Chapter 56: Five Camps and One Cup
They went down to Low Reed on the hundred and second day, twenty-two days later than they had meant to, in three boats, on a river running fast enough that the return would take four days instead of two.
The council had decided to hold it before the wet closed the river. The wet had closed the river on the eightieth day, four days after the decision and about three weeks earlier than anybody had budgeted for, and Havek had sent word upstream that he intended to hold it anyway and would rather be wet than wait until the dry.
Kharun had read that message twice and then said that a camp which will not postpone a meeting is a camp that has understood what the meeting is for.
Kharun, Veya, Doran, Luma and Leon, and Sila steering, and nobody else, because five people from one camp at a meeting of five camps is a delegation and eleven is a demonstration.
Veya had not been more than an hour from Retharu in nine years. She sat amidships wrapped in three hides with the cord in a sealed gut bag on her lap and did not speak for the whole of the first day, and Leon eventually worked out that she was not unwell.
She was reciting.
***
Low Reed put them on the high platform and gave them four days.
Havek had built the meeting around food and Leon spent the first morning irritated about it, because two of those four days went on eating and on a long formal exchange of the state of everybody’s stores that produced no decisions at all.
By the second evening he had stopped being irritated.
The state-of-stores exchange was the meeting. Five camps said out loud, in order, in front of each other, how much food they were sitting on going into the wet, and nobody lied, and everybody knew nobody was lying because everybody had been on this terrace two months ago and had seen the same animal come apart.
Retharu said two hundred and forty-one baskets and a poor grain store.
Nethvar said less than that and did not apologise for it.
The fourth camp, which had been counted two months before anybody and had never mentioned it, said their number and then said the other thing without being asked, which was that they had been visited a second time, in the wet, nine days ago, by two people rather than three.
The platform went quiet.
Doran got up and asked one question, which was whether the two had been the same two, and the fourth camp’s speaker said that one of them had been the woman.
***
The water rules took most of the third day and were rewritten twice.
Leon had assumed this would be the easy part. Five camps had agreed the five rules in four hours in a crisis; putting them back into a cord in the calm ought to have taken an afternoon.
It took nine hours and produced a different set of rules.
The first draft was Nayra’s five, said back. Low Reed accepted them in about a minute and then Nethvar’s speaker asked what happened when a camp broke one, and the whole thing came apart, because nobody had thought about that at all.
On the terrace the enforcement had been six hundred people watching each other. At two days’ distance there was nothing.
They spent four hours on it. Havek wanted a penalty in goods. Renketh said that a camp that is poor enough to foul a water line is a camp that cannot pay a penalty in goods, and that a rule you can only enforce against people who can afford it is not a rule.
Veya said almost nothing until the middle of the afternoon.
"A cord does not stop anybody doing anything," Veya said. "It never has."
She waited until the platform was quiet.
"In sixty years I have never seen an obligation held by anything except the fact that it was known."
So they built it out of knowing.
The rule that came out was not the rule Nayra wrote. It was thinner and it was enforceable: every camp names a person, that person holds the water rules for their camp, and once a season the five of them walk each other’s water lines and say what they found, out loud, at the next meeting, in front of everybody.
No penalty. No authority. Five people and a season and a public report.
Doran, who had spent nine hours writing versions of a thing he had not proposed, said afterwards that it would probably work for about fifteen years.
Leon asked him what happened then.
"In fifteen years there will be somebody who does not care what four camps think of them," Doran said. "On that day you find out whether you built a habit or a rule."
He went back to his marks.
"I do not expect to be alive to see which."
***
The fourth day produced the thing nobody had put on the list.
Havek raised it in the last hour, when everybody was tired and packing, and he raised it badly, which Leon later decided had been deliberate.
He said that Low Reed had fourteen fewer people than two summers ago, and that the reason was not one thing. It was a bad season, and two families walking downstream, and four deaths in a wet season that a healer would have prevented.
Low Reed had no healer. Neither did the fourth camp. Nethvar had a woman who set bones and did not claim to be anything more.
Retharu had Nayra, who had put five rules to six hundred people and had them adopted, and had spent a season writing down what she used and how much and at what hour.
Havek did not ask for Nayra. He was too careful for that.
"Would Retharu take somebody?"
One person, from each camp that wanted it, to go up and stay and learn, for as long as it took, and come back.
Kharun looked at Veya. Veya put her hand on the cord and left it there and did not tie anything, which by now Leon could read: no objection, and something too large to be settled by the five people in this boat.
Kharun said that he would carry it home and it would go to the council and there would be an answer before the river dropped.
Then he said the other half of it, which nobody had asked him for.
"If we take one from each camp and teach them," Kharun said, "then in four years there are healers on this river who all learned the same way, who all write the same way, and who know each other."
He said it as a warning.
"I am aware," Havek said, without any expression whatsoever. "That is why I waited until the last hour of the fourth day."
***
They came back up the river in four days against the current and Leon spent most of it in the bow with nothing to do.
He had been at a meeting of five settlements for four days and had said nine words, all of them in answer to direct questions, and none of them had changed anything.
Veya, on the second afternoon, said something to him from under her three hides that Luma had to lean over to repeat.
"It was about water," Veya said. "And a healer. And a woman who came back with one person instead of two."
Luma leaned in to carry it and did not need to.
"Not one of those was why we went."
They had gone to have a second meeting about the first one.
That was the whole purpose and it had worked, and everything else that had happened had happened because five camps had sat on the same platform for four days with nothing urgent in front of them.
Leon wrote that in the register that night under the tested-mark, which he had never used for a thing that was not physical.
Then he sat looking at it in the dark, and thought about the fact that on the ninety-sixth day somebody had walked onto a spur three hundred metres from two people watching for them, and had lain there, and had gone away again, and that in one hundred and six days he had not managed a single idea about who that was that survived contact with anybody who knew this river.