The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,165

and we sipped it side by side, saying nothing very much except take some honey in it or there’s more water if you want some. I think we was both happy with the day’s labours, which had kept our minds busy as well as our hands.

But there was things that was weighing on me, and I had a sense it was the same with Ursala. She seen me looking at her, and tried to hide the seriousness that was in her face.

“Did you decide yet where it is you’re going?” she says.

“Yeah, I did,” I told her. “But you first.” For mine would take more believing.

54

“I’m going north,” Ursala said. “Out of the valley up into what used to be called Scotland. I’ve worked in the Calder villages for a long time – half my life – but I don’t feel like I have very much to show for it.”

“You got the people you saved with your doctoring,” I said. “My sister Athen being one of them, so I’d call that much. I’d call that more than much, and some over.”

Ursala smiled, but the smile was kind of weak and tired. “Thank you, Koli. I needed to be reminded of that. I was thinking of my bigger failures.”

“And what are they?”

“Ludden. Tabor. Mixen. Mankin. I’ve been doing everything I could to keep the birth rate up, and it hasn’t worked. All those dead villages are the proof. No matter what I do, these tiny communities simply aren’t viable. Even places like Half-Ax, that have populations in the thousands, are marginal. And everywhere I look the trend is only going one way.”

She swirled her cup, staring down into it. She looked like she was reading the tea leaves to see the future in them, the way Jemiu used to do sometimes for me and my sisters.

“So I’m going to look somewhere else,” she said after a long while. “Somewhere where there’s a higher baseline to start from. The only other option would be to give up, which doesn’t appeal to me.”

It was strange and exciting how her thoughts chimed with mine, like the melody and harmony of a song. “What if I said there was another way to do that same work?” I asked her.

She lifted up one eyebrow and put it down again. “Well, then I would love to hear it,” she said.

I considered where to start. Senlas would not be a good idea, though his mad visions was part of it. He thought the world that was lost lay at the end of a tunnel, and his belief was so strong he all but made me believe it too for a while.

Or I could talk about the hidden trails the shunned men used to get around the valley so fast without being seen. But that wasn’t right neither, though it was one of the things that nudged my brain into doing something besides just sitting there inside my head. People went where the paths was put. If you was to put the paths somewhere else, that’s where they’d go.

“I’m listening, Koli.”

All right then, I thought. I had got to try to say this so it sounded like there was some sense in it.

“The villages that died,” I said, “they didn’t die from disease or drones or wild beasts, did they, Ursala? It was the babies.”

“The birth rate. Yes.”

“Because they was too few.”

“Exactly.”

“Not just too few babies though. You said there was too few growed-up people to make the babies, or at least to make them properly. I misremember the word you used…”

“Homozygosity. There isn’t a big enough gene pool.”

“That was it. And it’s happening everywhere, you said. In all the villages. Fewer babies all the time, and more of them that’s born turning out to be dead or sickly.”

Ursala sighed. “Where is this going, Koli?”

“Imagine there was a village with a million people in it,” I said. “Would that be a big enough gene pull to make good babies?”

“More than enough,” Ursala said. “But there aren’t a million people in the whole of Britain. A hundred thousand, maybe two, would be my guess.”

“All right. Then would a village of a hundred thousand be enough?”

“Well, of course it would, but there’s no way…” She stopped in the middle of her thought because she finally catched hold of mine. “Wait. Let me understand you. Are you proposing some kind of mass relocation?”

I wasn’t certain sure what that meant, but my thoughts was coming clearer now, and I run with them. “Tech