Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

She did this without seeming to notice that in doing it she set herself apart from the others. It was the chief’s duty to send the runner off. Joba saw how her daughter managed this, quietly and without calling any attention to herself, and wondered how long Shateel would remain blind to her own power. Around the sampo, when the other women asked her how her daughter did, Joba only shrugged.

  “You should come sit down around the sampo,” she said to Shateel. “You might hear things of interest to you.”

  “I cannot now,” said Shateel. “My garden is growing too quickly. I was too ambitious, I planted too much, I must work from dawn until dark, my back breaks every day.”

  They all went to the Gathering. Moloquin did not come; it was the principal subject of conversation throughout the camps, and the people of the northern villages indulged themselves in sneers and laughter at the others, called them Unwanted People, making jokes on Moloquin’s name.

  The men had all come from the Pillar of the Sky to the Gathering, and when they heard the northern villagers’ taunts, there were mutters and arguments and angry talk around all the hearthfires. The men danced every night until they dropped, and none danced longer, leapt higher, played the drums faster than the men of Shateel’s Village, who had no chief to lead them.

  Still the northern villagers made mock; that was the way of the People, when things happened they did not understand.

  The Gathering ended. The men of Shateel’s Village all came home again, to pry up another stone from the tumble by the High Hill and haul it away to Moloquin’s dead place. They grumbled about the work; they were in no hurry to do it at all, and they lay around the roundhouse yard most of the day working on their masks and taking turns in the sweat-house. Then one day a bear appeared on the village midden.

  The boys’ band saw it first, early one morning when they were coming up from the stream, and they ran at once to the village, shouting the news.

  When the women of the village heard of the danger, they gathered up their children, sat down in the longhouses, and refused to go out. They turned their eyes expectantly toward the roundhouse, toward the chief who was not there.

  Joba, with the rest of the old women, went to the roundhouse yard, and there they found the men lazing around. Shateel was with the women, but she stood in their midst, not at their head, and she said nothing.

  Joba it was who spoke. Joba advanced into the yard, glared around her, and said in a loud voice, “Now there is a bear on the midden, and no one can go out of the village, the gardens will fail, we shall all starve, and here you sit, doing nothing.”

  The men stared insolently back at her. Among them were many young men, Bear Skull novices, makers of stones, watchers of stars, and now haulers of stones; they stared insolently at the headwoman, and slowly, with elaborate carelessness, they got up, took their masks, and went out the roundhouse gate.

  They went forth, with their drums and their masks and their flutes, and the whole village gathered to see what they would do. They went out the gate in the roundhouse fence by twos, because the gate was narrow, but they remained in pairs as they walked through the village, and by the time they reached the gate in the brush fence that was nearest to the midden, they were dancing.

  Shateel went after them, in among the women. She had not yet seen the bear.

  The midden lay to the southeast of the village, outside the brush fence. Between it and the path from the village was a wide flat meadow, trampled to dust. Here the men danced, in pairs, their feet striking the earth in the rhythm of the drums; they put their masks on. With the rest of the villagers in a tight pack behind them, they advanced on the midden, shaking their arms and wagging their heads back and forth. At first no one saw the bear.

  The midden was old, and piled high with refuse. There the women daily took the sweepings of their hearths; there they cast out offal and garbage, the innards of slaughtered pigs and goats, the chaff of their grain. It lay in a hollow at the far edge of the flat grass, at the foot of a steep rise crowned with little trees. As the men danced slowly forward toward it, there seemed nothing more formidable before them than a line of saplings.

  Then from the top of the midden a great black head thrust up, and the men faltered in their dance—now, instead of going forward, they spread out sideways, forming a wide curved line of dancers before the midden. The head rose above the midden and sniffed. Its muzzle was brown. Its eyes were tiny and red, like a pig’s.

  The men shouted and kicked high in their dance, and the black head tossed. It grunted. With a lurch, the rest of the bear heaved up into view, vast and strong, and wholly unafraid.

  The women all screamed. The bear lumbered forward a few steps, tossed its head again, and let out a roar that sent the bravest of the boys’ band scuttling toward their mothers.

  The men beat furiously on their drums. All up and down the line many faltered, many would have given ground before the bear but others stepped forward. Here and there young men with gaudy masks stepped forward waving their arms, daring the bear’s attack.

  The women stayed back with the children, and had to crane their necks to see. Around Shateel they murmured to one another. “What can they do, with no chief to lead them?” A few shook their heads. “Look at them! What fools—they have no chief, no power, the bear will kill them.” Some others began to speculate on the bear’s power: if it were a demon, or just a beast from the forest.

  Shateel moved a little closer, trying to see what was happening. The bear prowled along the edge of the midden, sniffing, and then abruptly it stood up on its hind legs and roared again.

  Now nearly all the men shrank away. The rhythm of the dance fell apart, the drums stilled, most of them, and stark in the sudden quiet were the voices of those few men who still had the heart for this.

  There were several of them. They surged forward when the others fell back. They shouted taunts and insults at the bear; they leapt high in their dance, they shook their arms in furious gestures, competing with one another for ferocity, gaining strength somehow from the bear.

