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Chapter 33: The Ground That Was Already Empty

Chapter 33: The Ground That Was Already Empty

Tala gave him a basket and a place in the line, and that was the whole of his role for three days.

Leon understood the arrangement about two hours in. He was not consulted on the route. He was not asked about the weather. When he opened his mouth near a stand of something he half recognised, Sila put a hand flat on his forearm without looking at him, and he shut it again, and nobody mentioned it afterwards.

He carried. He counted. He kept up.

It was the most useful he had been in a week.

Eleven of them went north along the high bank on the morning of the nineteenth day, with the granary full of everything the settlement had and the arithmetic still twelve days short. Tala led. Bren stayed behind on Nayra’s orders and was extremely clear about his feelings on the subject.

The first stand of tubers was two hours out. It had been worked over.

Not stripped. Worked, the way you work a bed you intend to come back to — the big roots taken, the small ones left, the crowns replanted. Reed River had done that. Reed River had been doing that for longer than anybody standing there had been alive.

"Small," Leon said.

Tala made the sign for ei, and kept walking.

By midday they were past anything he recognised from the maps he had been drawing since Day Four, and he started counting paces, because it was the only thing he could contribute that nobody had to stop him doing.

The second bed was four hours out. The third was six.

He wrote the numbers on the inside of his forearm with a stub of charcoal because the light was going and he did not want to unpack the book.

By the second afternoon his shoulders had stopped complaining and started simply reporting, which was worse. The basket strap had found the place on his collarbone where it intended to live. His feet were fine. His hands were not; three weeks of rope and timber had put a callus across the base of every finger and the new skin split when it got wet, which it did, constantly, because they were walking a river.

Nobody offered to carry less. Nobody offered to carry more, either. The line moved at the pace of the slowest full basket and rested when Tala stopped, and Leon worked out somewhere in the fourth hour that the rests were not evenly spaced, and that they came just before the ground got difficult rather than just after.

He asked about it that evening. Sila looked at him as though he had asked why people breathe in.

Two hours. Four. Six.

Not a coincidence, and not a bad year.

The near ground was empty because Reed River had been eating it, carefully and sustainably and for generations, and a bed that gets worked every season yields a little less than one that gets worked every third, and nobody had ever been able to see that because nobody had ever walked the whole radius in one trip and written it down.

He worked it through while he carried.

He did not know how many people had lived here fifty summers ago and he was not going to guess. He did not need to. The walk was the evidence. A bed worked every season yields a little less than a bed worked every third, and a settlement that has to reach further each decade is a settlement that is spending more of the food getting to it.

Half an hour a decade. Invisible inside any one lifetime, and fatal across four.

The flood had not created the shortfall. The flood had removed the cushion that had been hiding it.

He stopped walking.

Sila walked into the back of him and said something about his ancestry.

He told Tala that night, badly, at the fire, using the marked cord for distances because his numbers meant nothing to anybody.

Two hours. Four. Six.

Then he drew the settlement in the ash and put a ring around it, and made the ring bigger, and bigger again, and pointed at the years with the counting-ending.

Tala watched him do it.

Then she said something to Luma, and Luma laughed, and Leon asked what.

"She say," Luma managed, in the English she had been extracting from him for four evenings, "she know."

"She knows?"

Tala took the stick off him and drew a fourth ring, wider than his three, and pointed north-east, past everything they had walked.

Then she said a sentence with the inherited-tradition marker on it, and it took Luma two passes, and it came out as: my mother took me to a valley where the Shenara came every wet season, and she said her mother took her, and the Shenara have not come there in my life.

Leon sat with that.

"You know," he said. "How long?"

Tala shrugged, which she had now completely stolen from him.

Always. Everybody knew. They had simply never had a reason to put a number on it, because a number does not feed anyone, and knowing that the walk gets longer does not make the walk shorter.

"I can measure," Leon said. "I cannot fix."

