Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  He had dropped the pouch, and the jug of bean broth was still there; Grub dropped to his knees beside them and plunged his hand into the pouch. There was nothing left but a few grains. He wet his fingers and picked up the last of the meal and licked it away. He turned the jug over his open mouth and a few drops fell on his tongue. Slowly, because even such a little amount of meal was too dry to eat easily, he swallowed the bit in his hand. He turned the jug over again and waited patiently until one final drop formed on the lip and fell, and then he went after the boys’ band.

  In the middle of the fields near the forest’s edge, the People had dug a pit and set in it a floor of stones, to thresh their grain on. There were no stones in the ground around the village, so the stones were brought from another place and kept in the roundhouse from year to year. They were hard, flat, bright-colored stones like the ones of which the sampo was made, broken into chunks that could be handled, and set down edge to edge into the ground. The women built fires on the floor and fed them with oak wood; when the fires died down to coals and embers they swept off the ashes, leaving the stone floor clean and very hot.

  The women had been harvesting their grain for several days, gathering the stalks and binding them into bundles. They surrounded the floor in a ring, each with her sheaf of grain, and her children waiting to bring her more, and beat the bundles of stalks on the stone floor.

  This knocked the grain loose. Before long the floor was beginning to disappear under a layer of seeds, and the aroma went up of toasting grain, warm and dry and delicious. When the grains were toasted, the inedible chaff that encased them cracked and fell off by itself, and when the grain was winnowed the chaff blew away, and nothing was left but the sweet and nourishing seed, already cooked a little.

  The women worked ceaselessly at the threshing; as they swayed and swung with their bundles of grain they seemed to be dancing, although women were generally forbidden to dance. The children ran back and forth between their mothers and the piles of harvest grain, taking away the emptied stalks and bringing new bundles, and the older girls now leaned in past their mothers and swept the toasted and threshed grain into baskets.

  They could not all work at once, of course, and the crowds of women waiting for a chance to thresh their harvests gathered a little way away, and there Karelia sat, and told stories.

  Grela, the sister of the headwoman Tishka, worked with the first group of women over the floor, and she could see directly across the floor and beyond the other workers to where Karelia sat. She worked as hard as she could to be done with it, so that she could join the others; she loved hearing Karelia, who knew more stories of Abadon than anyone else.

  Abadon was a favorite of Grela’s, and had been since she was a little girl. Aware as she was of what was expected of her, she herself would never fall to the level of such tricks as Abadon was always playing, but it was a joy nonetheless to hear them done.

  Grela swung the sheaves of wheat in great full strokes, dashing the heads of seeds on the floor, and a simple delight filled her: the rhythmic work satisfied her, and soon she would hear stories. There seemed room for little more happiness in her moment. She stepped back, to let her older daughter sweep a pile of grain into a basket; the inside of the basket was worked with the many-pointed star which was Grela’s own sign. Waiting for room, the mother wiped her face on her forearm and looked across the floor toward Karelia again, wondering what tale she was telling—besides her endless Abadon cycle, Karelia had an abundance of stories of Rael the Birdwoman, and so many other stories that Grela knew no one who had heard them all. Then as she stood there she saw Moloquin coming.

  He was carrying wood down from the forest, wood for the threshing floor; he was stooped under the weight of the sling on his back, and looked like a monstrous animal. Grela glanced to either side of her.

  None other had noticed him. She hesitated, unsure what to do—after all, he came and went through the longhouses; why should he not be allowed here? But there were no other men here. She looked at him again, frowning, her mind struggling with this messiness.

