Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  They said, “We are not hungry now, Opa-Moloquin-on.”

  He looked into their faces and saw nothing there, no interest, no passion, not even any anger, only the stupid fear of panicked animals, and he knew he would not get them back this way. And he went on to the next group.

  Bahedyr had come up from the Forest Village, where he lived with his wife and children, and was staying in the roundhouse. Moloquin found him with several other men, throwing a sheep’s bone for sips of beer. When Moloquin said, “We must finish the Gateway. I need help to finish the Gateway,” all the other men shook their heads and crept away, but Bahedyr said, “I shall help you, Moloquin.”

  Like all those who had followed Moloquin into the forest, that Midsummer’s Day long before, he called Moloquin ever by his simple name, undecorated.

  Moloquin went back into the roundhouse, to collect his things to go to the Pillar of the Sky, and now Ladon’s son came to him.

  Tall and pale, the enemy of his youth came before him with gestures of respect, and said, “I am sorry I was gone, Moloquin—I spent the night with my wife in her longhouse.”

  Having lost Shateel, he had married again the next spring.

  Moloquin said, “I do not need you.” His voice was harsh.

  Ladon’s son spread his hands and bowed his head. “I heard that you went to the other men and asked their help.”

  “They refused me. They are frightened fools,”

  “They are surely frightened,” said Ladon’s son. “They are not fools. I will help you.”

  “You.”

  Moloquin laughed. The rage he felt toward all of them bubbled up in him now. “You have never worked at the Pillar of the Sky. What use would you be to me?”

  Ladon’s son lifted his head a little, surprise shining in his eyes. “Perhaps I am not offering much, but it is something—”

  “Not enough,” Moloquin said. “I do not need you, brother. You have failed at everything, but I do not mean to fail. Go.” When Ladon’s son still hesitated, his cheeks red with shame, Moloquin said, harshly, “Go!”

  Ladon’s son turned and walked away, his shoulders stiff. Moloquin watched him, trembling with anger, and as his mind cooled he wondered if his voice had spoken so to Ladon’s son, or Ladon’s voice.

  Therefore only Moloquin, and Bahedyr, and Fergolin and Twig went to the Pillar of the Sky. There was work for them—the shaping of the North Watcher; the clearing away of the broken platform where Ruak had died. As they worked, Moloquin saw, the others lost some of their fear, although Fergolin, most pious of all of them, would not look at the gateways if he could avoid it. Moloquin did the work inside the gateways, he and Bahedyr together, moving Ruak’s decomposing body and dragging off the crushed and jagged logs of the platform.

  As he worked, Moloquin thought about what he must do.

  He could not leave this place. Even now, when many thought it was nearly finished, he knew it was barely begun. And his time was failing him. His youth was already gone; he knew himself a man on the edge of decline, even as he lifted up logs and hauled and shoved them here and there, he knew his strength was mortal. He saw forward to his death, and he saw forward to the finishing of the Pillar of the Sky and he knew that his death would come first.

  Therefore he began to pay more heed to his son, Twig.

  “Barakal,” he called him now, whenever he saw Twig. Barakal, the Promise. Everybody thought it was a sort of joke, because when Moloquin had asked if he would not flee the Pillar of the Sky, Twig had said, “I promise.” It ran deeper than a joke for Moloquin.

  The boy was very young, but already he showed himself his father’s child. He did not run with the boys’ band, but stayed with Fergolin, and studied the Pillar of the Sky. In the few years they had been working here, Fergolin and Twig had recovered much of the lore that had died with Brant. They had used the Watchers to find the point of the midsummer sunrise, so that no longer had the New Village to rely on the Turnings-of- the-Year to keep their time; now, in the evenings, when the four workers rested, Twig sat with Fergolin and listened to the Bear Skull master talk about the stars.

  Moloquin listened also; his mind was full of the pieces of something that he was struggling to fit together, something dark and furious, something even he was afraid of, and as he worked with his thoughts, he felt in the blazing night sky above him the mirror of himself.

