Sect Year 3 · eleventh month · night of day 11 · the thirty-third life: Ammel Gorge, her sixteenth year
By the third dry summer running, the lower ford was no longer a ford. It was a field of cracked grey silt with a few pools left in it, each one smaller than the last and each ringed with a white crust that flaked under the feet like old paint. The flies rose off the pools in the afternoons. The herders stopped bringing their dogs down to the water, because the dogs would not drink from it.
Ysha stood at the toll-bar with the tally board under her arm and counted what came up the slope. Goats first, because goats always came first, thin and bony, with their hip bones standing out under the hide. Then the herders, in a line that never got shorter, with empty skins on their shoulders and nothing in their hands.
Then the children, who went around the bar without asking anyone and knelt at the holes where the last water had sunk. They drank from their own cupped palms, and when the palms were empty they licked the wet silt off their fingers.
Garrec had locked the water tank in the spring. The key hung on a cord at his belt beside the switch, and he touched it the way some men touch a purse. “Nobody drinks from the jar without a coin,” he said every morning, to nobody in particular. “The jar belongs…
