Page 11 of Circle of Days

The Midsummer Rite was over, life had returned to normal, and the girls were bored.

Joia, Vee, and Roni were sitting by the river on a warm morning, idly watching people washing their cookpots, their clothes, and themselves.

Then something interesting happened. A group of men and women appeared and began to maneuver a raft into the water.

Joia recognized Dallo, an old craftsman, much respected though never eager to try new ideas.

He was the leader of a group of carpenters and handymen, many of them his kin, who did the craftwork people could not do for themselves.

They were called cleverhands. The cleverhands coppiced willow trees at the end of winter, cutting the trunk just above ground level so that in spring it would sprout many long, thin, bendy branches suitable for weaving together to form walls and doors and baskets.

A cleverhand could build a boat, or a smokehouse, or a roasting spit that could be turned with a handle.

Joia watched with eager curiosity, wondering what project Dallo and the cleverhands might be engaged upon today. Whatever it was, it would relieve the boredom.

Her curiosity was further piqued when the cleverhands began to load large coils of rope onto the raft. The process of twisting honeysuckle vines into long, strong lengths of rope was slow and tedious. A lot of work had gone into producing these big coils.

A cleverhand called Effi was manhandling a coil with the help of his son, Jero, a boy the same age as Joia and her friends, when Jero stumbled and Effi fell into the water. Everyone laughed: Effi was famously clumsy, and Jero was turning out just like his father.

Soon a crowd began to gather. Whenever something unusual happened, herders would watch. They liked communal experiences, and any event would do. The ropemaker Ev, who was a wit, had once said: “Herders would form a crowd to watch a pot of water come to the boil.”

When finally the loaded raft set off, it only crossed to the opposite bank. The crowd followed. People who could not swim crossed in their clothes, holding on to bits of wood; the others undressed and swam across holding their tunics and shoes above the water.

There were a few farms on the far side of the river valley.

The crowd followed Dallo to a field recently reaped.

Conspicuous in the middle of the field was a large stone, about the size of one of the mysterious bluestones that formed the outer ring of the Monument.

It lay flat, one end rounded, the other in a rough point.

Joia learned that the farmer, an older man, was fed up with having to work around this useless stone and wanted to get rid of it.

He had agreed to give the herders a fine young bull if they would move the stone off the field and dump it at the riverside.

The herders gathered around the stone, eager to see how Dallo would manage this.

He began by instructing his cleverhands to lay ropes across the stone in straight lines. One end of each rope was then pushed under the stone, the cleverhands using sticks to shove the rope into the soft earth. The other end stretched out on the opposite side.

Next, longer ropes were laid along the length of the stone, then the two sets of ropes were interwoven.

Joia saw that Dallo was making a giant version of a familiar object, the string bag that people made with cords of plant fibers twisted together.

The round end of the stone would lie at the bottom of the bag, she explained to her friends.

Vee said: “But how will he get the stone into the bag?”

Joia could not figure that out. Listening to the conversations all around her, she gathered that others were asking Vee’s question.

They soon learned the answer.

Five of the strongest men and women stood beside the stone with stout tree branches in their hands, careful not to tread on the long ends of rope.

Putting the ends of the branches where the stone met the ground, they shoved together, attempting to roll the stone.

On the other side, another five kept pushing the short ends of the ropes under the stone.

Inch by inch, the stone moved, rolling onto the short ends and pulling the long ends with it.

The stone moved, then stopped; then with a big effort from the cleverhands moved again.

They kept it up until the short ends of rope emerged from under the stone on the other side, where they could be joined to the long ends.

The stone was in the bag.

Working quickly, the cleverhands completed the weaving and knotting of the rope bag, joining the two sides then bringing up the long base, so that the entire stone was contained within the bag.

At the open end, Joia now noticed, the ends of the ropes were much longer than it seemed they needed to be. But now she learned why. The long ends were grab lines. All the cleverhands took hold of grab lines, held them hard, and pulled.

