Chapter 52: Doran Had Been Right Twice
Aru came off the crutch on the fifty-seventh morning and made sure everybody knew.
Nayra had told him four days earlier that he could try weight on it, and he had, and had then continued using the crutch for four more days because the crutch was interesting and being seen with it was interesting and Aru had never in his life discarded an audience.
Then he put it down on the terrace edge, walked eleven paces, turned round, walked back, and stood there waiting.
Nobody said anything.
He tried it again, slower, with more of a limp than the first time, which Leon was fairly sure had been added.
Sila, going past with a strap over her shoulder, told him that he had walked better with the stick.
Aru said something Leon did not catch and Luma refused to translate, and Sila laughed for the first time in about nine days, and Leon stood at the water chain with a full jar and understood that this was what a settlement sounded like when it had thirteen days of food instead of seven.
***
By the middle of the afternoon Leon had worked out that nobody had spoken to Doran properly in four days.
It was not a shunning. It was worse than that and less deliberate. Doran had walked six days downstream with a message he had argued against, had come back with four answers and one of them a refusal exactly as he had predicted, had then argued for inviting that same camp to the kill and been overruled by a cord older than his opinion, and had then watched nine baskets go to them anyway.
He had been right twice and wrong once and the settlement had simply moved on, and there had been a fire and a hunt and six hundred people since, and nobody had gone back to it because nobody goes back to it.
Leon knew what that felt like. He had spent about nine years being right in meetings and finding out afterwards that being right was not the same as being thanked, and had eventually stopped noticing, which he now recognised as the injury rather than the recovery.
He also knew that he had about a hundred and ten words and no idea how to do this.
So he did it badly.
He went and found Doran at the storage frame and stood there until Doran stopped counting, and then said the sentence he had been building since midday, in the wrong tense, with two mistakes he heard himself make.
"You said the camp would say no. The camp said no. Nobody told you."
Doran looked at him for a while.
Then he said something long, and Leon caught about a third of it and got the rest from Luma that evening, and what he had said was this.
"I did not want to be told," Doran said. "Told makes it a thing I won."
He went back to the tally and did not stop working while he finished.
"I won nothing. The message went. It brought back four answers, and one of them turned into sixty-one people walking two days to be fed. That is worth more than my objection was."
What he wanted was different and smaller and he said it plainly.
"Leave the knot in the cord."
Not as a monument. As a record that on the thirty-fifth day one person had said what would go wrong, and that part of it had gone wrong exactly as described, and that this had been written down before anybody knew.
Because the next time he objected — and there would be a next time — somebody in that council ground was going to need to know whether Doran’s objections were worth the four minutes.
***
Kharun did the wall inspection at dusk and Leon went with him because he had asked to.
Nine metres of new palisade, charred at the buried third, standing in a line that did not quite match the old work on either side and never would. Oren had accepted that on the first day and had spent no time at all being upset about it.
Kharun walked the whole eastern face and put his hand on eleven posts and pulled on four of them.
Then he stopped at the join, where the new section met the old, and stood looking at it for long enough that Leon eventually asked what was wrong with it.
Nothing was wrong with it. That was the point.
"A wall is not a thing you build," Kharun said. "It is a thing you have built. Then you keep it."
He pulled on the next post and it did not move.
"The difference is forty years of somebody walking it at dusk. Nobody has ever needed to walk this one."
He said that he had inherited a palisade that had been adequate for as long as anybody could remember, because for as long as anybody could remember nobody had wanted anything on this terrace.
Then he said the rest of it and Leon got most of it without help.
The wall was better than it had been. The store would be full in a month. There were five camps on this river that had eaten together and agreed a rule about water, and there was a road eleven days north with somebody at the end of it who cut brush back on both sides and made old men repeat a name until they got it right.
Every one of those was an improvement.
And every one of those made the terrace more worth counting.
***
The river rose in the night.
Leon found it at first light on the fifty-eighth morning, and stood in water that was over the second mark on his stake for the first time in forty-nine days of readings, and did the only thing there was to do about it, which was to write the number down.
Then he went and woke Fel Longline, who did not thank him for it.
Fel came down to the landing with his hair on one side of his head and stood in the shallows for about ten seconds.
Then he said something short and went back up the bank at a speed that no sixty-one-year-old should have been capable of, shouting a word Leon had never heard before, and by the time Leon got up the path behind him there were nineteen people already moving and four of them were carrying nets he had not known existed.
The fish were six days behind the rise.
Nobody on that terrace intended to spend a single one of the six not ready.