Chapter 121: Who Does This When You Are Dead?

Doran asked it on the thirteen hundred and second day and it emptied the council ground faster than any question anybody has ever asked there.

Not physically. Everybody stayed. But about thirty people found a reason to be looking somewhere else inside four seconds, and Leon watched it happen and understood that Doran had chosen the morning deliberately, because Fel had been dead eleven days and there was no good way to pretend the question was hypothetical.

"Who does this when you are dead?"

He said it to Nayra first. Not to the ground.

"You. The ward. The wound rule. The four kinds of knowing. Who does it?"

Nayra opened her mouth and then did not say anything, which for her is unheard of.

"Vethra," she said eventually.

"Vethra is forty-eight and came here from Low Reed three years ago and has a cough in the wet that I do not like." Doran did not soften a syllable of it. "Say a second one."

She did not have a second one.

***

He went round the ground and it took most of the morning and it was the worst hour that settlement had spent since the counting party.

Tala. The spur, the surveys, the ground, twenty-one days of watching a Sethkar to learn where it would be. Who does it?

Nobody. There are four people who can take a spur turn and none of them can do what Tala does, and Tala said so herself, flatly, without any modesty about it at all, because false modesty in that conversation would have been a lie in a register.

Oren. The wall, the granary, the drawing, the jars, the diversion, the apron. Who?

"Selora."

That got a noise out of about nine people and Doran wrote the noise down.

Nesh. The racks, the run, and the thing nobody can describe, which is knowing at the fourteenth hour which of eighty people is about to stop being useful and moving them before they know it themselves.

"I have been doing it nine years," Nesh said. "I could not tell you what I do."

"That is the answer," Doran said. "That is exactly the answer, and it is the reason I am asking, and you have just told this ground that when you die we lose it and cannot even name what we lost."

***

The only person on that ground with an answer was Veya, and she has had one for eleven years.

Luma has had the account since the wet of the first year. She has had the whole cord since the night before the counting party. She has been made to recite it back twice in front of witnesses more times than anybody has counted.

Veya is sixty-eight. Luma is twenty-two.

"That is not because I am wise," Veya said, when Doran got to her, and she said it to the ground and not to him. "It is because my mother's brother died in eleven days of a thing in his chest, at fifty-one, holding forty years of it, and there was nobody. We lost four generations in eleven days and it took us thirty summers to put half of it back from three old women who disagreed."

She turned the cord over.

"You are all sitting there thinking this is a thing keepers worry about. It is not. It is a thing that happened, to this settlement, before any of you were born, and you do not know about it because the part that would have told you is the part we lost."

***

What Doran built out of that afternoon has four parts and Leon copied it whole.

An office is a thing, and not a person. It has a name, and it is written, and under the name is a list of what the office actually does — not what it is for, what it does, in order, with the days on which it does it.

Every office has a second. Not an apprentice. A second.

The second is somebody who can do the work badly. That is the whole standard and it was Doran who insisted on the word.

"I do not want the best. The best is the person you already have. I want somebody who, on the morning the first one is dead, can do it wrong and keep the settlement alive for a season while somebody better is found."

And the fourth part is the one that makes it real.

The second does the work. Actually does it, alone, with the first one not present, four times a year, for a whole day — and if they cannot, the settlement finds that out in a season when it does not matter, instead of in a wet when it does.

***

Kharun asked the question everybody was waiting for and asked it about himself, which is why it worked.

"Who is mine?"

Nobody answered.

"Say it, then. I will not be offended and I would like to be offended, because it would mean somebody had a name."

Doran put the charcoal down.

"You do not have an office. That is the problem with you. Everybody else here does a thing and you do not do a thing — you decide, and you say the cost out loud, and you make people say what they mean, and there is no list of days on which you do that."

"Then write one."

"I cannot. I have been trying for a year." Doran was not being difficult; he sounded tired. "The nearest I have got is that when something happens, you are the one who says what it will cost before anybody votes on it. And I do not know how to teach that, and neither do you, and I have asked you twice."

Kharun sat with that.

"Then put two names down and not one," he said. "And put them down for the same office, and let them disagree in front of everybody, and let the ground watch them do it for four years before they need to. If I am wrong about which of them it should be, four years is enough for everybody to find out without me."

***

It took the rest of the winter and it is nineteen offices and thirty-one names.

Some of it was easy. Some of it was Selora, and that took eleven days and is the next thing.

But the part Leon has gone back to is a line at the bottom of the first page, which Doran wrote on the first evening, before any of the names, and which he has never explained to anybody.

This is not for us.

The keeper who needs this page is a person who does not know what any of these people were like.

Write it for her.