  Fergolin said, “There, see? The White Wanderer stands high in the sky, as high as I have ever seen her.”

  There in the west, where the sun had just gone down, the blue-white star hung in the clear vault, pure and holy, the beauty that stirred the heart.

  “She stands near the Gate of Heaven,” Fergolin said. “Perhaps she is waiting for some great chief to enter, or perhaps some crowd of lesser souls. She does not often signal terrible things. She is a quiet, welcoming star.”

  And Twig said, “Which signals evil, Opa-on?”

  “The Red Wanderer, and the Old Wanderer when he enters into certain circles of the sky, especially when he goes backward to reach them, these are grave portents. But now, look, the moon is rising.”

  At that, both the man and the boy leapt up and went running across the Pillar of the Sky. Bahedyr and Moloquin watched them, startled, as Twig went to the West Watcher, and Fergolin to the easternmost of the four great old stones.

  Twig scaled the West Watcher like a squirrel going up a tree. Bahedyr laughed to see it done. Turning to Moloquin, he said, “We are broken sticks compared to that one, Moloquin.”

  “The fire is bright in him,” Moloquin said.

  Fergolin was out of their sight. Moloquin got up and walked around the outside of the circle of the sacred precinct until he could see both Twig, on top of the western stone, and Fergolin, standing by the East Watcher.

  The moon was just appearing, a pale glow in the east. As Twig stood there, poised on top of the stone, Moloquin saw why he had climbed it; now he could see across the gateways to the tip of the other stone, where Fergolin stood, and could use the two points as a line of sight to the horizon. Moloquin turned to watch what they saw.

  Above the distant skyline, a fat pale blob had appeared: the upper limb of the moon. Its point of rising was far to the north of the line of sight of the two Watchers, and Twig and Fergolin left their positions at once, and came together at the edge of the circle and stood talking. Moloquin went to them.

  “You must have the line of sight wrong.”

  Twig looked up at him and smiled, reassuring, or condescending to the ignorant. Fergolin shook his head.

  “No—it is useful. First, this is not the full moon, but its older brother, and it is the rising of the full moon that most concerns us.”

  “Then why watch this one at all?”

  Fergolin’s eyes widened a little; he looked mildly surprised. “As I said, they are brothers.” He smiled, his eyes narrowing, as if at some secret joke. “And we must look, if we would see.”

  At that he shrugged, and raised his eyes to the night sky; the mist was creeping up the horizon from the south, a pale breath of vapors. He turned and pointed to the west.

  “See, the White Wanderer goes to her rest.”

  Indeed, the blazing pure glory was lower in the sky than before, following the sun away.

  Twig stood by his father’s elbow. “Tomorrow she will not climb so high, and the next day even less, and soon she will be gone utterly.”

  He spoke with pride and authority, giving knowledge to the unknowing. Moloquin laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder, pleased with him, proud of him. Then into his mind leapt the memory of Ladon, who had stood thus before his other son, glowing with pride.

  Moloquin pulled his hand away; he turned his back on Barakal. With a last glance up at the sky, now fading into the blank mist, he went away.

  The spring grew warm and rainy. In the fields the women
dug and hoed, put in their seeds and watched them sprout; many of them slept in their gardens, to protect the seedlings from deer and birds.

  Ladon’s son took the men of the New Village away to the river, where they built a sweathouse and sweated themselves.

  In the dark and stifling heat of the sweathouse, Ladon’s son struggled with his soul. Around him were the men of his village, men who had been boys when he was a boy, men who did as he told them, as if he were the chief. But he was not the chief.

  Could he not be the chief? Moloquin had failed. The Pillar of the Sky had mocked them all, destroyed him who strove to conquer it—was Moloquin not proven false, a fool, and dangerous?

  He knew the other men would follow him. He could go among them now, and tell them that he meant to be the chief, and they would follow him; they would cast Moloquin out, and Ladon’s son would at last become what Ladon had intended.

