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

Boro traded for six hours and did it badly on purpose.

Leon had watched him work once before, on the eleventh day, and had come away with the clear impression of a man who could have sold him his own boots. That man had negotiated from a position of strength, slowly, with long silences, and had extracted a folding saw and two of four small files for salt and a route and a promise.

This one took the first offer on three separate items.

Doran noticed it about an hour in and stopped enjoying himself, which for Doran was a significant public statement. Veya noticed it earlier and said nothing. Kharun had noticed it the previous evening on the landing and had spent the night with two people awake who were not usually awake.

Boro wanted to be finished.

***

What he brought was mostly ordinary and some of it was very good.

Salt from a source he would not name, better than the seep. Four hides of a kind nobody on this reach had seen, thin and strong. A gut bag of dried berries that Nayra confiscated within about ninety seconds pending an argument. Cordage. Two fire drills. A stone core of a quality that made Ket go quiet.

And at the bottom of the load, wrapped in hide and then in bark and then in hide again, four pieces of worked metal.

Not stone. Not the soft grey stuff that came out of the Redland trade in beads. Metal, grey, hard, worked thin, with edges that had been ground rather than flaked.

Two of them were blade fragments, broken and reground, and had clearly been something else first.

One was a flat strip about the length of a hand with three holes in it, and Leon looked at it for some time and eventually decided it had come off a machine and that he had no idea what machine.

The fourth was a file.

***

Leon knew it across four metres of council ground in bad light.

Not the same one. Not his. His had gone east on the eleventh day with two of its four brothers, and this one was heavier, older, worn most of the way down on one face, with a tang that had been reshaped by somebody who did not know what a tang was for and had made it into a handle anyway.

But it was a manufactured file. Machine-cut teeth, regular, in two crossing directions, in a pattern that no hand on this continent could produce and nothing in nature makes.

Doran had put it on the mat with the other three and was asking Boro where it had come from.

"East," Boro said, and gave the number of hands it had passed through, which was four that he knew of and probably more. "The man I took it from had it from his mother."

He nodded at the mat.

"It cost me more than everything else there put together."

Kharun asked why he had bought it.

Boro looked at Leon for the second time in two days.

"On the eleventh day a very tall man put a made thing in my hands," Boro said. "Better than anything I have held. In front of the whole council. And he did not haggle properly."

Nobody laughed.

"I walked east and back for a hundred and twenty days thinking about where a thing like that comes from."

And that four hands east, in a camp he did not name, he had seen this on a woman’s belt and had recognised the shape of the question.

***

Leon asked to hold it and Doran passed it across the mat and Veya watched him do it.

It was cold and heavier than it looked. The cut was a double-cut bastard file, coarse, worn smooth over about two-thirds of its length by decades of use on something harder than wood. There was rust in the low ground of the teeth and somebody had oiled it, recently and inexpertly, with animal fat.

He turned it over.

The tang end had been beaten into a rough tapering point and bound with cord. Whoever had done that had wanted a scriber or a punch and had not cared what they were destroying to get one.

He turned it again, into the firelight, and found the shoulder.

Every file made in a factory carries a mark there. It is the flat between the cut face and the tang, and it is where the maker stamps, because it is the one part of the tool that never gets used and never wears.

There was a stamp on it.

Leon held it a hand’s width from his eye and turned it very slowly until the fire caught the depressions at the right angle, and the council ground went on happening around him and he stopped being aware of any of it.

It was not a symbol. It was not a clan mark or a tally or a scratched glyph.

It was letters.

No. No, that is pattern-matching, that is a man seeing what he has been carrying for four months in a scratch on a piece of iron.

He turned it another two degrees into the light.

It was letters.

Five of them, in the alphabet he had learned when he was five years old, pressed into steel by a die in a press in a place where somebody had made dies and presses, stamped square and even and slightly too deep on the left the way a worn punch does it.

W E I S S.

***

He did not say anything for a long time.

Nobody hurried him. That is not a thing they did here. Veya had her hands still on the cord and Kharun was watching his face and Luma had already got up and moved round the fire to be where she would be needed, and none of them knew what he was looking at and all of them knew it was the thing.

Leon put the file down on the mat, flat, with the shoulder up.

He had a hundred and forty words and the past tense and a name he had been carrying since a turbine hall in Kaltenbruck, and none of that was going to be enough, so he did what he had done on his first day and every important day since.

He got out the register and he drew.

The file, in outline. The shoulder. The five letters, larger, one at a time, exactly as they sat in the steel.

Then, underneath them, the mark he had drawn on the twenty-first day when the cube had shown him a geometry and a single point pulsing far east, and had never explained.

Then he pointed at the letters and said it in Rethari, slowly, in the past tense, with the evidential ending for seen with my own eyes.

"This is a name. It is the name of a man from my world. He came here before me."

Luma said it again correctly. Veya’s hands began to move.

And Kharun, who had asked who is accountable on the first day and every day since, who had made Leon promise not to go out at night alone, and who had spent a hundred and thirty-one days keeping a settlement of a hundred and seventy-four people alive on a river somebody else was counting, looked at five letters stamped in a piece of steel that had come four hands out of the east.

Then he asked the only question that mattered, and it was not who is he.

"Is he still there?"