Chapter 112: Nineteen Names, Read Out Loud

The low water came back on the eight hundred and eleventh day and Fel was seventy-two by then and had spent the whole winter refusing to be excited about it.

The list was read on the eighth day before the water dropped, on the council ground, in the morning, in front of everybody, which Halu insisted on and which about six people told him was a mistake.

They were right. It was a mistake. It was also the only version of it that was not worse.

He could have posted it. Nobody there can read.

He could have told the nineteen privately and let everybody else work it out, which is what a kind man does, and which would have meant a hundred and fifty-four people finding out over four days from somebody else's mouth, in the wrong order, with the reason missing.

So he read it out.

***

The reading took about two minutes and the ground took the first eleven names without any trouble at all, because the first eleven were obvious and everybody had already put them there in their own heads.

It went wrong at the fourteenth.

Not because of who was on it. Because of who was not.

Bren is thirty-six. He has been on every hard piece of work this settlement has done since the day he arrived, including the salt expedition where an Aertal opened his shoulder on the seventh day, and he stood up when the list finished and said one sentence.

"Say my name."

Halu did not pretend not to understand him.

"You are not on it."

"Say why. In front of them."

***

Leon has thought about that morning more than about almost anything else in two years, because Halu did the hardest available thing and did it in about ninety seconds and nobody helped him.

"The shoulder does not come back."

"It came back."

"It came back enough to carry, which is why you have carried on every run for two years and why nobody has ever had to think about it." Halu had the hide on the board and did not look at it once. "Kneeling in a river is not carrying. It is that arm, under water, below the level of your heart, nine thousand times, for two months."

"You do not know that it would go."

"Na. I do not." Halu said it straight out, which was the thing that saved him. "I know that Nayra has you down four times in two years for the same shoulder after cold work, and that the fourth one took eleven days, and that eleven days in the eighth week is a man who does not come back to the water at all that season."

Bren stood there.

"Then say it is a guess."

"It is a guess." Halu turned the board round, which was useless, since Bren cannot read either, and which everybody understood anyway. "It is written on here as a guess, with the four entries under it, because that is what a guess with a reason is called and I am not going to pretend it is anything better. And it is still my answer, and Kharun gave me the answer in the winter, and if you want it changed you have to change the rule and not the list."

***

Nobody changed the rule.

That is the part Leon wrote down that evening and looked at for a long time, because a settlement that hands a man authority in the winter when it is cheap, and then leaves it alone in the summer when it costs somebody something, has done a thing that most places on Earth never manage at all.

Kharun said nothing whatsoever during the entire exchange, deliberately, and Leon watched him do it, and watched what it cost him, because Bren has stood beside that man in three bad places.

Afterwards he went and found him and did not offer him anything.

"I am not going to give you the water."

"Ei."

"I am going to give you the thing that is worse, which is the store and the racks and the ninety-four, for two months, with everybody who is any good gone." Kharun crouched down beside him. "You will have three of the nine, and the children, and Nesh, and you will be the reason the terrace is still standing when they come out of that river. And nobody will ever say a single word about it, because nothing will have gone wrong."

Bren did not answer for a bit.

"That is a worse job."

"It is a much worse job. I have done it twice."

***

Two others took it badly and one of them, a woman of thirty called Ilva, took it in a way nobody had prepared for.

She was not angry. She agreed with it. She had known for a season, because she is not stupid and her back has been telling her since the wet, and she had been quietly hoping to be told rather than to have to say it.

And when it was said, out loud, with a hundred and fifty people listening, she sat down on the ground and cried, in front of everybody, at thirty years old, and nobody moved for a moment because nobody there had ever seen a person cry at being excused from two months of the worst work on the river.

Nayra got to her first and did not say anything comforting.

"It is not the work."

"Na."

"Say it, then."

"It is that I am thirty." Ilva had her hands over her face. "And it is written down."

That is the cost of the instrument and nobody had counted it, and Leon put it in the register under a heading he had to invent, because there was nowhere honest to file it.

A count that is right about a person is still a thing that happens to them.

***

Fel came down at the end of it, which took him a while, and stood at the edge of the ground with his stick until Halu noticed him.

Everybody assumed he had come about the water.

"Read it again."

"The list?"

"The whole thing. Slowly." Fel got himself down onto the mat with about four people pretending not to be ready to catch him. "I have been asking for this for fifty-two years and I have never once heard the names of the people who would have to do it."

So Halu read the nineteen out again, slowly, and then the thirty-eight, and then the ninety-four, and then the eleven things that stop.

It took eleven minutes.

Fel listened to every word of it with his hands on the stick and did not interrupt once, and at the end he sat there for a while and then said the only thing anybody could get out of him for the rest of the day.

"That is a great deal of people."