Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  At that, a shadow fell across the room, and he turned to see that the doorway was full of Moloquin, standing there, silent and waiting to be told what to do. Harus Kum jerked a thumb at him.

  “Unload the charcoal into the storeroom. Do you know how to put it away?”

  “I have done it,” Moloquin said. He came forward half the way to the fire.

  “Well then, take some of the slaves and unload the boat too. Take care that nothing gets wet.”

  “I will.” Moloquin turned and went out.

  “Who is that?” said Harus Kum’s brother.

  “One of my slaves,” said Harus Kum.

  “A slave!”

  “Why do you seem so surprised? Is there any other here save me and the slaves?”

  “He does not seem like a slave to me. The way he spoke to you, the way you spoke to him.”

  “Ah?” Harus Kum blinked, startled, into his brother’s face. “Really? Yet he is certainly a slave, one of the savages I spoke of.” He turned to look after Moloquin, but the young man was already gone. He resolved in the future to speak to Moloquin more as a master.

  After three days of foul winds, the air turned fine again, and the brother of Harus Kum and his crew loaded up their boat with supplies for the voyage and with sacks of tin, tied their wooden image on in front, and rowed away. Harus Kum stood on the shore watching. The boat bucked over the surf, wallowed down into the trough behind the breaking wave, and struggled up the next slope. At the top, its stern rose high into the air and the boat slid down the far side of the wave and disappeared. A moment later it bobbed up again, farther away by the length of a wave, the oars clawing at the water. Harus Kum stood there watching until his eyes burned from salt and the boat was long out of sight.

  When he turned, his chest packed with rage and homesickness, he saw that Moloquin stood there also, squinting into the spray-laden wind. Harus Kum snarled at him, “Have you nothing to do? I shall give you work if you are idle.”

  Moloquin lowered his head submissively. He was nearly as tall now as Harus Kum.

  “How many days must they travel?” he asked.

  “That depends,” said Harus Kum. “If the weather is fair and the seas run toward home—eight days, or ten. Then they come to a swampy coast, all eaten into with little rivers, where no people live. Our home is across the big bay to the south of that—our village is built on the sea cliff, it is magnificent to see it, rising above the waters, as you sail in.”

  He shook his head, scuffing at the sand with his feet. “I would give up my soul to be back there.”

  “Why are you not, then?” asked Moloquin.

  “Because I am here,” Harus Kum said, furious suddenly. “Because someone must do this work, keep you stupid fools at work, and mine the tin. Someday, though, make no mistake, I shall go home again, and then I shall live like a rich man and have all that I wish, all that I desire, someday.”

  He strode away up the beach, winding a trail through the black saw-toothed outcroppings of rock that studded the sand. The tide was ebbing away, which would carry the little boat out to the safety of the open water, far from shoals and rocks. His heart yearned after it. Moloquin was still following him, and he wheeled, venting his bad temper in a burst.

  “What, do you think because we have passed on all we mined that we shall mine no more? Get the others, we will go up the stream and bang the rocks around.”

  This time Moloquin obeyed him. Watching the young man’s back as he walked with long strides up the beach, Harus Kum fought the urge to call him back—to walk beside him.

  He told himself he was just lonely, now that his brother was gone.

  Yet it was good to have Moloquin. He asked interesting questions, and he brought bits of rock for the master to inspect, and he learned everything Harus Kum tried to teach him—learned the way a piece of cloth absorbed a spill. He had a natural feel for this work. Once Harus Kum had loved the work. Being here, year after year, driving slaves to it, bereft of his own kind and never knowing when he might return to his home, he had grown dull and his interest had lost its power, but Moloquin was bringing it back to him. He longed now to open up the little hut at the back of the house, light the fires, fill the bellows, and show this youth the real power in the rocks. Give him something to admire in his master.

  He glanced at the sky, cloudless and blue. There was no use in wasting the good weather. Soon the winter storms would shut down over them, and that would be the time to take Moloquin into the forge. Harus Kum went into the storehouse for his whip.

