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

"The line is not a place you tell from," said Stone-First.

Stone-First had known this would come and had not found a way round it, because Stone-First does not go round things.

"A telling is told standing up. Here. In the warm, to people lying down, who are being told. That is what telling is. On the line I stand with the whole body still and I do nothing, so that nothing I do becomes part of the telling by mistake. That is the whole of what I do there. I have stood on it for longer than the small ones' whole tellings and I have not said one word to an up-person, and neither has any of you, and it is not because I had none."

"You moved a stone," said Went-Round. "On the line. You answered them. That was not nothing."

"A stone is not a word."

"No. It is the thing before one."

"Then let them have the thing before one," said Stone-First, "which they have, four times over, and let the word be told where words are told."

"They cannot come here."

"No."

"And you cannot go there."

"No," said Stone-First, "and I would not if I could, because the line is where I put it and that is where it stays. So the telling is mine, and the place is the line, and I say the line is not a place you tell from. I know how that sits. I am not going to go round it to make it sit better."

The warm thought about it. You could feel it think, and you could feel it get nowhere, because it had nowhere to get. An argument among the Told is settled by who was there, and nobody had ever told a telling on the line, so nobody had been there, and the people's whole way of settling a thing had come up against a thing that had not happened yet, and stopped.

"Then nobody can say it cannot be done," said Went-Round, from the far side.

"That is not how it works," said Stone-First. "That is how you get a rule you go round later."

And Went-Round, who had kept that rule all one season and knew it, said nothing, and the warm was quiet, and the small ones in the middle, who had stopped playing for Stone-First, began again, because there was nothing else to listen to.