Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  A light rain was beginning to fall. The other men stood around with their heads lowered, their eyes glaring, and Ruak came forward, his mouth open. Moloquin raised one hand to quiet him. “Now, we have to raise the other end. We shall need sticks, poles—be ready to stick the rollers underneath.”

  The men raised up such a groan that the watchers on the bank burst into laughter. Moloquin made each one take a tool, and they gathered around the top end of the stone, where the knob was.

  Again it was as Ruak had predicted. They could not budge the stone, not even a little. They laid the ends of their sticks under it and pried and cursed and hung their weight on it; they did this separately and all together, but the stone would not rise up.

  Then from the bank the women came, one by one, casting down their gardening tools, and they added their weight and strength to the strength of the men, and they hauled and hauled. The rain fell all around them, trickling down off the smooth surface of the stone and pebbling the faces of the workers.

  They tried once, and failed. Many slumped down to sit on the grass, dispirited, but Moloquin went around and urged them up again, and again they strove, and again they failed.

  More and more people were appearing from the New Village, and as they came they joined the workmen. The rain was coming down more heavily, and their feet slipped in the grass. Moloquin stood watching from one side as they struggled, and when they had failed again, he went in among them took the poles they used, and arranged the men so that there were the same number on each of the poles. Under the center of each pole he put chunks of chalk and bits of broken logs, so that the tip of the pole was beneath the stone, and the end where the men worked thrust high into the air, and the center of the pole rested on the piles of debris, and then he stood back and called to them all to pull down together.

  They hauled down on the poles, and from behind Moloquin a little boy cried out, “It moved! It moved!”

  The People began to laugh and shout; they dropped the poles and ran around laughing, leaping on the stone and banging it with their fists. When Moloquin shouted to them to get back to the work, they fell on the poles like wolves on a dying deer, and heaved.

  The stone did move. It moved only a little, just enough for the children to wedge logs underneath, but when they strained again at the poles, it moved another little bit, and again they could push logs and earth under it, to keep the space they had won. With the rain sluicing down their faces, they lifted the stone up steadily, bit by bit, until at nightfall, when they had to stop, the great stone hung with its foot over the hole, its head as high above the ground as a child’s, its body braced up with earth and sticks and chalk.

  Singing, the women and the children marched away toward the village, and most of the men followed them. The men of Shateel’s Village wandered off toward their roundhouse, on the far side of the Pillar of the Sky. Fergolin could smell food cooking, and his belly was flat with hunger; he went around in the deepening twilight, gathering up tools and stacking them against the bank.

  He thought he was alone. But when he came around the bank, he came on Moloquin, squatting in the mud, tracing in the mud with his finger.

  Fergolin almost spoke to him. He gathered words in his mind to say, ordinary words such as one man might say to another merely to narrow the space between them, but in the end he said nothing. Moloquin was busy, drawing in the mud; whatever Fergolin said to him would be only an annoyance to him. Fergolin went away, toward the New Village, toward the society of men he knew.

  In the morning, in the rain, they went to work again. The women did not go to their gardens, nor the boys to the games and errands of the boys’ band; the littlest children ran to help in the raising of the stone.

  All morning they struggled and strove with their poles and logs and baskets of earth, fighting the stone up a little higher, a little higher, until it seemed poised above the hole, ready to slip down the sloping side. Moloquin was everywhere, running all around the stone, shouting orders, racing to help where he thought they could not hold. The rain eased a little. Near noon, as they braced up the stone, now high as a man above the ground, the monster slipped a little.

  “It goes! It goes!” Screaming, flinging their tools aside, the whole crew dodged back away from the stone.

  It hung there, precarious on its broad footing of dirt and wood, its head stuck up into the air, its foot reaching down into the hole, and everyone thought he could see it wobble. Moloquin dashed to the bank and ran back with coils of rope.

