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

Leon knew how to make soap, which is why it took him six days to find out that he did not.

Fat and lye. He had done it at nineteen in a first-year practical, in a fume cupboard, out of a bottle with a hazard diamond on it, and he had got a bar at the end of the afternoon and a mark he could not remember.

The fat came out of the store, which was the first thing that went wrong and nobody noticed at the time. Ket weighed it out and asked him twice what it was for, and both times what she was actually asking was whether it was coming back.

He rendered it over four mornings. Chopped, heated slow with water so it did not brown, strained through cloth, cooled, and the clean layer lifted off the top in a pale disc that smelled of nothing much. That part he was good at and it went exactly as it should, which he later decided was the problem, because it made him confident going into the part he was not good at.

Then the ash.

Hardwood only. He was specific about it and made a small speech about it that Ket listened to politely. A barrel with a false bottom of reeds, ash packed on top, water poured through and caught underneath, then poured through again and again until what came out the bottom was brown and slippery to the touch and stung a cut on his thumb.

He boiled it down by half. Then by half again.

Then he took a feather off the fletching pile and put it in.

The old test, and he knew it, and he had been looking forward to it in a way he was mildly embarrassed about: strong lye eats a feather. The barbs let go, the shaft softens, the whole thing comes apart in your hand and you know your liquor is ready.

The feather sat in the pot for a count of two hundred and came out wet.

Leon looked at it for a while.

Then he decided it was close enough and put the fat in.

Close enough. I said that out loud, in a room, to a woman who has watched me be right about eleven things.

***

It took most of a day and it did make soap.

Six hours over a low fire with somebody stirring the whole time, which for four of those hours was Ket and for two was Ket-li, who was seven and did it better. The mixture went from two things floating past each other to one thing, cloudy, then thick, then a soft brown paste that would not set no matter how long it cooled, and which had to be kept in a jar because it slumped.

He washed his hands in it in front of eleven people.

He had spent the morning at the char trench on purpose and his hands were black to the wrist, and the black came off, and it came off fast, and there was a moment on the terrace that afternoon that Leon enjoyed more than he was later comfortable with.

Ket washed. Then Oren, who did not want to and did it anyway. Then most of the eleven.

Nayra was not there. Nayra had said she would come the next morning, which he had taken for politeness and which was not politeness at all.

***

She arrived with a bowl, a bag of red ochre and a bowl of clean water, and she had thought about it for a day and a half.

Nayra set the bowl down. "Six."

Six people who had gutted fish that morning and had not yet washed. Ket. Kel. Two of the younger foragers. A woman from the drying ground whose name Leon still got wrong. Ket-li, who put her hands out flat without being asked because she had watched her mother do it.

Nayra had ground the ochre into rendered fat until it was a red grease, and she smeared it across all twelve palms and made them work it in, in between the fingers, round the nails, the way she made people work water rules.

Then she sent them to the soap.

They washed. They washed well and for a long time, because everybody wanted it to work.

Then Nayra sat them down one at a time and had them press both hands flat on the inside of a clean white bowl.

Leon watched the first two and understood.

The palms came off almost clean. The creases did not. There was red in every line of every hand, and under the nails, and in a fine ring where the finger meets the palm, and when the sixth hand came off the bowl there was enough of it on the white surface to see across a room.

Nayra turned the bowl toward him and did not say anything, because she did not need to.

"Ei."

She pointed at the char trench. "Again."

They did it again with plain charcoal and no fat, and the soap took it off completely, and the bowl stayed white.

Two tests, an hour apart, and between them the whole shape of the thing.

It lifts what is loose. It does not lift what is bound in fat. And what is on a person’s hands after a day of gutting fish is bound in fat.

He sat down on the edge of the drying platform and did the reasoning properly for the first time in six days, which was five days later than he should have.

The feather had told him. He had asked the question, got the answer, and overruled it because he wanted to be finished.

Ash liquor is not lye. It is a weaker relative that behaves like lye in a bad light. It will take fat apart, slowly, if you boil it long enough, and it had, and the paste in the jar was real soap. But not all of it. There was fat in that jar that had never reacted at all, and a soap carrying loose fat puts back roughly what it takes off, which is why the red stayed in the creases and the black did not.

He needed a stronger base. He knew exactly what that was and exactly how to get it and it was not available to him.

Burnt stone, slaked, stirred into the ash liquor. He could write the whole thing down in one line. He could not do it, because burning that stone requires a kiln that holds a heat he had no way to reach, built out of a material he had not found, and Oren was not going to build him one on the strength of a man who had just been wrong in front of eleven people.

Not this season. Possibly not this year.

Nayra let him sit for a while.

"It is not nothing," she said eventually. "It took the black."

"Na. Not the fish."

"Not the fish." She was cleaning the bowl, which she did herself. "The students come and they will gut fish."

Leon got out the register and turned to the page where her marks lived.

Seen. Told. Tested. Reasoned. Four marks in her hand, cut into the corner of the page on the sixth day out of a pebble, a leaf, a thumbprint and a shell, and every claim on this river filed under one of them since.

He wrote soap and put the tested-mark against it, because it had been, twice, in front of witnesses.

Then he stopped, because the mark was wrong. Not false. Wrong. It said the thing had been tested, and it had, and anybody reading it in a year would take that to mean it worked.

He turned the register around and showed her, and pointed at the mark, and said one of the four words he had that could carry it.

"Na." He put his finger under the mark. "Tested. And na."

Nayra looked at it for a long moment.

Then she took the charcoal out of his hand, and beside the tested-mark she cut a second, small, a short line crossed once — and she did it slowly, the way people do a thing they intend to keep doing.

"Tested. And not enough."

It was the first time in thirty years of her practice that a thing had been written down as false, and the woman who invented the mark for it had not been the one who was wrong.