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Chapter 39: Nayra Counted Everybody

Chapter 39: Nayra Counted Everybody

The council went until the fire in the middle of it had to be built up twice, and nobody won it, and that was the correct outcome.

Leon understood about a third of what was said. Luma sat at his left shoulder and gave him the shape of the rest in signs and single words, and by the second hour she had stopped translating and started summarising, which he minded and did not mention, because a summary from Luma was more accurate than anything he could have assembled himself.

Kharun spoke first and wanted the wall.

Nine metres of it, burned to the ground, on the eastern face, which was the face nearest the spur. He wanted it closed before anything else happened, and he had the count in his head already: posts, cross-pieces, the hauling distance from the timber ground, the days.

Doran gave the days out loud so that everybody had to hear them. Fourteen.

Fourteen days of the settlement’s labour, at a moment when the settlement had eighteen days of food and thirty-two days to the fish run, and had just added two days a month of rack-carrying to its permanent obligations, and needed every hand it had in the water and on the foraging line.

Kharun did not argue with the number. He said it again himself, slower, so that everybody had to hear it twice.

"Fourteen days," he said. "A wall you build after they come is a wall you build in the dark."

Veya asked whether it had happened before.

Not to this settlement. She went through the cord for it anyway, working backward with her hands, and found something forty-one summers old about a camp two days upriver that had been watched for a season and then approached, and she recited what had been done and what it had cost, and Leon caught almost none of the words and every part of the fact that the room had gone quiet.

Then she said the thing that made Kharun sit down.

Luma gave it to him in three pieces, leaning in, not translating so much as handing it over.

"The camp had built," she said. "It had built well."

She waited for him to get there.

"They came because it had built well. They would not have troubled with it otherwise."

Nobody had a good answer to that. Kharun’s answer was that the alternative was to be worth taking and undefended, which was not better. He was right, and it did not help.

Nayra had been writing since the fire started and she read her list standing.

One hundred and seventy-four people.

Of those: forty-one children under twelve. Nineteen over sixty. Eleven pregnant or nursing. Nine currently unable to work at all, which included Nesh with his forearms and Aru with his leg. Twenty-two she classed as able but committed — the water chain, the racks, the sick, the small children, the things that stop if the person stops.

She read the categories in the order she had written them and did not editorialise, and when she reached the end she said the remaining number once.

Thirty-one.

Thirty-one people who could stand at a wall for a day and still be useful the next morning.

The council ground was quiet for long enough that Leon heard the river.

Halu Reed-Cut said he counted.

He was the one whose leg Leon had knelt beside on the second day, the closed fracture, the foot warm and the pulse good, splinted by Nayra with Leon holding the light and not being allowed to touch anything. He had been on the terrace since. He got himself up onto one crutch and said, in a sentence that even Leon could follow, that he had two hands and one leg and that a man at a wall does not run anywhere.

Nayra let him finish.

Then she said, "You are under nine. I put you there this morning."

Halu started to speak and she went straight over him.

"I move you when the bone is ready. Not before. Stand at a wall for a day on that leg and I spend the next month on you instead of somebody else."

Halu sat down.

He was not persuaded and he sat down anyway, and Leon watched a man accept a ruling he disagreed with from somebody whose authority he recognised, and understood that this settlement had a healer who could overrule its own defenders, and that nobody had ever needed to write that down for it to be true.

The lamp took the least time and cost the most.

Leon had been working on how to say it since the second ridge, two nights and one whole day, and what he had at the end of that was about eighty words and a drawing.

He drew the spur. He drew the terrace. He drew a straight line between them and wrote the distance on it in the numerals Luma had learned and half the council had not. Then he drew the lamp, and drew the line again, and made the sign for seen.

Then he made the sign for seen a second time and pointed at himself, and held his hands the way he had held the lamp for Nayra while she stitched, and left it there.

Luma said four sentences he had not given her.

He knew they were not his because they were too long and because Kharun’s face changed at the third one, and afterwards Leon asked her what she had said, and she told him: that the light was the only one of its kind, that it could not be mistaken for a fire, and that it had been going three or four nights in seven since the third day, which was ninety-one nights, and that somebody with patience had been counting them.

Leon had not worked out the ninety-one.

The decision took about four minutes and nobody enjoyed it.

The lamp does not come out after dark. Not on the terrace, not on the low bench, not anywhere with a sightline to the north-east ridge. Indoors, screened, for Nayra, when she needs it and only then, and the shutter goes over the doorway before it is switched on.

Nayra agreed to it before anybody asked her to.

Then she said, in front of everybody, what it cost, because she was the one who wrote things down and this was going to be written down. She had stitched four people under that lamp in one evening. She had set a fracture under it. She had looked into a child’s throat with it on the fifth day and seen the thing she needed to see, and she would not have seen it by firelight, and the child was alive.

"I will work by firelight," she said. "The work will be worse."

Doran wrote the arrangement and Veya put her hand on the cord.

And then she took her hand off it again.

Luma explained it twice before Leon understood. A knot is tied when somebody disagrees, so that if the decision goes wrong the disagreement is on record and the person who held it is protected. Veya had reached for the cord out of sixty years of habit, and had then found that she had nobody to tie it for.

Nobody in the council ground had objected. Not one.

They had all agreed, immediately, to put out the only light on the continent, and every one of them had hated it, and hating a thing you agree with does not get a knot.

***

The lamp went into the ceramic box at dusk with the charge at sixty-one percent.

Leon closed the lid himself, because it seemed like the sort of thing a man should do with his own hands, and then he sat on the low bench in the dark with the box beside him and looked out over a settlement that had, on the terrace and the landing and along the water chain, fourteen cooking fires and nothing else.

It looked exactly like every other camp on this river.

That was the entire point of it and it had taken four minutes to decide and it still felt like putting something down that he was not going to be allowed to pick up again.

Behind him Aru came out on his crutches, entirely too pleased with himself, and asked whether the sleeping push was asleep now.

Leon thought about it for a moment.

"Ei," he said. "It is asleep."

"Good," said Aru, who had never once in his life let a thing go. "Then nobody will hear it snoring."