A server filled his mug. He’d lost count of how many he’d had out there. Assured of a stable bench under his backside, he sipped the ale, not because he wanted the alcohol, but to ease a throat raw and dry from panting.
Most of the dancers were still going, but the two borderers, after deriding the junior for flagging, had fallen down at other tables.
The sounds he heard now were all of drums and flutes, the sights all whirling bodies, recollections of gaslights spinning past.
Human images, human company… humans couldn’t image to each other without the horses close, and with the horses absent, human minds could grow quiet, exhausted, blind, deaf, and voiceless. The rogue-presence was gone, its burden lifted. Funerals ought to be loud and raucous, and one could hope the dead woman could somehow know they’d thrown a good one—borderer that she was, the camp she’d been intending for her winter-over at least knew she was gone, and, in that, acknowledged they all were mortal. They wished the dead rider a good hereafter, if there was one, or at least wished themselves drink and dance and noise enough to make the dead hear the party.
It might ease Stuart’s mind if he heard the drums out there in the dark. He hoped Stuart did know he and the red-haired woman had friends in camp. He hoped Stuart might come in and have a drink and sit and mourn in sanity, giving the lie to the fools who, in their stupid, idle speculation, put the rogue business on the man who’d only loved that rider—because he’d made them feel it; he’d shoved it at them hard, and their nerves were jangled.
God, he wanted his family to be safe tonight. He wanted to know Denis had made it home to bed before the craziness started in the town, as he very much feared it could. It would be better in town once the dancing had started and angers fell in camp. It would be better for the town if, in the Shamesey taverns, there could be dancing, too, or prayers in the churches, or whatever calmed hearts and tempers—since the preachers said dancing was the Devil’s way.
No question that the slum could hear the drums: many the nights of his life he’d heard the like from that third-floor flat, lying in his bed, scared of devils. His family would hear the drums and flutes tonight and know there was dancing going on. His mother would be angry and his father would be praying to God to forgive their wayward Danny for dancing and for drinking and for being with low minds, that was what his father called it, words he’d surely gotten from the preachers.
Low minds, consorters with the beasts.
He’d not asked to be a rider. But nobody, not even the boss-man (and he had asked that among the first agonized questions he’d ever dared ask the boss) nobody knew why horses picked somebody, or why, as the boss said, they’d sometimes travel unaccountably long distances in search of someone, the way Cloud had done for him.
Cloud had just, in the autumn of his second year, wandered down to Shamesey looking for someone of a description that somehow he guessed he happened to fit.
Maybe Cloud had found no prospects in the high villages. Maybe he’d been so persnickety he’d decided to search a really big town, because there were just more to choose from. Cloud had been persistent about it once he’d arrived. Cloud had hung around Shamesey hills, coming down to the town gate at night, scaring hell out of the gate-guards. The whole town had heard that the night-watch had been shooting at a horse, which so far they’d been lucky enough to miss, and the town council had been recipient of an angry ultimatum from the riders, who took strong exception to the firing.
At the time, he’d been solidly on the gate-guards’ side, frightened for his town, believing absolutely in his father’s hell, and night after night suffering strange dreams nobody else—he’d tried to figure if he was the only current case—admitted to.
He’d been steadily losing sleep and having nightmares about the gates and the gunfire ever since what the kids called the devil-horse had shown up. His dreams had finally grown so vivid and his mind so sleep-cheated and frantic that, after a day of agonizing over the prospect of another night of such dreams, he’d marched down to the camp to protest to any rider he could find that he was a good God-fearing kid, to state that riders were clearly responsible for protecting townfolk, and to ask that rider how to stop hearing it.
The rider he’d asked at the safe limit of the gate had taken him, in his extreme reluctance, right inside the camp where he’d never been and straight to the camp-boss, whereupon the boss had looked him up and down for the scrawny, unlikely kid that he was, and drawled, as if there was certainly no accounting for tastes, “The horse wants you, that’s all.”
Then the boss-man had asked him his name, and said he’d be living in the camp, soon—told him plainly that he really didn’t have any choice about it, that when a wild horse was sending like that and you started feeling it as that personal, then pretty soon you were going to start hearing everything that came along, every little burrower at meadow’s-edge, every bird that perched on the roof-trees… the world would never be quiet to you, ever after.
The boss-man had said that if you got a Call and lost that horse, you’d never, ever sleep again, and probably you’d go crazy… so he might as well take a hike into the hills and let the horse find him.
The boss-man had lied to him, he’d found out. He’d actually had a choice. But in the conviction that he hadn’t, he’d walked out of the Gate Tavern and lost his breakfast, right at the camp gate, he’d been so scared of hellfire.
Then he’d heard the horse in broad daylight. He’d seen it waiting for him in the hills across the road, hills he couldn’t even see with his eyes from inside the gate: he’d been getting images that strongly, from that far away. He’d never realized it.
Clouds across the stars, that was the way Cloud called himself. Clouds scudding fast, before a storm wind. You couldn’t say all of it aloud, with the rain smell and the shivery chill and all, and he’d been completely, helplessly swallowed up in it—he’d seen nothing but that starry sky when he’d begun to climb that same grassy slope that Stuart had run, and met, past that hilltop and another one, a horse that decided, finally, it had found a fool who satisfied its juvenile itches.
