Rider at the Gate

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Rider at the Gate Page 9

by C. J. Cherryh


  He could lose them if they got off the road and he’d be out in the dark alone with the goblin cats and the willy-wisps.

  He was damned mad.

  came to his mind.

  Maybe that was his thought.

  Fine, he said to himself, and sulked along, limping with his sore ankle on the rutted road, a mere track the trucks maintained, dragging chain on the undercarriages to keep the weeds down. It was a fine road for trucks. It was perfectly fine for nighthorses.

  It was a damned sorry mess for human feet.

  It was a damned long walk, measured in telephone poles and sore joints, and in the tracks of the riders in front of him, riders doubtless laughing at him. And he was more and more sure that Cloud was up there on the heights, as steep as the hills had risen above this section of road.

  Maybe the other riders could stop for noon break, but he didn’t dare stop, for fear of not overtaking them before dark. He kept thinking, irritably, Cloud understood that.

  And eventually, when his steps were growing shorter and shorter, and his tailbone decidedly hurt with every step, he saw a dim image of

  he sent. He’d learned stubbornness from Cloud.

  < Danny getting down from Cloud. Danny falling down the hill.>

  he sent back, the maddest he’d ever been at Cloud.

 

  The argument kept up, until he changed tactics, thought about pain and sore feet and bruises, thought and < still water. >

  Then he was aware of Cloud’s presence closer than had been. Cloud met him as the road took a bend and a climb, Cloud standing on the hillside, and then walking along, head down and ears flat. Danny threw him only the most casual of glances, and limped, badly, thinking about < woods and rocks and the dead rider. >

  Dirty trick.

  He heard Cloud behind him, then. He didn’t have to look. He could see himself, ahead of Cloud, limping along with the stupid baggage.

  He heard Cloud closer, a whispering in the grass, a soft breathing.

  Cloud imaged.

  < Raindrops on still water, > he thought, and Cloud shoved him between the shoulders.

  Cloud thought.

 

  Unfair, of course. Humans couldn’t image on their own, but humans were tricky and inventive when they got the knack of it.

  Cloud peevishly dashed raindrops onto their still reflection. Cloud understood his tactic.

  But Cloud couldn’t drown the reflection. Cloud wasn’t as mad as the human in question was determined—and the human in question wasn’t stopping or getting into details. Danny just kept limping ahead, in the tracks of horses nice enough to carry their riders.

  Cloud thought.

  Cloud could combine images when two thoughts crossed in his head.

  And they clearly had.

  Cloud came up beside him and slumped along pace for pace. They walked along maybe half an hour before Danny thought and Cloud stopped and waited for him to climb up.

  He didn’t do so well getting up this time. He hadn’t the strength for a swing on Cloud’s mane, he just planted his arms across Cloud’s back, jumped up and landed belly-down, tangled in the strings of his baggage, to work his way across Cloud’s back in a maneuver he would be humiliated to do in front of the strangers he was trying to overtake, while, annoyed by a knee in his kidneys, Cloud began to amble on his way, giving him no grace whatsoever.

  But Danny didn’t argue. Cloud was going his direction.

  he thought, to please Cloud.

  Cloud imaged,

  “Cloud. Behave. Dammit.” He’d not had so much trouble out of Cloud on the regular hire they’d taken. He’d worked with other riders. He didn’t know why Cloud should take so profound a dislike to horses that were going to guide them to the High Wild, that would be their protection by their experience and their riders’ guns once they reached an area they might not be able to cross safely on their own… granted anything went amiss.

  Cloud persisted sullenly.

  Then Cloud threw his head and looked back, just the red-edged corner of a nighthorse eye, cast along their backtrail.

  Nostrils widened.

  Cloud imaged, and stopped joking.

  Did we miss them? was Danny’s first thought—stupid thought. There were multiple nighthorse tracks under Cloud’s feet at the moment.

  They were following three horses. But Cloud was looking behind them.

  He thought of the horse who’d gone out the gate, following Stuart:

  Cloud persisted. Cloud didn’t think it was one horse he was hearing back there.

  Line riders, Danny thought. Inspecting the phone lines.

  But it wasn’t the day they usually went out, when he thought of it—unless they had a break in the line that shut down the phones, which would bring somebody much faster.

  So who among the riders would go? Danny asked himself and Cloud, trying to see if Cloud could recognize the horses.

  But Cloud didn’t answer his perplexity, except with this same dark image of more than one horse, on ambiguous ground, except that there was Cloud’s wind-image in it, the sweeping of the images, coming and going, distorting to many and back to a conservative two or three.

  Danny asked.

  Cloud shifted footing, snorted to clear his nostrils of stray scents and sniffed again.

  was all Cloud could give him, but this time they had riders, less certain an image—just the illusion of shadows atop shadows.

