Stone-First-Who-Waited (Pandoid, keeper of the margin)

Stone-First went back up to the line, afterwards, because that is where the margin is, and keeping it means being there.

Three stones. The up-people's, a year old, with the silt worn smooth round it. Stone-First's answer, beside it. And the third, at the edge of the silt, at the top of the shelving, lying beside the mark of where it had been, moved well, nobody's.

Stone-First stood on the line and thought about what a stone is for, because it was the first time in a whole life that the question had needed thinking about.

A stone is so that nobody is surprised by anybody. That is the whole of it. You move one, and the ground tells whoever is there, and then when you come they are not surprised, and when they answer you are not surprised, and nobody has had to be anywhere they were not asked into. It is short, because it has never needed to be long. It has worked for every stone that was ever moved below the roof, since before the tellings begin.

It had worked for this one. The ground had done its part. Stone-First had not been surprised by anybody.

That was the thing Stone-First kept going round, standing there, and could not get to the other side of. The manners had been done, properly, by nobody, and they had worked, and Stone-First had stood on the line and waited to be told who, the way you do, and the telling had not gone on. A stone is the beginning of a telling. This one had begun. Stone-First did not know whose it was, and nobody did, and it might not go on, and Stone-First was going to be on the line if it did, because that is what the line is for.

Above, the loud came down the long passage, all at once and then steadily, and settled, and then one of the up-people came to the squeeze and set a stone down on their side, and stepped back.

Stone-First answered it. A good one, at the edge of the silt, moved once.

And thought, moving it, that the up-people had stood on their side of a stone for a whole season, not knowing who had moved it, and had not made a rule, as far as anyone below the roof could tell. They had kept coming down. They had kept asking the dark. And in the end the smallest of them had come through the squeeze with a stone of their own and set it on the line and waited, and that had been the right thing, and it had been late, and it had been theirs.

Stone-First did not know what the other side of nobody's stone was, or whether it had one.

Stone-First stood on the line, with three stones, and waited.