Chapter 116: They Took Their Own Dam Apart

Nobody went out to the shallows that year.

Leon has put that at the top of the page because it is the single largest thing this settlement has ever risked and it was decided in the winter, quietly, by people doing arithmetic, and nobody has ever made a speech about it.

Eighty-one people cannot be at the third bend and at the narrows in the same two months. Fel said that at seventy-one and Halu's count said it again at seventy-two, and there was never a version where both happened.

So they ate the store.

Four hundred and fifty-two baskets is what a settlement looks like when it has had two good years and has published the number to six camps, and it turns out that what it is actually for is one year in which you do not fish.

They will be thin before the wet ends. Doran ran it four ways in the winter and the best of the four has them at about eleven days of margin in the last month, which is the number this place spent its first year at and has not been near since.

And if the weir does not work, they have spent a year's food on a wall in a river.

Nobody said that out loud either. Everybody on that terrace had it in their head every day for sixty days.

***

The first thing they did after Oren capped it in the dark was pull down eleven days of their own work.

The diversion had to come out. Leon had said so in the winter and had been half-listened to, and it took Oren about four seconds to understand it properly once the fill was in and the water was rising.

A brush-and-stake dam left in a river does not stay a dam. It comes apart in the first real flood, all at once, and it goes downstream: thirty paces of stakes and bound brush and clay, moving fast, into the upstream face of a structure that is nine days old and has not been tested by anything.

"We built it," Kel said, from the bank, when somebody complained. "It is the only large object on this river we are certain about."

So they took it apart by hand over four days, in rising water, wet through, at the very end of two months, and Leon has never seen the settlement work worse or complain more.

They were done. Everybody was done. The thing had been finished — actually finished, at dusk, in the dark, with a torch — and then there were four more days of dismantling a thing they had built themselves, in a current that got stronger every morning, for no visible result whatsoever.

Halu took four people out in those four days. Two of them swore at him.

He wrote the swearing down as well, which Leon initially thought was petty and then understood two evenings later was not: a man who swears at the count on the last morning is a man who was pushed too far, and the number that matters is how many, not who.

***

They got the last of it out on the eight hundred and eighty-second day and walked home.

Then the water came up, and there was nothing to look at, and nothing to do, and no way of finding out.

That is the part nobody had prepared anybody for.

Sixty days of work, every hour of it visible, every stone placed by somebody who could see where it went. And then the river rose over the whole of it in about eleven days and the weir stopped existing as an object anybody could inspect.

You can stand on the eastern shoulder and see a change in the water: a line where the surface goes smooth and then breaks, four paces further out than it used to be. That is all. That is the entire available evidence for four months.

Leon went up there more than he is willing to write down.

Ket-li went up more than he did. She had a page and she was measuring the line against three marks on the far bank because Kel had asked her to, and she did it every fourth day for the whole wet, and about half of the entries say the same thing.

Cannot see. Rain.

***

The flood came on the nine hundred and forty-first day and it was a big one.

Tala had it off the spur two days before, from the colour, and everybody had a day and a half to bring things up, and the racks came in, and about eleven people stood on the eastern shoulder in the rain the whole afternoon it arrived, and there was nothing to see except a great deal of brown water going past very fast.

Fel was one of the eleven, at seventy-two, and had to be got back up the path afterwards by two men, and did not thank them.

Leon stood next to him for about an hour.

"You cannot see it."

"Na."

"Then why —"

"Because it is happening now." Fel had the rain running off the end of his nose and did not appear to notice. "Whatever it is, it is happening today, under that. And in the spring somebody will go down and look and find out what happened, and that is not the same thing as being here for it."

He watched a while longer.

"I have been coming down to this reach for fifty-two years to look at a place where a thing was not."

***

Doran wrote the wet-season entry in eleven lines and Leon has copied it whole, because it is the only page in the register that is about not knowing.

The weir is finished and is under water and nobody has seen it since the eighth hundred and ninety-third day.

We did not go out to the shallows this year. The store was four hundred and fifty-two and is now two hundred and six, and it is the middle of the wet.

Nineteen people were in the water for sixty days. Nobody died. Eleven were taken out and four asked to be.

The clay is on the upstream face because a wall in a side channel silted itself shut in two days.

Nobody knows anything else. Everything we believe about that structure this winter, we believe because of arithmetic and two little walls, and not because we have looked at it.

If it is wrong we will find out in the spring, and it will be too late to have done anything different, and it was too late the day we started.

Then, at the bottom, on its own line, in a hand that is not Doran's, because Doran made Leon write it himself.

This is what it is like to have done a thing properly and not yet know.