Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  Joba said, “You have been much with your husband, yet you bear no fruit of it.”

  Shateel turned to her mother, angry, and said, “Why is everyone so concerned about that? He has many children.” Only that winter a runner had come from the Forest Village, announcing that Wahela had borne a healthy daughter.

  “You have only Dehra,” said Joba, unperturbed; she could see that Shateel was angry only because she herself worried.

  Shateel turned toward the work again. The banging of the drums filled her ears. She looked in vain for Dehra among the flights of children circling and circling the field.

  “From your womb must the chieftain spring,” said Joba. “If you bear no sons, we shall have no chief, when Moloquin dies.”

  “There is time yet to make a son for him, if that really matters so much to you,” said Shateel.

  “Something stands between your womb and his power,” Joba said. “Something must be done first about Dehra.”

  Shateel wheeled toward her. “What? What should I do with my child?”

  Joba looked surprised; her eyes opened wide and her mouth pursed. At last, she said, “I thought only that you might send her to my hearth, perhaps, or to another’s. I meant no ill to her, Shateel.”

  Shateel jerked herself around to face the work again. Her eyes stung. She put her hands to her wrist, where she wore the bronze bracelet.

  He had given her this bracelet, and he had given her the power over this village; he would give her the power of life as well, if it all went as everyone else thought it should. She stared at the work below, the men prying at the stone with poles, the men grunting and leaning on ropes, but she saw nothing of it.

  What was her power? In every being, surely, there was some center, some kernel from which all its desires and abilities flowed: where was hers? It could not be merely that she was the niece of a chief. It could not be merely that she was the wife of a chief, or the mother of a chief: where was her power, then?

  She raised her eyes again to the circling stream of children, looking for Dehra, but saw no sign of her. She knew it was true. For Dehra’s sake, Shateel often stayed with her daughter instead of going to Moloquin. For Dehra’s sake, her womb had closed itself against the possibility of a rival. For Dehra’s sake. What was to be done for Shateel’s?

  Her unseeing eyes were fixed now on the great stone cradled in its wooden frame, that the men strove to free from the grasp of the High Hill. She saw none of them; she saw only shadows, that moved and shifted through the light of the world. She saw only that the world lay before her, and that she was powerless to enter it.

  Then suddenly the Hill gave up its prize, and the stone reared up.

  The People roared. The men scattered and ran back, and the stone stood up on end, poised a moment there, and fell over backwards with a thud that shook the world. Shateel herself, deep as she was in her own thoughts, let out a cry of surprise and wonder, and the rest of the People, who had watched everything with attention, now broke from their ranks and ran forward to surround the stone.

  They buried the stone in themselves. They swarmed over it, stroking it, heaving at it, testing it with themselves. Moloquin waited nearby, knowing that in their frenzy they would not hear him, waiting until their passions cleared. Shateel shook herself. She was alone on the hillside, alone, looking down at the stone and at the People who struggled now to master the stone. Now, suddenly, Dehra appeared beside her.

  “Ana, what is it?”

  Shateel said nothing. She put out her arm and gathered the child to her; her fingers closed on a fistful of the little girl’s hair. Pressing the child tight against her, she watched the work below.

  With levers now they were prying up the front end of the stone and struggling to force a roller under it. Already they had tied ropes to the front of the sledge, and the People were fighting for a place at the ropes. Their voices rose, ebullient, crackling like flames, a fire leaping toward Heaven. They stretched out in lines, each line clinging to a rope, and the lines of the People stretched away into the distance, so far away that she had to squint to see the end. Then, with a wave of Moloquin’s hand, the drums began to beat again, and an old man blew upon a horn made of a goat’s horn, and the People leaned into the ropes.

  The stone resisted. It had lain so long in this place it had roots here. It wanted only to stay where it was. The People strained at the ropes. The drums beat furiously and the horn blew again and again. Moloquin walked around and around the stone, stroking it with his hands. The People heaved against the ropes. Even Joba had gone among them; even Joba leaned her weight against the weight of the stone.

  They screamed, they shouted, and the drums beat, and the horns blew. The stone heard them and it answered them, slowly, yielding its grip on the earth, creeping forward toward its new home. As it gave way to them the People gave tongue to one tremendous cry. Their faces had been turned backward toward the stone, to plead with it, to call it after them, but now they faced forward, they stooped to the work, and they stepped forward, driving steadily forward. The stone followed obediently along in their wake.

  The boys’ band leapt and danced at the edge of the flat ground. Now Moloquin waved to them, and they ran up to the nether end of the stone, which was just now leaving behind the last of the rollers. Two boys at each end lifted the roller, and two more bore the middle of it. They ran around to the front of the stone, wove their way in through the many ropes, and laid the roller down, and as the stone moved slowly forward it crept up onto that roller, and left another behind, and that one also they ran to bring to the front.

  Shateel stood there, watching this, and it seemed to her that the whole world wore away while this stone was moving a distance no longer than a man’s hand.

  She touched the bracelet again. That was power: to cause other people to do as Moloquin wished. That was Moloquin’s power. She turned her back; she wanted something else, but what it was she had no notion of. She walked away, Dehra beside her, away over the flank of the High Hill.

