Been Told

This is told the way things are told below the roof, by the one who was there, and this time the one who was there was telling, up on the line, and this is not that telling. That one has been told, to the ones it was for, and it is theirs. This is the telling of it.

Stone-First-Who-Waited was on the line, and the loud came down.

The shape of a working time has not changed in two years and it did not change now. The loud down the long passage, all at once and then steadily, settling at the junction. Then one of them coming on, down the third passage, to the crack. The light, low. The smallest of the up-people behind it, with a stone held to the front and the small hard thing on the chest that is not a light, out onto the silt, breath not back. The looking, which is short now. The kneeling. The stone set down a hand from Stone-First's feet, small and plain and complete, and the ground saying what the ground says, late, and theirs. The step back. The thing said that goes up at the end.

Then the wait.

Stone-First bent, and put a hand on the rock at the edge of the silt.

And kept it there.

Not to see. Stone-First had felt the wanting to keep it there once, some tellings before, with nothing on the line but a stone and a hand, and had moved the stone at once, because a thing done to find out is neither manners nor a telling. This was not that. This was the telling. The hand was on the rock because the warm had sent that answer up the shelving in Carried-It-Sleeping's mouth, and the warm had found it in the middle of itself under a small one's hand, and Stone-First had heard it and said tell them I heard it, and this was the time.

The up-person waited the way they waited. With the whole body still, in the low light, for as long as you would wait for a hand to be filled.

Stone-First had measured that once, from the line, and it was not long, and it was coming. Stone-First felt it come the way you feel the end of a passage coming before you reach it. The place where, on every working time for two years, the stone had already spoken and the up-person had already turned. It came.

The up-person did not go.

Stone-First felt that through the whole body, the way the ground says someone: plainly, and all at once, and not to be argued with. Nobody below the roof had known whether they would. The old one had said they would, lying at the edge of the amber, and the warm had taken it, and nobody had known. Now one of the Told knew, and it was Stone-First, on the line, with a hand on a rock and a small up-person standing still on the silt, waiting for a stone that had not spoken.

So Stone-First told it.

Here is how it was told, because the how is the only part of it that is this telling's.

A telling is told standing up. Stone-First had said that in the warm, and meant it, and it is true. On the line, with a hand on a rock at the edge of the silt, you cannot stand all the way up, and Stone-First did not go round that, because Stone-First does not go round things. Stone-First stayed bent to the rock, with the hand on it, and told it from there, which is not how a telling is told and is how the line let it be told. Stone-First would say so afterwards, in the warm, plainly, so that nobody made a rule of it.

What was told was the telling of the up-people's first stone. The loud that came on instead of settling. The one light, low. The small one out of the crack, and the looking, and the wanting to go back with every part of the body that was not the eyes, and the not going. The stone carried to the front and knelt with and set down late, and theirs. The step back. The sound that went up at the end, and what it was, which Stone-First did not know and said so, because saying so is also manners. The rock at the edge of the silt. The going. All of it, in order, at the pace it goes, leaving nothing out, because there is nothing in it that is a reason and nothing you can take out without making a different telling about less.

It is not set down again here. Everyone below the roof has heard it. The small ones play it. It was told this time to the one it was about, from an arm's length, and that is where it is now, and the telling of a telling does not take it back by telling it again.

The up-person stood for the whole of it.

Stone-First watched that while telling, the way you watch a small one while telling, not to see whether it is arriving but to see that they are there. The light stayed low, on Stone-First's hand and the rock under it, and did not lift. The small hard thing on the chest stayed pointed where the light pointed. The breath came back from the squeeze and went ordinary. And the up-person stood with the whole body still, which Stone-First had done on the line for a whole life and had never once seen an up-person do, and was seeing now, from the other side of it.

Whether they understood a word of it, Stone-First did not know, and did not look to see. Went-Round had said it in the warm, a season ago, and it had been true then about small ones and was true now about this: nobody waits until you understand to begin. You are told, and then you go on being told, and the understanding comes along afterwards, for as many tellings as it takes. Stone-First told it the way you tell a small one the first warm seep. All of it, and no slower for the not knowing.

