Chapter 124: He Learned It From the Man Who Refused
Leon asked him on the thirteen hundred and thirtieth day, at the works, in the evening, with nobody else there, which was cowardice dressed up as tact and both of them knew it.
Kharun did not pretend not to understand.
"Veya told you."
"She told me your father is alive. She did not tell me anything else and she said she would not."
"Ei. She would not." Kharun sat down on the bench, which he does not usually do in the works. "It is four sentences and she has held them for thirty years and she will hold them after I am dead, and that is the whole reason I gave them to her."
He looked at his hands for a bit.
"I will tell you the rest. It is not the four sentences and it is longer, and I would rather you had it from me than worked it out."
***
Thirty years ago there was a thin year on that reach.
Not a famine. A thin year — the sort where a camp eats and is careful and nobody dies of it, which Toran was having, on old ground, with a good spring, with two hundred and forty people.
And a camp below them lost their water. Their seep went in one season, which happens, and which nobody has ever been able to predict, and about sixty of them came up the reach in the autumn and stood at four hundred paces and waited to be seen.
They did it correctly. They named what they could do. They asked to work.
Toran refused them.
"Say the number," Leon said, because he had already understood where it was going and wanted it said properly.
"Eleven." Kharun did not look up. "Eleven of the sixty. Over the wet. Not all at once and not in front of anybody. They went on down the river and they came apart and eleven of them are in Veya's cord by name because she took it four years later from a woman who was one of the forty-nine."
***
Tor spoke for the refusal.
That is the part Leon had not expected and it took him a moment.
"Your father."
"Ei."
"And you argued against him."
"I argued against him for four evenings and I was twenty-six and I was not very good at it." Kharun turned his cup over. "And I lost. Not because he was stronger. He was not shouting. He never shouted in his life."
He was quiet for a while.
"He stood up and he said the cost out loud. All of it. Two hundred and forty people, a thin year, sixty more mouths, and he gave the number of days it would take and he gave the number wrong by about nine days in the direction that hurt his own case, because he was careful."
Leon had gone cold about four sentences earlier.
"He was right," Kharun said. "That is the thing. He was right about the arithmetic. Toran could not have fed sixty people that winter without going into the spring at nothing, and he said so, and he was believed, because he had never once in his life said a number he had not checked."
***
Leon sat down.
Because he had been in that settlement for three and a half years and had heard Kharun do exactly that, at that fire, perhaps forty times.
Say the cost out loud. Before anybody votes. Including the part that makes your own case worse.
"That is you," Leon said.
"Ei."
"That is the thing you do. That is the thing everybody here follows you for. It is the whole of how this place decides anything."
"Ei," Kharun said. "I learned it in four evenings from the man who used it to send sixty people down a river in the autumn."
***
He did not say much for a while after that and Leon did not fill it.
"I took forty people out of Toran in the spring," he said eventually. "Everybody who had voted with me and their households. My father did not stop me and did not argue and did not come out to the path."
"And you have not been back."
"Na."
"Thirty years."
"Thirty years." He said it without any self-pity in it at all. "And I could give you nine reasons and eight of them are true and none of them is why."
Leon did not ask what the ninth one was.
He has thought about that a good deal since, and about whether not asking was restraint or the same cowardice as before, and he has not settled it.
***
What he did do, eventually, at the end of a very long silence, was the only useful thing available.
"You told the ground four reasons."
"I did."
"They were all true."
"They were." Kharun looked at him properly for the first time that evening. "Say the rest of it."
"You did not repeat the part where I said I would have to stand there and look."
"Na. I did not."
"Why?"
And Kharun gave him the answer, and it is the reason Leon has never been able to be angry with the man about any of it, before or since.
"Because I do not know whether I want to help them or whether I want to be the man who arrives." He put the cup down. "I have had thirty years to think about walking up that reach with something they need. I have thought about it more than I have thought about anything except the wall. And I cannot tell, from the inside, which of those two things is moving my mouth, and I am not going to send a hundred and seventy-six people up a river on a reason I cannot see the bottom of."
***
Leon walked back up on his own and did not sleep much and wrote it out at about the second hour, badly, three times.
The third version is the one in the register.
Kharun is not refusing to help Toran. He is refusing to trust himself about Toran, which is a different thing and is the more careful of the two, and which everybody on this terrace would praise him for if they knew.
And a spring does not care which of those it is.
If the water at Toran is going for the reason I think it is going, they have two years and possibly four, and they will not know that until the fourth one, because nobody up there has ever written a number down about it.
And the man who could tell them will not go, for a reason that is honest and careful and which I cannot argue with.
He looked at that for a while and then wrote one more line, and it is the first thing he has written in three and a half years that he has not shown to Doran.
So somebody else has to make him.