  Not wild horses, then. Not likely, unless Cloud was getting not the scent but the desire of the horses for humans.

  A wild lot wasn’t something to meet in the autumn. And they did go on the move in this season.

  Danny suggested. But Cloud didn’t, Cloud only started uphill and off the road, where Danny didn’t want to go.

  Danny swatted Cloud’s shoulder, wanting

  was Cloud’s thought.

  And Cloud picked up the pace.

  Danny thought, not the still-water of silence, but

  Cloud didn’t think so. And maybe it was true: they were so close the scent-image came to them on the wind from their backs, and strange riders were almost certainly back there—it was too persistent to be anything Cloud just remembered. But the wind came to them treacherously as it did in the foothills, reversing its ordinary direction in places, coming almost east to west, when nearly the opposite was the rule on the road—and they could only trust the wind would shift again.

  A human knew that. He wasn’t sure Cloud did. What ruled Cloud’s decision was likely the surety that he didn’t smell humans in the direction he took and he did smell them at their backs.

  Trouble was what they had to reckon it. Towns were the safe zones. You didn’t trust what you ran into in the Wild—not solitary riders or groups of riders. That was the law Danny Fisher knew. Maybe it was a townsman way of thinking, but Cloud lit out at that fast-traveling pace Cloud could hold for long, long runs— Cloud had learned that humans didn’t put their noses down and smell tracks, but they saw them and they understood them by processes that had never occurred to Cloud.

 

  That was what Cloud reasoned—maybe as far as the fact that nighthorses without humans didn’t use roads. And Cloud wasn’t staying around to meet them.

&nbs
p; * * *

  Chapter vi

  « ^ »

  GUIL STUART SWEATED LIGHTLY IN THE NOON SUN, WATCHED THE brown grass pass under his dangling feet and Burn’s three-toed hooves, and avoided the thoughts bobbing to the surface of a distracted, several times jolted mind. He rode northerly still, not using the road, but overland, up over the rolling, grassy hills, on the same course which he had begun to choose in their first panic flight.

  Burn had other ideas, making a slow, quiet intrusion into his vision.

  Burn imaged for him, the characteristic two stones with the old rider signs, that exact view of the mountains, so for a moment Guil didn’t find himself on this road at all, but well south of Shamesey town, high in the hills where the Domerlane left the MacFarlane High Trace, the mountain ridge towering on the right.

  Burn sent, and, falling enthusiastically under the spell of his own imaging:

  Guil thought, then, slipping into a moment of weakness,

  Then, abruptly: because that ugly image leapt into his mind whenever it found the chance.

  He stopped it. He thought of water. He thought of bubbles on the surface.

  Burn recalled pleasantly.

  Guil resisted the imaging at first. But he did recall that day with pleasure. He remembered Aby laughing, playing keepaway with Moon and Burn.

 

  A lump arrived in his throat.

  Burn imaged,

  The whole moonlit moment rebuilt itself, lived vividly and faded into the present sun and chill breeze, as if it were the same day.

  Wind and grass, sun on autumn colors. On the left hand the mountains loomed up, the Firgeberg, the backbone of the continent. The wind came down from the foothills with a chill that shivered through the grass, cold and clean enough to wipe away the stink and madness of Shamesey camp.

  Burn sent him.

  Burn had no long memory for distress. Troubles came and they went. Horses died. Horses were born. As long as it wasn’t Burn, Burn didn’t stay concerned.

 

  One more sunrise. One more sunny afternoon on the hills. A rationed number of them.

  But Burn also had no memory for money. Money ran counter to Burn’s sense of the world, and Burn forgot where bacon came from. Burn’s rider was supposed to have it, that was all.

 

 

  Guil sent.

  Burn thought, much more cheerfully. Burn imaged the slow rolling of hills northward.

  And they argued for a while about the connections of Anveney town, banks (a concept Burn refused to deal with, as a repository for things worth bacon: naturally one would immediately get what was worth something, and not leave it anywhere) and humans (not high in Burn’s thinking right now, since humans had lately had rifles shooting at them). Burn was vastly put out by humans and would be put out so long as Guil’s leg hurt, because it made Burn’s leg hurt. Almost. Well, close enough.

  When they rode alone Guil could sink into trains of almost-thought and exist in Burn’s realm of sun-on-back, humans-at-distance, food-the-day’s-necessity and sex-on-opportunity. Sometimes in the high hills you ran into a partnership like that, one where you couldn’t talk to the man except through the horse; and Guil supposed in the long run they were happy enough—never work, never come into a town, they’d barter sometimes, food and skins for clothes or a knife. Usually when you met them, the human half wanted to trade, the horse was skittish—and the rest of the time you just got a spooky feeling in the brush, the intimation of something that might have been there for a moment, might have looked you over in a slightly predatory or slightly fearful way… wild things did that sometimes, before they ran.

