Dzeni turned away, his jaw clenched, and went to wake the chief. By the time the sun was fully up, the whole camp knew, or sensed, that something had broken. Whispers moved through the column like wind through dry grass. Mothers held their children closer. Warriors looked at Jolon with hard eyes as he sat apart, his head bowed, Sani beside him with Lula in her arms, her face pale and tear-streaked and defiant all at once.
The chief called a council at midday, under the thin shade of a lone cottonwood that stood, green and stubborn, in the middle of the dry land โ a sign in itself, Ethan thought, though no one said so aloud. The chief sat on a flat stone, Besh and Kani beside him, Dzeni standing with his arms crossed, Jolon kneeling before them with his head down, and the band gathered in a wide circle around them, silent.
Kani spoke first, telling what he had seen, and then Jolon spoke, haltingly, telling the rest: the first night trip, the barrel of water, the coin, the second trip, the route given away. He did not excuse himself. He did not beg. He told it as a man tells a wound to a healer, plainly, because hiding it any longer would only let it fester.
When he finished, the silence was deep, and Ethan could feel the band's trust straining like a rope under too much weight. They had followed a stranger's signs across a desert. They had stood unarmed before rifles. And now they knew that one of their own had told their enemy where they were going.
Dzeni spoke, and his voice shook with the effort of holding back his anger. "We must change course," he said. "Murdock knows the northwest road. If we keep on it, he will be waiting at every wash, at every pass. We should hide the trail. Turn east, circle back, lose him in the rock country, and come at the canyon from another way."
Others murmured agreement. Besh shook his head. "Turning east costs days we do not have. The water is nearly gone. The children โ"
The children will be dead if Murdock takes the canyon first, Dzeni shot back.
The chief raised one hand, and the argument stopped. He looked at Jolon for a long time, and then at Ethan, and then out across the band, at the faces turned toward him in the hard light, waiting for a decision that would shape all their lives.
Murdock knows a direction, the chief said slowly. "He does not know the canyon. He does not know the stone. He does not know the seam. A direction is not a destination. And we have already lost days to this drought. If we turn aside now, we lose more. If we press on, faster, we reach the water before he can find it."
He stood, and his height and stillness commanded the circle. "We press on," he said. "Faster. The scouts ride ahead. The column marches until dark and rises before dawn. And Jolon โ" He looked down at the young father, who flinched. "Jolon will answer for what he did, before the whole band, and not in whispers. Tomorrow, at the fire, he will speak. Until then, he walks with his family, and no man lays a hand on him. That is my word."
The council broke, and the band began to move, faster now, with a new urgency in their steps, and Ethan walked beside the chief for a while in silence, thinking about how trust, once strained, could either snap or be retied stronger, and wondering which it would be for this band, and for Jolon, and for the water that still lay ahead of them, unseen, beneath the burning earth.
The fire was built high that evening, and the band gathered around it in a wide circle, and Jolon stood in the middle of it alone.
He had washed his face and changed into a clean shirt, though his hands still trembled, and Sani sat at the edge of the circle with Lula asleep against her breast, her eyes never leaving his face. The warriors sat with their weapons laid aside, as the chief had ordered. No one would speak out of turn. This was not a trial by shouting. It was a confession and a judgment, and everyone knew how it was handled would decide whether the band marched forward as one people or began to come apart.
Chief Nan-tan-lupan sat on his flat stone, his gray braids over his shoulders, his scarred cheek lit by the firelight. He nodded once to Jolon, and Jolon stepped forward, and his voice, when it came, was hoarse and young and terribly clear in the desert night.
I did it, Jolon said. He did not look at the ground. He looked at the chief, and then around the circle, meeting eyes where he could, flinching where he could not. "I went to Murdock's well at night, twice. The first time, I told him we were marching northwest, and he gave me a barrel of water and coin. The second time, I told him more, and he gave me a skin. I did it because my daughter Lula was fading. Sani's milk was failing, and the child was so small, and I could hear her crying weaken, night after night, until it was hardly a cry at all, just a thin sound, like wind through grass. I thought โ I thought if I could get her water, just water, she would live, and the rest would not matter. I was wrong about the rest. I know that now. Murdock used what I told him. He waited at the wash with rifles. He could have killed us. He could have killed Lula herself, in the fighting, and then what would I have bought with my bargain? Nothing. I bought water with the lives of my own people, and I am ashamed."