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

Nara had been going down to the trough in the evenings since the day she handed over her bark, and on the two hundred and eleventh day she found out who else was.

She had not been sleeping well. That was the whole of it and she would not have said so. She had given a piece of bark to a man she barely knew, in front of her teacher, who had watched her do it and had not helped, and four days later she had worked out why Nayra had not helped, and it had not made her feel better.

So she went down at dusk and stood near the fifth station, where the log had the marks in it.

On the fourth evening there was a child there with a flake of chert, cutting a new one.

***

Ket-li did not stop when she saw Nara and did not hurry, and finished the mark before she looked up, which Nara said afterwards was the part that told her it was serious.

"What are you counting?"

The child considered this for a while. Not because she did not know. Because nobody had ever asked her a question in that shape before, and she was working out whether it was the kind you answer.

"The ones who go round."

Nara looked at the log.

There were a great many marks in it. They were not in rows of five the way the storage keepers cut them and they were not in Doran’s shape either. They were in clusters, and the clusters were not the same size, and it took Nara most of a minute to see that each cluster was a day and each mark in it was a person.

"How long?"

"Since the water started."

Twenty-two days. Every evening.

"Why that?"

And Ket-li gave the answer that Doran later said was the most useful sentence anybody produced that season.

"Nara was doing the other one."

***

She had watched Nara counting the washers for eleven days before the trough and nine days after, and had wanted to do one, and had understood without anybody telling her that there was no point in doing the same one.

So she had taken the other side. The people who came up the path with a basket, saw the queue, went four paces left along the goat track behind the racks and came out past the fire with their hands as they were.

She could not write. She could count and she could recognise every person on this terrace, and she had put a mark for each of them each evening on the day it happened, and she had never once told anybody, because nobody had asked and because she had not been sure it was allowed.

"Is it the same people?"

"Ei."

"How many?"

Ket-li thought about that one properly, running a thumb down the log, and it took her a while because she had no word for what she was doing.

"Nine," Ket-li said. "Mostly."

Nara took it to Doran.

She did not take it to Leon and she did not take it to Nayra, and she thought about that afterwards and could not decide whether she had learned something or given something else away.

***

Doran came down and sat on his heels in front of the fifth station for the better part of an hour with the child telling him which mark was which person, and the students watching from twenty metres away because Vethra had told them to stay there.

Then he came back up and did not say anything for the rest of the evening.

He said it the next morning, to Leon, at the works, standing, which was how he said everything.

Nine people. The same nine on most days. Seven of the nine came out of three households.

"Which three," Leon said, and then wished he had not, because he had already worked it out and asking made him a man who wanted it said out loud.

Doran said it out loud anyway, because that was the job.

Three of the six. Three of the households whose fat was in the jar.

Doran turned the hide over once. "They have been going round it since the second day. Not one of them has come to me. Not one of them has said a word at the fire. They put their fat in the store because that is what you do, and their fat goes into a thing they walk round twice a day, and they have said nothing about it to anybody, and I have been telling myself for a month that I know what this settlement thinks."

He stopped.

"And a child with a flake of stone knew and I did not."

***

Ket was one of the three.

Leon found that out on his own, that afternoon, by asking, because he did not want it delivered to him by anybody else and because he needed to be the one who went and stood in front of her.

She was at the leach barrel. She had been at the leach barrel most days for two months. She rendered the fat, she ran the ash, she carried the jars down to the six stations every fourth morning, and her household was one of the ones the fat came out of.

"You asked me twice. Whether it was coming back."

"Ei."

"And I said —"

"You did not say anything." Ket did not stop working. "You said what it was for. Both times."

He stood there.

"Do you go round?"

"Na." She lifted the top layer of ash off with a paddle and set it aside. "My daughter is on that log."

She said it without any particular weight and it landed like a dropped stone anyway.

"My sister goes round. My sister’s man goes round. I told them both to stop and they have not stopped, and I am not going to stand in the path and make them, because they are not wrong and I am tired."

Leon did not have anything for that.

Two months. She has carried the jars down every fourth morning for two months. Out of her own household’s fat, past her own sister, and she has never once made a face about it in front of me.

"Say it at the council."

Ket looked up at him for the first time in the conversation.

"Na."

"Why?"

"Because I make it." She went back to the ash. "A woman who makes a thing and then stands up and says it is good is not a witness. She is the person who makes it."

She was right, and it took Leon until the middle of that night to see how completely.

Doran had lost Halu because Leon had been kind. He was about to lose Ket because she was honest about her own standing. Three of his six households were voting with their feet and would not vote with their mouths.

And the count would still come out for the soap, because a hundred and thirty-eight people liked the trough and nine people walked round it in silence, and a show of hands does not know the difference between a settlement that agrees and a settlement in which the people who disagree have already stopped talking.

Doran knew it too. He had known it since the log.

He said so at the end of that week, to nobody in particular, on the terrace, in the flat voice.

"It will carry. And it will prove nothing at all."