Chapter 4: A Council of Thirst
That night the council fire was lit small, because wood was nearly as precious as water, and the people gathered in a wide circle to decide what to do with the stranger.
Silas sat outside the circle, where a guest who has not been granted trust must sit, and laid his day's findings before them. Three stones, showing how the rock tilted. A twist of roots. The willow wand. And in a shallow bowl, the cool damp sand from the wash, which Taklish passed from hand to hand so every elder could squeeze it and judge.
Joseph spoke first, hot as his years. "He is a white man alone, which no white man is for long. Behind him will come others. Bragg's men guard the wells now and speak of papers and of owning. If this one finds water under our valley, whose name will be on the paper then? I say drive him out while his rifle still lies in our dust."
"Bragg's men," said a woman from across the fire, "did not offer our children their last bottle."
Old Marta turned her eyes, which missed very little, toward Saya's silence. "The healer has not spoken. The water is under her hand. Let us hear the one who carries the gourd to the dying."
All faces turned. Saya rose.
"I do not trust him," she said. "Let no one mistake my meaning. His hands are clever hands, but clever hands built the forts and wrote the papers that have taken every valley ever promised to us forever. He speaks of damp sand, and I felt it, and it was cool, and I will not deny a true thing even from an enemy's palm. But hope is also a ration, Grandfather. If we spend it on this man's reading, and the wash gives us only deeper dust, we will be weaker than if we had spent those days walking out to the river country while the horses can still walk."
A murmur went around the fire, for she had named the choice haunting every lodge: to stay and trust the valley, or leave it to Bragg and beg mercy on a long road the old people could not make.
"And yet," Saya said, and her voice changed, as a path changes at a fork, "my nephew asked this man if water lies under the ground, and he did not swear that it does. He said he had found it in dry places, and failed in kinder ones, and any man who swore more was selling something. No white man who came smiling to this valley ever admitted he could fail. I distrust his errand. I cannot yet distrust his honesty. A healer learns to keep different sicknesses apart."
She sat down, hands folded hard, because she had argued against half her own heart for giving an enemy's son a chance, and was not sure Tomi's thirst had not done the arguing for her.
Taklish was silent a long while. The fire sank. Beyond the lodges a horse stamped, and Tomi slept leaning against Old Marta with his empty cup still in his hand.
At last the chief spoke.
"When I was young, men sealed certain things in this valley that are not spoken of at a fire where strangers sit." He looked at Silas steadily, though he said no more of it, and Silas lowered his gaze as if he understood a door had been shown to him but not opened. "That is for another night. Tonight the question is smaller. A thirsty people need not trust a man forever. It needs only to lend him its eyes for a little while, and watch where his feet go."
He raised his staff and set its foot in the dust.
"Silas Hart, you shall have three days. No more. You will dig where the council permits and nowhere else. You will sleep where Joseph can see you, and Joseph will work beside you, so every spadeful is witnessed. You will drink what Saya measures to you, no more than any man of this camp. If at the end of three days you have found only damp sand and fine speeches, you will take your rifle and ride out, and no hand here will be raised against you, for you gave a child water when you had little, and that debt is paid in safe passage."
"And if I find water, Grandfather?" Silas asked.
"Then," said Taklish, "we shall learn what kind of man you are on the far side of being believed, which is a harder country than this one. Men have been ruined by it before."
Silas bowed his head. "Three days is a fair measure. I accept it, and the watching, and the ration. I would think poorly of any people who offered a stranger more, having buried as many promises as you have."
Joseph rose without a word and went to fetch the pick and the shovel from the stranger's saddle, and carried them himself to the edge of the western wash, so the work, and the watching, could begin with the first light.