Ethan spent the last hour before the storm teaching Nakai what the signs meant, because the boy had asked, and because teaching was the only way Ethan knew to keep fear from settling. He showed him the salt grass, tough and pale, and told him that grass like that grew where the ground stayed damp below, even when the top was dust. He showed him the saplings, thicker now, their leaves a deeper green than anything else in that country, and told him that cottonwood roots reached sideways, hunting, and that where they grew in a line, water had once run, and might run again below. Nakai listened with his whole body, the way children listen when they sense a secret is being trusted to them, and he touched the dark soil under the basalt shelf with his fingertip, and whispered, "It is cold."
That is the ground telling the truth, Ethan said. "Remember that. Cold earth in a hot land is never an accident."
Kani, watching, smiled for the first time in days, and Besh nodded, and even Dzeni, standing guard on the ridge, allowed himself a brief, hard glance at the green line of the wash, as if he were permitting himself to believe, just a little, and no more than that.
Then the storm came, and belief had to wait. The chief's orders were given without panic: the hollow, the rock face at their backs, the cattle herded into the lee, the horses' heads covered with blankets, the children tucked into the middle with the old people around them like a wall. Ishtah secured her medicine bundle inside her own blanket, wrapping it twice, because what little medicine remained was worth more than any other possession in the camp. Tahnee held Yana on one side and Koi on the other, her arms around both, singing low into their hair, a song without words that Ethan recognized as the same tune Ishtah had sung over Nakai's fever. Jolon sat apart, his barrel of Murdock's water hidden beneath his own blanket, his face turned toward the storm, his guilt a private weather, darker than the sky.
Ethan pulled his hat low and pressed his back against the rock, with Sable's head tucked against his shoulder, and felt the mare tremble as the first gusts hit. He thought about the notebook in his coat, its pages full of plants and stone and soil, and about how far a line of green saplings had carried them — from a dry wash in Dead Canyon, through Murdock's road, through fever and temptation, to this hollow, to this damp earth under a basalt shelf. If the storm scattered them, the notebook would still hold the way, and Besh knew the marks now, and Kani was learning them. The knowledge was no longer only his. That, Ethan thought, as the dust thickened and the light failed, was the one thing Murdock could not buy, and no storm could scatter, even if it scattered the band itself for a night. The wind hit like a hand, and the dust came down, and the world went brown and roaring, and the band held together in the hollow, waiting, as the land promised water and the sky promised a trial, and the march held its breath between them.
The storm left the world the colour of old blood and broken things.
It had come out of the west the day before, a wall of dust taller than Red Mesa. The wind had torn at blankets and baskets, driving sand into eyes and mouths until breathing felt like swallowing gravel. Ethan had pressed himself against Sable's neck with his coat over both their heads, feeling the mare tremble, while Nakai curled into the hollow of a rock with his wooden cup clutched to his chest, and Ethan covered the boy with his own body until the worst passed.
Now, in the pale, bruised light of morning, the band counted what the storm had taken.
One horse was gone: a roan gelding, steady and unremarkable, whose loss would be felt in a hundred small ways — a load now carried on human shoulders, a rider who must now walk. No one had seen it go. In the height of the storm it had broken its tether and vanished into the dust, and though Besh rode out at first light, the wind had scoured the ground clean. There was nothing to follow. Besh came back with his hat low and said nothing.
Supplies were scattered for half a mile. Baskets had burst open, spilling dried meat and cornmeal into the sand. A water skin hung torn on a thorn bush, its contents gone into the dust. Children were sent out in pairs to gather what could be salvaged, sifting sand for kernels of corn as if each one were a coin.
Chief Nan-tan-lupan stood apart, looking northwest, his gray braids stirring in the thin wind. His face gave nothing away, but Ethan could see the weight in his shoulders. The band had marched for days on one cup of water a day, trusting a stranger's reading of plants and soil. Now the storm had taken a horse and part of their food, and the water signs were still only signs — green lines in dry washes, damp earth under stone, promises not yet kept in full.
We march, the chief said, when the salvage was done. His voice was not loud, but it carried. "The storm has taken what it has taken. We do not wait for it to give anything back."
And so the column formed again, thinner and more tired, and moved out over red-rock country. Great slabs of red sandstone rose in broken steps, and the ground was gritty and uneven, studded with stones that turned ankles and caught at the cattle's hooves. The sun climbed, the heat thickened, and the wind was now only a dry whisper lifting dust from the trail.