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

They came down the north path on the six hundred and fifth day, nine of them, three of them children, and they stopped at four hundred paces and waited to be seen, which is the correct way to arrive and which somebody had clearly told them to do.

They were from the camp two reaches up.

Luma got the name and went slightly still, and Leon did not understand why until Veya was carried down to the council ground, which she has not asked for in a year and a half.

The camp two reaches up is in the cord.

It is the one that refused. Sixty-odd years ago, in a year Veya can name, Retharu sent up the reach and was told no, and the no has been in the record ever since, and every person on that terrace over the age of thirty has heard about it.

They did not beg. That was the first thing and it mattered.

The oldest of them, a man of about fifty with a bad hand, stood on the flat below the gate and said, through Luma, that they had heard the number, that they had come eleven days, that they had brought nothing because there was nothing to bring, and that they would work.

Then he named what they could do. All nine. In order, including the children, and including what the children could not do.

Doran wrote it all down while the man was speaking, which is the closest thing to courtesy Doran performs.

Kharun asked one question and Leon has thought about the shape of it ever since.

"How many did you leave?"

"Thirty-one."

***

The council went badly for about an hour and Leon was no use in it whatsoever.

Half the ground wanted to read the cord out. Not out of cruelty — out of a perfectly reasonable feeling that a settlement which has just written down everything it owns should not be obliged to give it to the first people who read the page.

And the cord was on Veya's knees and she was the one who had been refused, or rather her mother's brother had, and she is the only living person who heard it said.

She untied it and read it.

The whole thing, in the form, with the endings intact, and it took about two minutes, and by the end of it the council ground had gone very quiet in a way that had nothing to do with respect.

Because the refusal is four sentences long and everybody had been carrying about nine.

The camp two reaches up refused a crossing in a named year. The reason is in the cord, because a reason is always in the cord: they had lost the run and had eleven days of food and thirty-eight people, and the man who refused said so, and said it to Retharu's face, and offered instead a thing Retharu did not want.

"That is it," Veya said. "That is all of it. There is nothing else in there."

Somebody at the back asked, in the tone of a man who has been robbed of something, whether they had ever paid it back.

"There was nothing to pay back. Nobody was owed anything. They were asked and they could not." She let that sit. "You have all been telling each other a story for sixty years and the story is not in the record. That is not their doing and it is not mine. It is what happens to a thing that lives in mouths."

***

Doran got up before anybody could answer that, because he had spotted the real problem and had been waiting for the room to be ready for it.

"There is no rule."

Kharun waited.

"We have a rule for the medicine. We have a rule for the water. We have a rule for who decides and a rule for what gets written and a rule for who may be taken out of a river." Doran had the hide flat. "We have nothing at all for this, and whatever we do this afternoon is the rule, for ever, because it will be the first one and everybody will point at it."

"Then we write it after."

"Na. We write it after and it will say whatever we did." He was not being difficult; he was being exact. "I am telling you that you are about to make law by accident, in front of nine tired people, and I want everybody here to know that is what is happening while it happens."

Nayra asked what he wanted them to do instead.

"Nothing different. I want it said out loud." Doran finally looked up. "Veya has spent a year and a half teaching me that the danger is not the decision. It is the decision nobody knew they were making."

***

They took them.

It took the rest of the afternoon and it was not charity and nobody pretended it was, and Leon copied the terms into the register because they are eleven lines and they are the first agreement of that kind on that river.

Sixty days. Work at the direction of the settlement, on the wall and the racks, not in the water.

Food at the same ration as everybody, from the same store, counted the same way.

The children go to Kel.

At sixty days, either side may end it, and if it ends they go with four days of food, and that is written first so that nobody has to ask for it later.

And what they carry home, whether they stay or not: the germination test with the number of days underlined twice, the wound rule, the trough, the marks. Copied by their own hands, by whichever of them Kel can teach in sixty days.

The man with the bad hand asked what Retharu wanted for that, and Doran told him: nothing, and you may give it to anybody, and you may not sell it, and nobody may stop you giving it away.

He did not believe it. He agreed to it, and he did not believe it, and Leon watched him not believe it and could not think of a single thing to say that would have helped.

***

Kharun said the thing at the fire that night, to about four people, and did not enjoy saying it.

"We are the ones with the store now."

Nobody argued.

"Nine people walked eleven days because they had read a number. We wrote terms. We put them in a column." He turned his cup over. "Tell me the shape of that is different."

Leon tried. He got some of the way.

The shape is not different. The content is: nobody is on a list, nobody is asked to report, the terms are written twice and both sides hold a copy, and the thing they carry home is the part that means they may not need to come back.

"Ei," Kharun said. "That is a real difference and I will hold on to it. And in eleven years, when there are forty of them and we are the only place with a store, I want somebody to read this evening back to whoever is sitting here, including the part where I said it out loud and did it anyway."

Doran wrote that down too.

He has begun writing down the things Kharun says about himself, in a separate place, and Leon found out about it by accident and has not mentioned it to anybody.