Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  But then the women came.

  Grela led them. All her fat quaked when she walked. Her face was dark with bad temper, and when she saw Moloquin she marched straight up to him, and she said, “You have set the boys to stealing our baskets.”

  He said, “I need them. You see my work here.”

  She swatted the air with her arm. “I see nothing here but dirt and stones! I need my baskets for the harvest and for my daily work.”

  “Then make new ones. And make me new ones too.”

  “They stole cloth also.”

  “Make new cloth,” he said.

  She glowered around her; she glowered at him and at the stone. “You will never raise it up,” she said. “It belongs in the earth and there it will stay.”

  “It is on the earth still,” he said. “The earth itself helps me lift it.”

  “Pagh! Fool!”

  He said, “You did not call me a fool when I put food into your mouth, Ana-Grela-el.”

  Her face slackened; she wore her outrage like a mask, while behind it her feelings moved. At last, she said, “You have done what you have done.”

  “Yes.”

  She looked away; when her face was revealed to him again, all her rage was wiped away. She said, “I shall do as you wish.” Ponderous as a stone, she walked away across the circle; she hardly glanced at the men’s work, but passed through the gap in the embankment and was gone, and the other women followed after.

  All but Wahela. Her hips swaying, she walked across the embankment to Moloquin. “Well, you have stirred up the women now; if you think you have trouble with the stones, you shall have real trouble now.”

  Moloquin put his hands on his hips. “Are you going to help me?”

  “Help you!” She laughed, her eyes flashing. “What help can I be to you, keeper of treasures!”

  His temper flared. He seized hold of her with both hands, and when she twisted away, squealing, he got hold of her skirt and ripped it free, all around her waist.

  She screamed. Half-naked before all the men, she staggered back away from Moloquin, crouched to hide herself, turned red and ran, bare as a baby, after the other women. The men shouted and whistled after her. Moloquin watched her go, her skirt in his hand.

  “Here.” He tossed the skirt to the boy Sickle. “You can make another sling from this.”

  All that day they heaved at the stone; they pried it up a finger’s breadth and braced it with earth and rocks, took the levers to the other end, and did the same thing there. By nightfall the stone was level with Moloquin’s knee.

  The men went down to the roundhouse. Moloquin remained beside the stone; he had come to recognize the places where the demons lurked in his task, and now he foresaw another. The men braced their poles on logs, to pry up the stone, but the log had to be placed higher than the bottom of the stone for the levers to work. Soon that would be impossible.

  He sat there, studying the problem, and behind him there were certain small sounds that he recognized; he paid little heed to them, since he had expected them, and before long Wahela sat down beside him.

  “You humiliated me before the men.”

  He said, “You ought not to challenge me, Wahela.”

  “How can you treat me this way? When I have loved you so long.”

  She hung her arms around his neck; she pressed her kisses to his face. He studied the stone, submitting absently to her caresses, but when he did not respond to her, she turned on him and struck him.

  He recoiled from her. “Why did you do that?”

  “Pay heed to me!”

  “I shall pay heed to you—” he drew his hand back and slapped her.

  She fell down at his feet; without pause she got up again and came at him, scratching and weeping. Moloquin wrapped his arms around her and held her, pinning her arms to her sides, and when she tried to bite him he wrestled her around backwards to him. She strove with her feet to kick him and he gathered her legs up and held her like a baby.

  “Let me go,” she cried, and he dropped her.

  He went away a little, and sat down again in the dark, facing the stone. His heart hammered. Fighting with her had awakened his lust for her. He had lain with Shateel only recently, but his hunger for Shateel was only a little flicker of his appetite compared to the way he craved Wahela, and when he fought with her he craved her more.

  She had crept away; she sat on the grass a certain distance from him, and he could hear her loud sobs. He knew she cried for his sake. She was hard as a stone; everything he did to her rebounded from her, leaving no impression. Was that why he lusted so for her, because she was impossible to master?

  She wept loudly into her hands. His heart sank. Before him were the stones; he could lift stones into the air, but he could not bring himself to comfort the woman he loved. For the sake of his stones he had taken the baskets of the women, and for the sake of his stones he would take everything else his People had.

  He knew himself the fool Grela had called him. He strove and strained to do that which was impossible, and which would bring him no happiness; while that which would bring him happiness was within the power of any man, and yet he could not do it.

  Was this not Ladon in him? Did he not hear Ladon, even now, laughing in his ears? Ladon, whom he had burned, and whose soul now hovered in the space behind his eyes. Ladon, his father.

  He almost rose up. The power swelled in him to stand, to turn his back on the stones and go to Wahela and lift her into his arms and swear never to treat her ill again. They would go down to the roundhouse, and live together in peace, and he would come no more to the Pillar of the Sky.

  But it was too late. Before he could yield, she had yielded. She came to him over the grass, crying, and sank down beside him, and leaned against him; she turned her face toward the stones and he did not have to choose between her and the stones. He put his arm around her shoulders. He faced the stones, and the great problem of the stones, and she pressed against his side, and with her there beside him, his regrets and even his care for her slipped away into the background of his mind, while the stones stood there before him, as they always had, huge and real, the only thing that mattered.

