Chapter 15: Digging Together
The answer to sabotage, Saya decided before the sun was fully up, was not a guard. It was a crowd.
"A hole one man digs can be filled in a night," she said, standing on the spoil heap with her hair bound back for work. "A hole the whole camp digs belongs to the whole camp, and a man who fills it must fight the whole camp to do it. So we do not repair Silas Hart's shaft. We dig our own, all of us, too big and too loved to kill."
She organised the valley the way she organised a sickroom, completely and without leaving any soul a place to hide. The strongest men took the shaft in turns of one hour, no more, for a man who digs past his strength is spending tomorrow's water today. Joseph Bane led the first turn, swinging as if Kane's face were at the bottom of every stroke. White Clay led the second, digging with the ferocity of a man paying off a public shame. The women took the channel: a long, shallow road for the water, running from the grove down toward the dry cistern. The grandmothers lined its bed with flat stones, fitting them close as teeth. The children carried the spoil away in baskets, a laughing ant-line, Tomi at their head.
And Silas, a man accustomed to digging alone, found himself everywhere and in charge of almost nothing, which was Saya's genius. He set the levels with his father's compass and a plumb line. He showed Joseph how to timber a wall, and Joseph showed him how Apache men brace a cut with mesquite root. He went up and down the channel tapping stones, adjusting a gradient by the width of a finger, for water will not climb even a finger's height to please a careless man.
"You fuss," Saya said at noon, bringing the ration round, a measured swallow for every worker, poured from the gourd that the trickle in the cave, fetched twice a day by lantern now, kept barely alive.
"I fuss at the size of a fallen leaf," he said. "Water notices what men call nothing. My father said a channel is a promise you make to a river before you have met it, and it keeps you to the letter."
"Your father said a great many things for a man in a notebook." She poured his swallow last and watched him drink it, a free man working for no wage in a camp that had doubted him at sunrise. "Did your father say what a camp should do with such a man?"
"He said take his measure slow, and feed him if he stays."
Something crossed her face then that was not the healer and not the chief's granddaughter. She brushed the dust from his cheek with her thumb, once, as wiping a child's face, and went back up the line, and Silas understood that some sound in him, long dry, had been struck like a stone and had rung.
The respect between the men came harder and therefore truer. It came at the third turn of the afternoon, when the shaft, cleared of Kane's mischief and sunk two feet deeper than it had ever stood, showed a wall seam that wanted watching, and Joseph called for the well-digger, not with Belagana or white man but with a name.
"Hart," he called. "Hart, come and put your hand on this earth and tell me if she is honest."
Silas went down the rope into the smell of cold stone and new mud, stood shoulder to shoulder with his watcher-turned-fellow, put his palm where Joseph's palm had been, and felt the faint, deep tremor water makes in rock when it is near and gathering.
"She is honest," he said. "She is better than honest. She is close."
Joseph nodded once. Then he took the amulet of braided horsehair from his own neck and tied it around the shaft's main timber. "For the hole," he said. "So it knows whose it is. All of ours." He looked at Silas sidelong, abashed. "If you speak of this above, I will say you dreamed it in the sun."
"I will keep the secret," Silas said gravely, "to my grave."
They worked until the light failed. No one had to be driven. At dusk the trickle had not failed but run a finger's width stronger, as though the spring approved of being wanted by many hands. Taklish walked the channel at evening on Marta's arm, an old king inspecting a road built for a guest not yet arrived, and at the cistern he looked into its cracked, empty bowl, then back along the stone-lined road to the grove.
"Forty years I have known this valley thirsty," he said to everyone. "I did not know it was only waiting for us to dig toward each other."
That night the camp posted no guard. It posted the whole camp, awake in turns, singing low around small fires along the channel, so that any man with spurs would have had to walk through music.