  They pounded the ore into rubble and lugged it back to the stockade, but before it could be cooked, the winter broke. One storm chased another up across the western sea; each brought first a warm furious wind, carrying the rain along in bursts and fits; then the storm seemed to settle down and stopped blowing and rained hard and steadily for days. Sometimes in the late day the rain would stop, and the low-lying sun broke through and the rainbow appeared, arched and glistening among the clouds.

  After this had gone on for some time, Harus Kum came to Moloquin and said, “I need your help. Come with me.”

  Silently the youth rose and went after him. They left the big house and walked around behind it to the little hut at the back, well away from the other buildings. Harus Kum opened the door and led Moloquin inside.

  The rain was falling on the thatch overhead, rattling and rustling like mice in the straw. Harus Kum opened a window at the far side, and by that light found a big shell full of oil and dropped a wick into it. Moloquin stood silently by the door, looking around him.

  The hut was round, small, crowded with strange furniture. In the center was a stone tub, waist high, with a long tube coming up from halfway along its side. Next to this stood another huge chunk of stone, worked roughly square, and set on a massive tree trunk. Harus Kum went around the place, with his hands as much as his eyes finding the tools laid out on a bench to one side, and stopping to pick up a flat leather bag from the floor.

  “Go fetch me a basket of charcoal,” he said, as he passed Moloquin. When Moloquin went out, he looked over his shoulder and saw Harus Kum fitting the leather bag to the tube in the side of the stone box.

  Moloquin brought in the charcoal, and Harus Kum gave him further orders. He lit a fire in the stone box and put in the charcoal, gradually, until there was a thick layer of charcoal, burning well, in the stone tub. Meanwhile Harus Kum was fussing around in the semi-darkness. He went out once, and Moloquin heard him poking at the thatch; something grated, and looking up the young man saw a hole opening up in the roof directly over the tub of stone. A drop of rain blew in and hissed on the charcoal. Harus Kum returned.

  “Today I will only sharpen knives,” he said.

  He laid out several knives on the edge of the stone tub, now glowing red with the charcoal fire. Moloquin said nothing. His hands were damp with excitement. He watched the master go to the bench and take up tools: a heavy mallet in his right hand, and a long flat stick in the other. Returning to the fire, he picked up one of the knives, fit it carefully into a hole in the stick, and laid the blade down on the hot coals.

  “Now, this—”

  He circled the tub to Moloquin’s side. The leather bag hung between them, attached to the tube running into the firebox. Taking hold of the bag with both hands, Harus Kum pulled it open and squeezed it, and Moloquin heard the rush of the wind forced from the bag down the tube and into the charcoal, and the layer of orange coals bloomed a furious red and sizzled with the heat. “Pump,” said Harus Kum, and gave the bag to Moloquin.

  With Moloquin working the pump, Harus Kum went back to the far side of the firebox, pushed the knife blade into the coals a little, took it out, inspected it, put it back in again, and picked up his mallet. Now he stood midway between the firebox and the great stone square on its tree-trunk base, and his hand with the mallet was by the square sto
ne. Taking the knife from the fire, he laid it on the stone, and struck it with the mallet.

  The blade glowed, hot as the coals. Moloquin worked the pump with both hands, but his eyes were fixed on the red-hot blade. As the mallet struck it, he saw how the blade yielded, bent, and flattened, and with the next blow flattened still more.

  He nearly cried out aloud. Hard as the stone when it was cold, somehow the metal got from stone turned malleable as clay when it was hot. When he saw this it was as if a new power sprang alive in his muscles. A new knowledge awoke in his mind. With a passionate energy he pumped and pumped on the leather bag, until the coals were white and shimmering, and Harus Kum gave a laugh and backed away, one hand up.

  “Leave off a little, it is too hot.”

  “I’m sorry.” Moloquin stepped back.

