Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

“What will we do now?” Moloquin asked.

  “I have—something—”

  The master got up, threw down the scraps of bronze, and stood the axe against the wall. “The bronze is beautiful,” he said. “It makes beautiful things, and perhaps that is all it wishes. Maybe the demon resents being used for mean things. Maybe only stone is crude enough and simple enough for such low things as tools.”

  Moloquin put the bar of bronze back into the fire, and went to the bellows; he kept his head turned toward Harus Kum, to encourage the master to talk; he had learned much metal-lore listening to Harus Kum ramble. Now the master strolled around the forge, looking into the little shelves and wooden nooks on the walls.

  He said, “I have some other ore here, somewhere, that may serve.”

  “More tin,” Moloquin said.

  “It is not so easy as that. I showed you, remember, what happens when you try to cast pure copper.”

  Moloquin nodded. They had melted a little copper and poured it out, but the metal would not flow evenly, and the castings, when they cooled, were full of holes and could not be worked at all without breaking.

  “So we add the tin to it, and then it flows smoothly, it cools evenly and well, but the more tin you add to copper, the more brittle it becomes, and eventually it cannot be forged at all.”

  Moloquin flexed the bellows between his hands, watching the bronze bar glow. It was so beautiful, to take dull earth and turn it into something shining and hard, yielding gracefully to its master. Maybe that was enough, the whole virtue of it; maybe Harus Kum was right.

  Yet as he faced the bronze, something hard and shining in himself arose and would not be defeated. He thought, I shall make an axe, and the axe shall lead me home again.

  Now Harus Kum was back, a little leather pouch in his hand, and he upended it and dumped some small rocks and dust onto the top of the anvil.

  “Arsenic,” he said. “Hard to come by. Hard to use. We shall add a little to the copper, and see what we shall see.”

  This new metal was soft and lustrous to look at. Moloquin put out his hand to touch it, and Harus Kum knocked his arm down.

  “No. Handle it only as I show you. This is evil stuff, it can kill.”

  With a little flat stick he scooped the arsenic into a crucible of clay, and dumped in after it the pieces of copper with which they had sheathed the stone axe. With jointed sticks, they put the crucible into the fire, and Moloquin went to work the bellows.

  Harus Kum said, “My brother told me that when the traders came from the east—they come in the spring—”

  “Where do they come from?” Moloquin asked swiftly.

  “Over the water. They come in the spring and buy our metals, but this time they spoke of another metal. They craved this metal more than the tin and the copper, almost as much as gold, which is so rare I myself have seen only a few things made of it. But we have none of that, not gold nor the other metal whose name I have forgotten.”

  In the crucible the metal flowed and ran, glowing red. Moloquin leaned over it, drawn by the shimmering colors. There was nothing more wonderful than this gift of the earth.

  He said, dreamily, “The tree dulls the axe. Wood will dull a knife. But flesh—that yields, so soft—”

  Harus Kum gave a harsh bark of laughter. “The bronze slays, again and again.”

  Moloquin smiled down into the crucible; he thought he saw the demon of the metal in the streams of molten copper.

  “You want to kill Ladon, is that it?”

  Moloquin could not bring himself to speak of this with Harus Kum. It was completely other than his life with Harus Kum. He watched the last cool shape of the metal disappear into the melt.

  “Don’t be a fool,” Harus Kum said. “Forget Ladon. Forget those people. You are mine, now. This is where you belong. You have the hands and the soul for it, and I mean to teach you all I know of it. But you will be mine forever. You will never go back to your people.”

  Moloquin lifted his head, but he said nothing; with a sudden ache in his heart, as if his heart were cracking into two pieces, he saw that life before him, as Harus Kum had described it. He remembered Karelia—what did she think of him, did she believe he was dead? Did she remember him? His thoughts rushed back to that moment when he had seen her last, when they were arguing. Harsh angry words, the last he had spoken to her. His heart was sore with longing for her. There were no stories here, as there was no bronze there. His heart was split in two. Grimly he lowered his gaze to the shining stuff in the crucible.

