wanted for holding and soothing, which he was good at — eleven years of
cavalry had made him fluent in horses if in nothing else the valley valued. It
was on the herd ground, the second week, that an old woman he did not
know appeared beside him at the pickets with a bowl she did not offer him,
studied him a long moment, and said — Pahket translating afterward,
beaming — that he had a herdsman's patience and a guilty man's sleep, and
that the second of these would mend if the first held. He thought about that
through two nights of walking the pickets. He had been assessed by generals
in fewer words, and never so accurately.
Waneka he saw only at the work of healing, in those first weeks — the
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council's design, Seeka's design, plain as a fence: the chosen man and the
chief's daughter did not court in the valley's sight; they worked in it. She was
called, the second week, to a child in the far lodges who had fallen from a
pony and broken his forearm against a root, and because the boy's mother
was screaming louder than the boy and hands were needed, Pahket delivered
Micah to the lodge door with the basin and the bundle of splints and bark
cloth like a man delivering equipment. Inside, in the close warm dark,
Waneka set the arm. Micah held the basin. He held the boy's good hand
when he was told to. He watched her hands do their work — the way she
tested the break with a touch so graduated it seemed she was listening
through her fingers, the way she spoke to the child in a low unhurried stream,
half of it words and half of it tone, so that the boy's breathing slowed to
match hers; the way she pulled the bone true in one motion so clean that the
boy's cry came a breath after the pain had already peaked and begun to ebb,
and was more surprise than agony. She bound the arm between the splints
with bark cloth and sinew, her knots small and exact, and through the whole
of it she never once performed gentleness. That was what he filed away,
holding the basin like an altar boy, the steam of the water going up between
them: she was not gentle the way kind people are gentle, as a quality of the
heart. She was gentle the way a good scout is quiet — as a discipline, a
mastered thing, a strength kept deliberately at low water so that what was
frightened could approach and drink. He had seen officers try to command
that quality into existence in themselves and fail. She had it the way she had
her own name. When it was done she rinsed her hands in his basin and
looked at him properly for the first time since the fire, and said, in her careful
agency English, "You did not flinch at the wrong moment. Men do, usually.
They flinch with their whole body, and the child feels it." It was not praise,
exactly. It was a healer's note on an assistant. Micah carried it out of the
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lodge like a coal in a pot, aware of its ridiculous warmth, and Pahket, waiting
outside with the air of a man who sees everything, said, "You held a basin. In
my grandfather's time men courted with horses," and Micah said, "In my
grandfather's time they did too. The basin is new," and Pahket laughed so
loud the boy's mother came to the lodge door to glare at them both, which
only made it worse.
Kweo's cold war opened so quietly that for two days Micah did not
understand he was in it. His mare — the strayed horse he had come into the
valley hunting, the whole accidental hinge of his life — had been found by
Kweo's herders ranging north and brought in, and she was returned to him at
the herd ground in the morning with a formality that had witnesses. She came
to him glossy and well-kept, her coat brushed out, her tail combed — and her
mane worked into the tight, handsome braids that the band put on a horse
that was being given in ceremony, a gift-mare's dressing. And she was
barefoot. Her shoes, the iron shoes a cavalry farrier had set in September, had
been drawn cleanly, nail by nail, the holes still dark in the hoof wall. Micah
stood with her head against his shoulder and read the gesture the way it had
been written. A courtesy and an insult in the same act, braided as neatly as
the mane: we cared for your horse as a guest's horse should be cared for —
and we have taken the iron off her, soldier, the iron your people's horses
wear into our country, and given you back a horse of the valley, soft-footed,
unfit for a hard road, unfit for running. If he was offended, he would have to
say aloud which half of the gift had offended him, and either answer made
him small. He understood it precisely, and he understood also that Kweo,
who had stood off by the herd with his arms folded and watched the return
without approaching, had composed the message personally, the way a man
composes a letter he hopes will be read at a council fire. So Micah read it,
and answered it in kind, in the open: he thanked Kweo across the herd
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ground, in English and then in his halting new words, loudly enough for the
herders to hear, for the care of the mare and for the braiding, which he said
— with a straight face and a craftsman's nod — was finer work than any
farrier in Fort Stanton could do. He did not mention the shoes. Kweo's face,
at the distance, did something complicated, and he inclined his head the exact
fraction a man inclines it to an opponent who has declined to be insulted
correctly. The herders grinned into their hands. Pahket, at Micah's elbow,
whispered with awe, "That was well done. He will have to think of
something worse," and Micah said, "That's what I'm afraid of," and led his