"He's right," Micah said, and felt the words cost him. "The proof is real and it
is thin. It wants the shoe itself off the horse, or the smith's book with the
shoeing written down, or that bay standing in a corral where the
commission's own men can put a hand on it. Ground dries. Ground washes.
What we read here this afternoon, the rain can unwrite by Friday." He stood
up with his knees cracking, and the two trails — the dead man's walk out, the
riders' mill around him — seemed to him suddenly like the two trails at the
horse meadow, one loud, one careful, a story and a fact, except that here the
fact had a name and a bay gelding and a cracked shoe, and the fact was
heavier than the story by exactly the weight of the work it would take to
prove it.
Kweo was quiet a long time, reading the ground the way Micah had read it,
47
the way Waneka had read the arrow — three students of the same text,
coming to the same translation at different speeds. What frightened Micah,
watching him, was not the war leader's anger, which he had learned to
weather like weather. It was the silence of competence recognizing
competence across a gulf neither man had dug: Kweo seeing what Micah
saw, knowing what Micah knew it meant, and understanding — Micah could
watch it arrive on him like weather off the peaks — that a debt had opened
under both of them, owed to a dead man neither of them had liked, payable
in a currency of truth that spent badly in every market either of them knew.
Kweo rode back ahead of them, alone, at a pace that was not quite a gallop,
and did not come to the council fire that night.
Kweo came to him that night at the horse herd, alone, in the hour when the
village had gone down to coals and only the herders and the sleepless were
abroad in the world.
Micah was walking the herd's edge — a duty he had asked for and been
given, which was its own kind of sentence — when the man stepped out of
the dark between two grazing horses with the ease of a man the herd
considered furniture. For one bad second Micah's hand went to a rifle that
was not there, because the herd watch carried no rifle, and Kweo saw the
movement and his mouth did something that was not a smile. He had a knife
at his belt, as every man in the valley had a knife at his belt, and as they
stood facing each other in the horse-smell and the cold he drew it — not fast,
not as a threat is drawn in the stories, but slowly, the way a man takes out a
letter he has decided to read — and held it up between them so the blade took
what light there was, and looked at it a long moment as if consulting it. Then
he put it away. His own choice, made in his own time, with Micah close
enough to see that the choice had cost him something real and that the cost
48
was the point of the whole visit: I was armed with my decision too, and I am
putting mine away also, and neither of us will speak of this as mercy.
"I have been deciding what I am since the choosing fire," Kweo said. "You
believe you know what you are. A man who was ordered to be a husband by
a dream." He said dream the way other men said the word for a debt owed by
the dead. "The whole village watched her walk past every man who had bled
for this valley — past me, Micah Thorne, me, whose father's bones are in the
north field, whose name the old men speak when they need a hard thing done
— and put her hand out to a deserter with dust on his boots and nothing in
his hands. And I have carried that all autumn the way a man carries a stone in
his chest that moves when he breathes. I am not telling you this so you will
carry it too. I am telling you so you will know what the next thing cost me to
say."
He stood a while, listening to the horses tear at the dry grass, and Micah
waited, because waiting was the only grammar he had that was equal to this.
"Ames's man spoke to me," Kweo said. "Not Ames. A man of Ames's,
through the agency interpreter, the fat one who pretends not to understand
insults. Three days before the horses were taken. There were gifts laid out the
way gifts are laid out when they are not gifts: horses, counted. Rifles, better
than the ones your army took from us in the year of the treaty. And a chief's
portion — his word, chief's — of the mining money, when the cession is
signed and the valley opened. What he wanted for it was small, he said.
When the commission sits, the commission will ask whether the young men
of the band want the cession. The old men will say no. The old men always
say no, it is what old men are for. If the war leader of the band stands and
says the young men want the money and the future and the road — the
commission will have its answer in two voices, and the no will be an old
49
man's noise, and the yes will be the future speaking." He paused. "I have not
said no, deserter."
The silence went out into the herd and came back with the sound of horses
breathing.
"I have not said yes. I have not said no. The man thinks my silence is a price
still being counted, and I have let him think it because a man whose answer
can be bought should at least be bought dear. But tonight I read a trail with
you, and I watched a white man's arrow that flies like a thrown stick, and a
shoe I cannot unknow, and I am a war leader of this band and my thinking