  The work at the Pillar of the Sky belonged to Moloquin no longer. It was the work of the People now, and they went to it with hearts as full and hot as a lover’s. All that year, they dragged the stones away from the High Hill to the Pillar of the Sky, and all the next year they did so, until there were ten more stones lying outside the embankment, and they went to the work then of raising them up.

  Moloquin measured everything, and told them what to do, and with each stone some new problem presented itself: either one of the uprights was too short, and had to be shaped with a great knob at its base to keep it in its hole, or when they got the beam up there, the holes did not fit the knobs on the tops of the uprights, and had to be cut again. Yet each problem seemed to vanish before the will of the People. In the year after they got the stones to the Pillar of the Sky, they raised up the third Gateway, and in the year after that, the fourth.

  All the People said that the place was lucky for them. Everyone who worked at the task was a talisman, and those who could not work, the women, who had to keep the gardens, the old and the sick and the young, envied the others and would go to them for luck, for counsel, for some cast-off glory. Many of them travelled across the country to see the Pillar of the Sky, even if they could not work on it, and all could see now what a magnificent thing it was.

  The great Gateway stood at the foot of the place. On either flank, shorter than the center one but exactly even with one another, stood another pair of gates; now, on the northwestern side, the first of another pair rose up in its place. When the sun shone on them, and cast their shadows on the ground, the People often danced in and out of the shadows, rejoicing.

  They still took their dead to the place, but they left the bodies at the very edge of the circle, where the two entry stones were. After the flesh was gone, rather than take the bones away to one of the many old tombs nearby, some of the families burned the
bones inside a pot of clay and buried them there at the Pillar of the Sky.

  There were holes along the outer edge of the place, just within the embankment, holes full of old chalk, and the People took to digging out the chalk and sticking the burned bones and ashes into these holes and ramming the chalk in on top. That way, they reasoned, in the end, the spirits of the ancestors would stand around the place in a protective circle, like the circles of stones, like the circle of the horizon that enclosed the world.

  In the next summer, they went to raise the last of the gateways, the fifth.

  Ruak knew the work now better than anyone except Moloquin. He and Moloquin measured the stones, and they oversaw the digging of the holes. They had come to see the value of shoring up the inner edge of the hole with wood, so that when the uprights thundered down into the holes there was something inside to brace them up, and now they dug the ramps down into the hole when they dug the hole itself, not waiting until the stone lay ready to go in.

  The summer was hot and rainy. Moloquin had to go away to the Forest Village, where Hems, returned from his apprenticeship with Baras Ram, was building himself a forge. While Moloquin was gone, Ruak did the work, glad of the chance to show that he, Ruak, was potent in himself.

  None of the People of the New Village, none of the workmen from Shateel’s Village, none of the People of the Forest Village went to the Midsummer Gathering at the Turnings-of-the-Year. Not even Fergolin went, the Bear Skull master. He had found ways of observing the stars and their passing at the Pillar of the Sky, and he had his own novice now, Twig, the son of Wahela, who learned everything Fergolin could teach him and was hungry for more. Instead of going to the Gathering, the People stayed at the Pillar of the Sky, and there they danced and feasted, and told stories and sang, made marriages and gave tokens.

  At the end of the summer, with the two uprights for the fifth Gateway in the ground, and the beam dressed and ready to go up on top of them, Moloquin was away at the Forest Village, welcoming Hems, building the forge. And Ruak set about raising up the beam.

  When he left Buras Ram’s mine, Hems had brought with him a box made of a cedar tree, full of the copper that Buras Ram had promised Moloquin, but he was a little unwilling to bring it forth. He had looked into it and knew what it contained; he thought Moloquin would be displeased.

  First, therefore, he showed Moloquin his prize, the last and finest work he had made, while he learned the craft in the old forge at Harus Kum’s mine. It was a collar made of links of copper wire from which hung bronze plaques, incised with decorations and studded with pieces of polished stone. When Moloquin saw it, he took it into both hands and stared at it a while, smiling.

  Then Hems brought out the chest of copper, and when Moloquin saw it, he lost his smile. With a grunt, he reached into the chest and lifted out some of the bracelets and necklaces and armbands and rings that filled it. “They are throwing out their garbage.”

  Hems poked at the chest full of castings and broken pieces of jewelry. Buras Ram had made as if he were giving Hems a great treasure to take home to his chief, but in fact he was throwing out flawed and worthless work, fit only to be melted down for the copper, itself impure, and much less than it seemed in this form, filling up the chest.

  Hems said, “I am sorry. I have failed you.”

  “No,” Moloquin said, and his gaze shifted sideways, to the collar lying on the mat beside him. “This is excellent. I am very pleased with you. We shall make a forge here, there are better things to do with this than rings and pins.”

  They went out of the roundhouse, into the broad clearing by the stream, the site of Moloquin’s first village. The roundhouse behind them had grown too small, now that Hems had children, and Bahedyr had his wife and children, and Kayon also was married, and the men had raised a second roundhouse at the far end of the clearing. Between these two, Hems and Moloquin built a forge.