  It was woman’s work, to thresh, and like all their works they preferred it done away from the men. But here was Moloquin, laying down the wood, and in truth the threshing floor would be cold by midafternoon, and would need to be fired again. Grela looked with piercing eyes to see that Moloquin was properly clothed—the first impression of many of the women was that he went about naked, and would leap on the girls. He wore a belt, a cloth drawn through it, down the back, between his legs, up over the front, all properly modest although only little boys wore woven cloth. He was piling the wood up, and no one else seemed to care that he was there. Now he was going away again. He was a fool, everyone said, and she remembered the strange child of old Riskel, with his funny misshapen little face and stubby fingers and stupid speech, whom everyone had loved, who had stayed with his mother until she died and then with her sister until he died, still a boy to them all, although he was full grown.

  That was what Moloquin was. Pleased, Grela slipped him away into the same memory, there with Riskel’s child, and now there was no confusion any more, everything belonged where it was. Everything had happened before. She took a sheaf of wheat from her elder daughter and turned to lash the stone floor with it.

  Grub thought, It isn’t fair.

  He had meant to stay with the boys’ band and avoid the women, but Ladon’s son made that impossible. He got them to herd the swine and the goats together into the lush meadows at the lip of the forest, and then he himself, and all the older boys, stole away down to where Karelia sat in the middle of a great mob. So all the other boys went too, and there Grub was again, in the middle of the women, looking for his mother.

  He saw her at last, from a distance, and dared not go any closer. She was nursing his little brother again, cuddling him, crooning to him, allowing him the whole use of her breast. Grub turned away, his eyes scalded.

  Then he saw Moloquin, coming down from the forest with his load of wood, and his resentment flared up. He thought, It isn’t fair, and went after Moloquin, keeping his distance, staying out of range, but determined to follow him.

  At first there was no place to go. Moloquin put down his wood, and instead of dumping it in a heap, he squatted down and stacked it neatly in crisscross rows. Grub drew a little nearer, watching his hands. Behind him, the crowd around Karelia gave up a great shout of delight, and many whistled and pounded their hands together in applause.

  Moloquin turned his head, looking that way; by chance his interest led him to look straight in Grub’s direction, and for an instant their eyes met. Grub lowered his gaze at once, and his skin crawled uncomfortably. When he looked back, Moloquin was getting up, the sling over his shoulder, moving away toward the woods.

  Grub went after him; he supposed he might find some berries to eat on the way, although everything this close to the threshing floor would long since have been eaten up. He kept his distance from Moloquin, but he kept him well within sight, because although he was a little afraid of Moloquin, he was much more afraid of the forest.

  Moloquin was glad to be back in the forest. At the edge of the trees he broke into a run, and for a while he merely ran among the trees, leaping over fallen branches and brush and slapping the trunks of the oaks and lindens as he passed. He knew that one of the other boys was following him but he paid no heed to that. He ran down to the edge of the river, where the bank overhung the stream, and throwing aside the loincloth Karelia had given him he leapt into the slow-moving water.

  Diving down to the bottom, he groped through the stones and mud, chasing frogs off toward the green depths, and nearly caught a wedge-shaped bug; he liked those for the way they crunched between his teeth, but this one escaped.

  He slithered out onto the riverbank again and walked along the river a little way, picking such berries that he found, eating lily shoots and a few snails he broke out of their shel
ls and washed—snails were always full of dirt. While he lay on his back on the riverbank, he noticed again that the other boy was nearby.

  This was a little fair-haired boy, crouched down in the brush as if he were hiding from Moloquin, and therefore Moloquin said nothing to him.

  Karelia had listened to his dream about the Pillar of the Sky and had said nothing to him about it, but he could see by the flash of her eyes and the little smile she gave him that the dream was important. He liked to think about it whenever he could. The vision of the Pillar of the Sky, completed, its great gateways open to the Sun and huger than any man, gave him the same intense satisfaction as he got from learning new things well. In his mind he saw the enormous stones, he even felt them, their hardness and smoothness, and especially their great weight and strength, that no man could move.

  Nothing so clearly and exactly seen could exist only in his dream. The great gateways were real somewhere, and somehow he would make them be real in the place where they were meant to stand: he, Moloquin.

