Chapter 111: The Place You Go When Two Copies Disagree

The council spent two evenings on Rhek Var and got nowhere, and Leon has never been prouder of a room for getting nowhere.

Because everything anybody proposed was bad, and everybody could see it was bad inside about a minute, and nobody pretended otherwise to save face.

Stop giving the pages away. Then the copies out there stay wrong for ever and the missing not in the wound rule kills somebody in a camp Retharu has never visited.

Send teachers of their own. With what? There are four people here who can write and one of them is fourteen and two of them are needed.

Ask Rhek Var not to say where it came from. Kharun killed that one himself, in four words, and looked embarrassed that it had been said.

"We have nothing," Oren said at the end of the second evening, with his hands on his knees. "The man is honest, the pages are ours, he is doing what we asked for, and he is doing it for a man we do not like. There is nothing in that to take hold of."

Doran had been quiet for two evenings, which is how everybody knew.

***

"There is one thing."

He waited until they had all turned round, because he has learned that from Veya and is not subtle about it.

"He came here to be checked."

Nobody followed. Leon did not follow either, at first.

"Two days on a bad ankle." Doran had the stack notes in front of him, the four errors marked. "Not to be paid. Not to be thanked. He walked up this river because his copy is four hands from the original and he wanted somebody to read it against the one that is not a copy."

"He wanted the master," Nayra said.

"Ei. And there is only one, and it is in a shelter forty paces from where I am sitting, and every page he teaches for the rest of his life will be right or wrong depending on whether he can get to it."

Kharun sat forward.

"Say what you want."

"I want us to be that. Not the owners of it. The place you go when two copies disagree."

***

It took the rest of the night and most of the next day and Leon mostly kept out of it, because Doran was building something he did not have a name for and Leon had four names for it from another world and every one of them would have been wrong here.

What it came out as is six lines.

The register kept here is the one that is read against. Not because it is better — because it is the one everybody agrees to point at.

Anybody may come and have their copy read against it. Anybody. Named enemies included, in a bad year included, without notice.

It is read out loud, by two people, one of whom did not do the copying, and the differences are written down and given to the person who brought it.

Retharu takes nothing for it, ever, and may not refuse it to anybody for any reason short of a person standing there with a spear.

Where the master itself is found to be wrong, that is written into the master, with the day, and the name of whoever found it, and the old wording left legible underneath, so that a person who copied the bad version can find out that they did.

And the last one, which Doran wrote and which Leon thinks is the whole of it.

The master is not secret and is not for sale and is not owned by the keeper. It is the settlement's, and a keeper who will not show it is finished as keeper the same day.

***

Kharun said the cost, because he always does.

"This means the gate is open. For ever. To anybody, in any year, including a year when we are hungry and they are not."

"Ei."

"It means Rothen's men come and go as they like, and they will, and they will see what we have while they are here, and Anev will be told everything." He looked round. "I have spent six hundred days making this a place that is hard to walk into and I have now agreed twice in one year to make it easier."

Veya, from the mat: "Say the word."

"Which word?"

"You know which word."

Kharun did know, and said it, and Leon watched him not enjoy it.

"Every year. Whether we are strong or not. Whether we like the man or not."

"Then it is an obligation," Veya said, "and I will hold it, and Luma will hold it after me, and it does not need you after tonight."

***

Leon walked up afterwards with Doran, which he does about once a month and which neither of them has ever acknowledged is a habit.

"You have made us the smallest thing in the arrangement," Leon said.

"Ei."

"He has nine teachers and eleven by the wet and a store and a list and four reaches. We have a shelter with nineteen pages in it and a rule that anybody may read them."

"Ei." Doran did not sound remotely troubled. "And in eleven years there will be four hundred copies on this river and every one of them will have gone wrong somewhere, because that is what copies do, and every camp that cares whether its page is right will send a man here."

"And Rothen?"

"Rothen has a count in a woman's head that nobody is allowed to check." Doran stopped on the path. "That is a very good machine and I would not want to be standing in front of it. But it cannot do this. He cannot let anybody read the thing he holds, because the whole of what he sells is that he is the only one who has it, and the moment a camp can read his book he is a man with baskets."

He started up again.

"We are going to be the ones with the book everybody may read. He is going to be the one with the baskets. In my lifetime he wins that, and I have made my peace with it."

***

Rhek Var came back on the seven hundred and forty-third day, forty-one days after he left, having walked all nine camps and corrected the wound rule out loud in every one of them, in front of whoever was there, saying each time that he had taught it wrong for a season.

He did not have to say that part. He said it nine times.

Doran read his stack against the master again and it took four hours and there was one error, in a place where Rhek Var had corrected something that was not wrong.

Then Doran did the thing he had been waiting forty-one days to do.

He gave him the six lines.

Rhek Var read them twice, slowly, with his ruined hand flat on the mat beside the page, and when he got to the last one he stopped and went back and read it again.

A keeper who will not show it is finished as keeper the same day.

"You wrote this down."

"Ei."

"Where anybody can read it."

"That is rather the point of it," Doran said.

Rhek Var sat with the page a while longer.

"I am going to make a copy of this one," he said, "and I am going to teach it before I teach anything else, and I am not going to tell Onnek I did that until it is in nine camps."