  Harus Kum took the cooling blade and plunged it down into a bucket of water at his feet. There it hissed and darkened and a cloud of steam rose. Harus Kum fit another knife into the long stick and put it on the coals to heat. Moloquin watched every move of his hands. The deft, sure motions were full of beauty; each blow he struck was perfect. He hammered the dull blades until their edges gleamed, thin as fingernails, and plunged them into the water to cool. Done, he held one of the blades out for Moloquin to inspect.

  It was sharp as a stone knife, and much finer to hold. Moloquin sighed. He stroked the flat of the blade with his thumb, lost in its smoothness and shine, and put it against his cheek. Harus Kum watched him with a little smile on his face.

  “So. You see what it is all about, this work of ours.”

  Moloquin laid the blade down on the stone where it had been beaten. He thought of Ladon, pompous in his piles of blue beads, ignorant of that power in which he sheathed himself. Made foolish by his efforts to be wise.

  He thought of Ladon’s belly. Of this knife, piercing that fat belly.

  “Now,” said Harus Kum, his sharp voice breaking into Moloquin’s thoughts. He laid down the mallet and the stick on the flat stone, and went into the back of the hut. When he came forth again, he had a stone bowl and one of the bricks of shining metal his brother had brought him.

  “This is copper,” he said. “There is some of it to be found here, but not enough to be mined—at least, none that I have found.”

  He put the stone bowl on the coals and dropped the brick of copper into it. All the while he talked.

  “You find copper in ores that are green, or blue, very pretty. At first, I think, men used them for their prettiness, to paint pots with, and that was how they learned that cooking such ores will melt them, and then they run like water, and can be made into any shape.”

  Moloquin said, “Ah—” not from surprise, but from delight.

  “But the copper is soft. It will not hold an edge, or stand up to hard work. So—”

  He took a pouch of tin granules and poured them in on top of the copper. “Mix these two together, and they make bronze.”

  Already the copper was melting. Dark patches floated on the surface. The light cast subtle inflections of color on the shimmering melt. Harus Kum leaned over to see it and stirred it a little with his stick, and the soft reflected glow lit up his face like a mask.

  “Keep the bellows going.”

  Moloquin worked the leather pump. Harus Kum went around the hut, laying out the cooled knives and sticking their handles back on; he hummed to himself as he did this, something Moloquin had never heard him do before, and in fact he seemed happier than Moloquin had ever seen him. In the stone bowl, the copper melted down to a shining soup. Moloquin watched it, absorbed. All his life he had strained against the world, and the world had packed itself around him and bound him tight in its own courses. Now, in the stone bowl, the earth itself was mere matter, to be shaped as he pleased. He smiled at the obedient copper.

  When it was all melted, Harus Kum brought out a broad thick tray of pottery, which he set on the square anvil stone. Four long regular hollows indented the surface of the pottery. The master poured the hot bronze into the pottery tray and the molten metal ran into the hollows and lay there, still gently glowing.

  “Now they will cool,” Harus Kum said, and set down the little crucible on the side of the firebox. “Rake over the fire. Tomorrow we will fix the axe, and perhaps you can work a little on it.”

  Moloquin turned the fire over and they covered the box with a lid of stone, Harus Kum went around the forge again, fussing with his tools. The rain splashed in through the smokehole, hit the lid of the firebox, and jumped up, hissing, into the air. Moloquin, his hands empty, watched his master fiddle with his things. He guessed that Harus Kum was loathe to leave this place, and he knew why: there was a power here beyond anything any of the People had ever dreamed of. Moloquin filled his chest with air: a bellows for the fires of his brain. Harus Kum went past him to the door, and the two men left the forge.

  Ap Min said, “Do you not think him fine to look at?”

  The older woman grunted. She never said much; she did her work, her head bowed, and ate what Harus Kum gave to her and slept where he told her and rose in the morning to do more work. Today they were brewing the beer; first they had malted the barley that Harus Kum had brought from inland, spreading the grain out in shallow baskets and soaking it until it sprouted, and now they were cooking it in a great tub of water. Murky and bitter-smelling, it yielded slowly to Ap Min’s paddle as she stirred, and gave off a soft murmur of its own, a low rippling music.

