Chapter 105: The Same Number to Everyone

Leon came up the north path on the five hundred and seventy-third day and the first thing he did, before he sat down, before he ate, was tell Kharun that he had given away a copy of the register without asking anybody.

He had rehearsed it for eleven days and every version had a reason in it, and in the end he said it with no reason attached, because Doran was standing there and would have taken the reasons apart one at a time in front of everybody.

Kharun heard him out.

"To Rothen's man."

"Ei."

"Who is paid by the man who sent the woman who counted us."

"Ei."

Doran did not wait to be invited.

"He had no authority to do that."

"Na," Leon agreed, before Kharun could. "I did not."

"Then say the rest of it, because you are going to say it eventually and I would rather it was tonight." Doran had the charcoal out. "Was it a decision or was it a feeling?"

Leon thought about that honestly and gave the honest answer, which was that it had been about two-thirds a decision.

Doran wrote that down as well.

Kharun ratified it in about four words and then did the thing that made it a settlement and not a man's opinion: he made Doran record that it had been done without authority and ratified afterwards, and he said the difference out loud so that nobody could quote the second part without the first.

The council took three evenings.

The first one was the report, which took two hours and which Leon gave without ornament, and the room was silent for a long time afterwards, mostly because of the forty baskets.

That is the number that did the damage. Not the list, not the count, not Onnek. Forty baskets, sent before the wet, to a camp that had told the truth about a bad year.

"There is no argument against that," Nayra said, eventually. "I have been sitting here for an hour trying to build one and there is not one. If our run fails, I want the forty baskets."

Nobody contradicted her, and Leon noticed that nobody agreed with her out loud either.

Kharun's position, when he finally gave it, was the one everybody expected and he was honest about why.

"I do not want a man four reaches up to hold a number about us that we cannot see."

"That is not a reason," Doran said. "That is a preference."

"Ei. It is." Kharun did not take offence, which he has stopped doing. "Say a better one or I am going to act on my preference, because somebody has to decide something by the third evening."

***

Doran did not have a better reason. He had a third thing, and he brought it out on the second evening, and it took him a while to make anybody understand it because there is no word on this river for what he was proposing.

"We give the number."

Half the ground started talking at once.

"To everybody." He waited. "Not to Anev. Not privately, to one man, once a year. We write it, and we send it to Havek and Low Reed and Renketh and Fel's people and the two camps up the reach, on the same day, by five carriers, and any of them may read it to anybody they like."

Kharun stared at him.

"You want to shout our store at the whole river."

"I want to make it worthless to know it." Doran turned the hide over. "What is Onnek worth to Rothen? Not the count. Anybody can count. He is worth the count nobody else has. The moment six camps have our number on the same day, holding our number is not a thing. It is weather."

"And when Rothen has it?"

"He has it now. He had it in the spring. Anev walked round this terrace for three days and she is better at it than we are." Doran put the hide down. "The question was never whether he gets the number. The question is whether he is the only one who does."

***

Kharun took the whole of the third evening and he spent most of it saying the cost, because that is his method and it is the reason people follow him.

Everybody will know they have four hundred and fifty-two baskets.

Everybody includes the camps who send their sick, who will now know exactly how far Retharu could stretch, and will ask, and will be right to ask.

Everybody includes whoever is thinking about a bad year and a wall with one soft panel in it and a stack of posts leaning against it.

"I am not going to pretend that is small," he said. "I have spent five hundred days making this place harder to walk into and I am about to write down how much is in it and hand that to strangers."

He looked round the ground.

"And I am going to do it anyway, and I want the reason on the hide in my words, not Doran's. The alternative is that one man knows and we do not know what he knows. I would rather be robbed by somebody who had to walk here."

Veya spoke for the first time in two evenings.

"Then it is an obligation and not a plan."

"Say the difference."

"If you do it once, it is a gift, and a gift can be stopped, and the year you stop is the year everybody finds out something is wrong here." Her hands were still. "If it is an obligation, it goes in the cord, and it happens in a bad year, and the bad year is the only year it is worth anything. Say the words every year out loud or do not do it at all."

Kharun said them out loud.

***

They sent it on the five hundred and eighty-first day, five carriers, five copies, one day.

Doran wrote it as flat as he could make it and read it out twice before anybody left, and Leon copied it into the register whole because it is the first document of its kind on that river and it is nine lines long.

A hundred and seventy-three people.

Four hundred and fifty-two baskets, of which two hundred and eleven are this year's run.

Forty rows planted, two hundred and forty of last year's seed held back in jars.

Seventy-four panels, two bad, one being repaired.

Two healers. Seven courses of the medicine, and the rule for who gets one, in full, copied out.

Nineteen people who could stand in a river for two months, and the weir not started.

Nine dead this year, named.

The count of who can write, and the offer to teach anybody who is sent.

And the last line, which Doran argued for and Kharun eventually let him keep.

This is what we have. We will send it again next year at the same time whether it is more or less. If it is less, it will still be the true number.

Leon watched the five of them go out through the gate at first light and stood there a while after, working out why his hands were unsteady, and got there in the end.

Nobody on Earth ever did this.

Every state I know of was built the other way round. They counted you and you did not get to see the book.