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

The spur watch saw the fires on the four hundred and twenty-third day, on the shoulder a day out, at about the ninth hour of the evening.

Four of them, spaced the way a party spaces fires when it is not hiding.

The firewood was being used. The firewood that had sat cut and stacked under an overhang for two hundred days while a settlement decided, publicly, to walk past it and touch nothing.

Tala came down herself with the count and gave it in one sentence, and Leon watched about eighty people receive the news that the thing had actually happened.

Then she gave the other part, which nobody wanted and which everybody heard anyway.

"Four fires. And the ground is wrong."

Doran had the hide out before she had finished saying it.

"Wrong how."

"Wrong for a hundred." She was still breathing hard from the path and did not sit down. "I was on the shoulder at the last of the light and I looked at where they are standing and where they have walked and where they have been going for water, and it is not a hundred people’s worth of ground. It is a third of that. Perhaps a quarter."

"You are guessing."

"Ei. I am guessing. I have never watched a hundred people make a camp, so I have nothing to hold it against. I am telling you it is a guess and I am telling you anyway."

Doran wrote it down.

Leon watched him do nothing else with it, and could not afterwards work out what he had expected the man to do.

Because there was nothing. Every stopping place Tala had surveyed, Kharun’s rotation, forty days of Oren’s panels, every hour of the rehearsal — a hundred, all the way down. And you do not take a plan apart in the dark on a scout’s hedge.

So the number stayed on the hide, and everybody went and did the ordinary evening, because there was nothing else to do with it.

The water chain ran. The trough ran. Somebody’s roof needed doing and got done.

Nesh turned the racks. Ket carried a jar down to the fifth station because it was the fourth morning coming and she was not going to be behind on the day. Two of the children fought about a mark on a log and were separated by Kel from a sitting position, which he could now do with some authority.

Nayra went round the ward twice instead of once.

Kharun did nothing anybody could see, which Leon eventually worked out was itself the thing: he walked the terrace once at dusk and spoke to about nine people about nothing in particular, and every one of them was calmer afterwards, and not one could have told you why.

Leon sat outside the works and did no work.

Ket-li came and sat down next to him at some point with a strip of bark and a flake of chert and got on with something.

"Are you frightened?"

He thought about lying and did not bother, because she was seven and would have known.

"Ei."

"Of what?"

That took him longer. He had been sitting there an hour turning over walls and panels and baskets and none of it was the answer, and when the answer came it was smaller than he expected.

"That they will be right about us."

Ket-li considered that with her head on one side and then went back to cutting, having plainly filed it as the sort of thing adults say.

After a while she said the other thing, without looking up.

"Kel says we still have lessons tomorrow."

"Ei?"

"He says if we stop, that is a thing they can count."

Halu came past at full dark with the leg and the limp and a bundle under his arm, on his way up, and stopped.

"Nayra put me on the ward."

"For tomorrow?"

"For tomorrow." He shifted his weight off the leg. "In case. She says a man who cannot run is exactly the right man to be standing where the hurt ones arrive, because he is not going to go anywhere else."

He said it flatly and Leon understood that he had thought about it and had decided it was a compliment.

"And I am the count," Halu said. "For the weir. So I asked her to teach me the marks, because there is no reason to wait until there is a weir."

Leon did not say anything for a moment.

"Nayra is teaching you."

"Vethra is teaching me. Nayra watches and disagrees with her about twice a morning." Halu started up the path. "It is very slow and I understand about a third of it and I have never in my life been in a room where two people who know a thing argue in front of the person who does not."

Leon went up past panel forty-one on the way back and there was somebody standing at it in the dark.

Oren, with four cut posts on his shoulder, adding them to a stack that already had eleven in it.

"It was enough at the ninth hour."

"Ei."

He put them down anyway, squared the ends with his boot, and stood looking at a hole he was not going to fill for forty days.

"I have walked that wall for eleven years and tomorrow somebody comes down it who knows what she is looking at." Oren picked the adze up off the grass. "I would rather she found me in the middle of something."

***

Veya was on the flat stone above the landing at about the eleventh hour, which she should not have been, and Luma was with her, which explained it.

They were not talking. Luma was reciting, quietly, and Veya was listening with her hands still on the cord.

Leon stopped where he was and did not go closer, because after fourteen months he knew what he was looking at.

She was giving Luma the whole thing. Not the account of the file, which Luma had held since the wet. Sixty-one years of cord — the obligations, the crossings, the dissents, the year the camp two reaches up refused, the thirty-one summers of paying, the weir as said.

She was doing it the night before, because she was sixty-six and because the one thing the record cannot survive is living in one skull on the day something happens.

He went up the path the long way so that neither of them would have to notice him.

He got the register out in his own shelter and did the only useful thing he could think of, which took him until about the second hour.

He did not write about the counting party.

He wrote down every method the settlement had that would be lost if the people who held it were not here. The four marks and what each one means. The germination test, in eleven lines, with the number of days. The shatter test. The charcoal edge on a wound. The two counts at the trough. Why you char below the line and not at it. Which seed goes in thicker and why.

Plain language. No reasoning. The kind of page you can hand to somebody who has never met you.

Then he wrote a heading on it, because Doran had taught him that a page without a heading is a page nobody finds.

How, if there is nobody to ask.

He put it in the middle of the register where it would not be the first thing anybody opened, and went to sleep, and slept badly, and got up at first light with everybody else on a morning that was, in every respect anybody could see, an ordinary one.