Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

Wahela clutched her fist to her chest; Moloquin stood there, blood on his face, still as a stone, while the lesser men surged back and forth around him. The People screamed and cried out, and many of the children began to cry. Moloquin raised one hand, and the uproar quieted a little.

  Muon had seized his brother. Calling for help, he drew Eilik back away from Moloquin and laid the dead man on the ground, and kneeling beside his brother he looked up at Moloquin and the spearmen.

  “All the People saw,” Moloquin shouted, “that I struck no blow. Eilik struck the blow, and he has suffered for it.”

  Muon sprang up. “He did as you wished of him, Moloquin,” he cried, and he flung himself forward at the man with the bronze axe.

  At once all his men rushed after him, armed with knives and clubs. Moloquin shouted something, Wahela could not hear the words, and the spearmen closed on Muon and his followers. There was a short struggle, but there were far more of the spearmen than there were of Muon’s People, and swiftly they fell into the power of Bahedyr and the others; swiftly they were forced down to their knees at Moloquin’s feet.

  Now Moloquin began to speak, and he sent his words out to all the People; as he spoke, he walked up and down through the Turnings-of-the-Year and swept the crowds on the embankment with his gaze, so that all would feel the weight of what he was saying.

  He said, “Eilik and Muon are chiefs no more! Henceforth, you shall all be my People—you shall all be one People again, as it was meant to be. Only wretched ignorance and sin has driven you apart. Now I am calling you to be one again, to be as Heaven meant you, to be as the ancestors were: One People. Will you answer me? Will you do what is right, my People, and save yourselves? I weep to see you throw away your lives, wasting your lives in sin and error. All I want for you is that you be what you are meant to be. Now, on the plain at the Pillar of the Sky, I am raising up a House of Heaven, and therein shall we all dwell, all our spirits forever more, if you will only help me.”

  The crowd fell still and silent, listening, save for the wails of a few babies; the wind blew over them, and Moloquin’s words reached them like a call on the wind. Wahela looked around her, but she saw only her own People, who had followed him almost from the beginning; they were eager enough. She looked out to see the others, the strangers, to whom he really spoke.

  He said, “I need you. To raise up my stones, I need every hand, every soul. Let there be no weakness in the People! If there is weakness in the People, then the stones themselves cannot stand. I need you to be what you have almost forgotten you can be. Remember the old stories? In them are men foolish and frightened—are men weaklings, who strive against one another with bundles of feathers? Be as you were then! Be strong, and upright, like the stones! Come to the Pillar of the Sky and there we shall live forever!”

  He raised his hands, and on the embankment, all around Wahela, people flung their arms up and cried out, “Forever!” They looked keenly around them, to see who did not shout. “Forever!” All along the embankment, more and more arms shot up toward the sky, and more throats opened. “Forever!”

  Now before Moloquin, kneeling in the trampled grass, Muon raised his head; Bahedyr had put the tip of his spear at Muon’s throat, and at the motion he stepped forward. Muon ignored him and stared up at Moloquin, who was looming over him, and Muon raised one arm and called, “Forever!”

  With that, it seemed, the clouds themselves gave voice. All the People shouted in one breath.

  “Forever! Forever! Forever!”

  Packed tight around Muon, the men who had followed him and his brother flung up their arms and shouted louder than any other. At Moloquin’s feet, Muon lowered his head to the dust.

  That night all the men danced at the Turnings-of-the-Year, all the men save Moloquin.

  The People built fires along the top of the bank, so that the whole place was filled with a leaping, crackling light. The women gathered to watch, holding their sleeping children, and as the night wore on, many of the women began to clap their hands together and sing. They ate and drank well, and laughed and made games, and the memory of the night before dimmed and lost its power to frighten them.

