Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  “Yet it is their way. Our way. It is a woman’s pride, to make splendid baskets for the harvest, and they will not give it up.”

  He frowned at her. Bahedyr came up to him and went down on one knee beside him, and before Moloquin spoke again to Shateel he turned to Bahedyr and said, “We shall need all the new rope—bring it out of the roundhouse. Get the younger men to help you. See they keep it in coils.”

  “Yes, Moloquin.” Bahedyr went swiftly off.

  Her husband turned to Shateel again. “Then let them keep their baskets—only, when they bring you the harvest, have your own baskets, each the same as the others, and empty theirs into yours.”

  “They will not like that either.”

  “They like nothing I do, it seems to me. Do it in the roundhouse, where none can see.”

  “Am I to deceive them? This is troublesome to me.”

  “They will never know, if you do it in secret.”

  “They will know, and almost at once.”

  He smiled at her. “All the better.”

  In the smile was something she disliked, something sly and ugly. Something, she thought, much like Ladon.

  She rose, shaking out her skirts. “I must go back to My People.”

  “Come here,” he said.

  He took her into the roundhouse. In the dim space under the rafters, as they walked toward the shaft of light at the center, he said, “I shall come to your village at midwinter, and let them come to me then with all their complaints and I shall thresh them all out.”

  “What of your work here?” she said, because she had marked how loath he was to go even as far as the New Village from the Pillar of the Sky.

  “I have told Ruak that if we cannot raise the stones as I want them, then I shall give up the whole enterprise. By this fall I shall be the fool of the People, or I shall need more stones.”

  They went into the center of the roundhouse where there was a pile of furs, where his axe hung on the tree North Star, where other emblems of his power marked the place as his even if he was so seldom there. He pulled the fur back and pulled out a basket, and beckoning to Shateel to stoop beside him as he lifted the lid on the basket.

  “Ah!”

  Before her in the basket lay a heap of glowing red-yellow objects. She stretched forth her hand to touch the smooth cold surfaces. Moloquin took hold of her forearm; he chose a wristlet from the mass of ornaments and slipped it over her hand.

  “Let this be a token,” he said, “of my power and yours. I will be there at midwinter.”

  He put the lid back on the basket, pulled the furs over everything and rose. Without waiting for her, he went out of the roundhouse, and she could hear him calling to the men outside, bringing them together to go to the Pillar of the Sky. She did not move. Long she remained there, the wristlet heavy on her arm, her thoughts churning; at last she lifted the wristlet to her face and pressed the cold metal to her cheek.

  The stone that Moloquin intended to raise up onto the top of the first gateway was roughly shaped. Ruak soaked wood shavings and small twigs in pig fat, and laid the stinking mess in a line along the side of the stone, and set it on fire.

  At the whoosh of the flames all the men stepped back, their arms raised over their faces. Moloquin paced up and down, watching. He had never seen this done; he chafed at his ignorance, at his dependence on Ruak. The Salmon Leap master watched the flames calmly from the side. Behind him he had lined up several of the boys, each with a jug of cold water, and as the flames began to die down, he urged them forward with sweeps of his arms and they dashed the cold water onto the rock.

  Nothing happened. They pushed aside the slop from the fire, the soaked char and floating ash, and the men pounded with their stone mauls along the line the fire had drawn on the rock. As usual the tools made almost no impression on the stone. Moloquin walked up and down, up and down.

  In the middle of the day, Ruak again piled his fat-soaked tinder onto the line where he wished the stone to break, and again he set it on fire. The fat popped and snapped as it burned, and a thick black smoke climbed a little into the sky and was blown off in a ragged streamer toward the east. The boys with their jugs rushed forward and dashed the cold water onto the fire, and again there was no result that Moloquin could see.