  Moloquin awoke before dawn. He could hear the rain failing in the thatch, and the snores of the other slaves around him; the house was dark except by the fire, where a small red glow still shone. Quietly, without rousing Hems beside him, he rose up and went to the door.

  Just as he reached it, the door opened. He stepped quickly back, his neck tingling, expecting Harus Kum, but it was Ap Min who came into the house, looking pale, her arms folded over the round bulge of her belly. She gave him a look of surprise and he moved aside to let her by, but instead she stood before him, blocking his way.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Out,” he said.

  “Don’t go,” she said, louder, and he glanced quickly behind him to see if she had wakened anyone else; his heart racing, he faced her again, where she stood in his way, and put his hand on her arm.

  “I must go make water,” he said, and with his arm he urged her gently out of his way.

  “Moloquin,” she said, “Moloquin, don’t leave me here.”

  He gave her a startled look, wondering what she meant—wondering also if she knew what was on his mind—but he said nothing to her, and went out the door into the yard.

  There, he did not piss. He went to the stockade fence and climbed up over it and walked away, to the east, up the gorge of the stream. Before he came to the mines, he veered off, climbed the steep crumbling bank, and went into the forest.

  He did not know if he was going home or not. He had promised Hems to take him, when he left, but Hems had come to do well enough here, as well as he would do among his own People, or so Moloquin told himself as he put distance between himself and Hems.

  Between himself and Harus Kum; between himself and the bronze.

  He went on into the forest. The trees closed around him. The rain dripped and splashed around him, so that the whole forest shook. As usual, he ate whatever he came on as he walked, snails and grubs and lily bulbs, and his tongue told him what he feared to know, that the spring was wearing down toward summer, that soon the People would gather at the Turnings-of-the-Year.

  He had promised Hems to take him there. Harus Kum, too, had business there, but Harus Kum, he guessed, would avoid the Gathering this year, after his experience there the year before. As he walked, the rain streaming down his naked shoulders and chest and matting his hair to his head, he played with the thought that he might go to the Gathering and do Harus Kum’s work for him.

  That would mean facing Ladon.

  When he thought of Ladon his blood burned. His hands ached to grip that fat foolish neck.

  He thought also of Karelia, of her delight when he came back. He would have stories to tell her, for once. He would tell her he had seen the broken edge of the millstone. She knew of it already, the stories had given her that knowledge, although she had never seen it herself. That still impressed him, that mere words—noise and air—could carry such a burden, the whole world contained in a breath.

  That was his choice. To the east, among his own People, were the words; to the west, with Harus Kum, was the bronze.

  He longed to hold the hammer again, to beat the bar of bronze on the anvil. What a power that was! Even men who chipped stone into tools had no such power; a man working stone had to strike it at exactly the right spot, or the whole flint would shatter. The form was already there in the flint, t
he man merely released it with his blows. But the bronze would be whatever he wished of it; if he but used his strength and will and mind, he could dominate it wholly.

  Around him the whole great dripping forest warmed with the coming of the sun. Birds chattered in the treetops, and he climbed a forked pine tree, split by lightning, and found a nest and ate the eggs. The pitch clung to his hands in black streaks. Crossing the stream, he knelt at the edge and tried to scrub his hands clean, but the pitch would not come off, although he ground his palms against the gritty sand of the streambed.

  He stayed there by the stream, intermittently scrubbing at his hands, and let his mind bring him what thoughts it would. His choice tormented him. He told himself that if he crossed over this stream, he would go all the way back to Karelia, but if he remained here on this bank, he would go back to Harus Kum. The forest brightened with daylight; as he sat there, hardly moving, the birds grew bolder in the trees, leaping from branch to branch and screaming at one another, and a squirrel ran down a trunk nearby him and began to hunt for food in the deep mast of the forest floor.

