Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  He turned to Shateel. “I shall need much of your harvest to feed the people at the Pillar of the Sky.”

  “There is enough,” she said.

  “I want you to tell me exactly how much there is,” he said. “I want you to take a long stick, and for each basket of grain, cut a notch in the stick. Make sure all the baskets are the same size. When you have numbered all the grain, number the beans and the vegetables in the same way. Then hang the sticks on the rafter of the roundhouse, and we shall see how much there will be left over, when all the people here have what they need to eat through the winter.”

  “I will do it,” she said. “They will not like it.”

  “I do not care if they like it.” He moved closer to her, he put his arm around her, and there in the full sight of all the men he kissed her. This too was against the old ways; but he meant to overturn the old ways. “Come inside,” he said. “I want a child of you.”

  She laughed. “Moloquin. Do you expect us all to work as hard as you do?” But she got up and went into the roundhouse ahead of him.

  That winter, with the harvests in, all the men of the three villages went up with Moloquin at their head to the High Hill, and they chose another stone from the stones collected there. They slid rollers under it and pushed it away to the river, floated it down the river, and hauled it over the plain to the Pillar of the Sky.

  After that, they went back up to the High Hill and brought another stone down. When the bad weather struck them, Moloquin would not let them stop. The stone crept along, but Moloquin seemed to fly; he was everywhere, shouting and nagging the men with the ropes, urging on the men who pushed at the back of the stone, bullying the boys who moved the rollers. The rain lashed them; the snow fell on them, so that their hands froze and the ends of their fingers split open against the stone and bled into the muck, but Moloquin was always at their backs, always driving them on.

  At night they made campfires and huddled shivering around them, and Moloquin himself passed out the food. There was always plenty to eat, and he himself did not eat until the littlest boy had gotten his fill—this they noticed, grudgingly, and grudgingly admired, along with his strength and his will and his tirelessness. When his back was turned, they cursed him under their breath and day-dreamed of killing him.

  In the midwinter, the bad weather broke for a while. The second stone was just arriving at the Pillar of the Sky; the sudden warmth and sunshine filled them all with new life, and that night, after they had eaten, all the men gathered together inside the embankment and danced.

  There were no dances connected with the Pillar of the Sky; most of the People, dreading the place, had never spent more than a few moments there, leaving the bodies of their dead. Now the site had become a sort of home to them, a place of joy, since reaching it meant they could stop working. They formed rings in the middle and danced as their feet took them, and that seemed right enough: a new dance for a new People.

  Moloquin went up to watch them. The drumbeat floated to him on the soft thawing wind. They had lit fires along the top of the embankment and their bodies moved like shadows through the orange light. He and the men of the New Village had pulled up the old stones in the first winter of his rule, and these stones were thrown carelessly around at the southern end of the place; he climbed up on top of them and stood watching the men dance in the Pillar of the Sky.

  He wanted to stop them. Always before, this had been his place. Their dread of it had been his protection; he had felt safe here. Now, too late, he saw that what he had begun here would change everything for him too.

  He sat down on the stone, thinking of Karelia, and a sudden longing swept over him. The old woman had known everything. She had had a story for everything. Now he looked into the future and saw only a grey blank. She would have given him a story to put there, something to move into.

  He thought of his mother Ael, and tore his mind away. He hated Ael. He never thought of her any more.

  That left him lonely. In the dark, alone, he watched his People dancing in the only home he had and knew he had lost something, somehow, that he had never imagined could be separated from him.

  “Moloquin.”

  He turned toward the voice. She stood there, behind him in the shadows, the warm wind billowing out her skirts. She held out a hand to him. “Moloquin,” she called.

  He stood; he cast one last look toward the Pillar of the Sky, and turned and went into the darkness with Wahela.

  Now he set about laying out the circles on which he would raise the stones, and now for the first time he realized that within his design there were demons waiting to trap him.

  He had not given thought to it before. When Brant made the rope and laid out the circles for the roundhouse, he had not asked how Brant knew that the rope must be a certain length, but he saw now that he would have to know even before he cut the rope how his stones would stand, how far apart, and therefore, how long the stone beams of the gateways would be.

  The other men were there, waiting to work, or doing work: the Salmon Leap Society, which knew much stone-lore, was beginning to shape the stones they had brought down. Moloquin, with the demons in his mind, went to watch.

  These stones were hard. He had seen flint worked, and that was easy: a blow struck in the right place knocked off exactly the size and shape of chip that the master wanted, and shrewd hands could fashion a rough core into a tool in a matter of a few blows. Harus Kum himself had taught Moloquin much stone-lore, but from another way of thinking; he had crushed stones in the mines, and he had seen some that went to dust at a mere touch, and some that resisted, but none that ignored the hand of man as these stones did.

  The Salmon Leap master, Ruak, led his society at the work. He used a maul made of stone, and with all his strength he bashed at the edge of one of the building-stones, and nothing happened. He slugged at the stone with all his strength, until at last a little trickle of dust blew away, and then the others could see that what Ruak did had some effect, but the effect was very small.

