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

Havek's camp came into view on the eleventh day and Leon's first thought was that Retharu is a small, cold, badly sited scratch on a hillside.

A hundred and thirty people on flat ground inside a bend, with the river on two sides and a long soft slope on the third. Deep soil. Old trees left standing where they are useful and cleared where they are not. Nine buildings that have been repaired so many times that you cannot see where the original one is.

The path in has stone laid along the wet stretch. Somebody did that, and then somebody else maintained it, and then a third person, for long enough that the stones have sunk level.

Nobody stared at him. That was the first thing that was strange. Two children looked, and were called off, and went.

Havek met them on the path and was exactly as Leon remembered him from the eighth day, which is to say wide, unhurried and about four steps ahead in the conversation.

"You are thinner."

"I have been working."

"Ei. I heard about the work." Havek turned and walked, which meant walking with him. "I heard about a good deal of it. Some of it was even true."

***

Tevi found him before the meal and Leon did not recognise her for a moment, which he was ashamed of.

She has been at Havek's for a hundred and thirty days. She left Retharu as a girl of nineteen who could write and had learned it from Kel, who had learned eleven letters from Leon and taught the eleven he had.

She now has all of them and about forty words she made up herself for things this river has and English does not, and she has fourteen people learning.

"Fourteen," Leon said.

"Nine who come every day." She was not showing off; she was correcting the number, which is a habit she must have got from Doran. "The other five come when it rains."

She had the whole of Kel's method and had improved it in two places without being told to. She had also, entirely on her own, worked out the copying trick — two people, same page, compare — and had been using it for two months.

Leon asked whether Kel had sent it to her.

"Na. There is no way to send anything." Tevi shrugged. "It is what you do when you cannot read your own hand from yesterday."

He sat with that for a while afterwards, because it meant the method was not a Retharu invention at all. It is what the problem does to anybody who has the problem.

***

He spent four days looking, and by the second one he had a feeling he could not name and by the fourth he could name it.

Havek's camp is better than Retharu in every way you can measure in a season, and it has not changed in about thirty years.

The buildings are good and are the buildings they have always been. The fishing is good and is done the way it has always been done. There are two women who know plants and they know the same plants their teachers knew.

Nobody is hungry. Nobody is desperate. Nothing is wrong.

And nothing is new either, and when Leon started asking about it — carefully, through Luma, not as the Varu but as a man who wanted to know how a thing was decided — the answers all had the same shape.

We do it the way it is done.

Which is not stupidity. It is what a place looks like when everything works. Retharu changes constantly because Retharu has been eleven days from nothing since the day it moved onto that terrace, and a settlement that is comfortable has no reason at all to take a risk, and taking risks is mostly how you lose things.

He wrote it down that night and did not enjoy it.

They are not behind us. They are ahead of us and they arrived thirty years ago and stopped, and there is nothing wrong with that, and I would not want to be the man who talks them out of it.

And in eleven years we will have things they do not have, and none of it will be because we are cleverer. It will be because we were poor at the right moment.

***

The copy went over on the fifth day and Havek did it properly, in front of about sixty people, and asked good questions for two hours.

He wanted to know why the pages that said do a thing all had a second half saying how to check it, and when Leon explained about the camp on the sixth day and the three-day count, Havek laughed until he had to sit down.

"Three days."

"Ei."

"That is Enu's camp. I have traded with that woman for twenty years." He wiped his eyes. "I am going to say nothing about this for about a year and then I am going to ask her, in front of people, what her count is."

Then he stopped laughing and asked the question Leon had been braced for since the first evening.

"Why are you giving it to me?"

Leon gave him the honest answer, which took a while, and which included Anev by name and Rothen by name and the sentence about wanting to know whose it is.

Havek listened to the whole thing without moving.

"So it is not a gift."

"Na. It is a gift and it is also a thing we are doing to make ourselves harder to buy, and I would rather say both than have you find out the second one later."

"Ei." Havek nodded slowly. "That is the right way round. Most people say the gift and hope."

He got up and looked out over the flat ground and the nine buildings and the stone path for a while.

"You should meet Onnek."

***

Onnek was sitting under the eaves of the fourth building with a board across his knees, exactly the way Halu sits, which was the first thing Leon noticed and the last thing he wanted to be true.

A Rethari man of about forty-five. Not from this reach; his vowels come from four reaches up. Unremarkable hide. A folded stack of prepared skins beside him with the edges squared.

He was writing.

Not marks. Not tallies. Writing, left to right, in a hand that was small and even and unhurried, and he did not stop when they came up, but finished the line first, which is a thing you only do if writing is your work and not an occasion.

Then he put the charcoal down and stood and greeted Leon correctly, and Kharun second, in absentia, which is not a thing anybody does.

And he said the name.

"Varu."

"Ei."

"Na," Onnek said, and there was nothing unfriendly in it at all. "I mean the other one. You are Leon."

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