Then it was done.

You know the end of a telling the way you know the end of a passage. Stone-First knew it, and the up-person went still in a different way, the way a small one goes still when the voice stops and the stone has not yet moved and they do not know yet that those are the same thing.

Stone-First moved the rock. A good one. Once.

The up-person heard it, and stood for as long as it takes to say a name, and went. Back through the crack, slowly, not scraping more than they had to, and the light went with them, and the silt was in the light that never changes again.

Stone-First took the hand off the rock. It came off. Stone-First had not been sure it would, and it did, easily, and the rock was only a rock again, which is what a rock is for.

Keeps-A-Hand-On-It had a hand on a stone when it happened, which is where the hand usually was.

The game was going in the middle of the warm, the way it went now, whatever the old ones were doing. A line of stones across the floor. One on it, standing very straight. The rest bunched below, all one warm piece. It was Keeps-A-Hand-On-It's knock, and the hand was on the stone, and the warm had gone still for it the way it did, piece by piece, old ones and all, and Keeps-A-Hand-On-It was holding the stillness the way you hold a thing that is yours, and making it a little longer, because the waiting is the best part.

Then, far up, from the line, the ground said someone.

Small. Late. The up-people's stone. Everyone below the roof knows that sound; it comes at the start of every working time, and after it, before the ground has finished saying it, comes the other one. Stone-First's answer. A good one, from the line, in Stone-First's way. The two sounds are so close together that the small ones who were born after the stones think of them as one sound with two parts, and Keeps-A-Hand-On-It had never in a whole life heard the first without the second.

The second did not come.

The warm noticed before Keeps-A-Hand-On-It did. You could feel it notice. The stillness that had been for the small one's hand changed what it was without changing anything about itself, and went deeper, and went wider, out to the edge of the amber where the ones who do not say much lie, and it was not for the game any more. It was for the line. Everyone in the warm knew what Stone-First was doing. Everyone had heard the old one say it and had heard it go round. And nobody had known whether it would work, and the whole warm lay in the amber and found out together, by the ground not saying anything.

Keeps-A-Hand-On-It kept the hand on the stone.

Not to make it longer. There were two hands on two stones now, one in the middle of the warm and one on the line, and the whole warm was waiting for the one on the line, and you do not move yours while everyone is waiting for another. Two stones at once is noise. The ground does not know the difference and that is exactly why you do. So the hand stayed, and the game stopped around it, the way it had the day the old one spoke, and this time nobody said anything, because there was nothing to say that the ground was not already saying by saying nothing.

It went on.

Keeps-A-Hand-On-It had never kept a hand on a stone this long and had never known that anyone could. To measure it, the way the old ones measure a thing with no day in it, Keeps-A-Hand-On-It told the first warm seep through, in the head, from the stone moved first to the end, and got to the end, and the ground had not spoken. So started the long dark. And was most of the way through the long dark, at the part where the warm is found again, when the ground said someone, from the line, in Stone-First's way, a good one, once.

The warm let go. All at once, the way it had gone still in pieces.

Keeps-A-Hand-On-It moved the stone. Once, well. The one on the line said the smallest, and was right, and nobody heard, because the whole warm was saying one thing at once, and it was not the small sound and it was not a name. It was two words, going round, from the middle to the edge and back, in old ones' voices and small ones', the way a thing goes round when it has just been found out.

They stayed.

Keeps-A-Hand-On-It lay down with the hand off the stone and let it go by, and did not count it, because it was not the kind of thing that becomes a name. It was about the up-people. Nothing about the up-people had ever gone round the warm like that before, and Keeps-A-Hand-On-It, who had been born after the two stones and had never once thought of the up-people as anything but a told thing, lay in the middle of the warm and heard the people say a thing about them the way the people say a thing about someone.

Stone-First came down at the end of the working time and told it standing up, and it was short, because the long part had been told already, up there, to someone else.