  Now Moloquin went up, and he took the maul from Ruak and began to smash at the stone with it—Ruak, with swift gestures, showed him where to hit. The maul was heavy, taking all his power to lift, and he drove it at the building-stone with his whole might. At first he seemed to do nothing, but then gradually he saw that his work was wearing the great stone smooth and straight along its edge.

  At that he let out a roar. He flung down the maul, whirled, and raised his fist to the others, sharing his triumph with them; but all he had from them were puzzled looks. Disgusted, he turned to Ruak.

  “Keep at the work. It can be done, if we but keep faith with the stone.”

  “Keep faith with the stone,” Ruak said, disbelieving. “How can you speak of it that way—the stone refuses, it will not obey—what faith are we to have in it?”

  “This,” said Moloquin. “You may have this faith: that if we are men enough, the stone will yield to us, and then we shall have been masters of something worth mastering. Now—go finish what we have begun, because if we leave off, there will be such a hole in the world here that all the demons ever hatched will come rushing in and devour all of us.”

  Ruak gave him a white look of suspicion, but he went to the men and gathered them together and spoke with them, and when Moloquin walked back into the embankment to study his problem of the circles, he could hear the men bashing at the stone again with their mauls.

  He sat on his haunches and looked at the Pillar of the Sky. With the failed circle of stones now taken away, it was smooth and pure as a virgin; the only stones that remained were the four ancient uprights, the Watchers, where Brant had been used to observe the setting and rising of the midwinter sun and the midsummer sun, the stones at the major entrance through the bank, at the northwestern end, and the misshapen corrupted stone some paces beyond, which from the center of the circle pointed toward the midsummer sunris
e. The circle was so clean it seemed almost wicked to put anything on it. He tried to imagine his gateways standing on it, but the wholeness of it resisted him; his mind could not see it complete.

  He went outside the embankment and cleared away a space in the dust, and with his forefinger traced his circles in the dust. At first he could not find a way into it, but he realized right away that he could see it best from above it, and drew two rings in the dust, and saw everything. The size of the circle depended upon the length of the beams; if he chose beams of a certain length, the circle would have to be exactly as long as all the beams laid end to end, or they would not fit.

  The shorter the beam, also, the easier it would be to lift it to its place on top of the gate. He went to where the great stones lay waiting in the grass, and he took his rope and measured their width, each stone, where each was narrowest. Clearly if they were all to look the same, none could be wider than the narrowest of them, and the work of the stonesmiths would wear off more of their width. To find the space between, he measured his own shoulders. The width of this beam he marked with a piece of chalk on the shortest of the stones in the grass.

  Then he stretched his rope from the North Watcher to the South Watcher, and marked its place, and marked the line also from the East to the West Watcher, and where these two lines crossed was the center of the circle. With the rope and the stakes he found the perpendicular through the center and marked that with stones.

  Now he took the rope and he measured the beam ten times, since he could keep track of that on his fingers. Even without experiment he could see that that length would make too small a circle, and he measured the beam ten more times and called the other men in.

  They came gladly from their labor. They were coated with dust and sweat, and their hands were bashed bloody; as soon as they came inside the bank they dropped down on their backsides on the ground. Moloquin counted twenty of them and made these get up again, and he tied the rope together into a circle and made the men hold it out in a ring.

  Ruak sat on the grass with the others, and when he saw how small the ring of men was, he turned to the fellow next to him and said, “At least he does not mean to rival Turnings-of-the-Year.”

  Moloquin swung toward him; Ruak and the others had no notion yet that he intended to raise a beam of stone across the tops of the uprights. He said, “Then come and we shall make it bigger. Ten more.”

  He widened the circle by ten more men. Ruak sneered at him. “Turnings-of-the-Year is bigger yet than this.”

  “I am a humble man,” said Moloquin. He marked the ring with stones and gathered in his rope again. “I shall be content with this.”

  Ruak was obviously enjoying his condescension. “I shall not complain any more, since I see I am asked to do nothing that other men have not done before me.” He strutted back toward the bank, and the other men trailed after him, their spirits uplifted. Moloquin took his rope and laid out another circle, halfway between the first one and the center.

  That done, he went back outside the embankment, to the place where he had drawn his rings on the ground, and he squatted down and stared at the image for a while. Finally he set in the other marks of the Pillar of the Sky: the four Watchers, the two entry stones, and the stone beyond that.

  Now the design began to satisfy him; it seemed complete, somehow, full. As he watched it, however, a discontent with it arose in his mind, because to see it his eyes had to move constantly, from one place to another; there did not seem to be a one-ness to it, a single looking at it. The two rings in the center seemed unrelated, and he began to draw the smaller one again, shrinking and expanding it, and moving the center up and down the line of the midsummer sunrise. In his mind he saw the two rings of uprights, connected at the top by the smooth circle of the beams. He had always intended to make the inner ring higher than the outer, climbing up toward Heaven, and now suddenly it occurred to him to make the inner ring not a ring at all, but a circle of five free-standing gateways. As soon as he saw that in his mind, his hand went out and opened up the end of the inner ring that faced the midsummer sunrise, accepting in the flood of light, and at once the design filled him with a profound delight, everything seemed part of one order, steadily more intense from the bank inward to the central space, with its smooth curve, and its arms open to the rising sun.

