Chapter 101: The List of Things That Stop
Fel asked for one thing in exchange for giving up his year, and it sounded like nothing at the time.
Count the people in the winter and not in the week before.
The count started on the five hundred and twentieth day and took forty days, and it turned out to be the hardest piece of work anybody on that terrace did all winter, including the wall.
Doran ran it. Nayra supplied the only number anybody had. Halu wrote it, because it was his column and because Kharun had made him the count for life on a night when nobody quite understood what they were agreeing to.
They started with Nayra's forty-one.
Forty-one people who can carry four days and arrive able to work. Nine of those she will not send twice in a season. Thirty-two.
It took Halu about a day and a half to establish that the thirty-two had nothing to do with the weir.
"Carrying is not standing in water."
"It is harder than standing in water," somebody said, from the back, and meant it.
"It is heavier." Halu had the hide flat on a board across his knees, which is how he works now. "Carrying is four days and then it stops. The narrows is kneeling in a river with your hands under the surface, twice a day, every day, for two months, and the thing that takes you out of it is not your back."
He put his own leg out in front of him, because he uses it as an instrument and has stopped being shy about it.
"It is cold and it is wet and it is the same movement about nine thousand times."
So they had to build the number from nothing, and the way Doran built it is the part Leon wrote up in full.
He did not ask who could do it. Asking a man whether he can stand in a river for two months gets you the answer he wants to be true.
He went and found out what people had already done, from the ledger, over five hundred and twenty days.
Who was on the fourteen-day wall crew and how they were on the fifteenth day. Who carried on the run and how many days it took them to be right again. Who was in the water at the crossing in the wet and who got out of it early and never said why.
Nayra had the ward entries. Halu had the run. Kel had the survey. Oren had the wall.
Between them, four incomplete records that nobody had ever laid side by side produced a thing this river has never had, which is a list of a hundred and seventy-three living people with a mark against each one saying what they had actually done, and not what they said they could do.
What came out was nineteen.
***
Nineteen people who could reasonably be asked to kneel in the narrows for two months.
Kharun looked at that for rather a long time.
"Fel wants forty."
"Fel wants forty in the water. He does not want the same forty." Doran had done this part already and had been waiting for somebody to ask. "Five days in, five days out. Two shifts. That is thirty-eight people to keep nineteen in the river, and the other nineteen are not resting, they are doing everything the first nineteen are not doing."
"And the rest of it? The store, the racks, the children, the wall, the water chain."
"Ei."
"Say the number."
"Ninety-four." Doran did not soften it. "A hundred and seventy-three, less thirty-eight on the weir, less the ones who cannot be asked, less the ones who will be feeding the thirty-eight, and the terrace runs on ninety-four people for two months."
Kharun asked what ninety-four people cannot do, and Doran turned the hide round, because he had written it that way on purpose.
The list of things that stop.
It has eleven items on it and Leon copied it into the register unaltered, and reading it is the closest thing to a picture of that settlement he has ever managed to put on a page.
The eastern plot is not worked.
The second drying ground does not open.
No soap gets made, and the six households that put fat in are told why, in advance, at the fire.
One count a day at the trough instead of two.
Nobody goes to the seep.
Somebody looks at the wall and nobody touches it.
Panel forty-one is not repaired, again, for the second year.
Nesh does not take anybody out to the eastern racks and the two days a month go into the river instead.
And the tenth item is the lessons.
That one took an evening and a half.
Kel argued it himself, from a mat, against about nine people who wanted to protect him and did not know they were doing it, and he argued it in the only way that was going to work, which was arithmetic.
"Six children. Two hours. It is not two hours of my day, it is two hours of theirs, and none of the six is on the weir list and four of them are seven years old. Whose hands am I taking?"
Nobody had an answer, because there was not one.
"And the child who told a stranger about row eleven is the same child who wrote the row down." He let that stand. "You are about to stop the only thing this settlement does that pays in eleven years instead of in a season, to save two hours that nobody is using anyway."
The lessons stayed on.
Item eleven was the census itself. Doran struck it out and wrote continues beside it, and did not explain, and Leon understood him perfectly.
***
What they did last was the one that mattered, and it took about four minutes.
Halu put down the charcoal.
"The count is not advice."
Kharun waited.
"If I take a person out of the water, they are out. Not argued about at the fire that evening. Not put back the next morning because we are behind." He was not looking up. "And that includes you."
Everybody on that ground went quiet in the particular way they do when somebody has said the true thing early.
Because there is going to be a day in the eighth week, with the water rising and the shoulder half filled, when the strongest man in the settlement is worse in the morning than he was the night before, and Halu is going to have to say so out loud, and everybody standing there — including that man, especially that man — is going to have a good reason why not.
Kharun did not deliberate. He has got faster at this over five hundred days.
"Ei."
"Say it properly. I am asking for a thing nobody here has ever given anybody."
"You take them out and nobody puts them back. Not me. Not the council. Not the man himself." Kharun said it to the whole ground, the way he says the things he intends to be held to. "And if I am the one who argues with you, somebody is to remind me, out loud, that I agreed to this in the winter when it was cheap."
Veya tied it into the cord that evening, and it took her longer than usual, because there is no existing form for a settlement handing that kind of authority to a man with one good leg and no household.
She invented one, and said so while she was doing it, and made Luma repeat it back twice.