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

Leon asked Vethra because she was the only person on the terrace who had no reason to protect him.

He had carried the word for seventy days. He had written it in the register on the night Veya said it and had put nothing after it, and had gone back to that page about once a week the way a man goes back to a bruise, and had asked nobody, because the two people who could have told him had both declined in a way that was itself an answer.

Vethra was outside the shelter mending a carry-strap on the two hundred and forty-second day, and Leon sat down two metres away and waited until she looked up, which took a while and which he had learned was the correct way to start with her.

"Hemra."

Vethra put the strap down.

"Who said it to you?"

"Veya."

"About you?"

"Ei."

She looked at him for long enough that he began to understand that he was about to have a worse afternoon than he had planned for.

***

She got Luma, which he had not expected, and Luma came and sat down and did not look pleased and did it anyway, and Vethra said the whole of it slowly and made Luma render every part.

Hemra is not a thing that happens. It is a thing a person does.

You give somebody something they cannot refuse. Not a gift. A gift can be refused and everybody understands the refusing. A hemra is chosen so that refusing it in front of other people would be worse than taking it — because the person is hungry, or hurt, or has a sister, or because saying no would mean admitting in public what they have been hiding.

And once they have taken it, they cannot speak against you. Not because anybody forbids it. Because everybody who hears them speak will hear the gift first.

"It is old," Vethra said. "It is old because people have always done it and there has always needed to be a word."

Leon sat with that.

"Who does it?"

"People with something," Vethra said, "to people with nothing. That is who can. A man with nothing cannot hemra anybody. He has nothing to put in their hands."

Luma got to the end of that sentence and stopped translating and did not offer to continue, and Leon understood, seventy days late, exactly why she had refused the first time.

Veya had not described what had happened.

She had said what he had done. Twice. In front of Doran. In the one word that means you did this on purpose and we have a name for it.

***

He went up to Veya that evening and did not prepare anything, because there was nothing to prepare that would not have been a defence.

She was at the flat stone. She always was.

"I did not know the word. Now I know it."

"Ei."

"I did not do that." He had the past tense and he had the negative and he had almost nothing else, so he used the register, and drew the path and the jar and Halu’s shelter, and then drew himself and put a line through the drawing of himself, which was not grammar but which she read without difficulty. "I did not think it. I did not want his voice."

Veya turned the cord over.

"I know."

Leon waited.

"I have known since the morning after," she said, and Luma gave it to him carefully, in pieces, because Veya was speaking properly now and not for a learner. "You are not a man who takes voices. If I thought you were, I would not have said it where you could hear it. I would have said it where you could not."

"Then why —"

"Because what a thing is called is not decided by what was in your head."

She said it without any heat at all, which is what made it stick.

"A cord holds what happened. It does not hold what was meant. In sixty years, nobody will be able to ask you what you meant, and the thing will still be exactly the size it is now, and it will still have taken his voice."

Then she told him the part he had come for without knowing it.

"You are asking why I said it out loud."

"Ei."

"Because if I had not, Halu would have been a man nobody listened to and nobody would have known why."

Leon stopped.

"He would have stood up at that fire," Veya said, "and thirty people would have felt a thing in their chest and not been able to name it, and they would have decided he was soft, or bought, or on your side, and they would have decided it privately, one at a time, over a season. And he would never have got it back, because you cannot argue with a thing nobody has said."

She let that sit.

"I named it. A named thing can be finished."

"How."

And Veya told him, and it was the only ugly thing she said all evening, and she said it the way she said everything, which was once.

A hemra is discharged by the person who received it. They give back something of the same weight, in public, so that the debt runs both ways and cancels, and afterwards neither of them owes the other anything and both of them may speak.

There is no other way. The giver cannot cancel it. The giver cannot forgive it, because forgiving it is another gift.

"It has to come from him."

"Ei."

"He has nothing."

"Ei," Veya said. "That is the whole of what is wrong with a hemra, and you have found it in one."

***

He went and stood at the top of the path for a while and then went down to the works instead of up to Halu’s shelter, because he did not trust himself to arrive at the right size.

Ket was at the leach barrel. She had been at the leach barrel most days for three months.

"Halu."

Ket did not look up.

"You know."

"Ei."

"How long?"

"Since the day after he came down here." She lifted the ash paddle and set it aside and finally did look at him. "He asked me what a full jar weighs. Then he asked what a jar and a half weighs."

Leon did not say anything.

"He has been going out with the pairs," Ket said. "Off the spur, on his leg, an extra turn every four days, because a turn is worth something and he has nothing else to sell. And whatever it comes to, he is putting it into fat, and it is going to be a little more than two kilograms, because it has to be a little more or it does not cancel."

She went back to the ash.

"And he cannot give it to you until it is finished, and it will be finished about the time the counting party comes."

Leon stood in the works with his hands at his sides and did the only arithmetic left in it.

A hundred and sixty days of a man with a shortened tibia walking an extra watch every four days, to buy back the right to say one sentence at a fire, about a thing he had been going to say for free.

And I cannot stop him. Stopping him is another gift.