  As he squatted there, looking down at the sketch in the dirt, the power of the place worked on him again. Again he saw before him the finished building. The smooth lines, the hugeness of the stones, the difficulty of doing it, and above all the flow of the light of the sunrise through it delighted him like the ecstasy of sex. For a while, contemplating the Pillar of the Sky, he saw everything whole; he understood all things.

  Nearby, not within his sight but within his hearing, the men of Shateel’s People were hammering away at the stones. Whatever Ruak had said, they complained and cursed as they worked, and their curses were aimed at Moloquin; they called for demons to eat his flesh, and for the rot and ruin of his whole kindred, and for the extinction of his People, and he heard all this and cared nothing for it. With his fingertip he traced again the shapes in the dust. Before him in the dirt lay the key to Heaven, and Moloquin wanted nothing more.

  When Shateel came back to live in her mother’s village, everyone waited to see what she meant to do, now that she was Moloquin’s wife.

  With the death of Rulon, the village had no chief. Moloquin claimed to be their chief but he was far away and showed no interest in them. Yet because of his claim there would be some obvious risk in naming another chief, and anyway there was no man of that family old enough, with Rulon dead, to take his place. Therefore some people were glad that Shateel came back to live with them, with her daughter, without her husband.

  Joba was not pleased. She was headwoman of her kindred, and when she spoke around the sampo, the others listened to her with respect. Now that Shateel would sit among them, Joba knew her daughter would challenge her, as she had always challenged her.

  So she waited with the other women around the sampo for Shateel to come among them and for Shateel to speak forth and expect to be heeded because she was Moloquin’s wife.

  Shateel did not come. For the first few months she lived again among the People she had grown up with, she did nothing at all to claim any rank or authority. She made a hearth in the longhouse, close by Joba’s, giving a fine basket and a blanket to another woman to secure the place. She went out to the fallow ground lying at the edge of the village and she dug up the ground to make a garden.

  She had no seed, Joba knew, and waited for her daughter to come and ask her for seed. But Shateel did not. Shateel seemed not to know her mother was there, although she had given a fine basket and a good blanket to be nearby her hearth, and instead when a runner went off to the Pillar of the Sky, to Moloquin, she gave him a message for her husband, and when he came back he had a pouch full of seed for her.

  Now Shateel came to her mother’s hearth, with Dehra in her arms. She came in through the opening in the front of the wall of stones that separated Joba’s home from the rest, and knelt down there, right in front of the hearthplace, and she put out before her a round basket and a jug of glazed clay with two spouts and a cured deerskin, and finally she put down a little flat wooden bowl, and on it a handful of seed. Then with bowed head she sat there and waited for her gifts to be accepted or rejected.

  Joba sat where she was, saying nothing. The whole of her daughter’s deed charmed her; she recognized it as an admission that Shateel knew she had been wrong before in her relations with her mother, and for a long while Joba could not bring herself to speak, her feelings brimmed so near to overflow. Then Shateel raised her head, and the two women leaned together and embraced.

  Joba’s tongue was now freed from restraint, and she said at once, “How do you mean to live here?”

  “As I am doing,” Shateel said. She held the baby on her lap; the child wok
e, mewled loudly, and Joba’s daughter opened her clothes and gave the baby the breast. Now Joba’s breast also seemed to draw with milk. Shateel stroked the baby’s cheek. She lifted her gaze again to her mother’s.

  “You do not understand,” she said to Joba. “When I left the Gathering to follow Moloquin, he took us away to a place where there was nothing at all, no village, no older people, no hearth—nothing but the forest and the earth, and we began from nothing, and for a long while we had nothing. To live here, to be among so many other people, to have so much—I am very content just to be here again, and to know what I have here. I want nothing else.”

  Joba said, “What does Moloquin wish of you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Shateel. “His mind is like a wild bird, it touches the common earth only now and then, and very lightly. I do not know what Moloquin wishes of any of us.”

  Joba stroked her chin. She saw that Shateel held Moloquin in some awe. She herself saw him more clearly, she thought.

  She said, “He has little regard for our ways. Yet before Rulon, he spoke in a voice that moved me. I cannot believe he means us to be doing as we wish.”

  “Then he shall have to come here himself,” Shateel said. “I do not mean to do anything other than what I am doing now.”

  Joba smiled at her. “Then why did you marry him?”

  Shateel opened her mouth but no reply came out, and slowly she flushed. She lowered her eyes and said nothing. Joba did not press her. They spoke of other things, especially the baby, who resembled Joba slightly.

  With the men gone off to haul stones to the Pillar of the Sky the village was peaceful. The old Bear Skull master who kept the village’s year brought the news from Turnings-of-the-Year that the sun was coming to her midsummer ascendency, and the women made ready for the Gathering. Shateel sent a runner to the other villages, to the north and to the south, that the Gathering would soon begin.