The beans came up on the four hundred and seventh day, eleven days after sowing, exactly as the ridge crop had eleven months earlier, and for about two hours it was the best morning anybody had had since the fish.
Then the children read their bark and it stopped being a good morning and became a useful one.
Eight rows of jar seed at the old spacing came up like a drawing of a field.
Thirty-two rows of grey seed at three-for-two came up thinner, and patchier, and in about the proportion Leon had told them it would, which nobody except Leon and Nayra had entirely believed until they were standing in front of it.
Ket-li’s bark said row eleven had gone in at three-for-two.
Row eleven had come up like the jar rows.
She was the one who noticed, because she had walked it twice and because she was the only person who had both the number in her hand and the row in front of her at the same time, and she came and got Leon by the sleeve, which she had never done.
It took Doran about a quarter of an hour to find it, and he found it by asking who had planted row eleven, which is not a question Leon would have thought to ask.
A woman from the drying ground whose name Leon still got wrong, who had gone up the row on the first morning before the charcoal, when the piles were still mixed.
She had planted row eleven out of the jar pile by accident and at the thin spacing by instruction, and it had come up at ninety-odd, and it was the only row in the field that had.
"So we know two things now," Doran said.
Nobody asked. He gave them anyway, because that is what he does.
One: the germination test was right, in a field, at scale, which nobody had actually confirmed and which everybody had been assuming.
Two: they had been eleven days from never finding that out. If Ket-li had not written the row number down, row eleven would have been a nice surprise that nobody could explain, and the whole field would have taught them exactly what Leon had feared on the first morning, which is nothing.
He wrote both down.
Then he wrote a third thing, and read it out, and it was the one that went round the settlement by evening.
The child’s bark is the only reason the field says anything.
***
The wall came in on the four hundred and eleventh day, and it came in short.
Three panels done out of four. Fourteen days to the counting party, and the fourth panel is nine days of work if nothing goes wrong, and something always goes wrong, and Oren said so himself before anybody could say it for him.
"I would rather have three good ones and tell you the truth about the fourth."
Kharun took that the way he takes everything and then asked the question that the whole thing had been building to for forty days.
"Which two?"
Because it had never been four bad panels.
It had been four bad panels of which eleven — of the original nineteen — stood above ground nobody could climb, and three of the remaining eight had been repaired, and Sevik’s timber had bought four more.
What was left, when Kel read it out from the survey, was two.
Two panels of wall, out of seventy-four, that would be bad on the day a hundred strangers walked down the north path, and one of them was going to stay bad because there was not time.
Kharun made them do it publicly and he made it take an hour.
Panel forty-one: above a slope, but not a steep one. A loaded person could come up it slowly. Two hundred paces from the gate.
Panel fifty-two: flat ground, wide approach, forty paces from the granary, and the only reason it was not already repaired was that it had been eleventh on Oren’s list and the list had been in order of decay and not in order of what was in front of it.
"Fifty-two," said about four people at once.
"Fifty-two," Kharun agreed. "And I want it written that we knew about forty-one, and chose, and that nobody was surprised."
Doran wrote it. Kel copied it. And then Kel — who had been sitting up for eleven days and was going to be walking inside a month — asked the question that made the last hour worth having.
"What do we do about forty-one?"
Kharun turned.
"You are not going to repair it. Ei. But somebody is going to stand in front of it in fourteen days and look at it, and if there is nothing there at all then what they see is a bad panel."
He shifted the page on his knees.
"And if there is a pile of cut posts beside it and a hole started, what they see is a bad panel that is being repaired."
Nobody said anything for a moment.
"That is not a lie," Kel said. "We are going to repair it. We are going to repair it in about forty days. I am only saying that the day they walk past is not the day to have nothing there."
Oren, from the back, sounding faintly annoyed about it: "It is also cheaper. If the posts are cut and stacked now the fourth panel is five days in the spring and not nine."
***
Leon walked the wall that evening on his own, which he did about once a month and had never told anybody he did.
Seventy-four panels. Nineteen bad in the autumn. Eleven above ground nobody can climb. Three repaired by two men and a boy. Four bought with a dead man’s metal. One that is going to be finished tomorrow. One that is going to be left, on purpose, with a pile of posts beside it and a hole started.
Nobody solved that. Not one person solved it.
Oren counted it. Kel turned it round and looked outward. Selora changed the joint. Sevik took the strip. Vethra found two pairs of hands. Kharun chose which one to leave and said so out loud so that nobody could pretend later that it had been an accident.
And a nine-year-old ran the number that told a trader we were desperate, and a seven-year-old wrote down the row that proved the seed test works.
He stopped at panel forty-one and put a hand on it, and the timber was sound to about a hand above the ground and soft at the line, the way Oren had said it would be, exactly, in a word Luma does not have.
I have been here four hundred and eleven days and I have been the most useful person on this terrace for perhaps nine of them.
And the wall is standing.
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