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

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.