Wade stood, slower than he'd have liked, and the boy was there to walk him back through the dark as if he were something valuable and breakable — which, for three more days at least, he was.
Chapter 7 — Marry Her, or Leave
He thought about it all the next day, which the camp seemed to arrange — nobody put a tool in his hands, nobody asked him anything, children were steered from his path with the firmness reserved for sleepwalkers and loaded guns. He walked down to the gravel bar where the wash ran thin over the flood's leftovers, and stood looking at his own drowned camp's debris — a wagon bow, a shirt in rags in a thorn bush, nothing to build a life back out of — and did the arithmetic until the numbers stopped moving.
Forty horses. Twenty-eight of them grazing fat in the valley herd under the band's guard, twelve gone up-canyon with the water or whoever the water had served. His saddle, bedroll, grubstake, two seasons of trading up from nothing — all of it on four legs, all of it here. And against that: a woman he had known for five days, most of them fevered, standing in a circumstance neither of them had chosen.
The council fire was fuller than the night before. Wade took his kept place and felt the whole camp's attention on him the way you feel weather coming — in the skin first.
Tazlo did not make him wait. The old chief stood this time, unlike the night before, and his voice, when it came, came out of his chest like something struck.
"You have heard the law of the lodge," he said. "Now hear the word of the lodge's father." He turned his head, and Wade understood the next part was not for him — it was for the camp, for the record, for the years. "My daughter. Tali. The river took her mother and the raiders took her season, and this camp—" the growl deepened until it was almost not words, "—this camp has twice let other men's mothers and aunts talk her out of marriage like a horse with a hidden limp. She is spoken of in her own valley as the returned one, as if what was done to her were a thing she did. I am done with it. I am done-price with it, as the traders say."
He faced Wade then, full on.
"Marry her," Tazlo said. "Marry my daughter before this camp, by our law and your God both, and be of this lodge, and your horses are your horses and your debts are ours and your life is a life here. Or—" the old man's hand cut the air once, a gate closing, "—or leave. Leave this valley before the traders' moon rises, on the horse you can catch with your own hands, with the clothes you stand in and the life my daughter pulled out of the wash — the gift, not counted. The twenty-eight head grazing in my herd stay in my herd. A man who will not be kin does not draw wages for having been rescued. Those are the roads. There are two of them."
The silence that fell was so complete Wade could hear the cottonwood leaves worrying each other in the dark.
He had prepared speeches. All day he had built them — Texas-built speeches with hinges and latches, arguments about capital, contracts, the Army waiting for those horses, about a man needing to know a woman longer than a fever. Every one had been addressed to a negotiation. This was not a negotiation, and standing in the firelight with his speeches dying in him one by one like flies in a jar, Wade understood the exact shape of his shock: there was nothing to argue with. The old man had not named a price. He had named a world. Marry a woman you had barely spoken to awake, or walk out of the valley naked of everything you'd built, past the bones of your own camp, owing your life to the woman you were refusing with your feet.
He said nothing. A minute went by. A child whimpered somewhere and was hushed. At the firelight's edge, motionless among the women, he could make out Tali's profile — chin level, eyes on the fire, giving the camp nothing to feed on, enduring her own name being handled like a public document with a dignity that made his silence feel like the loudest thing at the fire.
"Chief." His voice came used-up and strange. "I'm not refusing. A man who refuses quick is hiding, and I'm not hiding. But you haven't asked me for a horse or a favor. You've asked me for the whole of two lives, in front of everybody, and a thing that size deserves better than a drowning man's first answer. In my country a man asked to sign in the dark asks for daylight — not to escape the signing. To read it."
He swallowed. The ribs pulled.
"Give me three days. Three days to walk around this thing, and learn what I'd be saying yes to — her, this valley, all of it — and then I'll stand here and answer once, and it'll be an answer that stays answered. If your law has a place for that, I'm asking for it with respect."
Tazlo looked at him for a long time. Then, slowly, the old chief nodded, and something in the camp's held breath went out all at once like a sigh the valley itself had been keeping.
"The custom of three days is older than my grandfather," Tazlo said. "It is the right of any man asked a life-question, so his answer is a man's answer and not a startled animal's. You have it. Three days, Mercer. At the third night's fire, you will speak." He sat down heavily, a man setting down a load carried since the flood. "Until then, the camp's hands are still. Eat. Work, if your body asks it. And decide — as a man should, with the whole of it in front of him."