Chapter 122: A Second Who Is Worse

Selora is from Nethvar, four days east, and she has been at Retharu for three years and eleven months.

She came with Tevi and two others as a healer's student, in the second summer, sent by Renketh with no message and no explanation, and she said almost nothing for the first two days and then asked Oren why the timber on the eastern panels was let in at the wet line instead of above it.

Nobody had an answer that survived being said out loud. Four panels were redesigned that season and it is the reason panel forty-one is the last bad one instead of the fifth.

She has been on the wall crew ever since. She was on the weir. She held a torch in the dark on the last night of it while Oren capped the western third by feel and she did not put it down when it kept going out.

And when Doran asked Oren who his second was, Oren said her name without any hesitation at all, and about nine people on that ground made a noise.

***

The objection was not what Leon expected and he is ashamed of what he expected.

Nobody said she was a woman. Oren has had women on the wall crew since the first year and the person who runs the drying ground has been a woman for eleven years and the two people who hold the record are both women.

Nobody said she was young, because she is not; she is twenty-nine.

What they said was that she is from Nethvar.

***

It came out at the fire in the fourth evening and it came out of a man Leon likes, which is what made it worth writing down.

Rehu is about fifty and has been on the wall from the first fourteen days and lost two fingers to it in the second year, and he put it plainly and without heat and he was not wrong about the facts.

"She has family four days east."

"Ei," Oren said.

"And in eleven years, when Renketh's people need a man who can build, they will send for her, and she will go, because that is her mother's fire and not ours." Rehu turned his hand over. "And we will have spent eleven years teaching her the whole of that wall, and the day she goes we will be where we are now, and we will have lost the eleven years."

Nobody had a fast answer.

Selora did not say anything at all, which Leon noticed, and which he thought at the time was dignity and later understood was something harder.

***

Doran took the whole of the fifth evening, and he did the thing he does, which is to refuse to argue about the case and argue about the rule instead.

"Say what you are proposing."

"I am not proposing —"

"You are. Say it." Doran had the hide out. "You are proposing that the second for an office must be somebody with no family anywhere else. Say it out loud so I can write it down, because if we do it once we have done it, and I would rather it went on the page in your words than in mine in eleven years."

Rehu did not want to say it and eventually said it, because that fire does not let you not say it any more.

Then Doran read the list back at him.

Vethra is from Low Reed and is the second healer and has a mother's fire four days downstream.

Kiri is from the camp two reaches up and holds the second copy of the register and has a father up that reach who cannot read what he carries.

Luma's grandmother came from Nethvar.

And Halu, who holds the count, and whose authority the whole weir stood on, has a sister who married east in the first year.

"There is one person on this terrace with no family anywhere else," Doran said. "He came out of the sky with a broken pack and he is not eligible for anything, because he will be dead in forty years and cannot carry a basket properly."

Somebody laughed. Leon did not mind it.

***

Kharun ruled it on the sixth evening and he did not rule it the way Leon expected, and it is better than what Leon would have written.

He did not say Rehu was wrong.

"He is right. She may go. In eleven years Renketh may send, and she may go, and we will have taught her the whole of that wall, and there is no rule I can write that stops it and no rule I would want to."

He let that sit.

"So we lose eleven years of teaching. Say the other thing. Say what happens if she goes."

Nobody said it, so he did.

"She goes east, four days, to a camp of ninety that has never built anything that stood, and she builds them a wall that stands, and in twenty years there are two places on this river that know how, instead of one."

Rehu started to say something about that not helping Retharu.

"It does not help Retharu. Ei." Kharun did not raise his voice. "It helps the river, and we have spent two years deciding that we are the sort of place that gives things away, and I am not going to discover a reason it does not apply to a person."

***

The rule that got written is three lines and Doran made Rehu read it back, through Kiri, because Rehu cannot read.

A second is chosen for the work and for nothing else.

Where they were born is not a reason and may not be given as one.

If a second leaves, the office names another, and the settlement writes down what was lost and how long it took to put back — so that the next time somebody makes this argument, there is a number under it instead of a feeling.

Rehu accepted it and then did something Leon has thought about ever since.

He went and found Selora, on his own, the next morning, and apologised in front of four people rather than none, which is the harder version and which nobody had asked him for.

And Selora, who had not said one word in six evenings while a hundred and seventy people discussed whether she could be trusted, said the only thing she said about the whole business.

"You were right about the eleven years."

"Ei."

"I have not decided." She picked up the adze. "I want that written down as well. I am twenty-nine and my mother is alive and I do not know what I will do, and I would rather you all knew that than had me pretend."

Doran wrote it down.

That evening he told Leon, without being asked, that it was the single most useful sentence anybody had said in six days, and that he had spent about an hour working out why, and had got there in the end.

"Everybody in this settlement has been assuming things about what everybody else will do in eleven years." He rolled the hide. "She is the first person who has ever stood up and said I do not know. In writing. With her name on it."