the smell of woodsmoke and roasting meat all around him, and said Aponi's
name, and then Tadan's, in the clear voice of a man who has nothing in either
hand. He used the few words of the language he had bought with trade and
years, and they were understood, or his errand was. He was walked through
the lanes of the camp — lodges breathing warmth, a child crying and being
hushed, old people watching him pass the way weather is watched — and
brought to the chief's fire, where Tadan sat wrapped in a blanket against the
night cold with his council around him, and Aponi stood up from the fire's
edge with her hand going once, involuntarily, to her healing side.
Emmett told it standing. He told it the way he would have wanted it told to
him, in the order it had happened, with nothing left out that a man might later
be caught having left out. The smell on the water at dusk. The bailing and the
scrubbing and the fresh drawing. The cup he had drunk himself and the mule
that had drunk after him. The trough standing clean now, and full, and his for
the watching, but he would not have their stock at it in the morning until the
chief had heard it from his own mouth in the dark, because water a man is
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not told about is not water a man has been given.
Aponi translated where his words ran out, and where hers ran out she
rendered him in the chief's own tongue by gesture and emphasis, and
Emmett, watching her do it, understood that she was translating him fairly —
harder than fairly. Twice she put his words to the council in a tone that did
not soften them. Once, when he said he did not know who had done it or
what exactly the stuff had been, she repeated the not-knowing twice, flat, so
that no one at the fire could mistake it for a curtain he was hiding behind.
The silence when he finished was a long one. The fire settled. Somewhere in
the camp a horse stamped and a baby made a small sound and stopped.
Tadan looked at Emmett across the fire for a time that Emmett made himself
stand inside of without moving, and when the old man finally spoke it was
not in anger, which Emmett had braced for, and not in disbelief, which he
had braced for harder.
"He asks," Aponi said, "whether you drank from the cup before the mule, or
after."
"Before," Emmett said. "A man tests his own water on his own belly first.
Then his stock. Then his guests. That's the order of it at my well."
She said it to the fire. The old chief's face, in the firelight, did something
complicated and brief, and he nodded once, slowly, like a man setting a stone
in a wall.
"He says that is the right order," Aponi said. "He says a man who had put the
poison would not have drunk first, and a man who meant to lie about it
would not have come in the dark to tell it. He says—" She stopped, listening,
and her own face changed a little. "He says his young men will stand at your
trough from tomorrow. Not against you. Beside you. Two of his, and you,
39
and the trough between. If a hand comes to that water again, it will have to
come past both your peoples to do it. He says that is what the water is now. It
is watched water. It belongs to both camps and it will be guarded by both."
Emmett stood with the fire warm on his face and the cold at his back and felt
something in his chest give way that had been braced for forty-five years —
not break; give, the way a gate gives when a man finally leans on the side of
it that opens.
"Tell him," he said, "that I'll keep coffee on for his young men, and they'll
stand their watch like Christians whether they want to or not."
Aponi's mouth, translating, could not entirely keep the chief from hearing the
shape of the joke, and Tadan, who had a grandfather's ear for tone, smiled
into the fire before she got the words out.
So the well became a small nation, with hours for its laws and a trough for its
capital, and Emmett Cole — who had come to this valley precisely to be quit
of people — found himself the unwilling clerk of its parliament.
The rhythm built itself the way rhythms do in dry country, out of necessity
first and ceremony after. The band's horse herd came at first light, in bunches
of forty, the young men riding the edges and the dust rising gold. Then the
household water, which was Aponi's invention and Aponi's empire: a queue
of women and children with every vessel the camp owned — kettles, gourds,
canvas bags, one cracked crockery pitcher carried like an infant — filing
through his gate in an order nobody announced and everybody kept. Then the
band's loose stock at midmorning, and his own cattle at noon, and the herd
again at evening, and through it all the windlass creaked and the bucket went
down and came up and went down, and the well gave its water at the pace it
chose and not one bucket faster.
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That pace was the law under all the other laws, and it was Emmett who
taught it and Emmett who enforced it, and it made him enemies for exactly