  Moloquin himself sat under his roof of cloth at the center of the Turnings-of-the-Year, where everybody could see him. Wahela sat beside him. In their wonderful ornaments they were magnificent, and the People went up to the edge of the shelter just to see them and be amazed. None dared talk to them. Moloquin sat in silence, his head turned a little. Wahela was up and down often and called to her friends and demanded food and drink, but Moloquin kept silent.

  Then Dehra came.

  She was still only a girl, thin as a stick, with lank pale hair and a face sharp as a willow switch. She wore clothes as carelessly as the last leaves hanging on an oak tree in the autumn. She walked with no grace, but with long strides like a man’s, and her eyes were full of fury.

  She came walking down through the noise and tumult of the dancing, brushing against people as she passed, as if she did not see them; her gaze was fixed ever on Moloquin, there beneath his roof of cloth. She strode in between the stones and went straight up before him, and her voice rose in a cracked cry, like the voice of a bird.

  “Moloquin,” she cried, “what have you done with my mother?”

  Around her, those who heard stopped what they were doing and turned to look, and seeing it was she, and hearing what she came to say, most people thought it better to pretend they did not hear. They turned their backs on her; they left her to Moloquin.

  Under his roof of cloth, he stared back at Dehra, and he said nothing. She came a step closer, and again her voice rose.

  “Moloquin, what have you done with my mother?”

  Beside the chief, Wahela stood up. “Go, you unlucky, undeserving—” Moloquin put out his hand and stopped her.

  He said nothing to Dehra. He merely stared at her, as if from a long distance, with a faint curiosity on his face.

  Dehra came to the very edge of the shelter, and again she raised her cry.

  “Moloquin! What have you done with my mother?”

  He gave her no answer. He stared at her without speaking any word at all. Beside him, Wahela sat rigid, twitching her head from side to side, to look first at him and then at Dehra; her fists were clenched in her lap.

  Dehra turned and walked away; Moloquin’s gaze followed her. Wahela heaved a sigh, and lowered her eyes.

  He had succeeded. The whole People belonged to him now, the whole People would come to the Pillar of the Sky. Everything was one now, everything round and full, complete.

  In his mind he saw the broken millstone mended, the nether millstone, world of living men.

  Some had died. He had foreseen that, and made some provision for it—he himself had killed no one, he had done nothing himself. In the Overworld, it was Eilik who would receive blame, as it should be, because Eilik had resisted the truth. Moloquin had done nothing save follow the right way.

  They all knew it. They had all come to him, finally, even Muon and the others of the northern villages, bowed down to him, submitted to his vision. Only one, in all the People, had defied him.

  Only one. He told himself, over and over, that one alone could make no difference.

  She had stood before him as if he were an ordinary man, and chided him like a child, scolded him like a mother. But she was the only one. All the others had come to him. All the others were his.

  She who had listened to his deep thoughts. She who knew his soul.

  But she was the only one, and she was wrong; all the others knew she was wrong, all the others had come to him, and only one—

  He had done what he knew to be necessary. He had forged the People together, he had shaped them to his purpose. If she had resisted the tempering, she was unworthy of it, she deserved to be thrown aside.

  Yet when he thought of her cast aside, he saw, in his mind,
something else cast aside. With her she took something of Moloquin.

  She was unworthy. In the testing she had proven herself flawed. That part of him that he had sent away with her—

  He would find another to listen to him as she had. He had sent her away and he could easily bring another to her place, he was master here, all around him did as he bid them. If they did not, he would crush them, as the stones had crushed Ruak. He did not need Shateel.

  He laughed to think of that. He was chief of all the People, master of the bronze, master of the Pillar of the Sky, whose power stretched from the sea to the forest. He drew forth matter from the belly of the earth, and shaped it to his wishes; he raised stones no other man had ever dreamed of lifting, and suspended them in the air. No longer had he to walk, like an ordinary man; his People carried him wherever he wished to go. He was the center of their world; they brought him what they made, and he gave them what they needed. There was no flaw in this circle, nothing missing, no room for anything else. What could one woman matter? He put away his longing for Shateel.

