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Chapter 40: They Brought Nothing to Trade

Chapter 40: They Brought Nothing to Trade

The beans came up on the eleventh day, which was the day Leon had said, and Aru got there first because Aru got everywhere first now that he could move on one crutch and had nothing else to do.

He came back down the ridge at a speed Nayra would have stopped if she had seen it and made a shape with his hands that Leon did not know and understood completely.

Nineteen out of forty.

Leon went up and counted them himself, on his knees, in the row, and the number was right. Nineteen pale hooked stems out of forty seeds, pushing up through cracked dry ground two ridges north of a river on a continent that had never seen one, with the two seed leaves still folded and the hook not yet straightened.

Less than half. He had expected better and had said so in the book under the reasoned-mark when he sowed them, and here was the tested-mark, and it was worse than his reasoning and it was not nothing.

He wrote the number and the date. Then he sat back on his heels and allowed himself about four seconds.

Then Pel came up the ridge at a run and said there were people on the north path.

***

Kharun had ninety minutes and he used every one of them.

He did not hide anything. Leon watched him not hide things with a kind of horrified admiration, because Leon’s instinct — his immediate, physical, whole-body instinct — had been to get the modules under cover and the archive out of sight and the cube off his chest and into a hole.

Kharun did the opposite in every case.

The tool record went out on the mat where it always was. The water chain kept running. The racks stayed lit. Doran sat where Doran sat. The children were not moved. The nine metres of burned palisade were not screened and not apologised for and not repaired in a hurry, because a wall repaired in a hurry says you are frightened and a wall left open says you have other priorities, and only one of those two is a lie.

What Kharun moved was people.

He put Tala on the terrace edge in plain sight, doing nothing, which meant that anyone approaching had to walk past somebody who was clearly a scout and clearly not busy. He put four of the thirty-one at the timber ground where they would be visible working. He sent nine people who had no reason to be anywhere in particular to the far end of the landing, and told them to stay there and be a group.

He was not concealing the settlement’s strength. He was arranging what it looked like, which is a different thing, and he did it in ninety minutes without writing anything down.

And he told Leon to stand where he normally stood and do what he normally did.

***

There were three of them and they came down the path openly, at walking pace, from a direction nobody had been watching because it was not the spur.

They were unhurried. They stopped once, forty metres out, and waited until Kharun had come down to the landing before they moved again.

Leon had been building a picture of these people for two days out of four flattened ovals and a cut thorn, and none of it survived contact.

They were well fed. That was the first thing, and it went into him like cold water. Not thin. Not lean the way everybody on this terrace had been getting lean since the fire. Their forearms were heavy and their faces were full and one of them, a woman of about forty with grey coming in at one temple, had the beginnings of a comfortable stomach, and there was not a comfortable stomach anywhere in Retharu.

Their gear was better than Retha gear. Not different in kind. Better in finish. The hafting was tighter, the cordage was evener, the hides were tanned to a softness Leon had not seen here, and one of them had a spear point of something that was not stone and was not metal and Leon could not identify it from six metres away and did not get a second look.

And they were carrying almost nothing. Two small packs between three people, a water gourd each, and no trade goods at all.

Nobody comes two days on foot with nothing to trade.

***

The conversation took three hours and Leon understood perhaps a twentieth of it.

They spoke a dialect that was not Rethari and was not Havek’s downstream speech, and the whole exchange ran through a trade register that Luma and the older woman shared and everybody else half-followed, which meant it went slowly and every sentence got repeated in two forms, which Leon eventually realised was not a limitation but the entire point. Nothing said in that register could be denied later. Both sides heard everything twice.

They asked after the settlement’s health. Kharun answered.

They said the season had been poor in the north as well. Kharun agreed.

"We came to see whether the river camps are still where the river camps were," the older woman said, through the register, twice, in both forms. "It has been a long time."

"They are," said Kharun.

Nothing was threatened. Nothing was demanded. Nobody’s hand went anywhere near anything, and by the second hour two of the children had come out to look at the visitors’ boots and had not been told off by anybody on either side.

Leon stood at the drying frames and split reed with a stone blade, badly, for three hours, and watched them count.

They were extremely good at it. The youngest of the three walked the length of the landing twice on the excuse of the water, and Leon knew from the way his head moved that he was doing what Leon would have done, which was to take a number and then take it again from a different angle to check it. The woman counted from where she sat, by looking at the cooking arrangements, which is a better method and produces a household count rather than a head count.

By the third hour Leon had stopped watching them count and started counting what they had counted, and had arrived at the unpleasant conclusion that they now knew the settlement’s population, its rough age structure, the state of its food, the number of boats, the fact that nine metres of the eastern wall was open, and that nobody was rebuilding it.

They had also seen the burned ground.

The woman looked at it for a while and asked one question about it, and Kharun gave a two-sentence answer, and she nodded and did not ask a second.

They noticed Leon in the second hour and did nothing about it for an hour and a half.

He was a hundred and ninety-six centimetres tall, wearing clothing that had been made in a factory, with a face and a colouring that were not from anywhere within eight hundred kilometres, splitting reed with an incompetence that must have been visible from the water.

Nobody looked at him twice.

That, Leon understood eventually, was the second thing that had gone wrong. Three strangers had walked into a settlement, spent an afternoon in it, and had not once turned to stare at the enormous foreigner in the corner.

They already knew he was here.

***

At the end of it they stood up to go, and the older woman said something to Kharun that took a while, and Kharun answered in about six words, and then she turned and looked directly at Leon for the first time all day.

She crossed the landing.

Leon put the stone blade down and stood up, which put him a full head above her, and she did not adjust for it at all.

She said four words.

He caught the first one, because it was the only one that mattered and because he had been hearing it since the sixteenth day, and it stopped him more thoroughly than a spear would have.

"Varu."

Builder. Tala’s word for him. Made up on a riverbank in the first week by one woman who had needed something to call him, used since then by perhaps forty people, none of whom had gone anywhere.

Leon did not move.

The woman waited a moment to see whether he would answer, and he did not, because he had nothing, and she seemed to find that acceptable. Then she said the other three words, and turned, and the three of them went back up the north path in the last two hours of light, unhurried, exactly as they had come.

Luma had gone very white.

"What did she say?"

Luma looked at Kharun. Kharun was watching the path.

"Luma. What did she say?"

"She said," Luma said, and then stopped, and started again. "She said it as a greeting. The way you greet somebody whose name you already know."