The stone did not move.

Dallo stood in front of them, shouting: “Ready… heave!” When nothing happened, he tried again. “Ready… heave!” The cleverhands reddened and perspired, and the muscles of their arms and legs bulged with the effort, but it was not enough.

Some of the crowd joined in, grasping the ropes and pulling when Dallo said: “Heave!” They seemed ineffectual.

More came forward, doubling the original number.

They took a few moments to work out what was required.

Joia noticed that they quickly learned to set their legs firmly, digging their feet into the ground, and lean forward, putting their weight into it.

When there were about twenty people pulling, the stone at last moved.

It shifted, stopped, and shifted again; and Dallo yelled: “Keep it going! Keep it going!” Joia guessed that the stubble might be slippery, which would help. This time when the stone moved it did not stop.

Now Dallo had to direct it. Facing the pullers and walking backward, he gestured with his arms, getting them to move to their right, toward the riverbank.

The field looked flat, but it was not perfectly so, and the stone stopped as it hit a bump.

Joia guessed there had been a tree in that spot, and when it was felled, probably long ago, a stump had remained, and then the crops had slowly grown over it.

How was Dallo going to deal with this? Perhaps the cleverhands would try to flatten the bump with flint axes and wooden shovels; but then they might come across the remains of the stump, which could be very difficult to dig up.

But the long grab lines gave Dallo room to maneuver.

He directed all the pullers to move to one side, then got them heaving at an angle, so that the stone would avoid the hump.

Once again it took several tries to get the stone to move at all; and once again it continued to move smoothly when it got started.

It tracked perilously close to the hump, but Dallo had judged well and it just missed the obstacle.

The last short stretch of the journey was easier, as the ground sloped gently down toward the river. Before the stone reached the bank, Dallo stopped the pullers, and his cleverhands untied the ropes for reuse. Ropes were never to be wasted.

When the bag had been dismantled, the stone was rolled down the last few paces to the edge of the water.

The crowd cheered their congratulations.

The ropes were taken back across the river and the bull was brought and forced to swim across. The spectators drifted away. Once again the girls found themselves at a loose end. Sitting on the riverbank, Joia said: “Let’s have an adventure.”

The three girls had had adventures before.

One time they had sailed down East River on a log.

It had been great fun, with people waving from the banks, until the log came to a stop in the middle of a wide swamp where East River met South River.

They had had to tramp through muddy meadows with dangerous ponds, and it had taken them all afternoon to walk home, soaking wet.

But now when they talked about it they laughed at their own silly cheek.

On another occasion they had gone into Three Streams Wood to look for the village of the woodlanders. They had got lost, but the woodlanders had rescued them and had shown them the way home.

It was Joia who dreamed up these adventures, and they were always a little bit dangerous—that was part of the fun. Joia was like her father, or so her mother said: he had been a risk-taker.

Now Vee and Roni were keen to hear what Joia had in mind, but they were also wary. They often resisted an adventure at first, and had to be talked around, each in a different way.

Joia looked at Vee, who was stocky and strong and had a rebellious air, as if ready to defy the world. If she was approached in the right way, she would hide any anxiety. Joia said to her: “I’m not sure about it. You might be too scared.”

“I would not,” Vee said immediately.

She was the only girl in a family of boys, and was always in competition with her brothers, proving that she could run fast and shoot arrows and cut a pig’s throat just as well as they did. She took pride in being fearless, and could never resist a dare—something Joia liked about her.

“Maybe you wouldn’t be scared,” Joia conceded.

Roni said anxiously: “What’s the adventure?”

“I want to spy on the priestesses.”

Roni gasped.

The priestesses allowed people inside the Monument on special days, but most of the time they were secretive and kept everyone out.

They performed a ritual every morning at sunrise, and you could hear their singing.

Presumably they were dancing too, but no one seemed to know, and their privacy was respected from a mixture of reverence and fear. The Monument was a sacred place.

Joia wanted to know what they got up to.