  Five

  THE MILL OF HEAVEN

  “Can you see them yet?” Fergolin asked.

  Barakal shook his head. He shaded his eyes with his hand. “Only the dust.” He peered keenly away to the northeast, over the rolling country, trying to make out what lay between the brown haze of dust boiling into the air and the earth below it. Beside him, Fergolin sat on the ground, breathing hard.

  They had come out here to see the stone hauled up from the river. It was a long walk for Fergolin, who was sick again, coughing blood now, and Barakal had at first refused to go, but the old man had insisted. He loved the stones, and their procession over the earth moved him unutterably, and, he said, if he were to die one day sooner because he had come here, yet he would come here whenever he could, to see the stones brought to the Pillar of the Sky.

  “I see them,” Barakal cried.

  There beneath the spreading cloud of dust and the brown earth, small dark figures moved. Fergolin turned and stood, the young man’s hand on his arm.

  “Shall we go nearer?” Barakal asked.

  “No,” said Fergolin.

  So they waited where they were. Here the open rolling plain sloped away to the river; except for a few isolated trees, nothing grew here but grass. The sun had just risen. It shone with a hot bright glow on the cloud of dust, a bronze overlay of the blue sky, and the promise of the day’s heat crackled in the air. Barakal had brought a jug of beer and he gave it to Fergolin and made the old man sit down again. The stone would be many days yet passing by this place.

  Barakal said, “Only three more days to the full moon, Opa-on.”

  Fergolin smiled at him. “Are you eager, my boy?”

  “My blood leaps even to think of it.”

  “And if we are proven wrong?”

  Barakal shrugged one shoulder. He did not see how they could be wrong. They had been watching the full moon rise at the Pillar of the Sky for years. He knew every motion that the light made; he had learned to stand in the Pillar of the Sky in full daylight and point to the horizon and say, There he will appear tonight, and when the moon rose, if there were no mist and no rain and no cloud, he appeared where Barakal had foreseen.

  He had learned that this point of rising moved up and down the horizon, north to south and back again, in the course of each month; more, he had seen that the point of rising of the full moon shifted steadily along the horizon also. In the month previous to this, the full moon had risen exactly in line with the West and the East Watchers, a line running diagonally across the Pillar of the Sky. Tonight, when the full moon rose again, Barakal knew it would have shifted back to the north again.

  He did not know why he knew this. He thought the Pillar of the Sky had spoken to him, perhaps in a dream. Yet he was certain of it. The Four Watchers marked not only the point of rising of the midsummer and the midwinter sun, but also the extremes of the rising of the full moon.

  When he thought about this, which was nearly all the time now, his soul grew light and joyous. His pleasure in the simple elegance of this design was without words. It was perfect, and it proved what Moloquin himself could only guess at, that the world was one, a single turning of the wheel, and the one-ness began here at the Pillar of the Sky.

  Now, against the drifting bronze cloud of dust, he could make out the figures of men, creeping toward them over the plain.

  Fergolin was dozing. Barakal took the jug of beer and drank some of it, enjoying the warmth of the sun and his own idleness. It was a good thing, over all, to be Moloquin’s son; it meant he did not have to drag stones around, he had all day long to think, to sit in the sun, to sleep, so that at night he could watch stars rise.

  Far down the plain now more of the figures were creeping into view. There were several lines of them, strung out along lengths of rope, each man bent to the rope over his shoulder, their legs bent to thrust against the ground, their heads bent. Every little while, the men at the back of the line would run up to the front, and the men at the front would move back; otherwise, the dust of their own passage would overcome them. Once, when Moloquin had had many fewer men than this at his command, it had taken them a whole season to move a single stone. Now the entire People labored, and it was as if the whole earth moved.

  Barakal stood up. There was respect due these men, these faceless wordless choiceless men who hauled the stones.

  All the rest of the day they came on. Fergolin woke coughing and spitting blood, and Barakal half-carried him away to the roundhouse at the Pillar of the Sky, and then returned to the slope to watch.

