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

The wall got built, and the labour came out of the foraging line, because there was nowhere else it could come from.

Doran had gone downstream with the message and two others, so the arithmetic fell to Leon and Veya between them, and it was not complicated. Fourteen days of work, thirty-one people who could do it, and the foraging parties were four of those thirty-one plus six of the twenty-two Nayra had listed as able but committed.

Take the ten. The wall goes up in nine days instead of fourteen.

Leave them out. The wall takes fourteen and the store is a day better at the end of it.

Kharun took the ten and Veya recorded that he had, and nobody tied anything, and Leon watched the store go from thirteen days to eleven over the course of the build and could not find a single place in the chain where anybody had made a mistake.

The posts taught them something, which nobody expected, least of all Leon.

He was at the burned section on the second morning pulling out what was left of the old line, and the stumps came out of the ground in three conditions. Some had burned through at the surface and snapped. Some were ash. And four of them had charred to about a finger’s depth on the outside and stopped, and when Leon got one of those out of the socket and knocked the loose black off it with a stone, the wood underneath was sound, and the buried end was in noticeably better condition than the buried end of the post beside it that had never been near a fire.

He sat down in the dirt with it across his knees for a while.

Then he went and found Oren.

He had about a hundred words now and none of them were hydrophobic or lignin or fungal, so he did it with the two posts. This one, buried three years, no fire, and he put his thumbnail into the soft grey outer millimetre of it and it went in. That one, buried three years, burned last month, and he put his thumbnail into the black and it did not.

Oren took both posts off him and did the same thing himself, twice, and then went and got two more and did it to those.

Then he said something short and went to get an axe.

What Oren already knew was the part Leon had not got to.

He knew it from grass fires, which came through this country every few years and left standing timber charred at the base, and he had been cutting that timber for forty years and had opinions about it. If the char went past about a finger it was not a coating any more, it was a loss, and a post charred that deep had less wood in it in the place where a post most needs wood.

"A finger," Oren said, on the second evening, holding one up. "Past that it is not a skin. It is wood you have thrown away."

They worked out the depth between them over two evenings and a lot of ruined test pieces.

The method they ended up with was Oren’s: build a long shallow trench of embers, roll the buried third of each post through it, turning, and pull it out when the outside blackened and before the crack lines opened. Nine posts to a burn. Somebody has to be watching the whole time and the somebody they gave it to was Nesh, whose forearms were healing and who could not carry anything but could sit and could count.

It would not make the posts last forever. Leon was careful in the book about that, and put it under reasoned with a note that he had no way to test it inside a lifetime and that the four surviving stumps were four, which is not a number.

Oren’s estimate was that a charred post would go three or four years longer than a plain one in this ground.

Then he said, without being asked, "We burned a wall down and got a better wall."

He looked at the char trench for a while.

"Forty years I have been building. I have never once managed that on purpose."

***

The timber ground was two hours north-west and they were out there for four days.

That was the part Kharun had not liked and had done anyway. Ten to twelve people at a time, in the open, cutting and hauling, at the far end of a settlement that was fourteen days from having a complete wall and had thirty-one people who could hold one.

On the third day the herds moved.

Leon noticed it the way he noticed most things, which was late and by arithmetic. The Parasaurolophus-grade animals that had been grazing the flat ground between the timber and the river had shifted about a kilometre west over two days, and he was working out whether it was the water when Pel put a hand on his arm and did not say anything at all.

She was ninety metres out, on the high ground, and she had been there for some time.

Leon had seen her twice. Once on his first day, at four metres, when he had been eleven minutes old in this body and had put a foil blanket between them and had not understood any of what was happening. Once from a ridge in the third week, at distance, going the other way.

Charcoal along the back, rust brown underneath. The long low skull. The tail held out straight and rigid and feathered along the top. One foot up, the sickle claw off the ground, the way they carried it when they were not doing anything in particular.

She was not hunting. Leon was fairly sure of that and Tala would have been certain and Tala was four days north.

She had come because the herds had moved, and the herds had moved because ten people had been cutting timber in the open for three days, and she had followed the food, and the food had led her to the people who had moved it.

Nobody ran.

Kharun brought everybody in to the cut face and put the hauled timber on the open side and then simply stood, with his people behind stacked wood, and waited, and after about twenty minutes she came down off the high ground at an angle that took her past them at sixty metres and went on west after the herd, unhurried, without once turning her head.

The whole thing took less than half an hour and nothing happened, and Leon’s hands were still not steady an hour later.

***

They talked about her that night at the timber ground and by the second evening she had a name.

Not from Leon. He would not have dared. It came off one of the young men who had been at the cut face, and it was descriptive and slightly rude and referred to the colouring along her back, and by the following morning four people were using it and Aru, who was not even there, had somehow acquired it and improved it.

Kharun stopped it on the fourth day.

He did it in front of everybody and he did not raise his voice. Leon got about half and Luma gave him the rest that evening.

"A thing with a name is a thing with a story," Kharun said. "A story has a shape. A shape tells you what comes next."

He let that sit.

"And then somebody who has heard it nine times walks onto that high ground expecting the animal in the story. Not the animal on the ground."

He did not raise his voice for the last part and did not need to.

"She has no name. She is a large killing animal whose ground touches ours and who has no reason to know what we are. Every time anybody sees her, it is the first time."

Nobody argued. Nobody in this settlement was going to argue with Kharun about that.

And walking back down to the terrace the next morning, at the front of a haul line, Leon heard two of the carriers behind him discussing where the grey one had gone.

Which was the name with the rudeness filed off, and which was going to stick, and which was exactly what Kharun had said would happen.

Leon got out the register that evening and wrote Talrakh, female, high ground north-west of the timber cut, and then the date, and the seen-mark.

Then he wrote the grey one underneath it, and looked at it for a while, and drew a line through it.

Then he wrote it again below the line with the reasoned-mark beside it, because it was not what she was called, and it was what people were going to call her, and both of those were facts and only one of them was true.