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

The council said no on the six hundred and thirty-fourth day and it said no for good reasons, and Leon had expected it and had told Tala so on the walk down.

Four hundred and fifty-two baskets. A number published to six camps eleven days ago. Nine people from up the reach eating out of the same store on written terms.

And the Varu wants a rule about where the scraps go, so that vermin will be more comfortable.

"Say it back to yourself," Oren said, not unkindly.

Leon said it back to himself and it sounded exactly as bad out loud as it had in his head, and he did not push, because a man who has been right four times in a row is the most dangerous person at a fire and he has been trying to notice when he is becoming one.

What passed was smaller. Nobody throws anything. That was all — not a rule about waste, just an instruction to leave them alone, which cost nothing and which about half the settlement forgot inside a week.

Tala's part failed outright. A watch that cannot be told what to do is not a watch, said four people, and they were right, and Tala did not argue with any of them.

***

Tov found it eleven days later.

Tov is nine. He ran the message about the eight panels in the autumn of the year before and was unbearable about it for a week, and his standing in his own age-group has never recovered from having peaked at eight.

He came up the path at the eighth hour with something inside his shirt that was moving, and did the thing children do, which is to present a decision that has already been made.

A `reshek`, about half grown. The left foot was wrong — an old break, healed badly and turned in, which on a thing that lives by running is a death sentence with a date on it.

The animal had been out on the slope below the racks for two days, apart from the others, which is what a pack does with a body that cannot keep up.

"It cannot run," Tov said. "So it cannot go."

Nayra looked at the foot for about four seconds and said the same thing she says about people, in the same tone.

"It will not straighten. It has been like that since it was small." She sat back. "It will live. It will never be quick."

***

Kharun let it happen and did not make a ruling, which Leon understood about a week later was itself the ruling.

A boy keeping one crippled animal is a boy. Forty people keeping forty animals is a policy. There was nothing to decide yet and Kharun has become very good at not deciding things that have not arrived.

What he did do was make Tov say, out loud, in front of his mother, that the thing eats what he eats, and that nobody is going to be asked for anything, and that if it is in the granary once it is finished.

Tov agreed to all of it instantly and has, as far as anybody has ever caught him, kept every word.

The thing ate scraps, and a great many of them. It followed Tov round the terrace at four paces, would not be picked up, hissed at Kel for six days and then stopped, and slept under the edge of the drying frame where the ground stays warm.

By the fortieth day it was going out to the slope at dusk and coming back before light, and Tala confirmed what everybody had already worked out, which is that the pack was letting it feed at the edge and not letting it any closer.

It has a foot and a pack and a boy, and it belongs to none of the three properly, which Leon wrote down one evening and then crossed out because he could hear how pleased with itself it sounded.

***

The name happened by accident and Leon has stopped being surprised by that.

Tov asked what the word was in the Varu's language for a thing that catches on you and will not let go, and Leon, who was tired, and who was thinking about a hedge on a road in Bavaria that his mother swore at every spring, said bramble without thinking about it at all.

Tov could not say it. He got about two-thirds of the way and produced something with the stress in the wrong place and a vowel that does not exist in English, and repeated it about forty times that afternoon at everybody he met.

The wrong version stuck, the way they do.

Luma wrote it down in her own hand in her copy — the Rethari spelling, not the English one — and when Leon pointed out that it was not quite the word, she gave him a look he has learned to recognise over five hundred days.

"It is the word now."

***

Fel came down to the racks once in the middle of that month, which is a walk he does not make any more, and stood a while watching them work the ground.

"My grandfather threw stones at these."

"Ei," Leon said. "So does everybody."

"Na. You have not heard the whole of it." Fel had his hand on the frame. "He threw stones at them from the gate. Because they came to the gate."

Leon turned round.

"They do not come to the gate now. They come to the racks, and the racks are thirty paces outside the wall, and they have been there two years." Fel shrugged, once, the way a man shrugs at something he is fairly sure of and cannot prove. "Before the racks they came to the middens. My grandfather said they used to keep further off than that again, when he was small."

"You are telling me they have been coming closer."

"I am telling you an old man said a thing about his own grandfather and I have carried it seventy years and never once had a reason to say it out loud." He started back up the path. "Somebody should have been writing that down."

He sat out on the slope again at the end of that month, on his own this time, and did the thing he does when he is not sure whether to be pleased.

It will not work.

Not this. Not one bird with a bad foot and a nine-year-old. The chance that a crippled animal at the edge of a pack is the start of anything is very small, and Leon knows the shape of the mistake he is being invited to make, which is to look at a thing that is happening and decide it is the beginning of a story.

What he wrote instead was three lines, and he wrote them plain, and put them in the register under a heading that did not exist before.

This may be nothing. Nobody is to spend anything on it.

But somebody should watch the racks for a year and write down what comes, how many, and how close.

And if in eleven years there is a `reshek` that will stand still while a person walks past it in daylight, that will be the reason, and the reason will be older than anybody who is doing it.

Kel took the watching, because Kel sits in one place all day and has six children who are extremely interested in an animal, and because he pointed out that counting a pack every night is exactly the sort of work that ruins an adult and delights a seven-year-old.

Ket-li made the first entry.

Nine. Eleven paces. One with a bad foot, closer.