Chapter 114: Nine Thousand Times

The middle of it has no story in it and that is the truest thing anybody could write about the weir.

Weeks three to seven are one day. Leon has gone back over Halu's column and his own register and he cannot separate them, and neither can anybody else, and Doran's entries for that period are the shortest of the whole two years.

Nineteen in the water at the fourth hour.

Out at the tenth, whether they want to be or not, which took Halu about six days to enforce and one very bad argument.

The second nineteen in at the eleventh. Out at dusk.

Stone up from the bar below the landing, which is nine hundred paces, on a two-pace drag path Oren cleared in the winter, by the ninety-four, who are supposed to be running the terrace and who all end up on the stone line anyway because that is where the work is.

Fill. Pack. Measure. Fill.

***

The bodies go in a particular order and Nayra had it written down inside eleven days, from watching, having never seen this work before.

Hands first, and not from cold — from wet. Skin that has been wet for eight hours a day for a month stops being skin. It goes white and soft and then it splits, at the knuckles and along the sides of the fingers, and it does not close while you keep putting it back in the water.

Then knees, from gravel.

Then the shoulder that does the reaching, on whichever side a person favours, which is why Halu started making people change sides in the fourth week and why about eleven of them refused and why he made them anyway.

Then backs, and backs are the ones that do not come back.

Vethra had the ward moved down to the narrows in the second week, which is a thing Retharu has never done, and which Nayra fought for one evening and then conceded in about four sentences when Vethra pointed out that a healer eleven hundred paces up a hill is a healer who finds out at dusk.

They boiled cloth and they wrapped hands every night and half of it came off in the water and they did it again the next night.

Nobody died. Leon has written that sentence in the register with nothing after it, because it is the single most surprising fact about the whole two months and nobody at the time thought it was worth saying.

***

Fel was there every day.

He could not work and everybody had decided in advance to be gentle about that, and he removed the problem himself on the first morning by sitting down on a flat stone on the eastern bank at the fourth hour with a hide and a piece of charcoal and doing the only job on that river he was qualified for.

He watched the water.

Not the work. The water. Where it came round the diversion, where it was quick and where it was slack, where the grey came up when somebody kicked and how long it took to go, which side of the fill it wanted to run at when the level dropped a hand.

He had seventy-two years of that river in his head and no way at all to get it out except by sitting on a rock and pointing.

On the nineteenth day he pointed at a place four paces from the western end of the fill and said the water was going round something.

It was. There is a hollow in the bottom there that nobody had found, because it is on the far side from the undercut and nobody had thought to probe a place that was not the problem.

It would have gone under the western end inside two floods.

***

The eighth day of the fifth week is the one Leon writes about when he wants to remember why any of it worked.

A girl of sixteen from the drying ground — Nuli's niece, which nobody mentioned and everybody knew — stood up in the water at about the seventh hour and said she thought the fill was going in wrong at position forty-one.

Not that it was wrong. That she thought it was.

She had been on that position four days running and the stone she was setting was going down further than it had the day before, which either meant she was imagining it or meant that what was underneath was still moving.

Oren was two hundred paces away. Kharun was on the stone line. The man supervising that section had been doing it for six weeks and was very tired and told her it was fine.

She went and got Halu.

Not because he is the count. Because he is the only person on that work who cannot be sent away and told to get on with it.

Halu had them stop the section, which cost forty people about two hours, and had the pole in at positions thirty-eight to forty-four, and found nothing wrong with the fill at all.

The problem was two paces upstream. A basket of silt had been tipped short, by somebody in the fifth week who was too tired to carry it the last four paces, and the fill at forty-one was settling into it a finger at a time.

Two hours. Four people to dig it out.

If it had gone in and been buried under a season's stone it would have been a soft spot in the foundation of the western third with nothing above the water to show for it, and in nine years there would have been a hole and nobody alive who knew why.

***

Kharun made her tell it at the fire that evening, in front of everybody, and she hated every second of it.

Then he did the thing that Leon has decided is the actual reason that man leads a settlement.

He did not praise her.

He asked, out loud, of the whole ground, how many other people had noticed something in six weeks and had not said it, and he asked it in a way that made it clear he was not going to do anything about the answer.

Eleven hands.

Eleven. In six weeks. Every one of them a person who had seen something and been tired and been told it was fine by somebody who was also tired.

Doran wrote all eleven down and they went in the pole the next morning, one at a time, and nine of them were nothing.

Two were not.

Leon sat up half that night with a page and could not make it come out any other way.

Nineteen people in a river for two months will find every fault in it. Not one of them will report it if the answer is going to be that they are wasting everybody's afternoon.

She only spoke because there was a man on that bank who could stop the work and could not be overruled, and he could not be overruled because a settlement decided that in the winter, in the cold, about nothing, when it was free.

Everything below the water on this weir stands on a rule that was written eleven months before anybody got wet.