Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  As she watched, it climbed slowly into the sky, and the last earthly veils fell away from it: its radiance shone brighter and fiercer and more beautiful, and she sighed.

  “It is magnificent. What is its name?”

  Barakal sat there smiling, his legs crossed, his arms loose over his knees. “Her name is Erwenda, the Companion, the Messenger, the Mouth of Truth.”

  “What truth does she bring, then?”

  He shrugged. “She stands in the Gateway of Heaven. Perhaps she has come to greet someone who will soon pass between worlds.”

  Dehra faced the star again. Even Barakal was unsure what the burning light meant; he loved it, saw no harm in it, but Barakal loved all the stars. Surely there was some harm in it. It glittered as it rode the sky. Shafts of light erupted from it. She saw them suddenly as spears, a shower of malicious beams, raining down on the People.

  “I am going,” she said, and started away.

  “Why? Come sit with me, if you are cold.”

  “I am tired. I am going.” She hurried away, her head bent, her back bent, away from the cruel punishing star, to hide in the shelter of the hut.

  Moloquin startled awake, jumping awake all over, sitting up at once in his bed, and looked all around him. Slowly he grew aware that he had been dreaming.

  Someone had called his name. He had been dreaming; it was only in the dream.

  Not his name. Not Moloquin. Some other name. Or just the word “boy,” and him the only boy.

  Dreaming.

  Beside him Shateel lay sleeping, half-uncovered now, and he put forth his hand and drew the bearskin over her. Suddenly from the deep of his mind, part of the dream came back—a flash or the dream—the forest, the trees towering all around him, and from the distance, someone calling.

  Not his name. The words that had called him before he had a name. Before he had a name for her who called him.

  He shut his eyes. The dream was gone, even the feeling gone; with a sense of desperate loss he yearned after it, and after her who had called him once, before he had a name; he longed for that moment, that place, where he sat quiet and whole in the center of the forest, all the trees rising tall around him, while she called him.

  From another part of the roundhouse came a shout, hoarse and loud and real. Again he pulled the heavy bearskin over his sleeping wife and sat up.

  On the far side of the roundhouse someone cried out, “He’s gone!”

  Moloquin grunted. Here was something he could deal with. He thrust off the cloaking gloom of the dream and got heavily to his feet, took his axe down from the post North Star behind him, and went swiftly toward the voice. He was naked, and the night was cold, but his blood burned enough to keep him warm. He went straight into the back of the roundhouse, where Bahedyr was supposed to be imprisoned.

  This part of the roundhouse was utterly dark. He walked by memory, one hand out before him to encounter posts and other obstacles. In the darkness around him were scurrying feet, and voices.

  “He’s gone, I tell you! Go look there!”

  Moloquin filled his lungs; into the darkness he shouted, “Shut the roundhouse door!”

  His voice boomed out through the building, and abruptly all other sounds stopped. All through the roundhouse, men froze, hearing him. Then suddenly there was a trampling of many feet as they ran to do his bidding.

  “Light a lamp!” Moloquin shouted.

  He trudged forward, sliding his feet over the floor, creeping forward into utter darkness. In his right hand he held the axe, ready to strike, and his left hand reached forward into the dark. He sniffed, smelling burned oil from a lamp, smelling stale sweat, smelling the fragrance of the grain stored nearby, and he went toward the smell of the grain, groping his way into the dark, until his foot caught in cloth lying on the floor.

  He stooped and felt over the floor. A pile of rags lay there, and some rope. He raised the rope to his nostrils and on it smelled Bahedyr.

  “Gone.”

  Now suddenly the light bloomed, behind him, reaching its long fingers forward among the posts of the roundhouse, casting shadows past him into the tight pack of the stores. He stood up. Bahedyr had escaped somehow, but he was too weak and sick to go far.

  “Find him,” he shouted, and struck with the axe at the nearest post. “Find him, Sickle—”

  He strode back toward the door of the roundhouse. There the men were gathered, murmuring, and at his approach they spread out, facing him. Sickle was not among them.

