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

They went downstream on the fifty-third morning: Leon, Luma, Tala and Sila, in one boat, with four days of food and Kharun’s instructions read out twice on the landing in front of witnesses.

The instructions were about coming back.

Not about what to ask, not about what to look for, not about the north. Four sentences, all of which were about the boat, the river, the pairs and the day they were expected, and Leon understood by the third one that Kharun had spent the previous evening building a set of rules that would make it impossible for anybody to justify going further than the third camp.

Leon had, in fact, spent the previous evening thinking about exactly that.

Leon said ei and did not look at anybody.

***

The river below Retharu was a different river and it took him about an hour to stop being stupid about it.

Fifty-two days on eleven kilometres of one reach. Leon knew the bar, the bend, the reed beds, the stake, the drop below the landing where the water went dark. Out of that one reach he had built a model of what this river was, and the moment they came around the second bend the model started failing.

The bank got lower. The reeds gave way to a broad flat of grey mud with birds working it that he had never seen. At the fourth bend the channel split around an island the size of the entire Retharu terrace, and Tala took the left arm without looking, and Leon realised he had spent seven weeks thinking of the river as a line.

It was not a line. It was a system, and he had been living in one room of it.

Leon got the notebook out at the third hour and did not stop writing until the light went.

Sila spoke about eleven words in two days and one of them mattered.

She was in the stern with the steering paddle because she had grown up on this water and had made this run more times than anybody in Retharu except Havek, and she took them past two places without comment where Leon could see, from the surface texture alone, that the bottom did something abrupt.

At the middle of the second afternoon he asked her, in his terrible Rethari, how she knew.

Sila looked at the water for a while.

"My mother showed me," Sila said. "Her mother showed her."

She adjusted the paddle by about a hand.

"It has moved twice since I was small."

Leon wrote that down and then sat with it.

Three generations of knowledge about a hazard that relocates every twenty years. Not written anywhere. Not in Veya’s cord, because the cord recorded obligations and decisions and not the shape of a riverbed. Held in the heads of the people who steered the boats, transmitted by pointing, and complete only in the sense that it had not yet failed.

Leon thought about Sila drowning, which was not a thought he had asked for, and about what would go with her, and did not write that part down.

***

They came onto the Nethvar landing in the last hour of the second day, and the camp was smaller than Retharu and better sited.

Leon saw it within about ninety seconds of the boat touching, and spent the whole first evening trying to work out why nobody had ever mentioned it. The camp sat on a spur inside a river bend with water on three sides and one approach, which meant it needed about a third of the palisade Retharu needed for the same protection. There was no burned ground. Nothing there had ever needed a fourteen-day wall.

Their speaker was called Renketh and she had walked two days late to a kill and come back with nine baskets and an argument to win, and she had won it, and she did not appear to be enjoying it.

She fed them. That was the whole of the welcome and Luma said afterwards it was the correct one, because a camp that makes a speech about a reconciliation has not had one.

Then she took them to the old man.

His name was Rehu-vek and he was eighty-one and had not walked in two years.

Rehu-vek lived at the far end of the camp under a good roof somebody maintained for him, and he had four grandchildren who took turns, and the first thing he did when four strangers came in was to look at Leon for a long time and then say something to Renketh that made her laugh once, sharply, and not translate it.

Luma got it later. He had asked whether anybody was feeding this one properly.

Leon sat down on the floor, which put his head at about the level of everybody else’s, and did not say anything for the first hour.

That had been Luma’s instruction on the boat, delivered with a directness he had not previously experienced from her: you will want to ask him about the thing. Do not ask him about the thing. He has been asked about the thing for four years by people who did not believe him and he has learned how to say it in the short form. We do not want the short form.

So they got the long form.

It took the whole of the first evening and most of the next day, and for the first four hours it was not about the north at all. It was about his wife, and about a fishing arrangement with a camp that no longer existed, and about a dispute over a boat in the year the water came up early, and Luma listened to every word of it with total attention and Leon eventually understood why.

She was not being polite. She was learning how he told things. What he exaggerated. What he flattened. Which words he used for large and whether he used a different one for very large, and what he did with his hands when he was certain and what he did with them when he was not.

By the middle of the second day she could hear the difference, and that was the point, and Leon had been in the room for eighteen hours before he grasped that the entire method was calibration.

***

North, in the summer of the year the river came up early, which was four summers ago, and he was seventy-seven when he did it, and he went because a young man from his camp had gone and had not come back and nobody else would go.

Eleven days of walking.

Rehu-vek described the way, and Luma turned it over to Leon as it came, a piece at a time.

"He says the low brush was cut back," she said. "Both sides. An arm." Leon heard the brush cut back on both sides and the drained stretch and the cleared slip, all of it, in a vocabulary that had no word for road, from a man who had walked it four years before Tala had.

He described the people he met. Not many. Nobody stopped him. Twice he was overtaken by parties going the other way with loads, and both times they greeted him and went past, and one of them gave him food and would not take anything for it.

Then the end of the eleventh day.

And this was where his hands changed, and Luma’s shoulders came down half a centimetre, and Leon stopped breathing for a moment because he had spent a day and a half learning to read exactly that.

The ground, he said, had been cut in lines.

"Not a field," Luma said. "Lines. Straight. Going away from each other and never meeting, with the earth taken out between them and put somewhere else."

She waited for the next part and then gave it exactly as it came.

"He followed one for a long time. It did not stop and it did not bend."

There was a thing standing up out of the ground that was not a hill.

People had asked him, four years ago and many times since, how big, and he had learned that the answer got him laughed at, so he had stopped giving it. Luma did not ask him how big. She asked him how long it had taken him to walk past it.

Most of a morning, he said.

Then Leon asked his one question, in Rethari and badly, and it was not about the size or the lines or the thing standing up.

He asked what the people there called it.

Rehu-vek said the name.

Rehu-vek said it slowly and carefully and with the cluster in the middle intact, exactly as Renketh had said it on the Retharu landing four days earlier, and then he said the thing that made the whole eleven-day walk worth having.

Then he said that a woman there had made him repeat it four times before she was satisfied.

He did not know what it meant, and that he had asked, and that the woman had told him, and that he had not understood the answer and could not remember it, and that it had been a long sentence with a great many words in it for a name.

Luma wrote nothing down. She never did. She sat still for a moment with her eyes closed and took the whole of it in one pass, the way she took a ninety-second genealogy, and then opened them and said one word to Tala, and Tala got up and went out to check the boat.

Leon sat on the floor of a shelter two days downstream from the only place he knew, eighty-one years of a stranger’s life in his ears, and understood that somebody eleven days north of here had cared enough about a name to make an old man from another river say it correctly four times.

You do not do that for a place.

You do that for a place that expects to be found.