Wade walked back through the dark alone this time, three days sitting on his chest like stones, and the strangest part of the night riding with him: somewhere underneath the shock, buried under the horses and the outrage, was a small, still, undrowned fact he was not ready to look at.
He had not, even once, in all his day of speech-building, built a speech for yes.
Chapter 8 — The First Day
He woke before the camp on the first of his three days with the decision sitting exactly where he'd left it, and decided the only honest thing to do with a day like this was put his hands to work and let the thinking happen at the pace of sweat.
The flood had been a thief with poor aim. It had taken his camp entire and scattered the band's goods like a gambler throwing dice — lodge poles in the cottonwoods, a travois upside-down in a side canyon, half the winter's dried meat gone to mud, and the band's horses and the remuda's remnants drifted into every bend of the valley. The men were gathering it all back by degrees, and Wade presented himself at the corrals at first light and said, in his workmanlike way: "I can ride a fence line and I can carry. Put me where I'm least in the way."
They put him where he was most useful instead, which he understood later was its own kind of measurement. All morning he rode the side canyons with two young men — Pilat, who had grinned at him since the first day, and an older, silent one called Horse-Speaker by everyone — dragging drift-lodged poles out of the brush, turning strays, finding the band's ponies tucked in unlikely folds of ground with flood-trash still tangled in their manes. His ribs complained, then settled into complaining at a lower register. The men watched how he handled frightened horses in tight ground — quietly, by approach and patience rather than rope and force — and something in their shoulders changed by noon from escort to company.
At midday, coming down with a bunch of gathered mares, they passed Tali's lodge, and Wade saw the first thing.
A young mother was coming up the path at a half-run with a child against her shoulder — a boy of three, flushed and limp-limbed, his breathing audible from the trail. She did not go to the chief's lodge. She did not go to any elder or singer. She went straight to the door of the returned one, and called Tali's name once, and Tali came out of that lodge like a person coming out of a door she owns in her bones — already moving, already assessing, one hand on the child's forehead, one on his wrist, asking three questions pitched for the mother, not for any audience. She took the boy inside. The mother sat down outside the door with her back to the lodge wall and her hands folded, in the posture of a woman who has delivered her terror into competent hands and can now afford to wait.
"The fever-worm," Pilat said, beside him, with the shrug of a man naming weather. "The little ones get it after the floods, from the bad water standing. Two died of it, the year of the big rain." He jerked his chin at the lodge. "None have died of it since Tali came back from—" he stopped, edited himself with visible effort, "—since Tali learned what she learned out there. She learned their medicines, the ones who held her. Whatever else that year was, she came home carrying that. Half this camp has had her hands on them. My own sister's boy."
They rode on. Wade said nothing, and filed it where it belonged.
The second thing came in the late afternoon, and it was larger. The sky over the canyon's throat had been doing something all day that Wade — plains-bred — had half-read and wholly ignored: a thickening, a yellow stillness, the wind worrying at the grass from two directions like a dog that can't settle. The men were still scattered wide when Tali came up out of the camp at a fast trot on her spotted mare, stood in her stirrups at the corral gate, and called out — not loud, but in the voice people use for words that end discussion.
"The throat is closing. Water by dark, a hand's breadth, maybe two. Move the herd to the high pasture, now, and picket the colts by the lodges."
Nobody asked her how she knew. Nobody asked the chief, or an elder, or the sky. Men who had been arguing all morning about the order of drag-work remounted in a body and went, the herd stringing out up the valley in a long, purposeful line, and Wade — forgotten, irrelevant, exactly where a deciding man ought to be — fell in at the drag with the dust in his teeth, watching a camp turn itself inside out on one woman's reading of the wind — and then, by lantern-light, hearing the wash mutter and rise in the dark, a hand's breadth and a little more, precisely as promised.
He ate at Weshka's fire with his arms aching to the shoulder. Across the camp, the flood's second, smaller hand worried harmlessly at empty ground, because every hoof and child in the valley was already above it.
"She told you water," Weshka observed, not looking up from her bowl. "In the morning. Did she tell true?"
"She told true," Wade said.
"She generally does." The old woman ate a moment. "That is a hard thing in a wife, for some men. And in a daughter it is a hard thing for a camp that likes its stories small." She said it without emphasis, the way a person mentions that a trail is rocky, and went back to her supper.
Wade lay awake a long while in the dark of the lodge afterward, listening to the water spend itself out in the wash, doing arithmetic that had changed its terms while he wasn't watching. The camp's mouths called her rejected. The camp's feet — every sick child carried to her door, every herd moved on her word, his own fever cooled by her unerring hands — told an entirely different story, and a man did not have to choose which account to believe. He only had to notice that one of them was spoken, and the other one was done.