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

Halu Reed-Cut finished on the three hundred and eighty-first day, forty-four days before the counting party, and he came and told Doran first, which was correct and which Leon found out about afterwards.

A hundred and seventy-eight days of an extra spur turn every four days, on a leg that had been broken in two places below the knee and had healed short. Doran had the count on a hide, because Doran had been keeping it since the week it started without telling anybody, and the number of extra turns was forty-two.

Forty-two turns, converted at the rate the cord uses for a watch, came to a little more than two kilograms of rendered fat.

It had to be more.

Veya’s rule says the same weight, and Ket had told Leon on the day it started that it would be a little over, and both of those are the same rule said from different ends. Nobody can weigh a hundred and seventy-eight days of a man’s walking exactly. So you go past it, on purpose, where everybody can see, and then there is no argument left to have.

They did it at the fire because a hemra is discharged in public or it is not discharged, and Veya sat on the mat for it, and about sixty people came without being asked.

Halu’s sister stood at the front. She was fourteen and she had been giving him her share since the wet and telling him she was not hungry, and Leon had learned that in a doorway a hundred and seventy-eight days ago and had thought about it roughly once a week since.

Halu said the weight out loud before he handed it over, which nobody had told him to do and which Doran said afterwards was the correct instinct, because the whole of a discharge is that everybody standing there hears that it was more and not equal.

Two kilograms and about a fifth.

The jar went from his hands to Leon’s hands and it took four seconds.

Leon had spent a fortnight working out what to say and used none of it, because Veya had told him beforehand, once, in the register she uses for teaching, that a man discharging a hemra does not want a speech from the person he is discharging it to.

So he said the only thing there was.

"Ei."

And Veya said the sentence that ends it, which nobody on this terrace had heard in eleven years and which Luma had to render twice for Leon because the verb form in it exists for nothing else.

Neither owes the other. Both may speak.

Halu’s sister did not thank him, then or afterwards, and Leon spent some of that night working out that she had been paying part of it for a hundred and seventy-eight days and that there was no ceremony at all for what she had done, and no word for it, and nobody was ever going to stand up at a fire and cancel anything with her.

Leon had expected to feel something and had assumed it would be relief.

What he actually felt, standing there holding a jar of fat that he did not want and could not refuse, was a kind of low administrative dread, and it took him until the following morning to work out why.

Both may speak.

I have spent a hundred and seventy-eight days waiting for this man to be able to say something, and I have not once asked myself what he is going to say.

***

Two evenings later Halu said it at the fire, standing, in the plain register, and he opened by naming the thing so that nobody could pretend it was about anything else.

"The weir."

Fel Longline turned his head.

"I have heard it four times since it went in the cord and every time somebody says forty people and a season, and nobody says what a season on that bottom does to forty people."

He shifted his weight off the leg, which he did about every forty seconds and had done since the fifty-first day, and Leon watched sixty people notice him do it and understood that he had chosen to speak standing for exactly that reason.

"Stone, in water, on a soft bottom, for two months. Lifting wet. Carrying wet. Feet you cannot see going down on ground you cannot see."

He let it sit.

"Nayra has forty-one people who can carry four days. Ask her what forty of them look like after a season of that, and then ask her again after the second season, and the third, because Fel said every season for ever and he was right and I am not arguing with him."

Fel did not look away from him.

"I am saying that this settlement is about to buy a thing with legs," Halu said. "And nobody has counted them."

Nayra answered because it was hers to answer, and she did not soften it and did not exaggerate it, which is the hardest thing to do with a number that frightens people.

Backs, mostly. Shoulders. Knees on the older ones. Cuts on a submerged bottom that go bad faster than cuts on dry ground, which she had learned this year from Kel and had written down.

She would not give a figure for how many, because she did not have one and said so.

"But it is not none," Nayra said. "It is never none. And I would want the count kept from the first day, because if we do not keep it we will find out in ten years by looking at how people walk."

Kharun said one word and it was not a question.

"Halu."

"Ei."

"You are the count."

And Halu, who had spent a hundred and seventy-eight days buying the right to say one sentence at a fire, stood there and got handed a job for the rest of his life instead, and took about two seconds over it.

"Ei."

***

Doran wrote it that night, under the weir entry, in the crooked letters Luma had been teaching him since the wet.

He did not write it as an objection, because it was not one. He wrote it in the column he had ruled for costs, beside the forty people and the season and the every season for ever.

and the legs

Then he sat back and looked at the page for a while.

"That is three prices on it now," he said. "Forty people, a season, and the legs. It is the first thing anybody has proposed here that has been priced properly before a single stone was moved."

Leon was sitting on the far side of the fire with a jar of fat beside him that he still had not worked out what to do with.

He gave it back, and the debt cancelled, and I spent two days worrying about what he would do with a voice. What he did with it was produce the most useful sentence anybody has said about the weir. It could only have come from him, and it could not have come from him yesterday.

That is what a voice is for. It is not a courtesy. It is a load-bearing member.

Veya got up when the fire went down, and stopped by him on her way past, the way she does.

"You look better than I expected."

"Ei."

"Good." She put the cord over her shoulder. "Most people are relieved. The ones who are relieved have not understood what they gave back."