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Chapter 31: Nineteen Days, and Who Eats Less

Chapter 31: Nineteen Days, and Who Eats Less

The number went public on the thirteenth day, and it went public because Leon put it on a wall.

That was the mistake, and he did not understand it was a mistake for another six hours.

He had been carrying it for two days. Nineteen days of grain, now twenty-six with what Boro’s trade had brought, against a lean season that Veya put at forty-one days before the first river fish ran and something over sixty before anything came out of the ground.

Twenty-six against forty-one.

He drew it on a bark sheet, big, in the marks everybody could now read: a line of the days they had, a longer line of the days they needed, and the gap between them shaded.

Then he pinned it to the post beside the storage platform where people walked past it forty times a day.

By midday half the settlement had stood in front of it.

By afternoon three families had come to Veya to ask whether they should send children to relatives downstream.

"You should have brought it to the circle."

Leon had been braced for Kharun. It was not Kharun.

The man was about thirty, narrow, with ink-dark hair cut close and a scar through one eyebrow that Leon noticed with a small unpleasant jolt because it was on the same side as his own. He had been at every council since the flood, sitting behind Veya’s left shoulder, saying nothing, and Leon had catalogued him as storage keeper and moved on.

"Doran," Tala said. She did not sound surprised.

"You should have brought it to the circle," Doran said again, and he said it slowly, in the register, so there could be no confusion about whether Leon had understood.

"It is true," Leon said.

"Ei."

"They must know."

Doran looked at the bark sheet for a moment.

Then he asked a question with about fourteen words in it, and Luma had to render it twice, and what it came down to was this:

"Which of them must know first," Luma said, "and what will they do in the hours before the others find out?"

Leon opened his mouth.

Three families had already asked about sending children away. Two of those families had grain on their own platforms, because household stores were separate from the settlement’s, and Doran had spent the morning watching the traffic between the platforms and the smoke racks and could name, from memory, four people who had moved food since the sheet went up.

"They are frightened," Leon said.

"Ei."

"That is not wrong."

"Na." Doran made the sign for not wrong and then, beside it, at head height, the sign for and.

Frightened, and moving grain, and now everybody who did not move grain knew that somebody had.

Leon took the sheet down.

Doran stopped him, which Leon had not expected at all, and put his hand flat on the bark.

"Na. Late."

The information was out. Taking it down now would say something worse than leaving it up.

The circle met that night and Leon expected to be shouted at and was not, which was in several ways harder.

Veya put it plainly. Twenty-six against forty-one. Fifteen days short, before anybody argued about anything.

Then she opened it, and Leon watched eleven adults work a problem he had assumed he was the only person capable of framing.

The fishing crews proposed a night rotation, which would get more fish and cost them the people who repaired nets. Oren proposed emptying the two damaged platforms early, on the grounds that grain sitting on a structure that might fail is worth less than grain in a jar you can carry. Sila raised the tubers on the north bank that nobody harvested because they were bitter and took two days of leaching, and everybody looked at her, and she said that two days of leaching is cheaper than fifteen days of nothing.

None of it was enough. Everybody in the circle knew it was not enough. They kept going anyway, methodically, because the alternative was to skip to the part they did not want to reach.

Eventually Veya reached it.

Rations.

Leon had a system ready. He had built it that afternoon, out of habit and shame, and he was proud of it in the specific way a man is proud of work he has done to make up for something.

It was good. He knew it was good.

He allocated by need. Body mass, workload, age, pregnancy, illness, recovery. Nayra had given him the numbers for the sick and the healing without asking why. He had a column for the man with the broken leg — high, because bone repair is expensive — and a column for Bren’s shoulder, and a lower column for the elderly who were not working, and a graduated scale for the fishing crews depending on whether they were on the water that day.

He put it on the mat in stones and shells.

It would carry the settlement thirty-one days instead of twenty-six. Five days, out of arithmetic, at no cost to anybody’s survival.

The circle looked at it.

Then Doran picked up one shell and moved it, and the whole thing came apart.

The shell was a portion. He had moved it off an old woman at the north end of the terrace and onto a boy of fourteen who was on Leon’s list as a low-workload adolescent.

"Why," Leon said.

Doran told him.

It took a long time, and Luma worked hard, and Leon understood by the end of it that he had spent an afternoon building something beautiful and structurally illiterate.

The old woman had fostered the boy for six years after his mother died. She had no children of her own living. In the ordinary way of things she ate from his portion, because that was what fostering meant on this river — you fed a child and the child fed you back, later, for as long as it took. It was not charity and it was not sentiment. It was the entire retirement system of a society with no writing, no money, and no institution larger than a settlement, and it had been running for longer than anybody could count.

