Chapter 110: A Man Who Teaches for Nothing

Tala brought it back off a spur turn on the six hundred and ninety-first day and gave it in the flat way she gives everything, and it took about four seconds to stop being interesting and start being something else.

There is a man at the camp at the second bend, two days down, who has been there since before the wet.

He teaches writing.

There is nothing he wants for it.

***

The man came up himself eleven days later, alone, on a bad ankle, and stopped at four hundred paces and waited to be seen, which by then Leon had begun to notice is what everybody does who has been taught how to arrive.

Rhek Var is about forty-five and built like a man who used to carry, which he did, for twenty-two years, on the reach below Havek's, until his hands went.

They have gone in the way hands go. The left one will not close past halfway, so he writes with the right and holds the hide down with his forearm and makes nothing of it.

Kharun first, Veya second, and both of them right.

Then he said what he was, and did not wait to be asked twice.

"I teach. Nine camps this year. I am paid by Rothen and I will say so to anybody who asks, and I have never once been told what to teach or what not to."

Doran, who does not do preambles: "What do you teach?"

Rhek Var put the stack down on the mat and opened it.

***

Leon knew the shape of the top page before he could read a word of it, because he wrote it.

The marks. The trough, with the two counts and the reason for the second one. The wound rule, in full, including the part about who else was ill that day and did not get a course, named.

And the germination test.

A hundred beans between two layers of wet cloth on a warm stone in the shade, damp, turned daily.

Counted at ten days.

Underlined twice.

Leon sat down on the mat because it was that or stand there with his face doing something he could not control.

It is his page. Not a version of it, not a rumour of it — his page, copied from Onnek's copy, which Onnek made from the copy Leon put in his hands at Havek's camp, on the two conditions, which Onnek has kept exactly.

He may copy it for anybody who asks.

He may not sell it.

Nobody may stop him giving it away.

***

Kharun asked whether he knew whose it was.

"Ei." Rhek Var did not look at Leon; he looked at Doran, correctly, because Doran is the keeper. "It comes from here. I say so at every camp before I open the stack, because Onnek told me to and because it is true and because a page with no name on it is a page anybody can claim."

"And Rothen tells you to say that?"

"Rothen has never said one word to me about it. I have met the man twice." He shrugged the shoulder he can shrug. "Onnek told me to. Onnek is the one who taught me."

Then he did the thing that Leon has been unable to stop turning over since.

What he wanted was to be checked.

Not politely. He had come two days on a bad ankle for it. He put the whole stack in front of Doran and asked whether the copying had gone wrong anywhere, because it is four hands from the original and he has watched things go wrong at two.

Doran read the lot, out loud, against the register, with Kiri following on the second page because Kel wanted her to see it done.

There were four errors in nineteen pages. Three were spelling and one was not: a line in the wound rule had lost the word not, which reversed it, and which Rhek Var had been teaching in nine camps for a season.

The colour went out of his face.

There was no argument out of him and no explanation. He sat there while Doran read it twice more, then asked out loud, to himself, how many days it would take to go round the nine camps again, and answered his own question, and the answer was forty-one days.

The next morning he left to do it.

***

Kharun asked his real question at the fire before that, and Rhek Var gave the answer straight, because he has plainly never in his life been anything but straight.

"How many of you are there?"

"Teachers? Nine. Eleven by the wet."

"All paid."

"All paid. All of us with something finished." Rhek Var turned his ruined hand over on his knee, without any self-pity in it at all, as a piece of evidence. "That is who he takes. A man who cannot carry and can still think. There are a great many of us on this river and until four years ago there was nothing for any of us but a mat by somebody else's fire."

Nayra asked, very quietly, whether he would have learned to write if Rothen had not paid for it.

Rhek Var thought about that properly, which everybody noticed.

"Na," he said. "I would have sat down."

***

Leon walked up to the works after and did not go in and stood outside it for a long time.

Leon got what he asked for.

Every single thing. The methods are out, in four camps and nine and eleven by the wet, correct, with the checks attached, taught by a man who names the source and asks to be audited and walks forty-one days to fix a missing word.

There is no villain in any part of it. Onnek kept the terms exactly. Rhek Var is a better teacher than Leon has ever been and is doing it for people Leon has never met.

And it is not Retharu's any more, and it was never going to be, and Leon spent about an hour on that and found that he did not actually mind, which surprised him.

What he minded was the second thing, and it took him until about the fourth hour to get it into words.

Nine men. Eleven by the wet. Every camp on this river, inside four years, will be able to read.

And every one of them will have been taught by somebody Rothen pays.

He did not stop us. He did not have to.

He looked at the thing we made, and agreed with it, and is now doing it faster than we can, with more people, in more places — and every page in every camp will be true and checked and free, and the man who brought it will be his.

Three words went at the bottom of the page that night, and he sat looking at them for a while.

He arrived first.