Tala patted him on the shoulder twice, in a way that he was fairly sure she had learned from watching Nayra handle disappointing patients, and went to check the fire.

They found it on the third morning, eight hours out, at a bed nobody in the party had ever worked.

Sila saw the ground first and stopped.

The bed had been taken. Not worked. Taken — every root out, the crowns turned over and left to dry, the whole stand pulled in a single pass by people who were not planning to come back next year and had decided that was acceptable.

Leon put his hand in the soil. Dry to a finger’s depth, damp below.

"Four days," Tala said. "Five."

Nobody spoke for a while. Eight hours of walking, most of it uphill, and the thing they had come for was in somebody else’s baskets on the other side of the ridge.

Then Aru’s cousin, a thin quiet man called Pel whose name Leon had learned eleven days late, said one word and pointed at the boundary stone at the edge of the bed.

There was a mark cut into it.

Fresh. Made with something metal, which narrowed the field of candidates on this river to a number Leon did not enjoy.

It was a sign.

Not a scratch, not a tally, not a personal mark. It was the sign register, cut into stone, and Leon knew it because Luma had drilled it into him on the eighth day and he had used it four times since.

The sign for taken.

And it was cut high on the stone. Above the natural line. At the height a standing adult’s head would be.

Head height.

A question.

Leon felt the whole of the last three weeks arrange itself into a single cold shape, and it started with the fact that he had spent nine days being condescending to a system of hand gestures, and it ended with a diplomatic instrument carved into a rock eight hours from home.

We took this. Do you accept?

Tala stood in front of the stone for a long time.

Leon looked at what she was looking at, which was not the mark.

Below the boundary stone, at the edge of the turned soil, somebody had left the crowns in a row. Not scattered where they fell. Laid out, side by side, all facing the same way, dried past saving.

It was not carelessness and it was not spite. It was a display. Whoever had taken this bed had wanted the next people here to see exactly how completely it had been taken, and had spent time on it, at the end of eight hours of digging, when everybody wanted to go home.

That was the part Tala was reading.

Then she made the sign back, in the air, at chest height, and did not cut it.

Leon watched her not cut it and understood that he was watching somebody decline to answer.

"Havek," he said.

"Na." Tala touched the mark, then held up four fingers, then closed them and opened them as five. The gesture from the gate on the eighth day. More than there were.

Not Havek. Havek’s people, or the people beyond them, or somebody moving through — but whoever it was had four days’ head start, metal to cut with, and enough organisation to ask a formal question of strangers they had never met.

Kharun’s four spears in the reeds had not been about Reed River’s palisade.

They had been about this.

They came home on the evening of the twenty-first day with a little under half of what they had gone for.

Leon spent the walk back doing arithmetic he did not want to finish and finished anyway.

Twelve days short before. The haul closed maybe five. Which left seven, and a foraging radius that had just been amputated at eight hours by a camp with better tools than his settlement had, and thirty-three days to the fish.

He had a granary that would save eighteen days a year starting next year.

He had a number that explained the last fifty summers and changed nothing about the next forty days.

And he had a question cut into a stone at head height, unanswered, waiting.

Veya was at the gate. She always was.

She looked at the baskets, and at the faces, and asked nothing at all until they had eaten, which was its own kind of information.

Then she took Tala’s report, and Luma’s, and Leon’s numbers, and she added a knot.

"Answer," Leon said. He had the verb. "We answer?"

Veya turned the cord over in her hands.

"Na," she said. "Not now."

"Why?"

The old woman looked at him with the expression she had used on the fourth day when he had asked to name a fishing weight.

Then she said a sentence he needed Luma for, and Luma said it twice before she was satisfied she had it right.

"A question cut at head height can be answered any time," Luma said. "It waits. And whoever cut it into stone instead of wood wanted it to keep waiting. Which means they are not ready either."

Leon looked east, out of habit, and then north, which was new.

"And when they are ready?"

Veya added a second knot beside the first, which he had never seen her do.

"Then we will already know what we say."