Chapter 98: Nine Days at Sixteen Hours
The run started on the four hundred and forty-seventh day and the settlement emptied by half.
Eighty-one people went downriver to the shallows below the third bend, nine days out on foot with the loads, and the work there is sixteen hours a day for as long as the fish are moving, which is about six weeks in a good year and nobody had ever bothered to write down whether this was one.
Leon had done it last year and had been useless at it, and had spent this year assuming he had learned something.
He had. He was now useful for about eleven hours and then stopped being able to hold a knife properly, which is worse, because a man who is useless at the start gets put somewhere harmless and a man who fails at the twelfth hour is standing in the water when it happens.
Nesh runs it. Nesh has run it for nine years and does not consult anybody about anything, and Leon watched him for two days and understood that the whole of Nesh’s authority is that he knows exactly what everybody’s hands can still do at each hour of the day and moves people before they know they need moving.
At the fourth hour he has the strong ones in the water.
At the tenth he has them out of it and splitting on the bank, and the ones who have been splitting go to the racks, and the ones on the racks go and sit down whether they want to or not.
At the fourteenth he stops looking at the fish and starts looking at feet.
***
Nuli was the fastest splitter on the bank and had been for four years.
Leon had been calling her Nulu since about the fortieth day.
He worked it out at the fifth hour of the third morning, watching Ket-li call to her across the racks — Nuli — and hearing, quite clearly, that it was not the sound he had been making.
He asked Luma at the meal, quietly, feeling the shape of it coming before it arrived.
"It is her name," Luma said. "You say the other one."
"Which is what?"
"The same name for a person you have not spoken to. If I tell you about a woman down the river you have never met, I say Nulu. When you have spoken to her, she is Nuli."
Leon sat with that.
Fourteen months. Every day. To her face.
"Why has nobody —"
"Because you are the Varu and your mouth does what it does, and there are nine sounds you cannot make and everybody stopped counting after the first month." Luma was not being cruel; she has never once been cruel about it. "And because she did not mind. I asked her, in the wet. She said the Varu has forty words and eleven of them are hers."
He went and said it properly that evening, at the racks, and got it wrong twice and right on the third go, and Nuli laughed at him, and corrected the vowel, and went back to work.
***
Fel and Halu were not there. They were at the narrows, six hundred paces above the landing, in water that was as low as it gets, and they were there for eleven days.
Doran got Halu’s account of it afterwards, and what came back was four things.
The eastern shoulder is undercut worse than Oren’s survey said, and the void runs back about two paces under sound rock, and it is full of soft grey silt that will have to come out before anything is put in, by hand, under water, kneeling.
The bottom at the narrows is not stone. It is stone under about a forearm of gravel, and the gravel moves.
There is one place on the western bank flat enough to work a lever from, and it is nine paces from where the biggest stones would have to go.
And Fel walked the whole of it four times, at seventy-one, and on the fourth pass said the sentence that Halu wrote down in the marks Vethra taught him, badly, and got the meaning of exactly right.
Everything I said in the autumn was true and none of it was the hard part.
***
The hard part, when Leon finally saw it written out, was the thing Halu had gone there to count.
Not stone. Not labour. Not the season.
Kneeling in moving water, in gravel, with your hands under the surface where you cannot see them, scooping silt out of a hole for eleven days, and then doing the other seven weeks.
"Feet you cannot see on ground you cannot see," Halu had said at the fire on the three hundred and eighty-third day, and had been made the count for it for the rest of his life, and had now gone and stood in it.
His column has three headings on it. Doran copied them into the register without changing a word, because he said he could not have written them better and Leon agreed with him.
Who was in the water.
How long.
And whether they were worse the next morning than they were the night before.
Leon looked at the third one for a long time.
It is the whole of it. Not injuries — injuries announce themselves and get counted anyway. The thing that takes a body apart over twenty years is the day you are slightly worse in the morning and go in again, and the day after that, and nobody writes any of it down anywhere on this river or ever has.
A man with a shortened tibia thought of it in about a week, because he is the only person here who has had to find out what a body does when you keep asking after it has said no.
***
The run came in over six weeks and it was a good one.
Two hundred and eleven baskets on the racks by the end of it, on top of the two hundred and forty-one already in the store, which is the largest number anybody at that fire has heard in their lives and which Doran refused to say out loud in front of strangers ever again after what happened in the spring.
Nesh got everybody home.
He said that on the last evening, on the bank, with his hands in the water because they had stopped closing properly two days before.
"Nine years. Nine years I have brought everybody home."
Leon, who had a knife in one hand and no feeling in three fingers of the other, and who was too tired to hear it as anything but a pleasant thing a tired man says at the end of a long job, said something agreeable and went to sleep on the stones.