  Shateel saw this; she saw also that among these men one would soon stand out alone, and if this one man drove away the bear, or killed it, then he would have a claim to the roundhouse, a claim that Moloquin, far away, would have to struggle to deny.

  A claim that could only be a mortal danger to her. Dehra lay in her arms, and Joba stood beside her. She thrust the child into her mother’s grasp and moved forward, leaving the other women.

  She passed between two silenced retreating dancers, going up among the other men, the challengers. She saw herself as only one of them, a rival for the power in the bear. Now suddenly she wondered if the bear might not think she was a man, if she assumed the aspect of one.

  She pulled herself up as straight and tall as she could. She threw her chest out, and strutted, lifting up her legs in high ground-seizing strides, and she shouted in a deep harsh voice. Waving her arms over her head, she went slowly toward the bear.

  The great beast, on all fours, watched her come. Blasts of air snorted from its nostrils. Bits of the garbage of the midden clung to its glossy black fur. Shateel danced harder. She shook her arms and waggled her head from side to side, and she lifted her legs high, knees bent, and worked her face into hideous grimaces, sticking out her tongue and rolling her eyes to simulate a mask. Behind her, the drums picked up again. A flute began to pierce the air with its ringing voice.

  The bear stood up again, stretching its forelegs to offer its murderous embrace. She sprang into the air and shouted, throwing her limbs wide; coming down again, she leapt up once more, and all the drums beat furiously.

  The bear grunted. Turning, it ambled slowly away down the other side of the midden, and a moment later they saw it scale the steep rise just beyond and vanish among the trees. Shateel sank down, trembling.

  The People went running past her, scrambling over the midden, as if they
could wipe away the bear’s presence by trampling its tracks. Shateel went back into the village. Joba followed her; they came together just inside the brush fence.

  “What did I do?” Shateel asked her. “What did I do?”

  Joba gave her back her daughter. “What you meant to do, Shateel.” She went on back to the sampo, leaving Shateel behind, more unsettled now than when she had faced the bear.

  After that the whole village waited for Shateel to take her place at the sampo. Instead, she went to her garden every day and worked among the plants; she tended her child, and lived as quietly as any other woman.

  Now around the sampo the old women spoke of times when there had been no chief, when the chief had died suddenly with no boy of the proper mother old enough to follow him, that in such times the women had chosen one among them to be first. They spoke also of Rael the Bird- woman, who had the power to assume the shape of birds and trees, and who lived so quietly among her green growing things that no one noticed her, taking her instead for a blade of grass, or a thrush, and yet in every harvest was her handiwork.

  Now Joba had given Shateel the wool from one of her goats, and Shateel used a round of wood and a long stick to make a spindle, but to spin the wool she had to sit up high off the ground, so that she could keep the spindle turning with her feet. Therefore, not long after the bear had gone, she went to the roundhouse, found some of the men idling there, and told them to bring her a stump from the fields. This they did, and set it before the door of the longhouse, across the yard from the sampo. After that, all through the summer, Shateel sat up on the stump and spun the wool of the goat into yarn, and from her high vantage point she looked out over the whole village, and the others got very used to seeing her there.

  Not all the men complained about the work at Pillar of the Sky. Fergolin enjoyed it.

  With Ruak he shaped the first of the great uprights; they stood on opposite sides of the stone and smashed the edges straight and even, using a piece of rope to keep the line, and while Ruak grumbled and cursed Moloquin under his breath, Fergolin watched the stone give way to his strength and knew what Moloquin had said was true: if they had faith in the stone, they would become its master.

  As he worked, bit by bit he found the craft. He had made tools all his life, but this was different: not merely the hardness of the stone, but the size and the result all made this something other than his tool-making skill. But it was an easy thing to learn: all it took was strength and resolution. They bashed and crushed the long edge of the stone until a hollow appeared in the surface, then they worked the hollow across the width of the stone and turned at the far edge and went back the other way. Between each hollow a ridge formed; these they wore off quickly, striking from both sides.

  Inside the embankment, Moloquin and another bank of men were digging the first hole. They cleared away the grass and the topsoil, reached the chalk layer beneath, and with antler picks they pried up chunks of the chalk. Moloquin came with his rope and measured the stone Ruak and Fergolin were working, went to the next longest stone, which lay nearby in the grass, rude as a wild beast’s tooth compared to the shape slowly emerging from the stone between Ruak and Fergolin, and measured that one, and then he went back to his place just outside the bank where he had cleared away the grass and he drew in the dust with his finger.

  Ruak said, “He is mad. Where did he come from? Why did you choose him to be your chief?”

  Fergolin straightened, his back sore. His hands throbbed from the many small collisions with the stone. Turning, he sought out Moloquin with his eyes.

  “The women chose him. We had fallen into terrible times, we needed someone with great power.”

  “What power does he have? All he does is sit in the dirt!”

  Fergolin smiled at him, and Ruak with an oath stooped down for his maul and attacked the stone again, furiously, as if he did it for his own sake and not Moloquin’s.

  When the sides of the stone were smoothly shaped, Moloquin came to them, and measured out the stone again with his rope. He laid his hand on one end and said, “This is the top of it. On the top, here, make a knob.”