  Behind him the little boy coughed and rustled the brush and sighed, and his stomach rumbled. He was hungry, with all this wealth of food around him. Moloquin got up and went to his work, looking for wood.

  Grub saw, amazed, that Moloquin ate bits of the forest, and his neck prickled up. He felt deeply uneasy just being beneath the trees, where the sun reached him only in stray tendrils. The thorny and impenetrable underbrush caught at him with its million fingers and he knew that the rustlings and crunchings around him were the sounds of ferocious beasts; he dared not even think about the demons and spirits behind every branch.

  Moloquin belonged here. The forest fed him. The wild chaotic brambles parted to let him through and then closed over to block Grub’s passage. The forest gave Moloquin wood as well; he went straight to an oak tree and gathered up the smaller branches, breaking them to good lengths with chunks of wood.

  He worked like a woman. Grub curled up at the foot of a bushy tree to watch and was amused. Moloquin never paused in his business. His stack of wood grew higher and rounder as the sun ascended. How did he imagine he would get all this back to the village? Grub would have laughed, but he was too hungry, and a little afraid of what Moloquin would do if he found him there.

  When the sun reached the summit of the sky, so that her long fingers touched the floor of the forest, Moloquin stopped in his scurrying and rushing around; he came over toward Grub but seemed not to see him, and climbed up into the tree beside him, up to the high branches.

  There he stayed a long time. Unable to see him now, Grub stopped thinking about Moloquin and instead thought of his mother.

  He knew he should not want to stay with his mother. He knew he was supposed to go with the other boys, to follow Ladon’s son in the boys’ band, to learn the ways of men. In a few years he would enter one of the societies—the Bear Skull, he dearly wanted to be a novice of the Bear Skull, because that was the greatest of all—and carve his mask.

  He should be thinking about that. He should be struggling with the other boys for a place in their midst, and not merely stand waiting at the edge, the last, always the last, always the least. But he wanted his mother. When he thought of his mother nothing else mattered except that he was far away from her, and tears welled into his eyes.

  Something hard bounced off his knee. He looked around, startled, and something small and hard struck the tip of his nose and sailed away into the brush. He looked up.

  There, high above his head, Moloquin sat among the green leaves of the tree, one knee crooked over a branch. Grub shivered, drawing back—surrounded by the sunlit green, Moloquin looked like a demon of the wood. As he stared upward, Moloquin put something small and red into his mouth and spat out another hard pit that fell down through the air and plopped into Grub’s lap.

  Grub leapt up, furious and ashamed. “I hate you,” he shouted, and cast about him for stones to throw, but Moloquin was well out of reach of his arm. Coolly the boy in the treetop laughed down at him, picking the fruit from the top of the tree and eating it. Grub howled with rage. He bounced up and down below the tree, but Moloquin was not cowed at all.

  The pile of firewood was still there in the clearing. Grub ran to it and threw the branches around, strewing them all over the open ground, but this also was useless against Moloquin, who laughed at him all the while. Grub ran away, back toward the village, furious.

  As he neared the margin of the forest, his steps slowed. Out there the women were working, the other boys were herding the goats and swine, there was no place for him. He imagined the village as a great net, and through it he, Grub, fell like a little fish between the lines.

  He was hungry. He wished he could do what Moloquin did and eat whatever he found. He kicked at the ground around him, turning over rotten sticks and tearing up bits of vine and brush, but he found nothing to eat, only a few green berries, a fat horrible worm, and some mushrooms.

  At last he came on a plant that he had seen Moloquin eat. The thin white stalks were crunchy and sweet; they burned his tongue a little, but they felt good in his stomach. Feeling better, he went back into the forest to find Moloquin again, and see what else he ate.

  In the afternoon Karelia stopped telling stories; her throat was sore and her tongue stiff. The people clamored and begged and caught at her clothes to keep her there but she rose up out of their midst and went away, going toward the threshing floor; when she looked back, someone else had sat down on the stump where the storyteller sat and was trying to spin words.

