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

Above, the loud came on down the third passage, and the light came low into the crack, and the smallest of the up-people came out of it the way they did now, and knelt, and set a stone down, and stood, and stepped back one step, and said the thing that goes up at the end.

Stone-First answered it. A good one. Once.

And thought, moving it, that this was the thing the small ones were doing at the foot of the shelving. Exactly that. A stone set down, a step back, the ground saying someone, a stone back. The up-people had learned it by watching, which is the slowest way, and had done it late and kneeling and theirs. The small ones had learned it from the telling of the up-people doing it, and did it for fun, which is the fastest way, and, if Went-Round was right, the oldest. Nobody had told the up-people. Nobody could. They had never been told anything.

That was the thought, and it had a far side, and Stone-First did not go round to it. Not on this time.

But it was there. The telling of the up-people's first stone was Stone-First's own. It had been told standing up, and told again by people who had not been there, and the small ones had learned it, and now they played it. Everyone below the roof had heard it. The up-people, who had been there for it, had not.

A telling is not yours until somebody has heard it. Stone-First put that aside, with the whole body still, for a time when nothing happened.