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

The wall closed on the forty-sixth day and nobody celebrated, because Doran read the store out the same evening.

Seven days.

Seven days of food against a fish run that everybody in Retharu had been counting toward since the racks burned, and which Fel Longline had been saying was close for about a week in the way an old man says a thing is close.

Leon had been waiting for somebody else to ask the question and nobody had, so on the forty-seventh morning he went down to the landing and asked it himself, badly, in about sixty words.

"How do you know when the fish come?"

Fel Longline was sixty-one and had been on this water since he could hold a line, and his answer took most of an hour and Luma had to sit in on the second half of it.

"There is no day," Fel said. "Nobody has a day."

What he had was a set of things that happened together. The wading birds go from the shallows to the bar. A particular reed puts out its second flower. The water goes from cold at the bottom to the same all the way down, which he could feel with his legs and could not explain. And the water turns.

That last one was the important one and he said it four times.

"The run does not come because the season says so," he said. "It comes when the water first rises after the low. The fish come up on the front of the rise."

He held up one hand and let it fall.

"Rise late, fish late. No rise, and they go somewhere else, and you learn that in the second week of waiting."

Leon asked whether he could see the rise coming.

"No," Fel said. "You know it started on the morning it started. Anybody who tells you different is selling you something."

***

Leon had put a stake in the river on his third morning.

He had put it in on the third day, in the slack water below the landing, cut with lines a finger apart, because he had arrived on a continent with no instruments and no maps and no idea what season it was, and reading a river level every morning had been the only measurement available to a man who needed to be measuring something.

Nobody had asked him to do it. Nobody had ever asked him about it. He had gone down at first light for forty-four consecutive mornings and read a number and written it in the back of the register, and about half the settlement had watched him do it and had filed it under the general category of things the tall one does.

He brought the register down to the landing that afternoon and drew the numbers out flat on the mud with a stick.

Forty-four marks. Day along the bottom, level up the side. He had never plotted them before. He had written them because writing them was the discipline, and had assumed that at some point in the future they would be worth something.

Fel Longline crouched down in the mud and looked at it for a very long time without saying anything.

Then he asked which mark was today.

What the plot showed was a fall.

Forty-four days of it, steepest at the beginning, flattening as it went, which was what a draining catchment does and which Leon could have told anybody in advance without a single reading. The interesting thing was not the shape.

The interesting thing was that there was no bend in it anywhere.

Leon put the flat of his hand along the last twelve marks and they lay under it.

Bend. Do one thing for me. No wobble, no shoulder, nothing that could be argued into the beginning of an inflection. Whatever the river was doing on the forty-seventh day, it was doing exactly the same thing it had been doing on the thirty-fifth.

He asked Fel, through Luma, what the water usually did before it turned.

"It stops," Fel said. "It does not rise. It stops, and it holds, and then it comes up."

Not rose. Stopped. Three days, four days of holding at one mark, and then the rise, and he had watched that happen more times than he could count and had never once thought of it as a thing that could be drawn.

Leon looked at his own twelve marks.

Then he asked the question he did not want to ask, which was how many days there were between the water stopping and the fish arriving.

"Six," Fel said. "Seven. Sometimes five."

***

They worked at it until dark and the answer they got was worse than either of them had brought to the mud.

Fel’s fifty years said the run was near, and had been saying it for a week, and his confidence in it had been high enough that the settlement had built its entire arithmetic on the assumption that the racks and the store and the days that were left had to bridge to soon.

Leon’s forty-four marks said that the river was still falling, at a rate that had not changed in a fortnight, and that on the evidence available it had not begun to do the thing it does before it does the thing they were all waiting for.

Fel’s method could not see the future and had never claimed to. It read the present with extraordinary accuracy and then applied the memory of fifty years to it, and fifty years of memory is an average, and an average is a lie about any particular year.

Leon’s method could not read the present at all. It had no birds in it, no reed flower, no temperature at the bottom of the water, no fish. It had a stick and a number, and the only thing it could do was tell you whether today was different from yesterday.

Together they said: the water has not turned.

And under that: it is not close to turning, and the earliest it can now begin is three or four days from the day it stops falling, plus six or seven for the fish, and nothing on this mud says the stopping starts tomorrow.

Fel gave the number in the end because it was his to give.

"Eight days late," he said. "Perhaps fourteen."

***

Doran did the rest of it in front of the council that night and it took four sentences.

Seven days of food. The run at the earliest eight days out and possibly fourteen. Between those two numbers there was a gap of one day if everything went well and eight days if it did not, and one of those was survivable by tightening and one of them was not.

Nayra had her list out before he had finished.

She did not say who would move and she did not have to, because everybody in the council ground had heard the four categories read out eleven days ago and had been carrying them since. Nineteen over sixty. Forty-one children under twelve. Eleven pregnant or nursing.

Leon sat with his hands on his knees and understood, with a clarity that arrived all at once and made him feel physically cold, that he had spent forty-seven days being extremely useful and that the single most useful thing he had ever done here was to put a stick in a river on his third morning for no reason he could have articulated at the time.

And that the reward for it was a more accurate account of how bad this was going to be.

Fel Longline said one more thing before the council broke up and Luma did not want to translate it.

Leon made her.

There is a word, she said, for a year when the water turns late. It is an old word and it is not used for anything else and she had heard it perhaps twice in her life, both times from people over sixty.

Leon asked what it meant.

Luma said it did not mean hunger, because they had a word for hunger and used it constantly. It meant something closer to the year we do not count from. A year you do not use as a marker when you are placing other events in time, because nobody wants to say that was two summers after it.

She said the last person who had used it in front of her was Veya.

Leon looked across the council ground at an old woman with sixty years of knotted cord in her lap, who had lived through one of these before and had never once mentioned it, and who was, at that moment, already working backward through the record with her hands.