Found a fool that knew where to scratch, of course. Cloud was a glutton for human fingers.
Found a town-bred fool who’d fall off and near break his neck half a dozen times before he quit insisting he was going one way when Cloud knew very well he was going another.
It hadn’t been easy for a young fool in any sense. Bruised and skinned on various parts of his body, he’d been, when he’d written down a message to his family and sent it by a town kid.
He’d thought a lot about hell in the two days he’d waited for an answer from his family.
He’d said, in that message: I can make more money being a rider, —because his father and his mother understood money.
He’d said, —We can get the apartment fixed. We can buy a new drill, one of those electrics—we can bring in a line. He knew his father lusted after that, most of all.
His mother had written back—he still kept the letter, folded up, in the lining of his coat: Your father hasn’t accepted it yet. But he says you can come in. He doesn’t want to hear about the horse. Come to supper Sunday. We won’t talk about the camp.
That had been the agreement, the condition under which he was acceptable at his family’s dinner table. That and the money he brought. His evident prosperity. As things were now…
A lump started gathering in his throat, and he washed it down with forbidden ale. Now it might be a while before mama could talk papa into Sunday dinners again. Maybe papa’s anger would stretch into winter—there wasn’t much time left in the year.
You couldn’t get hire in winter, to speak of, but there was spring when all the goods had to move at once, and if he could somehow come back next spring with a lot of money, papa would be happier.
And they might have worried about him, a little, if they didn’t hear from him. He could sit in camp all winter and not write. Just let them worry. Let them wonder if he was mad
at them. Or if he was all right.
Papa just didn’t like to think about the drums and the drinking and the fornication, that was what papa called it. He hadn’t ever had any chance to fornicate, himself, but it wasn’t something you could argue with papa. In papa’s mind fornication and wickedness was what went on in the camp, all the time, and after the work of summer and fall, winter was one long misbehavior, that was what papa called it when papa was being delicate in front of Denis.
When papa was mad, however, he found that papa had other words, some of which he hadn’t heard even from his friends in Shamesey streets, words that made him mad, and made him ask what you learned in church when you got to be his father’s age— he’d never had that in his lessons.
But if he’d outraged his father and embarrassed him in front of the church by showing up in rider style, he’d profoundly embarrassed his mother, who had to face the neighbors and her customers, and them of course all asking questions—like where the money came from to paint the apartment, and what went on in the camp, and she wouldn’t know, she wasn’t interested in hearing it from him—but nobody was going to believe she didn’t. That was the position he’d put his family in.
The preachers said once you started hearing the beasts of the world, you couldn’t ever stop, you couldn’t come back… because once you heard one, then you started hearing all the beasts, even the little ones. So you slipped deeper and deeper into damnation and became like a beast yourself.
That was one thing the preachers said that had turned out to be true, but not quite the way they’d said: it wasn’t like hearing words. Sometimes you’d just see things, when you were riding out and about the hills. You’d see yourself and your horse going down the road, and you’d know you were picking something up from some little creature somewhere, under the bushes or up the hill.
And it just wasn’t that bad. They were gentle images, most times, a little spooky toward dark, but you learned very quickly to tell what was sending it—and mostly the feelings they brought with them were anxiousness, or curiosity: very few wild creatures wanted to come near a nighthorse.
As for the sex his parents imagined… God, that was a joke. If you were a townbred junior, you just lay in the dark when the images came past you from somebody else, as they did, and you tried to imagine you’d found some rider girl who didn’t think you were pond scum, but there weren’t many girls among the juniors. Shamesey girls didn’t come out to the horses. They were too scared of hellfire, or no horse had ever wanted one. And there were rider girls, but they all had boys they’d grown up with. So that left a Shamesey rider on his own at night.
But, oh, there were women who came into camp, full of mysteries a sixteen-year-old couldn’t possibly deal with, women in fringed leather and carrying knives, sun-tanned and wonderful, women who bunked down mostly with senior riders they personally knew… a lot richer than he was, and not needing a junior to tell them his sweaty-palmed aspirations.
The horses eavesdropped, at the same time, and sometimes spread feelings all through the den, until, if you were in the vicinity, God help you…
Cloud was a pushy horse, and devious, and Cloud flirted with all the mares. Cloud drove him crazy sometimes.
Like now.
He finally knew exactly where Cloud was: in the dark of the den by the gate, not that far out of Cloud’s range when Cloud was excited. And Cloud was sniffing after a mare who was more than interested.
He couldn’t stop it. It wasn’t even his right to stop it, the boss-man had told him that, and the boss-man could as well have left it off the list of particulars: Cloud would have made him know his rights and dues beyond any doubt at all.
The dancing was still going on, a little slower, as everybody ran out of wind, but craziness was running the camp, with the autumn cold in the air. So, of course, when he was so buzzed he staggered, Cloud, with the images of blood and dead females in his head, had to think, tonight, of sex. God, Cloud had no sense of moderation.
Nor did the mare.
Damnation, the preachers said. A nighthorse had no kindness. Animals had no souls.
