Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  The old women saw her coming and raised their heads, one by one—grizzled heads, ugly old faces, unfit for power, and yet they had so much power. Wahela went in among them and sank down on her knees.

  She turned to Grela; without any preliminary, she said, “I want that which your son has found, in the ashes of the old roundhouse.”

  Grela’s face widened with surprise. She looked from the woman on her left to the one on her right and faced Wahela again.

  She said, “Go away, foolish woman. Nothing you say means much to us, you are full of wind.”

  Wahela said, “I see you are ignorant of everything as usual. Now, heed me. Your son found something in the old roundhouse—something of such a power that it will burn his bones to black dust and curdle up his soul unless he puts it into the hands of one whose power is capable of the charm. Now, I charge you with this, old woman—find those charms for me, and bring them to me, or else all evil will fall on you and I shall do nothing to turn it aside from you.”

  She remained where she was a moment, glaring around at the old women; at last she got up, and straight and slim as a birch tree, she walked away through the village.

  Grela watched her go. Grela lowered her head, her gaze on the sampo, and put out her hand to turn the wheel around.

  Sam-po, sam-po

  La li la la li li la

  All must rise and all must fall

  La li la la la la li la

  Sam-po, sam-po

  “What is this?” asked one of the other women.

  Grela shrugged. She watched the mill turn around and around, the meal dribbling from its edges, and wished she had a knife, and the courage to thrust it into Wahela’s heart.

  She said, “The Mill turns, that’s all. I must go and find my son.”

  “Grela! You will not do that woman’s bidding?”

  Struggling up to her feet, the headwoman turned and scowled around her at her companions around the mill. She said, “Do not be fools! Let the idle catch themselves in their own nets. I shall come back.”

  Moloquin stroked his hand over the stone, warm from the sun, and kneeling down he looked along the edge. Ruak and Fergolin watched him impatiently, and when he straightened and nodded they broke into wide smiles, warm as the sun.

  “You must put the knob on this end,” Moloquin said. “The other end is uneven.”

  He stood a moment with his hand on the stone, but his gaze went to the other stone, standing just beyond the embankment, its head raised to the sky. He itched to throw this stone up beside it, to begin the crucial work of raising the beam up to the top of the gateway; it was maddening that everything went so slowly. Here these two men stood smiling at him because he had said this stone was ready to raise up into its place, as if their work ended with that, when it had just begun, and the days were slipping by—the days went by like the clouds that scudded past the top of the standing stone, the time bleeding away.

  He said, “The hole isn’t quite dug out yet. Come, let us see how deep it is.”

  Ruak said, “I will wait here.” He sat down on the end of the stone in the grass.

  “Come,” Moloquin said, and walked away through the gap in the embankment, Fergolin on his heels.

  The other men were digging up the chalk, clearing out the hole and piling the rubble beside it. Moloquin carried his rope on his shoulder and now he took it down again, leaned down over the edge of the hole, and lowered the end of the rope to the bottom.

  Ruak came up, grumbling, slapping his palms on his thighs. He looked up into the sky, squinting at the bright sunlight.

  “Soon will be the Great Gathering. I have a lust to be there, I cannot wait until the sun rises over the stone.”

  Moloquin, kneeling by the hole, said, “We have much to do here.”

  “Yet I mean to go to the Gathering,” said Ruak.

  Moloquin, straightened, holding the rope bunched in his fist. He said, “How can you want to go to that place, where all the stones had been raised for generations, when you can be raising this one? Here.”

  He went back to the new stone, lying in the high grass outside the bank. The other stones were waiting a little way away, still rough and un-worked; beside this stone like a shadow was a patch of crushed grass and muck that showed where it had lain before they rolled it over to work the other side. Moloquin measured it off again with his rope. He did this many times a day; the other men always smiled to see it, and he knew they thought him mad, but the exact sizes of the stones had begun to obsess him. At night sometimes he dreamt of measuring the stones. Now he took a piece of charcoal from his belt and made a mark on the stone.

  “This much of it will go into the hole. This line here—” with the charcoal he drew a line all the way across the stone—“this marks where the stone will rise above the earth, and this—”

  He measured with his rope and drew another line, one hand’s breadth from the top. “This is where the top of the stone must be. When you chop away the stone to make the knob, chop it down to this line.”

  Ruak grunted. “What difference does it make?”

  Moloquin ignored him. He had gotten used to Ruak’s challenging everything he did.

  With his maul, Fergolin set to work at the end of the stone, shaping the knob, and Ruak fell in beside him. Moloquin went off to his favorite place, just outside the embankment, where he could draw in the dust. But when he came there, Wahela was there.

  She sat cross-legged in the grass, her back to the embankment, and she seemed almost asleep, her limbs splayed comfortably in the sunlight, her head back and her hair loose around her all warmed with the sunlight, but he saw the glint of her eyes when he approached, and knew she was awake, alert as a wild bird, and wanted something. He sat down beside her and she turned to face him.

  “I have told you many times that Grela is wicked, and now perhaps you will believe me.”