  He could not bear to watch the long, slow, fruitless labor. He walked away from the work, away toward the North Watcher; the air smelled rankly of the smoke. In the grass before him lay a tangle of bones. His mind turned to Shateel, and what he had told her, the night before, as they lay together beneath the stone—he would have told that to no one else. He wondered at himself, that he had told it even to her.

  He could not have spoken so to Wahela. If he showed any weakness to Wahela she would despise him, and the whole village would know of it—if not from her lips, from her attitudes. He knew that Shateel would tell no one.

  Yet he was relieved that she was gone. He had shown his soul to her and he was afraid now if he looked into her eyes he would see himself mirrored there. He would see the truth about himself in Shateel’s eyes, and so he was glad she had gone away.

  Behind him, now, the fire sprang up with its thousand tongues, its roaring voice, and he turned and walked back that way. The boys ran forward with their jugs and poured the water down the line of the rock, and the smoke rolled up in a thick rank plume, and the stone cracked.

  The sound raised the hairs on the back of his neck. Like a stick breaking, the stone split and popped all its length, and the men shouted and whooped. Moloquin went closer; with Ruak he bent over the stone and pushed away the debris of the fire, stinking and oily, and the two men bent together over the stone saw the long crack in it, the fresh rock below gleaming in a dozen colors, new to the sun and the air as a new baby. They raised their heads and smiled at each other.

  Ruak bawled to his men and they jumped forward with their mauls to begin the work of shaping the beam. The Salmon Leap master backed away, his hands on his hips, smiling. He looked up at Moloquin beside him.

  “You thought it would not work.”

  Moloquin shrugged. “You proved me wrong again, Ruak-on.”

  Ruak said, “Let you prove me wrong when we go to lift it up, Moloquin-on.”

  Moloquin looked quickly at him, surprised; he had thought Ruak wanted him to fail, so that they could all go home. The Salmon Leap master, squat and square as a trimmed stone, stood watching his novices pound away at the beam. His hands and arms and face were streaked with oily black. Moloquin went to fetch his measuring rope.

  For many days they worked the stone into shape, pounding away the edges and beating hollows into it to fit the knobs on top of the uprights. Those who did not work the stone made rope and cut logs. The summer sun rose hot and dry and beat on them as they beat on the stone. By midday the men who had begun the work at dawn were too exhausted to continue; they went to the bank and sat in the shade, and ate the food the women had brought from the New Village.

  Fergolin sat there in the grass; his eyes stung with sweat and stone dust, and he had broken a finger which swelled up and turned black and hurt him every time he moved. Lying in the grass, looking up at the two stones they had already raised, he was certain that they would never achieve what Moloquin wanted. To his fatigued mind the whole idea seemed ridiculous—to float stones in the air! He shut his aching eyes.

  With his vision sealed off, he found the small sounds around him grew larger and more precise. The ceaseless pounding of the stone mauls on the beam faded to a background; nearer he heard the sighs and groans of the men who rested in the shade of the bank, and he heard their jaws champing at their food, and the slosh of the broth in the pots. He heard a woman laugh, just beyond the bank, and he heard also a child’s little tuneless song.

  “A-stone-a, a-stone-a-a-a-a—”

  Fergolin looked around him; it was Twig, Wahela’s son, who climbed
on the bank and sang his little song. The boy walked along the top of the bank, lost his footing and rolled down the grassy slope, in among the men.

  They laughed; in spite of their exhaustion, they scooped him up and tossed him about, and the boy shrieked with pleasure and when he was let go he tumbled by himself in the grass, rolling over and over. Fergolin rose and caught him up and kissed him.

  “What do you do, little boy?”

  “Measuring the stones!” Twig bounced down from Fergolin’s arms and darted away toward the nearer of the outlying stones, standing inside its own little ditch in the curve of the embankment.