  Ruak grunted at him, gave a shake of his head, and said, “What?”

  Moloquin stroked his hand over the top of the stone. With the rope he made two or three brisk measurements. “Here,” he said. “Knock off the top part on either side, make a knob in the middle, as you might do if you were making a roundhouse post.”

  “Why?” said Ruak. The other men drifted closer to hear.

  Moloquin said calmly, “Because I mean to lift a beam onto the top of it, and the knob will hold it steady.”

  Ruak and the other men crowded tight around him. “What are you going to do?”

  Moloquin said again, “When the uprights are in place, we will put a beam across the top. Therefore—”

  The rest of his explanation was lost in the shouting and arguments of the other men. Fergolin stepped aside from the others; he went slowly to the gap in the embankment and looked in.

  The place was clean and empty. Without the old ring of stones it looked somehow wilder, more pure and more holy. He tried to see Moloquin’s stones in place here and could not. But his back tingled. In his mind he could see the thing, two stone uprights, a stone beam across them, and he knew how high it would stand by the throbs and pains and soreness in his back and hands—by the work he had done on the upright. When he imagined it all the hair tingled up on the back of his neck. He went slowly away to where Moloquin stood in the center of the crowd, with Ruak shouting into his face.

  Ruak was saying, “It is impossible. Impossible! We cannot lift one of these stones high enough from the ground to slip a finger underneath.”

  “If we cannot do this first one,” Moloquin said, “we will stop utterly. If I fail now I will not try again.”

  That silenced Ruak. Moloquin looked around him, at the men staring at him, their faces long with disbelief and dislike. His curly black hair and beard wreathed his head. He wore only his loincloth. Years of hard work had sleeked his body smooth and hard. His face was impassive as the stones; only the glint in his eyes revealed the passion in his soul.

  He said, “If I cannot do what I intend, then you can go home, I will trouble you no more. But you must give me all you have. I warn you, if you shirk, there are such powers gathered here that will canker up your heart and eat your mind, and tear the whole of the People apart.” He looked around him, staring into their faces. “Now we must begin. Ruak, do as I bade you, make the knob.”

  Ruak ground his teeth together; he flung a fiery look at Moloquin. A twist of cloth around his forehead kept his long grey hair in place, and now in a sudden fierce notion he tore it off, untied it, wrapped it tight again around his brow, and fastened it. With the same energy he seized his maul and set upon the stone, and Fergolin went up to help him.

  “Here and here.” Ruak’s hand stroked quickly over the butt end of the stone. Side by side, the men began to smash down the surface.

  On a cold rainy day they set about raising the first stone. With ropes and rollers they hauled the stone in through the gap in the embankment; while they were grunting and straining, the word got down to the New Village that they were putting up the stone, and the women and children drifted up to watch. By the time they hauled the foot of the stone up over its hole, the bank was crowded with the curious.

  Moloquin jumped down into the hole, and with his rope he measured everything. The other men stood around with their hands on their hips. Fergolin had never seen a stone raised and was impatient to begin, but the other men sat down or sprawled on the stone and groaned loudly of their fatigue.

  “Up. Up.” Moloquin burst out of the hole and strode around the stone, driving the men to their work, and they scattered before him like chaff before a gust of wind. He sent half of them to fetch the logs stacked in the lee of the embankment and gave the other hal
f rope and showed them how to loop the rope around the stone, to hold it fast.

  The stone was going nowhere. Fergolin had raised the uprights of roundhouses, and thought that hard work; now he strove with all his strength and all the strength of a mass of other men and they could not budge the stone. Moloquin jumped down into the hole again.

  Ruak said, under his breath, “Push it in on top of him,” and the men near enough to hear all laughed and pretended to heave at the stone.

  Moloquin called out for help. Fergolin and some few others went cautiously forward. Moloquin stood in the hole, looking up past them. He said, “Bring some picks and shovels. Quick!”

  From the embankment came some of the women, who had been working in their gardens and had brought their tools with them here. Fergolin got a pick and took a shovel and went back to the hole.

  Moloquin seized the pick. Still standing in the hole, under the butt end of the stone, he began to attack the wall of the hole under the stone, wedging the tip of the antler pick into the chalk, and heaving and wrenching at it until a great block of the chalk fell out. He stepped aside, gesturing to Fergolin to get in beside him and shovel the chalk out.

  Fergolin climbed down into the hole and busied himself a few moments shoveling out the debris before he straightened and turned to look at the stone.

  When he did, his heart contracted. The stone seemed poised above him. When it came down into this hole it would fill the whole space; it would crush all that lay beneath it. Now, with Moloquin, he was digging out the ground under it, to make it fall. He nearly leapt up out of the pit. His hands trembled. Bending his back, he forced his attention down to the ground and worked, but his back knew the stone was there; his back itched and crawled with expectation of the fall.

  Moloquin hacked and wrenched at the hole, filling it up with rubble which Fergolin shoveled away; at last they had dug out almost the whole side of the hole under the stone. Moloquin struck Fergolin’s shoulder. “Go up,” he said, and Fergolin flew out of the hole, lightly as a little bird. Moloquin climbed out the other side.