I Won the Lottery and Went Back in Time!?!

Oren brought his survey in on the two hundred and eighty-eighth day, twenty days before the second stone, and he brought it in the worst possible way, which was correctly.

He had walked the wall four times. He had numbered every panel between posts with charcoal, starting at the landing end and going round, and there were seventy-four of them, which surprised everybody including Kharun, who had built a third of it with his own hands and would have guessed sixty.

He put a strip of bark on the mat with the seventy-four numbers cut into it in four rows, and the bad ones scored through.

Nineteen.

Kharun looked at it for a long moment.

"How bad."

"Two are bad now." Oren put a finger on two of the scores. "Seventeen are bad in a wet."

He was not dramatic about it. He never was. He explained it the way he explained a fall on a trough, which is to say once, in order, with his hands.

They had charred the buried third of every post in that wall, on the strength of four surviving stumps, and the charring had worked. He had dug two of them out to look, which is why the survey took eleven days instead of four, and a hand below the ground the wood was sound.

The rot was at the line where the ground stops, which is the one place nobody digs to.

That is where the wood is wet and dry in turn and has air, and that is the only place that matters, and there is a word for it that Oren used twice without explaining and which Luma rendered as nothing at all because she did not have it either.

Morren.

"Below, it is dry enough. Above, it is dry. At the line it is neither, all season, every season." Oren turned his hand over. "The char is under the line. The rot is on it."

Then he gave them the part that was about people.

Leon saw it before Oren said it, because Leon was looking at the bark and counting where the scores were, and they were not spread out.

Nineteen bad panels and seventeen of them were in one run.

"When did you build that stretch?"

Oren did not need to think about it.

"Last."

Fourteen days. Doran had priced the wall at fourteen days on the thirty-second and the council had taken it and they had done it, and Leon had been proud of that at the time and had written the number down. Everybody had.

And the last four days of those fourteen had produced seventeen of the nineteen panels that were now going to have to come out.

Nobody had cheated. Nobody had been lazy. In the last four days you take the posts that are to hand instead of the posts that are right, you dig the hole to where the ground gets hard instead of to where the post needs, and you char for as long as the fire has left instead of as long as the wood needs, and every one of those decisions is made by a tired person who is correct about the deadline.

We did not build a wall in fourteen days. We built five-sixths of a wall in ten days and then we built a fence.

Kharun took it without a word, which Leon had learned by now was the expensive kind of taking it.

Doran asked the only question his rule permitted.

"Nineteen panels. Between now and the second stone, or between the second and the third?"

Oren had the answer ready, which meant he had spent the eleven days doing the arithmetic as well as the walking.

Two men and a boy, working steady and not fast, with the good timber ground two hours north-west: eleven panels in forty days. Not nineteen. Eleven, and only if nothing else took them off it, and something always took people off it.

"And nineteen?"

"Sixty-five days. Perhaps seventy."

Which was a wish, by Doran’s own rule, and Doran did not say so and did not have to.

The ground went quiet in the way it did when the arithmetic had finished and nobody wanted to be the one who said what came next, which was that eight panels of this settlement’s wall were going to be bad on the day a hundred strangers came down the north path to price it.

Then Nayra gave Leon a job, and she did it in front of everybody so that it could not be refused politely.

"Kel."

Leon waited.

"He has been awake for thirty-one days with nothing to do but be looked at, and a man who is only a leg gets worse. That is not soft. It is a thing I have watched happen four times and two of them did not come back from it." She was not looking at him with any particular sympathy. "He can sit up. His right arm is fine. He can count and he has been counting the racks from where he lies since the ninth day because nobody told him to stop."

"What job?"

"Yours."

Doran got there half a second ahead of Leon and made a sound that was almost a laugh.

Oren’s survey was on a strip of bark and in Oren’s head and nowhere else. And Oren was about to spend forty days out at the timber ground and up ladders, which is to say the only man who could read the survey was about to be entirely unavailable, and if he fell off something the settlement would lose seventy-four numbers and eleven days of walking.

Somebody had to hold it who was not Oren.

"Teach him letters," Nayra said. "You have forty days and a man who cannot go anywhere."

***

Leon sat down with Kel that afternoon and did not know how to start.

Not because of the teaching. Because he had carried a corner of that hide and had not spoken to him properly since, and because there is no good way to walk into a shelter and offer a man a job that exists because he cannot walk.

Kel solved it in about four seconds.

"Nayra sent you."

"Ei."

"She has been telling me for eleven days that I am going to do something." He shifted, which took a while and which Leon made himself watch. "What is it?"

Leon told him. Oren’s numbers, on a page, in a hand that was not Oren’s, before the second stone.

Kel thought about it.

"I cannot see the wall from here."

"Na."

"Then he has to tell me and I have to write what he says." He looked at the register. "And if I write it wrong, everybody thinks the wall is a thing it is not."

Thirty-one days flat on his back and the first thing out of his mouth is the failure mode.

"Ei."

"Good," Kel said, and put his right hand out for the charcoal.

***

He was slow and it did not matter, because they had forty days and he had nothing else and he worked at it the way he had stood in the path, which was without any visible effort and completely without stopping.

Eight days in he could write the numbers to a hundred.

On the eleventh day Oren came in from the wall with the day’s readings and sat down on the floor of the shelter to give them, and this became the shape of the thing: Oren talking, Kel writing, Leon sitting behind Kel’s shoulder correcting the letters and saying nothing about the wall.

And on the fourteenth day Kel stopped in the middle of a number and asked the question.

"What is outside it?"

Oren looked up.

"Outside what?"

"The panel." Kel put the charcoal down. "You have told me eleven times which panels are bad. Nobody has told me what is in front of them. I stood at that trough for a season and the only thing I ever learned is that it is not the gap that decides, it is what a person has to walk to get to the gap."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Then Oren got up and went out, and did not come back until dark, and when he came back he had a second strip of bark with seventy-four marks on it in a different hand from his own, because he had made a boy write them down while he called them.

Eleven of the nineteen bad panels stood above a slope no loaded person could come up.

He put the two strips of bark side by side on the floor and looked at them for a while, and then said the thing that Leon wrote in the register that night and read again twice before he slept.

"I have walked that wall a hundred times."

Oren put his hand flat on the second strip.

"I have never once walked it looking out."