  First they built the firebox, out of stones and mud from the river, and they dragged in a stump of a tree and set it down flat into the ground, to make an anvil. In this, and in the rest of the work, Hems knew more than Moloquin, and was the leader, the first time he could remember when he had not followed Moloquin but had seen Moloquin follow him, obeying him, performing faithfully whatever Hems asked of him.

  It was the bronze and his mastery of it that had won him this new position. It had given him strength and pride, a new manhood for the boy the other boys had always taunted. As he struggled with Moloquin to raise up the corner posts of the forge, he promised himself never to yield this hard-won place again, not to anyone.

  At night, their work done, they sat in the roundhouse, and Ap Min brought them food and beer which now she brewed herself, here in this village, with barley from the gardens of the New Village, and yeast that Buras Ram had given Hems.

  Hems grunted at her. “This is cold,” he said, and thrust the dish of meat back at her. She took it and hurried away to bring him something better, and Hems turned and smiled at Moloquin.

  “She is very glad to see me, she does everything I say.”

  Moloquin broke a seed cake in half. “She did whatever Harus Kum said, also.”

  Hems scowled at him. “What do you mean?”

  Moloquin shrugged. “I would be very happy if my women did as I told them. It seems to be a gift of the men of those people.”

  “It comes from the bronze,” Hems said, loudly. Ap Min came back and put down food at his feet, and hovered around him, waiting to make sure that he was pleased.

  “Perhaps it is,” Moloquin said.

  “They are not such a bad people,” said Hems. “When I was a slave, I hated them, but this time I was one of them and not a slave, and they treated me very well.”

  Ap Min brought them both more beer; when her husband caught her skirt and pulled her down against him, she giggled. Hems hugged her. He liked this life very well. He was master here, in this village; even Moloquin knew it, deferring to him, and he had a wife who would obey him, coddle him, and never leave him. All this came from the bronze, from the hammer and the anvil, from the force of the blow.

  He said, “Those other people, they say there is a spirit who watches over men, a spirit who is a—”

  His voice trailed off. He struggled again with the notion that Buras Ram had given him, that the bronze contained a demon that responded to the work of a virtuous man but not an evil one. Actually Buras Ram had never said the demon was in the bronze, but that the demon worked the bronze, somehow, like a man, in a spiritual forge, somewhere in the sky, and his hammer strokes made the lightning, and the ringing of his metal made the thunder.

  It was a fine story, but Buras Ram had meant it for more than a story. Hems shook his head.

  “He said we should have a mask and make offerings to it, for the sake of the bronze.”

  Moloquin said, “Those are their demons. They have nothing to do with us. How could they? They are not our ancestors, this isn’t even their land. Pay less heed to Buras Ram when he speaks of such things, he is deluded.”

  Ap Min went out, and returned with a tall jug full of the beer, but as she came in the door, after her came another.

  He was a stranger to this village but not to Moloquin, who seeing him stood up at once and said, “What is it?”

  The stranger stumbled on into the middle of the roundhouse. He was exhausted, filthy from his travels, and he dropped down to his hands and knees in the warmth of the roundhouse, and Ap Min at a nod from her husband brought him food and drink.

  Moloquin said, in a harsh voice, “This is one of my workmen from the Pillar of the Sky. Why have you come here? What has happened?”

  The man shook his head. “Awful. Terrible. You must go back.” Worn to nothing with fatigue, he leaned sideways on his outstretched arm and hung his head. Ap Min knelt beside him with a cup of the beer and gently urged him to drink.

  Moloquin rose;
he went into the back of the roundhouse and got his bearskin coat. To Hems he said, “Keep well. Go on here as you will, I trust you here.” He put the bronze axe into his belt.

  “Wait,” Hems cried, and leapt up. He crossed the roundhouse in three long strides to the place where he kept his goods, and came back with the magnificent collar he had made.

  “This is for you,” he said, and held it out to Moloquin, and all his new pride and his long-enduring love shone in his eyes. “I made this for you.”

  Moloquin took it, smiling, and clasped Hems by the hand. “Make me something every year,” he said. “Something fine.” He coiled up the collar and slipped it into the pouch at his belt, and whirling he went away out the door.

  Twig said, “Master, if they raise more of the gateways, they shall block our lines of sight.”

  Alarmed, Fergolin was walking around and around the North Watcher, which was sagging over to one side. The rains had weakened it, he thought, or perhaps all the digging under it that Moloquin had done, as a boy, when he had made his caves under the stones. Soon the stone would collapse. He went to find a log, to brace it up, although part of his mind told him that no piece of wood would keep the stone in place. Yet it comforted him to do something.

  He said, “When Moloquin comes back, we must talk to him about this.”

  Twig said, “Master, did you hear me? Look how the gateways will block our line of sight.”

  Fergolin straightened. The center of the space, around the gateways, was filled with men. Out of them, rising up from the midst of their bodies as if it grew from their bodies, the platform stood that held the fifth Gateway’s beam, and that too was swarmed over with workmen, crawling on the wood, straining at the ropes, prying with the levers, hurrying to get the beam up into the air before Moloquin came home.