Chapter 59: Nayra Argued Against Herself
The council took the healer question on the hundred and twenty-third day and Nayra spoke against it for most of an hour.
Leon had expected almost anybody else to. He had spent three days building the arithmetic of four extra mouths for Doran, and a version of the in four years there are healers on this river who all know each other argument for Kharun, and had been fairly pleased with both.
Nobody used either.
Doran said the four mouths were affordable and that he had checked it twice. Kharun said he had already given the warning at Low Reed and had meant it as a warning and still wanted it done. Veya said nothing at all for the first half-hour.
And Nayra stood up and said that they should not do it.
***
Her reasons took a while and none of them were about time.
"What I have is not knowledge," she said. "It is four marks. Rules about cups and water. A way to dress a wound and set a bone. Fourteen years of writing down what I used and how much and at what hour."
She looked round the ground.
"I could teach all of that in a season. I would like to teach it."
The problem was the other thing.
"On the fifty-sixth day I took one thing out of a locked case and gave it to a man whose leg was going," she said. "It probably helped. I cannot prove that."
Nobody moved.
"There are eight left. There will never be any more."
If she took four students, she would have to tell them.
They would see the case. They would see her write in her record on a day when the case was opened. They would go home to camps of eighty and a hundred and twenty people, and they would be, in their own camps, the person who knows that somewhere upriver there is a small locked box with eight of something in it that stops a wound killing a man.
"And one day somebody down there will be dying," she said, "and my student will know, and my student will come."
She said that she had no rule for who gets the next one. She had been carrying that for eleven weeks and had not solved it and did not expect to. And she was not prepared to hand out the knowledge that the box exists to four more camps before she had an answer, because the moment four camps know, the question stops being hers and becomes a thing five settlements fight about.
Then she sat down.
***
Nobody had an answer for about a minute, which Leon had learned by now was the correct response in this settlement to a serious argument.
Then Veya asked her one question.
"Do the four marks save more people than the box?"
Nayra did not hesitate. Boiled water, clean hands, separate vessels, a latrine downstream, a wound irrigated twice a day and a record of what was done — against eight doses in a box.
Not close. Not remotely close.
Veya said that in that case Nayra had just made the argument for sending the four students home with the thing that works and had spent an hour arguing against sending them home with the thing that mostly does not.
"That is true," Nayra said. "It does not change my objection."
"I know," said Veya. "It goes in the cord."
***
The council carried it, and the shape it carried was Nayra’s own.
Four students, one from each camp, for a full season, arriving when the river drops. They learn the four marks, the water rules, wound care, bone setting, childbirth, and the record — everything Nayra has, and every one of them learns to write it down, which means Luma has four more pupils and did not ask for them.
Nothing from the module. Not the drugs, not the microscope, not the instruments. The students do not learn what is in it, do not learn how it is used, and do not learn how much of it there is.
And on the first day, each of them is told, once, by Nayra, in front of a witness, that there is a locked case in Retharu with a small number of things in it that can save a life, that there is no rule about who gets them, and that Nayra does not have one and would like help finding one.
That last part was Nayra’s condition and she would not move on it.
Leon asked her afterwards why she had insisted on telling them the thing she had spent an hour refusing to tell them.
"I argued against them knowing it by accident," she said.
The third knot in sixty years went into the cord that night, and it was hers, against a decision she had helped design, and she watched Veya tie it and looked, Leon thought, faintly relieved.
***
The river dropped fourteen marks over four days at the end of the hundred and twenty-sixth, and the terrace came back to life like something waking up badly.
Everything had to be dried, aired, re-tied and re-thatched. Two shelters had to be moved off the scar the drainage failure had left. The drying ground came back into use on the hundred and twenty-ninth day and Nesh, who had spent six weeks with nothing to do but think about it, had the frames re-angled by noon.
Leon put the second bean plot in on the hundred and thirtieth.
Two plots, exactly as he had written it nineteen days after the pods came. One in fresh ground four hundred metres east. One in the same ridge as last season, in the same soil. Seed from the same harvest, uncoated, seventy-four pods’ worth split in half by weight, sown the same morning at the same spacing by the same four people.
Aru marked the rows. Sila fenced both. Asha’s name was not spoken because nobody in Retharu had ever heard it.
Leon wrote the design in the register with the date, and then wrote the thing he was actually testing underneath it in one line, because he had learned that a trial you cannot state in one line is a trial you have not designed.
Are the bacteria in the ridge, or did they come in on the seed and die?
Eleven days to emergence, if it goes the way it went last time. Sixty to the first nodule count.
***
Boro Nightcall came up the landing path on the evening of the hundred and thirty-first day, on foot, in the rain, alone.
He had gone east on the eleventh day with a folding saw and two small files and a promise about the winter, and he had been gone a hundred and twenty days, and nobody in Retharu had expected to see him before the dry.
He was thinner. He had lost the nail off one thumb and had a healed cut across the bridge of his nose that had not been there. The milky eye was the same.
He put his load down on the mat in front of Doran, which was the correct place and the correct man, and said something short to the whole terrace, and Luma gave Leon the sense of it, which was that he had come the long way and would explain in the morning and would like to be fed now.
Then he looked across the fire at Leon, and did not say anything at all, and Leon felt the back of his neck go cold for no reason he could have defended.
Boro had come a hundred and twenty days in the wet.
Traders do not do that.