Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  One of the ropes broke, spilling the sledge and its cargo down into a marshy lowland, and they spent the rest of the afternoon gathering up what they could salvage and packing it away into the sledge again.

  Thus they went, day after day. In the morning the sun warmed their backs and while they struggled and groaned and Harus Kum swung his whip back and forth the sun raced up over the sky and as if to mock them rolled away to the west, going where they struggled to go, and came up the next morning and burned their backs again. The countryside was rough and overgrown. A sledge broke and they stopped to cut new runners among the standing trees. They had to walk far off the path to find a suitable tree.

  The boy Moloquin followed, watching everything with an all-absorbing attention. Harus Kum had brought the axe he had made of bronze, and he himself set to work with it to hew down the tree, but shortly the axe dulled, and he threw it down angrily and took another. Later in the day, as he stood watching the slaves split the felled trunk with wedges and mauls, he noticed Moloquin crouched nearby on the grass, running his fingers over the beautiful head of the dulled axe.

  They went on. The rain fell again, and in the mud, on a precipitous short hillside, a rope broke, and the sledge roared down over the slippery ground and crushed one of the slaves under it. When they pried the sledge up off him he was dying. Harus Kum screamed and plied his whip like a madman but he could move none of the others back to their work; they stood in the driving rain, a circle around the dying man, and some wept. Finally, raging, the trader had to wait until they were ready—until their fellow had given up his life and lay still in the mud and the blood. Then at last they were willing to take up the ropes again, but as each one of them left the dead man behind him, he stooped and plucked some grass or a bough of green leaves and laid that over the body.

  The sun dried them. Lacking one man, they had to bring the sledges on in two groups, taking the first set ahead a little, going back to bring the next one, dragging the first off again.

  This gave the men a little leisure, which they spent singing and talking, like fools. The boy Moloquin caught a rabbit and two squirrels and found some bird’s eggs, which he gave away to any who asked. He would not join in the singing and talking. The other boy followed him everywhere.

  They dragged the four remaining sledges over a ridge, the ground underfoot loose and crumbling away under the weight of a foot, treacherous, sharp and spiky, and descended down the far side into the valley of the little stream that ran past home. The older slaves recognized it and rejoiced as if they sat already by their hearth.

  Moloquin stood staring away into the west, looking down the narrow gorge of the stream, the dark green pine trees all shrouded in a low clinging mist, and the clear sky blue above.

  “What is that noise?” he asked.

  Harus Kum did not know at first that the boy spoke to him; Moloquin had never addressed him before. Moloquin tugged on his arm.

  “That sound? What is that sound?”

  “Ah?” Harus Kum pricked up his ears. He heard sounds all around him, the twittering of birds in the brush, the slap and gurgle of the stream, and the wind sifting through the pine boughs. “Which sound?” He cuffed Moloquin for causing him to spend so much attention on him.

  “That—the low one. The roar. It sounds as if the ground is roaring.”

  Harus Kum said, “You are mad, brat.” He could hear nothing. He went away to the front of his train, away from this boy’s ridiculous questions.

  They hauled the sledges single-file down the gorge. The older slaves sang boisterously, as if soon their work would all be over—as if, once the sledges were dragged into the stockade, they did not then have to go to work in the mines. Moloquin stared always forward, even as he hauled the rope over his shoulder, looking for something; he sniffed the air, he cocked his ears. The wind was beating into their faces, coming up the stream, tasting of salt and rotting seaweed, the shore smell. Once in a while it brought with it the thunder of the surf, and halfway on, Harus Kum came to realize that that was the sound Moloquin had heard: the pounding of the sea. The ground itself roared. Harus Kum laughed, amused.

  The others went singing by him, pulling on the ropes as if they were thistledown, and the sledges bounced away down the stream.