"They stayed," said Stone-First. "I told it. All of it, the way it is told. Bent to the rock, with the hand on it, which is not how a telling is told, and is how the line lets one be told, and I am saying that so nobody makes a rule of it. They stood for the whole of it. They did not lift the light. When it was done I moved the stone, and they went."

"Did they understand it?" said a small one, which a small one would.

"I do not know. I did not look to see. You do not look to see with a small one. You tell it."

Carried-It-Sleeping was lying in the middle, with the small ones back in it, where they had been told to be, and the smallest nearest, still, with a hand on nothing.

Went-Round, from the far side of the amber, said the thing Carried-It-Sleeping had been lying there waiting for someone to say, and had thought it might be Went-Round, and it was.

"Somebody has told them something."

Nobody made the small sound. It was not that kind of thing. It was the oldest thing anyone below the roof knew, turned over. Nobody has told them anything. Stone-First had said it first, in the warm, a long time ago, to a youngest who had asked why the up-people never asked, and it had been the truest thing anybody had said that night, and it had been true on every telling since, through the stones and the shapes and the game. And Stone-First had ended it, on the line, with a hand.

"Are they Told, then?" said an old one. Not kindly, and not unkindly. The way you ask a thing you want the answer to.

"No," said Went-Round, and for once went straight through it. "Being told one thing is not being Told. It is being a small one. Every one of us was told one thing first, before we knew what a seep was, and then another, and then all of them, and somewhere in there we were one of the people and nobody can say which telling it was. They have been told one thing. They are at the beginning. That is all anybody is ever given first, and it is a great deal."

The warm thought about that. You could feel it think, and you could feel it agree, which is a different feeling from getting somewhere, and quieter.

Carried-It-Sleeping lay in the warm and thought about the humming stone.

Carried up asleep, through the squeeze, held still while it woke, set down at the edge of the up-people's place so that their own ground would tell them someone was there. That was the first stone, and Carried-It-Sleeping had done it, and had not known, doing it, that it was the first half of anything. And tonight the telling of what had come of it had gone up the same squeeze, in the only mouth that had been there for it, and been set down at the edge of the same people, and they had held still for it. The whole of the distance between the one and the other was this: the first time, the up-people's thing had slept through it. This time they had not.

Then the telling began to go round, the way tellings do, from the ones who had heard it to the ones who had been half asleep, and Carried-It-Sleeping listened, from habit, the way Carried-It-Sleeping listened after anything happened now, for a thing said twice and three times until it was worn smooth.

What went round was they stayed. It was about the up-people. It was not a name, because it was not about one of the people, and Carried-It-Sleeping let it go by and did not count it. Nothing grew that night. Carried-It-Sleeping noticed that, lying there, and did not mind it, and did not think it meant that nothing would.

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

Four stones. The up-people's first, worn smooth. Stone-First's answer. Nobody's, at the edge. The up-people's newest, a hand from Stone-First's feet, where the smallest of them had knelt this working time and stood for a telling. And the rock at the edge of the silt, which had had a hand on it for the length of a telling and was a rock.

Above, when the next working time came, the loud came down, and the light came low into the crack, and the smallest of the up-people came out of it and knelt and set a stone down and stood and stepped back and said the thing that goes up at the end, and waited.

Stone-First bent and put a hand on the rock, and moved it. At once. A good one.

Because the telling was told. You do not tell a telling twice to the same people; you tell them the next one, when there is one, and whether there is one is not a thing you decide on the line. The up-person heard the stone, and waited a hand, and went, the way they went, and Stone-First watched them go and thought that they went now the way a small one goes after being told something: not knowing it yet, carrying it up the long passage into the cold, where it would be understood afterwards, for as many working times as it took. Or never. That also happens to a telling, and it is not the teller's.

Nobody had told them anything. Stone-First had said that first, in the warm, to a youngest, and it had been the truest thing anyone below the roof knew, for longer than the small ones' whole tellings.

It was not true any more, and the line was where it was.