By the third morning after the fire, the water in the cistern had sunk to a dark ring no wider than a wagon wheel, warm and thick with dust. Saya measured it with a notched willow stick, and her face told the camp more than words could. There would be enough, if every soul took only a mouthful, until nightfall. After that, nothing but cracked earth and prayer.
The children did not cry anymore. That frightened Silas more than weeping would have. They sat in the thin shade with heads bowed, too weary to chase lizards between the stones. Tomi held his wooden cup in both hands and did not lift it, as if saving the asking itself for later. Old Marta lay with her eyes half open, and when Saya knelt beside her, she only shook her head.
"It is the young who must drink," Marta whispered. "I have had my rivers."
"You have had no such thing," Saya said fiercely, and tipped the cup herself.
Silas's own ration stood in a tin dipper by the cistern, no more than a swallow and a half, caught before sunrise so it would be cool. His throat had closed to a burning passage, and his hands trembled when he looked at them.
He carried the dipper, steady as he could, to where Tomi sat.
"Here, son," he said.
Tomi looked up, his eyes too large for his face. "That is yours, Mr. Silas. Auntie said every man gets his own, even you. Especially you, because you dig."
"Well, now," Silas said, crouching though the world tilted a little, "a man who is mostly sitting in shade giving orders about digging can spare his. A growing boy cannot. Drink it slow."
Tomi drank in three careful swallows, then turned the cup upside down, solemn as a judge, to show there was no more, and Silas laughed, though it came out mostly breath.
There was still Hosteen to see to. The old man had not risen in two days. His portion had been spilled that morning by a girl whose hands shook too hard to hold the gourd. No one had blamed her, nor replaced it, for there was nothing to replace it with.
Silas asked if aught remained in the skin bottle kept for the sick. Saya came with it, light as a bird's wing.
"There is one drink in it," she said. "I was keeping it for you. Do not argue with me, Silas Hart. You fell at the shaft yesterday and said it was the sun. It was not the sun."
"Then give it to Hosteen," he said, "and we will call that no argument at all, only sense."
Her eyes flashed, but she went. Silas knelt while she lifted the old man's head and let water cross his lips a thread at a time. Hosteen drank, and caught at Silas's sleeve with fingers like dry twigs.
"Your father," he said, in halting English, "he had the same foolish heart. Good foolish."
Silas went still. But the old man's eyes had closed in sleep.
That afternoon Silas walked the channel line once. Halfway back, the red mesas leaned sideways in his sight. The ground rose and took him, and the last thing he knew was Tomi's small hand striking at his shoulder, and the wooden cup rolling empty in the dust.
He woke in darkness to the taste of water, given drop by drop from a cloth. When he tried to sit, a firm hand pressed him back.
"My share," Saya said. "Mine. Do not dishonour me by refusing it."
"I am the healer of this camp, and you are my patient," she said, when he tried to protest. "That is the end of the talking."
So he drank until the cloth was dry.
"You gave it all away," she said at last. "Yours, and the sick bottle too, near enough. Tomi told me. Why?"
"Because a woman asked me for water once," Silas said, his voice a rasp, "on a road in Texas, when there was none left that could save her. Her name was Clara. She was my wife."
Saya was quiet a long while.
"We were crossing to her sister's in a dry year," he said. "The wagon broke an axle forty miles from the river. She was carrying our child, and the sickness was on her. I gave her the last of the canteen and walked for help. I was gone eleven hours, and in eight years I have never made those hours come out any road but the one they took." He stopped. "I do not give water away to be noble, Saya. I know exactly what the last ration costs, and I will not watch a boy pay it while I stand by with a full dipper."
She took his hand then, work-rough and fever-hot as it was, and held it between both of hers like something the camp had entrusted to her keeping.
"Then live," she said. "Drink my share and live, Silas Hart. Tomorrow we go down into the earth again, and you will show me where your father's water sleeps."
Chapter 22: The Marked Chamber