"Then I had better be worth her trouble," Silas said, and lay down with his hat over his eyes, and dreamed of a dark weeping in a canyon wall, and under it, faint and far below, the sound of water moving where no water should be.
Chapter 8: Bees Over Burned Ground
They set out before the sun cleared the mesas โ Saya, Silas, and Joseph, with Tomi trotting behind until his aunt sent him back with a look. What water they carried would fit in a single canteen, and Saya carried it, which Silas understood to be both practical and a judgement.
Taklish had spoken the word at dawn. "Walk the north ground," the old chief had said. "Walk it whole, even the burned place. If water hides from us, it will hide where men stopped looking."
The burned grove lay beyond the last of the camp's grazing, where lightning had struck years before and fire had taken a stand of mesquite down to blackened bones. The people passed it rarely. Old Marta said the ground there remembered fire the way a scar remembers a knife, and the trees stood like ribs of something that had died standing up.
"You do not like this place," Silas said to Saya.
"I do not like any place where things burned and nothing came back," she said. "Everywhere else, even in drought, something tries. Here, nothing tries."
"Or something is trying where we cannot see it," Silas said, and pointed with his chin. "Look there. Tell me what you see that does not belong."
At first there was only ruin: ash-gray earth, charred trunks, a raven picking through old charcoal. Then Saya's eyes, healer's eyes, trained to find one green leaf among a hundred brown, caught what his had caught. Bees. A line of them, low and purposeful, crossing the grove and dropping โ not scattering, dropping, the way bees drop at evening toward water โ behind a tumble of fallen rock at the grove's heart.
"Bees do not lie," Silas said quietly. "My father wrote it in his book. A bee will fly miles for a flower, but she flies straight and heavy when she has found drink. Those bees are laden, Miss Saya. They have been somewhere wet this morning, close by."
"There is no wet here," Joseph said, but to the grove, not to Silas, and his hand had left his knife, which for Joseph was a kind of listening.
They followed the line on foot, slow, the way trackers follow sign. Over the grove the swallows had come too, though swallows had abandoned the dry wash weeks before โ stitching the air low over the blackened trees, dipping toward the same quarter, snatching at insects that rose only where the air held damp. Silas stopped often to kneel and lay his palm flat on the ash, eyes closed, while Saya watched his face instead of the ground.
"There," he said at last, and she came and looked where his hand rested.
A line of grass ran through the grove like a green seam sewn into black cloth โ no wider than a man's forearm, but greener than anything that had grown in Caldera Flats in seventy days. It did not follow any wash, nor run downhill as rain-fed green must run. It crossed the slope as if it followed some road beneath the earth that fed it root by root.
"It should not be here," Saya said slowly. "Nothing feeds this. The rain has not fallen." She knelt, pulled a blade, and split it with her thumbnail, and the heart of it was moist and pale. "It drinks from below."
"From below," Silas agreed. "Shallow below, maybe, or deep and leaking upward along a crack in the stone. But water walks this ground under our feet, Miss Saya. I would stake what little I own on it โ a broken compass and an old book โ so stake your own judgement beside it."
For the first time since he had ridden into camp, she almost smiled. It was quickly governed, but Joseph saw it, and looked away as if he had witnessed something private.
They fanned out then and searched the grove properly, and it gave up its small testimony like a witness who has waited years to be asked. Lichen on the north face of a boulder, dark and living. Earth under a fallen trunk where Silas's knife came up clean and cool-smelling. Ants in a column, carrying their burdens toward the rocks at the grove's centre.
"My grandfather brought me here once," Saya said suddenly, among the charred trees. "When I was small enough to ride in front of his saddle. He told me some things in this valley were hidden the way a mother hides a child โ not lost. Hidden. I thought it was a story to make me sleep."
"Stories in a dry country are often maps that learned to sing," Silas said. "My father used to say that too."
Above them the bees kept their road through the burning air, patient as scripture; and Saya stood looking at the green seam running toward the fallen rocks, and for the first time let herself think the thought she had forbidden since the cistern failed.