"Water?" she said.
"Yes," he said. "Please." And she smiled, because he was himself again, asking.
Chapter 13
The River Learns to Whisper
By the second week of October, the San Pedro had learned to whisper. Where it had run green and certain in spring, it now slid thin over its stones, leaving its banks bare in cracked shelves of pale mud. Cottonwoods dropped their leaves early, as if the trees themselves were rationing. Wells that had never failed in Chief Noche's memory gave up their water a bucket at a time, and the women carried each one as if it were glass.
Naya walked the river at dawn with her grandmother's routes turning over in her mind like beads on a string. The old woman had shown her where water hid when the world pretended there was none: under the leaning mesquite where the earth stayed dark, behind the red rocks where cottonwood roots drank deep, at the stone lip where a seep wept, slow and faithful, even in the worst summers.
"The river is not gone," her grandmother had said. "It is only hiding from careless hands."
She led the water party out before the heat rose: four women, two older boys, and Micah Donovan, who had asked, not assumed, if an extra pair of hands and his mule would be welcome. He walked at the rear, where the loaded animals would need steadying, and took his turn with the digging stick when they reached the first seep and found it choked with silt.
They worked the way her grandmother had taught. Clear, do not tear. Take, do not drain. A seep emptied in greed would silt and sulk for days; a seep tended gently would give again by morning. Naya set the order herself, skins and clay pots filled in turn, no family twice before every family once.
It was near the second spring, behind the red rocks, that the neighbors found them. Tomas Reyes came on foot, leading a mule gone ribby, with his wife Elena behind him and their two small sons walking in the dust with cracked lips. Their well, over the ridge on their little ranch, had gone to mud that morning. Tomas did not beg. He stood with his hat in his hands and said the thing plainly, which Naya respected more than begging.
"We have nothing for the animals by tonight," he said. "The children, we can carry a little longer."
From her own people, Naya felt the silence tighten. Water found on Apache routes, in Apache memory, in a dry year, was not a small thing to share. Reyes was no friend in particular. But her grandmother's voice was plain in her, too: a spring does not ask a thirsty man's name.
"Half of this filling," Naya said, in Apache first, so her own people heard it from her and not after. "Not from our portion. From the spring's. We take less today so the spring gives more tomorrow, and they take only what children and beasts need to live."
Old Ana, who had known the grandmother, nodded once. That ended it. Micah, she noticed, said nothing at all in the deciding, though the mule and the labor were partly his. He only lifted a filled skin onto Elena's mule and checked the strap twice, the way a man does who intends a load to arrive.
Elena Reyes wept without sound when the first skin was full. She pressed Naya's hand between both of hers and promised beans when their patch came in, if it came in, and Naya told her the debt was to the spring: come to it gently, and never with a shovel.
They were filling the last pots when the youngest boy, pointing up the ridge, asked what the shining was.
Sunlight struck glass and brass on the skyline. Three men stood there beside a tripod, its legs splayed like a thin black insect, and a fourth walked a measured line with a chain that flashed as it paid out. They made no effort to hide. That was the worst of it. These men worked openly, in good hats, with a canvas shade for their instrument, as if the valley were already a paper in a drawer somewhere and they were only copying it out onto the ground.
Micah had gone still beside her. "Brandt's colors," he said quietly. "That kerchief. Copper company survey, I'd stake my boots."
"They measure our land," Ana said.
"They measure the cut they want for their rail," Micah said. "Through the valley mouth. Through water."
Naya watched the chain flash, link by link, patient as a knife being sharpened in another room. She thought of how a line drawn by men who had never drunk from a seep could be carried into a judge's office and come back heavier than a rifle.
"Finish the water," she said, steady, to the party. "Every pot. We do not hurry for them, and we do not leave a drop of our work undone to please their watching."