The two missing attachments arrived at the Well Zone together early the next morning.
No one had burned them.
Nor had anyone ambushed and killed the archivists delivering them.
They had been sitting in old archive cabinets in their respective countries all along. They had simply never been brought to the site of the dispute.
The wartime attachment was explicit.
Iwatari Village held priority allocation rights until the first water-source review after the war ended.
If the surface river resumed flowing, water from the deep well had to be redistributed according to permanent resident populations, and wartime priority rights could not be resold.
That review had never taken place because the border agencies had been merged or dissolved.
Iwatari Village had therefore interpreted "no review" to mean that its wartime rights remained valid.
The supplementary page of the postwar agreement did not grant Ashihara Village a complete victory either.
Although its land and waterways had been returned, Ashihara Village had to guarantee basic drinking-water allotments for Iwatari Village's existing residents until an alternative water source was built.
The funds allocated for the replacement reservoir had later been diverted to bridge repairs, leaving the project with nothing but a shallow pit.
Ashihara Village had thus publicized only the return of its land, not its continuing obligation to supply water.
The leaders of the two villages sat at opposite ends of the same long table.
After the attachments had been read out word for word, neither accused anyone of forging the seals.
Gen first asked Iwatari Village's leader, "When did you first see the review clause?"
"When I took office three years ago."
"Why didn't you tell the people guarding the well?"
The man fell silent for a moment.
"The review never took place. We believed the clause had not yet taken