It was a woman's voice, young, dry as paper. Wade stopped fighting, mostly because he had no strength left to spend. He was lying forward against a horse's neck — he could feel the wet hide under his cheek, smell horse and rain and woodsmoke — with his arms loose and his legs dangling useless on either side, tied at the ankle, he discovered, with a strip of something, to keep him from sliding off like a sack of meal. The indignity of it registered faintly. The relief of not being dead registered more.
"My horses," he said. His voice came out scraped raw. "Forty. Bar M. They broke—"
"I have seen your horses' sign," the voice said. "Some. The river has the telling of the rest, and it is not finished. Be still now."
The horse picked its way down the flooded canyon with the patience of long practice, stepping in water, stepping over wreckage, its rider guiding it more with knees than rein. Wade drifted. The sun climbed. At some point the woman stopped the horse in the shallows and came around and lifted his head with one hand and gave him water from a skin, a mouthful at a time, waiting between each for his throat to work, the way you water a man who has been thirsty past sense — not from pity, he understood even then, but from knowledge. She knew how much a drowned man could take. She had done this before.
He tried to see her and got an impression more than a face: dark hair braided back, a wet buckskin shirt, a scar through one eyebrow that made her look like she was asking a question she had already answered. Her eyes went past him to the canyon walls, to the water, to the wrack-line in the brush, reading everything the way he would read a newspaper. Nothing in her manner hurried for his sake, and nothing in it was careless of him. She handled him the way she handled the horse and the river: as facts.
"The camp is below," she said. "My grandmother will say I should have left you on the gravel. She is lying when she says it. She says such things to hear herself be wise."
"Whose camp?" Wade managed.
"Arroyo." She swung up behind him, light as a cat, and settled his weight matter-of-factly against her arm. "Mine. You will eat and you will sleep and you will not die, if you can manage that much."
Midway down the canyon she stopped the horse again, where the water ran clear over gravel in a side pool, and this time she came around and put her hand flat against the side of his head, feeling the place where the rock had kissed him. Her fingers came away with old blood on them, not new. She grunted, the smallest sound, like a woman checking a knot and finding it sound.
"The bone is not broken," she said. "You are lucky in the way of men who are used to being lucky and call it care." She wet a strip of cloth in the pool and bound it around his head with brisk economy, talking all the while to the horse, it seemed, in her own tongue — a low, running commentary that the animal answered once with its ears. "He says you are heavy," she reported. "He says all white men are heavy, even drowned ones. He is a horse of strong opinions."
Wade tried to thank her and produced something that was not words. She considered him a moment, then swung up and gathered the reins, and the world began to rock again.
Below the bend the canyon widened into a valley green as a held breath — a spring, cottonwoods, lodges along the water, horse herds on the grass, smoke rising straight in the still air. It looked like a place the flood had only visited, not owned. Wade saw it the way a man sees shore from a wreck. People came out as they rode in: children first, then women, then men standing at the lodge doors with their arms folded, watching a white stranger come into their valley lashed to their chief's daughter's horse like a found thing.
A very old woman stood waiting at the largest lodge near the spring. She looked Wade over the way a buyer looks over a lame horse — thoroughly and without sentiment — and then said something in her own tongue at which the younger woman answered, short, and the old woman snorted and jerked her chin at the lodge door.
"My grandmother," the rider said, swinging down and beginning to work at the knots at his ankles. "She says a man found by the river belongs to the river until he is dry. You are hers until then. I am Tali."
"Tali," Wade repeated, to fix it. The valley tilted slowly, terribly, like a picture coming off its nail. "Wade Mercer. The horses — if any of them—"
"Are in God's hands and my father's, which are better." Strong hands — hers and another pair — got him down off the horse and half-carried him toward the lodge door, low and dark and smelling of smoke and herbs. "Sleep now, Wade Mercer. The counting comes after."
He wanted to argue. He had forty horses and a contract and debts drawn against all of it, and counting was the only prayer he knew. But the dark of the lodge came up around him warm as held hands, and the last thing he knew was the woman's voice, already turning away to other work: "Grandmother. He will need the cool cloths. And he talks about horses, so he will live."
Chapter 3 — Three Days of Fever
The three days that followed never lay straight in Wade's memory. They came back to him ever after in bright, broken pieces, the way a man remembers a trail ridden in the dark — a smell, a sound, a hand — with the distances between them lost.