  The day wore on. Three times his resolution formed and he rose to walk across the stream, and three times his feet would not carry him over the water. The thought of Hems gnawed at him. If he went home, he might never see Hems again, but his friend would not forget; his friend would go on knowing Moloquin had left him behind, broken his promise and left him with Harus Kum, and Moloquin too would know it. At the end of the afternoon, Moloquin rose up, turned to the west, and walked back to Harus Kum’s stockade.

  The men were slaughtering one of the cattle; they had driven the herd down into the gorge, all the slaves together yelling and waving their arms, and there they separated a yearling from the others. Ap Min stood in the gate of the stockade, watching them drag the calf down the stream by a rope around its neck. The calf resisted, its four legs braced, its hoofs tearing up the ground; behind it Harus Kum walked, lashing it continually with his whip.

  Hems left the other men and walked over to Ap Min in the gateway. “Has he come back?”

  She shook her head. She could not bring herself to speak Moloquin’s name.

  Hems said, in a shaking voice, “He will come back.”

  He put his arm around her waist, and suddenly he laid his head on her shoulder. She turned to him, her cheek against his hair. From down the stream came a sudden high-pitched bleating of the calf.

  She sat down, Hems beside her, and comforted him. Her arm went around him, holding him fast—if Moloquin had gone, yet she still had this one. She stroked his hair, murmuring to him.

  As they sat there, his head on her shoulder, Harus Kum came up from the lower valley; there was blood all over his hands and sleeves. Ap Min rose to let him through the gate and he stopped and frowned down at her.

  “You are growing fat again, Ap Min.” He put his hand roughly on her belly. “I shall make you a potion for it, we shall have you thin soon.”

  She froze. Suddenly everything around her, the stockade, even Hems seemed far, far away, and she alone with Harus Kum. She raised her face to him,

  “No. Please.”

  “You will be no use to me if I do not cure you. Not now. You can do as you please for a while, I have to find the herbs.”

  He went off. She sank down as if her legs had lost their strength, turning her face to the wall of the stockade. Hems lifted his head to stare at her.

  “He will kill my baby,” she said. “And me too.” Then she put her face into her hands.

  Hems moved closer to her and laid his arm around her. She put her head on his shoulder and wept.

  At sundown they all went inside. Even Ap Min, who had sat in the gateway of the fence all day long, looking for Moloquin, gave up her vigil. They had built a big fire in the hearth, and were roasting fresh meat over it, and the house was full of the delicious aromas of the meat. Harus Kum carved a chunk of it for himself and sat down to eat it, but the meat would not go past his teeth; it turned to ashes on his tongue.

  He told himself he did not need Moloquin. He needed no one. Had he not stood against the king, when none other dared? And come here and lived by himself all these years, by himself, needing no one. Yet his mind turned over toward Moloquin, every step on the threshold brought his head around to see who entered, his ears strained for the voice of him who had gone. At last, furious, he rose up and went out of the house, though now it was after sundown, and went to the forge.

  The smell of cold metal greeted him. The place was dank from the rain. He lit the lamp and stirred up the coals of the fire, and as he did so, the door opened and Moloquin came in.

  Harus Kum wheeled toward him, ready to shout, to laugh, to welcome him, to chastise him, and unable to do all these things at once, he did nothing. Moloquin’s head hung a little; he gave his master a sideways look and went by him to the bellows and took the handles in his hands.

  “Is it too late to work now?”

  Harus Kum shrugged. He struggled to keep the triumph from his face. He had won something; he knew that now he had Moloquin forever. He crushed down his delight. Turning to the tools on the wall, he reached for the hammer, he reached for the tongs. He said, “Let us see what we can do with this piece of bronze.” His voice shook. Avoiding Moloquin’s gaze, fighting the smile on his lips, he bent to the task of his hands.

  This time it was different.

  They had mixed the copper and arsenic and tin together in the crucible, and poured the metal into a bar; when it cooled, they heated it up again in the forge, and began to beat it with the hammer. Harus Kum tried first, and before he had done three strokes he was shaking his head, backing away.

  “It’s too hard. It will not yield to me.”