  “Fergolin! Ruak, Hems, Bahedyr—” he flung a heavy mass of rope into Ruak’s arms, and they swung the ends up and over the stone, one rope to the right, one to the left. As they did so, the stone slipped again.

  All the People screamed. The men on the ropes strained back to hold the great stone still, while it wobbled back and forth on its wedge of earth, and Moloquin, still running, gathered up the poles and pressed them into the hands of those people standing idle, and running to the stone he put the tip of a pole against it and pushed. As he did so, all of a sudden, the sun came out.

  In the warmth and light the people sighed, lifted their faces and spread out their arms to the sun. Moloquin shouted to them to push the stone. He gathered up as many men as he could, and got them three and four to a pole, put the tips of the poles against the stone and heaved, and the stone slipped again, crunching on the earth, and stopped. The men on the ropes leaned away, yelling in their excitement, hardly knowing what they were doing; the men with the poles flung their weight against them and thrust, but the stone seemed to have reached its balance, and it would not do as they wished. Then all at once, it roared downward, skidding over the sloping edge of its hole, slamming butt first into the bottom of the hole with a thud that shook the ground, and swayed upright, the ropes whipping out of the hands of the men.

  Slow-bending like a great old tree in the wind, the stone swayed solemnly back and forth, and Moloquin howled. Snatching up a shovel, he dashed forward, into the shadow of the stone as it wobbled and tipped, and began to scoop the clumped dirt into the hole.

  Only the chalk close around its foot held the stone upright. As Moloquin piled the dirt in around it the stone swayed above him, leaning over him, ready to crush him. On the grass around him, Fergolin started forward to help, and the shadow of the stone fell on him and he shrank back. Moloquin cried, “Help me!” His arms worked in a frantic rhythm. Fergolin plunged forward to his side, dropped to his knees, and with his hands began to shove the heaped earth into the hole.

  As if they wakened suddenly from a daze, now the other men rushed in around the foot of the stone. They flung all they could find into the hole, to steady the stone, and the great swaying upright slowly found its roots and was still. They backed away from it, looking up at it, and a shout left their throats. Turning to one another, they banged each other on the backs, shouted their own praises, flung out their chests, and marched around the stone in triumph. Moloquin went away a little, alone, and stood there looking at it.

  Fergolin went up to him, and said, “It is magnificent.”

  “It is only the first, Fergolin-on,” Moloquin said. “And the hard part is yet to come.”

  He clapped Fergolin on the shoulder, half a blow, half a caress and went down toward the gap in the embankment. The other men were dancing around the stone they had raised; they had forgotten how they had cursed the stone and Moloquin together while the great brute still lay in the grass. Fergolin smiled to himself. The men were malleable and soft, much softer than the stone. Under the maul of Moloquin’s will, what could they not do? And praise themselves full well afterwards. Fergolin went after Moloquin, out to the next stone, and taking up his tool he set to work to smooth it into shape.

  In the late spring, while the men were digging the hole for the next stone and the women were tending their gardens, a boy went to play in the ashes of Ladon’s roundhouse, down by the river.

/>   Usually the People avoided this place, because they felt Ladon’s malevolent spirit lingered there; although Ladon’s son had dug the bones out of the ruins and taken them away to one of the old tombs on the far side of the river, everyone remembered that Ladon’s body had not been brought to rest in the Pillar of the Sky, where his spirit might be lifted up at once to join the rest of the dead, and so they suspected their dead chief might remain where he had died, waiting for a chance at revenge.

  The boys of the boys’ band shunned the place also, because their parents did, but one boy was adventuresome, and at the height of the day, in the full blast of the sun, he went down to the great scar on the riverbank, the place of ashes and char, and began to turn over the lumps of half- burned wood. At once he found some small bowls of clay, shrunken and cracked and hard from the heat, and that spurred him on; he circled around and around the immense flat bed of fire-ruin, and found a stone knife.

