Ferni, a generally affable cadet, took a look at the wall I had ascended and said, “Go ahead. It’s easier to take them from here than dig them up out from under all the little ones anyhow.”
Within a very short time, Ferni was joined by the other two boys, Caspor and Poul, and the girls, Jaker and Flek, who also found it easier to take the stones I dropped down than to dig them out of the general rockfall, especially with all the squabbling over territory that was going on. Meantime, I mentioned quietly to Ferni that one of them should always stay by our stone pile to prevent it being borrowed from by neighboring teams, and Ferni quietly passed the word to the others.
I, meantime, was counting to myself: so many stones to the row, so many rows to the layer, so many layers to make the wall. Midafternoon came, and team six had not built a foot of wall while some of the others had sizable structures. Grangel, working with one of the fastest teams, was loud in his mockery and direct in his abuse.
“Look at the noomi bunch!” he cackled. “Buncha real slow worms!”
“We better build something,” complained the smallest of the group, Poul. “Everybody’s ahead of us, and they’re calling us names.”
“Good enough,” I conceded. “I think we have almost enough stone to complete the job. We’ll start with the largest flat ones we have, but let’s grab a couple of those shovels over there to level the soil first.”
We leveled, to cackles of derision, particularly when I poured a thin stream from my water bottle at various spots on the leveled area to see if it went anywhere.
“They think old Orley told them to dig a latrine!”
“Ho, Noomi, you puttin’ in a swim pool?”
The leveling process uncovered several jutting stones, the smaller of which I insisted we remove. We bridged the larger ones when we set flat base stones around them. The big, flat stones were laid up quickly into courses one and two. As we were midway through the third course, cries of dismay erupted from the neighboring group five, whose quickly built wall suddenly collapsed in a cloud of dust when one hasty rock carrier tripped and fell into it.
“Slowly,” said I in a low voice. “Don’t look at them, look at what we’re doing, starting on course four. Make sure every stone is level and wedged to the next one. If it teeters, it’s in wrong!” With no comment, the other five went on building while I fished my coil of twine from my pocket, one of the things I’d brought in my memorabilia box, tied one end of it around a small stone, and heaved it over a low branch that jutted just above where we were working, lowering the stone until it hung just above the earth alongside their wall.
“What are you doing?” demanded Ferni.
“We did our best to level the bottom,” I replied. “Now we have to be sure it’s rising straight, otherwise it’ll topple over like that other one. Point your fingers, lay your palm where it just touches the string and your middle finger just touches the wall, move it up and down and you can tell whether the wall’s going straight up. If we had some really straight sticks, we could put in some stakes, but there aren’t any.”
“There’s shovels,” said Ferni. “Nobody’s using them.”
I grinned at him, and together we brought over the shovels and made a line of them, each handle adjusted by plumb line to be straight up and down. No one had watched us doing this because all eyes were on group two, where Grangel was summoning attention by showing off what heavy stones he could lay in place. As he heaved an especially large one atop their structure, I clenched my teeth and held my breath. The rock immediately below the space Grangel was attempting to fill was roughly spherical, wedged into position with small, also rounded pebbles. When Grangel’s burden hit the wall, the round rock slipped sideways, the smaller pebbles shot out of place, and half the wall collapsed as the spherical stone bounded across the space between walls two and three, hit wall three a resounding blow and destroyed a large part of it.
Groups two and three began to direct their scorn at Grangel instead of at me.
“Pay no attention,” said I. “Caspor and Ferni, we’re going to need more middle-sized and small flat rocks to finish off. You’ll find the best ones right under where I was getting them. The four of us will go on building if you’ll gather more stones for us, and don’t waste a trip. Pick them carefully.”
The wall went on growing. Almost flat, it rose regularly equidistant from the vertical shovels, needing only a final layer to reach the required height. Each layer contained stones of varying thickness, but all were leveled and interlocked, with no rounded ones used at all. While Jaker, Poul, Flek, and I leveled the course for the last layer, Caspor and Ferni moved back and forth with the smaller flat stones I had asked for.
Only four teams were still building. Teams two and three were madly piling rock, making up for lost time; five had not yet totally recovered from its collapse, and six was still leveling its last course while the teams that had finished amused themselves by insulting those who had not. “Noomi” had become a favorite word, and I noticed our team looking sideways at me. “Don’t