  He snorted. “I wish you would not bring me these little quarrels of yours. I have much to do here.”

  He leaned forward and traced circles in the dust and drew lines through them, this way and that, examining the way the lines met at the center. Wahela leaned forward and with her hand wiped the dust blank again.

  “Will you not listen to me? Moloquin, sometimes I think this place has robbed you of your wits.”

  He smoothed the dust with his palm. “Tell me, then.”

  “Grela hates us. She wants us destroyed, and now she has the power to do so.”

  At that Moloquin threw his head back and laughed, and his laughter boomed up toward Heaven; all the men turned to see what drew forth this unaccustomed mirth from him. He faced Wahela again, his hand protecting the dust from her—as he turned, he put his body between her and the place in the dust where he drew.

  “Now,” he said, “tell me more, Wahela.”

  “She has some magic, I am telling you, magic like your axe. Her boy found it in the old roundhouse. She will use it to bring demons on us, because she hates us.”

  As she spoke, her eyes shone; she lifted her hands and tossed her hair back. She was beautiful, he loved to look at her with her passionate beauty, and every look reminded him of the times when she gave her beauty to him to enjoy; looking at her always made him lusty. Now she leaned toward him, her gaze fixed on his, as if she could draw forth his soul through his eyes, and she said, “I want that magic, Moloquin. Make her give it to me.”

  He laughed; he put his hands on her arms and pulled her toward him, smelling the sun in her hair and on her skin, feeling the soft glide of her skin against his.

  She thrust at him with both hands. “Are you listening to me?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “You say that Grela has found the ornaments that Harus Kum gave to Ladon.”

  “I want them,” she cried, and beat with her fists on her thighs. “They should be mine—as you have your axe, and I
am your woman, so I ought to have the things that Grela has!”

  He sat watching her, his hands still on her, smiling at her passion. She flung back her long black hair with one hand, and her eyes flashed at him.

  “They ought to be mine!”

  “They brought Ladon no good,” Moloquin said. “They brought no good to anyone. If you wish Grela such ill, then leave them with her, they will surely bring her unhappiness.” He did not tell her that the ornaments were the price of the two boys Harus Kum had dragged away into slavery.

  “Moloquin.” She leaned toward him, hissing between her teeth. “I want them. Make her give them to me, or I will go back to the forest.”

  He smiled at her, enjoying her wild temper. “Are you threatening me? Go, then—go, never come to me again, Wahela.”

  She scowled at him, her face flaming, and he laughed at her; he knew as well as she that without him she had nothing, not even a garden. He took her by the arms and drew her close to him, and he kissed her mouth.

  “Tonight,” he said softly, “we shall lie together, you and I, and you can have your temper out of me then. Now, listen to me—the things that Grela has will bring her no good. Leave off quarrelling with her over them. Let things work as they will.”

  Bitterly she said, “You care nothing for me. I have given you my whole life, and you will not even grant me this one small wish.”

  “No,” he said, “I will not. Now, go and let me do my work.”

  She spat at him. Getting up, she walked away toward the New Village, her back very straight, and her skirts gathered up in her hands. Moloquin watched her go; he told himself that by nightfall she would forget that she was angry with him. He told himself he was right not to marry her. Bending over the dust, he drew his circles in the dirt with his forefinger.

  Moloquin went down from the Pillar of the Sky in the late afternoon, when the day was fat and full and warm; he went into the New Village, to the sampo, and there he squatted down on his heels behind the circle of old women.

  At first they paid no heed to him. No chief had ever come to them before; always in the past they had been summoned here and there, to answer a chief’s questions and to receive his orders and his anger at their failures. Moloquin was unlike other chiefs. There were times when Grela thought he was no chief at all, and as she sat there, turning the millwheel, talking over the gossip of the village (there had been a birth in the night, the new child’s ancestry had to be fully discussed, to make her name, her connections and her duties known), she became angry with him for his ambiguities.

  She knew why he was there. The night before, she had taken from her son Sickle a great heap of glossy red-yellow ornaments, beautiful and glowing, and she had hidden them away outside the village, afraid to bring such potent stuff inside the fence. She would have liked to talk this over with the other women but she was afraid even to mention the treasure, afraid of its magic, afraid of those who wanted its magic. Now, her thoughts knotted, she turned angrily toward Moloquin and said, “Well? What have you to say to us?”

  He squatted there like a boy from the boys’ band, his quick dark eyes like beams of light. He studied her a moment, and she did not look away; but she felt his power, and that too irritated her.

  At last he said, “Do you think I am here to speak to you, Ana-Grela-el? What knowledge can I offer you who sits at the foot of the Mill all day long? I am here to listen.”

  The women turned toward him; they turned their backs to the sampo to face him; they drew up their shawls over their heads and faced him, seven old women, each so like the next that they could have been one creature. Then Grela said, “What are we to say to one as potent as you, Opa-Moloquin-on, who will not bow even to Heaven?”

  He said, “I am waiting to hear it.”

  “Pagh! Go listen to your woman, Wahela!”

  “I have listened to Wahela. Now I have come to listen to you, Ana-Grela.”

