Chapter 93: They Asked to See the Register
She asked for it in the morning, on the mat, in front of about sixty people, in the same voice she had used to ask after Kharun’s arm.
"I would like to see the count you keep."
Nobody had prepared anybody for the silence that followed, and it went on slightly too long, and the length of it was itself an answer.
Kharun drew breath to refuse.
Leon saw him do it and understood, a half second ahead of everyone, that a refusal was the worst available move — because a man who says no is a man who has confirmed there is something to say no about, and because Anev had not asked whether they kept a count. She had asked to see it.
Veya got there first, from the mat, without hurrying.
"Which one?"
***
Leon spent the next several minutes wanting very badly to go and get it.
He is not proud of the reason, and he wrote it down that night because Doran had taught him that the useful pages are the ones you would rather not have.
The reason was that he thought she would understand it.
Nineteen pages of hide in a shelter forty paces from where he was standing. The four marks and what each one means. The germination test in eleven lines. The two counts at the trough and why the second one matters. Nobody on this river had ever looked at that and known what they were looking at, and here at last was a professional, a woman who had spent a day building twenty baskets per frame out of three unrelated conversations, and some part of him wanted to put it in her hands purely to be seen doing the work.
That is vanity, and he knew the word for it while it was happening, and it very nearly moved his feet anyway.
What stopped him was not Doran’s fourth rule.
It was a heading in the middle of the register, written three nights ago by a man who had been frightened, on a page nobody was supposed to open first.
How, if there is nobody to ask.
He had written that page for a world in which everyone on this terrace was dead. Handing it to Anev did not make that world less likely. It made it a thing somebody could plan.
He put the bucket down and stayed where he was.
***
What Veya did instead took eleven minutes and Leon will be thinking about it for years.
She recited.
Not the register. The account — the one that lives in cord and mouth, the one Sevik Two-Boats had given back to her fourth-hand with the endings intact. Sixty-one years of it, cut to six sentences, in the form: what was owed, who crossed, who dissented, the year the camp two reaches up refused, the thirty-one summers of paying, and the weir as said.
She gave it slowly and she gave it complete and she did not leave out the parts that are not flattering.
Anev listened without moving.
And when it was done she repeated the last two sentences back, in the same form, with the endings intact.
Luma made a small sound.
Leon did not know what the sound meant until Doran told him afterwards, and by then he had worked most of it out himself: the endings are the instrument. Getting them right is not memory, it is training, and there are perhaps four people on this river who can do it, and one of them had just walked in from eleven days away wearing unremarkable hide.
"You hold that well," Anev said.
"I have held it since I was five."
"Ei." Anev turned her cup on the mat. "I have had most of it already. From two camps, before the wet. It came to me fourth-hand and it came to me correct, which is the useful thing about your instrument and also the expensive one."
Veya inclined her head about a finger’s width, which from her is a great deal.
"That is not what I asked to see."
"Na."
"You keep two things." Anev said it without any edge whatsoever, the way you would name the weather. "You keep that, which is old, and which everybody on this river keeps, and which I can get from anybody. And you keep another one, which is new, and which is on hide, and which is why a child of seven can tell me how you know a seed is dead."
The council ground did not make a sound.
"I am not going to ask twice," she went on. "Asking twice is how you find out that a place will lie to you, and I would rather not know that about you. You have been honest with me for two days and it has cost you a great deal and I think you know exactly how much."
She got up, and took her staff, which she does not need.
***
It was Kharun who asked, because Kharun asks the thing at the end.
"What will you tell him?"
Anev thought about it properly. That was the part Leon found hardest to watch — she did not have the answer ready, which meant she was going to give a real one.
"I will tell him your number. It is a good number and it is honest and he will be pleased with it, and if that were all of it I would have left yesterday."
She looked, briefly, up the slope at panel forty-one, at the bad panel with a pile of cut posts stacked beside it and a hole started.
"And I will tell him that this place has a memory that is not in anybody’s head. That is the rare thing. Camps have strong men and strong men die, and camps have keepers and keepers die, and the camp goes back to what it was inside a generation, every time, on every river I have counted."
She started for the north path, and her people fell in behind her without being told, and she said the last of it over her shoulder, pleasantly, to nobody in particular.
"He will want to know whose it is."