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

Doran made them rehearse it on the four hundred and fifteenth day, and it was the most uncomfortable morning Leon had spent on that terrace since the fire.

Not because it was hard. Because it was embarrassing, and because it worked.

He put Vethra at the gate as the counter, on the grounds that she was the only person there who had ever seen it done, and he told everybody else to do exactly what they would do on the day, which nobody could, because nobody knew what they would do on the day, which was the entire point of finding out on a morning when it did not matter.

It fell apart in eleven minutes.

Three people gave Vethra three different numbers for the granary, all of them honest, all of them slightly different, because one was counting baskets, one was counting days and one was counting what was in the granary as opposed to what was in the store.

Two households said they had four people. One of them had four people and a woman from another household who had been sleeping there since her roof went.

Somebody offered Vethra food, which is what you do, and Doran stopped the whole thing and made everybody watch him not eat it.

"That is not hospitality today," he said. "Today it is a number. If you feed a counter you have told them you have enough to feed a counter."

Nayra pointed out, from the side, that refusing to feed a guest tells them something as well.

"Ei. It tells them we are careful. That is a face and it is one we can wear." Doran did not look up from the hide. "The face we cannot wear is generous and slightly frightened, and that is what forty people offering food at once looks like from the outside."

***

They did it again after the middle of the day and it took two hours and it went better and it was worse to watch.

Better, because the numbers came out the same from four different mouths. Doran had spent the interval doing the one thing that actually fixes it, which is not coaching people on what to say but agreeing what the words mean.

A basket is a basket. The store is everything not planted. The granary is the building. A household is who sleeps there tonight.

Worse, because with the numbers straight everybody had time to hear how it sounded.

A hundred and seventy-four people. Two hundred and forty-one baskets and the run not yet in. Forty rows of a crop nobody up the river grows. A wall of seventy-four panels with two bad ones. Four camps who will send when asked.

Vethra stood at the gate with the hide and let it come at her, and when it was done she put the hide down and said the thing that turned the afternoon into something people took home.

"You sound rich."

Nobody had said it out loud before.

Leon had been on that terrace for the fourteen months it took to become true and had not once heard anybody use a word like that, because the words available were store and enough and eleven days, and a settlement that has spent a year eleven days from nothing does not have a word for what it is now.

"Say it again," Kharun said.

"You sound rich. You sound like a place that will still be here in three summers and will have more in it." Vethra had not moved. "Which is true, and which is the single most dangerous sentence anybody could say about you inside a hundred paces of that woman."

Veya, from the mat, without looking up: "That is the face."

"Ei."

"Not poor. Not strong." She turned the cord. "Exactly not worth coming back to. I told you in the autumn it was hard to wear, and now you have all felt it, and none of you can do it, and that is what a morning like this is for."

Doran did not try to teach them to lie, and Leon had been quietly dreading that he would.

He did something narrower, and it took him about ten minutes, and Leon wrote all four down that evening because he thought they were the most practical piece of work anybody had done that month.

Answer what is asked. Not the next thing. Not the thing you are proud of. If she asks how many people, say the number and stop.

Give the number you would give anybody. Not a smaller one. Nobody in this settlement can lie to a professional and every single one of you would be caught inside an hour.

Do not explain how. The number is a number. How you got it is the only thing that is actually worth anything, and nobody is going to ask, and if they ask, that is when somebody comes and finds me.

Nobody shows anybody the register.

He said the fourth one twice and then wrote it separately and put a line round it.

***

Leon went and found him afterwards, on his own, and asked about the fourth one, because he had been turning it over since it was said and had got somewhere unpleasant.

"You think they will ask."

"Na. I think they will not ask, and then somebody will show them anyway, because we are proud of it." Doran rolled the hide. "It will be one of the children. Or it will be you."

"Ei."

"I am not being unkind."

"Na. You are being right."

Doran put the hide inside his shirt and looked out at the field for a moment, at forty rows of beans coming up in two different colours of green.

"They will count baskets and people and panels, and they will get an honest number, and that number is a thing we survive. It is one bad year and one good one." He glanced sideways. "What they must not get is the shape. How we knew the seed was dead before we planted it. That there is a rule about who dies. That a man who cannot walk holds a survey and a child holds a field."

"Because that is what makes us worth something."

"Na," Doran said. "Because that is what makes us worth arranging. Nobody walks eleven days for baskets. They walk eleven days for a place that keeps producing, and the reason we keep producing is on nineteen pages of hide in a shelter, and a person who understood that would not price us at all."

He started up the path.

"They would want somebody living here."

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