Leon’s allocation gave the boy a portion and the old woman a smaller one, separately, by workload.

Which meant, in the arithmetic of that terrace, that the settlement had just formally announced it did not recognise the debt.

"She will not take it," Doran said. "She will give him hers."

"Then she starves."

"Ei."

"That is —" Leon stopped. He did not have the word for irrational, and by the time he had thought about it for another two seconds he did not want it.

Doran went round the mat.

Nine of Leon’s forty-one allocations were wrong, and every one of them was wrong in the same way. Two brothers who had split a household but not the obligation. A woman who was owed labour by three families and had been taking it in food since the flood. A man who ate at his sister’s platform four days out of seven and had done for eleven years. A widow with no visible workload whose portion came, and had always come, from the fishing crew her husband had drowned with.

None of that was written anywhere.

All of it was known.

"You count people," Doran said. It took him three attempts and Luma’s help and he got there. "Not enough. Count what they hold."

Leon sat back on his heels and did the thing he had learned to do somewhere around the twenty-fourth day, which was to stop defending the model and look at what it had missed.

It had missed the whole substrate.

He had modelled a hundred and seventy individuals with nutritional requirements. What was actually on this terrace was a network of several hundred standing obligations — care given, labour owed, children fostered, deaths absorbed — and food had never once moved through this settlement along the lines his diagram showed. It moved along those.

His allocation was not merely unfair. It was unimplementable. People would ignore it, quietly, out of decency, and the settlement’s actual distribution would go on happening underneath it, and within a week his numbers and reality would have separated entirely, and he would be the man with a beautiful chart that described nowhere.

"You knew this," he said to Doran. "Before. All of it. In your head."

Doran shrugged.

"How?"

That question, Luma did not have to translate, and Doran did not answer with words. He looked at Veya, and Veya lifted the cord, and Leon understood that he had been asking the wrong question for three weeks.

The cord was not a record of grain. It never had been. It was a record of who owed what to whom, and the grain was one of the things people owed, and Veya had been reciting the settlement’s balance sheet to him since the night of the flood while he wrote down the food numbers and ignored the rest.

"Doran," Leon said. "You hold this? Now?"

Doran made the sign for some, and then pointed at Veya, and made the sign for all.

Then he made a third sign, at head height, and Leon needed Luma for it.

And when she is gone?

They built it together over the next two days, and it was slower and uglier and better.

Doran gave the obligations. Leon gave the arithmetic. Nayra gave the medical loading and vetoed two allocations on grounds Leon could not argue with. Veya arbitrated four disputes that had been dormant for years and which the rationing had woken up, and settled all four in under an hour, and Leon wrote down what she decided and why, and that turned out to be the most important thing he did all week.

The final allocation carried them twenty-nine days instead of thirty-one.

Two days worse than his version. Leon put both on the same sheet, side by side, with the difference marked, because Nayra had taught him what happens to a claim that is not shown its alternatives.

Nobody in the circle looked at the thirty-one.

"Twenty-nine," Veya said.

"Twelve short," Leon said.

"Ei."

Nobody pretended otherwise. That was the thing about this council that he had stopped being surprised by: they did not close a gap by talking about it. They looked at twelve days of nothing and then went on to the next item, because the next item was where the twelve days would have to come from.

Afterwards Doran found him on the platform edge in the dark.

He sat down without being invited, which was new, and for a while neither of them said anything.

Then he pointed at the sheet in Leon’s lap. The one with both versions on it.

"Good," he said. "Bad. Both."

"Ei."

Doran tapped Leon’s column. Then his own. Then he made a shape with both hands that Leon had not seen before, and which Luma explained the following morning meant something close to two ropes twisted.

Neither rope holds. The twist holds.

"You are angry," Leon said. It was a guess and he had the words for it now.

Doran thought about that.

"Na," he said. Then, after a moment, with the seen-marker, and slowly enough that Leon got all of it:

"I am angry that you were fast. I am not angry that you were wrong."

He stood up, and stopped, and said one more thing that Leon had to take to Luma at dawn, because it had four verbs in it and one of them was in a tense he did not have.

It came back as: Next time, bring the number to the circle before you bring it to the post. Then it belongs to everyone and nobody has to move grain in the night.

Leon looked at the empty post where his bark sheet had hung for six hours.

Three families had asked about sending their children away.

He had not thought, at any point in the afternoon, about what it would cost to be the person who told them.