  “Hah.” Grela frowned at him. The thought of the treasure pressed on her mind, yet she could not free her tongue to speak of it, especially to him. He was a man, and a chief, set apart from women; she had no common ground with him. Still, she remembered how he had sat beside Karelia when the old story woman joined the circle at the sampo, and how he had listened then. He had not changed; he still spoke more like a child among women than a chief among men, and this understanding loosened her tongue, although even now she could not speak of the treasure.

  “It is Wahela,” she cried, and flung back her shawl. Her anger spilled from her like water overflowing a jar. “She comes among us as if she had some formidable power, and yet what has she? Is she not merely a woman like the rest of us? And you! It is your doing that she is as she is. You have taken her to wife and yet not to wife, none knows who she is to you save you yourself.”

  He said, “Abadon has many lovers, and marries none.”

  “What! Do you dare compare yourself to Abadon, who walks among the stars?”

  “I compare Abadon with me, who walks in the world. Have you seen my stones at the Pillar of the Sky?”

  Grela was still mulling over the mention of Abadon, who did seem in many ways like Moloquin. Reluctantly, she said, “I have seen your work, Opa-Moloquin-on.”

  “That is my answer. Let any who doubt my devotion go there and see: no man is more reverent than I toward the order of Heaven and earth.” He cast his gaze around the circle of the old women, their faces pouched and seamed and riven with age. “I care for you above all things. At the Pillar of the Sky I am raising you to glory. If I fail you in small ways, fix your minds on the greater.”

  Now Grela said, “What of the treasure the boys found in Ladon’s house?”

  He shook his head. “The treasure matters nothing to me.”

  That impressed her. She studied his face a while longer and turned her eyes toward the women around her and found them all watching her, waiting for her to go on.

  Cautiously she said, “The boys found it in Ladon’s house.”

  He nodded his head once. He did not seem much interested in the matter, and that emboldened her; she knew he would tell her the truth.

  “It brought much evil on us,” she said. “It is full of magic.”

  Moloquin shook his head. “It has no power of its own. Whoever understands the lore, he has the power, and none here has the lore save me.” He got to his feet, and with one hand he saluted them. “Keep faith with me,” he said, “and I will keep faith with you.” Saying no more, he walked away through the village, and all heads turned to watch him go.

  Grela sank down in her place. The other women bubbled over with quick talk, excited, exclaiming over the minutest details of his appearance and the lightest inflection of his words. By day’s end, the whole village would have witness of Moloquin’s sitting among the women. Grela drew her shawl around her and turned her gaze inward.

  The treasure lay only a few paces away from where she sat, outside the brush fence in a hole in the ground, covered with grass. What Moloquin had said lightened her mind somewhat. For all the glossy beauty of the stuff, the rings and belt were only charms, decorations, vessels of power, not important in themselves.

  If they had been magical, surely he would have wanted them.

  Wahela wanted them. Grela drew her shawl closer around her, thinking with anger of Wahela. Moloquin had shunted aside her complaints, he had made light of Grela’s own power, which was to keep the order of things among the women.

  Smooth and sleek and glowing, the treasure of Ladon. Even now, buried away in the grass outside the village, it fascinated her; her feet itched to carry her there, her fingers yearned to touch, to lift, to wear the charms on her own body.

  Then it did have a power of its own. He was lying to her.

  She gnawed her lip. She wanted to believe him—that was his gift; when he spoke to her, she believed whatever he said. She watched the sa
mpo turn, her thoughts inward and full of doubt. When she had been only Tishka’s sister, the work of the headwomen had seemed so easy— they sat here, they heard all things, they conformed all things to the rule of Heaven. Now that she sat here, the rule of Heaven itself was veiled in mysteries. What was she supposed to do?

  Evil, the treasure, evil and potent, whatever Moloquin said.

  Yet that made no sense to her, because if the treasure had so much value, then he would want it for himself, and he seemed indifferent to it. What had he said?—that the charms themselves were empty—that the power lay in him who had the lore.

  Only Moloquin had the lore.

  She sat there, rocking back and forth as she thought, turning the mill with her hand. The other women had threshed out all their opinions about Moloquin. Their speech now turned to other things—to babies, to gardens, to weaving, to the thousand small crafts that bound the world in its course. Yet Grela still crouched inside her shawl and could not free her mind of the treasure.

  Sam-po, sam-po

  La li la li la la li la

  The Mill turns forward, never backward

  The Mill returns ever where it was before

  La li la la li li la

  Sam-po, sam-po

  Grela covered her face with her shawl.

  In the afternoon the runner came from Turnings-of-the-Year, to bid them all come to the Great Gathering. The women of the village had been expecting it—their gardens kept time for them as well as the heavens kept time for the men—and they went at once into the longhouses, to make ready for the journey.

  Wahela also went into the longhouse, and there she packed up her blankets, her clothes, and the things her children would need. The women of her circle helped her, fluttering around her like butterflies around a blossom, and when everything was packed up and ready, she took her little son Twig, who was Moloquin’s son, and she walked away to the Pillar of the Sky.