  Excited, he ran back up the slope, to where the boys’ band was herding the goats of the New Village to pasture, and he showed the other boys what he had found. The leader of the boys’ band was Grela’s son, whose boy’s-name was Sickle because he was so thin his bones looked sharp enough to cut, and he led the others in a wild rush down to the old burned-out roundhouse.

  Some of the trunks that had held up the roof had not burned down all the way, and their stumps jutted up from the black blowing ash. There were holes hidden under the debris, and bits of wood that caught the boys’ feet and tripped them. As the boys prowled around, the wind suddenly lifted up a whirl of grey ash and carried it away toward the river, and the little boys screamed that Ladon was walking the ruin, and they fled. At that, many of the older boys lost their enthusiasm and announced loudly that there was nothing here anyway and they too drifted off.

  The boy who had found the stone knife remained; Sickle remained, and a few others. They crisscrossed the blackened circle, kicking at the ground and turning over lumps of rain-soaked ash. Then the boy who had found the stone knife saw something gleaming in the dirt.

  He stooped and pried it loose: a lump of shining stuff, like a rock. Not a rock. Looking around him, he saw the other boys distracted, heeding only their own searching, and he hid the shining thing in the pouch on his belt and turned over the ashes with his hands, and quickly he uncovered more of the same stuff. Some the fire had warped. Some kept its shape: links of sleek red-yellow disks and curved forms.

  He tried to put it all into his little pouch and could not. He thought of hiding it there and coming back again, but the whirling column of ash had frightened him too, and he was loath to return here again, once he had gone. He folded the treasure he had found into the front of his loincloth and tried to walk casually away, as if he had lost interest in the place.

  Sickle saw him at once and trailed suspiciously after him a few steps; the littler boy panicked and burst into a run, and as he ran, he dropped the shining treasure behind him. Sickle let out a yell and gathered up all he could. He knew immediately what they were; he sat down where he was and put the curved bracelets on his ankles and on his wrists, and he hung the belt around his middle, and strutting and flinging his arms around he went to find the rest of the boys’ band and show off his delights.

  Wahela’s son Laughter ran with the boys’ band, although they were cautious with him and often excluded him because his mother was not really of their village. When he saw what they had found in the burned-out roundhouse, he went straight to the New Village where his mother sat in the midst of other women.

  She had not planted this year, not at the Forest Village, nor here at the New Village; she had decided that Moloquin would take care of her, and so she had no need to work. Therefore she had nothing to do all day but sit in the sun and play with her children. Some of the younger women usually joined her with their weaving and their wool-plucking, but the older women, sitting around the sampo, refused her company and would not let her sit with them.

  Chief among these rivals was Grela. Tishka had died in the Famine, and Grela had become headwoman in her place, which had brought a great change on her. Before, she had been talkative and light-minded, but now she felt the weight of the whole People on her back, and everything she did she examined closely to be sure that it was a good example for the others to follow. Wahela was her special enemy. Wahela did nothing that Grela wanted others to imitate. No one knew exactly how she stood with Moloquin, except what was obvious—that they slept together and she had borne him a little boy, yet it was Shateel who was his wife. Also, he fed Wahela, instead of the other way around, which all the women considered a great scandal.

  So Wahela sat with her circle, the young women who resented the power of their elders, and Grela sat around the sampo with the elders, and they made gossip like wicked nets to throw at one another, and throughout the whole village the overriding question was who sat with Wahela and who sat with Grela.

  Now Wahela sat in the sun, with her hands idle in her lap; her baby son played in the dirt nearby with a pile of little bones, threading them on and off a cord. The other young women were busy with their crafts. As they worked they talked of how ugly and old the headwomen were, but Wahela was tired of that; words had lost their power to amuse her. Then her son Laughter came to her.

  He said, “Ana-el, Sickle and the other boys have found something in the old roundhouse.”

  “What were they doing there?” One of the other women raised her head. “Ladon walks there—he will eat them certainly.”

