Rider at the Gate

by C. J. Cherryh

  Not senior riders. It was juniors’ work. Senior riders sat warming their feet inside.

  Juniors carried the wood. Filled the water barrel with clean snow that floated white in black water. Seniors complained about the length of time the door was opened, and burned more wood.

  Something had turned last night. Danny tried not to think about it, but there was something unpleasant in the ambient, and Cloud was surly and snappish enough to match Shadow’s disposition.

  “What are they mad about?” Randy asked when they were out on the steps.

  “Missing Stuart, probably.” It wasn’t the truth. He wasn’t sure what was the truth; but something had gone skewed from the moment Jonas lectured them last night on false hopes, and that image had come to him which he didn’t want to think about.

  So he went back in. They had the storm shutters set back for the daylight hours, barred them only at night—and he’d found books, ten of them, the whole that the store offered for sale. He sat down by the window in the white light reflected from the snow, and read about

  He found a strange lot of attention on him then. The boys were staring. Jonas and Luke and Hawley were. And the horses.

  It was funny, he’d never read around the horses before. He’d just gotten into the habit of picturing things in his head since long, long ago, when mama would read to him and Sam and papa.

  Sam never got good at it. Sam wanted to be down in the shop. Sam didn’t want to study. Sam wanted to marry somebody who read.

  Mama had read aloud.

  “You can go on,” Luke said, meaning he wanted more, but Luke wasn’t going to admit it out loud. So he read to them.

  It was an easy place to dive into, full of images. The horses were confused, but they liked some of it, he guessed—Cloud kept trying to fix the images so they looked more like Cloud understood, which wasn’t a real help; and sometimes his audience did the same, until the images were something they more agreed on. Jonas cut in, on the king’s side. You could guess. The boss-man couldn’t be a fool. The story had to bend until the boss-man found some vindication.

  He read until his eyes were tired, and until he was at a place and a turn of the story that he could shut the book and think about it and nothing else—like wanting the storm to end, so they could go out and go find Stuart before Harper did. And stopping the rogue so they could find someplace safe, and quiet, and he and the boys wouldn’t have to take orders.

  He sat by the fire and had himself a snack—he never in his life thought he could get tired of ham.

  “Could go on another day,” Carlo said. “Never knew it longer. But it could, I guess.” Carlo ducked his head,

  “Quiet,” Danny said, feeling the disturbance. “Calm down. Say words. Don’t picture things.”

  “When they go out of here, after him, I mean, are you going with them?”

  He’d shifted thinking about that. He’d begun thinking differently since last night. And he was scared.

  “I don’t know.” He tried to think about the stove, whether it needed cleaning out: they’d been About the story. “I really don’t know.” He owed Stuart. He didn’t trust what was going on. put the boys in danger; going put the boys out there where their was.

  “She’s our sister,” Carlo said urgently. “She might listen to us.”

  “She might not. You want your brother to be there?”

  Carlo was scared, too. Cloud moved up and nosed in between them, jealous of anything that wasn’t him. Danny shoved him with a hand on his chest, not even thinking about it. Carlo put his hand on Cloud from the other side. Cloud didn’t offer to bite.

  “I want her alive,” Carlo said, and it was the truth. “I don’t like her. But I want her out of this.”

  “What about Randy?”

  “Is here safe?” Carlo asked. “Even if you stayed, is here really safe?”

  It wasn’t. Not with Harper loose. Not with a lot else that was going on. But he couldn’t avoid Jonas.

  There was leisure for shaving, for washing clothes to dry in front of the fire—not damn much else to do. They washed up the pans they’d used and then, with the wind still howling over the roof, Tara spent a long, long time working over Flicker’s mane and tail.

  That made Burn jealous.

  Mud, hardly. But he owed Burn on this trip. He got up and combed until Burn’s tail and mane were drifting silk. Brushed a perfectly good nighthorse hide until Burn was starting to complain of pain.

  “Pretty fellow,” Tara said, and stroked Burn did have male muscle and a healthy sheen that made ripples when he flexed it. As he did. Of course.

  With Tara

  Hell, Guil thought, seeing desertion and conspiracy. He wasn’t feeling at all sociable this afternoon, if it was afternoon. He was stuck inside, under roofs, with the hearing company of a woman he liked, to whom he was bound to be polite, while irreconcilable facts were churning around in his head and he was wanting to shoot Jonas Westman for suspicions he couldn’t fix in any world of fact.

  So he skulked off with his surliness and his suspicions to clean his guns, which could take a considerable time if it needed to; and he took all the time and care he could justify at it.

  But a man could only spend so long oiling guns and doing mending and washing dishes, while two fool horses were at a whole damned afternoon and evening of foreplay. It was going to be a lot worse come nightfall—he only hoped to God the storm kept going long enough to let two lovelorn horses get it worked out and at least quieter. He didn’t want to imagine the rogue coming calling when the ambient was as erotically charged as it was—particularly since Tara was sure, at least in the ambient she’d relayed, that the rogue was female.

