Page 26 of Circle of Days
The argument raged, with many villagers joining in; but in the end most people came round to Ani’s point of view, and there was no war.
Not yet.
The news reached Farmplace a few days later.
Yana had a she-goat tethered to a post and was milking her, the warm liquid squirting into a shallow pot. Pia was watching, holding the goat’s head to keep her still. Troon came striding along, all sneering triumph. “I told you so!” he said.
Pia had been taught that kind people never said that.
Yana did not look up from her work. “What did you tell me, Troon?” she said in a tone of weary tolerance.
“The herders are cowards.”
“And what has happened to make you so sure you’re right?”
“A traveling man has come here, who sings and plays a drum for food and a place to sleep. He was in Riverbend before, and someone told him the whole story of us cultivating the Break, andthe herders squealing and threatening war. But they told him they had decided not to have a war. So there!”
“Sensible people. Congratulations.”
“Thank you.”
He was enjoying this, Pia could tell. She said: “How many enemies do you think we’ve made?”
“What?”
“I’m asking how many enemies we made with your venture. Too many to count, I suppose, since no one knows how many herders live on the plain.”
“I don’t care. They’re all cowards.”
“You don’t mind being hated?”
Troon grinned, showing uneven teeth. “Mind?” he said. “I love it.”
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 projectDallo 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 ridof 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.
