Chapter 3
: The Woman Who Came Thirsting
She came again the way she had come the first time, at dusk, on foot, out of the arroyo where the shadows gathered first. Josiah was drawing the evening bucket when the cattle lifted their heads together, and he set the bucket down and stood still, and after a moment he saw her at the gate, waiting to be seen. That was her courtesy. She could have come to the well unseen. She chose to be met.
Two summers before, in 1875, she had come half-dead of thirst, her dress torn by brush, her feet wrapped in rags, her lips split. She had spoken no English that first hour, or had not chosen to, and he had given her water a mouthful at a time, until sense came back into her eyes. Only when she could stand had she told him who she was. Aiyana, daughter of Nahlin, who led the council of her people. She had been traveling between camps when her horse died of a snakebite two days out, and she had walked. She had thanked him formally, and gone before full dark. He had not expected to see her again.
Now she stood at his gate at thirty, straight and spare in the fading light, an empty waterskin over her shoulder, her hair bound back, a knife at her belt. Josiah opened the gate.
"You are welcome," he said. "The cup is where it was."
"I remember the cup." She spoke English carefully, each word set down like a stone in a crossing. "You keep it for anyone."
"For anyone."
She drank, not desperately this time, but with the steady thirst of a person who has rationed herself across a dry day. She washed the dust from her face at the trough and stood looking at the ruin, without asking about it. Then she filled her waterskin at the well, slowly, by cupfuls, and the water sounded cold in the skin.
"You walk far again," Josiah said.
"Not so far. My father's camp is beyond the second ridge since the soldiers moved us from the river meadows." Her mouth tightened at that. "I came because I would rather carry this word myself than let it come to you wrong from another mouth."
"Someone is making signs," she said. "Three times this month, signs of raids where no raid was. A fence down near the crossing, and arrows left broken in a line, all of one making, all fletched alike, as our arrows are not. A calf killed above the river and left, and beside it a moccasin print pressed deep — but the ground everywhere else was hard, Josiah Merritt. A print cannot be deep where the earth is stone, unless a man kneels and works it in with his hand, as a man sets a stamp in wax."
"You've seen these yourself."
"I am a tracker. My father sends me to look, because I read sign and because, when the council must speak to settlers, I am one of its speakers." She glanced east, where Voss's grazing land ran to the horizon. "My brother Itza says no speaking will matter. He is twenty-four and has buried cousins who did nothing but be found near a settler's loss. He distrusts settlers the way a burned hand distrusts a stove. Nahlin is sixty-five and tired of choosing between hunger and the soldiers. The council fears a manufactured war — small angers built one upon another, until a real shot is fired and no one can say by whom, and then the soldiers come and the valley is emptied."
Josiah thought of the door barred from outside, and said nothing of it. Not yet. It surprised him how near the words came, after five years in the dark, and how he held them back anyway, out of habit.
"If the raids are staged," he said, "who gains?"
"Whoever wants this valley cleared of both of us, perhaps. Our camps, your small ranches. Water does not change hands while men who will not sell are alive and believed." She tied off the waterskin. "I tell you because you gave me water when you did not know me, and because your well is spoken of in my father's camp as a true place. Watch the signs you are shown. Read them twice. A track can be made to lie by the man who leaves it, if he thinks you will not kneel down close."
The light was going blue now, and a wind had come up the arroyo, smelling of dust and creosote. She settled the skin on her shoulder.
"I'll walk with you to the ridge," he said.
"No. If I am seen leaving with an escort, the seeing will be used. Alone is safer, and I know the dark better than you." For the first time something like humor crossed her face. Then it was gone. "The next sign will be bigger than a fence. That is the way of such work. It grows until men stop looking close at all."