Chapter 72: Kel Stood Still
Tala gave them one day for the harvest instead of two and was right about it for five hours.
The plan was hers and it was built on twenty-one days of sitting on the rise east of the plot with somebody beside her, and it was the best piece of work anybody on that terrace did that season.
The Sethkar came at first light and again in the last hour before dark. In between they lay up somewhere north in the broken ground and did not move. So the plot got worked between the fourth hour and the tenth, and not one minute either side of it, and Kharun agreed to it in about four seconds, which for Kharun was enthusiasm.
Two watchers on the rise the whole time. Nobody within forty metres of the northern edge. Everybody inside a straight run to the drag path, which went back four hundred metres to the wall and which Oren had cleared to two paces wide the previous week so that people could go down it three abreast without falling over each other.
Nobody bends without somebody standing. That was the rule and Tala made every one of the twenty-two say it back to her at the gate.
Leon said it back too. He also spent the walk out being quietly pleased about the fact that his crop had produced the first hunting-ground survey in the history of this river, which he later thought about at some length.
They cut through the morning and it went well and it went fast.
Beans come off in armfuls. You pull the whole plant, you carry it to the sledge, you go back. It is stupid work and it is the best kind, and by the eighth hour they had two thirds of the plot down and stacked and the sledge had gone back to the wall twice.
Leon was in the middle of the plot with his back to the north, pulling, when the sound of the field changed.
Not a noise. The opposite. The small continuous rustle that had been under everything all morning stopped, the way the forest had stopped on his first day, and every hair on his forearms understood it about a second before he did.
Then the ground in front of him came alive.
They came out of the standing third of the crop in a wave — dozens of them, small, brown, low, the things that had been living in the beans and eating the pods and had been the reason the burrows were there in the first place. They had been squeezed into a smaller and smaller island of cover all morning by twenty-two people pulling it up around them, and the island had just become too small, and they broke.
They went every direction. Most of them went north into the grass, because north was where the cover was.
The plan was for a field with a crop in it.
We have spent five hours turning it into open ground while standing in it.
***
The watchers on the rise called it before the animals had finished crossing.
Leon did not see the first part and got the rest from four people afterwards and none of the four agreed about the order.
What is certain is that the Sethkar came out of the broken ground north of the plot at speed, at the eighth hour of the day, which it had not done once in twenty-one days, because nothing in twenty-one days had put a hundred running animals into open grass in front of it at midday.
What is certain is that everybody in the middle of the plot got to the drag path.
Kharun was at the head of it and did not shout. He stood at the mouth of the path with an arm out and counted people through it, and the counting was the thing that stopped it being a rout, because a person who is being counted runs to somewhere instead of away from something.
Kel was at the far corner with Selora and Tevi and eleven armfuls of crop, seventy metres from the path, and he did the thing that had worked every single day for a season.
He put himself between, and he stood still.
He had stood still in the path at the trough on the third morning and a grown man had washed his hands rather than walk into him. He had stood still eleven or twelve times since and it had worked eleven or twelve times, and it had worked because a person coming up a terrace path with a basket is a person, and can be embarrassed, and will stop.
Tala was screaming at him to move. Selora said afterwards that she heard the word four times.
He did not move, and it went through the place where he was standing, and it did not stop and it did not turn and it was not interested in him at all.
It took one of the small brown animals about nine metres further on and went north with it, and the whole of it, from the call on the rise to the grass closing, took somewhere between four and six seconds.
Then it was twenty-two people standing in a cut field in the middle of the day, and one of them on the ground.
Nobody screamed. That is not a thing they do here and Leon had stopped finding it strange about two months in. Tevi got to him first and Selora second and neither of them touched him, because Nayra had spent a season on exactly that, and they knelt on either side and looked and did not touch and called for the ones who could.
Three parallel openings, from the point of the left shoulder down across the chest and into the upper arm, and a fourth deeper one in the thigh where the foot had come down and gone through.
The thigh was the one that mattered and Leon knew it before anybody said it, because he was standing close enough to see that the bleeding was not spurting and was not stopping, which is a particular combination and is not the good one.
Vethra came up the field at a speed that took years off her and put a knee into the top of the thigh and leaned, and held it there for the eleven minutes it took them to build something to carry him on, and did not say one word in all eleven minutes.
Tala did not go to him.
She went to the northern edge of the plot and stood there facing the grass with her spear, alone, for the whole eleven minutes, so that everybody working behind her could work, and she did not look round once.
***
They carried him the four hundred metres in nine minutes on a hide slung between two poles, six people, changing at the halfway mark without stopping.
Leon had a corner. He had asked for one and nobody had argued.
Kel was awake for most of it, which Nayra said afterwards was neither good nor bad and only meant what it meant. He was grey and his hands were cold and he was talking, on and off, in the way people talk when they have decided something is finishing.
About two hundred metres out he said Leon’s name.
Leon leaned in. He had a hundred and forty words and half of them went out of his head.
"The count."
"Na. Not now. Rest."
"The count." Kel’s hand came up about ten centimetres off the hide and went down again. "You never asked me."
Leon did not understand and said so, badly.
"To stand in the path." It came out in three goes. "Nobody asked me. You made a gate and somebody had to be the one who stops people, and it was me, because I am the one who is good at standing still."
The path went past the racks and up.
"I did not want to be that man." Kel had his eyes shut. "I voted against it because nobody asked me whether I wanted to be that man."
He was quiet for about thirty metres.
"And I did it anyway. Every day. Twice."
Then they were at the top and Vethra was already there with her hands washed to the elbow, at a count of sixty, in water she had made somebody carry up ahead of them.