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

Kharun said no to the weir on the three hundred and seventy-eighth day, and he did it properly, with four reasons, in front of everybody, and every one of the four was true.

Thirty-two carriers who could work four days and be well after.

Eight panels of wall before the wet.

Fifty days to a counting party nobody could see the size of.

And no version of any of it in which forty people stand in a river for two months.

On the four hundred and thirtieth day Doran read those four reasons back off the hide at the morning fire, in Kharun’s own words, without any expression whatsoever, which is the most aggressive thing that man does.

The wall is finished except for one panel that was left on purpose with a stack of posts beside it.

The counting party has been and gone.

The store stands at two hundred and forty-one baskets with the run not yet in.

And the low water starts in eighteen days.

Nobody said anything for a while. Kharun looked at the fire.

"You have been carrying that hide around for two days," he said eventually.

"Three."

"Waiting for what."

"For you to notice it yourself, so that I would not have to be the man who did this to you in front of your settlement."

Kharun made a sound that was almost a laugh and was not one.

***

He did not decide it there. He went and found Fel.

Leon was not supposed to be present for that and was, because Fel’s shelter is above the drying ground and Leon was up there re-siting a rack, and by the time he understood what he was listening to it was too late to leave without being seen leaving.

Kharun did not soften it and did not apologise.

"I said not this year. I meant it and it was right when I said it."

"Ei."

"It is not right today. Every one of my four reasons is gone and two of them are gone because of work you were not on." He crouched to be at the old man’s level, which Leon had never seen him do. "The narrows. The two months. If you still want it."

And Fel, who is seventy-one, and who stood up at a fire he had sat at for fifty-one years to say the thing, and who had been told no in front of everybody and had taken it without a word of complaint for fifty-two days —

Fel said no.

***

It took Kharun a long moment.

"Say that again."

"Not this year." Fel had a strip of hide across his knees and was not doing anything with it. "You have thirty-two people who can carry. That is what she told you and I heard her say it. Forty people in a river for two months is not thirty-two people, and it is not thirty-two people plus the eight who cannot be sent twice in a season, and it is not the children."

"We can put a hundred people on it."

"You can put a hundred people at the narrows. You cannot put a hundred people at the narrows and bring the run in over six weeks with the same hands, and the run is what you eat this winter." He said it without any heat at all. "The run comes first. It always comes first. It came first for my father and it will come first for whoever is standing there when it holds."

Kharun did not move.

"I have been offering you the thing you asked for."

"Ei. And it is the first year in fifty-one that anybody has, and I am going to sit with that for a while before I do anything about it, because it is a great deal better than what I expected." Fel turned the hide over. "But you would be giving it to me because you feel bad about the autumn, and a weir built for that reason gets built badly and gets built once."

Leon, who had stopped pretending to work on the rack about two minutes earlier, discovered that his throat had gone tight and was not sure exactly which part had done it.

"Next year," Fel said. "Two months of low water, next year, and this time we start counting the people in the winter and not in the week before, and Halu walks the narrows with me between now and then so that a man who cannot walk far has seen the ground before anybody asks him to keep a number about it."

***

The settlement heard about it by the middle of the evening, the way it hears about everything, and Leon watched the reaction go round and did not like what he saw in himself when it reached him.

People were relieved.

Not one of them said so. Thirty-two carriers had been quietly working out, all afternoon, what two months in a river does to a household that also has to bring in a run, and when the answer turned out to be not this year there was a loosening in about eighty people that nobody was proud of and nobody could have hidden.

And then, an hour later, the second thing, which was worse: they were ashamed of the first thing.

Nesh said it at the racks, to nobody, with his back turned.

"He is seventy-one."

***

Doran wrote it down that evening and made a small noise when he got to the end of it, which for him is an outburst.

"He refused it."

"He refused it," Kharun agreed, from the other side of the fire.

"He is seventy-one and he refused a thing he will probably not live to eat off." Doran held the charcoal still. "Do I write that as refused?"

Veya answered before Kharun could.

"You write it as deferred by the man who asked for it, and you write the reason he gave, and you write that the reason was the run." The cord turned in her hands. "In eleven years somebody is going to say the weir was slow because this settlement did not want it. That is the sentence I am preventing, and it is the only kind of work I do."

Leon walked back up on his own and stood outside the works for a while in the dark, doing arithmetic he did not enjoy.

Fel is seventy-one. The weir wants a season. A weir wants repairing every season after that, for ever, which is the entire point of it and the reason nobody built it.

He has just spent the one year he could definitely be certain of, buying a better first year for people who will not remember which year it was.

And he did it in about forty seconds, sitting down, without raising his voice, in front of one witness who was pretending to fix a rack.

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