Chapter 119: Less Fish and More People

The run came to them on the twelve hundred and forty-first day and it was a disappointment, and everybody had been told it would be, and it was a disappointment anyway.

A hundred and thirty-one baskets over six weeks.

A carry year is two hundred and eleven. It was two hundred and eleven the year Nuli died and it has been about that for as long as Nesh has been running it, and every single person on that terrace knew both numbers by the end of the first week.

They lost a third of it in one bad stretch in the fourth week, when the water came up a hand and a half after rain and about two days of fish went straight over the top of the weir and away downstream while forty people stood on the bank and watched.

The trap was wrong twice. Oren rebuilt it in the second week and then again in the fifth, and the fifth version is the one that will be used for the next four generations, and he arrived at it by getting it wrong twice in front of everybody, in public, at the worst possible time.

Nesh said one sentence about the whole six weeks and would not be drawn any further.

"I have run nine of these and this is the first one where I did not know what I was doing."

***

Fel had told them. In the autumn, twice, and again at the fire eleven days before the water dropped, and nobody had really heard it because a settlement that has eaten its store to build a thing wants that thing to work immediately.

He said it the way he says everything, which is slowly, at seventy-five, without any attempt to make it easier.

"You will not get a full year out of it until you have watched it for four."

"Say why."

"Because nobody here knows when they come." Fel had his hands on the stick. "I have watched fish go up this river my whole life and I could tell you within four days when they will be at the third bend, and I could not tell you within a fortnight when they will be at the narrows, because nobody has ever needed to know."

He shrugged the way he does.

"You will find that out by being here for it, wrong, four times."

***

Doran did the arithmetic and read it at the fire and it took him about two minutes.

Eighty-one people. Nine days out. Nine days back. Twice a year, for the run and for the salt, and four or five more short carries besides.

That is somewhere over three thousand days of walking under a load, every year, by the same hundred and seventy-three people, for ever.

This year: nobody walked anywhere.

Twenty-two people worked the narrows over six weeks, none of them more than nine hundred paces from their own shelter, and every one of them slept at home every night of it, and the ninety-four ran the terrace at the same time without stopping a single thing on the list.

"One hundred and thirty-one baskets," Doran said, "against two hundred and eleven. That is eighty baskets."

He put the hide down.

"And it is three thousand days of legs. Halu has the number and it is not close and it is not going to be close in any year, including the bad ones."

Nayra said the rest of it from the side, in four words, because she is the one who has to live with the other end of the arithmetic.

"And nobody's back went."

***

The thing that finished it for Leon was not the numbers.

It was the fourteenth day of the fourth week, at about the sixth hour, when he came down the path to the narrows and found six children working the eastern trap.

Ket-li is nine now. Tov is eleven and is still unbearable. The other four are between seven and twelve and two of them are from the camp two reaches up.

They were lifting the woven trap on a rope over a pulley Oren made out of a forked branch and a length of gut, tipping it into a basket, dropping it back, and shouting at each other about whose turn it was to count.

Kel was on the bank on a mat with the page.

It is knee-deep. It is nine hundred paces from the granary. Nothing there can kill anybody and Halu has walked the whole of it and said so, twice, in writing.

Leon stood on the path for a while.

A woman went down on a slope four days out with a quarter of her own weight on her back, at the fifteenth hour, on ground eighty people had already walked, and there was nothing wrong with the slope and nothing wrong with the load and nothing wrong with her.

And that work is now being done, in daylight, in knee-deep water, by a nine-year-old who will be finished by the ninth hour and is arguing about whose turn it is.

He went and sat down next to Kel and did not say any of that out loud, because Kel had a page and was busy.

"How many?"

"Fourteen since the fourth hour." Kel did not look up. "It was nine yesterday and eleven the day before, and I have started writing the hour as well, because Ket-li asked me whether they come at the same time every day and I did not know."

"Do they?"

"I will tell you in four years," Kel said, which is a thing Fel says, and which Kel has plainly picked up off him and does not know he has.

***

Veya put it in the cord that autumn and it took her a long time, and she made Luma sit through the whole of it and say it back twice.

She did not put it in as a triumph.

She put it in the way the cord takes everything, which is as an obligation with a beginning and a set of terms and a cost, and the terms are the part Leon copied out.

The weir at the narrows. Asked for by Fel Longline at the fire in his fifty-first year of sitting at it, and refused, and asked for again, and deferred by the man who asked for it because the run comes first.

Built in sixty days by nineteen at a time out of a store that was not fished for a year.

The clay is on the upstream face because two walls were built in a side channel and one of them silted itself shut.

Nobody died. Two backs will not be what they were and both of them are named.

It must be repaired every season, for ever, by whoever is here, and the year it is not repaired is the year it stops being a weir and starts being a line of rocks.

Held its first flood. Held its second.

Then she stopped, and turned the cord over, and put in one more knot, and gave it the closing form that has a verb in it which exists for nothing else.

"And it is not finished," she said, "and it never will be, and that is what it is."