  He thought of the women. The women belonged to Moloquin.

  Or Moloquin belonged to the women, it was unclear to Ladon’s son where that circle began. They had raised him to his place, and they were loyal to him as they had never been to Ladon, stirred up as they had been by the suspicions of Karelia and Tishka; but these women, the women of the New Village, with Grela at their head, did whatever Moloquin told them.

  He sat in the hut with his skin flowing like a river, all the impurities of his body rising to the surface, and the impurity of his mind rose like a froth to the surface.

  The men around him spoke of Moloquin and of the Pillar of the Sky, and some were angry that Moloquin had brought them to such a turn, and some despised themselves for their weakness and cowardice. In the dark- ness of the sweathouse they spoke freely, whatever thought came first to the tongue, and a man who one moment cursed Moloquin for an evil sorcerer spoke in the next moment of the shame of failing his chief.

  Ladon’s son went out of the sweathouse and plunged into the river to cleanse his skin. On the bank of the river, with the other men, he ate ritual herbs and seeds and drank a bitter tea. The sun was still high, but the tea made him sleep.

  The tea made him dream, and it was a horrible dream.

  He found himself again in the old village, during the famine, when his father lay dying. He walked through the middle of the village and saw the People dying, all around him were the dead, so starved their bones thrust up through the skin. They stretched their arms toward him, the dead and the dying alike, and begged him for food. They seized him as he passed through their midst, they dragged him down into their tangle of bones, and they gnawed on his flesh, they consumed him, they devoured him, and he grew weaker, but they grew no stronger; they were dead, and just before the dream ended, he was dead too.

  When he woke, he knew he would not be the chief.

  He got up from his place. The other men were sprawled around him, some in the middle of dreams, twitching and murmuring, and others merely sleeping, their souls elsewhere. Ladon’s son went back to the sweathouse, where his mask, with the others, sat in a circle.

  He knelt down before his mask. He had carved it from a living tree, and put eyes of quartz into it, and painted the lips with red ochre; when Moloquin had given him a string of blue beads, he took the string apart and fixed the beads to the mask like blue hair.

  Now he knelt down before it, and he told it, and through it told his ancestors, that he understood. He had been tested. They had sent him a temptation, a lure, to test him, and he had nearly fallen victim to the trap, but they had also sent him a dream, to help him understand how to be, and he had taken heed. He gave the mask a handful of seeds to eat. Then he went back to the men, and as they woke he talked to them of his dream, his revelation of the right way.

  “We cannot do it by ourselves,” Fergolin said.

  They had cleared away all the debris from around the gateways. They had laid the North Watcher down on its side and with mauls smoothed it and worked it to a symmetry and polish like the uprights of the gateways. Now there was no more work to do save that which they could not do without the help of others.

  “We can try,” Moloquin said.

  They dug holes for posts, set the posts, crossed them together at the top, and hung ropes over them; they looped the ropes around the stone, and while two men pulled, the other two rammed poles under the stone and struggled to pry it up. The stone refused. It lay there without moving and would not obey them.

  All four of them pulled at once on the ropes, with no success, and all four of them pried at the stone with levers, with no success.

  Bahedyr said, “I must go back to my village, Moloquin. If there is nothing to be done here—”

  Moloquin gave him a sharp look, but when he spoke it was not of the struggle here at the Pillar of the Sky.

  He said, “The Gathering will be soon. Fergolin: when?”

  “Within the waxing of the moon,” said Fergolin.

  Bahedyr grunted. Like most of Moloquin’s People he seldom went to the Gathering. He put his hands on his hips. “My wife will bear before the end of the summer. I would be with her when she labors.”

  Moloquin fixed him with a look. “I want you with me at the Gathering.”

  “You are going to the Gathering?”

  Moloquin said, “We are all going.”

  “Why?”

  Moloquin smiled at him, saying nothing, his eyes unblinking. Bahedyr scrubbed his face with his hand.

