Josiah took his parcels and went out into the white glare of the street. The bell rang behind him as bright as it had rung coming in. Halfway to his horse he understood that he had not been refused by an enemy, and that this was the colder thing. An enemy refuses you out of hatred, which is at least a kind of honesty. Micah had refused him out of terror, with a mortgage held like a hand over his mouth — and a man that frightened had been trying, three times over, to tell him something he believed might get him ruined, or killed, for the telling.
Chapter 8
: The Council Fire
He rode north at dusk, when the heat loosened its grip, unarmed but for the knife at his belt, with a full water skin slung at his saddle as an offering of the only wealth he had. The Apache camp lay in the cottonwoods where the Cienega still ran thin under the sand, and Josiah knew he was seen long before he saw anyone. A tracker stepped out of the brush ahead of him without a sound, rifle down, and looked at the water skin, and at his empty hands, and fell in beside his horse without a word.
Aiyana met him at the edge of the firelight. Two years had not altered the steadiness of her, nor the way she took the measure of a person before she spent a greeting on him. "You come at a bad hour, Merritt," she said. "My brother says the settlers sharpen their knives and call it justice. He is not the only one saying it."
"I came because knives are being sharpened," Josiah said. "Ben Rawlins has lost his herd. The trail was made to look like your people's work. I do not believe it, and I came to hear the truth from the only mouth I trust to speak it plain."
She studied him, then turned and led him in. The council fire burned low in a ring of stones, and the old men sat around it with the patience of those who had buried more truth than any young man had yet spoken. Chief Nahlin sat at its head wrapped in a blanket despite the warmth, his face a map of every dry year he had outlived. Itza stood behind his father, arms crossed, twenty-four and burning, and did not sit when Josiah was given a place, which was itself a kind of speaking.
Nahlin heard him out in full, the stolen herd, the staged trail, the talk in town, and when Josiah had finished the old man was quiet a long while, feeding the fire one twig at a time. "No raid went out from this camp," he said at last. "No young man of mine has lifted a settler's cow this summer. I say it at this fire, where lies are not spoken, because the fire remembers." He turned his palm toward the flames. "Now hear what your people do not ride out to ask. In the spring, three of our hunters were shot at from the rocks above the bend, by men who left brass that the army makes, though no soldiers patrol there. In June our corn plot by the lower field was trampled in the night by shod horses. Shod, Merritt. My people do not shoe their ponies. Twice this summer our water holes have been fouled with filth no animal leaves. Someone is writing a story with our name signed to it, page by page, and waiting for your town to read the ending aloud."
"Father," Itza said, his voice shaking with the effort of holding it level. "He drinks from the same trough as the men who —" He stopped, but everyone heard the rest: as the men who fired a ranch house, as the men who bar doors from outside. Josiah felt the words land where they were aimed, in the place he carried Miriam, and he did not defend himself, because at this fire a man did not.
"What my son cannot say with respect, I will say with grief," Nahlin said. "We have not forgotten your wife, Merritt. Fire is a weapon we are accused of and do not use against a sleeping house. Whoever barred that door was no Apache, for we leave our enemies able to run." The old chief leaned forward, and the firelight deepened every line of him. "Someone profits when settler and Apache bleed each other. Cattle leave the valley cheap. Land leaves its owners cheaper. Water, soon, will be dearest of all. You see it. I see that you see it."
"I see it," Josiah said. "What I lack is proof that any court or town will look at."
"Then hunt it," Nahlin said, "and hunt it with my leave." He took from his blanket a strip of white cloth, worn soft, and held it out across the fire. "This carries you safe among my people while you seek the truth. No hand of this camp will be raised against you. I can promise my own hand. The young are angry, and anger is a horse that throws its rider — but my word is my word." Itza made a sound and turned away into the dark beyond the firelight, and Aiyana watched her brother go with sorrow and no surprise.