Page 172 of Circle of Days

“Have you known him long?”

“Thirteen midsummers. When I met him I was a naughty girl.”

Dee smiled her ear-to-ear smile that showed gleaming teeth. “Naughty how?” she said, and there was a tone in her voice that made Joia breathe a little faster.

“I peeped at the priestesses doing a naked dance,” Joia said. “They caught me.” She remembered the fright she had felt. Her offense seemed trivial now, so many years later, but the memory of guilt and fear was still unpleasant. “I was taken to the High Priestess, who was called Soo. I expected her to punish me, but instead she taught me to count.”

“I want you to teach me to count. You told me the theory but I need to know the names of all the numbers. Then I’ll be able to count my sheep.”

Joia decided to risk another question. She was very curious to know whether Dee had a partner, but she paused to think of a tactful way to ask. “Are you alone up there in the hills?”

“In fact my place is not far from here, to the east. But no, I’m not alone. I live with my brother and his woman.”

No partner, then. “And you don’t know how many sheep you’ve got, because you can’t count them.”

“But I really want to learn.”

“I can teach you some of it in the next two days. We’ve got a lot of walking to do. Speaking of which, we should get up.”

Verila was carving cold mutton. Vee was helping her, and Joia introduced her to Dee. “Vee’s my oldest friend,” Joia said. “She was with me when we spied on the priestesses.”

Dee smiled and said to Vee: “Was Joia really such a bad girl?”

“Yes,” Vee said. “She persuaded others to join in her adventures, and we all got into trouble.”

Dee turned to Joia. “And now you have a whole army of people joining in your adventure.”

That was perceptive. “I suppose you’re right.”

They helped serve the mutton, then ate some themselves. Joia found it very chewy.

As the sun came up, everyone gathered around the stone.

The stone and the sled stood on the track, already looking like a monument. The cleverhands were busy encasing the ensemble in a kind of rope bag, which sheathed the stone and the sled, spreading the tension and ensuring that the stone could not fall to the side. Every rope had a long grab line, and these were neatly laid out in front of the stone, ten of them, straight like dead snakes, ready for the volunteers to pick up.

All was ready, and Joia was biting her lip. What if it wouldn’t move?

Seft had a last-minute thought. With Tem’s help he lifted the giant and tied him to the stone. “We’ll need this when we erect the stone at the Monument,” he said.

The volunteers took hold of the ropes, more than twenty people to each rope. There was some shuffling as they found places. Seft, Tem, and Joia had to encourage people to stand as close together as possible. “Make room—you’ll be glad of the extra help,” Joia told them.

She and Seft had agreed that they needed two hundred volunteers, making that calculation on the basis of Seft’s experience with the farmer’s stone, which had been much smaller. They could not be certain but they had no other way of estimating. Today they were going to learn the truth. Perhaps they would discover that they needed five hundred volunteers, in which case they would all go home with their tails between their legs.

She noticed that they had an audience. Yesterday she had seen a handful of woodlanders watching. Today there were more, fifty or sixty men, women, and children, all staring at the mad people trying to move a giant stone. A handful of shepherds were observing, too, with folded arms and skeptical expressions. Clearly this was the most interesting event to happen in the North Hills for many years.

The sled was at the end of a long track formed of logs embedded in the earth, made by Seft and the cleverhands over the winter. The track curved gently, then headed south in a straight line up a long rise to the top. It had taken some months and many felled trees, but both Seft and Joia had felt strongly that the beginning of the journey should not be discouragingly hard.

The volunteers splayed out in front of the sled in a flare shape, the leaders of each rope looking eagerly at Joia, waiting for the word. When she was sure they were all settled, she said: “Ready… take the strain… heave!”

They leaned in, bending their knees, straining at the ropes. Most chose to get a shoulder under the rope, then hold the rope with both hands in front of the chest. A few preferred to face the stone and pull backward. Joia watched their faces as they began to realize the enormous weight they were up against. They bent lower and pulled harder.

The stone did not move.

The ropes creaked. Would they snap? Would the timbers of the sled break?

She heard Narod’s voice again: “It’s not going to move. This is a waste of time.”

He was not popular among the volunteers, and someone shouted: “Oh, shut your mouth, miseryguts.”