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

The `Karafell` came up the reach on the sixty-fourth day and Leon heard them before he saw anything.

It was not a sound he had a category for. A low continuous disturbance under the ordinary noise of the river, like rain on a roof two valleys away, coming from downstream and getting closer for about a quarter of an hour before the first of it went past the landing.

Then the water changed colour.

Not entirely and not all at once. In the shallows over the bar the surface began to break in a way that had nothing to do with wind, and the pale bottom went dark, and stayed dark, and kept going dark for the rest of the morning and the whole of the afternoon and the day after that.

Leon stood on the landing for four minutes with his mouth open and then somebody put a basket in his hands.

***

The next nine days were the hardest physical work he had ever done and he was not the one doing the hard part.

The catching was almost incidental. Fel Longline’s people had two fixed traps in at the narrows by the second morning and a third by the evening, and after that the river simply handed the settlement more fish than it could carry up the bank, and the entire problem — the whole of it, from the first hour to the last — was that a fish out of water in twenty-nine degrees begins to go off within about four hours and is dangerous by nightfall.

They could catch in an hour what it took nine racks three days to dry.

So the racks stopped being the answer and became the enemy, and everybody on that terrace spent nine days working against a bottleneck they could all see and nobody could widen fast enough.

They built fourteen new frames during the run.

Not well. Green wood, cut that morning, set on the bare stone with stacked rock footings and no time to do it properly, and Oren stood in the middle of it with his arms folded watching people build badly and did not stop them once, which Leon understood was costing him something.

Nesh ran the whole drying ground with both forearms still wrapped.

He could not lift, could not turn a rack, could not hold a knife. What he could do was walk the line and say which frames were running hot and which were running wet and which strips were too thick and which fire needed feeding, for sixteen hours a day, for nine days, and by the fourth day people had stopped waiting for him to come to them and had started calling him over.

Leon gutted fish.

That was his job. He was fast at it by the third day and very fast by the sixth, and the thing he thought about most in ninety hours of it was that he had a doctorate and had once been paid four hundred thousand euros for eleven weeks of consulting, and that neither of those facts had any bearing whatsoever on the rate at which he could open a `Karafell` and get the guts out in one motion.

Sixteen hours. Nine days.

Doctorate. Four hundred thousand euros for eleven weeks of consulting. Neither of those makes the knife go faster.

Nobody sang. Leon had half expected singing.

***

By the third day Nayra had stopped nine people from eating.

She did it at the fires, in front of everybody, and she was extremely unpopular for about two days.

The settlement had been on short rations for six weeks. Not starving — she was precise about that, and used the ordinary word for hunger rather than the other one — but six weeks of less, in bodies that had been working through it. And on the first night of a run there is more food on a terrace than anybody can imagine and every instinct anybody has says to eat until it hurts.

Two people did, on the first night, before she got to them.

Both were violently ill within about four hours and one of them was still poor on the third day, and after that nobody argued with her.

Her rule was portions and intervals. Small, often, and building over four days, and no exceptions for the people doing the heaviest work, which was the part that produced the arguments, because the people doing the heaviest work were the ones who most wanted the exception.

Leon knew the shape of the thing and got the mechanism about a third right.

He had a memory of a lecture, or possibly a documentary, about what happens when a body that has been running lean is suddenly given everything at once — something about salts moving where they should not, something about the heart. He gave Nayra what he had, with the reasoned-mark all over it and an explicit admission that he could not test any of it.

Nayra listened, and took the useful part, which was the general shape, and rejected the specific parts he could not support.

Then she told him what she had, which was not a mechanism at all.

"After a bad season the ones who go down are not the weakest," she said. "They are the ones who eat most on the first night."

She drew the charcoal line round the bowl.

"I have seen it twice. My teacher told me, and hers told her. I do not know why it is true and I have been doing it for fourteen years."

She said the last part while marking a portion measure onto a bowl with a charcoal line, and did not look up.

"You will tell me why one day," she said, without looking up from the bowl. "I will still be doing it the same way tomorrow."

***

Pel got out of the shelter on the eighth day of the run and sat in the sun for two hours.

The redness had stopped moving on the third morning after the course started and had begun to retreat on the fifth. The fever had gone. Nayra had marked the edge every morning in charcoal for eleven days and the marks were on the splint where anybody could see them, going the right way.

She did not say the antibiotic had done it.

What she said, when Leon asked, was that the wound had been irrigated twice a day for a week before the drug and that the drug had come at the moment the redness was moving, and that she could not separate those two things and was not going to pretend otherwise, and that she had written down both.

The leg would be shorter. She had said so on the second day and repeated it now without softening it. Two bones through the skin do not come back to what they were, and Pel would walk, and would walk badly, and would not run again, and Nayra told him that herself while he was sitting in the sun and did not do it gently.

Aru sat with him for the rest of the afternoon and for once did not talk.

Eight courses left.

***

Doran gave the count on the seventy-third day, when the run had thinned to nothing and the last of the racks came off.

Grain: what was left, which was very little.

Dried fish: two hundred and forty-one baskets.

He said the number and then said what it meant, which was that the settlement had food into the wet season with a margin it had not had in three years, and that eleven new frames had come out of nine days and would still be there next year, and that on the whole this had been a good run.

Then he stopped, and looked at his own marks for a moment, and said the other thing.

The counting party would come back at the end of the next dry season.

Which was ten months away, and which they now had the food to think about, and which nobody on this terrace had been able to spare a single thought for since the day the racks burned.

Kharun did not say anything.

Veya put her hand flat on the cord and left it there, which was not a knot and was not nothing, and Leon looked around a council ground full of people who had been too hungry to be afraid and who were now, for the first time in six weeks, neither.