  “Where is he?” Moloquin walked in among the men, thrusting them away from him; he reached the door without finding either his prisoner or the guard, and his temper rose like a fist in his throat. He struck out with the axe again, and the blade bit deep into one of the posts of the door.

  “Find him! I will take you all to the Pillar of the Sky if you do not find him—”

  They rushed away. He unlatched the door and thrust it open and pounded out to the yard. The cold greeted him like a dash of icy water. He remembered he was naked; he remembered he was a fat old man. With his axe he slashed the air.

  “Find him—I will kill you all—”

  Through the door behind him came Shateel, wrapped in her cloak and carrying his bearskin coat. He turned his back on her, grateful, and let her put his clothes on him.

  “Where is Sickle? He let him go—I’ll kill him too—”

  Abruptly Sickle was pushing toward him, coming in the gate of the roundhouse fence; after him came a great crowd of men. Moloquin bellowed wordlessly at them. Sickle turned toward him, straining; he was dragging something after him, and Moloquin relaxed.

  It was Bahedyr, too nearly dead to walk. Sickle hauled him up before the chief and dropped him there at Moloquin’s feet.

  “Pagh!” Moloquin raised the axe at arm’s length. “I should kill you now, and be done with it.”

  Bahedyr curled up into a ball at his feet. His face turned up toward his captor; his eyes shone. Moloquin lashed out at him with the axe, holding short, so that the blade passed just over Bahedyr’s head.

  The tormented man flinched away, and Moloquin laughed.

  “What! Don’t you long for death, Bahedyr? Don’t you want to die? That’s the only way you will escape me! Don’t shrink back from it, Bahedyr—”

  He swung the axe in great sweeping blows at the man cowering before him, each strike missing by a finger’s breadth, and as he swung the axe, Moloquin capered in a strange dance, laughing and mocking.

  “You cannot escape me alive, Bahedyr—no matter who helps you—” saying that, Moloquin turned his head and looked for Sickle in the crowd—“I alone can free you, Bahedyr—”

  In the crowd, Sickle backed away, hiding himself among the others. The others pressed forward to watch: no one had ever seen Moloquin dance before.

  “Bring Dehra here,” Moloquin shouted; he leapt and struck around Bahedyr, the axe hissing in the air, cutting away the space on all sides of the man who crouched and whimpered in the dust, the blade sometimes grazing his skin or his hair. “Bring Dehra, let her see this, let her see what may become of her next—”

  He glared at Shateel, standing in the doorway of the roundhouse, her hands hidden inside her bearskin cloak. If he frightened her with these threats against her daughter she showed no signs of it. He swung the axe up above Bahedyr, and for a moment, his arms stretched, the axe heavy in his hand, he thought, End it now, and his arm quivered with a lust for this power, to drive the axe down and destroy the man before him.

  But if he did that, it would all be over. Instead he slashed the air by Bahedyr’s dust-caked head, he whirled around again, leaping into the air.

  Something else caught his eye. He lowered the axe, his head raised, his gaze on the sky, and a low exclamation left him. He took two steps forward, his eyes on the sky.

  “What is that?” He pointed.
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br />   They all looked; they all turned together, with a rustle and hiss of their turning bodies, and looked into the sky, up at the great new star that burned there, brighter than the two gateway stars. They gasped, and many went down on their knees, folding their arms over their heads to shield them from the star. Moloquin gave a long howl like an animal.

  “Barakal! Barakal—” he whirled around and flung the axe down, stabbing it deep into the ground beside Bahedyr, and with the bearskin flapping around him he ran out the gate in the roundhouse fence, ran away through the village, toward the Pillar of the Sky.

  Sickle said, “He is brainsick. Some demon has taken power over him. He is mad.”

