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

The council went through the options in about an hour and killed six of them.

Range further north. The ground up there had been stripped to the crowns nine days before the fire and would not have recovered, and the people who had stripped it were still somewhere behind it.

Ask downstream. Havek had said yes to an alliance and had eleven fewer people than he had two summers ago, and asking a camp that is short to be shorter is not an alliance, it is the end of one.

Eat the seed. Doran raised it because Doran raised everything, and it died in four sentences.

"Six kilograms," Leon said. "Most of it sealed. Two days of food. Three."

He put his hand flat on the mat.

"And it is the only reason there is anything growing on the north ridge."

Eat the breeding animals. Same shape, worse consequence.

Nothing else on the terrace was food.

Then Kharun said the seventh thing, which was not a proposal so much as the naming of something everybody already knew, and the ground went quiet in a different way.

They would take one of the big ones.

It was not a wild idea and Leon understood that within about a minute, mostly from how nobody reacted.

The Retha did not hunt the large herbivores as a matter of routine, for the same reason nobody on Earth ever hunted elephants for lunch: the animal is enormous, the risk is real, and what you get is more food than you can do anything with. Small game and fish and reed rhizome are what feeds a settlement, because they arrive at a rate you can match.

But in a bad year you take one, and there was a way of doing it that everybody in the council ground had heard described and four people had actually seen, and it involved a cut bank, a chosen animal, and about twenty people doing very specific things in a very specific order.

Kharun laid it out. Tala corrected the ground he had chosen. Fel Longline corrected the day, on the grounds of where the herd would be.

Leon listened to twenty minutes of it and did not say one word, because there was nothing in it he could improve and a good deal in it he did not understand, and because a man who has never killed anything larger than an argument should keep his mouth shut in that particular conversation.

Then Kharun asked him a question, and it was the arithmetic one, and Leon had been building the answer in his head for the whole twenty minutes and had been hoping to be wrong.

The animal would yield somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred kilograms of usable meat.

Leon gave the number as this much, in baskets, because kilograms meant nothing here and the basket was the unit Doran had already made everybody learn.

Against it: a hundred and seventy-four people, eating hard, could get through about five hundred and twenty kilograms in the two days before the rest of it stopped being food.

Because that was the part, and it was Nesh who said it, from a hide, with his arms still out in front of him.

"You cannot keep it."

It was twenty-nine degrees on the terrace in the afternoon and the air was wet enough to leave your shirt heavy. Meat cut off a carcass in that would be dangerous inside a day and finished inside two. Not spoiled in a way you could argue with. Spoiled in the way that puts nineteen people in Nayra’s ward in a settlement with seven days of food.

Drying was the answer and drying was the problem.

Nine frames. Four tiers. Thin strips, turned, over slow smoke, in eighty-two percent humidity, which was the single worst variable in the whole arrangement and the one nobody could do anything about. Nesh, whose forearms were still wrapped and who had been sitting on the char trench for six days and had opinions about everything, gave the throughput without hesitating.

Twenty baskets to a frame in a cycle. Nine frames. Three days to a cycle.

Leon did the multiplication out loud and then sat with the result.

Fourteen hundred kilograms of food, in a settlement eight days from nothing, and the binding constraint is nine wooden frames and the weather.

They could preserve perhaps two hundred kilograms. They could eat five hundred.

That left seven hundred kilograms of meat — five days of food for the whole settlement — rotting on the ground, because there were not enough mouths and not enough racks and not enough time.

Nobody said anything for a while and then Veya said that she had been through the cord.

She had been through it since the night Fel gave his number, working backward, and she had found the year. It was fifty-three summers ago and she had been eight years old and she remembered the smell of it, which was the part she said first and which Luma did not translate for a moment.

What the cord recorded was not a hunt.

It was a hunt and four camps.

You cannot keep that much meat and you have never been able to keep that much meat, and the people who worked this out did not work it out from a rack throughput calculation. They worked it out from the fact that a carcass is a thing that has to be finished, and that the only container large enough to hold fifteen hundred kilograms of meat for two days is people.

Six hundred people can eat it. A hundred and seventy-four cannot.

Kharun understood the timing problem before Leon did and said it flatly, which is how Leon learned that Kharun had also understood it was a problem.

Two days downstream. Two days back.

Which means you cannot kill the animal and then send for the camps, because by the time they arrive the reason for coming has gone green in the heat.

You have to send first.

***

That was the decision and it took the rest of the night.

Send four messages, to four camps, one of which had already said no to a much smaller request, inviting between three and five hundred people to walk two days upriver on the promise of an animal that Retharu had not killed yet, might not kill, and could very easily kill badly.

If it went wrong, five camps would have spent four days of walking and two days of food they did not have on nothing, in a late year, on Retharu’s word. Every one of them would remember it. Doran said what that would cost, in the flat voice, and it was not a number and he gave it anyway.

"I would rather owe four camps an apology," Kharun said, "than stand on that bar and watch seven hundred baskets of meat go into the river."

Leon put his hand up, which was a gesture nobody here used, and everybody had learned in six weeks meant that the tall one was about to say something in the wrong tense.

He said: water not turn. If water turn, fish come, no need.

It was clumsy and it was the right question, and Fel Longline answered it before anybody else could.

If the water turned tomorrow the fish would still be six days behind it. The invitation and the hunt would still be inside the gap. Nothing about a rise made this unnecessary; a rise only made it less bad afterwards.

Leon put his hand down.

The third camp was the argument, and it went on for an hour after everything else was settled.

They had said no. They had heard the whole message, fed Doran, thanked him, and said that they had their own eleven days.

Doran was for inviting them, which surprised Leon so much that he made Luma repeat it. Doran had objected to the alliance, had been proved partly right within six days, and now wanted to send an invitation to the one camp that had refused it, and his reason was arithmetic: they were seventy or eighty mouths and there were seven hundred kilograms of meat and the two numbers wanted each other.

Kharun was against. He did not dress it up. They said no, and a camp that will not carry a message will not stand at a wall.

Veya let both of them finish and then read out what was in the cord from fifty-three summers ago.

It was one line and Luma gave it to Leon twice.

"We did not ask who had helped."

That was all. No reasoning attached, no principle stated. Somebody in a late year fifty-three summers ago had made the same decision in front of the same problem and had left behind exactly six words about it, and the six words were not an argument, they were a precedent.

Kharun sat for a moment.

Then he said that the cord was older than his opinion, and that the invitation would go to all four.

***

The messages went out at first light on the forty-eighth day, four pairs, in the pairs Nayra had made compulsory nine days earlier.

Leon walked down to the landing to see them off and then went and stood at his stake in the slack water and read the level, because it was first light and that was what he did at first light.

He wrote the number in the register.

It was the same as yesterday’s.

He stood in the shallows holding a pencil and looked at two identical numbers with a day between them, and did not allow himself to feel anything about it, because one flat day is not a stop, and a stop is three days, and he had forty-five marks that said this river had never once done him a favour.

Then he went up the bank and told Fel Longline anyway.