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

Nineteen pages, four times, is seventy-six pages, and there are three people on the terrace who can write.

Doran did the arithmetic out loud on the four hundred and thirty-second day and then sat with it, because the answer was most of a season and they had eighteen days before the low water took everybody who could stand up.

Kel solved it from a mat with his leg out in front of him, in one sentence, the way he solves things.

"They do not have to be able to read it."

Leon said something impolite in a language nobody there speaks.

Because he is right, and it is obvious, and Leon had spent an entire morning not thinking of it. A copyist is not a writer. A copyist is a person who can put a shape on hide in the same order as the shape in front of them, and a child of seven who has eleven letters and a steady hand can do that all day and does not have to know what any of it says.

Kel had six of them working by the middle of the afternoon and had already worked out the part that made it usable, which was not the copying.

"Two of them do the same page. Separately. And then I read both."

"And where they differ —"

"Is where one of them is wrong." Kel had the two strips side by side on his knee. "I cannot read nineteen pages and be sure I have caught every mistake, because a man reading for mistakes stops seeing them by the fourth page. I can read the eleven places where two children disagree."

***

The argument was not about the copying. Nobody minded the copying.

The argument was about what went to Havek.

"The account, ei. The obligations, the crossings, the pricings, the weir as said." Doran laid it out on the third evening in the order he had thought about it. "And the four marks, because those are ours to give and they cost nothing."

"And the rest."

"Na."

Leon had known that was coming and had spent two days getting ready for it and still did not enjoy hearing it.

"Say why."

"Because it is the only thing we have." Doran did not raise his voice; he never does. "Eleven days downriver there is a camp of a hundred and thirty with better ground than ours and more people who can carry, and the only reason we are the place that eats and they are the place that sends us their sick is nineteen pages. You want to walk it down to them."

"Ei."

"Then say your reason and say it properly, because it is kind is not a reason and I will take it apart in front of you."

Fair enough.

"Anev’s last sentence," Leon said. "He will want to know whose it is."

Doran waited.

"A thing that belongs to one settlement is a thing you get by getting the settlement. You buy it, or you put somebody in it, or you wait for a bad winter and then buy it cheaper. That is a solvable problem and Rothen has people whose whole work is solving it, and one of them stood on that ground for three days and did not have to raise her voice once."

"And if four camps have it?"

"Then there is nothing to buy." Leon put his hand flat on the hide. "You cannot own a way of testing seed. You can own the only man who knows it. You cannot own it once six hundred people do, because it stops being a thing and turns into how everybody on this river farms, and a man like Rothen has no instrument for that at all."

Nobody said anything for a while.

Vethra, who had not been asked and was there anyway, put in the part Leon had not thought about and should have.

"And you are wrong about the sick."

He turned.

"You said they send us their sick. They send you their sick because they have nothing. Give Low Reed the germination test and the wound rule and half of what they send you stops needing to be sent." She was not being warm about it. "I have been on the other end of that arrangement for thirty years and I would rather not be famous for it."

***

Kharun ruled it on the fifth evening and did not pretend it was free.

The methods go. All of them. Written plain, the way Leon wrote the page in the middle of the register on the night before the counting party — no reasoning, no cleverness, the kind of page you hand to somebody who has never met you.

And the test goes with them. That was the condition and Kharun put it in himself.

"A method without the thing that checks it is a rumour, and a rumour about medicine kills people, and it kills them eleven days from here where we will never hear about it and never be able to fix it." He looked at Doran while he said it, because Doran was the one who would have to write it. "Every page that says do this also says how you find out whether it worked."

Then he said the price out loud, which is his habit and the reason people follow him.

"In three summers Havek’s camp will have what we have. Some of you will mind that. I would rather be one of five places that all eat than the only place that eats, because the only place that eats is a place people walk eleven days towards."

Doran wrote it without argument, which surprised Leon until he understood he had been outvoted about two days earlier and had gone on arguing to make sure the reasons got said properly.

That is not stubbornness. Leon wrote that down as well.

***

The last thing was small and Leon has not stopped thinking about it.

Ket-li came to Kel with two strips that disagreed and could not tell which was right, because she cannot read either of them.

Kel read both, and marked the wrong one, and it was hers.

She took it back and did it again without any fuss at all, and then stopped, and asked the question that a child asks about eight hundred times before somebody gives up and teaches her to read.

"What does this one say?"

Kel looked at the page in her hand, which was the page about the seed test, which exists because of a strip of bark she wrote row numbers on before anybody planted anything.

"It says what you did in the spring."

She looked at it for a long moment, the way you look at your own name.

Then she asked how long it takes to learn the rest of the letters, and Kel, who has eleven of them and is teaching the eleven he has, said that he would find out with her.