Page 173 of Circle of Days

It was Joia’s worst nightmare.

Seft said to her: “I want to try something else.”

Joia’s hopes rose. She shouted: “Relax, everyone. We’re going to do something different.” With relief, they let their ropes go slack.

Seft said to her: “Tell them to pull and relax, pull and relax. We want to rock the sled forward and backward. When I think it’s ready to move on, I’ll nod, and you can tell them to give it all they’ve got.”

Joia repeated the explanation to the volunteers. They seemed to understand, many nodding.

Joia felt it might help, though she was not sure why. Perhapsthere was a kind of stickiness between the blades of the sled and the ground, a stickiness that was reduced by the rocking. Anyway it was worth a try.

She called: “Ready… take the strain… heave!… Relax… heave!” She continued, watching for signs of movement. Suddenly the woodlanders joined in, not using the ropes but pushing the sled. Joia was not sure how much help they were, but they certainly did no harm.

At last she thought she saw the sled rock slightly, forward and back. “It’s working!” she yelled. “Heave! Relax… heave! Relax… pull harder! Harder!” The sled was rocking now, and Seft gave her the nod. “Relax… pull! Big effort next time… Relax… heave!”

Two hundred people strained at the ropes, panting with the effort, their feet digging into the earth, and at last the sled shifted, jerking forward a mere finger-width. “Keep it moving!” Joia yelled. “Keep it moving!” And to her delight the sled continued to move forward, with painful slowness, and the volunteers, jubilant now, kept pulling.

She walked backward in front of them. Once the sled was moving, its momentum made the pulling a little easier. As the track curved to the side, Joia moved in that direction, shouting: “Follow me, follow me.”

After the curve, the route sloped up, and the task became heavier again. Halfway up she saw them tiring, and shouted: “We’ve passed the halfway mark! Not far now to the top!”

They breasted the rise. The log track gave way to a flimsier version of branches and earth, which was less smooth, but the downhill incline more than compensated, and Joia could see the young volunteers recovering from the strain. As the stone beganto move a little faster, it occurred to Joia that if a volunteer should fall they could be crushed. She needed to speak to them about what to do if there were such an accident.

In any route from the hills to the plain, the movement would be mostly downhill, Joia figured; something she had never before thought about. However, hills were hills, and they went up and down; and soon there was another rise.

The volunteers were tired now, she saw. It would be wise to give them a rest at the top of this rise.

But the notion occurred to her too late. Halfway up, the volunteers began to falter, a few dropped out altogether, and the sled came to a halt.

Joia was dismayed. If they collapsed this early, how could they hope to pull the stone all the way to the Monument?

Making a virtue of necessity, Joia called: “Rest time, everybody.” She looked around. They were in a scrubby dale with little grazing. Behind them was a stream they had crossed almost without noticing it. “Drink some water,” she said. Many of them headed for the stream, others just lay flat, exhausted. Verila and two of her cousins had been following with baskets, and they now produced smoked pork and handed it round. Perhaps rest, water, and a little food would restore the volunteers.

Seft placed logs behind the blades of the sled so that it could not move backward. “I’m being cautious,” he said. “I don’t think this could move of its own weight even on a slope a lot steeper than this one.”

“Which is a good thing,” said Joia, “otherwise it might run on ahead of us and crash. We have no way of stopping it.”

“A design fault,” Seft said. “I’m to blame.”

“Don’t fret,” Joia said. “What you’ve done already is astonishing. No one else could have achieved this.”

Seft smiled and nodded. What Joia said was true, and he knew it.

She gave the volunteers plenty of time. When everyone had drunk and eaten and rested, they began to mill around socially, and Joia reckoned they were ready to start pulling again. She called them to the ropes.

They began to pull, but the stone did not move. Joia realized with alarm that restarting would be especially difficult on an upward slope. Neither she nor Seft had thought of that. They had made a bad mistake.

In future she would make sure that any stop took place on a downward slope. But they had to deal with this now, otherwise there would be no future.

“Relax,” she said to the volunteers.

Tem said: “We could run the sled back down the hill and a little way up the opposite slope. Then we’d have a downward start.”

“I hate to go backward,” Joia said. She also thought it would be demoralizing. “We’ll do that as a last resort.”

Tem nodded.

Joia called to the volunteers: “We’ll try rocking again.”