Page 217 of Circle of Days

When Arp finished, Duff said: “Laine, please come here.”

Laine now came out of the store, and the women gasped. Her pretty face was a mass of bruises and she walked with a limp. Duff and Arp got down and Duff helped Laine stand on the stump.

She said: “Everything Arp said is true.” She began to cry, and her words came with difficulty. “I’m so ashamed that my little boy should have seen it.” She gave in to her sobs and got down off the stump.

Duff got up again. “I have only two things to say. First, if you make me Big Man, every woman will own her land. Second, no woman shall be forced to partner with a man unless she wants to. So… just say who you want, Shen or Duff.”

Someone shouted: “Duff!”

Several others took up the shout.

Pia surveyed the crowd. No one was shouting for Shen, not even quietly.

The noise rose. There could be no doubt. Duff was the Big Man.

A bloodless takeover, Pia thought. She felt proud.

Shen walked to the house.

Katch, standing in the doorway, did not move.

“Get out of my way, woman,” he said.

“No, I won’t,” said Katch.

The crowd went silent.

Katch said: “And if you strike me, those women will tear you to pieces.”

Pia held her breath. So did many other people. For a long moment no one moved.

Then Shen turned aside and walked away.

By spring all ten upright stones were in place in the center of the Monument, forming an incomplete oval. It was quite a sight, Seft thought proudly. It was easy to imagine that the stones were mighty gods, standing in a ring to discuss the things that concerned gods: thunder and floods, eclipses and earthquakes, plagues.

All their tops were level, a technical achievement that Seft was particularly proud of. Each top had a dome-shaped protrusion in its center. When the crossbars arrived from Stony Valley, the challenge would be to make sockets in each so that the pegs would fit exactly.

Seft used the priestesses’ climbing pole to mount the nearest upright. He was carrying the hide of a large cow and a sharp flint knife.

He placed the hide across the upright and its pair, where the crossbar would lie. It was easy to step from one upright to the next: the gap was small.

Tem and Ilian then climbed the pole and stood at the two ends of the hide, keeping it taut and preventing it moving. Next, where the pegs stood up under the hide, Seft carefully cut two round holes in the leather, so that the pegs came through. Then he cut the edges of the hide to match the edges of the uprights.

When the crossbar was trimmed to this template, its edge would exactly match the edges of the uprights on which it stood, and there would be a socket exactly over each domed peg.

Seft spent the rest of the morning making a leather template for each of the five pairs of uprights.

It was a good scheme and Seft just hoped it would work.

When he climbed down from the last pair of uprights, he saw two people waiting for him: his brothers, Olf and Cam. “Oh, no,” he said, and he immediately felt depressed.

This time they did not have to tell him how unlucky they had been. Whatever they had done had ended in a fight and both of them had been injured. Olf had his left arm in an improvised sling made of twisted plant fibers, and Cam had lost his front teeth. They were both filthy.

Seft hated to be reminded so vividly of his childhood: the beatings, the scorn, the practical jokes that were never funny and always cruel. He had escaped from them fourteen midsummers ago, but he could never forget, much as he wished to. He had made himself a new and different life, and he was proud of that, but he still hated the old memories.

Cam looked at the giant stones and said: “What are they?”

“We’re rebuilding the Monument in stone.”