Cloud had no shame, that was sure, and he didn’t know how to be near human beings when Cloud was doing what Cloud was doing at the moment. He’d danced enough and drunk enough; he decided he’d better stagger off to bed, which, wobbly as he was, was just too far, in a cheaper hostel clear around the circuit of the camp. He only needed a place for an hour or so where nobody would bother him, where he could suffer Cloud’s mate-courting in private, and sober up enough to walk home, and he didn’t want…
Oh, God.
He had to get up fast, dazed as he was. He couldn’t stay in the tavern yard. He stood a moment, while images came and went, to be sure of his feet.
Then he wandered through the area of the dance, walked his unsteady way down the street toward the nighthorse den next the gate, which, sense told him, was where Cloud was doing his courting.
* * *
Chapter iii
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DANNY DIDN’T WANT TO GO INSIDE THE DEN. HE WENT ONLY AS far as its wooden wall, next the end where the earthworks were piled up to make its sod wall and roof. There he sat down on a pile of moldering canvas, overwhelmed by the night and the images, shoved his arms between his knees and tried to subdue an arousal so intense it didn’t let him think. He just stared blankly back at the tavern yard down the street, an island of light, like one of those other worlds the teachers talked about, men and women drinking at the tables, men and women dancing with each other under the gaslights.
He saw couples pairing up—one pair very drunk, completely distracted or as far from their own beds as he was. They didn’t wait. They just did it in the far side of the hostel, in the alley where they probably thought nobody was watching. He tried not to look, but he did, and worse… much worse… he grew angry along with watching them. He wanted to kill somebody at the same time, and that feeling was going through the camp, back again—when it had left them alone for the last hour or so.
Stuart… was aware. He suddenly realized that Stuart was watching the camp. Stuart wanted… he wasn’t sure what. The angry feeling was coming through the wooden walls, it was coming through the ground, and his eyes were suddenly full of tears he didn’t know he had. He kept wiping them, and they kept coming, while, somewhere nearby, Stuart wanted…
Death. Sex. The red-haired woman.
He felt Cloud courting the mare, felt the union, the mare’s sensations as well as Cloud’s, and he couldn’t stand it. He got up from his place by the den wall and paced the street.
The urgency and the anger grew less when he was walking. It slowly became endurable. He walked back and forth in front of the den, but the nighthorses were all disturbed, now, arousal was epidemic, and he found himself walking back down the street toward the tavern, toward company he didn’t really want, but there were human minds there, and the feeling near the walls and near the den had been dangerous and full of complex urges he didn’t understand. If it was Stuart, it was gone now. Or farther away. But he didn’t want to stay that near the horses if it started up again.
The dancing had gotten down to drunken singles, monofocussed on the intricacy of the steps, while the single remaining drumbeat had grown erratic.
He wove back through the tables, at which some slept, some sat talking in small, sober knots, saner than he was, wiser than he was. He kept getting images, maybe his own memory, he didn’t even know any longer, the feelings of a dark body, an intense misery of hurt.
Overwhelming awareness as a man brushed past him with a contact like electric shock. That man grabbed his arm, faced him about in a fit of temper. He felt the anger, he instinctively flinched from the blow—
But he felt something else flowing through the painful fingers, burning straight into his gut, and he couldn’t breathe.
“Damn kid,” the rider said, as if that meant dirt.
He jerked his arm free. The sexual feelings didn’t stop. The anger di
dn’t stop. The rider grabbed him a second time, hard, by the wrist.
No. Not Stuart. It was the riders who’d talked to Stuart outside.
They’d brought the rogue-image inside with them. They’d felt it up on Tarmin Height. They were the source of the fear—and the image. Not Stuart. The riders at the gate had been right to try to shut them out.
But you didn’t start a fight with anyone with the horses involved, not if you could help it, not for anything. Not for your life, if you had the least chance of saving it yourself. The men at the gate had let those three riders in, and the whole camp was in rut and anger and fear.
“Easy,” the man said. The grip on his wrist hurt, and he was scared, but Cloud wasn’t there to rescue him right now, Cloud was deep in the sensations of a den gone mad with mating.
“Kid! Dammit!”
He tried to get free, tried to draw a breath. The rider wasn’t the dark body he felt. He tried to see where he was, ignoring Cloud’s presence, ignoring what Cloud was doing.
“Friend of Stuart’s,” the man said. “Friend of his. Get a breath, kid. Get two.” The stranger popped him across the face, backhanded, enough to sting. A bench came up against the back of his knees and he fell down onto it. “Dammit, kid, come down. You’re sending it, d’ you feel it, do you taste it, are you deaf?”
The stranger had his attention, now, holding his wrist, trying to pull him out of the fog, but nothing human or sane got through the ambient. There was sex, there was anger, there was grief… they were both caught up in it. A vast, shapeless anger rolled out of the town streets toward the gates. He felt its frustration and its fear; he heard the sounds of voices, heard that sound of human beings in a mass, disturbed and angry, outside the camp walls.
A shot went off—from the gates, from the town, from inside the camp, he couldn’t tell—the report rang off walls and echoed off the hills.
Rider at the Gate Page 4