They finished in the heat, unhurried, and walked home in single file down the dry river's whispering bed, bearing water like a promise they intended to keep.
Chapter 14
Fever Upriver
The rider came at noon, when the heat stood white over Red Willow Valley and even the dogs had given up the shade for deeper shade. He was a boy from the freight road, fifteen perhaps, on a horse lathered past kindness, and he carried the news the way men carry a coal in bare hands β wanting to be rid of it.
Fever in the copper camp upriver. Not the slow ague that came with bad water, but a burning sickness that took strong miners in two days and left them talking to the dead before they joined them. The company had sent for a doctor from Cedar Flats. The doctor had sent back word that he would not come.
Naya listened with her herb basket on her arm. She heard what the camp did not say in its message. Copper camps kept women and children at their edges like goats at a fence β tolerated, uncounted, and first forgotten when trouble came.
Chief Noche looked at his daughter for a long moment. He did not forbid her. Besides, they both knew a healer who waits to be safe is only a woman with dried leaves.
"Take the gray," he said. "Take Micah Donovan as far as the ridge, if he will go. Beyond that, the sickness must not be carried home on two horses instead of one."
Micah went, when she asked him, without making the asking heavy. He rode as far as the ridge above the camp and there he stopped, as agreed, though everything in his posture said stopping cost him. "You send that boy back if you need anything that hands can carry," he said. "Food. Linen. Me, if it comes to it."
"If it comes to it, I will send," she said, and it was a promise, and they both treated it as one.
The camp stank before she saw it: hot iron, unwashed bodies, sickness in close tents. Perhaps forty souls lived in the rows of canvas and scrap timber below the mine cut, and the fever had moved through them the way fire moves through dry grass, choosing by no rule anyone could plead with. Naya worked as her grandmother and the mission sisters, in their different tongues, had both taught her. Boil what can be boiled. Open the tents to air. Willow bark for the burning, in careful measure. Cool cloths. Small sips, never gulps. And mark who had no one to sit with them, because those were the ones the fever took while the camp was looking elsewhere.
She lost three that first night despite everything, and saved, she thought, perhaps five who would otherwise have gone untended. In the second tent from the creek she found the woman already past saving, though her eyes still opened when Naya wet her lips.
"Rosa," the neighbor woman whispered, supplying the name as the dying now needed others to do. "Her man was killed in the cut last spring. She took in washing."
Rosa's hand moved, not toward the water cup, but groping along the blanket beside her, and Naya understood and looked, and found the child asleep in the tent's far corner, curled around a tin cup like something precious. A little girl, five or six, thin as a reed, her black hair stuck damply to her forehead β with fever or only with the tent's heat, Naya could not yet tell.
"Mine," Rosa breathed, with the last economy of the dying. "Luz. She has β " The breath went out of the sentence and, shortly after, out of her.
Naya sat with the body a moment, because someone should, and because the child was still asleep and deserved a few more breaths of a world in which her mother existed. Then she checked the girl's skin with the back of her hand β warm, not burning β and began, methodically, to do what could be done.
She stayed two days more, until the fever broke in the camp the way a storm breaks, leaving wreckage and a strange, rinsed quiet. She buried Rosa herself, with two miners helping who would not meet her eyes, ashamed that help had come wearing an Apache woman's face and that they had been glad of it. She washed the child and fed her broth a spoon at a time. Luz did not speak. She did not cry. She held the tin cup, and when Naya finally lifted her onto the gray horse, in front of the saddle, the small arms went around her waist with the grip of something that has learned the world drops people.
"No one else?" Noche asked, when she rode in at dusk, though he could see the answer riding before her.
"No one," Naya said. "She has no one else."
"Then she has us," her father said, as simply as a man setting down a stone that would hold a wall. "Until the world argues otherwise."