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

The wet season did not arrive. It closed, the way a door closes.

There were four days of heavy showers and then on the eightieth morning it began raining properly and did not meaningfully stop for nine days, and the settlement Leon had spent seventy-nine days learning became a different place inside a week.

The river came up nine marks and then twelve and then went past the top of his stake, which he had cut for a dry season and had never once thought would be a limitation. He stood in the shallows on the eighty-fourth morning with brown water at his thigh and the whole instrument underwater and could not take a reading at all.

That bothered him more than it should have. He had eighty-one consecutive numbers and the eighty-second was going to be a gap forever.

He cut a new stake the same afternoon, four metres up the bank, and started a second column, and had to spend an hour working out how to tie the two scales together so that the numbers meant the same thing.

Nobody helped him. Nobody had ever asked him to do it in the first place.

***

By the eighty-sixth day the drying ground had stopped working entirely.

That was the material fact of the wet season and it was worth more than any amount of rain on a roof. In the dry, air took water out of a fish strip. In the wet, air did not. Nesh sat under a shelter at the rack line with his forearms newly unwrapped and watched twenty frames do nothing at all for a fortnight, and said the thing everybody already knew, which was that the two hundred and forty-one baskets in the store were not the start of the season’s food.

They were the whole of it.

Nothing more would be preserved until the air changed. Whatever came out of the river now got eaten within a day or it was wasted, and the settlement went from a place that was building a store to a place that was spending one, and the arithmetic would run the other way until the water dropped, which Fel put at about two months and would not be pressed on.

Doran adjusted and did not enjoy it.

Then the terrace found out about the drainage channel.

It had been failing since before Leon arrived. It had taken out a retaining wall on his second day. It had been the wrong firebreak in the fire, and it had been on the repair list continuously for ten weeks, always behind something more urgent, and on the eighty-eighth night it took nine cubic metres of the upper terrace and put them across the path to the lower landing.

Nobody was hurt. Two shelters had to be emptied.

Oren stood in the rain the next morning looking at the scar with his hands on his hips, and Ket said something short, and Oren agreed with it, and Leon did not need Luma for either of them.

They had known. Everybody had known. And every single time it had come up, there had been something that mattered more that week, and the weeks had run out.

***

Leon had time for the first time since he arrived, and discovered that he was extremely bad at it.

The wet stopped nearly everything. No timber ground, no long foraging, no expeditions, no building above the waterline. Work became close, indoor, repetitive: cordage, hafting, hide, repair, and the endless carrying of wet things to somewhere less wet.

He filled the first four days with projects and abandoned three of them.

Then, on the ninetieth evening, Luma sat down opposite him with a piece of charcoal.

"You are going to learn how to say a thing that has finished," she said.

He had been putting it off for six weeks. Rethari marked time on the verb along with evidence, which meant that saying I saw it yesterday required getting two things right at once, and Leon had been avoiding the whole apparatus by describing everything as though it were happening now, and had been doing it for so long that people had begun to accommodate him.

Luma had stopped finding that acceptable somewhere around the day he built a sentence with a because in it.

She worked him for two hours a night for twelve nights.

On the ninth night he said, correctly, with the right ending, that the racks had burned and that he had run for water and that it had been the wrong thing to do.

Luma made him say it again.

Then she said, "That is the first thing you have ever told me about yourself in my language."

Leon sat there with a piece of charcoal in his hand and understood that he had spent ninety days being described by other people.

***

The spur watch came down on the ninety-fifth day with a count and it was zero.

Nineteen days, four pairs on rotation, six days each in the wet. They had built a low blind on the reverse slope three hundred metres back with a sightline to all four positions, and they had lain in it in relays and had watched the thorn on the shoulder and the north path below it, and in nineteen days nobody had used any of it.

Kharun took the report and did not look disappointed, which surprised Leon until he thought about it. A count of zero is a number. Nineteen days of nothing meant the positions were not in weekly use, and that was worth knowing and had cost four pairs a very wet fortnight.

Tala did not accept it.

She went up herself on the ninety-sixth morning, alone, which she was no longer permitted to do and did anyway with Pel limping along behind her at a pace that must have cost him something, and Kharun let it happen and said nothing.

They came back before dark.

The third position, the one under the thorn on the shoulder, had been used.

Not nineteen days ago. Tala put it inside four days, off the grass and off the way the rain had settled in the flattening, and she was as certain as she had been about anything since Leon met her.

Four days ago the blind had been occupied. Two people had been lying three hundred metres away with a clear view of that thorn for the whole of the daylight, in shifts, and had reported nothing, because they had seen nothing.

Somebody had come onto that spur and lain in the position and left again, inside a day, three hundred metres from two people who were watching for exactly that.

Kharun asked her the question and she answered it without softening it.

"They were not careless." Tala did not look at the two people she was talking about. "The blind is right. I would have put it there."

They had not been careless. She had gone over the blind herself and the discipline was good and the sightlines were right and she would have set it up the same way.

Whoever had used that position had known where the watchers were.