They come to lift the stones back down again.
This is what I cannot make my head hold. There is a great hall, warm as no honest house is ever warm, no fire in sight, and inside it stand rows of iron. Good iron. Enough iron to shoe every horse in the shire and mend every plough besides. And the folk take it up in their hands, and they raise it, and they set it down, and they raise it once more. To no purpose. No field is broken. No wall is built. The stone goes up, the stone comes down, and nothing in the world is different for it save the sweat on their brows.
We sweat too. God knows we sweat. But ours buys bread.
They have iron ropes they haul on that pull no bucket from any well. They walk hard and fast upon a moving board and arrive nowhere, same wall before them at the end as at the start. A man could walk to the next village and back in that toil and at least have seen his cousin.
And this is the strangest thing. It is the cold season. The dark, hungry months, when we thin the flock and pray the stores hold and bury the ones the winter takes. This is when they come, in a great crowd, more than at any other time. Fat with the feast still on them and frightened by it.
They do not fear the winter. They fear their own softness.
The good Lord gave us labor as our penance, and here are men who have wriggled free of it, and could not bear the emptiness, so they built the penance back with their own coin. I would weep, but I am too tired.