Chapter 120: The Ones Who Are Not Born

Fel went down to sit on it on the twelve hundred and ninety-fourth day.

He had been asking for four months and being put off by people who were being kind and who he had stopped forgiving for it about three weeks earlier.

It took two men, the hurdle chair, most of a morning, and a good deal of swearing from a man of seventy-five who has never in his life been carried anywhere.

They put him down on the eastern end of the crest, where the stone is dry above the water at that time of year, and then everybody went about forty paces off and pretended to be doing something, because a settlement that has known a man fifty years knows when to be somewhere else.

He sat there for most of the afternoon.

***

Leon watched from the shoulder for a while and then stopped watching, because it began to feel like something he had no business being at.

What he did instead was the arithmetic, which is his way of not thinking about a thing.

Fel was nineteen when he first understood where a weir would go. He has said that twice and never elaborated on it.

He stood up at the fire and asked for it at seventy-one, having sat at that fire for fifty-one years without standing up at it once, and been told no, and taken the no without complaint for fifty-two days.

He was offered it at seventy-two and refused it, because the run comes first.

They built it when he was seventy-three. It held its first flood when he was seventy-three and its second when he was seventy-four, and it brought in a hundred and thirty-one baskets when he was seventy-five, which is eighty short of a carry year, and he had said it would be.

Fifty-six years, from a boy on a bank working out where the stone would go, to an old man being carried onto it in a chair.

He will not see it produce a full year. Nobody has said that out loud in front of him and he has said it out loud twice, to Halu, without any weight on it whatsoever.

***

The children came down at the ninth hour because the children come down at the ninth hour.

Six of them, plus two of the smaller ones who are not officially allowed and who nobody has the energy to send back, and they came along the bank with a basket and stopped when they saw him.

Ket-li is nine and has no instinct for this at all, which is her best quality.

She went and sat down on the stone next to him.

Leon was close enough by then to hear it, having drifted about thirty paces without admitting to himself that he was doing it.

"Are you the one who wanted it?"

"Ei."

"Kel says you asked for it before my mother was born."

"Ei."

She thought about that with her head on one side, the way she does, and then asked the question a nine-year-old asks, which is the one nobody else on that river would have been rude enough to say.

"Why? You are old."

***

Fel laughed.

It is not a thing anybody there had heard before, and about four adults turned round, and Leon has written down that it was an unpleasant noise, because it was, because a man of seventy-five with that chest does not laugh well.

Then he answered her, and he did not simplify it, which is the part Leon has thought about since.

"Because a weir is not for the people who build it."

Ket-li waited.

"You build it for the ones who are not born."

And she nodded, immediately, without any pause at all, the way a child does when you have told them something they already know — and then said it back to him, in her own words, and did not know she was doing anything.

"Like the page."

"Which page?"

"Any of them." She was picking at the moss on the stone. "You write it down for somebody who is not here. Kel says that is the whole of why. He says if you only write it for the people who are in the room you do not have to write it at all, because they were in the room."

Fel did not say anything for a while.

"Who told you that?"

"Kel."

"And who told Kel?"

Ket-li thought about it and got it wrong, which is how Leon found out afterwards that she had never once been told.

"Nobody. It is just what it is for."

***

Fel died in the winter, at seventy-five, in his own shelter, of nothing in particular, about four months after that afternoon.

Veya did the account herself, which she has not done for anybody in eleven years, and it is six sentences and Leon has it whole in the register and is not going to write anything underneath it.

Doran put him in the register too, under the heading that has three words and no rule under it, which now has four names on it.

People we had.

***

Leon walked down to the narrows on his own on the first clear morning after and stood on the eastern shoulder for a long time.

Sixty courses of stone. Two hundred and forty in the apron. A hole that stopped. Clay on the upstream face getting quietly tighter every year, doing the only work on that river that costs nobody anything.

Below it, a line of children arguing about a trap.

Behind him, on the terrace, a settlement of a hundred and seventy-three people.

It publishes its own number to six camps every year, whether it is more or less. It will read anybody's copy against its own, free, in a bad year, without notice. It has a rule saying that a man with one good leg may take the strongest man out of a river and nobody may put him back.

And it has four people who can write and eleven who are learning, and none of them are him.

He came here with a broken pack, forty words, and a box of things nobody could make.

I have given them one page they did not have. It was about clay, and Oren did not believe it, and made me prove it, which is the only reason it is worth anything.

Everything else on that terrace, they built, and most of it while I was arguing about something else.

And in eleven years there will be a girl of twenty at Havek's camp and a woman of forty on this one and a man with bad hands teaching in nine places, and every one of them will be able to open a page and find out that a thing was tested, and by whom, and on what day, and what it cost.

That is the whole of it. That is what I did.

I got here four hundred thousand years early with a head full of answers, and the only thing I have managed to give anybody is the habit of asking whether the answer is true.

He stood there a while longer.

Then he went back up the path, because the racks needed turning, and because Kiri had left nineteen questions on the edge of a page for him and he had answered eleven.