  A scary situation if you were the one on the damn lunatic autumn-hazed male. He couldn’t hold Burn. No way in hell he could hold Burn from going right off a cliff, the same way Aby couldn’t have held Moon, on that road, with an edge too close.

  A tightness hit his chest. He was a lot better. He really was. Temper wasn’t helping it. Suspicion that Aby’s death didn’t need to have happened if people had been sane—wasn’t helping it.

  Aby’d been carrying secrets all right, secrets that the villagers had guessed and a horse would pick up on. Aby’d been carrying just too damn much without her partner. She’d picked up something from Jonas she didn’t like. She could have thought it related to the gold. She was trying to protect Cassivey’s contract—and if the word got gossiped about, Cassivey wouldn’t be happy.

  Jonas might not be after the gold as money. But the deal Aby had with Cassivey—Jonas could want that real bad. Aby and her regular partner hadn’t been together much in the last two years. Maybe Jonas had just gotten ideas and that was why Jonas wouldn’t face him at Shamesey. Aby’s good living off Cassivey sure as hell explained Jonas coming back up here. She was making money. She was making a lot of money; by what Cassivey was paying him, she was stuffing it in that bank account hand over fist, —and for what? What did a rider need, beyond her supplies and her guns and her winter-over?

  Time.

  God. Time.

  They talked about going into the hills and not working for a while. And they’d always made just about enough for winter-over. They spent too much. He’d spent too much. He hated towns. Hated the crowding, the noise—hung about them for her sake. She’d said—hadn’t she?—that someday they’d make the money, buy the time, take the break to go back to the high country—and he’d known it would never happen.

  Aby had pleaded with him to join her at Anveney. He’d refused. She’d gotten mad. And hurt. And they hadn’t talked about it. But winter at Shamesey let her do those jobs at Anveney. And make money she wasn’t spending.

  That was what she’d been
doing with her secrecy. That was why she’d been hurt. The big plan. The trip back to the south. The year off work. And Jonas moved in on her.

  Tara sank slowly down on her haunches in front of him and rested her elbows on her knees, chilled hands in front of her mouth. The air was scarily tense. The wind screamed a steady song into the world.

  Good man, Tara thought. Honest man.

  And so damn much so much —which he was so, so careful to contain in himself—all the signs of someone who’d been with the horses so early and so long that, hurt and hit, he had only the instinct to hold pain close and kill it, before it killed him, his horse, his partner.

  She knew. She was smothering a lot of it herself. And she didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t intrude where only that partner ever had. Different from her—who’d had a set of lovers, interchangeable and easy. But with Aby Dale—and him—she got images of Of Of a whole life—

  Fights. Reconciliations. Arguments.

  Love had never changed, in all of it.

  “Listen,” she said, in the face of his skittish suspicions. “Don’t— don’t shoot Jonas Westman. All right? You don’t know. If he shows up—and he could, when the storm quits, don’t—”

  “My business.”

  “Yeah,” she said, and knew when to back off. She began to get up.

  He caught her wrist. Not hard. Didn’t have words framed— just—image.

  “At you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. Now—I think so. But I’ve known them a lot of years. I don’t know how to think. Maybe they just knew there was a secret. Maybe they were prying at it. Maybe they were just worried about her. —Maybe—I don’t know how she thought, you know? —I don’t know.”

  “I don’t either,” she said, and was going on to say—But Aby would care what happens to you. I don’t want you to do something you could be sorry for—

  She was almost to saying— I could care. I don’t want you hurt.

  But another image overrode.

 

  “Hell,” she said. It was Flicker. But it was Burn, too. One had the idea, and then the other did.

  Guil shook his head, and then looked up.

  In silence. Or near silence. The screech of the wind on the shingle had sunk away to an occasional flutter.

  “Storm’s letting up,” she said. “Or we’re covered up over the roof.”

  Burn was pawing at the floor. Nudging the latch with his nose.

  “Damn, Burn. Hold it, can you?” Guil got up, snapped the loaded cylinder closed and gave it to her as she got up.

  Meaning guard the door.

  He went and shoved the latch up.

  The door wouldn’t budge. Burn shoved it, and it gave a little. Not much.

  “Well,” she said, meaning it had to be the snow-door, which meant moving a table, and unscrewing two heavy bolts that held a wooden bar as thick as her arm. Bear-bars, they called them. With reason.

  She moved the table, he unscrewed the bolts, and pulled the door open on a shoulder-high wall of snow with dark above it and a wind still fit to blast cold air and snow into the room.

  Burn pawed at it, got purchase and began digging furiously. “Burn!” Guil yelled in protest, nothing availing, and Tara got the snowshovel and began making a heap of it on the floor. Coats were definitely in order.

  “Damn,” Guil complained, pulling his on, and then took over the shoveling, piling the stuff in the middle of the board floor as first his horse, then Flicker behind him broke their way through a considerable drift. The wind was cold. A pile of snow in the room was quickly sending a trail of icemelt across the boards to a low corner under the bed. It was disgusting. And Tara inhaled a cold gust, shrugging into her coat, and felt like chasing out after the horses and breathing the free wind herself.

