boys and the world was simpler.
"He is alive," Saya said. "For now. They work him hard and feed him little,
and Dokan says a man kept that way does not stay alive long once he is no
longer useful."
Silas felt something cold settle behind his ribs. "Then we don't wait long."
"No," Dokan said, in English, surprising them both. "We wait until the
book." He tapped two fingers against his temple. "Book first. Then the shed.
In that order, or the shed is empty when we come and the book is ashes."
"How many hunters?" Silas asked.
"Eight," Dokan said. "Maybe ten."
"Tell him I don't want a war. I want the notebook."
59
Saya translated. Dokan listened, and nodded slowly, and spoke at length.
"He says his hunters will watch the trails," Saya said. "No one moves against
Hale's men until the book is in hand. A dead trapper is a warning. A copied
book is a sentence." She smiled a little. "He has been listening to me."
"Smart man."
"He also says β" She hesitated. "He says if you betray us, he will kill you
himself, and he will not ask permission first."
Silas nodded. "Tell him that's the most reasonable thing anybody's said all
night."
The plan took shape in the lamp light, with Saya doing most of the shaping.
"Pell's camp," she said, drawing in the dirt of the floor with a stick. "Here β
the draw below the red butte. The tent here. The cookfire here. The guards β
two, usually β sleep here, by the horses." She marked each with a pebble.
"Pell keeps the book in his coat. He sleeps in the tent. He drinks."
"So we wait till he's drunk and asleep, and then what β I crawl into his tent
and read by moonlight?" Silas shook his head. "Saya, there's copying a book
and there's copying a book."
"That is why you bring this." She went to her medicine pouch and took out a
folded square of paper β the wrapping from some long-used remedy β and
a stub of charcoal. "You do not steal the book. You lay a page flat, you lay
the paper over it, you rub the charcoal light across. The writing rises white
against the dark." She demonstrated on the back of an old envelope, rubbing
gently, and Silas watched Pell's imagined handwriting bloom in reverse. "It is
how my mother's people copied the treaty papers, when the soldiers would
not let them keep the originals."
60
Silas stared at her. "Your people are smarter than my people."
"My people are still here," she said. "That is the whole of it."
Dokan leaned forward and examined the charcoal rubbing on the envelope,
turning it in the lamplight. He grunted β the same grunt as before, only
deeper β and said something that made Saya's eyebrows rise.
"He says the hunters will take two pages each," she translated. "Eight
hunters, sixteen pages a night, if the book is fat. He says his people have
copied whole winters this way β songs, debts, the names of the dead β and
that paper remembers what men forget."
"Paper remembers," Silas repeated. He looked at Dokan. "Tell him I'm
starting to understand why your sister's so stubborn."
"He knows," Saya said. "He raised her."
Dokan approved the plan with a grunt that Saya translated as high praise.
They would ride at false dawn β Silas and Dokan, with two of Dokan's
hunters trailing wide to watch the back trail. Felipe would stay in town, eyes
open, hammer ready. And Saya β
"I am coming," she said.
"No."
"The leg holds. I can ride."
"You can ride, and then what? Crawl through a camp on a bad leg while
Pell's guards are ten feet away?" Silas kept his voice level. "Saya. You're the
only one who knows what those pages mean. If we bring back marks and
lines, you're the one who reads them. I need you here, alive, to do that."
She glared at him. Dokan said something in their language, short and final.
61
"He says," Saya translated stiffly, "that the white man is right, and that I will
stay, and that he will tie me to the porch post if I argue."
"Tell him I like him more all the time."
She didn't translate that. But the corner of her mouth moved, which was as
close to surrender as she was going to give.
They rode out at false dawn, when the sky was the color of a bruise and the
canyon still held the night's cold. Silas on Slate, Dokan on a paint mare that
moved like water, the two hunters already gone ahead like smoke. Silas had
packed light β the charcoal, the paper squares folded into his saddlebag, his
revolver, and the coil of rope he always carried. He'd left the rifle with Saya,
and his hand kept reaching for where it should have been, and he made
himself stop.
Saya stood in the cabin doorway on her crutch, the rifle leaning within her
reach, her hair loose in the gray light, watching them go.
At the bend of the trail, Silas looked back.
She called after them β first in her language, the words rolling like the creek
over stones, and then, so that he would understand, in English:
"Come back."
Silas touched his chest, over his heart, and held it there until the trail took
him. Dokan, riding ahead, did not look back β but his hand lifted once,
briefly, in acknowledgment, and Silas understood that the gesture was for
both of them.
Behind him, in the doorway, Saya stood a long time after the hoofbeats faded
β alone with Slate's empty stall and the rifle and the two graves under the
cottonwood and the stacked stones by the creek. The morning came up gray
62
and then gold, and she watched the light move down the canyon walls the