stretch. It was boasting, but it was boasting of a formal and courteous kind,
an accounting rendered in public, and the people listened to each accounting
the way men listen to weather reports from a country they all have to live in.
Then the speaker would finish, and the young man would turn — they all
turned the same way, like sunflowers, like iron filings — toward the chief's
daughter, and the fire would settle, and the whole valley would lean an inch
7
nearer.
She thanked them. That was the thing Micah could not get over, even at a
distance, even with the words coming to him mostly as tone across the open
ground: she thanked each man as if his coming had been a genuine gift,
which by the lights of the occasion it genuinely was. She rose for each of
them — she did not refuse a man sitting down, Micah noticed; she gave
every suitor the full ceremony of her standing — and she spoke to him
directly, not to the fire, not to her father, and whatever she said had in it no
cruelty and no coyness either. It had finality in it, the way a well-made gate
has finality when it swings to: not locked against the world out of spite, just
shut, because what it guards is not for this visitor. And each young man,
thanked, inclined his head — some stiffly, some with a visible effort that did
him credit — and led his horses back out of the firelight, and the next verse
of the song assembled itself.
Micah counted six of them while the dusk thickened into dark. Six young
men with their families' wealth on parade, six courteous refusals. He watched
the way he had been trained to watch anything that carried information:
without favor, without hurry, and with a growing unease he could not at first
account for. It was not the strangeness of it; he had sat at the edges of a
dozen councils. The unease was more personal, and meaner, and harder to
look at. It was the refusals. He knew the shape of a refusal delivered kindly
and meant completely. He had delivered enough of them himself, in
bunkhouses and agency offices and once, memorably, across a colonel's desk
— the colonel had called it by another name, and the name had stuck to him
in the records ever since, deserter — and watching the chief's daughter stand
and thank and refuse, stand and thank and refuse, with the patience of a
woman working through a task she had not chosen but had wholly accepted,
8
he recognized a discipline he knew from the inside. She was not enjoying the
power of it. She was enduring the arithmetic of it. Somewhere behind the
ceremony was a reason every answer had to be no.
He did not envy the seventh man his turn, whoever the seventh man was
going to be. But his business was with a horse, not with the poetry of other
people's marriages, and between suitors there came the lull he had been
waiting for — a stirring in the circles, children dispatched for water, old men
relighting pipes — and Micah eased out of the cottonwood shadow and made
his unhurried way toward the nearest of the outlying lodges, where a woman
was working at a hide frame in the last of the light, meaning to put his errand
into the few words of the tongue he had, get his horse pointed out to him,
offer what payment he could invent, and be a story these people told once
and forgot.
He had taken perhaps twenty paces when a boy materialized at his elbow, as
boys of that nation did — silently, and with the air of having been standing
there since creation. The boy was perhaps eleven. He regarded Micah's
boots, his bound left toe, his slung rifle, his general ruin, with the frank
appraisal of a horse trader, and then he said, in the trade English of the
agencies, very clearly: "That is a poor way to come courting."
"I am not courting," Micah said. "I am looking for my horse."
"The roan," the boy said. It was not a question. "With the saddle. With the —
" he made a gesture that took in the carbine, the bags, the whole apparatus of
Micah's former mobility. "He is with the herd of Kweo's people. He eats
well. He is a calm horse. He runs only in the night, when the lions sing." The
boy delivered this intelligence with the gravity of a staff officer and then,
with the cruelty of his age, added: "You cannot take him now. Now is the
choosing. No one goes to the herd in the choosing. It is not done." "You will
9
wait. You will eat. My grandmother says a man who comes at the choosing
with nothing—" he looked again, comprehensively, at Micah's nothing — "is
either a beggar or a sign, and we feed both, but we watch the second kind."
Micah stood with the boy's pronouncement hanging in the air between them,
and felt his sound plan come apart in his hands like wet paper. He could not
take the horse without leave. He could not get leave until the choosing ended.
He could not leave without the horse — three days afoot had instructed him
thoroughly on that point — and he could not stay invisible; he had already
been seen, and named, after a fashion, by an eleven-year-old intelligence
service.
"Your grandmother," he said at last, "sounds like a woman who has met
strangers before."
"She dreams them first," the boy said, which Micah took for a joke, and
which was not one. "Come. I will put you where the guests sit. The ones who
are not anybody. You will see Kweo present himself. Everyone wants to see
Kweo. Even the ones who hate him come early, to get a good place to hate
him from." The boy turned away with the confidence of a creature entirely at
home in the world. "After Kweo, it will be finished. Then you can beg your
horse like a Christian."
Micah followed him. There was, he reflected, a certain economy in the