Same boy, same giggle, same running feet, slapping away into the dark before he could even wipe his eyes clear. Stopped expecting mercy. Started expecting the water instead, which was its own strange kind of mercy, he supposeded, because a man who knows what's coming can brace for it, and bracing for pain is easier than being surprised by it. His shoulders learned the yoke. His hands learned new calluses over old ones.
Thick pads where the wood rubbed raw, then rubbed raw again, then f finally gave up bleeding and just went numb. His stomach learned to on schedule, which was almost funny if a man still had it in him to laugh. Hunger keeping better time than any church bell he'd ever heard back east. Water in the morning, wood in the afternoon. Whatever broke, he fixed.
Except fixing things wasn't the hard part. The hard part was Kessa. She watched him, always perched somewhere with a knife in her hand and her eyes doing all the cutting instead. He'd feel it on the back of his neck before he ever turned to find her. Some primal animal sense left over from years of scouting.
Some part of his brain that had learned a long time ago, the exact weight of being hunted. "You spilled it again,"her voice flat as the canyon floor. He looked down, half a bucket gone dark into thirsty dust. His arms shook from the climb, from the heat. From 3 weeks of eating less than a man needed to keep standing upright.
I slipped. He said it like an apology. It wasn't one. The water doesn't care why. Kessa's arms crossed.
And go fill it again. I'm doing my best. Your best is weak. No heat in it. Worse than heat, actually.
Just fact delivered flat as a slap. A white man's best is soft. You're used to sitting a horse while the animal does the work. Here you are the animal he wanted to argue. Started to even mouth already halfway open around some bitter reply then stopped himself because arguing with a woman who was one bad morning away from cutting his throat seemed on reflection like a poor use of his remaining breath.
So he picked the bucket back up and climbed again. She watched him go and something small and traitorous flickered behind her eyes. Gone before it could name itself. Not respect. Not yet.
Something smaller than that. Maybe just surprised that he hadn't quit. Men like him always quit in her experience. Or worse. Men like him always ran.
He hadn't done either. Which unsettled her more than she wanted to admit, even to the dark, even to no one. The second week, Tamson started rotating him through the camp like a tool passed hand to hand from one knee to the next. You help Ren, she said one morning, staff tapping the dust-like punctuation on a sentence she hadn't finished yet. Ren was the young mother, gentle where Kessa was sharp, skittish where Kessa was stone.
She led Silas to the camp's secondary well, a deep shaft lined with crumbling stones. It's dangerous. Ren's voice barely above a whisper. The earth falls in. I can't go down there.
Silas looked at the shaft, a death trap, plain as day. If the walls gave while someone was down there, that someone stayed down there forever. Rope, he said. She fetched a coil of braided rawhide. He tied it around his waist, handed the end to her and two other women, and told them the only thing that mattered.
Hold tight. If I shout, pull. Don't hesitate. He lowered himself into the dark. Cool down there.
The smelled of wet earth, which was its own kind of miracle in a country this dry. He worked for hours wedging stones, shoring up crumbling sides, delicate work for hands that had spent three weeks learning to be blunt instead. When he climbed out covered in mud to the elbows, Ren was waiting with a gourd of water. "Thank you,"she said, fingers brushing his as she handed it over. He drank, the water sliding down his throat like something holy. "It's fixed,"he said. "Tell the children to stay away from the edge anyway."Ren smiled. a small fleeting thing gone almost before it arrived. You have good hands, Merrick.
For a white man, the next day it was a trying to drag a bundle of firewood with a knot that kept slipping loose every time the wood caught a rock. He watched her struggle just for a moment, then stepped forward. Let me I don't need help. Eda's glare could have stripped paint. The knots wrong?
It'll slip every time. He knelt anyway. Retied it. a timber hitch, the kind that tightened under load and released clean when it needed to. Try it now, she pulled.
The wood followed, obedient as it hadn't been in an hour. Eda looked at the knot. Then at Silas, the white man knows ropes. A grunt, which from her was practically a parade. Perhaps he is not entirely useless.
Small victory, but it mattered because Tamson wasn't just testing him. She was weaving him into the fabric of the camp's survival, one small task at a time. becoming necessary, which was Silas was starting to understand its own strange kind of freedom. A man who is needed is a man who gets to keep breathing another day. One late afternoon, the heat finally broke, the sun dipping low.
Canyon walls flushed violet in the fading light. Silas sat mending a bridle with a borrowed all. A boy struggled nearby, trying to braid a rawhide lead line, small fingers fumbling with slippery leather. Silas watched, couldn't help himself. "Watch,"he said.