At last Nan-tan-lupan spoke. "Dzeni speaks from his wound," he said, "and his wound is real. But a wound is not a map. We have searched west, and the west is empty. We have rationed our water to one cup a day, and the cups are nearly empty too. If we do nothing, we will die here, slowly, watching the children first. If we listen to this man and he lies, we will die walking instead of sitting. Either way, we die โ unless he is telling the truth."
He turned to Ethan. "You will stay the night," he said, "as a guest, under guard. In the morning, we will see what the ground says near this camp. If it says nothing, you will go your way, and we will go ours, and no harm will come to you for having tried. If it says something โ" He stopped, and the firelight caught his face, and for the first time that night something like the ghost of a smile crossed it. "If it says something, then we will talk again."
Ethan nodded. "That's fair," he said. "That's more than fair."
The guards took their places. The ring broke apart slowly, people drifting back to their shelters, whispering. Dzeni stood a moment longer, staring at Ethan, and then turned away into the dark without another word. Ethan sat by the fire, his hands open on his knees, and listened to the camp settle โ the small sounds of blankets, of children being tucked in, of a woman singing very low to a baby who would not sleep โ and he thought, not for the first time in his life, that suspicion was not the same as hatred, and that curiosity, thin as it was, was a better door than any he had knocked on in a long time.
The night was cold in the way only a desert night can be cold, the heat of the day gone as if it had never been, the stars hard and bright above Red Mesa and the air sharp in the lungs. Ethan sat by a small fire at the edge of the camp, under guard, with a blanket the chief had ordered given to him, and he did not sleep for a long time. He watched the camp the way a man watches a place he may have to leave in the morning, taking in the shapes of the shelters, the positions of the horses, the low sounds of people breathing in the dark. The guards did not speak to him, but they did not threaten him either, and that, he thought, was something.
Ishtah came to him before the moon rose high. She was fifty-eight, small, her iron-gray hair pulled back, her hands stained with the dyes of the herbs she worked with, a medicine bundle of yucca fiber slung over her shoulder. She was the healer of the band, the keeper of songs and of memory, and she moved with the unhurried certainty of a woman who had tended births and deaths and everything in between and was not easily impressed.
Your horse, she said, without preamble. "Her foot."
Ethan nodded. "Front-left. She lost the shoe three days ago. I've been picking stones out of the hoof when I can, but the ground here is hard, and she's sore."
Ishtah went to Sable where she stood tethered, her head low, and knelt beside the hoof with a patience that made Ethan think of Silvano, who had knelt beside wells the same way. She lifted the foot gently, cleaned it with water from her own ration โ Ethan saw her do it, and the sight of it, a woman spending her own cup of water on a stranger's horse, stayed with him โ and packed it with a poultice of herbs that smelled green and bitter in the cold air. Sable stood still for her, as if she knew a kind hand when she felt one, and when Ishtah was done she patted the mare's neck and said something low in her own language, a sound like a blessing.
She will walk, Ishtah told Ethan, returning to the fire. "Not far, and not fast. But she will walk."
Thank you, Ethan said, and meant it more than he usually meant thanks.
She studied him then, in the firelight, the way she might study a wound to see how deep it went. "You are not the first white man to come to this camp," she said. "But you are the first to put his rifle on the ground before he was told to."
Ethan shrugged, a small movement. "A rifle doesn't find water. And a man holding one doesn't get listened to."
Ishtah's mouth twitched, almost a smile. She was, after the chief, the first in the camp to believe he might mean no harm โ not because of his words, which any man could learn, but because of the way he had looked at Sable when she was tended, and because he had not once, all evening, looked at the camp's stores or its horses the way a thief looks at things he wants.
Nakai watched from a little distance, as he had watched all evening, half-hidden behind a shelter post, the wooden cup still in his hand. Ethan noticed him, and did not call him over, and did not pretend not to see him, either. He simply nodded, once, the way one acknowledges another person who is trying to decide something. After a while the boy crept closer, and then closer again, until he was sitting near the fire, not quite beside Ethan, but near enough to hear.
Is your horse going to be all right? Nakai asked.