  In the morning, when the workmen gathered at the Pillar of the Sky, Moloquin set half of them to the task of prying up the beam, one end at a time, and ramming earth and chalk beneath it. The other half of the men he got to work at building a wooden platform, next to the beam on the opposite side of the upright stones.

  He himself chose the wood for the platform, going over each log carefully with his hands to find any cracks or holes that would weaken it, and he watched ceaselessly as the men dragged the logs into position and lashed them tight to one another, crisscrossing the logs back and forth, to make the structure strong enough to hold the stone. And this work took them many days.

  Ruak was overseeing the other work, the levering up of the beam. One day while Moloquin stood watching a layer of logs bound tight to the logs under them, Ruak came to him and said, “We cannot lift this stone any higher.”

  Moloquin nodded absently. “Leave it for now.”

  Ruak stood there watching him a while; Moloquin ignored him. At last Ruak went away and took his workmen off to the river, to swim in the cool water.

  The summer was climbing to its height. The heat of the sun cooked the world, turning the beans fat and creamy inside their furry coats of green, ripening the grains of rye and barley in their bearded heads; the sun’s heat boiled up the clouds and stirred them to a dark and violent temper. The men cowered down in the ditch outside the bank and watched the storm roll over them. The rain battered them, streamed down the sides of the bank into the ditch and made pools around their feet, but it was from the voice of the storm that they hid, from the howl of the wind and the crash of the clouds, and from the long forked hands of the clouds, that reached down to pluck aw
ay the souls of men.

  Now the workmen began to ask themselves if the storm were not a warning, that Moloquin was climbing too high—that Heaven frowned on the thing he was building here, this monster, this stone that would hang in the air. When the rain had passed, and the sun came out again, he had to drive them back to the work with the lightning of his tongue and the thunder of his rage.

  He stood with Ruak before the stone, now lifted up on a bed of dirt and chalk and rubble, and he showed Ruak how he intended the stone to be placed on the wooden platform beside it. Ruak shook his head.

  “You should have told me this before, Opa-Moloquin-on.” The workman put his hand on the beam, with the holes worked deep into either end, to fit over the knobs on the tops of the uprights. “Now the ground holes will be on the wrong side.”

  “Make new holes,” Moloquin said.

  Ruak flung his arms up. “You say things as if it were as easy to do them as it is to say them.”

  They gathered up all the men, and once more they dug two holes in the ground, and fit two tall logs into them, bound together at the top, so that the ropes could be thrown over this cross. With this structure and the one still standing on the far side of the uprights, and with levers, they tipped the stone slowly up onto its side and rolled it tenderly as a new baby over onto the top of the platform.

  The wood groaned, but it held fast. Moloquin walked restlessly around the whole structure, looking for cracks and signs of collapse, while Ruak and Fergolin, their stone mauls in their hands, climbed up onto the platform and bashed new holes in the ends.

  Now the work began again. The platform was large enough that the men could work entirely on top of it, levering up one end of the beam, sliding logs beneath, and levering up the other, but the task was very slow, because they had to build up the platform also as they went along. Before they had gotten the beam up as high as Moloquin’s head, they ran out of wood, and he had to lead them all to the forest to find more wood to use.

  Here again he encountered the fear most of the People held for the forest; most of the workmen refused even to set their feet beneath the trees. Therefore, he sent to the Forest Village, where Hems and Bahedyr were with the women, and ordered them to cut wood for the Pillar of the Sky.

  At this time also, he gave them word that they should come to the New Village at the end of the summer, when the berries ripened. He did not tell them why. The reasons he had for this, and for wanting the first gateway to be finished before the equinox, he told to no one.

  They found more wood, and built the platform high and wide, and the beam rose, a little at a time. As the platform got higher it began to shake and sway, and Moloquin got his men to dig holes all around it and put in heavy posts like the trees that supported the roundhouse, and they lashed the platform to the posts.

  One night one of Ruak’s novices dreamt that the stones reached to the sky, and the platform reached almost to the sky, and that he was at work on it and fell and lay on the ground dying. The dream was so real to him that when he woke up in a sweat, and shaking, he lay on the ground inside the roundhouse and cried out to his friends not to leave him there alone in the place of the dead. And thereafter none of the men would climb the platform; only Ruak and Fergolin and Moloquin would climb to the top of it.

  Moloquin threw ropes around the ends of the levers so that the men could work them from the ground. He climbed over and around the beam as it rose into the air; he sat on it and let it carry him higher into the air; he seemed to see nothing but the beam.

  Now he ordered them all to dig away the mound of earth on which they had first raised the beam and which lay between it and the upright stones, and when they had done this he made them build another platform closer to the stones. From the Forest Village came the wood, dragged in on sledges and borne on the shoulders of men and women; Wahela came up from the Forest Village, with her son Twig.