  The horses had broken through into the night outside. They nipped each other and plowed through small snowbanks because they were there, they did their essential business when the urge took them, marking the area as theirs—and got to flirting with shadows, tails up, snow flying, while two humans froze, shoveling out the snow two horses had kicked into the room.

  Guil insisted, when they’d cleared everything but white traces of the shovel edge and a huge wet spot off the boards of the floor.

  There was no sympathy. There was a rogue out there somewhere in the woods, and two fool horses wanted to play tag through brush that masked holes and drop-offs. Tara sent furiously.

  Thirsty work, shoveling or digging. That drew the rascal, who came shaking her mane and shaking herself once she was inside, a spatter of quickly melting snow; Burn was right behind, hardly slower to spatter them and the room, with a whip of his tail to finish it—and no question in the world what was on both minds now. Flicker got her drink, from the bucket they kept full; and Burn moved in for a few gulps of water while two frosted humans were securing the snow-door to keep the heat in the room and the bears out.

  But before they were done, the ambient was awash in and and there seemed to be a second source of heat in the room.

  Two half-frozen humans went to the fire, nonetheless, to warm their chilled hands—impossible to ignore what was going on in the room, impossible not to feel the heart speeding and sensitivity increasing in areas one politely—desperately—tried not to think about.

  And did, because it was impossible to believe a man and woman in the same room with those two were going to clench their teeth till daybreak.

  She tried to concentrate on the fire. But she looked at him the same moment he looked at her, and it was like one thought, awareness of each other—impulses shooting through the parts in question. He was trying but she didn’t think he was winning. She wasn’t. Air seemed very scarce in the vicinity.

  “Oh, hell,” she said, or something like, and he was a degree closer and she was—they might both have leaned. A thickly padded hug gave way to a totally mindless intention, mouths meeting mouths and breathing finding some way to happen.

  Burn and Flicker were down to basics; but humans had clothes to go, and bare skin in a chilled room, and blankets that somehow the other party was sitting on, that resisted being wrapped around fast enough to keep the chill away, so her rear was cold, but she didn’t figure out where the end of the blanket was, and didn’t care.

  After that—after that were explosions, intermittent rest, and a quieter trial or two, with the horses quiet enough to let them feel their way around each other’s sensations, new to each other, and old as their experiences, and full of ghosts.

  He was thinking through half of it. She was thinking, now and again—but not that she didn’t care. They were both confused, and so much was still recent with them that neither of them could straighten out where they were.

  But within the ambient, human heartbeats began to be in unison—which bothered the horses, whose hearts beat in a different time. A feeling ran through her like electricity, coming from his hands, coming from the air—the horses found their own preoccupations, but he was he was the sole shuddering link keeping them both from flying off into the dark…

  was safety.>

  that was his personal terror.

  Then Fright at first, then a long, pleasurable, leisurely descent until they were breathing together, settled together.

  Hands held matching hands. Fingers clenched. The floor and the room still tried to come and go until the horses drifted to sleep, finally, themselves exhausted, and left them in a leaden, blind dullness of senses, just the physical touch, fingers on fingers, arm against arm.

 
They didn’t talk. He just touched. That it kept on to its own unaided and less acute conclusion meant something, she wanted to think, if only that they each wanted the kind of human contact you got alone in barracks, in the few places riders found to do things the blind, strange way humans did alone—for different reasons. Like companionship. Like sensation in that blind, numb state, far from the horses, when the world seemed so scarily quiet.

  It was an autumn craziness. It meant not a damned thing.

  And did. He’d let her inside, all the while afraid he might have let Aby’s killer inside with him.

  He’d let her close to him—all the while skittish and wary of the betrayals he expected, and had gotten, from men who should have helped him.

  Gold; and motives for accidents that weren’t accidents—a boxful of gold hadn’t mattered in his thoughts; it was his partner. It was only his partner.

  Damned if she was going to ride off from him.

  They were going out of here tomorrow. They were half dug out, only had to get the main door clear and bolt the snow-door tightly shut—in case Aby Dale’s working partners wanted the shelter tonight.

  They could go to hell. But you didn’t leave a shelter so somebody else couldn’t use it. Even the likes of them.

  Fingers squeezed hers. With the horses asleep, higher things didn’t come through. Worry could.

  She turned her head. Stuart looked asleep. She kept watching. He gave no sign he wasn’t. But he turned over and faced the fire then. So she suspected he hadn’t been.

  Truck. Rolling down the mountain. Faster and faster.

  Horses snorted. Danny waked with his heart thumping, the boys were awake—everybody in the room was awake, the ambient still awash with terror, and the remembrance of

  He suddenly felt spun over on one arm with the realization it wasn’t a dream—that somebody was coming at him,

  Cloud squealed a warning and dived for the man. Bit. Hard— and everybody was scrambling for their feet—horse hit the stove and recoiled with a squeal of pain and rage.