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

Leon went up for the morning lesson on the three hundred and thirty-fifth day and could not get in the door.

There were six of them. Four sitting, one lying on her front with her chin on her fists, and one hanging off the frame of the doorway in a way that was going to end badly for the frame.

Kel was in the middle of it with the charcoal and did not stop when Leon arrived. He held up one finger, which Leon had never seen him do, and finished what he was saying.

"Again. Not the tall one. The tall one is the other sound."

Ket-li, from the floor, without looking up: "He did it wrong yesterday too."

"I did it wrong yesterday because you were talking."

"I was not talking to you."

Leon stood in the doorway for a while and did not say anything, mostly because if he had opened his mouth something undignified would have come out of it.

Nobody had arranged it. That was the whole of what he liked about it.

It had started, as far as anybody could reconstruct afterwards, because a man who cannot walk sits in one place all day and children are extremely interested in a person who cannot chase them. Ket-li had been in there since about the fourth day, on the grounds that she had known Kel her whole life and he had nothing else to do.

Then Tov, who was nine and had run the message about the eight panels and had been unbearable about it for a week. Then Tov’s sister. Then three more, in the way that children arrive.

And at some point in the last fortnight the shape of the room had turned round, and it was not six children watching a man write, it was a lesson.

Kel taught it the way he did everything, which was slowly and without any visible effort and completely without stopping. He had eleven letters. He taught the eleven he had. When somebody asked him for one he did not have he said he did not have it, and wrote the question on the edge of the page for Leon, and by the end of that fortnight there were nineteen questions on the edge of that page and Leon had answered eleven of them.

He is a better teacher than I am and he has been doing it for fourteen days.

I have been doing it for four hundred and I have taught one man.

Nayra came past at the middle of the morning, looked in, counted heads, and went away again without saying anything at all, which from Nayra was applause.

The one who was best at it was not Ket-li, which surprised everybody including Ket-li.

It was Tov’s sister, who was five and could not be persuaded to sit still for anything else in the settlement, and who had worked out on her own that the marks stayed the same when you turned the page round and that this was, in her opinion, the entire point.

She demonstrated it to Leon by turning the page round.

Then she turned it round again.

Then she looked at him to see whether he had understood, and Leon said that he had, and she nodded and went back to it, satisfied that the tall one had been brought along adequately.

Leon walked back down the path to the works at about the tenth hour and was in an unreasonably good mood for the rest of the day, and did not examine it, and it survived until dusk.

***

What happened at dusk was that he went down to the landing and sat with Doran’s sentence, which he had not been able to put down for four days.

Every single thing we have built this year is portable.

He had been trying to solve it as a defence problem for three days before he understood that he was doing it, and that he was doing it because a wall is the shape his own head goes to and because Kharun was the only person he had discussed it with.

The weir was not the answer. The weir was the shape of the answer.

Veya’s third camp had not been left alone because nobody could take them. They had been left alone because what they had could not leave, and a thing that cannot leave is only worth having if the people who work it are still there next year, and that is not a raid. That is a relationship, and nobody walks eleven days to start one.

So the question is not how do we hold this.

The question is what could we build that only works where it is.

He got the register out and sat on the landing stones and wrote a list, and the list was bad and he knew it was bad while he was writing it. Terraces take four years. A kiln is a heat he cannot reach. A road belongs to whoever walks it. A granary is a building with legs in it, because the legs are the baskets.

He was still on it when Fel Longline came down to check the night lines and sat on the next stone along, uninvited, the way he had every few evenings for a year.

Leon showed him the list because Fel could not read it and because saying a thing out loud to Fel had turned out, several times, to be the fastest way to find out that it was wrong.

He got about a third of the way through it.

"Weir," Fel said.

Leon had not said the word. He was sure of that afterwards and stayed sure of it.

Fel Longline stood up, which for Fel took a moment, and pointed upstream past the bar to where the reach narrows between two limestone shoulders about six hundred paces above the landing.

Then he described it.

He did not describe a plan. He described a thing he had been looking at for fifty years — where the stone would go, which side takes the current, how far out you can work before the bottom drops, that the eastern shoulder is undercut and would have to be filled before anything sat on it, and that the whole of it wants doing in the two months when the water is at its lowest and not one day either side.

He gave the labour without being asked and he gave it honestly.

Forty people. A season. Every season, for ever, because a flood moves stone and a weir that is not repaired is a line of rocks.

And after that: the run comes to you instead of you going nine days out to meet it, and it comes over six weeks instead of nine days, and you take it as you need it and the rest of it stays alive in the holding water behind the stone.

Leon sat on the landing stone and did the arithmetic he had been dreading.

Thirty-two who can carry four days. Eight panels of wall. Ninety days.

Forty people. A season. Starting in a window that has not opened yet.

It is the correct answer and it is the wrong project and both of those are completely true.

***

He asked the question that had been sitting under all of it, and he asked it badly, in the past tense, with the wrong ending.

Why has nobody built it?

Fel Longline thought about that for longer than Leon expected, and looked at the narrows while he did it, and did not answer with anything about labour, or floods, or forty people, or any of the things Leon had spent the last ten minutes writing down.

"My father knew where it went."

He sat back down, slowly.

"So did his mother. Everybody who has fished this reach has known where it goes. It is not a secret and it is not difficult and any of us could have said it to you on your first day if you had asked."

The light went off the water.

"A weir is not for the people who build it," Fel said. "You put forty people on stone for a season and you are dead before it pays. You build it for the ones who are not born."

He watched the narrows for a moment.

"And until this year nobody here was sure there were going to be any."