Chapter 107: The Ones Already Outside the Wall

Leon started the arithmetic on the six hundred and twentieth day and did not tell anybody what it was for, because he was fairly sure it was going to end in nothing.

The carry is the largest single thing this settlement does with its legs.

Eighty-one people, nine days out and nine days back, a load a little over a quarter of what a person weighs, twice a year for the run and four or five times more for everything else. Halu's column says it takes more out of people than the wall, the water chain and the sowing put together, and Halu's column is now the only document on this river that would know.

It killed Nuli. Not a slope. A load, on a slope, at the fifteenth hour of the fourth day.

So Leon wrote the question at the top of a page and it is four words long.

What here can carry?

***

He gave it eleven days and he did it properly, which meant writing down the conditions before he looked at any animal, so that he could not bend them afterwards to fit something he had got fond of.

Six things, and he got them from a book he read once and has not seen in seven years and does not entirely trust himself on.

It has to eat something you can spare. An animal that eats what people eat is a person who does not work.

It has to grow fast enough to be useful before it dies of something.

It has to breed where it lives, in front of you, without going anywhere. A thing that will only breed in some place you cannot follow it to is a thing you catch, not a thing you keep.

It must not panic. Not must not bite — panic. A creature that runs into a wall when a child drops a pot will kill somebody eventually and will do it to itself first.

It has to live in a group with an order in it, so that a person can stand at the top of the order.

And it has to be a group that does not defend ground, because a thing that defends ground defends it against you.

Then he went through everything on this reach.

The big herbivores fail on the first line and it is not close.

A grown Styracosaurus takes something on the order of two hundred kilograms of green matter a day. There is no version of a settlement of a hundred and seventy-three people that feeds one, and there is no version where you follow the herds either, because the herds go where the herds go and Retharu is a terrace with a granary on it.

The `Parasaurolophus` fail on the same line and again on the third, because whatever they do in the north they do not do it here.

The `Sethkar` fail on temperament in a way that does not need writing down, and Leon wrote it down anyway, in the register, in one line, because a page that does not say why you rejected a thing is a page somebody will re-open in eleven years and waste a season on.

The `Aertal` fly.

The fish are fish.

That is the whole of it. Eleven days of work and the answer is no, and Leon sat with the page for an evening and then took it to the fire, because a negative result that stays in a shelter is not a result.

He read it out. All six conditions and every failure.

And Tala, who had been listening from about four paces back with her arms folded, said the thing that undid the entire eleven days in about nine words.

"What about the ones at the racks."

***

There are animals that come to the drying racks at night.

They have come every night for five hundred days.

They are about knee high, feathered, brown going grey along the spine, and they work the ground under the racks in the dark — six to nine of them, always the same number, taking what has dropped and what has been thrown out and nothing that has not.

Everybody knows about them. They have a name. `Reshek`.

Nobody has ever thought about them for one second, because they are vermin, and the standing instruction for five hundred days has been to throw something at them.

Leon went out that night with Tala and sat on the slope above the racks with no fire, and did not move for three hours, and did the arithmetic again while he watched.

They eat what is already waste. First condition, without a single change to anything.

They have an order. He watched a smaller one wait, twice, for a bigger one to move off a piece, and not out of fear — out of order.

They are here in the winter, which means they breed here.

They did not panic when Nesh came out at the second hour and walked past them at eleven paces to check a cord, and that was the moment Leon put his hand over his mouth, because they did not run. Three of them moved four steps and stopped and went back to the ground.

Eleven paces. They have already made that decision, about people, over five hundred days, on their own.

***

He wrote it up that night and the honest part is the part he wanted least.

I did not do this. Nobody did this. It has been happening outside the wall since before I arrived and the only thing anybody here has contributed is the food we throw away and the fact that we are too busy to be consistent about chasing them off.

Every animal on Earth that ever became ours started exactly here and it took a very long time and nobody who started it was present at the end.

He gave Kharun the timescale straight, because the alternative was letting a council decide something on a hope.

Not a season. Not eleven years. Some number of generations that Leon cannot name, because he does not know how long a `reshek` lives or how young it breeds, and neither does anybody else, and the first job is not taming anything at all. The first job is a page with two columns on it and somebody watching a rack for a year.

Kharun asked what it would cost to start.

"Nothing." Leon heard how that sounded and said it again properly. "We stop throwing things. We put the waste in the same place every night instead of wherever the wind is. That is the whole of it, and it is not free, because the same place every night is a rule and rules cost arguments."

***

It was Tala who took it, in the end, and not for carrying.

She had listened to eleven days of a man doing arithmetic about loads and had let him finish, and then gave the reason that will actually get it past a council, which she had been holding since the first night on the slope.

"They wake before we do."

Leon turned.

"Every night I have been on that spur I have known what was coming up the reach before the watch did, because the birds go first." She was looking down at the racks. "Those things go up when something comes onto the drying ground. Every time. I have been hearing it for five hundred days and calling it noise."

"You are saying they are a watch."

"Na. I am saying they have been a watch for five hundred days and we have been throwing stones at them."