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

"Where did you get that?"

"From your own girl." Onnek said it without any weight on it. "She writes it at the top of her practice pages. Tevi. Retharu. Taught by Kel, who was taught by Leon. She has written it about two hundred times and she leaves them on the bench, and I read things. It is what I am for."

Leon sat down on the step because his legs had made the decision without him.

Nobody had betrayed anything. A girl of nineteen had been proud of where she came from and had put it at the top of a page, in a camp with a man in it whose entire profession is reading pages.

***

Onnek came in the spring of last year and has been here about two hundred days.

He keeps Havek's count. Households, stores, the fish, the trade, who is ill and who has died and who has been born. He writes it, on prepared skins, in a hand better than Doran's, and once a year Anev comes down the river and he gives it to her, and she carries it away in her head and leaves nothing behind.

He is not from this reach. Four reaches up, a camp Luma knows the name of. He was taught to write by a man who was taught by a man, and he can name the whole chain, and it goes back further than Leon expected and does not go anywhere near a Varu.

"Rothen pays you."

"Ei."

"In what?"

"Salt, mostly. And I do not carry for anybody, and I do not stand a watch, and nobody in this camp asks me to, and I eat every day." Onnek squared the skins with the side of his hand. "I am forty-five and my knees are finished and I would be a burden here. I am not a burden here. That is the whole of what I am paid."

Leon asked what Havek gets.

Havek answered that one himself, at the fire, and he did not wait to be asked twice.

"Two years ago the run failed. Not the fish — the water. It came up wrong and it came up early and it went straight past us in eleven days instead of six weeks, and we had a fifth of a normal year on the racks and a hundred and thirty people."

Leon had not heard about this. Nobody at Retharu had. It happened before he arrived and eleven days is eleven days.

"I sent up to Onnek's man in the autumn and told him the number. The real one. Not a smaller one and not a bigger one."

"And?"

"Forty baskets came down before the wet. Forty." Havek held up a hand, flat. "I did not ask what it cost anybody. I have never asked. My brother's children ate that winter and they are outside this fire tonight, and one of them is that one, with the stick, hitting the tree."

Nobody said anything for a while.

"So you are going to tell me we sold something." Havek was not angry. He has clearly had this conversation with himself many times and won it. "We had nothing to sell. We told a man how many we were. That is all that has ever been asked of us. And in the bad year he sent forty baskets, and there is no arrangement on this river, or any river, that has ever done better than that for anybody."

***

Leon asked the only question he had left, and asked it of Onnek, because Onnek would give him the mechanism and Havek would give him the feeling.

"What happens to a camp that says no?"

"Nothing at all." Onnek did not even look up. "They are not counted."

"And?"

"And when the year is bad, the baskets go to the places on the list." He shrugged, once, and it was not a cruel shrug; it was the shrug of a man explaining where a path goes. "There are never enough baskets. They have to go somewhere. They go where somebody knows the number."

Leon sat with that for what felt like a long time and was probably four seconds.

There is no army. There is no threat. Nobody has taken anything from Havek and nobody is going to. There is a man with a list, and a store somewhere up the river that Leon has never seen, and a rule that says the store goes to the people on the list — and the only cost of being on the list is that you say, honestly, every year, exactly how much you have.

It is the oldest machine there is and he recognised it the way you recognise a face across a room.

And it works. That is the part he could not get round then and has not got round since. It is not a swindle. It is not even unfair. Havek's brother's children are alive.

***

Onnek asked his question at the end, and had plainly been waiting all evening to ask it, and asked it the way a professional asks a professional.

"Anev wrote that your settlement keeps a memory that is not in anybody's head. I have been asked to find out what that means."

"You have been asked by whom?"

"By her. She writes what she is told and she asks what she wants." He put the charcoal down. "I have four hundred days of Havek's count on those skins and I have never once been asked what it is for. She asked me that in the autumn and I did not have an answer."

Leon looked at him for a while.

Then he told him. All of it — the four marks, the two counts at the trough, the germination test with the number of days underlined twice, the row that was planted out of the wrong pile, the second round that came up cloudy, the four jars with nothing in them, the page in the middle headed How, if there is nobody to ask.

It took most of two hours and Luma had to sit down halfway through.

And at the end of it Leon offered him a copy, and said the two conditions out loud: every page that says do this says how you check it, and you may copy it for anybody who asks, and you may not sell it, and nobody may stop you giving it away.

Onnek did not answer for a long moment.

"You understand what you have just done."

"Say it."

"I am the only man for four reaches who can do this." He was not looking at Leon. His hand had gone flat on the stack of skins the way Vethra's had gone flat on the jar. "That is my whole worth. That is why I eat, and why nobody asks me to carry, and why a man in a camp I have never been to sends salt down eleven days to a stranger with bad knees."

"Ei."

"And you have just handed me the thing that makes men like me common."

"Ei."

Onnek picked the copy up and squared its edges against his knee, twice, and put it under the stack of skins where he keeps the things that are his.

"He will not try to stop you," he said. "That is the part you should carry home. Stopping a thing is expensive and my employer is not a wasteful man. He will do what is cheaper."

"Which is?"

"He will arrive first."

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