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

It happened on the fourth day of the carry, at about the fifteenth hour, on a slope that eighty-one people had already walked up.

Nuli was fourth from the back with a standard load, which is a little over a quarter of what she weighs, and she had carried it for four days without complaint because she had carried the same thing for four days every year since she was fifteen.

There was no bad stone. Leon went back and looked at the place afterwards, twice, and there is nothing there. It is a slope. It is not steep. There is grass on it and a worn line through the grass where a hundred people a year have gone up it for longer than Veya’s cord goes back.

She went down sideways, the way you do when a knee has stopped taking instruction, and the load went with her, and her head found the one piece of limestone on that whole slope that stands up out of the ground.

Vethra was eleven paces behind her and had her hands on it inside a quarter of a minute.

It did not matter.

The bone above her right ear had gone in. Not far. Vethra could feel where the edge was and would not let anybody else touch it, and she knew exactly what it was, and she knew exactly what it meant, and she said so at the second hour of the night to Nesh and Leon and nobody else.

"She will be awake for a while and then she will not."

"What do we do."

"Keep her flat. Keep her quiet. Keep her head up a little. Do not let anybody give her water when she cannot hold her own head."

Leon waited for the rest of it and there was not any rest of it.

"That is all of it?"

"That is all of it." Vethra was not looking at him. "You could put me in a room with everything you have ever described to me and it would still be all of it. The bone is on the inside of the bone. There is nothing to wash and nothing to cut and nothing in your box that has anything to do with it."

She was right, and Leon knew she was right about four seconds after she said it, and spent the rest of the night going through it anyway, because that is what he does, and finding nothing, because there is nothing.

Trephination. He knows the word. He knows it has been done for ten thousand years with a flint and that people survive it. He does not know where on a skull, or how deep, or how to tell the swelling that would be relieved by it from the one that would not, or what to do with what comes out. Doing it would be a guess with a chisel on a woman who was talking.

She was awake until about the sixth hour and mostly made sense.

She asked twice whether the loads had gone on ahead, and was told twice that they had not, and did not believe it either time, and was right not to, because Nesh had sent thirty people on at first light and had not told her.

***

She died at the middle of the second day and they buried her on the ridge above the crossing, because it was five days to the terrace and it was the end of a good year and warm.

Nesh dug. He would not let anybody take the digging off him and nobody tried twice.

He did not say anything about nine years. He has not said anything about it since. Leon has thought about that sentence on the bank about four hundred times and has come to the conclusion that Nesh will say it again in about ten years, to a young person who has never heard it, and will mean it differently.

The other eighty walked in on the five hundred and fourth day with two hundred and eleven baskets and the news, and Retharu found out the way settlements find out, which is that the count of people coming up the path is wrong before anybody has said a word.

***

Kharun did the thing at the fire on the second evening that Leon will be borrowing for the rest of his life.

He did not make a speech. He said one sentence and he said it to the whole ground and he was looking at Fel while he said it.

"Fel did not do this."

Fel had not spoken since they came in. He had been sitting at the same fire he has sat at for fifty-two years with a strip of hide across his knees that he was not doing anything with.

"He asked for a weir and I said no, and then I said yes, and he said not this year and gave the run as his reason, and his reason was correct and it is still correct." Kharun did not raise his voice. "A weir would not have been finished this year. There would have been a carry this year whatever anybody had decided in the spring, and there would have been a load on that slope, and I want that said out loud tonight while everybody is here, because in a month it will be too late to say it and somebody will have started thinking it."

Veya put it in the cord that evening, in front of nine people, with the ending on it.

Not caused by the deferral. Said by Kharun, on the second evening, unprompted.

She was not doing it for Fel and she said so afterwards. She was doing it for whoever stands up in eleven years and asks why the weir is only eleven years old.

***

Doran opened the register the next morning to write the year’s account and stopped at the top of a clean page.

"How do I write her."

Leon did not understand the question.

"You have four marks and none of them is for a person." Doran had the charcoal in his hand and had not put it down. "Reasoned. Tested. Said. Guessed. She is not any of those and I am not going to put her under one of them."

He ruled a new heading, the second one that year, and it has three words on it and nothing under it but a name.

People we had.

Then he asked how to spell the name, because Doran spells by ear and by asking, and Luma was not there.

Leon told him.

He had it right on the first go, both vowels, the ending as well — Nuli, the form for a person you have spoken to — and it was correct because nineteen days ago on a bank downriver he had stood in front of a woman at a rack and got it wrong twice and right on the third try, and she had laughed at him and fixed the vowel and gone back to work.

Doran wrote it and moved on to the baskets, and Leon went out and stood on the terrace for a while, and could not for the life of him decide whether it had been worth learni

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