Chapter 49: One Flat Day Is Not a Stop
Leon read the stake on the fifty-first morning and got the same number he had got on the fiftieth.
The number went in the register and nowhere else.
On the fifty-second morning he read it again, in the grey before light, with the camps gone and the terrace covered in the wreckage of six hundred people, and it was the same again.
Three marks. No change.
Do not. Do not do this. Two more mornings and then you can think about it.
Standing in the shallows with a pencil took him rather longer than the reading required.
One flat day is not a stop. Two flat days is weather. Three flat days is what Fel Longline had described on the mud eleven days ago while Leon drew forty-four numbers with a stick, and Leon had written the description down in the register that night and had reread it about nine times since, and could have recited it.
It stops falling. Three days, four days of holding at one mark. Then the rise.
Up the bank, he found Fel Longline before the man had finished his first cup of anything.
Fel did not take Leon’s word for it, which Leon respected enormously.
Fel went down to the stake himself, and looked at it, and then walked eighty metres upstream to a rock he had apparently been using for fifty years and looked at that, and then went out to the bar and stood in the water to the knee for about four minutes without saying anything.
Then he came back and gave three things, in order.
The water was the same at the bottom as at the top. Fel could feel it on his shins and could not explain it and had been feeling it since he was nine.
The wading birds had gone off the shallows onto the bar. Fel pointed. Eleven of them were out there and there had been none of them out there four days ago.
And the reed at the second bend had put out its second flower.
Every day for a month he had walked past that reed bed and had never once looked at it, and he went and looked at it now, and it had small dull green flowers on it that would not have registered as flowers to him under any circumstances at all.
Three signs and forty-six marks on a stick.
Fel gave the number, and it was the first time Leon had heard him give one without hedging it.
"Six days," he said. "Perhaps seven."
***
Doran did the arithmetic in front of the council at midday and it was survivable, which was not the same as good.
Seven days of store. Thirty-one baskets of dried meat off the racks, which he had weighed himself and which came to about six more days if it was eaten as a supplement and not as a meal.
Thirteen days of food, against a run six or seven days out, and then four or five days after the run before there was enough coming out of the water to matter.
They would clear it by about six days.
"Six days is not a margin," Doran said, and sat down. "Six days is the width of one bad thing."
Nobody cheered. Leon had half expected somebody to and had been embarrassed in advance on their behalf, and then the number was given and the council ground simply absorbed it and moved on to the question of whether the racks could be got back into ordinary use before the run arrived, because if the run arrived and the racks were still full of meat then the fish would have nowhere to go.
That was the entire reaction.
Sitting on the mat, he thought about the weeks he had spent watching people be about to starve, and about the fact that the moment they stopped being about to starve they began worrying about a scheduling conflict.
Aru, from the edge, on his crutches, said that the fish would keep in the river.
Nayra told him that so would he, and the council ground laughed for about four seconds, and that was the celebration.
***
By the afternoon the sound had been in his head for two days.
He had not written it down, because he was not confident he could render it and did not want a bad transcription to become the record, and because part of him had wanted to be wrong about it for forty-eight hours.
In the afternoon he found Luma at the rack line and asked her to say the name the third camp’s speaker had said.
Luma said it.
Then he asked her to say it again, slower.
She did, and then she stopped and looked at him, because he had gone still in a way that people had learned to notice.
The middle of it had a cluster in it. Two consonants hard against each other with nothing between them, the second one a sound made at the back of the mouth, and the whole thing landed in the ear like a stone dropped into a bowl of water.
Rethari did not do that.
Leon had fifty-two words and had been listening to nothing else for fifty days, and Rethari was open, syllable-timed, and soft at the edges. Every word he had learned went consonant, vowel, consonant, vowel. Havek’s downstream dialect did the same thing with different vowels. The trade register the visitors had used did it too.
Was it a Rethari word, he asked.
She said no.
Then whether it was a word from any of the tongues she knew, and she was the settlement’s language teacher and knew four of them well enough to argue in, and she thought about it for a long time and then said no again, and then said something that Leon had to have twice.
"She said it the way you say a word you were taught," Luma said.
Leon waited.
"Not the way you say a word you grew up with. The way you say one somebody made you repeat until you had it."
***
All of it went to Kharun and Veya together that evening, and made a mess of explaining it, and got there in the end with Luma doing most of the work.
The argument was not about whether the name mattered. Everybody in the shelter agreed it mattered within about two minutes.
The argument was about the old man.
The old man was eighty-one, he did not walk, he was two days downstream at a camp that had refused them nine days ago and had then walked two days to be fed anyway, and he had been talking about the north for four years to people who did not believe him.
Kharun wanted to send two scouts.
"A scout brings back what a scout can carry," Veya said. "A route. A description."
She did not look up from the cord.
"What we need is everything the old man can still say. His words. His order. Including the parts that sound wrong."
Which meant Luma.
Which meant Luma going two days downstream and sitting with a man for as long as it took to take a whole life’s worth of testimony, and Luma was the only person in Retharu who could hold ninety seconds of speech in one pass, and was therefore the only person who could do it and also the person the settlement could least afford to send anywhere.
Then Veya said the other thing, which stopped the room.
Somebody had to go who would know what the words meant.
Not what they said. What they meant. An eighty-one-year-old man describing something he saw four summers ago is going to describe it in the only vocabulary he has, and if he saw a wall, he will say a wall, and if he saw something that is not a wall and has no word on this river, he will say the nearest thing, and everybody who has heard him for four years has been hearing the nearest thing and has been believing it.
Kharun looked across the shelter at Leon.
Leon, who had had exactly one thought since the previous morning and had been trying not to have it in public, said the only sentence he had ready.
"Ei. I go."
"Not alone," said Kharun.
"Not alone."
Kharun held his eye for a moment longer than was comfortable and then made the sign for ei at chest height, which was a statement, and turned to Veya, and the two of them started arguing about which two others.
Out on the terrace, at the eastern break in the dark, he stood and worked out that in fifty-two days he had not once been more than six hours from this river.
Behind him, the cord was moving.