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

Nobody slept, and the council that ran through the night was the first one Leon had attended where he was not the reason for it.

Kharun opened it by saying what had not happened.

They had not demanded anything. They had not counted the boats out loud. They had not asked to see the store, which Leon had spent three hours dreading and which had never come, and Kharun said that this was the part that mattered.

"You do not ask to see a store you mean to take next week," Kharun said.

He let the fire have a moment.

"You ask to see a store you mean to take a share of. Every year. For as long as there is a store."

The woman was the second tell and Tala gave that one.

She had spent the afternoon watching the three of them the way Leon watched a pressure gauge, and what she had was this: the two young ones deferred to the older woman on everything, including the route home, and neither of them was armed in a way that mattered.

A party sent to look at a target does not send its senior person and leave the fighting at home.

A party sent to look at a holding does exactly that.

Nayra had the third one and it was the one that frightened Leon most, because it was a medical observation and she made it in the flat voice she used for numbers.

They were well fed.

The season had been poor from the delta to the northern ridges. It had been poor for Havek downstream and poor for the camps Boro traded with and poor enough here to burn seven days of food and feel it in the knees. And three people had walked two days into it carrying almost no food, arrived in good condition, and gone home again the same evening.

"Either they have better ground than anybody on this river," Nayra said, "or they have somebody else’s harvest."

Doran did the arithmetic on what a share meant, because Doran did arithmetic on everything and because nobody else was going to say it in numbers.

Take a tenth. That was the friendly version, the version where nothing was burned and nobody was taken. A tenth of the stored grain, a tenth of the dried fish, once a year, at the end of the dry season when the store is countable and before the fish run refills it.

He worked it against this year’s figures. Then against last year’s, which had been better, and the year before, which had been better still.

In a good year a tenth was a hard month.

In a year like this one a tenth was Nayra’s list rearranging itself, and everybody in the council ground knew exactly which of the four categories would move, and Doran said the categories out loud anyway, because he had learned three weeks ago what happens when you let people avoid a number.

Nineteen over sixty. Forty-one children under twelve.

Leon said the wrong thing first, which by now he could feel himself doing about half a second before it happened and had never once managed to stop.

He wanted to go up on the spur. He wanted to sit there for two nights and watch the north path and see what came back down it. He had a route worked out and a plan for the cold and an argument about how information was the only thing they were currently short of that did not have to be grown.

Kharun let him finish and then said one sentence, and Leon caught all of it, because Kharun had chosen words he knew.

"You promised me. Not at night. Not alone."

He had made that promise on the fourth day, sitting on a mat, feeling faintly patronised.

"Ei," Leon said. "I promised."

He sat down. It cost him more than he expected and he could see Tala noting that it had.

Then, an hour later, when the argument had moved on to the wall and had got stuck there, he said the small thing, and it turned out to be the useful one.

They will come back at the end of the dry season.

Not because they said so. Because that is when a store is countable, and everything about the visit had been a count, and a person who has taken the trouble to build an accurate number does not throw it away by returning at a time when it is wrong.

Doran stopped moving.

Then he said, in the tone of a man discovering that he has a deadline, that this gave them until the end of the next dry season, and that this was not a threat, it was a date, and that a date could be worked against.

The proposal came from Veya and nobody had expected it from her.

Send downstream to Havek. Send to Low Reed and to the two camps below the bend. Not for help, because help is a thing you ask for when something is already happening. Send to say what walked into Retharu on the thirty-fourth day, and what it looked like, and what it did not ask for.

Because whatever those three people were pricing, they had walked past four other camps to get here, and if they had done to those camps what they had done to this one, then five settlements on this river currently each believed they were the only one being counted.

Kharun understood it before anybody else and went very still in the way that was becoming familiar.

Leon understood it about a minute later and had to sit with what it was.

A village does not do this. A village that is being looked at closes its gate and hopes the looking stops. Sending word out is what you do when you have decided that the unit at risk is not your terrace, and once five camps have compared their counts they are no longer five camps, and there is no version of this where you send that message and then take it back.

Doran objected.

He did it properly, standing, with the numbers ready, and Leon respected him enormously for it and thought he was wrong.

He is going to be half right, and the half he is right about is going to be the half that hurts.

A message costs two people for six days. An alliance costs more than that and it costs it in food. Every camp on this river was short. The moment Retharu said we are being counted, and so are you, the four other camps would look at their own stores and their own lists and would arrive at the same arithmetic Doran had just done, and some of them would decide that the cheapest available answer was to be smaller and quieter and less worth counting than the settlement upstream of them.

"A neighbour does not have to wish you harm," Doran said. "A neighbour only has to be hungrier than you."

He said that he would carry the message himself if the council chose it, and that his objection was to the choice and not to the work, and he wanted it recorded.

Veya reached for the cord.

This time she did not take her hand off it.

She worked for about a minute and a half, and Leon watched a knot go in beside the one she had tied thirteen days ago about a jar of beans, and understood that the settlement had now produced two formal disagreements in six weeks after sixty years of producing none, and that this was either the beginning of a politics or the beginning of a crack, and that nobody in the room could tell him which.

The council carried it.

***

Tala went north the next morning, alone, for six days, with Kharun’s authorisation and against his preference.

Not to the spur. Past it. To find the path the three of them had come down and follow it far enough to learn one thing, which was whether it went two days or eight.

She left before light. Leon walked her to the burned section of the palisade, because it was the nearest thing the terrace had to a gate now, and stood in nine metres of open ground with her while she checked a strap he could not have fastened.

He had about eighty words and he used four of them.

"Six days. Then back."

Tala looked at him for a moment.

Then she made the sign for ei, and the sign for I have heard you, and then a third one he had never seen, at chest height, which meant it was a statement and not a question.

She was gone up the slope before he thought to ask Luma what it had been.

By the time he did, at the middle of the morning, with the sun coming across the burned ground and nineteen bean seedlings standing up two ridges north, Luma had to think about it for a while.

Then she said that there was not a good word for it in his language, and that the nearest thing was a promise you make about something you do not control.