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

Tala pointed out on the three hundred and seventeenth day that Doran had asked her to break Kharun’s rule, and she pointed it out in front of Kharun, because she was not going to do it any other way.

Nothing goes north. Not one person. That had been decided on the seventy-sixth day, in the third of three evenings, and it had been kept for two hundred and forty days by a settlement that had every reason to want to know what was up there.

And Doran had asked her where a hundred people coming down the north path would have to stop.

You cannot answer that from the terrace. You can guess at it, and the guess will be about water and flat ground and it will be roughly right and roughly right is a thing that gets people killed at the wrong end of a hundred days.

Kharun stood with it for a while.

"How far."

"Two and a half days." Tala did not hedge it. "That is the last place a hundred people stop before they are here. If I get that one and the shape of the two behind it I have enough."

"And if you are seen."

"Then they know we are looking, which they will assume anyway." She was crouched, drawing. "And if we do not look, they arrive and we find out where they slept by the ash."

He gave her six days and a pair and a return day, and said the return day twice, and Tala repeated it back to him without being asked, which was as close as either of them came to saying anything about the last time.

***

She was back on the sixth day at the ninth hour, which Doran wrote down, because a scout who comes back on the day she said is a fact about the settlement and not about the scout.

The survey was four places and she gave it with times, and the times were the whole of it.

Eleven days out: a wide flat above a bend, water, room for two hundred. That is where a party coming from far north assembles.

Six days out: a narrow one. Water on one side and rock on the other and no room to spread. You do not choose that place. You end up there.

Two and a half days: the last wide ground. Everything after it is close country.

One day: a shoulder of dry rock above the path with a spring under it, big enough for a hundred if they are organised, and you can see the smoke of Retharu’s cook fire from the top of it on a still morning.

Kharun took the four and turned them over the way he turned everything.

"So they come out of the six-day place tired."

"Ei."

"And they sleep one day out, where they can see us."

"Ei." Tala put her hand flat in the dust. "And they will use all four, because whoever cut that road cut it for people carrying."

Then she told them about the firewood.

She had gone to the one-day shoulder last, on the way home, because it was on the way home and because a scout does not walk past a thing.

There was firewood on it.

Cut, split, stacked in four piles under an overhang, off the ground on cross-poles, dry. Not gathered. Cut — with an edge, to a length, by somebody who intended to come back to it.

The hearth had been dug and lined and a drain cut off the uphill side of it so that a night of rain would not put it out.

Two flat sleeping platforms cleared of stone, and the stone stacked at the edge, which is what people do when they intend to use the ground again.

Nobody had been there for weeks. The ash in the hearth had rained on and set. The cut ends of the split wood had gone grey.

Leon listened to all of it standing at the back with his hands at his sides and understood the whole of it about a sentence before Tala finished, and the thing that went through him was not fear.

This is not a raid and it is not a visit.

Somebody stood on that shoulder a month or two ago with a party of men and a plan and cut a hundred days of firewood for a night they have not had yet. They are not coming to see what we have.

They have a schedule, and we are on it.

***

Kharun asked the question and there were only three answers to it and he made everybody say all three out loud.

Burn it.

That is a declaration. Somebody walks up in a hundred days, finds four piles of ash on a shoulder they prepared, and now the conversation starts with a settlement that destroyed their property before they arrived. Doran priced that in about eleven words and nobody argued.

Take it.

Same thing, and it is theft rather than a message, and you have four piles of firewood you did not need in exchange for the one thing you cannot buy back.

Watch it.

Two people, a day out, permanently, until they come. Two people out of thirty-two who can carry four days. And the pair on that shoulder would be the first two Retharu people a hundred strangers meet, alone, in close country, a day from the wall.

"There is a fourth," Ket said, from where she was working, and did not look up. "Leave it and say nothing and let them find it exactly as they left it."

Kharun turned round.

"That is not a fourth. That is the third one with nobody standing in it."

"Ei," Ket said. "That is what I said."

***

Veya gave her survey that evening, and it was the only good news anybody had all week, and it did not feel like good news for about an hour.

Three pricings on this river inside the cord’s memory.

The first was the one everybody knows, two reaches up from Low Reed, the year she was eleven. She gave four sentences on it. They refused, and they were not there the following summer, and the cord holds the names of nine people and the fact that the rest went downriver and did not come back as a camp.

The second paid.

They paid every fourth summer for thirty-one years and were still paying when the arrangement lapsed for reasons the cord does not hold, and in the meantime they grew, and nobody in the four camps around them thinks about it now, and Veya said that last part twice.

The third is the one Leon wrote down.

A camp on a reach nobody had heard of. Assessed, counted, and left alone, and they were never come back to, and it was not because they were strong.

"What was it?"

"A weir."

Veya let it sit for a second, because she had been waiting all evening to put it down.

Their whole living was a stone fish weir across a narrows that four generations had built and that took forty people a season to maintain. It fed them and it fed two camps downstream in a bad year and it was the most valuable thing on that stretch of water.

And you cannot carry a weir.

You cannot take it, you cannot move it, and if you break the people who keep it you have a pile of wet stone. The only way to have any of it is to leave them there and come back, and coming back that way is an arrangement, and an arrangement is not worth walking for.

The council ground had gone very quiet.

Doran said the rest of it, because Doran says things.

Retharu’s granary can be emptied in a day. The dried baskets walk. The seed jars walk. The salt walks. The metal is the length of a hand.

"Every single thing we have built this year," he said, "is portable."

***

Kharun went out to the shoulder himself on the three hundred and thirtieth day with two people, openly, on the record, and came back on the fourth day at dusk and went to the fire before he went to his own shelter.

He gave it in four sentences.

The firewood was where Tala said it was. He had not touched it. He had walked round the platforms and not stood on them, and had drunk at the spring and left the cup-stone where he found it, and had come home.

Then he said the thing that Leon understood was costing him more than anything he had said in a year, and he said it standing up, in front of everybody, in the flat register a man uses when he wants to be quoted correctly afterwards.

"We are not going to touch it. We are not going to watch it. When they come, they will find it dry."

Nobody spoke.

"And I want it said now, while it is still my choice, that this is the first thing in eleven months that I could not do anything about."