  “I still must go to the Forest Village.”

  “That fits in very well with me. There is something there I need, and you can bring it back with you. And bring your spear, also.”

  “I will.”

  “Good,” Moloquin said, and went away, back to the work they could not do.

  With a sharp stone and a mallet, Fergolin was pecking a design into the face of the North Watcher. Moloquin sat on the ground nearby watching him, but his thoughts whirled.

  He was beginning to understand what the Pillar of the Sky demanded: the heart and soul of the whole People. When he had raised the first upright, all the people, even the children, had come to help, and they had succeeded, but now those who shirked were bringing everything to ruin, failing everybody, the living and the dead.

  He had to bring them together, draw them to this one purpose, save them from their weakness and stupidity.

  And they were weak and stupid. Nothing in their ordinary little lives could matter as much as the Pillar of the Sky; what they resisted was their own greatness. Anything he did was justified, if it brought them to the task.

  So his thoughts ran, as he sat in the shadow of the Great Gateway, yet his mind would not rest. He had been thinking through this now for a long while, ever since he came back from the Forest Village and found Ruak dead and the rest of them scattered, but still he himself shrank from the work before him. In what he planned, he saw more than Ruak crushed beneath the Pillar of the Sky.

  He would make enemies. There were some among those closest to him, on whom he most relied, who would turn against him.

  Bahedyr he could trust, not because of the quality of the man so much as the quality of the work, which would suit him. Most of the other men would follow where they were led. Wahela would go with him anywhere. Grela would support him. But there were others. He was unsure now of Ladon’s son. Shateel—

  They belonged to him. They were his people, he alone saw the thing whole, while they were lost in their little, daily lives. He would do what he had to do.

  Karelia, with her stories, her hatred of Ladon, her contempt for rigid custom, she would know that this was necessary, this thing he had to do. Ladon himself would cheer it. Ael—

  He no longer cared about Ael. He gave her no thoughts at all, no reverence, nothing of his life to sustain her dead spirit. He hated Ael.

  The steady measure of Fergolin’s mallet ticked in his ears. The sun was moving, turning the shadow of the Gate
way, so that now Moloquin sat in the light again. He raised his eyes to Heaven. They were stupid, his people, they were useless, meaningless, without him to guide them. Whatever he did was justified. He was the heart and soul of his People. He shut his eyes, struggling with the voices that told him otherwise.

  In the evening, when the four men sat around a fire in the workmen’s roundhouse, Wahela came with several other women and brought them food to eat. Wahela sat watching Moloquin eat; she said, almost idly, “Ladon’s son has brought the men back from the river.”

  “Good,” said Moloquin.

  “I see no good in it, if they will not obey you.”

  Moloquin scraped the bowl clean with his fingers and set it down beside him. “We shall go to the Gathering within a few days, you should get ready, you and the other women.”

  She brightened like the sun rising. “We are going to the Gathering?”

  Behind him, Fergolin and Barakal raised their heads and turned to listen.

  “We shall all go,” Moloquin said. “You must take whatever you have that is wonderful—your best clothes, your hair combs of shell, and the beads I gave you.”

  “Oh, I shall,” said Wahela, delighted, and she leapt up and went out of the roundhouse and was away at once to the New Village, full of her news.

  Fergolin drew closer to Moloquin. “You are all going to the Gathering?”

  Moloquin swung his head toward him, made no answer, but only stared.

  “We would prefer to stay here,” Fergolin said. “Twig and I.”

  “Ah?”

  “The full moon will rise while you are at the Gathering.”

  “Oh. Yes.” Moloquin nodded. He leaned toward Bahedyr, who was drinking beer from a tall jug, and the spear-bearer gave him the jug. Ap Min made the beer, down in the Forest Village; there was little of it left. Moloquin drank. He nodded again to Fergolin.

  “Yes. You two stay here.”

  “Thank you.” Fergolin turned and with a smile shared his pleasure with Barakal.