Chapter 66: Four Times the Hunt
Doran did not count the fat, which took Leon four days to understand and was the whole of what he learned that season.
Leon had assumed he would. He had gone up to the works the next morning with the two numbers written out neat and the multiplication done, ready to be honest about it in public, braced for it, and had discovered that Doran did not want the multiplication and had already known roughly what it came to.
What Doran wanted was whose.
He walked the terrace for four days with a length of cord and asked the question in one form: when the fat came out for the soap, what did not get it?
Nobody had asked that. Leon had drawn it out of the store as a quantity, and the store is a word, and a word does not have a family attached to it.
The store did.
Six households had put fat in against the wet and had been drawing on it since, at a rate Doran could recite and had been reciting to himself for a fortnight without saying anything, because Doran does not say a thing until the thing is finished.
Halu’s household was one of them. Halu’s leg would always be worse in the cold and he had put fat by in the way a man does when he has learned that he will be cold and slow before anybody else is.
***
He gave it on the hundred and eighty-fifth day and he gave it standing, on the terrace, to nine people, which was not a council and was not meant to be.
He gave the rate first. Two kilograms in a jar. A jar every four days across six stations. Half a kilogram a day, every day, for as long as the trough runs.
Then he gave the span, because the span was the part nobody had done.
Two hundred and ten days to the counting party.
Then the product, and he did not say the number.
"Go and ask Nesh what came off the animal."
Somebody went. It took a while, because Nesh had to think, and then it did not take long at all, because he had weighed it himself for the sharing and had not forgotten a thing about that week.
Twenty-six.
Doran waited until it had gone round.
"Four times the animal." He was not looking at Leon and had not looked at him once. "Between now and the day they come to count us, that trough will eat four times what the biggest thing we have ever killed put into this settlement. We spent nine days on that animal. Two people came off it hurt and one of them will not walk right again."
He rolled the cord.
"And we did not decide this."
Leon opened his mouth and Nayra put a hand out, flat, low, and he shut it, which was the single most useful thing anybody did for him that day.
"I am not saying it is wrong," Doran said. "I am saying that six people built a thing in eleven days, and the thing takes food out of six households every four days, and not one person on this terrace was ever asked. The Varu is one of the six. Kharun is one of the six. Nayra is one of the six." He looked at Oren. "You are one of the six and you never said a word about the fat and you knew."
Oren did not deny it.
Doran rolled the hide back the other way. "That is how it works when the six are the right six. It also works exactly that way when they are not, and there is no way to tell which one you are having at the time."
Nine people looked at the ground. Leon looked down the terrace at the trough, which from where he was standing you could hear.
He is right, and the thing that makes him right is not the fat.
Seven people went to Veya and by the seventh telling a man in the east was coming. Fifty days later, six people put a trough across the only path in this settlement and it has been running for nine days and nobody voted. It is the same failure with better people doing it.
Leon went and found him that evening, on his own, which he had learned to do rather than say things in front of nine.
"Stop it. Until council."
Doran looked at him for a while.
"Na."
"Why?"
And Doran gave the honest answer, which was not the generous one and which was better than the generous one.
"Because I do not know what it is worth."
He said it flatly, the way he gave numbers.
He could price it. Pricing is his whole life. He could tell anybody on this river what a basket owed in the spring is worth in the autumn, and who was short, and what the shortness would cost in three seasons, and he had never once been wrong about it in the twelve weeks Leon had known him.
He had no method for this.
"A basket against a basket, I can do. A day of work against a day of work, I can do. Fat against — " He stopped and started again, which Doran did not do. "Against a thing that has not happened. Against a sickness that did not come."
"Ei."
"Nobody here has ever had to put a thing you can eat on one side and a thing you cannot eat on the other and say which is heavier." He rolled the cord back the other way. "I have spent four days looking for the way to do it and there is not one. So I will not stop a thing I cannot weigh. I will put both sides in the record and the council will do it at the turn of the season and it will be badly done, and it will be done by everybody."
Then he asked for the bark.
Nara was at the edge of the platform with the students, doing the thing she did where she was clearly listening and clearly pretending not to, and Doran turned round and asked her for it by name, which meant he had found out her name at some point in four days and had not mentioned it.
"You counted."
"Ei."
"How many days."
"Twenty." Nara’s voice went up at the end, the way it did. "Eleven before. Nine after."
Doran put his hand out.
She looked at Nayra. Nayra did not help her.
So Nara took the bark off her belt and handed it over, and Doran turned it once, and looked at the side with nine marks on it and the side with a hundred and thirty-eight, and put it inside his shirt.
"This is the other side. There is nothing else on it."
Then he went down the path, and Nara stood where she was and did not understand for about an hour what she had just given away — that a thing she had started on her second day because she wanted an old woman to notice her was now the only weight on one pan of a scale that was going to decide, at the turn of the season, whether a hundred and seventy-four people kept washing their hands.