even Karelia’s attacks.

They crowded together to hear her, and many of the sick and dying were carried close to her to hear her. Then she too was sick. Her voice wavered, the wonderful resonant power that formed pictures in the minds of her listeners, that wiped away the world and made it new again, and as she fell silent, they all saw that she was only an old, old woman now, light and frail as a dead leaf. All her power was gone.

So she died, there in front of them all, but before her life was gone, just at the same moment, she found her voice again. She put off the stories as, soon, her soul would put off her flesh, and she spoke to them directly. Poised there on the boundary between life and death, with the little cramped unhappy world of life behind her, and the infinite shining glory of the Overworld before, she turned her head to look back and she warned them that if a son of Ladon’s ever reached the high seat, their whole world would go to ruin.

Then she was dead, and her body lay cast off on the mat in the yard of the roundhouse.

The women mourned her the most. They took her up, many hands to lift her, who would have been light enough in the arms of a single woman, and carried her away to the Pillar of the Sky. Already many of the People lay there, feeding the crows, so many that it was hard to find space for her within the circle of stones. There they put her down to rest.

She was the last to die of the sickness. There were those who said she had brought it all on them, that the Overworld protected Ladon from her, and that his power was greater than hers, and that he had beaten her.

There were others who said, however, that the struggle was not yet over.