Chapter 3 · Chapter 3

The skins began to fail on the fourth day out of the reeds, and on the fifth they were finished.

This is the fifth day as he gave it to me afterward, and I have set it down in his order, with nothing added.

It happens quietly. A man lifts a goatskin by its legs and the thing hangs slack in his hands, and he shakes it, and what comes out is dust and a smell of old iron, and he says nothing, and the next man lifts his. By the time the sun stood overhead the column had stopped of its own accord, without an order given, the way a body stops when there is no blood left in it to spend.

Ahead, where the road bent around a shelf of black rock, there was a cistern. They smelled it before they saw it — wet stone, and the green, cool smell of a place where water sits and does not move.

It had a keeper. A man sat on the stone lip with a spear laid across his knees and a copper bowl at his foot, and behind him the mouth of the well, with its rope and its leather bucket going down into the dark. He was not of the column and he was not afraid of it. His own tents stood off to the side, low and brown, and his camels had the fat of good grazing along their humps.

The riders went first, and paid. Then those who had something to pay with. The keeper took coin, and cloth, and a knife with a horn handle, and he portioned out the water with the bowl and did not fill it. Nobody argued. There is no argument at a well; there is only the price.

Then Zachari stepped forward, and he had not been standing in the line at all.

The ring on his hand was Shirin's, from her father's house, before the years went thin: silver, worn thin at the shank, a flat green stone in a bed of four claws. Every tent in the column knew it. He had not once been seen to look at it.

He set it on the keeper's palm. The keeper turned it, weighed it, bit the silver at the edge, and looked at the stone a moment the way a man looks at a thing he does not need. Then he dipped the bowl and poured it two-thirds and no more, and Zachari took it in both hands.

He did not drink. He carried it, with care, stepping around the stones rather than over them, to the shade of the bales where Shirin sat, and he held it out to her, and she drank it to the last of the film in the bottom, and he stood over her with his empty hands.

The keeper laughed. He said the ring had bought a woman's mouth, and that a man ought to have better sense than to trade silver for what another person could swallow.

Shimon had not moved through any of it. He stood with his arms folded and his weight on one hip, watching the bowl go from the keeper's hand to his father's to his mother's, and when the laughing was done he said, mildly, and loud enough to be heard by the men nearest him: "She has better teeth than the stone. My father got the better of the trade."

Nobody laughed. That was the whole of it — nobody laughed, and the keeper stopped laughing, and Zachari looked at his son across the camp with the flat, patient face of a man who has heard this tone before and has no answer left for it.

He gave me the rest of it later, when the papers were already his to keep, in the flat voice a man uses for a day he has already survived. The column sat down that night with dry skins and a mouthful each, and the account of the water was brought out, and no one would put a hand to it.

The man who kept the account had been paid in another man's silver, and the men who had stood near enough to hear had either laughed or not laughed, and either way would not write it down.

So he wrote it himself. Silver ring, flat green stone, four claws, shank worn thin. One bowl, two-thirds full. Paid at the black rock cistern in the afternoon. He did not put the joke in. He put the price in, and where the account asks who paid, he wrote Zachari son of Arob, and beneath that the woman's name, Shirin, in the smaller space, because a thing paid for belongs to the one who drank it.

Where the account asks who witnessed, he left the line white.

And when he had finished telling it he turned the cup a while in his hand and said, "My father will have forgotten it by the second well. My mother will not. One of the two of them ought to be able to look it up and see what it cost her."

I wrote that down too, in my own hand, under his, because a thing witnessed by no one still wants a second line beneath it.