  Fergolin strolled after the child. His thoughts leapt up lively again. At the Turnings-of-the-Year, where he had watched the stars, seen the sun and the moon rise, and shaped all this into his memory, the idea had come to him that probably the stones at the Pillar of the Sky were star-pointers also. Moloquin had thrown down the circle of stones but he had left standing the old four that stood at the sides of the space. Fergolin went to the nearest, the one that Twig was playing by, and leaned against it, and looked toward the horizon.

  These two stones were a pair, certainly: when he stood here on the mound, and looked across the top of the second stone to the west, his line of sight passed neatly through a gap in the bank, framing a section of the horizon. He smiled to himself, pleased; he had a sense of recovering something.

  What was it? The child gamboled around him, singing his child’s song.

  “A-stone-a, a-stone-a-a-a-a-a—”

  Fergolin walked on down to the other of this pair of stones, turned and looked back. Raised up on its mound, the stone where he had just been cleared the top of the embankment and laid its point against the sky.

  He knew he would see nothing if he looked today. Surely the stones were meant to be used at some particular day, probably midsummer and midwinter. Brant had known all this.

  Brant knew it. The stones knew it also.

  As he stood there, thinking of this, a strange excitement came to him. There was knowledge locked in the stones, and if he found the way to free it—

  Long-striding, he crossed the broad grassy circle to the far side, where the second pair of stones stood. Here it was the western stone that stood on a mound, a ditch around it, and he stood with his back to the stone and looked across the eastern stone, and to his deep delight he saw that the top of the eastern stone now lay exactly within a notch in the distant hills.

  What star rose there? What light-beacon shone there, on some certain day, that would throw its beams of light through the notch in the hills, across the eastern stone, and strike the eye of him who stood in this place? A hand tugged at his shirt.

  Twig stood there beside him. “Opa, what are you doing?”

  “I am—” Fergolin stooped and picked the boy up. “I am with my ancestors, child. And with my sons’ sons’ sons.” He kissed the boy on the forehead.

  “What do you mean?”

  Fergolin shook his head. There was no sense in speaking much to a tiny boy. The pleasure he took in his discovery was something he could not communicate. He felt himself suddenly sliding into place, a part of the universe; everything fit, everything mattered. He sauntered off around the circle again.

  Just inside the bank the ground was clogged with chunks of chalk; the grass grew unevenly over it and in places would not grow at all, and as he walked he realized that there were such chalk marks, evenly spaced, all around the whole circle. Had Brant known also what these chalk studs knew? He came to the North Watcher, at the mouth of the gap in the bank. It was tipped over to one side; under it was a deep hollow, like a cave. He had seen Moloquin here, any number of times, sleeping here, or just sitting in the hollow.

  What did Moloquin know? Could he read the stones?

  Fergolin thought not: Moloquin had no men’s lore. As he stood there, the strangeness and wonder of that came to him for the first time. Here was a chief of the People, and a great one, master of several villages, who neither danced nor made a mask, and who had no lore, and yet was bringing the People to this place to raise up something no one had ever heard of before: a stone roundhouse.

  That was what it was that Moloquin was building here: a stone roundhouse, a dwelling of spirits. Fergolin stroked his hands together, excited. His body jumped with new energy. Quickly he went back to the stone, to begin his work again.

  When the stone beam was shaped, they pried the end up and forced the rollers underneath it and shoved it up through the bank to the foot of the two upright stones. Now the impossible task began.

  They did with this beam as they had with so many others; they levered up one end, shoved logs under, and levered up the other, and shoved logs under that one. Half the men grunted and groaned at the levers, and the other half ran in with the logs and thrust them into place. With the weight of the stone on them, the logs sank down into the soft earth, so the stone rose hardly at all.

  They forced the levers under the end again and strained and heaved to pry it up, and forced more logs beneath.

  When they tried to lift the other end, a log rolled suddenly, and another splintered and cracked; the beam slid sideways. The men scattered back away from it, afraid of the weight, and Ruak and Moloquin together, shouting and furious, had to drive them back to the work with threats. But when they struggled the stone up enough to jam another log in, more wood crunched, and the stone tipped sideways.

