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Chapter 37: The Sleeping Push Is Going Out

Chapter 37: The Sleeping Push Is Going Out

Moving the racks took four days and was the most boring thing Leon had ever been part of.

Thirty paces beyond the wall line, down onto the bare stone by the lower landing, which meant carrying every green pole and every cut cross-piece and every clay smoke-pot down a path that had been made for one person at a time. Then rebuilding nine frames on rock, where you cannot dig a post in, which meant Oren had to redesign the footing, which meant three days of arguing about weight distribution with a man who was not enjoying being asked to redesign anything that week.

Leon carried. He was good at it now.

By the third afternoon the settlement had stopped talking about the fire and started complaining about the walk, which Nayra said was the healthiest thing that had happened since the wind turned.

***

On the second day, Nesh still could not use his hands.

Nayra had them wrapped to the elbow and had told him, in front of witnesses, that if he put either of them in water she would stop treating him, which Leon understood was not a threat but a diagnosis of the patient.

So he got two of the young men to carry him down to the new rack ground on a hide, and he sat on the stone with his arms held out in front of him like a man holding an invisible basket, and told them the spacing was wrong.

It was. The old frames had stood one and a half paces apart on soft ground where the smoke pooled. On bare rock with the river wind coming up the landing, the smoke would go straight through and out and dry nothing, and the frames needed to be closer and turned, and the pots had to sit at the upwind end rather than under the centre.

Nobody had thought of it. Not Oren, not Kharun, not Leon, who had spent two days doing load calculations on footings for a structure that would have failed at its actual job.

They moved all nine.

Nesh watched with his arms out, correcting. "Closer. Turn it. Pots at the top end, not under."

When it was right he said so, and then asked to be carried back up because he was cold.

***

The lamp came out that evening because Nayra was stitching.

She had four to do, all from the fire and none of them serious, and she did them under the handheld lamp on the low bench with Ket holding the light steady and asking questions the entire time. He had been asking questions for four days. Why the water first. Why so much of it. Why not the salve. Why she looked at Nesh’s hands every morning and smelled them, and what she was smelling for.

Nayra answered every one. She had stopped finding it irritating somewhere around the second day and Leon had watched it happen and had said nothing, because the thing that was happening was that Ket was becoming the second person in this settlement who could dress a burn, and it was happening without anybody deciding it, and any comment from him would have made it a policy.

Kel came past with the empty water jars and stopped to look at the lamp.

He was eleven and had carried nineteen cups on the day the child was ill and had been extremely difficult to get rid of ever since.

"It is nearly gone," he said, or something close enough to it that Leon understood.

"It has four days."

Kel shook his head and pointed at the lamp, and then made a small closing gesture with his fist, and said, quite clearly, "The sleeping push is going out."

Leon looked at him.

The boy had not learned that phrase from Leon. Leon had never once said it correctly. Aru had built it out of a mangled sentence about stored potential eight days after Leon arrived, and it had gone round the terrace, and somewhere in the last three weeks it had stopped being Aru’s joke and become the word, and an eleven-year-old was now using it to a grown man in a sentence that had a verb tense Leon could not have produced.

"Ei," Leon said. "It is going out."

Kel nodded, satisfied, and went to get more water.

***

By the fourth evening, everybody on the terrace had heard that Aru had spent the fire on a rock.

This had been established immediately and at length, by Aru, to anybody who came within speaking distance for four days. He had a healing leg and a set of crutches Oren had made him and strict instructions from Nayra, and while the terrace burned he had been eighty metres from all of it, unable to carry, unable to run, and unable to shut up.

So he had counted.

He had a stick. On the stick were fifty-one marks in nine groups, cut with a knife he had no business having, and each group was a person, and each mark was a trip past the rock.

He had not been asked to do it. He had done it because he could not do anything else and the alternative was sitting still.

Veya took the stick from him on the fourth evening and turned it over twice, and then asked him, in front of the council ground, which group was Bren.

Aru told her.

She asked what the gap in the middle of that group was.

Aru said Bren went into the racks for Nesh there, and was gone the length of it, and came out at the sixth frame.

Veya put the stick down on the mat beside the cord.

"This is a record," she said. "Made at the time. By somebody who was there."

She turned it once more.

"I have spent sixty years putting this kind of thing back together afterwards, out of what people remember. What people remember afterwards is not this."

Aru had absolutely no idea what to do with being taken seriously.

He went red to the ears and said something about the knife and then stopped talking for the first time in four days, and Leon, who had spent thirty-six days trying to install a record system in a place that already had one, watched a nineteen-year-old with a bad leg invent contemporaneous documentation out of boredom.

Veya kept the stick.

***

Pel went out on the fifth morning with two others to walk the northern line, which was a two-day circuit and had been a two-day circuit for as long as anybody had done it.

They were due back at midday two days after that.

At dusk Tala came up onto the terrace and stood at the eastern break, where the palisade had burned out along nine metres and nobody had rebuilt it yet, and looked north with her arms folded.

Leon went and stood next to her.

She did not say anything for a while, and then she held up two fingers, and then one, and turned the hand over.

Two of three.

The other two had come in an hour ago.