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

Tala came in on the forty-fourth day, two days late, having gone further than she had been told to go.

She came down the slope in the middle of the afternoon at a walk, filthy, thinner in the face, with a strap taken up two holes further than it had been when she left, and she did not stop at the water or at the terrace. She went straight to the council ground and sat down on the mat and said, before anybody could ask her anything, that she wanted Veya and the cord and she wanted them now, because there were three things and she was going to forget the order.

Veya sent a boy for the cord.

Leon stood at the edge of the ground with his hands doing nothing and did not go anywhere near her, because Nayra had got there first and was already at her ankle, and because the last time he had counted, Tala had been out for eight days on six days of food.

The first thing was the path.

It went north-north-east from the spur, and for the first day and a half it was what she had expected: a route, used, the way any route between two places is used. Foot-worn in the soft ground and invisible on the hard.

Then, at about the middle of the second day, it stopped being that.

She described it three times and Leon understood it fully on the second.

"Cut," she said, and held her hands an arm apart. "Both sides. Not once. Two seasons, and somebody came back for the second one." The brush had been cut back on both sides. Not once, and not by somebody pushing through. Cut, deliberately, to about an arm’s length clear on either side, and cut again since — she could see two seasons of regrowth handled at two different times.

Where the ground was wet the way had been drained. Not built up, not paved, nothing so grand. A shallow cut on the uphill side taking water off the surface and away, for a stretch she paced at something over three hundred paces before it stopped needing to be there.

And in one place, where a slope had come down across the line, the fallen material had been moved.

Leon sat down on the mat, which he was not supposed to do, and nobody told him not to.

A path is what happens when people walk. A cleared, drained, maintained way is what happens when somebody decides that people should be able to walk, and then finds the labour for it, twice, in two different seasons, thirty kilometres from anywhere Tala had ever been.

You do not do that for a camp.

You do it for a route you intend to keep using for longer than you are going to be alive.

The second thing was that the way did not go two days.

She followed it for two more and it did not narrow, did not fork into the kind of scatter that means you are approaching somebody’s ground, and did not stop.

At the far end of the fourth day she came onto high ground and looked north with the light behind her, and the cleared line ran on across two more ridges and into haze.

She turned around there. She was clear about why, and she said it flatly.

"Four days behind me. Two days of food. Further means not coming back, and coming back was the instruction."

Kharun said one word, which was good, and did not elaborate.

Leon did the arithmetic anyway, because he could not stop himself. Four days out at Tala’s pace, which he had measured against his own often enough to put a number on. Call it a hundred and forty kilometres of maintained way, minimum, going somewhere she never got to.

He had walked two hundred metres of an ordinary Bavarian farm track in the rain in October and had thought of it as nothing at all.

The third thing was the part she had left until last, and she left it until last because she was not certain of it and she did not intend to say a thing she was not certain of first.

On the third morning she thought she had been seen.

Not a person. A place where a person had been, on a rise about six hundred metres off her line, with the grass wrong and the wrongness fresh — inside a day, possibly inside a few hours. She had gone up to it, which she said afterwards had been a mistake, and had found nothing at all, which she said was the answer.

Nothing at all is not what an empty rise looks like. An empty rise has animal sign on it.

She had made a decision then and she wanted it recorded before anybody asked her about it.

She had turned north again and walked openly for the rest of that day, on the way, in the middle of it, at a normal pace, and had made camp in the evening without hiding the fire.

Kharun’s face went through something complicated.

Leon needed Luma for the reasoning and got it in about four sentences. If she had been seen and then vanished into the scrub, she was a scout, and a scout who conceals herself is a scout somebody follows home. If she had been seen and then walked down the middle of the road for a day with a fire at the end of it, she was a traveller, and travellers are boring.

She had traded away her cover in order to keep her back trail.

Kharun asked whether she had been followed.

"I do not know," Tala said, which from her was not an evasion and everybody in the council ground heard it that way.

She said she did not know, and that she had come home by a route that took a day and a half longer than the one she went out on, and had crossed the river twice, and had spent the last night four hundred metres off the north path watching it.

"Nothing came down it," she said.

***

Nayra kept her sitting for another hour and made her eat before she made her talk any more, which nobody argued with.

Her feet were bad. Not injured — worn, in the way feet get worn over eight days on hard ground with two days of nothing in the middle, and Nayra took the boots off her herself and looked at them for a long time and then said, to the room and not to Tala, that this was the last time.

Not the last time she went out.

The last time she went out alone.

"I have done it since I was—"

"A person alone who turns an ankle at four days out does not come back." Nayra did not stop working on the foot while she said it. "Nobody finds them. Everybody in this ground knows it."

Tala started to argue again and got about four words into it before Nayra said the rest, which Leon caught most of and Luma finished for him afterwards. A person alone who turns an ankle at four days out does not come back. There is no version of that where anybody finds them, and everybody in this room already knows it, and the reason nobody has said it before is that until now there had not been anywhere worth going that was four days away.

Now there was.

Tala looked at Kharun. Kharun looked at the mat.

"Nayra is right," Kharun said. "The northern line goes in pairs."

He was looking at the mat.

"I should have said that before she left. I did not. Put that in as well."

***

Leon went and stood at the eastern break at dusk, which was becoming a habit he did not like.

The wall was six days from being finished. The charred posts stood in a row of black stumps that would be a fence by the end of the week, and beyond them the ground ran north and up and out of sight, exactly as it had every evening since he arrived.

He had been thinking about the drain the whole afternoon.

Three hundred paces of shallow cut on the uphill side of a way, to take surface water off it, thirty kilometres from anybody. Somebody had gone out there with a digging stick and had spent two days making a track slightly less bad in the wet, for the benefit of people who would come along it in a season they would not be present for.

That is not a warlord’s work. Warlords do not maintain drainage.

That is somebody’s road, and roads are what a place builds when it has decided it is going to be a place for a long time and needs its parts to reach each other.

Leon stood in the gap with his arms folded and finally admitted the thing he had been walking around since the woman had said Varu to him on the landing four days ago.

He had spent forty-four days assuming he had arrived at the edge of the world.

He had arrived at somebody else’s frontier.