Chapter 128: Somebody Did This Before

They came up the river in a boat on the fourteen hundred and twenty-second day, which nobody had expected, and the first strange thing about them was the way they gave their names.

"Iven Marr."

Two parts. Not a name and a thing he does, the way it works on this reach. Not a name on its own either.

Two names, both of them his, one of them shared with everybody in the boat.

Luma took a full day to establish what she was looking at and then explained it to Leon in about nine words, and he had to sit down.

"The second one is his mother's mother's mother's."

***

They are from four days beyond Havek and then two days east up a water Retharu has no name for, and they call the place First Garden.

Iven Marr is about sixty, with grey in a beard nobody on this reach grows and hands that have done one job for forty years. He came with three others and a boat carrying nothing anybody could trade.

What he had instead was a bundle.

***

He asked for Doran by title before Kharun, which is the wrong order, apologised for it immediately and correctly, and told everybody in four seconds what he had come about.

"A man with a bad hand came to us in the spring."

"Rhek Var."

"He read out four pages." Iven Marr had the bundle across his knees and had not opened it. "One of them says that if you put a hundred seeds between wet cloth on a warm stone and count them at ten days, you will know what the ground will do."

"That is ours," Doran said.

"Ei. It says so on it, which is the reason I came." He looked up. "It is a good page. I have nothing to say against it and we are using it and it has already saved us a season."

He put his hand flat on the bundle.

"It is the page after it that I have come about, and you have not written it yet, and I have four generations of it in here."

***

He opened it in the morning in front of eleven people, because Doran would not have it done at night with everybody tired.

Sticks.

Notched sticks, about the length of a forearm, tied in bundles of eleven. Kel counted them twice. A hundred and thirty-four.

One stick is one plot for one year.

The notches are not writing. They are a system, and a good one, and it took Kel and Kiri and Leon two days to learn, because Iven Marr let them work it out rather than telling them. Kel said afterwards it was the most generous thing anybody has ever done for him.

The near end is which plot. The far end is which year, counted from a fixed thing Iven Marr can name, about a hundred and ten years ago.

The middle is the yield, in a unit Leon has converted roughly and which does not matter, because the point is not the size of the number. The point is the shape.

***

Here is what those sticks say. Leon has copied it into the register as a table and has looked at it perhaps forty times since.

They cleared ground and planted it.

The first year was good. The second was better. The third was the best it ever got.

The fourth was a little less and everybody said it was the rain. The fifth was less again and they said it was the seed, and got new seed from two days off, and the sixth was less again.

By the eleventh year that ground was giving about a third of what it gave in the third, and they moved, and cleared new ground, and the new ground did exactly the same thing.

Twice.

A hundred and ten years, two plots, the same curve, and the second set is in the same hand-and-a-half of notches as the first, because a woman named Sayo Marr kept the first and told her daughter to keep going.

"She is the reason I am here," Iven Marr said. "Nobody in four generations has been able to tell me why. Nobody has been able to tell me it did not happen either, because it is on the sticks."

***

Leon did not say anything for a long time and everybody in that shelter noticed.

Doran, eventually: "You know."

"I know the name of it. That is not the same thing."

He said it badly, then made himself say it properly, and it took ten minutes and Kiri wrote all of it down.

A plant takes things out of the ground that are not water, and when you eat it or carry it away those things go with it and do not come back. Cleared ground has a great deal of it stored up from everything that lived and died there before, and for two or three years you are spending that, and it feels like generosity.

It is not generosity. It is a store, and you are eating it, the way a settlement eats a store in a year it does not fish.

"And then?"

"And then the store is at eleven days," Leon said, "and it stays there, for ever, unless somebody puts something back."

***

Kharun asked the only question worth asking and asked it flatly.

"Can you put it back?"

"Some of it. Not the important one."

He explained the rest worse than the first part, because he has been dreading this conversation since his twenty-second day on this planet and dread does not make a man clearer.

There are plants that do not take that thing out of the ground. They put it in. Not by themselves: something small lives on their roots and does it, and you can see where, because it makes lumps.

"I have pulled up perhaps four hundred bean plants on that terrace in four years," Leon said. "Second year, third year, this year. I have looked at every one of them."

"And?"

"There are no lumps."

***

Nobody in that shelter understood what that meant except Leon, and he sat with it a moment before saying the rest.

The seed came with him. The thing that lives on its roots did not.

It does not exist here as far as anybody can find out. It cannot be made and cannot be traded for, and there is no reason to think a local version would do the same job for a plant that arrived from four hundred thousand years away.

"So the beans feed you," Iven Marr said slowly, "and they take, and they do not give back."

"Ei."

"And your ground is doing what our ground did."

"Ei. More slowly, because it is better ground and we are in the fourth year." Leon put his hands flat on the table. "And I have known it since before I planted the first row, and I planted it anyway, because we were eleven days from nothing and I did not have four generations of sticks."

***

Iven Marr looked at him for a while.

Then he said the thing Leon has written down twice in two places, because it is the closest anybody here has come to forgiving him for something he has not forgiven himself.

"So did she."

He put his hand on the first bundle.

"Sayo Marr planted ground she was told not to plant, in a bad year, and it worked, and everybody ate, and her grandchildren moved twice because of it." He tied the bundle up. "And she kept the sticks. That is the only reason I am not angry with her. I do not need her to have been right. I need to know what happened."