Chapter 109: Four Days, and Then Six More

The sixty days ran out on the six hundred and sixty-fifth day and Retharu discovered that the hard part of writing terms is not writing them.

They had worked. All nine, without being watched, on the wall and the racks and the second drying ground. The man with the bad hand is called Sevur, and Leon got it right inside a week this time, and he turned out to know more about stripping bark than Oren, who said so out loud in front of people, which for Oren is a decoration.

So the council ground came to the last morning liking them, which is the worst possible condition in which to keep a promise.

Doran opened it by reading the terms out.

Not summarising. Reading, all eleven lines, in the order they were written, including the fourth-day-of-food line that sits at the top because Doran had insisted it go first.

Then he put the hide down and said the unpopular thing before anybody could say the popular one.

"Four days. As written."

Somebody suggested twelve, and it was not a bad person and it was not a bad idea, and about thirty people made a noise of agreement.

They have worked sixty days. They are going eleven days up a reach with three children. Four days of food is what you give somebody you are finished with, and nobody at that fire felt finished with them.

Doran did not budge and did not soften it either.

"If we give twelve today, the terms say four and mean twelve." He had his hand flat on the hide. "And the next people who come will be people we do not like as much, and somebody will stand where I am standing and say we gave the last ones twelve, and then we will either be unjust or we will be poorer than we can afford, and it will be this morning's fault."

"They worked well."

"Ei. And the terms did not say four days, or more if we like you. That is not a term. That is a mood with a number stuck on it."

Nayra asked, from the side, in the voice she uses when she has already worked out the answer and wants it said properly, what he proposed to do about the fact that everybody in the settlement wanted to give them more.

And Kharun ruled it, and it took him about a minute, and Leon has copied it into the register in full because it is the most useful minute of government he has ever watched.

Four days, from the terms, given first, in silence, with nothing said about it.

Then, separately, afterwards, as its own act, with its own reason spoken out loud and written on its own line under its own heading: six more days, given by the settlement, as a gift, because they worked well.

"The terms are the terms," Kharun said. "The gift is a gift. If you put them in the same basket you will have neither of them in three years."

***

Three went home.

Sevur went, because he has thirty-one people up that reach and had never for one moment intended to do anything else, and because the pages were the thing he came for and he had them.

He had them in his own hand, too. Kel got him through the marks and about a third of the letters in sixty days, which Kel said afterwards was the fastest anybody has ever learned anything from him and was entirely because Sevur was frightened of forgetting.

The germination test with the number of days underlined twice. The wound rule. The trough. The two counts. The four marks.

He asked Doran, on the last morning, in front of everybody, whether he was quite sure there was nothing to be paid.

Doran told him the same four things for the fourth time in sixty days: nothing, give it to anybody, do not sell it, and nobody may stop you giving it away.

Sevur looked at the pages in his hands for a while.

"Up my reach a man who has a thing gives it and is owed."

"Ei. I know."

"And you are telling me that if I give this to Hesken, and Hesken gives it to the two camps below him, and one of them gives it back to you in eleven years with something added to it —"

"Then somebody has done the thing correctly and I hope I am alive to see it."

***

Six stayed, and one of the six was the argument.

Kiri is fourteen. She came down that path in the winter as the fourth of nine, carrying a child that was not hers, and she has said perhaps forty words in sixty days to anybody who is not Kel.

Kel had been trying to tell people about her for a month and nobody had listened properly, because a man teaching six children is a man teaching six children.

She has all the letters. All of them, plus the marks, plus about ninety words of written English, in sixty days, having arrived unable to hold a piece of charcoal.

"She is faster than Tevi," Kel said, on the platform, to Kharun, flatly, as a fact and not an opinion. "She is faster than me and she is faster than the Varu was at learning our words, and I have been sitting on this for eleven days because I did not want to be the man who separates a girl from her father."

Sevur is her father.

They did it in public and it was awful and it was right, and Leon stood at the back and did not say one word, having decided about four days earlier that this was the single situation in his entire life where his opinion was least wanted.

Kharun would not let anybody decide it for her, and would not let it be decided quickly, and made her sit down and made everybody else sit down, and asked her directly, in front of her father, with Luma standing by and not needed, because she has enough words now.

She took a very long time.

She asked two questions. The first was whether she could go back. The second was whether her father would have to come and get her, which is not the same question and which everybody understood.

Then she said she would stay, and said why, and the why is the thing Leon wrote down.

"There is no one at home who can read what he is carrying."

Nobody had said that out loud. Sevur has a third of the letters and a bad hand and is fifty. If he dies on that reach, and men of fifty on that reach die, the pages are marks on hide in a camp of thirty-one and nobody in it can open them.

She is not staying to learn. She is staying to be the second copy.

Sevur did not argue. He stood there for a moment and then said the only thing he said about it, and he said it to Kharun and not to her.

"If she is unhappy, somebody sends. Not a message. A person."

Kharun agreed to it and Doran wrote it and Veya put it in the cord, and the three of them went up the north path the next morning with four days of food given in silence and six more given out loud.

Kiri did not watch them go. She was at the works with Kel, at the second hour, copying a page she could not have held sixty days ago, and she did not look up once, and Leon has never in his life been so careful not to look at somebody.