  Now the sun was sinking, blood-red in the dusty sky. Like a brown mist the clouds of the earth billowed up on the slow summer wind. Between the sky and the earth, lines of men crawled along on their ropes, stretching from horizon to horizon, and still the stone was not in sight. Barakal stood and watched them. Below him the men strained for each step, their bodies curled around the ropes, their bodies covered with the dust. With each step they gave up a sigh like the earth exhaling.

  The sun was dropping toward the horizon. Soon the moon would rise. He turned his back on the People at their filthy brutal work. He turned his back on the forward-creeping stone. He went up to the Pillar of the Sky, to watch the full moon rise, to see the perfection of the universe fulfilled.

  Moloquin caused the People of the northern villages, with their great herds of oxen, to cull their herds and drive as many as they could spare to the Pillar of the Sky.

  He also sent a few men away to the north, and to the east, and they went as far as the mountains in the north, and as far as the sea to the east, and there they found other people. But these people lived in huts of sod and wood, and fished in the sea, and made no pots, and used no metal, nor did they raise up stones; they had nothing that Moloquin wanted, and so he forgot them.

  He himself went nowhere. He stayed always at the Pillar of the Sky, watching every stone put up, and around him he kept all those whom he needed for his comfort: Wahela, and his children, and a host of other people who cooked for him and wove cloth for him, made his pots and hauled his wood and water, so that at the Pillar of the Sky a sort of village appeared.

  It was different from the other villages of the People. There Moloquin caused a forge to be built, like the forge in the Forest Village, and also a kiln, for firing pots. Before this, the women had been used to waiting until they had several pots to fire, and then they had merely dug a hole in the ground for the fire and put the pots on top, covered over with a roof of stones and clay, but now they had a stout little dome-shaped kiln of bricks.

  There also, he built a sampo. Moloquin remembered how, at the Bloody Gathering, Shateel, sitting at the sampo, had nearly turned the women against him; he knew where in his new village words could collect against him. Therefore he made his sampo too big to be turned by old women sitting in a circle aroun
d it, singing an old song. This sampo was too great for that. It had wooden spokes that stuck out of the sides, and men walked in circles and pushed at the spokes, and so turned the sampo, and no one sang.

  In the fall after the Bloody Gathering, Grela was threshing grain as usual, when she fell down against the threshing floor. She could not rise by herself, but had to be helped back to her longhouse, where she lay moaning in pain.

  For a few days it seemed she would get well, but then the pain worsened, and the flesh of her leg began to turn black.

  Knowing she was dying, she called all her daughters together, and her son, Sickle, and she said good-by to each of them, and gave each of them some of her goods. She berated her son again for his failure to join a society, told him no good would ever come of him, and sent them all away except Fergolin, her husband.

  Fergolin came and sat down beside her, and they were silent a little while, which was not usual with Grela. At last she sighed and turned to him.

  “Fergolin,” she said, “you have been the best of husbands.”

  “Ah, Grela,” he said, and wrung her hand.

  “The best of husbands,” she said. “But you have failed me.”

  “Ah? How so?”

  “You have induced me to trust men, thinking all men like you, and so I trusted Moloquin.”

  Having said that, she allowed him to enclose her in his arms, and with her head on his shoulder, she died.

  Not long afterwards the women of the New Village gathered around the sampo, to talk over who should become headwoman in Grela’s place, and while they sat there Moloquin came and squatted down behind them, and listened. With him there, they could not loosen their tongues, and so they named no headwoman.

  He told them: “You do not need this sampo. Come to my village, I have there a great mill, more wonderful than this one, and I shall grind your grain for you there.”

  So the women carried their grain up over the slope, past the Pillar of the Sky, to Moloquin’s Village, and there they ground it up. But Moloquin took the two stones of the sampo and he carried them to the river, and broke the stones, and threw them into the river, and the water rushed over them and they were gone.