Chapter 6 — First Light on the Prairie
The cold woke him before the light did.
Erik had slept the last watch in his coat, sitting against the sod wall by the window, and his neck was stiff and his bad knee talking when he stood. Through the window the prairie was that first gray that is not yet morning, the color of ash about to take a coal. The windmill stood still above the well. Somewhere out in the dark a horse blew once, softly.
It was not his horse. His two were shut in the lean-to since dusk; he could hear the gelding shift against the wall.
"Nils," he said.
His brother came awake all at once, the way the young do, the rifle coming up with him out of the blankets. "What —"
"Nothing yet. Put that down and come to the window. Slowly."
They stood together and watched the light come up, and as it came, the prairie filled.
Riders sat the whole rim of the valley at rifle-shot distance and a little more. They were not many at first — then the light strengthened and there were more, and more behind those, a line without a break from the creek bottom around to the bluff, hundreds of them, sitting their horses in the cold with their breath and the horses' breath making a white mist that hung along the rim like a second horizon. None of them moved. None of them called out. The silence was the worst of it — worse than shouting would have been. A shouting enemy is in a hurry. These were not.
"Her people," Nils said. He said it low, as if they might hear. At that distance they could not, but Erik understood the whisper. He felt it in himself.
"Ja," Erik said. "They have tracked her."
"Then they have come for her. Or for us." Nils's knuckles were white on the rifle. "If they think we have hurt her — Erik, if they think we have her prisoner —"
"Then it is well she can walk to the door and show herself." Erik put his hand over the rifle barrel and pressed it gently down until the muzzle pointed at the floor. "No guns at the window, Nils. Not this morning. Whatever happens here, it will not begin with a Halvorsen holding a rifle on men who have not lifted one."
"And if they lift theirs?"
"Then it will be over before your second shot, and you know it, and so it is better we do not begin." He let go of the barrel. "Put on your boots. Make the fire. Coffee, like any morning."
Nils stared at him. "Coffee."
"Coffee," Erik said. "Men who are making coffee are men who are not afraid, and men who are not afraid do not shoot too quick — and do not get shot too quick either, maybe. It is worth the try."
The dog came out from under the table and stood at the door with his hackles half up, growling down in his throat at the smell of strange horses on the wind. Erik spoke to him and got a hand on his collar, and the growling went on but lower, a sound like a saw far away.
Through the window Erik counted without meaning to count, and stopped himself. It was no use. They were too many, and they were placed — that was the thing to understand. This was not a war party rushing in the dark. This was a people who had come in order, in their hundreds, to stand around a white man's farm and wait to be answered. There was a discipline in it that frightened him more than wildness would have. Wildness spends itself. Discipline waits all day.
Behind him the door of the back room creaked. Kimimila stood in it, holding the doorframe with her good hand, her bound arm tight against her side. She had heard the horses too — or felt them, the way you feel weather coming in a hurt place. Her face was still gray with the three days, but her eyes were clear, and they went past Erik to the window and stayed there.
"My father," she said.
"How do you know?" Nils asked.
She did not look at him. "Because they are still." A breath went out of her. "If it was another chief — if it was soldiers — there would be noise. My father makes them still. He is telling you: I can wait. I have all the morning."
"And what does he wait for?" Erik asked.
"For you to come out." She turned her eyes to him then. "He will not come into your yard to fetch me like a sack of meal. He is a chief. You must go to him, or he must be asked. And Erik —" she used his name the way she had begun to, careful — "do not take the rifle. Not even to the door. He will be watching your hands."
Erik looked down at his hands. They were a farmer's hands, cracked at the knuckles, dirt ground into the skin that no washing ever quite got out. He thought of everything those hands had done in three years on this claim: dug the well, raised the sod walls, buried Ingrid under the hill. Everything he had in the world was inside this ring of riders — the house, the well, his brother, the woman standing in his doorway bleeding through a bandage.
"All right," he said quietly. "Then I go out as I am."
"Not yet." Mila's good hand tightened on the doorframe. "Let the sun come up first. Let them see the smoke from your chimney and the coffee steam. Let them see this is a house, with a morning in it." For the first time since she had fallen at his trough, something moved in her face that was almost the beginning of a smile, tired and wry. "My father respects a house with a morning in it."