  At last, in the evening, they hauled the sledges out of the narrow mouth of the gorge into the wide, flat, sandy valley where the stream ran into the sea. This was Harus Kum’s home, although he had not been born here. It was an old place. Men from his home village on the far side of the sea had been coming here for a long while, generations, to mine the tin ore in the banks of the streambeds, and they had trampled down most of the green brush in this flat-bottomed wedge-shaped valley, and built a stockade of wood posts at the end near the sea. Mountains of grey-white and black slag were piled up on either side of the stream, so that the sledges had still to go single-file through them. As they approached, the great flock of gulls that picked over the midden heap rose like a dirty white cloud in the air.

  Harus Kum busied himself getting the sledges into the stockade. The women came to the door of the big house to watch and greet them. He could smell beer brewing. It was good to be home. He released his breath in a sigh. Walking up and down through his stockade yard, the whip coiled over his shoulder, he shouted and kicked at the slaves who were hauling the baskets of meal into the storehouse. The women hurried to help and to see what they had brought. With yells and whoops, the men rushed toward the big house, their work done.

  Moloquin did not go after them. Harus Kum, pulling the gate closed, saw the boy standing alone in the yard as the others ran by him; even the little boy had gone inside. Moloquin turned and started toward the gate.

  “Where are you going?” Harus Kum blocked his way.

  Moloquin said, “I want to see.”

  “See. See what?” Yet the full intensity of the boy’s look was compelling. He stood back, holding the gate open. After all, where could he go? Moloquin went out; halfway across the threshold he broke into a run.

  Harus Kum’s back tingled. He told himself the boy was mad. His feet would not bear him into the comfort of his house, to his fire and his beer and the inviting warmth of the women. His feet took him after Moloquin.

  When he walked out the gate, Moloquin was already halfway down to the shore, going at a dead run. Two of the half-wild cattle that provided Harus Kum with meat were browsing there on the salt grass; at the boy’s approach they shied and galloped heavily away. Harus Kum followed him, his hand on his whip. He told himself, I am making sure he does not run away.

  The boy ran down to meet the incoming waves, and there he stopped, the sea boiling up around his ankles. There was something of a beach here; because the stream’s mouth gave some shelter from the pounding surf, a little irregular patch of sand had gathered here, behind the jagged black rocks. It always reminded Harus Kum of a woman’s private part. Moloquin stood at the edge of the sand, his face turned into the wind, and the giant crashing boom of the surf around him. As Harus Kum came up behind him, the boy walked into the sea up to his waist.

  The spray flew on the wind like whips of salt; Harus Kum could not hold his eyes open against it. He shouted, and the boy heard him and turned, and slowly waded out again, soaked.

  He came up to Harus Kum, his eyes blazing, and said, “What is this?”

  “This?” Harus Kum laughed, heavy with scorn, secure in his own knowledge. “The sea, you fool. It’s the sea.”

  “Ah.” The boy wheeled around again, facing the tumultuous surf. “Karelia told me about the sea.”

  “Stupid fool. Go inside, you stupid fool, get out of the water.”

  He raised his hand to strike the boy, but Moloquin said, in a calm voice, “Do not hit me,” and Harus Kum lowered his hand.

  “Then get inside, you fool.”

  Instead, Moloquin turned and looked toward the sea again. He
said, “What is beyond it?”

  “Beyond it! The rest of the world, of course.” Harus Kum laughed again. The wind snatched away his mirth. He tasted salt in his mouth. He wondered why he stood here answering this brat’s questions.

  “The rest of the broken millstone,” Moloquin said. “Oh, she is wise, my mother. You—” he pointed at Harus Kum. “You came from beyond there?”

  “I—yes. Yes.”

  Moloquin’s face was beaded with the spray, his hair soggy, his eyelashes dripping. Harus Kum said, “Come inside,” in another voice than he had used before, and did not call him a fool.

  “No,” Moloquin said. “You go—I will come in later.”

  He was dismissing Harus Kum out of his presence. The trader stiffened, angry, but the wind was cold. Inside the stockade there was a warm fire and a pot of beer to drink, and the women, from whom he had been gone so long. Slowly he went away.

  At the gate he stopped and looked back. The sun was going down. The sky was streaked with low clouds, turning pale orange and darker orange and red. Moloquin had gone down into the surf again, and as Harus Kum watched, he dropped something from his arms into the water. He went back up the beach, stopped, and lifted a rock up, and another rock, and carried them into the surf and piled them one on top of the other. He was building a pillar of stones.

