It is there, he said to Besh, who stood beside him with his scarred hands on his hips. "Under the slab. Behind the pack. It has been there all along, waiting for somebody to move the roof off its head."
That was the work of the day, and it was slower than any of them wanted. Ethan would not let them pry at the great slab first. "If that slab shifts wrong, it takes the whole face with it," he told the chief, and the chief nodded and passed the word: small stones first, from the top down, like unbuilding a wall in reverse. So they worked in relays, passing stones hand to hand down a chain that ran from the rockfall to a growing pile fifty paces away. The sun climbed. Dust settled on sweat, turning skin the colour of the rock itself. Ethan worked in the chain, his shirt dark with sweat, his hands cut in small places by the sharp basalt. He did not hurry anyone. Digging wells under Silvano Reyes had taught him that a man who hurries stone gets buried by it.
By midday they had cleared the upper tumble, and the shape of the basin began to show: a hollow scooped in sandstone, dark and cool, its floor still buried under gravel and a second, smaller slab that leaned against the great one like a door left ajar. Ethan knelt and brushed gravel away with two fingers, the way he had brushed dust in the chief's camp eleven days before, and felt the dampness deepen. The soil under the lifted stones was dark, almost black, and it smelled of rain that had never fallen. He pressed his palm flat to it and felt cold rise into his skin, and thought of his brother Tommy, dead of fever on a trail when Ethan was twenty-four, and knew again why he could not ride on past a thirsty camp. He had passed through his whole life. This time he would stay until the water ran.
Careful now, he said, rising. "The leaning slab next. Ropes, not shoulders. We pull it outward and down, away from the basin, and we stand clear while it comes."
They rigged the ropes the way Ethan showed them — looped around the slab's top edge, run back to a stout anchor stone, manned by six men on each line. Dzeni took one line, his face set. Jolon took the other, quiet, determined, a man still earning his place back one honest task at a time. The chief watched from a little distance, Nakai beside him, the boy's wooden cup clutched in both hands as if it were already full.
Pull, Ethan said. "Steady. Not hard. Steady."
The slab groaned. Gravel rattled down behind it in a dry rain. The men leaned into the ropes, boots scraping on stone, breath coming short in the heat. The slab moved an inch. Then another. Then, with a crack like a rifle shot, the anchor stone shifted, and the slab dropped, not outward as planned but sideways, its edge catching the hand of a young warrior who had stepped in too close to guide it with a pry bar.
The scream cut the singing off clean, as if a knife had cut a rope.
Ethan was there before the sound had finished. "Hold it! Nobody move the stone! If you lift it wrong you take the hand with it!" He dropped to his knees beside the young man, whose face had gone the colour of ash, whose hand was pinned beneath the slab's edge, fingers crushed flat, blood running dark over the dust. The man did not scream again. He bit his own lip until it bled and stared at Ethan with eyes that asked a single question: am I going to lose this hand?
No, Ethan said, and he said it the way a man says a fact about water — steady, because he would not lie about it either. "You are going to keep it. But it will hurt, and you must be still."
Ishtah came through the crowd with her medicine bundle, small and iron-gray and unhurried, and knelt on the other side of the stone. She looked at the hand, at the slab, at Ethan, and gave one short nod. Together they worked as two people work who have both seen pain before and are not frightened by it: Ethan levering the slab a finger's breadth at a time with the pry bar, Ishtah easing the hand free the moment there was room, her stained hands gentle and exact, pressing cloth, binding splints of straight yucca stalk, murmuring low words that were not quite song and not quite prayer. The young warrior wept silently and did not pull away.
It is broken in two places, Ishtah said at last, her voice carrying just far enough for the chief to hear. "But the fingers still move, and the blood still comes. He will keep the hand. He will not throw a spear with it this season, but he will hold his child."
A breath went out of the whole canyon. Women brought seep water to wash the blood from the stone. Dzeni clapped the young man's good shoulder. The chief laid a hand on his head, and the man nodded, ashamed and proud at once, and let himself be carried to the shade.
Ethan stood, his own hands shaking now that the work was done, and looked back at the rockfall. The leaning slab lay where it had fallen, clear of the basin at last, and behind it the gravel was dark and wet through. The way was nearly open. One more day of clearing, perhaps less, and the basin would give back water.