  Karelia walked around a while, stretching her aging limbs. She stood by the threshing floor and watched as the women beat the sheaves of grain until the seeds flew; when they lay on the hot floor and the chaff cracked, the seeds sometimes bounced high, like grasshoppers. The smell was delicious. It was hard not to reach out and take a handful of the toasted seeds lying on the threshing floor. Karelia sat down to watch a while longer. There was something comforting and fortifying in the sight of this work, done since time began, since the People began, since Rael the Birdwoman brought them knowledge of seeds. The mothers, whose gardens they were, stood tall and gracefully swaying all around the edge of the threshing floor, and when they bent to strike the grain on the stone they seemed like the growing grain itself, that bent and swayed in the wind. Between them their daughters pressed forward, their hands ready with baskets and with rakes and sweeps of wood to scoop the threshed grain away; when their mothers rose up, these girls pushed forward, and so there was an intense unceasing rhythm to their work, a completeness that left no room for trouble.

  Karelia drifted away, higher on the slope, toward the edge of the forest, and there she saw the boys’ band which had brought out the swine from the village to forage under the oak trees; the boys sat in a row on the slope, looking down toward the village, a row of solemn little men. She feinted toward them, as if she would walk through their midst, and they shrank back from her; with a laugh she went on her way.

  She was thinking of Moloquin’s dream. He had told it to her in a rush of excited words, still troublesome to him although he learned how to speak better every day, and she had made him tell it twice, to be sure she heard everything, although she had said nothing to him about it. There was really nothing she could say. The dream of the stone gates was obvious in its potency and force. It was a message from the Overworld, first to him, to give him his destiny, but also to her, to Karelia, because she had taken him in: the dream showed her what creature Moloquin was.

  Not an ordinary child. Around him there appeared now, to her whose eyes had been schooled, showers of light, and images of greatness—trees, stars, and standing stones. She began to see details of his power, whenever she placed her mind in the service of the Overworld, and carefully she noted these, to give to him when the moment came.

  The others knew nothing of this. To the women, he was still Ael’s son, and they despised him for his mother’s sake.
To the men, she hoped, he was just another boy.

  What he was to Ladon, she could only guess. She hoped he saw the boy as harmless; she hoped he would forget him. Her heart knew better than that. Her heart warned her ever against Ladon.

  She saw her son coming through the forest, carrying firewood on his back, and she smiled, pleased with him. The work would degrade him in the eyes of the village but in Karelia’s eyes it made him stronger. Although now he was bent over double under the weight of the wood, yet she knew one day he would stand in the gateway between Heaven and earth. Now he carried firewood, but one day he would bear his People on his shoulders, and when he did, he would make dust of Ladon and his power.

  She spoke of this to no one. Sometimes she herself, wakening at night or sitting by the fire, wondered if her expectations of him were not merely the wraiths of an old woman’s declining soul. At such times she needed only to look at him to know better.

  The other children crept closer to her hearth, sat around outside the ring of stones that marked the edge of her living space, and listened to her stories. She told how the red deer flew up close to the Sun and caught fire in its antlers to take to the People. But as the deer leapt toward the earth, a bit of the fire fell out of the bowl of its antlers and rolled down its back, and that was why on the back of the red deer there was a long black burn mark ever after.

  She taught him all the old rites for dealing with fire, rites that the People no longer used very often, preferring to take a bit of fire from a living hearth to start a new one rather than cause the flame to be born of cold and death. He listened to her with his eyes wide, hearing everything. Sometimes she asked him to repeat a story to her, and he did so, reciting each word as she had told it to him, repeating the pitch and force of her voice, even the gestures of her hands.

  Every day he gathered wood for the fires that heated the threshing floor, and he alone did this, all the others seeing that he did so well there was no need for any other to do the tedious work. Then on the eighteenth day, the threshing was done.