The chief laid a hand briefly on Jolon's head, a gesture of absolution and burden both, and the circle loosened, and people rose toward their blankets, talking in low voices, and Sani went to her husband and held him, Lula still asleep between them. Dzeni remained by the fire long after the others had gone, staring into the flames, silent, his anger spent โ not yet forgiveness, Ethan thought, but the beginning of the thought that it might be possible.
Ethan sat beside Ishtah, watching the fire burn down, thinking how a judgment that chose grace over vengeance was also, in the hardest sense, a strategy: a band that cast out its desperate fathers would soon have no fathers left, and no one to walk ahead into danger. Forgiveness, spoken by a chief the people trusted, bound the forgiven man to prove himself, and bound the band to let him.
Above the camp, the stars burned cold and bright, and to the northwest, unseen but increasingly certain, the canyon waited, and the water beneath the stone waited with it.
They reached Stone Bowl Canyon on the eleventh day, in the late afternoon, when the sun was low enough to paint the rock gold and the shadows were long enough to hide in.
Jolon had walked ahead all morning, as the chief had ordered, with Kani ranging beside him at a distance โ not guarding him, exactly, but watching, and teaching by example, and reporting back at midday that the scout's reports were true and prompt. It was Jolon who first saw the break in the ridge ahead, a narrow cleft between two shoulders of dark basalt, and it was Jolon who came running back down the trail, breathless and dusty, his eyes wide, to tell the chief that the land ahead had changed.
The rock closes in, he said, panting. "And there is green โ not saplings, but thick green, and the ground โ" He stopped, struggling for words, and Ethan, who had come forward at the sound of his voice, understood at once what Jolon was trying to say. The signs had thickened beyond anything they had seen so far. The land was no longer hinting. It was declaring.
The column pressed forward, faster now despite the heat and the weariness, the old people helped along by the warriors, the children carried on shoulders, the cattle driven with a new urgency, as if even the animals could sense a change in the air. Ethan walked ahead with Besh and Kani, his notebook forgotten in his coat, his eyes on the ground, reading as he went: salt grass, thick now, spreading in broad patches where before it had been sparse; cottonwood saplings grown tall and sturdy, their leaves green and rustling in the wind; and beneath a great slab of basalt that jutted from the canyon wall, soil so dark and damp that when Ethan lifted the stone and pressed his palm to it, his hand came away cool and moist, and he had to close his eyes for a moment against the rush of feeling that went through him.
This is it, he said quietly, to Besh, to Kani, to no one in particular. "This is the seam. The water is here. It is underneath us, following the stone, and it surfaces โ it must surface โ just ahead, where the canyon narrows."
They rounded a bend in the trail, and the canyon opened before them, and the whole band stopped, and a sound went through the column like wind through grass, a collective intake of breath, and then silence.
Stone Bowl Canyon was narrow and beautiful and terrible: high walls of dark basalt and red sandstone, a floor of pale gravel, and at its far end, where the walls curved inward like the sides of a bowl, a great rockfall โ massive boulders, some as large as a horse, some as large as a small house, piled and wedged in an old collapse, blocking the mouth of a stone basin behind them. The rockfall looked utterly solid, and for a terrible moment Ethan feared the band would see only the barrier and not what lay beyond it.
But then Nakai, who had been walking beside Ethan with his wooden cup in his hand, ran forward a few steps and stopped and knelt and pressed his small hand to the ground at the foot of the rockfall, and looked up at his grandfather with wonder on his face.
Grandfather, he said, his voice carrying clearly in the canyon's hush. "The ground is wet."
And it was. The gravel at the foot of the rockfall was dark, not pale, and damp to the touch, and in the lowest hollows between the stones, tiny beads of moisture glistened in the late light, and the air itself, after days of bone-dry wind, held a faint, unmistakable coolness, the coolness of water held close beneath stone. It was not a stream. It was not a pool. It was a promise made solid, a seep held back by rock, waiting for hands to clear it.
The band wept.
It began quietly, with Ishtah, who sank to her knees and laid both stained hands flat against the damp ground, her shoulders shaking. Then Tahnee, holding Yana and Koi close, laughing and crying at once. Then the old people, lowering themselves with groans of relief and pressing their palms to the gravel as if it were alive. Then the warriors, Dzeni among them, heads bowed, eyes wet, pride set aside. And the children, running to the damp ground and patting it, shouting, "Water! Water is here!"