Chapter 118: How Fast the Hole Gets Deeper

The instrument took an afternoon and it is a pole, a rope and a rock.

Kel designed it from a mat and did not go and look at the site once, and it worked first time, and the reason it worked is that he asked the right question before he built anything.

He did not ask how deep the hole was.

The question was how would somebody in eleven years know whether it changed.

So it is not one measurement. It is nine, at nine positions, marked on the far bank by nine stones set in a line that Oren buried to the shoulder so that a flood will not move them, and every one of the nine is measured from a fixed point and not from the water, because the water is a different height every time you go.

Ket-li and two of the six do it at the beginning of every month.

It takes them most of a morning. They read the numbers to Kiri, who writes them, and then Kel reads them back and the children check him, which he insisted on and which mortified them for about four months and then stopped being remarkable.

Nine numbers, every month, on the same page, in a column.

***

For the first four months the hole got deeper.

Not much. About a hand over four months at the deepest of the nine, and less at the others, and Leon spent those four months being extremely careful not to say anything to anybody about what he thought was happening.

Because a hole scoured by falling water does not usually go on for ever. It digs until it is deep enough that the water landing in it is landing in water, and the water in it takes the force instead of the bed, and then it slows down and stops.

Or it does not, and it undercuts the toe of the weir, and one spring the downstream side of the whole eastern third slides into the hole it has dug and takes four generations of work with it.

Those two things look exactly the same for the first year.

Leon knew that and said it out loud at the fire, once, at the beginning, in about four sentences, and then made himself stop talking about it, because there is a version of him that would have spent a whole year telling a settlement about a thing that might happen.

He wrote it instead, on the page above the column, so that anybody reading the numbers in eleven years would know what the numbers were for.

A hole like this either stops or it does not, and both of them look like this at first, and the only difference is what the fifth and sixth numbers do.

***

The fifth number came in the spring and it was the same as the fourth.

So was the sixth.

The seventh was a finger's width shallower, which nobody believed, and which Kel made them measure three times, and which turned out to be a stone about the size of a child's head that had come down in a small flood and settled into the bottom of the hole and stayed there.

That is the eighth month. From the eighth month the numbers stop changing.

Kel did not announce anything. He is not built that way. He put the column in front of Leon on a wet afternoon in the ninth month with his finger on the last four entries and said one word.

"Flat."

***

They laid the apron anyway.

That is the decision Leon is proudest of and he had almost nothing to do with it.

By then the hole had stopped. The numbers were flat for four months, then six, then eight. A settlement of a hundred and seventy-three people that had just eaten most of its store to build the thing in the first place had every reason on this river to look at a flat column of numbers and go and do something else.

Kharun put it at the fire in about six sentences.

"It has stopped because a stone fell in it."

Nobody had thought about it in those words.

"We know it stopped. We do not know why it stopped, and Kel says the stone is at least half of it, and a stone that came down in a flood can go out in a flood." He looked round. "So we can be a settlement that knows the reason its weir is standing, or a settlement that is lucky and does not know it. Those are different places and I would rather live in the first one."

So nineteen people went back in the water at the next low water, for eleven days, and laid about two hundred and forty large stones into and below the hole, keyed and graded, biggest at the outside where the water lands.

Eleven days. Not sixty. And nobody argued about the clay, and nobody had to be told what the pole was for, and Halu took two people out and nobody said anything about it at all.

Fel was seventy-four and came down on the hurdle chair for the first day and the last one.

Leon worked the whole eleven days and was still not good at it and was no longer embarrassed about that, which he counts as the only measurable improvement in himself over two years.

What was different was everything around it.

The pole went in without anybody explaining it. Kel's page had the nine positions on it already. Vethra had the cloth boiled before the first morning because she has seen what a fortnight of wet does to hands and did not need to be asked, and Nayra sent her without a word about it.

And on the third day the man of twenty-six who had told Halu he was tired, in daylight, in the last nine days of the sixty, walked up the bank and said it again.

He said it in about four words and did not look at the ground, and Halu wrote it down, and he went and carried stone instead, and not one person on that work turned round to look.

That is the whole of the difference and it took eleven months and a rule and one very uncomfortable morning in the eighth week.

***

Leon did the arithmetic on the whole of it that winter, three and a half years after he landed on a riverbank with a broken pack and no words, and he did it because Doran asked him to and not because he wanted to.

Sixty days. Nineteen in the water. Eleven more days a year later. One year without a run, eaten out of the store, at eleven days of margin in the worst month.

Nobody died. Two backs will not be what they were. Halu's column has forty-one entries in it that will matter to somebody in twenty years and to nobody at all before that.

And what they have is a line of stone across the narrows that will bring the run to them over six weeks instead of sending eighty-one people nine days out and nine days back, twice a year, for ever.

He put the last line at the bottom and then sat there and did not like it, and left it anyway, because it was true.

The best thing about this weir is not the fish.

It is that next spring, and every spring after it, nobody has to carry anything up that slope at the fifteenth hour of the fourth day.