  “Let me try,” Moloquin said.

  “It is too hard, I say. We must add more tin.”

  “Let me try it.”

  “Try it, then, fool, learn for yourself.”

  Moloquin took the hammer in his hand, and laid the bar on the anvil; he gathered himself up, and the hammer rose in his fist and struck down, and the whole forge rang with the blow. Harus Kum went to the bellows, to keep the fire hot and ready, and at the next stroke of the hammer, all his hair stood on end; he thought he could hear the metal sing in the stroke of the hammer.

  In the house, the others slept the dull sleep of beasts. In the forge, the two men contested with the bronze.

  “Is it coming?” Harus Kum cried.

  “I feel it,” Moloquin said, and he thrust the bronze into the fire.

  Harus Kum pumped air into the firebox and leaned forward to see. The bronze lay in the coals, drew the heat and glow from them, and its shimmering color paled. Still blocky and awkward, yet it was finding a shape, a broad wedge, a flaring face, and already the line was so smooth, the curve so strong that Harus Kum rejoiced to see it; he spat into the fire.

  “We shall feed you flesh soon enough,” he cried to the forge. “Go on, Moloquin, go on!”

  Moloquin lifted up the glowing metal and laid it on the anvil, and he reared back with the hammer, and with all his strength he beat on the metal. Harus Kum watched, rapt. He saw something growing on the anvil, something more than merely an axe; he saw life and beauty there.

  Yet the metal was strong, and one-minded; it would not yield easily. Even Moloquin’s strength could not tame it wholly. As it cooled and turned dull again, and the man with the hammer stood panting over it, Harus Kum rejoiced also in the rebellion of the metal.

  “Once more,” Moloquin said, although he was clearly tired. He laid the bronze in the firebed, and Harus Kum lashed the coals to a white blaze.

  He thought, This may be a masterwork, and if it is—

  The king loved nothing more than great weapons.

  Moloquin took up the bronze again and put it on the anvil, and he reached for the hammer. Harus Kum watched him closely. He saw how his p
upil gripped the hammer, his fingers flexing again and again, dissatisfied with their grasp. He saw how Moloquin collected himself and raised up the hammer, and now Harus Kum flung himself forward and caught Moloquin by the arm.

  “No! Leave off—you are too tired.”

  “I can do it,” Moloquin said.

  “Perhaps you can try, but you must not. If there is weakness in you when you form it, the axe will suffer. See—do you not see how it is?” Harus Kum took the tongs from him and moved the half-made axe over to the firebed. “There is that here we must not defile. We shall work on it again tomorrow.”

  Moloquin leaned on the anvil, his face older with fatigue. His gaze followed the axe from the anvil to the fire, from the fire to the tub of water where Harus Kum placed it. He said, “I cannot wait until tomorrow.”

  Harus Kum laughed. With a broad stroke of his arm he smacked his pupil on the shoulder. “Keep patience. Nothing good comes quickly. Let us go in and eat—there is fresh meat in plenty, and the others will be glad to know you are back.”

  At once he glanced at Moloquin, afraid, as if admitting that Moloquin had ever left would make it easier for him to do it again. The young man’s head hung. He was exhausted. His curly black hair veiled his cheeks. Harus Kum thought, He could have left, but he came back. He is mine now, mine forever. Like a king leading away captives, he got Moloquin by the arm and took him in triumph off to the house.

  In the morning, when Ap Min brought him beer, he saw again how advanced she was into her pregnancy, her belly grotesquely swollen, undesirable and ugly. Awakening as usual with an erection, he would have liked to possess her, but the old warnings of his people against coupling with a pregnant woman held him back, and he decided then to deal with this. He got up, put on his clothes, and went into the storehouse to find the pennyroyal.

  When he had the brew steeped, he took it to her, where she knelt in the back of the house, milling grain in a little stone tub with a roller of stone.

  “You should tell me these things as soon as you know,” he said. “Then it can be got rid of quickly and easily; now you will suffer some more, as you did the last time. Now get up and drink this.”