Josiah took the cloth and tied it at his wrist where all could see it. Aiyana walked him to his horse through the cottonwoods, where the river muttered under the sand. "My father gives you more than safe conduct," she said. "He gives you his belief that one settler can still hear. Do not make him a fool for it." She put her hand briefly over the cloth at his wrist. "When you find who writes this story, Merritt, you will find they have written your name in it too."
Chapter 9
: The Fouled Spring
Aiyana smelled it before she saw the water, on a wind that carried nothing else across the flats but heat and dust. Carrion has a sweetness at the bottom of it that no other rot shares, and it does not belong near a spring. She left her pony in the mesquite and went the last hundred yards on foot, reading the ground as she went: shod prints around the seep, more than one horse, a man's boot with a nick in the heel she filed away in her memory, because a mark remembered is a witness that cannot be frightened silent.
The north spring served six settler families and in a kind season ran clear out of a sandstone lip into a hollowed basin. Now the basin was a dark mirror filmed with grease. A coyote lay in the heart of it, bloated, its tongue black, and around it someone had heaped offal and a second carcass, a calf's head flies walked on like a road. The work had not been done in haste or in hunger. It had been arranged. Aiyana stood looking at it with her anger held very still, because she understood the arrangement perfectly: by noon a settler would ride up, by evening the town would know, and by nightfall men would be saying the Apache had poisoned the water, as if her people, whose own holes had been fouled all summer in just this way, would teach their enemies the trick by demonstrating it on themselves.
She heard the horse before she turned, and knew the rider by the white cloth at his wrist. Josiah Merritt came up the draw and stopped his horse so suddenly at the smell that the animal threw its head. He dismounted and stood where she stood, and what she watched in his face was not surprise. It was recognition, and grief arriving ahead of anger, which told her more about the man than his safe conduct had.
"Nahlin said your water holes were fouled the same," he said. "I believed him. I did not expect to believe him before breakfast on my own side of the line."
"It is meant for your side to find," Aiyana said. "Mine is meant to be blamed for the finding."
"Then we will unmake it before it is found." He rolled his sleeves above the elbow without another word and took the rope from his saddle, and she did not argue, though the work before them was the foulest a human being can do with his hands and both of them knew the sun would make it worse by the hour. They worked without speaking, because speech would have required breath neither wished to spend near that basin. Josiah waded in and got the rope under the coyote's swollen body while Aiyana hauled from the bank, and the carcass came up slow and dripping and obscenely heavy, and they dragged it far from the water and buried it under stones and sand where the digging was cruel work. The offal they carried in a grain sack from his saddle, trip after trip. Then they bailed the basin with his hat and her gourd, bailed until their arms shook, and let the spring do what a spring does, which is forgive slowly.
It was in the deepest part of the silence, both of them kneeling in wet sand with their hands raw, that she became aware of being watched. She had known for some minutes. On the ridge above the draw Itza sat his pony motionless, a figure cut out of the bright sky, and his fury came down the slope more plainly than a shout. He had followed her. He had seen her kneel in the mud beside a settler, cleaning a settler spring with her bare hands, and in his eyes it was not work she was doing. It was surrender, performed at noon.
She rose and lifted one hand to him, neither plea nor command, only acknowledgment. He wheeled his pony so hard it nearly sat back on its haunches and was gone in a rattle of stone.
"He will tell the camp," she said.
"Let him," Josiah said, wringing out his shirt into the sand. "It is true, what he will tell. We did this." He looked at the basin, where the water coming up out of the rock now ran clear over their disturbance, cloudy still but clearing at the edges. "What I cannot fathom is the meanness of the scale. It takes no profit to spoil a spring."