Chapter 1: The Empty Cistern
The sun came up white over Caldera Flats, as it had for seventy-one mornings, and found nothing left to pity.
No cloud had crossed the sky in all that time. No rain had darkened the dust. The red mesas held the heat through the night and gave it back at dawn. The earth had cracked into hard plates, and the wind moved a fine red powder that settled in the eyes and in the folds of every blanket.
At the center of the camp stood the cistern.
It had been dug by grandfathers and lined with flat stone, wide as a wagon bed and deep as a tall man. In good years children had leaned over its rim and seen their own faces in black, sweet water. Now Saya Taklish knelt beside it with a gourd and scraped, gently, because there was nothing left to scoop.
The gourd came up with mud. A mouthful, perhaps two, brown and thick.
She carried it as carefully as lamp oil, past lodges where women shook out blankets gray with dust, past the horse pen where the animals stood with heads low and ribs showing, to the shade where the old ones sat. Old Marta took the gourd without a word, wet her lips, and passed it on. Each elder took no more than a swallow. That was the law Saya had laid down when the water began to fail, and no one, not even the chief, had broken it.
"How much remains in the jars?" Chief Taklish asked.
At sixty-eight his hair was iron gray and braided, his face cut deep by sun and sorrow, but his eyes were still clear, and they rested on his granddaughter with a tenderness he showed to no other living soul.
"The clay jars hold perhaps a day, if we are careful," Saya said. "The skins, less. The horses must go without again."
"And the little ones?"
"I keep their share back until noon."
Taklish nodded slowly, as a man nods at weather he cannot bargain with. He did not promise rain. He had never been a chief who promised what he could not believe, and the people loved him for it and feared it in equal measure, for when Taklish was silent, the trouble was real.
It was then that Tomi came.
He was seven years old, Saya's nephew, orphaned the winter his mother took fever, and since that day he had slept in Saya's lodge and followed her like a second, smaller shadow. He carried his wooden cup in both hands. His father had carved it from mesquite root before he died, and the boy would drink from no other vessel, as if the cup itself were a kind of keeping.
He stood before the chief, his great-grandfather, and held the cup out. His lips were cracked. Dust clung to the sweat above them.
"Grandfather," he said, "is there water today?"
The camp did not stop, but it hushed. Women paused over their work. Joseph Bane, Saya's cousin, young and proud and already angry at the sky, turned from the horse pen to listen.
Taklish took the cup in his old hands. He held it a long moment, looking down into its empty hollow as men look into a dry well, as if an answer might be found at the bottom.
"Not yet, little hawk," he said at last. "The scouts went out before light. When they return, we will know."
"Will they bring water in their skins?"
"If the earth gives it, they will."
Tomi considered this with the gravity of a judge. "Then I will wait beside the cistern," he said, "so I am first to see." He sat down in the dust at the rim, cup in his lap, and set his face toward the northern trail, and no one had the heart to move him.
Saya laid a hand on his hair. Her own throat ached. As healer she read suffering everywhere now: in the elders' coughing, in a baby whose mother had too little milk, in horses that no longer whickered at dawn.
Near midday the heat stood still as hammered iron. Then a shout came from the lookout rock.
The scouts rode in one by one, three men on blown horses, their water skins slung loose and flat across their saddles. No one needed to ask. A full skin bulges and knocks against a horse's flank. An empty one lies like a sleeve.
The last rider slid down and shook his head at Taklish. "Miller's Creek is dust, Grandfather. The seep at Antelope Rock is mud, and Bragg's men have put a guard on the well there. We dug with our hands at the river bend until our nails broke. There is nothing."
Tomi was still sitting by the cistern, cup in both hands, watching. Saya crossed to him and knelt, and put the empty cup gently down into the dust beside them both, because there was nothing in all the valley she could pour into it.
Chapter 2: The Rider With Empty Hands