  They hauled and lifted the beam along the platform, until it was so close to the upright stones that only a finger could slip between the edge of the beam and the stones. The work was so slow and so arduous that no one came to watch any more. It was late in the summer and the women were in the fields, protecting their crops against deer and mice. At night, the skies were clear and full of stars. Fergolin sat on the bank at night with Twig in his lap, and pointed out the stars to him, and told him their names and their powers, and the time came when the boy could find the night travelers and name them and name also the places where they were, as well as any novice of the Bear Skull.

  They raised the beam up level with the uprights, and again they coiled rope around it, slung the ropes over the great posts that now stood all around the place. Moloquin brought every man up from the New Village; when people came to him from Shateel’s Village, he brought them to the work also, although they protested—they had come only to tell him that the equinox was near, not to work. With so many hands on the ropes, and so many backs working the levers, they moved the beam as slowly and carefully as a mother with her new baby. They rolled it up and over onto the tops of the upright stones, and there it rested.

  Still there was much to do. Moloquin would not let them stop to enjoy what they had done. He drove them to the work of dismantling the platform, stacking the wood carefully by the bank and digging up the posts and filling in the holes with rammed chalk rubble. The day was hot and the work tedious, and the men grumbled as they did it. They bent to their work, their eyes on the ground, like women, and never looked up again. Fergolin with Twig at his heels hauled baskets of chalk rubble to fill holes, and his back ached, and his hands were sore. When they were done, although the sun was still up in the sky, he was exhausted.

  Moloquin looked on them and saw they were tired and let them go. The sun was low on the horizon anyway. Stooped with fatigue, worn and hungry, the mass of the workmen started away down the slope toward the roundhouse. Then Fergolin happened to look back.

  He looked back, and what he saw froze him in his place. He let out a low cry of amazement, and the others all turned.

  They all turned, and they looked back where they had been, and there they saw what they had done. For the first time, they stood looking up at the great Gateway, poised against the sky, with the sunlight shining through it. No one spoke or moved. They stood with their mouths hanging open, astonished at what they had done, and slowly the burden of their weariness left them. They straightened up, and their eyes brightened. They turned to look at one another and they laughed, and they smote one another on the shoulders and laughed, and then suddenly they were whirling around in a vast dance, hugging one another, and laughing, and they ran up toward the Gateway and stood around it, and they roared with pleasure at what they had done: to raise stones up, to hang a stone in the air.

  That night no one left the Pillar of the Sky. The women came from the New Village, and when they saw what stood there on the plain they gathered their children, and they brought food for all the People, and they all sat down around the place and ate their dinner and admired their work. They did not dance. The men were too tired for that. They made fires and told stories, and when Moloquin walked through their midst, they lowered their voices to a hush and followed him with awe and love in their eyes.

  Fergolin sat on the bank and stared at the Gateway before him, and with each beat of his heart he saw the thing new and was amazed all over again. There it was, the stone hanging in the air, although he knew that was impossible. He remembered how they had done it, he and the other men, but now that all the wood and earth was gone the memory was a pale dream compared to the solid fact of the stones before him.

  Moloquin had told them how, but Fergolin himself had done it, he and all the other men, the ordinary, little men.

  Moloquin was a man of great power, certainly greater than any power Fergolin himself had known. Yet the stone had not risen into the air by any magic. Moloquin’s gift had been to move ordinary men to do what was i
mpossible.

  Sitting before the Gateway, Fergolin saw that the whole world had changed. Everything had become new with the rising of the stones. Nothing was impossible to him anymore. If ordinary men could do this, they could do anything, the only limit to what they could do was their power to imagine it.

  In the first instant he knew this, he rejoiced. In the next, he was cast into despair. Through that Gateway lay their freedom, and through that Gateway lay their doom.

  Yet he would not hold back. The Gateway led to a world wider and greater and more dangerous than this one, and Fergolin rose up, and he walked forward, and he passed through the Gateway that Moloquin had raised, there on the plain at the Pillar of the Sky.

  Four

  THE HOUSE OF HEAVEN

  The people who had come from Shateel’s Village to tell Moloquin of the equinox went back to their hearths, and took with them word of the wonderful Gateway that had appeared on the plain at the Pillar of the Sky. Many came down to see it for themselves, and when they saw it they were amazed, and envious also of those who had raised it and who now went about strutting and boastful. All those who had once laughed at the workmen for their trouble now craved a place among them.

  Moloquin had something else to do, but he could not ignore so many willing workers. Therefore he set Ruak and Fergolin, who knew the whole business, to gather up all the eager hands, shape the next set of uprights, and set them into the holes.

  There were only two more stones at the Pillar of the Sky anyway. When these two were raised up, they would need all the hands they could find, to drag new ones down from the High Hill.

  He marked where the holes were to go; he gave his rope to Fergolin, to keep the measurements, and told him how high the next gateway was to stand. Then he took his axe. He took Bahedyr and Hems, and Kayon, and Ladon’s son, those men who had been his, heart and soul, longer than any other, and without a word to anyone he led them away to the west.

  At the equinox, Moloquin remembered, the boat had come from over the sea to Harus Kum’s mine.