Chapter 10 · Chapter 10

The embers are not out yet, the light has only just come over the ridge, and I have not slept all night.

I lie wrapped in the blanket and listen to the camp waking in the wrong order. The goats first, which should be last. Then the women at the water jars, early. Then, before the sun has cleared the black rock in the notch of the pass, men's footsteps — and they are not going to work.

I pull the long cloth over my hair and go out.

The central fire sits where the two paths cross, so nothing said at the fire can be said privately. By the time I come down, Sheikh Aber is already there, his back to the embers, cloak pulled to his knees against the morning cold, and the council men are standing rather than sitting, which is what they do when they have not yet decided how to think.

The stranger comes up the path between them at no great pace; that is not dignity, it is the last of his strength. The soles of his feet are still bare. Someone has wrapped them in strips torn from tent cloth; the strips are dark.

"Shimon of the house of Zakhari," Aber says before he speaks. Loud enough to carry across the fire, the father's name first and then the son's, and said before the man has given his own. At a fire that is not a small thing. Every man standing there hears which way the ground has tilted.

The stranger answers low, and returns to Aber the greeting Aber is owed.

A boy brings a copper cup. Aber takes it in his right hand and passes it; the stranger takes it in his right, drinks, passes it back. Nobody mentions it. But the men at the rim of the circle watch the cup go round, and watching them watch it I know that by the time it comes back the argument about him has moved somewhere else.

"Your hand," Aber says.

The stranger holds it out.

Aber takes it and turns it over. He is an old man and his own hands are ruined in a particular way: the roots of the fingers splayed from a lifetime of rope, the palm hard as horn where the staff sits.

He presses his thumb against the stranger's thumb, into the callus there, and follows the ridge of the palm under the little finger, and turns the hand to look at the fingertips. They are not the fingertips of a man who has spent his life on a cushion.

He does not let go at once. He holds it longer than the examination needs, the way a man goes on holding a document he has already decided to trust but has not finished reading.

"Stone," Aber says.

"Stone," the stranger says. "Ink before that. Before that, nothing worth telling."

"There is a pit behind the thorn fence where we keep what is worth keeping," Aber says. "And there is far grazing north of the pass, the flocks mixed, the boys stupid, the water bitter. The pit is warmer."

"I have been warm," the stranger says.

The men laugh, and not unkindly.

"Then you go to the bitter well," Aber says. "You answer me and no man of mine; and if a goat is missing in the night I come to you first and the boys after."

Then my cousin speaks from the other side of the fire. "A man comes with paper and no shoes and we give him a flock. What does a herdsman want with paper?"

He says it lightly. He has a way of saying a thing lightly and leaving the mark of it.

Aber does not turn his head. "What does a man who walked out of a camp burning behind him want with paper," he says, "is the same question as what he wants with a well. When you are his age, ask him yourself."

Silence, and it is the kind that closes a matter.

Aber lets it close. Then: "The tally board."

The old man who keeps the count brings the board, and Aber takes the stick from him and draws one stroke; and the stroke is Shimon son of Zakhari, on the north grazing, nine she-goats, one ram, and the mixed ewes, answerable to the Sheikh alone.

I stand at the edge of the circle with the water jar against my hip and watch the ink go into the wood.

That is what a name on the tally board is. It is not honour and it is not favour. It is a fence. A man inside the fence is owed a share, and a share is a thing the camp will defend in a quarrel, because by then the quarrel is the camp's own account and not the man's. A man outside the fence has no share to defend and no account to hide in. I have grown up in this camp and I have never seen it put into one line of ink so plainly.

Nor have I ever seen what it costs to be written in. The stick moves and he stands very still. His jaw is set the way a man's jaw sets when someone has done for him a thing he could not do himself and would never have asked.

The circle breaks. The men go to work at last, the women back to the jars, and my cousin passes me without looking at me, which is also a sentence.

"Arwa."

I turn. Aber has not left the embers.

"Your cousin will speak with you tonight," he says. "You will hear him out. Do not answer him at the fire."

"I have never answered him at the fire," I say.

"No," Aber says. "You have not." He looks at the embers a while. "That cloth is still folded in your mother's chest," he says. "It can stay folded a long time. Long enough for a man to prove a pair of hands instead of a mouth. Do you understand me?"

"I understand you," I say.

And I do. He is telling me, in the only way a Sheikh speaks to a woman, that ink is not the end of the argument; that he has bought time with ink, and the time is mine, and spending it or wasting it is mine to choose.

I carry the jar back up the path. The sun is fully over the ridge now and the camp is full of ordinary work, the boys driving the goats to the near grazing, not yet knowing that the far grazing has a new man over it.

In the tent my mother is folding wool.

"Your hands are cold," she says, without looking up.

"The fire is low," I say.