  He was glad enough to sink into that kind of nowhere at least for the day. The leg ached when he didn’t. The stomach complained it was empty when he didn’t, and he didn’t care he was hungry, really—he hadn’t energy left to care.

  But somewhere toward evening Burn found the stream that crossed the road well north of Shamesey, a smallish stream—Guil was relatively sure it was the same one—cold in this season; and Burn wanted to cool his legs and drink and—definitely—find something to eat.

  So Guil sat down there and tended the wound he had gotten, the ugly rip that by now was somewhat scabbed and not wholly clean. He took off the breeches and sat on the bank, dipping up water to wash the wound and numb the pain, which was so miserable once he’d worked the pants off that Burn took himself from the vicinity, went a distance down the stream and slammed his three-toed foot down on something that wriggled.

  Burn ate it then, alternately washing it in the stream. It was not particularly nice; it was not the sort of thing Burn saved for cooking, and Burn had the grace to keep his tidbit out of range of a queasy stomach to eat it.

  “I don’t suppose you could catch a fish,” Guil said aloud, and thought

  Burn snorted, and wandered off along the stream, nosing into this and that, sampling the water. Burn came back to him with,

  He wasn’t that desperate.

  < Plate-fungus.>

  No.

 

  He was disgusted. he imaged, and got up to put his pants on. Burn came back to him, took him up again, uncommonly patient still with this carrying business.

  Burn imaged, having settled on that goal, imaging a good winter and enough to eat.

  He dreamed in that still sunlit but nippish ride, of the valley where he had been a boy, in the first spring he remembered. He wondered where it was, and whether it was what he remembered. He thought of it, in bad times.

  And perhaps he did gloss it a bit, being light-headed with pain and hunger, with the meadows spangled with starflowers and the delirious yellow spikes of mollyfingers, in green lush grass; but that was the way he liked to remember it—which was probably, he’d long said to himself, why he’d never found it.

  Burn took up his dream readily enough, embellished it with the restless longings of his own kind: a valley, a far, far different place from the safe, smoky dens of Shamesey hostels, where riders and horses lived in such muddy, smelly, close quarters.

  A clean winter, a wide winter, with all the white valley to hunt. Tarmin. Then this place.

  “Promise,” Guil said. “I promise.”

  Burn twitched his ears back and forth.

  “Don’t know ‘promise,’ do you? Probably it’s good you don’t.”

  <“You don’t,”> echoed back to him. Burn could image sounds he didn’t know, so far as his horsey brain could remember them. Or cared to remember them. Then a visual image.

  Mollyfingers didn’t grow in the lowlands. They wouldn’t grow where factories sent up smoke, or in places like Anveney, where men ripped copper and lead out of the earth and made beautiful, poisoned pools, bright blue and milky white.

  Burn thought, sulking, and then again, quite cheerfully, the sunlight in his thoughts belying the evening—

  Twilight was getting scarily deep scarily
fast in the folds of the hills, with the sun already over the mountain rim.

  Maybe the riders Cloud had smelled behind them had stopped for camp by now. Danny hoped that the Westmans had.

  They’d come back to the road finally. He’d found their tracks where the dust was thick, and where a horse’s toe had scored the occasional rock. He could track at least that well: from an old rider on his one long trip he’d picked up enough of the art at least to read whether a horse or a man was running or walking, how loaded his quarry was, and—if a human was involved—how tall that human was and maybe what the gender was.

  But he knew precisely the riders he was tracking; and he was scared, to tell the truth, not alone now of the riders they’d feared behind them, but of a night alone out where he’d never been alone before if they didn’t catch up before they ran out of daylight. He caught little strange vignettes of himself and Cloud seen from low to the earth or high on the hill or out of the brush, so he knew that small hunter eyes were watching them, nothing big, nothing that would bother a horse—yet. He had his pistol by him and he decided, considering having fallen on the hill and having had it slide free, that a tie-down would be a very good idea, but he wasn’t going to tie it in the holster now, thank you, he wanted to be able to draw it very quickly, and not shoot himself or Cloud, if an emergency happened. He was afraid his hands would shake if he had to aim. He was afraid of shooting in panic and hitting the men he was tracking. A townbred junior rider had no business alone out here, he was increasingly convinced—he’d never been alone in the dark in the Wild before, and he didn’t know what was watching them from the brush.

  The Westmans might have slowed down just a little, he said to himself. They might have helped, damn them, when he’d fallen, instead of laughing and riding on.

  They’d asked him to come with them out here. Jonas had said he’d improve their chances of finding what they were looking for— so why had they let Cloud dump him? Damned funny joke, maybe. But he didn’t think so.

 

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