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

Doran called it on the two hundred and sixty-eighth day, and he did not call it a council and he did not call it at the fire.

He did it on the flat ground below the granary at the middle of the morning, when about sixty people were within earshot doing other things, and he brought a bag of river pebbles and a stick.

He drew a line in the dirt about four paces long.

Then he put a pebble at one end.

"Us. Today."

Another at the far end.

"Them. When they come."

Then he went along the line and put down three more, evenly, and did it slowly enough that people stopped what they were carrying.

"Forty days. Forty days. Forty days."

Leon counted them twice from where he was standing and got the same answer both times and did not like it any better the second time.

Five stones. A hundred and sixty days if Fel’s signs were right and Veya’s count was right, and neither of them was a number, and it was the closest thing to a date anybody on this river had ever put on the ground.

Nobody had done that before. Not because nobody could count. Because a thing that is coming in a hundred and sixty days had never once needed to be a shape you could stand next to.

Doran straightened up.

"We have not done one thing about it since the seventy-sixth day."

He was not exaggerating and Leon checked afterwards, which was itself an admission.

Day 76: three evenings, four decisions. The Low Reed meeting before the wet. The spur watch in pairs all season. Nothing goes north, not one person. The lamp stays dark.

All four had happened. All four had been about this season.

And in the hundred and ninety-two days since, the settlement had put up a wall, run a fish season, held a five-camp meeting, taken four students, built a trough, argued about fat for a month, harvested a crop and stored the seed — and not one of those things had been done because a counting party was coming.

We have been busy. Busy is not the same as ready and I am the last person here entitled to point that out.

Kharun came over and stood looking at the stones with his arms folded.

"What do they count?"

Everybody knew the answer. Doran gave it anyway, because giving an answer everybody knows out loud is the whole of what he does.

Households. Racks. Boats. The wall and where it is thin. How much is in the granary. How many can hold a spear and how many of those are children with a spear. Whether the store looks like a store that can be taken twice or a store that can be taken once.

"And what do we want them to count?"

That was Kharun and it was the right question and the ground went quiet around it.

Veya answered it from a mat somebody had put down for her, and she took her time.

She had been at Low Reed in a year when a camp two reaches up had been priced. She was eleven. She could still say the name of the woman who had come to do the counting, and she said it once, and Luma did not know it either.

"They are not looking for what you have," Veya said. "They are looking for what you will still have in three summers."

Leon got most of that on his own and had Luma confirm it, and then sat with it.

A raiding party counts a store. A tribute assessment counts a stream. You do not price a settlement on what is in the granary today; you price it on whether the granary will be full again next year and the year after, because a thing you can take once is worth taking once and a thing that keeps producing is worth an arrangement.

"So we want to look poor," somebody said from the back.

"Na." Veya did not even turn her head. "A poor camp is taken and finished. You want to look like a camp that is exactly not worth the trouble of coming back to, and that is a different face, and it is very hard to wear."

Doran let that sit and then broke it into the part he could do.

He walked back down the line of stones and put his hand flat on the ground beside the second one.

"Everything we decide has to fit between two of these," he said. "Anything that needs longer than forty days is not a plan, it is a wish, and I am not writing wishes."

Then he named the four things he wanted before the second stone, and he named them in the order of who would have to do them and not in the order of importance, which Leon noticed and thought about for a long time afterwards.

Nayra: how many people can carry a load for four days without becoming her problem. Not how many are healthy. How many are healthy and will still be healthy after.

Oren: which parts of the wall are thin, written down, with the thin parts numbered, so that when somebody says the wall everybody is talking about the same eleven metres.

Tala: where a hundred people coming down the north path would have to stop, and how long it would take them to get from each of those places to here.

Veya: everything the cord holds about the last three times this happened anywhere on this river, whether it happened to Retharu or not.

Kharun looked at the list and asked why he was not on it.

"Because you will do what the four of them come back with," Doran said, "and if I put you first you will do it before they have finished, and then we will have your answer instead of the right one."

Kharun took that better than Leon expected. He took it, in fact, without any expression at all, which Leon had learned to read as agreement arriving faster than pride.

***

Leon was not on the list either, and he waited until the ground had cleared before he asked about it, because asking in front of sixty people would have been a different question.

Doran was collecting the pebbles back into the bag. He left the five in the line where they were.

"You want to know why."

"Ei."

"Because everything you are good at takes longer than forty days." Doran did not look up. "Your seed opens in a hundred. Your soap took a season and a half. The thing in the ground east of here took four months to tell you anything and it told you to carry dirt. That is not a criticism. It is what you are for."

He tied the bag.

"They are coming in five stones. Between now and then, this settlement needs people who can finish a thing."

And he is right, and it has taken me two hundred and sixty-eight days to be told it plainly, and the man telling me is the one who has never once been wrong about a number.

"Then what do I do?"

Doran stood up with the bag in his hand and looked at him for a moment.

"You have a hundred and sixty days and a thing that opens on the hundredth. Finish it early or finish it late and either way you will be standing there with a jar in your hands on the day they walk up that path."

He started up the slope, then stopped.

"So work out now what you are going to say about it, because they will ask what is in the jar, and I do not know yet is the most expensive sentence you will ever say to a person who has come to price you."

***

Over the next few days the five stones stayed where they were.

Somebody put a ring of larger ones round each of them by the next evening so they would not get kicked, and nobody admitted to it, and by the third day people were giving directions by them.

Down past the second stone and left.

On the two hundred and seventy-fourth day Leon walked past and found Ket-li crouched at the first stone with a flake of chert, cutting a mark into a flat pebble she had brought herself and was clearly intending to add to the line.

He crouched down beside her.

"That one is not there yet."

She kept cutting.

"Ei." Ket-li put it down between the first stone and the second, closer to the first, at about the place where the line had eleven days on it. "It is where we are."