  Around him the little crowd stirred and murmured, and most turned away from him. Shateel, in the doorway of the roundhouse, watched him as he put out his hand, reaching for the man nearest him, his mouth open to say more about Moloquin. That man pulled roughly away, but others drew nearer; other men leaned toward Sickle, whispering. Agreeing with him. Shateel looked up into the black bowl of the sky, toward the fiery new star, and a shiver passed over her, as if the star had touched her.

  Barakal said, “I do not know what it means, Opa-on. Perhaps it means nothing.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Moloquin said. “If you do not understand it, that is your failure, not the star’s.”

  Barakal shrugged. Long and pale, he seemed as unlike one of the People as his star was unlike the rest of the night sky. He said, “The Heavens are perfect in their order. Nothing is left out, nothing is unknown. Talk of meanings is of things that are unknown, things that are missing, and that must be drawn forth from what is known and not missing. In the perfection of Heaven, maybe there are no separate things at all, only an illimitable being.”

  Moloquin said, “I have no use for such words, Barakal.”

  He smiled as he said it. Barakal had amused him somehow. Shateel studied the tall young man; what he said had a strange effect on her, slipping by her, leaving no pictures in her mind. What he said had nothing to do with the People. His mind was wholly with the stars, he belonged to the stars, not to the People at all.

  Shateel said, “Yet many will think the star means something. And they will say it means whatever it serves them to have others believe.”

  Moloquin shrugged. He sat in his litter, in the shade, at the center of the Pillar of the Sky, with his wife on one side of him and his son on the other. All around them were the sounds and bustle of the workmen, hammering on stone and dragging up logs and rope to raise stones. They had finished shaping the stone from the Old Camp; all morning they had been dragging it in through the gap in the embankment, and the air was full of dust.

  Shateel said, “There is a runner here from my old village.”

  Moloquin nodded. “Let me see him.”

  She turned and with her eyes sought out the man who waited between the small gateways, and at her look he came forward. Shateel stepped back. The dust made her nose itch and her throat hurt. She was tired of standing at her husband’s shoulder, milling all the world into words. Soon the year would turn, the spring would come, and the earth would soften to the hoe and the pick, to the first probing roots of seedlings. She took some reassurance from that: against the sudden appearance of new stars she could raise up the constancy of the year, the eternal return of the spring.

  The runner was kneeling down before Moloquin, spouting words of praise and honor. Shateel laid her hand on her husband’s shoulder. Since Bahedyr’s betrayal, Moloquin had given the village into the keeping of one of his sons, a younger man even than Barakal. It was in the name of this young chieftain that the runner spoke. Yet when the runner appeared this morning in Moloquin’s Village, he had come first to Shateel, to ask her help in delivering his message to Moloquin.

  “Opa-Moloquin-on, we have had word from the northern villages that someone is attacking their herds of cattle, and we wish your permission to go and hunt them down.”

  “Someone,” Moloquin said. “Men? A bear? A pack of wolves? And what have you to do with the northern villages? Let them send to me themselves if they have need of me. You have other business. I need stones—I need two great stones from the Turnings-of-the-Year, and you are to get them for me. Tell him that.”

  The runner knelt down again, and again poured forth a river of words. From the far side of the Pillar of the Sky, suddenly, there was a shout.

  Moloquin wheeled around toward the sound; Shateel twisted to see, and Barakal went swiftly over to find out what had happened. Moloquin turned back to the runner.

  “Go to my son, bid him tend to what is his to do. Go.”

  The runner backed away until he nearly hit one of the uprights of the nearest Gateway; with his hand behind him he groped for the way out and was gone. Barakal came up beside Moloquin.

  “They are ready to begin raising the stone.”

  “I will come,” said Moloquin.

  Shateel said, “Should you not have given more heed to the runner? It is spring—until the gardens are well grown we need the meat from the north. If someone is attacking the herds—”

  Moloquin gripped her hand. “I will raise this stone,” he said, low. “Raise this one, and close the ring. Then there will be time for all these other matters.” He pressed her hand roughly to his face. “Have you no faith in me?”

  “Moloquin,” she said, and could say no more.