  Harus Kum swallowed down his sudden anger, his taste of fear. He had thought himself and this boy far from the land of the stone rings. But Moloquin had somehow brought them with him. Harus Kum turned and went into the shelter of the stockade.

  The mines of Harus Kum, dug into the black pocked rocks that walled the stream’s banks, produced a lumpy grey ore that was rich in tin. Harus Kum’s slaves dug up the ores and carried them away to a stretch of flat ground outside the stockade. There, with great stones and mallets of wood, they crushed the rock until it was like meal; the master himself supervised this operation and every subsequent step, and the work was heavy and harsh, and the dust covered everything.

  When the ores were smashed to grains no larger than grains of sand, Harus Kum had it hauled off to the furnaces inside the stockade. Here, within their own low wall of blackened craggy slag lumps, were three holes dug down into the ground and lined with rock. Here the ore was cooked.

  Harus Kum himself set up the furnaces, piling in a thick layer of charcoal, sprinkling a layer of the ore dust on top, then another layer of charcoal, another thin sprinkle of the ore, until all the furnaces were filled up.

  He lit the furnaces with a torch dipped in fresh fat, and then the men had to gather close to the fire, and put long thin tubes like reeds down close to the fire, and blow as hard as they could to get the fire hot. This was the hardest work of all, although no one had to run or jump or carry anything, and because a man blowing hard into the furnace was soon so exhausted and sick he would fall over, Harus Kum had them do it in groups of two, one group to each furnace, while the other men waited to take up the work as soon as one let go.

  When the fire cooled, they dug the furnaces empty, and spread the insides out on the ground. What came out of the furnaces was a stew of ash and lumps of spongy black slag. Harus Kum himself smashed up these fist-sized chunks of cooked rock, and picked out the tiny bits of shining stuff inside, and poured these carefully into a leather pouch. It took the eighteen men of Harus Kum’s crew more than half the month, from the digging of the ore out of the stream bank, until that thin trickle of beads of tin ran down into Harus Kum’s pouch.

  Moloquin and Grub worked with the others at this, hauling ores, pounding up the rock, and blowing into the furnaces. On the day after they had stood and watched the poor results of their work clink into Harus Kum’s pouch, Grub said, “I hate this place.” The next morning he was sick.

  The two boys slept on the floor of the big house, against the wall; when Moloquin woke in the grey dawn, he knew at once that Grub was close to dying. He could feel the heat from the boy’s body and on Grub’s lips a yellowish foam was drying in flecks, and while Moloquin watched, propped up on his elbows, Grub began to cough. Moloquin wrapped him in the rag he had been sleeping on and sat there beside him, afraid.

  Grub did not wake up. He lay there burning with a fever and coughing up gouts of green stuff. Moloquin took his hand and sat, waiting for something, he did not know what; waiting. The others were stirring awake; he could see them moving back and forth in the dark of the house. The younger of the two women knelt by the fire and raked over the coals, and the light spread over her face. Yawning and stretching, the other men moved closer to the hearth. Harus Kum, heavy-footed, loud-voiced, stamped in from the little room at the back where he slept.

  He called the women to him and led them off to the storehouse, and they came back with pots and a basket of food. The men crowded around them and were fed. Moloquin crouched on his hams, one hand on Grub’s hand, and watched.

  Beside him Grub whimpered in his sleep. His skin was hot and dry and cracking at the corners of his mouth. If he died, Moloquin would be alone here, among people who did not speak his language and whose guttural mumbling speech he was just beginning to accept as words.

  “Grub,” he said. “Don’t die. Don’t die.” But he felt death in the boy’s limp body, burning like a furnace.

  Harus Kum tramped toward him. “What are you doing, lazy ones? Get up and put some food in you, you have work to do.”

  “He is sick,” Moloquin said.

  “Hunh.” Harus Kum squatted down and touched Grub, felt his head and his limbs, and said, again, “Hunh.” He stared at Grub a while, frowning, and finally tossed the blanket over him. “Go on, you. Get something to eat, you have to work.”

