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

They got three hundred and ten kilograms out of the water before dark and lost the rest.

The method was ropes and thirty people and a great deal of shouting, and it worked in the sense that the hindquarters came up onto the mud in four pieces over about two hours. What did not work was the last of it, the deep side, which had to be cut free underwater by two people standing chest-deep in a river at dusk, and which Kharun stopped after the second attempt.

He gave the reason in three words and nobody argued.

The `Urukar` did not come. Nothing came. The two people Tala had posted downstream stood there for four hours with nothing whatsoever to report, and Leon walked past them on the way up and understood that this was not luck and was not safety, and that the reason nothing had come was almost certainly that something had been somewhere else, and would not be somewhere else next time.

They left ninety kilograms of meat in the river because the alternative was finding out.

***

The camps came in on the fiftieth day and the terrace could not hold them.

Havek’s people first, in fourteen boats, at the middle of the morning. Then Low Reed, which arrived on foot and turned out to be more people than Doran’s count had suggested, because a camp invited to a kill in a late year does not send a delegation, it sends everybody who can walk.

By the middle of the afternoon there were somewhere over five hundred people on a terrace built for a hundred and seventy-four, and no plan whatsoever for where any of them were going to be.

Kharun had thought about the meat and about the defence and about the order of the cutting, and had not once thought about the fact that five hundred visitors have to stand somewhere, sleep somewhere, and do everything else that people do.

Nobody had. It was not stupidity. It was that nobody in this valley had ever seen five hundred people in one place before, and there is no experience to draw on for a thing that has not happened in living memory.

Doran put them on the burned ground, which was the only flat space left and which was ash to the ankle, and which Havek’s people cleared themselves in about an hour without being asked.

***

Nayra had been on the terrace edge since first light with a stick and had not spoken to anybody.

She came down at midday and asked Kharun for the ground below the lower landing, all of it, from the rack line to the bend. Not for the meat. For the other thing.

Then she gave five rules and had Luma and two others repeat them to every camp before anybody was allowed to eat.

She had derived all five from one dipper.

Nine days into Leon’s time here a four-year-old had got sick, and Nayra had spent three days finding out why, and the answer had not been the water. The answer had been a shared cup at a shared jar handled by twenty people. She had built the whole of her practice since on the thing that discovery implied, which is that people who are fine on their own become dangerous to each other by touching the same objects.

Five hundred visitors. Six hundred people in total. Two days.

Every one of them thirsty.

"One. Every camp drinks from its own cups. No camp lends a cup or a jar to another camp for any reason. If a vessel goes across, it does not come back."

"Two. Every camp draws above our intake. At the bar. Not one step below it."

"Three. Nobody empties themselves anywhere between the bend and the intake. The ground below the lower landing is for that and nothing else. It is downstream of everything and forty paces from the water."

"Four. Somebody from each camp stands at that ground and makes sure of it." She named the number she wanted, and it worked out at one person for every twenty.

"Five. Every drop anybody drinks on this terrace for two days has been on a fire first."

She said the fifth one twice and then said that she knew it was the one they would break.

The camps argued about the second rule for about forty minutes and then agreed to all five in under a minute once somebody from Low Reed said the thing that ended it.

He was an old man and he did not make a speech.

"We lost nine in one season to the flux," he said. "Twelve summers back. We never found out why."

He let that stand a moment.

"We decided it was the year."

Nobody wanted to be the camp that found out.

Doran wrote the five rules. Veya put them in the cord. Havek’s speaker and the Low Reed speaker both put a hand on it, which was not a thing anybody had done before and which Leon watched happen with the very specific feeling of somebody who has just seen an institution get built out of nothing in front of him.

Nobody had planned it. There had been no proposal, no council, no agenda. Five settlements had arrived to eat an animal and had, within four hours, made their first common law, and it was about latrines.

Leon thought about the fact that he had been carrying a set of ideas about how a federation ought to be founded, and that none of them had involved this, and that this was better.

***

Leon’s job for two days was throughput and he did it well and it was not interesting.

The carcass came apart on the bar in an order Fel Longline set. The cutting line was thirty people. The fresh distribution was Doran’s and had to be visible, because five hundred hungry visitors watching an unfamiliar camp portion out meat is a situation with exactly one failure mode, so it was done in the open, in sight of everybody, with the same measure for every camp and Veya sitting beside it.

What Leon ran was the rack end.

Nine frames. Four tiers. Twenty baskets a frame in a three-day cycle, which meant the racks were the bottleneck and everything upstream of them had to be paced to them, and the thing he was actually good for was standing between the cutting line and the drying line saying slower and thinner and not yet for eleven hours at a stretch.

He got the strip thickness down by about a third on the second morning, on Nesh’s instruction, shouted from a hide he was still not allowed off, and the drying time came down with it.

That was Leon’s entire contribution to the largest event in Retharu’s living memory: he stood in the middle and made the rate match.

He was, he discovered somewhere in the second afternoon, completely content with that.

***

The third camp came on the second morning, when it was nearly all gone.

Sixty-one people, two days late, having decided something and then changed their minds about it, which was written on every face that came up the landing path.

There was no fresh meat left. Doran told them so.

Then Kharun told them what was left, which was the dried, on the racks, forty baskets of it, which was the entire preserved portion and the entire reason the settlement had spent two days working ten-hour shifts.

He gave them nine baskets.

He did it in the open with everybody watching, and he did not make a speech about it either, and Veya recited the six words from fifty-three summers ago once, and that was the whole of the ceremony.

Leon did the arithmetic that evening and it was not good. Forty baskets down to thirty-one. Two days of the gap given away to a camp that had refused them nine days earlier.

Their speaker came and found Kharun before they left.

She was about fifty and she had walked two days on a decision she had lost an argument about, and she did not thank him, which Leon eventually understood was deliberate.

She gave him something instead.

Her camp had sent a man north four summers ago. Not to trade. To find out where the path went, because they had been asking the same question Retharu was asking now, four years earlier, and had not told anybody.

He came back.

He was eighty-one and he lived at the far end of her camp and he did not walk any more, and he talked about what he had seen to anybody who sat with him, and for four years nobody had, because everybody had heard it and nobody had believed it.

She said the name of the place he described.

Kharun asked her to say it again.

She said it again, and Leon, standing four metres away with a basket in each hand, heard a sound in the middle of it that was not a Rethari sound at all, and felt the whole terrace go a very long way away.

It had a hard consonant in the wrong place, the kind of consonant that does not survive being passed through four camps and forty years unless somebody, somewhere, keeps saying it correctly.

Leon put the baskets down.