Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  She hated him. Her hatred was the purest and most sublime and uplifting feeling she had ever known; she would give it up for no one.

  The workmen were coiling rope now, standing beside the great stone rising at its awkward angle; on the far side of the hole they had raised up three poles and bound them together at the top, and while she watched, shivering in the shadow of the bank, they flung their ropes up over the top of the three-legged tree. The lines uncoiled slowly through the dust.

  Down the plain, behind her, someone shouted. Dehra got up and went to the opening in the embankment.

  Moloquin was coming. Up through the dust and the slanting morning sunlight came a procession of men and women, indistinct in the dust, so that first she saw only the vast collective action of their arms and legs, the rhythmic motion of a single beast. In their beast, swaying above them, came Moloquin’s litter, and now as it came nearer she could hear the jingle and clash of the ornaments, see the flash of the sun on the bronze and copper.

  She stood up. Coppered with the sun, he approached her step by step, and she awaited him in an ecstasy, a bride for the bridegroom, and she never saw that her mother walked first, ahead of all the others, and passed by her without a word.

  With Moloquin came Bahedyr, filthy and unable to walk, and they put him down into the hole in the ground, facing the stone they were about to raise. When this was done, and Moloquin, in his litter, was watching from one side, the work began.

  Half the men went to the ropes; the others bent their backs to the levers that would raise the stone, and all waited for Moloquin’s shout. Instead, another shouted.

  “Wait,” Dehra cried, and rushed in among them. “Do not do this—leave it!”

  Moloquin stood up. “Take her. She is in the way.” He grunted, kicking at the dirt, his black brows drawn down over his nose, his eyes gleaming. “She may harm herself here, take her away.”

  Dehra rushed at him, her hands raised. “Stop this—you must not do as you do. You will destroy us all! The world will end when you close the ring, Moloquin—”

  At that, the people all around them began to mutter and turn to one another, and the whole great mass shifted and stirred in the morning sunlight.

  Moloquin straightened. He cast a wide look around him, and with his hands on his hips he faced Dehra.

  “She is brainsick. Look at her! Not a rag to cover her. She lives in a hole in the ground, like a dog—”

  Dehra flung her arm up, shouting at him, contending with him. “Leave this! Stop it now, I say, in the name of Ael!”

  At that Moloquin startled all over, as if she had struck him. His face went black with rage. In two strides he reached the girl; with one hand he seized her, and with the other he whirled up the great axe out of his belt. He thrust her down on the ground before him and he raised the axe at arm’s length over his head, and between Dehra and the axe lay nothing but Moloquin’s will.

  The People screamed; Shateel too screamed; she hurried forward from the crowd and threw herself down over the body of her only child.

  “No, Moloquin, no!”

  “Get away from her,” the chieftain shouted. He still had Dehra by one arm, and now he shifted his weight, the axe moved, ready to sever the arm, to strike beyond Shateel. “She has said that which I cannot forgive or ignore, Shateel—”

  “Do not slay her!” Shateel sprang up, her hands out, her face lifted to his; she rose up into the face of his wrath, she laid her white hands on his chest, and spoke into the fury of his temper.

  “Do not kill her, Moloquin—she has done wrong, but if you kill her, will she not be with you always, as Ladon is? Drive her away, send her far away, and then she will be alive and cannot torment you. But if you kill her, she will never leave you.”

  The whole People hushed, to hear this; all looked on Moloquin, waiting. All saw that Shateel’s words had changed him. His furious look calmed. He lowered the axe, and with a contemptuous gesture he freed the girl who cowered beneath her mother. Straightening, he seemed tall as one of his great stones.

  He said, “So let it be. Take her, now, to the tin mines. Let her work there in the mines until she dies. Take Bahedyr too! Let me be free of them both forever.”

  He turned away, and among the People many sighed and were grateful, and saw a great wound being healed. Some of the young men went to the hole where Bahedyr slumped, and dragged him up; the women came quietly toward the stones and took Dehra in among them, and drew her away. Moloquin went back to his litter and sat down, and Shateel went with him and stood beside him, her hand on his arm.

  Then Moloquin said, “Raise the stone.”

  They hesitated. The murmur sprang up among them, like the whisper of the grass when the wind played in it, and their eyes were wide and white with fear. What Dehra had said remained with them even though she was gone down, dragged away over the bank. They dreaded the work now.

  Moloquin stood up. “Do you deny me? Raise the stone!” He went forward from his litter; he tossed the axe behind him into his bearskins, and went to the stone, and took his place at one of the poles. “Now, come!”

  One by one, they came forward. One by one, the men took up their levers and gripped the ropes, and with Moloquin among them they set to the work.

  With a yell and a gasp, they flung themselves on the levers, they dragged on the ropes, and the stone lifted slowly up off its supports, creeping higher; at a shout from Moloquin, two men on each side rushed forward to jam another log under the weight. The men stepped back a moment, wiped their burning hands, took a deep breath, and began again.

  The stone tipped up into the sun, and it slipped, its foot sliding down a little way into the hole before it. The men drew away again, resting, gathering themselves, and went forward, and leaned their backs into the work. They pried the stone up again, and this time the stone cracked.

