Chapter 115: Somebody Is to Remind Me

It happened on the eight hundred and sixty-ninth day, in the eighth week, with nine days of low water left and the western third of the fill still four courses short.

Everybody knew the date. Fel had given it in the winter and had not moved it once. The river comes up when it comes up and it does not care what stage the work is at, and a fill that is not capped when the water arrives is a heap of loose stone in a current.

So the eighth week is the week where a settlement decides what kind of settlement it is, and Retharu had eleven months' notice and still nearly got it wrong.

Halu called it at the fourth hour, at the water's edge, before anybody got in.

"Kharun. Out."

***

There were about sixty people within hearing and every one of them stopped.

Kharun had been in the water forty-one of the last forty-nine days, and on the stone line on six of the others, and he is fifty-two years old, and he had been up at the terrace two evenings that week besides because Bren had a question about the store that could not wait.

He turned round on the bank with a basket in his hands.

"Say the reason."

"Four mornings." Halu had the board flat and did not need to look at it. "The tenth, the eleventh, the twelfth and this one. Worse in the morning than the night before, four in a row, and the fourth is the one I do not let go."

"I am working."

"Ei. You are working very well. That is not the column."

***

And Kharun argued.

That is the part Leon wrote down first and thought about longest, because he had expected the man to be better than that and was wrong, and it turned out not to matter, and the fact that it did not matter is the entire point of the last eleven months.

He argued for about ninety seconds. His reasons were good. Nine days. Four courses. Nineteen people who will have to do it without him. He is not injured, nothing is torn, he can lift what he could lift on the first morning, and he can name three men on that bank who are in worse condition than he is.

Every word of it was true.

Halu let him finish, which took some doing with sixty people watching, and then said one thing.

"You told me somebody was to remind you."

Kharun stopped.

Doran was up on the bank already, because Doran had seen the shape of the morning from about the second hour and had gone and got the winter hide out of the shelter before anybody asked him to.

He read it out. Not summarised. In Kharun's own words, from the fortieth day of the count, in the winter, on a cold ground, about nobody.

You take them out and nobody puts them back. Not me. Not the council. Not the man himself. And if I am the one who argues with you, somebody is to remind me, out loud, that I agreed to this in the winter when it was cheap.

Kharun stood there with a basket in his hands and about sixty people looking at him.

Then he put the basket down and went and sat on the bank, and that was the whole of it, and it took four seconds, and Leon's hands were shaking for about a minute afterwards for reasons he could not entirely account for.

***

It cost them.

Nobody has ever pretended otherwise and Doran wrote the cost down that evening in the same entry as the decision, which is his habit and which is why the register is worth anything.

Kharun is one of the four strongest people on that work. Nine days without him, in the last nine days, on the hardest section, is somewhere between half a course and a whole one.

And it was worse than that, because a man sitting on a bank watching other people finish a thing he has been carrying for eleven months is not a restful object, and about four people spent the ninth week working harder than they should have because he was up there.

Halu took two of them out as well before it was over, and got no argument from either, and Leon eventually understood why.

Once you have taken the strongest man out in front of sixty people, the rule is not a rule any more. It is a fact about the world, like the water coming up.

***

Four people came to Halu on their own in the last nine days.

That is the number that matters and it is the one Leon put at the top of the page.

Four people walked up that bank, on their own legs, and said they were worse in the morning, and asked to be taken out — which in a place where a man's standing is what his hands can still do is a thing that had been physically impossible to say out loud eleven months earlier.

One of them was a man of twenty-six who had been telling everybody for six weeks that he was fine.

He said it badly and could not look at anybody while he said it and Halu wrote it down without a word and put him on the stone line, and by the evening he was laughing at something on the drag path.

Nayra came and found Leon about that.

"Do you know what that is?"

"Ei. It is the count working."

"Na." She sat down on the stone next to him, which she still does not usually do. "I have been a healer for twenty-two years and in twenty-two years no man has ever told me he was tired. Not once. They tell me when it is torn. They tell me when they cannot stand up." She looked out at the water. "That boy told a man with a hide that he was tired, in daylight, at the fourth hour, and it cost him nothing."

***

The western third went in on the eight hundred and seventy-eighth day.

Four courses, nine days, nineteen people short of the nineteen they should have had, and the last course went on at dusk with the water already a hand higher than it had been at first light.

Oren capped it in the dark by feel, on his knees, with Selora holding a torch that kept going out, and would not stop until it was done, and Halu did not take him out and has never explained why not.

Leon asked him about it a season later, once, and got the only unprofessional answer that man has ever given him.

"Because he would have come back at the second hour and done it on his own, and I would rather have him doing it badly with a light and four people than well with no light and none."

Then he shrugged.

"And because it was the last one. I am the count. I am not a stone."