  “No,” Moloquin cried, seized by a sudden panic; he knew if he left, he would find Grub dead when he came back. “No, I—”

  Harus Kum struck him. “Go work. Now you’ve lost your chance to eat, there isn’t any left. Go to work on an empty stomach, it will teach you to stay nimble.”

  The tall man got up, turned to go, and looked back at Moloquin. The boy crouched down again beside Grub, determined not to leave him, the only creature of his own kind left to him. Harus Kum swung around toward him again, and his hand went to his belt.

  “Come out and work, brat, or I will give your friend there a shorter way into the grave.”

  As he spoke, he took a little knife out of his belt, and the light jumped on the shining edge. It was made of the same stuff as the great axe. Moloquin licked his lips. He was afraid of losing Grub, and yet whenever he saw any of this magic stuff, his mind yearned toward it.

  He turned toward Grub again; he knew Harus Kum would kill him without any care at all—to him Grub was only a set of hands, a back, and a pair of feet. If he would not work, he was useless, a broken tool. Moloquin got up and went out with the others to the mines.

  They were digging ore out of the stream bank a little way up from the stockade. Here a thick layer of the brittle, lumpy tin ore curled like a worm through the heavy clays of the stream’s old bed. Conical heaps of the rock and dirt they had dug away to expose the vein stood all along the edge of the water. With mallets and wedges they hacked out lumps of the ore and piled them onto leather slings to carry away. Moloquin’s job was to gather up the chunks of ore as the other men broke them free of the bank. He scurried in and out of the line of slaves as they slugged at the streambank, dodging the great swings of their mallets. The dust got into his nose and eyes and his mouth and he went down to the stream as often as he could, and plunged his head and shoulders into the swift flowing water. The racket of the work was easier to get used to.

  At noon, the younger woman brought them meal and beer, and the men went across the stream to a little patch of grass and sat down and ate. Moloquin sat to one side of them, excluded from them. One of the women brought him a pot of the beer and a double handful of the meal; she was a young girl, broad across the cheekbones, flat down the nos
e, her eyes ever downcast. He thanked her in his language, knowing she did not understand him, and she gave no sign of hearing.

  She would know how Grub did, but he had no way of asking her. Probably she did not care. No one here cared for him and Grub. He was far from the land where his ancestors had lived, far from the havens of their spirits: here he was nothing, unconnected to the world, a thing of wind drift, forgotten.

  Around him sat the others, squatting like lumps on the grass, drinking beer, swilling up the meal with their tongues, their bodies swollen with muscle, their skins grey with dust. The dust caked their hair and their eyelashes; they hardly seemed men at all. What did they know of the deep green forest, the open rolling downs, and the ever changing sky? They scrabbled at the dull earth, the marks of Harus Kum’s whip crisscrossing their backs.

  He poured some of the beer into the pot of meal and stirred it with his finger to a dense mush. It tasted much different than the food he was used to. All at once his soul was cast down as low as the ground under his feet.

  Of all that had happened to him here, that only was familiar. He belonged to this feeling, of being utterly alone.

  Now here came Harus Kum again, swinging his coiled whip. Hastily they leapt up and crossed through the stream to their work.

  In the twilight, still miserable, now exhausted, Moloquin with the others carried the slings of ore back to the stockade. They bore the great burden as the men of the People bore Ladon, with poles across their shoulders. Moloquin wiped his face with his free hand. There was ore dust in his nostrils and in the corners of his eyes. The men around him chanted in tired, buoyant voices. They were going home.

  But he was going away from home, to the not-home, to the deathbed.

  He thought suddenly of his mother. But it was not Karelia to whom his mind flew, like a bird going home to its nest. He thought for the first time in a long time of Ael.

  He stiffened. He saw himself as she would have, had she been here—saw himself trudging along with the rest of the slaves, his eyes toward the ground, his shoulders round with another man’s labor, and he straightened up. He breathed his body full of the wind. He was his mother’s son. She had belonged to no one, to nothing, save to him, and now, around him, somehow, he sensed that she was with him still.