She smooths a crease with her palm, once, twice, and asks nothing else. I sit down beside her and push my cold hands into the wool and think about one line of ink on a board, and a man who answered a Sheikh in one word, and how short a fence is, and how easily a camp can move it.

That night my cousin comes to the tent.

I hear him out, as I was told to. He stands at the door rope with his hand not on it and his voice not raised, because a man who shouts at a tent door has already lost what he came to argue for.

"Nine she-goats," he says. "One ram. The mixed ewes nobody wanted. That is what the Sheikh thinks your father's daughter is worth."

"The Sheikh's account is not my account," I say.

"It will be." He looks past me, at the wool, at the chest against the back wall. "Twenty-four," he says. "The camp will say you were given to a man who came in barefoot, whose name no one here had heard a month ago."

"Then let them say it," I say. "The water jar hears worse every morning, and the water jar has not cracked."

He does not like the cold in that.

He says the rest of it quickly, the way a man says a passage he has learned by heart: that the agreement between the two houses was made when we were children; that a Sheikh saying nothing does not wipe out an agreement; that since the stranger has been written on the board the camp has a right to see what the ink bought; that he will take the cloth out of the chest and spread it at the fire and let the men judge.

I give him nothing. Nothing I could give him would not cost my father's name more than it is worth.

He goes down the path. I sit by the wool without lighting a lamp. After a while the horn sounds at the crossroads, and a horn at night is for a death or for a claim.

When I come down, my mother is already at the fire, the chest at her feet, closed. The council men are standing. Aber is seated with the tally stick across his knees, which is how he sits when he means to speak last.

The stranger has been brought down from the far grazing. He is dust to the knee, standing where the council stands, not looking at me. That is his courtesy and I know it, and it is worth more than a greeting.

My cousin lays his claim out before the whole camp. The agreement. The two houses. The years. A man of twenty-seven with a flock he has had for one day and a wife he has not had for one hour. And then the cloth.

Aber lets him finish. Then he says: "The cloth is not the camp's. It never was. It went into that chest the night her mother was married and it has not come out since, and no man standing at this fire has any right to ask for it."

"Then ask the mother," my cousin says.

Aber turns his head. "Shirin. Is it folded?"

"It is folded," my mother says.

"Then it stays folded," Aber says. "This camp judges a man by what he sets down and what he takes up. Not by a chest."

My cousin turns. "And you," he says. "You will stand there and let a woman's name be argued over with your goats and say nothing?"

The stranger looks at him the way he looked at the cup.

"From the morning I came up that path you have wanted the cloth," he says. "But it was never the cloth you wanted. Take the flock. The ram, the mixed ewes, the bitter well, the stupid boys, take them. I have been warm and I have been cold, and I did not walk out of a burning camp to have someone write me inside a fence and then measure me by how wide the fence is."

"That is not a condition," Aber says. "The tally board is not a thing a man gives back because he was angered at a fire."

"I am not angered," the stranger says, and he is not, and that is the worst of it. "But a fence is a small thing. A name is not. Keep the board. Let it record what I set down."

"What do you set down?"

"Nine she-goats, the ram, the mixed ewes, the bitter well, and the year's work that feeds them. The Sheikh has read these hands. And the answer I have given for her, whatever day and whatever hour this camp comes to ask it, I answer."

Aber looks at him a long while. Then: "And the name?"

"Say it," the stranger says. "Say it here, in front of the men who will hold me to it."

Aber picks up the stick. He draws one stroke. Then he says my name, and after my name he says my father's name; and no man at that fire says a woman's father before her unless he means the whole camp to be held by it.

I do not thank him. For a woman to thank a fire for her own name is to agree that the name was theirs to give.

My cousin stands a moment longer, his hands at his sides.

"The ink is cheap tonight," he says, and goes, out between the tents, and nobody calls him back, which is also a sentence.

Aber sets the stick down. "The tent goes up tomorrow behind the thorn fence," he says. "She walks to it with her mother. The door falls from the outside and does not open before the sun. Does the camp understand?"

The camp understands.

All the next day the camp is as quiet as a camp is when it has settled a thing and does not want to be asked about it again. The tent goes up behind the thorn fence before the sun is high. Two women who grew up with me set the poles and do not look at me; at the end one of them puts her hand on the rope and gives it two hard pulls, to show me it will hold.

At supper I sit where I always sit, and no one moves me, and that is the whole of what the camp thinks.

When the fire is low my mother takes up the folded cloth and walks me to the thorn fence. She says nothing the whole way. At the tent she lays her hand flat between my shoulders, once, the way she smoothed the wool.

The stranger stands on the other side of the door. He does not come near me. He has not come near me once since the morning he came up that path; the camp is watching from the fires, and my mother has the edge of the cloth in her fist.

"Arwa," he says. Only that. My name, in front of people, the second time, for every fire in the camp to hear.

Then the door falls from the outside, and the dark comes down with it.