The boy drank, and coughed, and drank again, and his fever did not break at once. It held, stubborn, through the dusk, and the band gathered around the fire that night and sang โ not loudly, but low and steady, the songs Ishtah had kept since she was a girl, songs for the sick, songs for the night, songs that asked the earth to be kind. The mothers sang, the old people sang, the warriors sang in low voices, and Ethan sat beside the chief, listening to a language he did not speak and understanding it anyway, because grief and hope need no translation.
Near midnight, Nakai's breathing eased. His forehead, when Ishtah touched it, was cooler. He opened his eyes, saw his grandfather's face above him, and whispered, "Grandfather... is there water?"
The chief held the wooden cup to his lips, and the boy drank, and the chief answered, as he had answered on the first day beside the empty basin, "We will find some. And tonight, you have some."
Nakai slept then, truly slept, and the singing softened into silence, and Ishtah sat back on her heels, her hands stained with herb dyes, her iron-gray hair loose around her face, and she looked at Ethan with an exhaustion and a gratitude that needed no words. The child had lived until morning. In a drought, in a march, with medicine running out, that was not a small thing. That was everything.
But the night was longer than Nakai's fever, and Ishtah's work did not end when the boy slept. Nita tossed in her blanket, her small face flushed, and Yana woke crying from a dream in which the basin was full and then, as she reached for it, turned to dust in her hands. Ishtah moved between them with her cooled cloths and her songs, her hands never hurrying, her voice never rising, and Tahnee helped her, holding a cup steady while Ishtah tipped water into Nita's mouth, drop by drop. Ethan watched them and thought about the medicine bundle, nearly empty now, and about what would happen when the last leaf was gone and the next child fell sick. He had dug a well of muddy water. He had not dug a cure. The difference pressed on him like a weight, and he knew that the march could not go on like this for many more days โ sick children, empty medicine, clay-pan water strained through cloth โ without something breaking.
The chief sat beside his grandson until dawn, not sleeping, his large hand resting lightly on the boy's chest, feeling it rise and fall. When the first light came, pale and hard over the ridge, Nakai stirred and asked for his cup, and the chief gave it to him, and the boy drank and looked up at his grandfather and said, with a child's blunt honesty, "I was afraid."
So was I, the chief said, and he did not hide it, because a chief who hides his fear teaches his people to hide theirs, and hidden fear grows larger in the dark. "Fear is not shame, Nakai. Fear is the price of loving someone. You pay it, and you keep walking."
Ethan heard that, and carried it with him as the column broke camp, as if it were a second notebook, written not in marks of plants and stone, but in the plain language of a man who had buried a wife and a daughter and still chose, every morning, to lead. He thought, too, of his own brother Tommy, dead of fever on a trail, and of how a chief's grief and a drifter's grief were the same grief, wearing different coats.
On the fifth day, Murdock came himself.
He rode into the edge of the camp in the late afternoon, not with rifles raised but with a wagon behind him, and on the wagon a barrel, and on the barrel a tin dipper, shining in the sun. He was a thin man, fifty-two years old, with a smile that arrived before he did and stayed after he left, and he wore a clean coat in a land where no coat stayed clean, and that alone told Ethan what kind of man he was: a man who kept himself apart from the dust he sold his way out of.
Friends, Murdock called, spreading his hands wide, as if he were a merchant at a fair and not a man standing at the edge of a dying column. "I have water. Good water, from my well, deep and clean. I know you are thirsty. I know your children suffer. I will sell โ fairly, fairly โ to any man who can pay."
He named his price, and it was ruinous. A blanket for a cup. A knife for a bucket. A horse for a barrel. The goods the band had left were their lives: blankets against the cold nights, knives for hunting and work, horses for the old and the sick. To pay was to strip themselves bare for a drink that would last a day.
Some wanted to pay. Ethan saw it in their faces, and he did not blame them. A mother whose infant had coughed all night, Sani herself, her eyes hollow, looked at the barrel and then at Lula in her arms, and her hands tightened on the shawl she would have traded. An old man, his lips cracked to bleeding, took a step forward before his son caught his arm. The temptation was not greed. It was love, and fear, and it was the hardest temptation of all, because it wore a mother's face.