Page 102 of Circle of Days

They ate pork stewed with crab apples. Joia said to Seft: “I’m worried about how long it would take to move one stone to the Monument—fifty days, if Ello is right, and I can’t see any flaw in her argument.”

“I’ve been thinking about that too,” he said.

“We might be able to muster two or three teams of volunteers who could work more or less at the same time.”

“That would reduce the problem.”

Joia frowned. “I’m just not sure I could persuade people to volunteer for fifty days. That’s not so much a celebration, more like a punishment.”

Seft nodded. “We’ve been working on some new ideas here. I’ll show you a few things tomorrow morning. I think we can find a way.”

Joia went to sleep full of pork and hope.

She woke up and went outside to a morning of low grey winter clouds, and she saw something she had not perceived yesterday in the dusk. A hundred or so logs, each about as long as two men, had been laid side by side, forming a kind of path. At one end was a small sarsen stone already encompassed in a rope bag.

Seft appeared as she was staring at it. “Ello is against us, but her pessimism is useful,” he said. “When she talked about how long it took to move the farmer’s stone, she drew my attention to the heart of the problem. It’s the unevenness of the ground. A dragged stone would constantly be stopped when its front edge hit a dip or a bump, or a rock or a puddle, and the front would have to be lifted to get over the obstacle, which would be difficult and take a long time. So I’ve been thinking of ways to make the groundmore even, so that the stone can move faster and not be stopped by minor obstructions.”

The cleverhands appeared in ones and twos and stood around. Joia realized with a thrill that all these people were committed to building the stone Monument.

Seft said: “By the way, the logs don’t roll. They’re hammered into the soil, to make the pathway stable.”

One of the cleverhands, Jero, said: “Shall we show her, Seft?” Jero did not have Seft’s patience. He was always in a hurry. His father, Effi, had been the same.

But there was no reason to delay, so Seft said: “Yes, go ahead.”

The cleverhands picked up the rope grab lines and got ready to drag the stone. Joia thought it was about a tenth of the size of the big monoliths, so about the same size as the farmer’s stone. The wives and older children of the cleverhands appeared to help, and in the end there were about twenty people.

Joia remembered the moving of the farmer’s stone, when she had seen only fourteen midsummers. The farmer’s field had been smoothed out by many years of cultivation, but even so, there had been at least one obstacle.

Tem led the pulling team, and they quickly got the stone moving. Joia was astonished by how smoothly it ran along the path of logs. Twice it hit a log that had risen slightly higher than the others, and both times it slowed briefly then crushed the raised edge and went on. The cleverhands pulled the stone to the end of the path.

“That’s wonderful!” Joia said to Seft. “You’ve solved the problem.”

He shook his head. “This is useful only for short distances. Tobuild a road of logs from here to the Monument would use up all the trees in the Great Plain. Just chopping them down would take years.”

“Couldn’t you use a smaller number of logs, and bring those from behind to the front as the stone was moving?”

“We tried that.” Seft smiled. “The men were exhausted, carrying the logs, working in pairs, running from the back to the front. But the real problem is that when the logs are laid in front of the moving stone they’re not embedded securely, so the stone pushes them out of the way.”

Joia’s euphoria went as quickly as it had come. “So we’re back where we started.”

“Not quite.” At the end of the log path was a different kind of path, made of branches of all sizes plus loose earth. “This is much easier to put in place, and we could lay something like it all the way to the Monument in a few weeks. But it’s too flimsy.” He nodded to Tem, who got the hands pulling again.

Joia saw the problem immediately. Where the stone had pushed the logs farther into the ground, here it just shoved the branches aside. The path quickly became disarranged and the stone’s progress was constantly interrupted and stopped. “It’s better than nothing,” Seft said, “but not much.”

“So you would plan to use both kinds of path…”

“But that still wouldn’t be enough to reduce fifty days to five.”

“You don’t look completely defeated. You’ve got something else in mind.”

“You know me too well. I’ve got one more thing to show you. Come with me.”

He led her to a rough shelter that was clearly his workshop. Inside were flint tools of all kinds, antlers for pressure-sharpening blades, a quern for sanding and polishing, and ropes. Four of the cleverhands went behind the workshop and returned carrying something Joia did not recognize.

It was made from the entire trunk of a tall tree, a flat piece of wood longer than the largest stone in Stony Valley. It was as wide across as a man’s arm was long, and thick. It was dead straight from one end almost to the other. Its most noticeable feature was that at one end—undoubtedly the end that had been the base of the tree trunk—it curved upward like the front end of a wickerwork boat. It had been polished and oiled, so that it gleamed in the weak winter sunshine.

Seft said: “Instead of trying to make the ground more even, we’re going to make the stone more flat.”