  “Don’t you think him good to look on?”

  The older woman said, in her harsh, unused voice, “He is a man.”

  “He is kind to me.”

  “He wants something.”

  Ap Min shook her head. Moloquin wanted nothing of her. He noticed her only when she stood directly before him. Then he smiled, he spoke some soft, idle word to her, not to get anything, not to have his own way, but simply because she was there.

  That was what amazed her. To the others she was there only as a thing to be used. Moloquin looked at her and met her eyes and smiled, the way men smiled at one another, to make friends one of the other.

  She leaned on the side of the tub, stirring, and the beer sang to her.

  The edge of the tub pressed against her belly; something hard and round in her belly pressed back. She had felt this way once before. Then Harus Kum had given her a potion stinking of pennyroyal mint, and she fell very sick, and after three days of agony her body gave up a tiny withered corpse, hideous and ugly, that Harus Kum cast into the fire of the forge, saying it would bring good luck.

  She dreaded the potion; she dreaded the horrible corpse. She gave her mind over instead to daydreaming of Moloquin.

  “Do you think Harus Kum would let slaves marry?”

  The older woman coughed and laughed at once, but she said nothing, she denied nothing. Ap Min swept the paddle in a broad arc through the young beer.

  Hems came in, his hair wet from the rain, lugging a basket of malted barley on his shoulder, and went to the side of the tub and poured in the grain. Close to Ap Min, he moved sideways, pretending not to see her until he rubbed up against her, and then laughed. Looking down at her, he gave her a long smile, and his arm moved, nudging her breast.

  “Go away,” she said loftily, although she liked Hems; he smiled at her too. But he wanted something, and that was why he smiled.

  “Come watch Moloquin chop wood in the rain,” he said.

  She straightened, letting go of the paddle, and the older woman caught the handle and laid the paddle up on the side of the tub. “Go,” she said, and snorted.

  Ap Min started toward the door, Hems beside her; he slid his arm around her waist and fondled her breast. She struck at his hand, not with any real intent of stopping him; it was play, part of the play between them, something as comforting in its own way as Moloquin’s smile when he saw her. Hems caressed her whenever he could, but h
e never took her. She wondered if he really wanted her. Perhaps he only liked the play. She went out to the doorstep.

  The rain was falling in a steady drenching downpour. The yard was half-lost under puddles, pocked with the rain falling, and there in the middle of the mud and the water was Moloquin, a chunk of wood at his feet and an axe in his hands.

  He chopped at it, once, twice, three times, and straightened, the tool swinging down in his hand. “This will not work,” he said, over his shoulder.

  It was not to those in the doorway he spoke, but to Harus Kum, who stood in the shelter of the eave, just at the corner of the house, watching. He said, “Well, bring it back in, then, we shall try something else.” His voice was flat with disappointment. Moloquin swung the axe up over his shoulder, a gesture so easy and full of lively grace that Ap Min sighed as he went away after the master toward the forge.

  Hems clutched her. His voice in her ear said, “If you have no work, we could go somewhere together.”

  He said this often. She always had work, as he knew, and there was no place to go in any case. She thrust him off, laughing, annoyed, and went back to the beer.

  With each blow of the mallet the tip of the bronze bar flattened out a little; he could flatten it less or more, by striking harder or softer. The metal wore the imprint of the hammer in a subtle mottling all over the work surface. He held the bar by a stick with a hole through it, and when he raised the mallet and brought it down, it was like making something whole again, like completing a circle. His body and the bar of bronze and the mallet formed a little world, an orbit of single purpose. He knew he loved the bronze.

  Glum, Harus Kum said, “I did not think this would work.”

  He was stripping off the bronze sheath with which they had covered the axe. For most of the winter they had been trying to make an axe of bronze that would hold an edge, trying first one way, then another, always failing.