  Wahela took her son by the arms and made him stand before her; restlessly she fussed with him, dusting him off, straightening his loincloth, patting his tangled hair flat. Done with her grooming, she reached up under his loincloth and gave his male part a tug, and he yelped and clutched his groin. The other women laughed at him.

  “Ana,” he said again, “they found something wonderful.”

  Wahela turned to the other women. “What could be wonderful about that place? It is a place of shame.”

  They nodded, agreeing with her, smiling at her—Wahela expected immediate agreement in all things from her circle. The little boy shrugged his shoulders.

  “I think I will go and tell Moloquin then,” he said, loudly.

  At that Wahela straightened up, her black brows flattening into an angry frown. “What is this? There is nothing you can tell Moloquin you cannot tell to me.”

  “I told you,” her boy said, swinging his linked hands back and forth; his voice was a taunting singsong. “You would not listen to me.”

  “Tell me again.”

  “I told you.” Laughter twisted his whole body back and forth, enjoying the attention of his mother.

  “Tell me again, little worm, or I will turn your hide to stripes.”

  The other women giggled. Laughter sidled away.

  “I think I will go and tell Moloquin!”

  Wahela lunged at him and got him by the ankle. “Come here, and let me warm my hand on your backside, impudent one.”

  “No,” he cried, as she dragged him in toward her lap. “No, no, I will tell.”

  She pulled him bodily into her lap, as if he were a baby, and held him tight. She put a loud kiss on his forehead. “Then tell me. Sishka, give me some of that honey-cake for my boy here.”

  Sishka gave her a sticky hard cake of honey and ground nuts, and she broke it in half and gave one half to Laughter on her lap. The other half she gave to the little boy who sat in the dust behind her, threading goat’s bones onto a cord.

  “Now,” she said, comfortably, “tell me.”

  “Shining things,” Laughter said, his mouth stuffed. “Sickle has them now. He wears them, there is a belt, and some bracelets and anklets.”

  “Pooh,” said Wahela. “Just some men’s pretties.”

  “No,” Laughter cried. “It is magic—it is the same as Moloquin’s great axe—that stuff!”

 
At that Wahela lost her easy ways. She turned on her son as if he were a little bird and she a hunting snake, and she fixed him with her eyes. “What did you say?”

  Laughter swallowed the last of the cake. “I said—Sickle and the other boys found some things in the old roundhouse, things made of the magic stuff, like Moloquin’s axe.”

  “Hah.” Wahela sat still, her head turned, her gaze directed nowhere.

  “It’s true!”

  “I believe you,” she said, absently.

  She remembered, now, that at the Great Gathering where Moloquin chopped down the chiefs’ platform and called his People away into the forest, Ladon had worn wonderful ornaments. Until now she had not connected the beauty and mystery of these ornaments with the great axe with which Moloquin destroyed the power of the chiefs. They must have lain hidden away in the roundhouse, all this time, waiting. She got to her feet.

  “Where are you going?” the other women asked her.

  She waved to them; she waved away Laughter when he would have followed her, and she went down through the village, toward the sampo.

  The New Village was shaped much the same as the old one had been. It stood on a rise close by the Pillar of the Sky, with the gardens all on the well-drained slopes with their light soils; there was a little pond in a hollow of the hillside that the People used for water. The village faced east, as all villages did; where before there had been four longhouses, now there were only two, because so many people had died in the Famine.

  The roundhouse was small, only two turnings of posts, and had no yard; the men were always busy with the Pillar of the Sky, and Moloquin was never at this roundhouse. Ladon’s son lived there, and they stored food in it, but it was not the same as the roundhouses of other villages; it had no air of power and beauty about it, it was only a little round building where they kept tools and food, and where the women could go when they wanted to talk to Ladon’s son.

  The real center of the New Village was the sampo, which the women had dragged reverently up the long slope from the old village and set down between the two doors of the longhouses. There the headwomen sat, grinding the day’s grain, and grinding out the news of the village. There Wahela bent her steps, her mind full of what her son had told her.