  Barakal squatted down beside his father. “She is right. You should pay some attention to what is going on, Opa-on—the People murmur against you, they will murmur more if there is no meat—”

  “Pagh.” Moloquin began to get up; he flung back the bearskin robe that covered his knees, reached for his axe, and prepared himself to get up onto his feet. “You make too much of it. They have whined and complained before, they have shrunk away before from the task, but they will do it. My People will not fail me. In small things they speak against me, but when the matter is great, when I need them, when I call them, they will come, they will obey me.”

  He put out his hand, and Barakal took it and helped his father rise up out of the litter; Moloquin grunted at the effort. He thrust his axe into his belt and swept the bearskin cloak around his shoulders. Shateel watched him go with heavy steps toward the work. His trust in the People moved her; she longed to believe him.

  She could not believe him. His People had already failed him. He was alone in his dream, as he had always been alone. Before, he alone had always been enough. She hoped it went on that way. Quietly she followed him across the Pillar of the Sky.

  Dehra lived in the hut of the star-watcher Barakal. Sickle waited until he saw Barakal far away from there, and went around to the hut and looked in the door.

  She was asleep. She lay curled like a dog on a mat, without even a blanket over her, although the day was cool. Sickle on hands and knees crawled into the hut, but before he could rouse her she sprang awake, leapt up, still crouched below the low roof, and cocked her fist at him.

  “Be easy!” Sickle slid backwards away from her, and raised both hands, palms out, to mollify her. She was ferocious: the demon who tenanted her mind would defend her against anything. “Be still, Ana-el, I have come to beg your favor, not to harm you.”

  “Ana-el,” she said slowly, watching him, and wrapped her arms around herself. Her eyes glistened in the semi-darkness. She and the star-watcher were fit for each other: both strangers to everybody but themselves. She said, “What do you want, boy?”

  “There is a story—” he cleared his throat. “There is talk, in the villages, that when Moloquin closes the ring—have you any knowledge of this?”

  “Of what?” she said. She wiped her eyes with her fingers; sleep still clung to her like a veil of fog.

  “That when Moloquin closes the ring the world will end. He is making a gateway, some say, and through it will come all the Overworld—” he gulped; he was babbling now
, repeating words that had no real meaning for him, just words he had heard long ago that sounded ominous, to make his effect on her. “Once he makes his gateways, then the world shall be destroyed.”

  She blinked at him. “Who told you this?”

  “Have you not seen the great star?”

  “It is Barakal’s star. He says there is no evil.”

  “Dehra—” he drew closer, his hands out, appealing to her. “When he has closed the ring he will kill us all, all his enemies.”

  “Are you his enemy?”

  “I hate him,” Sickle said, and was surprised to realize this was true.

  She stared at him a moment. Tendrils of her hair hung around her face, her eyes were sunken, she looked suddenly older than any woman he had ever seen. His spine prickled up. What a fool he had been to come here—to think to seduce the demon in her. He slid his feet backwards.

  “I have heard you,” she said, clearly. She blinked at him. He went out, his hands shaking, wondering what use she would be.

  Braced on its cradle of logs, the great stone from the Old Camp tilted up into the air, its foot overhanging the hole where it would stand. All around it the workmen bustled, making ready for the day’s labor, and their dust rose in gusts and clouds, billowing on the early morning breeze.

  Taller, heavier, moveless, the other stones stood there also, like great beings that watched the world, waiting for their brother. They loomed through the dust like monsters, and their long shadows spread out through the Pillar of the Sky and touched everyone.

  Dehra hugged her arms around her, blinking. Behind her was the bank, which still gave her some shelter from the sun, and she drew back near to it. Moloquin was not yet here and so she hardly remembered what she was doing here.

  Without Moloquin she was lifeless. She thought about him every moment, she dreamt of him at night, a black brooding overhanging half-shaped enemy dappled with stars. During the day she went as close to him as she could, living on the power that surrounded him, hungry for more; sometimes she imagined she was eating him alive, consuming his soul.