It was no flood. It was a fist. Brown and white and bellowing, chest deep in a heartbeat, slamming through the cave from back to front and taking everything. Lanterns, bowls, bracelets, gold. It hit Ror and Dashka together like a runaway freight wagon.
Dashka dropped under just the way I'd told her. Slid out of his arm like a trout out of a fist. Ror went over backward off his feet, still holding the sack. I jammed myself against the rock beside the entrance. Tavana with me, my arm locked around her waist.
The water tore at us both. Her rifle never came down. Ror came past us in the torrent. right past, close enough to touch, clawing at the wall with one hand, the other arm still hooked through the strap of that sack, the gold dragging him under like an anchor chain. Tavana's rifle tracked him, steady now, dead on his forehead. One squeeze, one month. 37 graves, she lowered it.
I don't know if he saw. I pray he did. I lunged, got a fist in his collar, held on. The river hauled at the two of us like it meant to have us both. Let go of the sack, Thaddius.
Let go of it. He looked at me, water sheeting over his face. Then he looked at the sack at the gold, and I watched him make up his mind, his fingers tightened on the strap. It's mine. The river tore his collar out of my hand, swept him through the cave mouth and out into the canyon, out into the brown roaring flood running down toward the open desert.
I saw his hand come up once, still hooked through that strap. Then nothing but water. the water he'd murdered 37 people to own. Dashka broke the surface 20 ft downstream, still inside the cave mouth, both arms wrapped around a shelf of rock, coughing, spitting brown water alive. Tavana was in the current before I could catch her sleeve, fighting it shoulder first toward her sister. I went in after the both of them, and the three of us dragged each other up onto the high rubble by the entrance and lay there in the rain, heaving like spent horses, while the river thundered past below us full of a hundred years of gold.
Dashka rolled onto her side and watched it go. Ball's bracelets, a breastplate turning over and over like a leaf. The spot where Ror had disappeared. Our grandfather's gold, I'm sorry. Do not be.
She coughed and wiped her mouth. It goes where it was always going, back into the land, and it took him along, a long breath. The grandfathers were very practical men. Tavana hadn't said a word. She sat on the rubble with the rifle across her knees and the rain running off her hair, staring at the water.
And then her hands began to shake. Not a little, all of her, like a cottonwood in a wind you can't feel. I sat down beside her. Didn't touch her, just sat. I had him.
Her voice was very small. One month I have dreamed of that one moment. I had him. Boon, I know. I did not lower it for him.
Understand that. Not for him. Then for who? She turned her head, looked at me with eyes I'd never seen before. Wet and furious and open all the way down.
For the woman my father raised. He would not have known the other one. I put my arm around her. Then she let me, and she wept into my wet coat for the first time since I'd cut her down from the tree, long and hard and nearly silent, while her sister watched the river and pretended not to hear, and the storm walked off, South grumbling like an old man who'd lost an argument. By midday, the canyon water had dropped enough to wade.
We found Ro's black standing where he'd abandoned it at the canyon mouth, shivering rain dripping off the silver horn of that saddle. I took the res. It came along easy. Horses don't hold a grudge for the men who ride them. It was late afternoon when we rode back under the cottonwood.
Puit sat against the trunk of that old tree. Right under the cut end of the rope that had been meant for me, his shoulder bound tight in strips of somebody's shirt. Yona's work neat as a seam, his face the color of candle wax. Kane sat on a rock 10 ft off with the sharps across her knees, watching him the way a hawk watches a field mouse. Wesley beside her, Isha cleaning a rifle and humming.
Lon Spivy lay on his belly in the sand nearby, wrists ironed behind him with my own spare cuffs, which Isha had plucked from my saddle bag with a great deal of satisfaction. Most of the hired men were gone. The few who'd stayed had stacked their rifles and sat in a row along the creek bank like school boys kept after class hats in their hands. Kane saw the empty saddle on the black horse first. She stood up, didn't speak, just looked at Tavana, and Tavana shook her head once.
Kane sat back down slowly, like something heavy had been lifted off her shoulders, and she didn't yet know how to carry herself without it. Yona bowed her head and spoke a few words in their own tongue, very low. Isha stopped humming, put down the rifle, put her face in her hands. Nobody cheered. That's what I remember.
Not one of them cheered. Puit looked from their faces to the empty saddle. He understood Thaddius. The rivers got him and all your gold. My He laughed weak, sour.
It was never my gold. I never gave a damn for the gold, Boon. It was the water. The water was the whole future of this territory. The water was never yours either, Amos.