Page 72 of Circle of Days

On the third day, Joia woke before dawn, but she could see the valley clearly in the light of a full moon. Glancing to her side, she was surprised to see Dee leaning on one elbow, looking at her with an expression of friendly curiosity. Joia was vaguely pleased. She decided not to get up just yet.

She said to Dee: “I saw you talking to Bax.” Then she bit her tongue. It had come out like an accusation, which she had not intended.

Dee seemed not to notice. “I was interested in her. She’s got the shoulders of a man.”

“What did you say to her?”

“I asked her if she liked being so strong. She said yes, she liked it, but her mother told her that men don’t like strong women.”

“Did Bax mind that?”

“She said it doesn’t matter because she doesn’t like men.”

Joia laughed, then said: “Do you like men?” As soon as she had asked the question she felt embarrassed. It was so personal.

Two blurts in four sentences, she thought; I’m getting worse.

Once again Dee did not mind. “I don’t dislike men, but I never fall in love with them, if that’s what you mean.”

Joia decided to stop asking questions and share something of her own. “I really love Seft,” she said. “But I’m not in love with him—which is a good thing, because he’s partnered with my sister.”

“Seft is terribly handsome.”

“He’s kind, too. He endured so much cruelty as a child that he wants never to make other people suffer that way. He told me that.”

“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.”

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. Perhaps there 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 began to 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?