  The sound was like a thunderclap. The People screamed to hear it, and the workmen fled from it; they darted back in all directions, leaving the stone there hanging above the hole.

  One remained. Moloquin remained there, gripping a lever, and he turned and shouted to them: “Come! Come—the stone is finding its place—come!”

  They hesitated. Their faces wrung with worry, they hung there like dead leaves in the wind, that had no will of their own. He turned and swept them with his gaze.

  “Come! Now, come!”

  They heard him; this time they obeyed him. Reluctant, cowering, they crept back to the stone and took their places, and at his shouted order they heaved all their strength against the power of the stone.

  Its foot slipped again. With a roar it rushed down into the hole. The stone heaved up off its supports. The ropes popped and lashed the air and the men ran madly to the edge of the hole, to kick and shovel in the dirt, to brace the foot of the stone. The stone swayed, it rocked from side to side, and its head swung across the sky; it leaned hard to one side and was about to fall in spite of them, and then again, it cracked.

  The men howled. As one being they fled away from it. Only Moloquin remained with it. He shouted to them. He flung himself against the stone, his arms stretched up, his hands on the stone, striving to hold it upright, and his voice bellowed out.

  “Come—come to me—now! Come!”

  None moved. Safe outside the ring, they watched the stone sway, they watched Moloquin strive with it, they heard him cry for help, and they left him there alone. He stretched upward, trying to hold the swaying stone, and with a shattering crack the top of it broke.

  It fell down through Moloquin’s arms; as if he tried to lay it softly down, he sank with it to the ground. For a long time no one moved. All watched Moloquin, slumped down over the stone; all waited for him to get up, to rise again to his feet, and turn and punish them for their failures.

  A black shadow swept over them. A great black crow flapped down from the sky, and with a beat of
its wings it came to roost on Moloquin’s shoulder, and at that they all knew he was dead.

  For a moment, still, they waited, thinking he would come back to them. The crying of the wind was the only sound. Then, one by one, they understood. One by one, with a wail or a cry, they turned and fled away. Like waves of the sea, they ran away from the Pillar of the Sky and from Moloquin.

  Barakal stood by the North Watcher and saw them go, and in a wild voice he called curses on them. In the confusion of his passions, one thought was clear: they had betrayed Moloquin, and that had caused his death. This was what the star had meant, Erwenda, the Messenger. He turned toward Moloquin, dead at the foot of the broken stone, with Shateel already kneeling beside him.

  He nearly went to help her, but instead he looked around him, at the Pillar of the Sky, and in a rush of understanding he saw that now, with Moloquin dead, the circle would never be finished. They had come so close, and now the thing would never be done. He could not bear to look on it. He could not bear to live among these People any more. He turned his back to it all and walked away, out past the West Watcher, over the bank, and into the forest.

  There was no mark on Moloquin, no blood, no broken bone. Shateel, bending over him, her hands on him, could find no sign that the stone had killed him.

  She thought the People had killed him. When they abandoned him, they killed the heart in him.

  Now no one remained but her. Even Barakal had gone. The wails and cries of the People drifted back to her from down the slope; the sound had changed a little. They were rallying, someone was gathering them. Sickle, perhaps, or some other she had no name for.

  She wondered what would become of them, without Moloquin; could they find another such among themselves, or could they do without him? She doubted that. Yet their old way was gone, and she had no faith that they could recover it. They would stumble blindly on through the new, half-made world, seeking another Moloquin to take them home.

  When Barakal’s star rose again, Moloquin would lie at the foot of its light; he would follow its beams to Heaven. She made him ready. She dragged him away from the stone where he had died, hauling him in through the unfinished ring toward the Great Gateway, and there she laid him down on his back. His body was gross and shapeless; she imagined she could already smell it rotting. Overhead, the crows were gathering, their scythe-shaped shadows flashing over the ground around her. She paused once and looked up at the stones, rising around her like the ribs of a great skeleton, and the power of death overwhelmed her, the omnipotence of death. She bowed her head over Moloquin, her grief too small to matter against the power of death.

  Around the feet of the stones he had raised, she gathered blades of grass, the first green shoots to show themselves in the new spring. She thought of him as a young man, when this place had been only a dream, when he lived in the forest with his people, when he built what other men built. Had he done no more, he would not have been Moloquin, who had called her forth from her selfish and useless and ingrown ways, had called her to a new and higher soul. That lifted her heart, to think of him as he had been—a star in the endless night. She spread the grass over him, telling him good-by, and then she went away and left him for the crows.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2000 by Cecelia Holland

  Cover design by Jamie Keenan

  978-1-5040-0766-5

  This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  EARLY BIRD BOOKS

  FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

  BE THE FIRST TO KNOW ABOUT

  FREE AND DISCOUNTED EBOOKS

  NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY

  EBOOKS BY CECELIA HOLLAND

  FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

  Available wherever ebooks are sold

  Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.

  Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases

  Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.

  Sign up now at

  www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters

  FIND OUT MORE AT

  WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM

  FOLLOW US:

  @openroadmedia and

  Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia