The first day ended. Two remained, and he no longer trusted his speeches to be waiting for him in the morning.
Chapter 9 — Kaslin
The second rise fell as fast as it had come, and by the second of Wade's three days the valley had the rinsed look of ground that has survived something. He spent the morning with the horse crews and the afternoon carrying water — a chore he chose himself, because his ribs were mending faster than his patience for idleness, and because a man carrying buckets is beneath notice — a fine place from which to learn a camp.
The spring came out of the canyon wall into a stone basin and ran through a carved channel to a set of troughs, and it was the valley's crossroads: women with jars, boys with the day herd, old men with opinions. Wade was filling his second pair of buckets when the horses at the trough shifted and Kaslin came in with three young men and the weather of a coming scene already on him.
Wade knew him by then — by name, by repute, and by the electricity that ran through the young men whenever Tali's name crossed a conversation. Kaslin: twenty-six, straight as a lance, and the second of the two broken betrothals — the one whose family's aunts had counted Tali's captivity like stones in a shoe and declared the match unclean. He did not look at Wade. That was the first part of the performance: he looked past him, the way a man looks past a fencepost, and addressed his friends, the trough, the water, the afternoon at large.
"The valley is generous this season," Kaslin said, conversational, lifting his chin so his voice would carry. "It shelters strays. It feeds what the river throws up. It even puts the question to them—" a small ripple of laughter from one of the young men, quickly swallowed, "—as if a stray could know what it was being asked. Three days to decide! My family's council needed an evening to decide about—" he let the sentence hang unfinished, which was crueler than finishing it, "—what everyone in this camp already knew."
Wade set his buckets down carefully. The spring ran on. Somewhere behind him, jars stopped clinking; the women at the basin had gone quiet the way of people who intend to describe it later exactly.
"There are goods the traders will not take back," Kaslin said, to the water, to the air. "Handled goods. A man inspects them, and turns them over, and decides—" savoring the word like a fruit he meant to spit out, "—and the whole camp must wait on his decision, as if the goods should be grateful to be inspected at such length."
Wade's hands, at his sides, did the thing he had spent a lifetime training them not to do unsupervised: they curled. He could see the next thirty seconds entire, the way you see a trail fork. He was a guest under decision in another man's valley, under his law, and a brawl at the spring would not land on him. It would land on her — on the girl whose name would be fought over like a dog's bone in the dust of her own camp, by the man who'd refused her and the stranger who hadn't yet answered for her, and she would pay for every drop of it in the whispers for a year. That was the law of honor here — unwritten, and as real as the trough stones.
He uncurled his hands, finger by finger, and picked up his buckets.
That was when Tali came around the basin wall with a lame yearling on a lead and a poultice-bag over her shoulder, and Wade watched a master do with work what he had failed to do with thirty seconds of arithmetic.
She did not look at Kaslin. She did not look at Wade, either, or at the audience. She looked at the yearling's leg, and set her bag down, and said — to the boy holding the trough rope, in her ordinary voice — "Bring me the black kettle from my grandmother's fire, and ask Horse-Speaker for the flat stone from the upper oven." The boy ran. To one of Kaslin's companions, who had laughed, she said, not unkindly, "Your mother's jar stands empty there. Take the trader's buckets" — she meant Wade's, and the young man's face went through several expressions, understanding he'd been handed honest work in front of everyone — "and fill it for her. She is too proud to ask twice." The young man went, carrying Wade's buckets, disarmed down to his bones.
Then she knelt at the yearling's leg and began, with poultice and bandage and a low commentary meant only for the animal, to do her work — while the scene Kaslin had built drained out of the afternoon like water out of a cracked jar. The men at the trough found reasons to move horses. Someone remembered an errand. The audience at the basin resumed its jars. And Kaslin stood alone in the ruin of his performance, watching the top of Tali's bent head, and Wade — watching Kaslin the way you watch a man at the edge of a cut bank — saw the thing the young warrior would have died rather than show the camp: under the scorn, plain as print, shame. Not shame for her. Shame at the sound of his own voice, still hanging in the air, saying things his grandfather would have whipped him for saying at the water.
Kaslin left without another word, leading his horse, walking like a man carrying something heavier than he had brought.
"Your buckets," said the young man, returning them brimming, not meeting his eye.