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

Sevik Two-Boats came up the landing on the three hundred and sixth day with two boats and did not unload either of them.

That is not a small thing. A trader unloads. Unloading is the beginning of the conversation and everybody on this river has known that since before Veya was born, and a man who ties up and walks past his own cargo is a man telling you that what he has come for is not in the boats.

He was about forty, river-worn, with a face that gave away exactly as much as he had decided to give away, and he greeted Kharun properly and Veya more properly and asked to sit down before he was offered, which Doran said afterwards was the second thing that told him.

Then he made his offer, and he made it before anybody had asked him what he wanted, which was the third.

"Eight panels of worked timber. Cut, dressed, floated up, and I put two men on the carrying."

Nobody moved.

"For the metal with the marks on it."

Leon was standing at the back with a bowl of soaked reed and put it down without noticing he had done it.

The council ground did the thing it did. Nobody looked at anybody. Doran, who was standing nearest, went completely still in the way that meant he was counting something.

Kharun took it the way he took everything.

"Eight."

"Ei."

"Why eight?"

And Sevik gave a small shrug and said it was a number he had thought would be useful, and Kharun let it pass, and Leon watched Doran not let it pass and file it somewhere.

Then Nayra sent a boy running.

Nobody stopped him and everybody knew where he was going, because the only person on this terrace who could say what eight panels was worth was lying on a mat two hundred paces away with a strip of bark and a page.

The boy came back at a run about four minutes later and said it out loud in front of everybody, because he was nine and nobody had told him not to.

Nineteen bad panels. Eleven of them above ground nobody can climb.

Eight.

Sevik Two-Boats did not react to that at all, which was the fourth thing.

Veya asked him where he had heard about the metal.

He told her, and he told her plainly, which Leon afterwards decided was the only honest thing in the whole afternoon, and it was honest because Sevik had worked out that pretending would cost him more than it bought.

He had it from a woman at the third landing below Nethvar. She had it from a boat crew. The boat crew had it from somebody at Low Reed.

Four hands.

"Say it," Veya said.

And Sevik Two-Boats sat on a mat in front of about thirty people and recited Veya’s account back to her.

All six sentences. In order. A trader called Boro Nightcall walked east for a hundred and twenty days and came back with four pieces of metal. On one of them there are five marks. The Varu says he saw the marks. The Varu says the marks are a name from his world. The Varu does not know whether the man lives. The Varu does not know how far. Nobody is going.

He got the endings right. Both of the does not know had the ending Rethari puts on a thing a person has said rather than a thing anybody has seen, and so did the fourth, and Sevik was not a singer and had never met Luma and had heard it fourth-hand.

Leon stood at the back of the council ground and felt something go cold in him that took him most of the evening to name.

It worked.

A hundred and seventy-four days and four sets of hands and it came back word for word with the uncertainty still in it. Veya built an instrument that does not degrade. She built it in one afternoon out of six sentences and a woman who can hold ninety seconds in one pass.

And it has carried the thing four hands downriver faster and further than the wrong version ever would have, because the wrong version sounds like a story and the right one sounds like a fact.

The offer sat there and got heavier.

Eight panels of worked timber is not a trade. It is not in the same country as a trade. Doran priced it out loud, because Doran prices things out loud, and he did it flatly and it took about ninety seconds and by the end of it several people were looking at the ground.

Cut, dressed and floated up, eight panels is somewhere near forty days of two men and a boy. Against a piece of grey metal the length of a hand that nobody here can use for anything, that arrived by accident, and that has been sitting on a mat outside the works under a guard for a hundred and forty days.

Leon did the only thing available to him, which was to say nothing at all.

I have no standing here. I put it in front of the council on the hundred and thirty-second day and I have not owned it since, and if I open my mouth now I am a man arguing to keep a thing because it has his own history in it.

Kharun looked at him for about a second and a half and did not ask, which was worse and was also correct.

Then Veya put her hand flat on the mat, which she does perhaps twice a season, and asked the question she always asks, which is never about the thing.

"Whose is it?"

Sevik opened his mouth and stopped.

Doran got there first and got there properly, and he did it without any pleasure, because he had realised at the same moment that this was his own failure.

Boro had put four pieces of metal on the mat and had traded three of them. He had never traded the fourth. He had put it in front of the council and gone east at first light and had not been paid for it and had not asked to be.

The council had never taken it. There was no entry. There was no knot.

Leon had read it. Leon did not own it.

It had been guarded for a hundred and forty days by two people at a time, which is a thing you do with a possession, and nobody in that entire time had said out loud whose possession it was.

"I cannot sell you a thing," Veya said, "that nobody here has ever agreed we have."

Sevik Two-Boats took that better than Leon expected, and Leon understood why about four seconds later. He had walked eleven days on an account and he was a professional, and a professional does not argue with an ownership problem, because an ownership problem is not a no.

It is a delay.

He asked how long, and Veya told him it would be decided when it was decided, and he said that he would be back up this reach after the wet, and he tied his boats properly and slept on the landing and left at first light with both of them still loaded.

***

Doran found Leon at the works that night with the ledger-hide in his hand and did not sit down.

"Eight."

"Ei."

"He said eight before anybody told him anything." Doran turned the hide over. "He did not walk up that landing and look at our wall and count. You cannot see the bad run from the water; it is round the shoulder of the terrace and Oren’s numbers are eleven days old and live in one shelter."

Leon had got there two hours earlier and had been sitting with it since.

"He guessed."

"Na."

Doran said it without any weight at all, the way he says the ones that matter.

"He knew what we needed before he tied up, and he priced it to the number. Somebody told him. And whoever told him did not get it from an account with the endings on it, because that account says nothing about a wall."

He rolled the hide.

"They are coming to count us in a hundred and twenty days. We have been counted already. This one just came to see what we would sell."

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