The stands of bamboo had disappeared, although it was evident that they would be quickly replaced. The bamboo had a phenomenal growth. Burton estimated that a fifty-foot high plant could grow from start to finish in ten days.
His gang had worked hard and cut down all they thought they would need for the boat. But they wanted to keep thieves away, so they used more wood to erect a high fence. This was being finished the same day that the model was completed. The trouble was that they would have to build the boat on the plain. It could never be gotten through the woods and down the various hills if it were built on this site.
"Yeah, but if we move out and set up a new base, we’ll run into opposition," Frigate had said. "There isn’t a square inch of the high-grass border that isn’t claimed. As it is, you have to trespass to get to the plain. So far, nobody has tried to be hard-nosed about their property rights, but this can change any day. And if you build the ship a little back from the high-grass border, you can get it out of the woods okay and between the huts. But you’d have to set up a guard night and day; otherwise your stuff will be stolen. Or destroyed. You know these barbarians." He was referring to the huts wrecked while their owners were away and to the fouling of the pools below the cataract and the spring. He was also referring to the highly unsanitary habits of many of the locals. These would not use the little outhouses put up by various people for the public.
"We’ll erect new houses and a boatyard as close to the border as we can get," Burton said. "Then we’ll chop down any tree that gets in our way and we’ll ram our way past anybody who refuses us right-of-way." It was Alice who went down to some people who had huts on the border between the plain and the hills and talked than into making a trade. She did not tell anybody what she intended. She had known of three couples who were unhappy with their location because of lack of privacy. These made an agreement and moved into the huts of Burton’s gang on the Twelfth Day after Resurrection, on a Thursday. By a generally agreed upon convention, Sunday, the first, was Resurrection Day. Ruach said he would prefer that the first day be called Saturday, or even better, just First Day. But he was in an area predominately Gentile — or ex-Gentile (but once a Gentile always a Gentile) so he would go along with the others. Ruach had a bamboo stick on which he kept count of the days by notching it each morning. The stick was driven into the ground before his hut.
Transferring the lumber far the boat took four days of heavy work. By then, the Italian couples decided that they had had enough of working their fingers to the bone. After all, why get on a boat and go some place else when every place was probably just like this? They had obviously been raised from the dead so they could enjoy themselves. Otherwise, why the liquor, the cigarettes, the marihuana, the dreamgum, and the nudity? They left without ill feelings on the part of anybody; in fact, they were given a going-away party. The next day, the twentieth of Year 1, A.R., two events occurred, one of which solved one puzzle and the other of which added one, though it was not very important.
The group went across the plain to the grailstone at dawn. They found two new people near the grailstone, both of them sleeping. They were easily aroused, but they seemed alarmed and confused. One was a tall brown-skinned man who spoke an unknown language. The other was a tall, handsome, well-muscled man with gray eyes and black hair. His speech was unintelligible until Burton suddenly understood that he was speaking English. It was the Cumberland dialect of the English spoken during the reign of King Edward I, sometimes called Longshanks. Once Burton and Frigate had mastered the sounds and made certain transpositions, they were able to carry on a halting conversation with him. Frigate had an extensive reading vocabulary of Early Middle English, but he had never encountered many of the words or certain grammatical usages.
John de Greystock was born in the manor of Greystoke in the Cumberland country. He had accompanied Edward I into France when the king invaded Gascony. There he had distinguished himself in arms, if he was to be believed. Later, he was summoned to Parliament as Baron Graystoke and then again went to the wars in Gascony. He was in the retinue of Bishop Anthony Bec, Patriarch of Jerusalem. In the 28th and 29th years of Edward’s reign, he fought against the Scots. He died in 1305, without children, but he settled his manor and barony on his cousin, Ralph, son of Lord Grimthorpe in Yorkshire.
He had been resurrected somewhere along The River among a people about ninety percent early fourteenth-century English and Scottish and ten percent ancient Sybarites. The peoples across The River were a mixture of Mongols of the time of Kubla Khan and some dark people the identity of which Greystoke did not know. His description fitted North American Indians, The nineteenth day after Resurrection, the savages across The River had attacked. Apparently they did so for no other reason than they wanted a good fight, which they got. The weapons were mostly sticks and grails, because there was little stone in the area. John de Greystock put ten Mongols out of commission with his grail and then was hit on the head with a rock and stabbed with the fire-hardened tip of a bamboo spear. He awoke, naked, with only his grail — or a grail — by this grailstone.
The other man told his story with signs and pantomime. He had been fishing when his hook was taken by something so powerful- that it pulled him into the water. Coming back up, he had struck his head on the bottom of the boat and drowned.
The question of what happened to those who were killed in the afterlife was answered. Why they were not raised in the same area as in which they died was another question.
The second event was the failure of the grails to deliver the noonday meal. Instead, crammed inside the cylinders were six cloths. These were of various sizes and of many different colors, hues, and patterns. Four were obviously designed to be worn as kilts. They could be fastened around the body with magnetic tabs inside the cloth. Two were of thinner almost transparent material and obviously made as brassieres, though they could be, used for other purposes. Though the cloth was soft and absorbent, it stood up under the roughest treatment and could not be cut by the sharpest chert or bamboo knife.