Halfway up the ridge, Ethan stopped and looked back. Murdock's riders had left the road and were climbing, too, at a distance, picking their way along a parallel spur, never hurrying, never closing. They were not attacking. They were learning the band's path, noting where the column slowed, where the old people struggled, where the water ran out fastest. Besh saw it too, and his mouth set in a hard line.
They count us, Besh said. "They count the children, and the cattle, and the days until we must turn back or pay."
Let them count, Ethan said, though his own gut tightened. "Counting is not finding. They can follow our dust all the way to the canyon, and still not know what the ground is telling us."
But as the sun sank and the ridge camp was made, with its stone ground and its cutting wind, Ethan found himself watching the distant fire below and wondering whether he believed his own words. Murdock did not need to understand water to own it. He only needed to arrive first, with rifles, and a claim. That thought followed Ethan into sleep, and into the thin, cold dreams of a man who had learned, too late in Texas, that finding water and keeping it were two different kinds of work, and that a claim staked with rifles could undo in an hour what careful reading had taken a lifetime to learn.
By the fourth day of the march, Ishtah's medicine was running out, and the sickness that had been waiting at the edges of the column moved into its heart.
It began with the smallest children. Lula, Sani's infant daughter, eight months old, had coughed through the night on the ridge, a thin, dry cough that would not settle. Then Nita, six years old, grew listless and would not eat. Then Yana, still weak from her fall, complained that her head hurt and that the light was too bright. And then Nakai, the chief's grandson, who had walked so bravely and ridden Sable with such pride, lay down in his blanket at midday and did not get up again, and when Ishtah put her hand to his forehead, her face went still.
Fever, she said, and the word fell into the column like a stone into still water.
Ishtah's medicine bundle was opened, and Ethan saw what was left: a few dried leaves, a small pouch of powdered bark, a twist of herb that smelled faintly of mint and earth, and nothing more. She had used the rest on the march โ on coughs, on sore feet, on a warrior's infected cut, on an old woman's aching joints โ and she had not complained, because healers do not complain about the work, but now she looked at the chief and shook her head, once, slowly.
I can cool him, she said. "I can sing over him. I cannot make water where there is none, and I cannot make medicine grow in dust."
The chief knelt beside his grandson. Nakai's eyes were open but unfocused, and he murmured in his fever, words that made no sense, calling for his mother Lani, who had died in childbirth six years earlier, calling for water, calling for the wooden cup that lay empty beside his blanket. The chief took the boy's small hand in his own large one, and his face, which had held steady through the march and through Murdock's road, broke for a moment into pure, unguarded grief.
Ethan stood apart, watching, and felt the old, familiar shame rise in him โ the shame of the well in Texas, of the family who had trusted him and watched the water fail. He had promised himself, when his younger brother Tommy died of fever on a trail when Ethan was twenty-four, that he would never again watch a child die while he stood by with empty hands. He would not stand by now.
He walked the ground around the camp that afternoon, not hurrying, not panicking, but reading with a focus so intense it shut out everything else. He looked for the signs Silvano had taught him: the slope of rock, the line of a wash, the place where the earth dipped almost imperceptibly, holding a memory of water. And near the foot of a low rise, where the soil changed from red dust to a pale, cracked clay, he found it โ a clay pan, a shallow depression where rain, when it had last fallen, had pooled and sunk, leaving the clay sealed and pale. Beneath the surface, he thought, there might still be dampness, trapped by the clay itself.
He dug with his hands and with his knife, and Besh joined him, and Dzeni, without a word, took up a flat stone and dug beside him. The earth was hard at first, then softer, then damp, then wet, and at last, at the depth of a man's forearm, water seeped in โ muddy, brown, thick with clay, but water. It was not clean. It was not sweet. It would make a healthy man sick if he drank it raw, and it would kill a feverish child.
Ishtah came and looked at it, and she did not waste time on despair. She took cloth โ a clean piece of hide, then a woven cloth from her own bundle, folded many times โ and she showed Ethan how to strain the water through it, slowly, letting the cloth catch the clay, wringing it out and straining again, until the water that came through was clearer, though still cloudy. She boiled what she could over a small fire, in the battered tin cup and in a clay pot, and she cooled it with wet cloths, and she mixed in the last of her powdered bark, and she held it to Nakai's lips, a little at a time, all through the afternoon and into the evening.