  Moloquin backed away, squatted on his heels and stared at the stone. In a knot the workmen gathered to murmur in low voices that the end of their labors was near.

  Ruak paced up and down, his hands on his hips. “Well? What shall we do now?”

  Moloquin stood up. “Get the boys here. Where are they?”

  The boys’ band was lingering outside the embankment, playing games and watching the men. They came into the circle, wiggling and shy, and stood before Moloquin.

  “Go to the village,” he said, “and fetch all the baskets you can find, and fill them with dirt and stones, and bring them here.”

  “My mother will give me no baskets,” said the leader of the boys’ band, Grela’s son Sickle.

  “I said nothing about asking her,” said Moloquin. “Go and steal them, if she will not give them up. Now go!”

  They raced away, streaming away through the gaps in the embankment; Twig scuttled after them on his round legs. Ruak grinned at Moloquin.

  “The women will turn their tongues on you, Opa-Moloquin.”

  He shrugged. “Then I shall tell them that they must make more baskets.”

  They went back to the stone lying on its heap of crushed wood, and all the rest of the day they spent dragging out the ruined wood and letting the stone back down again to the earth. In the evening, the boys came back, burdened down with baskets full of dirt and rocks; and that night, even the boys of the boys’ band slept in the roundhouse beside the Pillar of the Sky.

  In the morning they began again. They levered up one end of the stone, and thrust oaken logs under it, and raised the other, and shoved the logs under. Now Moloquin got coils of rope, and they lashed the stone to the logs, to make a cradle for it.

  “Now, raise it all up,” he said, and he brought the boys forward, each with his basket, and made them ready, and when the men heaved at the poles, and the stone crept monstrously into the air, he shouted the boys forward with their baskets.

  The stone hung there, inches above the earth, the men on the levers crying out with their effort. Moloquin’s voice rang forth with a wild urgency. On his hands and knees, he thrust the baskets of earth under the stone. The boys understood; without his orders they hurried to imitate him, and they packed the space under the stone with earth, so that when the men on the levers let down the giant, it rested not on the wood but on the earth itself.

  The baskets gave way, but the dirt and rocks did not; they packed down a little, but th
ey held the stone up, like a child in the lap of its mother, and when they saw that this would work, all the men cheered until the sky boomed.

  Now the baskets were used up. Moloquin gathered the boys around him.

  “You must bring me more baskets.”

  “Opa-Moloquin-on,” said Sickle, “if I take more of my mother’s baskets, she will cast stones at me and there will be none to gather up the harvest.”

  Moloquin was still. He saw that what the boy said was true, and yet the thing had worked; he had to strive to keep himself from declaring that the harvest did not matter.

  He fastened his gaze on Sickle. “Then bring me earth and rocks. I don’t care how you bring it, but I must have earth and rocks here, as quickly as you can.”

  The boy gathered in his breath, and his feelings walked across his face, doubt and wonder, indecision and resolution, his face like a sky over which the clouds blew.

  “I will,” he said. He yelled to the band, and they ran after him through the gap in the embankment.

  Moloquin went back to the stone; the men were standing there, watching him. They could do nothing more with the beam. He set them all to digging more holes, and all the earth he collected carefully in piles.

  In the morning the boys came back. They had made slings of cloth and sticks, and they hauled earth in them; they brought earth in sacks made of their clothes, and they had more baskets full of earth and stones, and the little boys carried stones in their arms. While the men heaved the stone up off the ground, the boys rammed the earth under it, using shovels and antler sweeps. Moloquin knelt beside him, his face as dirty as theirs, and thrust his arms under the stone, deep under the weight of the stone, packing the earth in. The little boys crawled beneath the stone to obey him, and the stone wobbled over their heads as the men groaned and cried at the levers. But when they let down the stone, it was a little higher than before, lying safe on its cradle of earth.