Cloud's Rider

Cloud's Rider Page 2

by C. J. Cherryh

  For what? Danny asked himself—and thought as he’d thought more than once on this trek upward that Tara Chang had been right in the first place: there was nothing particularly sacred about a thirteen-year-old life that wasn’t equally sacred about a person who’d proved himself a decent human being for twice that number of years.

  And three human lives and a good horse were damn sure more valuable than a self-willed girl with only a remote chance of recovering—but here they were, and they tried, and they hung on.

  The light had gone to that murky gray that heralded a thick spot in the clouds directly overhead. Sleet scoured off the rubble surface of the road in the windy zones and piled up in banks where the wind gave it up. Where it lay thick it afforded traction—but yesterday’s sun had created melt off a previous fall that had already frozen. Worse—there’d been high humidity this morning and the temperature had fluctuated. They were dealing with patches of ice, and those patches were growing more frequent on this stretch of the road.

  Then—then by the pitch of a twenty-percent grade and a sudden shift in what Cloud felt and smelled of the wind, he knew a picture he’d gotten from Tara, that right-angled turn in the road that led around flat before it climbed—that point where if they walked straight ahead and didn’t bend very abruptly to the right, they’d go over the rim and into white nowhere, straight down, no barriers, no warning.

  Truckers’ hell, the sharp turn and the abrupt up or down grade that led to it. That was where the truck had gone off that Guil and Tara meant to salvage. That was where Guil’s partner had lost her life—Tara had warned him of it, and, God, it had to be. A lot of the landmarks Tara had imaged to him he couldn’t find with the sleet coming down like this, but she’d dwelt heavily on this one image, and the hell of it was—the thing that made him suddenly sick at his stomach—

  He’d thought they’d passed this essential landmark turn a long time back.

  So they weren’t as far up the mountain as he’d thought they were. The whole scale of the problem shifted on him. They weren’t making the time he’d thought. And that affected—

  Everything. Every estimate. Every hope.

  Midway was hours behind them. If this was in fact the infamous turn—that meant everything he’d been sure he knew the position of was completely off.

  And if his reckoning where they were on the mountain was off— he wasn’t sure of the elapsed time, either, and he couldn’t find the sun: it could have passed behind the mountain into afternoon, for all he could tell. Light spread through the storm with no distinction.

  He caught from the boys, who’d surely picked up his distress. He caught A lot of that. He caught , and and from up ahead, where Cloud negotiated that dreadful turn—and the damned travois, that had cost them so much time, bucked and bumped over the uneven surface beside him.

  Two hours for this damn trek in high summer.

  Dammit, he didn’t know how he could be that far wrong—except if midway wasn’t at all mid-way from first-stage—and, he recollected with a sinking feeling, he’d learned already that the road crews put things not where they’d like to have them but where they could put them. One set of expectations was skewed by processes he hadn’t thought about, and other expectations could be, reason told him in this thunderstruck moment, thrown off by the same logic. He’d assumed by the name of midway—where he had no business to assume.

  But panic didn’t serve anybody. They’d make the shelter. Just—maybe—not before dark.

  A little beyond that turn a fold of the mountain came between them and the worst gusts. Cloud stopped and turned his tail to the wind that did reach them, taking a breather on his own schedule and at his opportunity, which Cloud did when his needs exceeded the rests they took.

  At such moments Danny and the Goss boys had generally stopped standing—but a pileup of sleet against the mountain afforded them a brake on the travois’ tendency to skid downhill and afforded a chance for a rest. Danny saw it, turned his own back to the gale and stood there just breathing, with the wind battering the back brim of his hat flat up against his head, and waited as a living signpost in the haze until the two muffled figures overtook him with the travois.

  Then he squatted down, and fell the last bit onto his rump, his knees beyond pain and refusing such delicate adjustments. He got up into a crouch his legs didn’t want to hold, but did, as Carlo had sat down after much the same fashion—he’d taken to heart the lesson about not sitting on the ground, but Randy just collapsed helplessly downward and stayed.

  Blacksmith’s kids, both, and Carlo had the height and the arms Randy had yet to grow to. Carlo shoved his brother, said simply, “Squat,” and Randy managed to get up off the ground and hold the position, with Carlos strong arm around him.

  After that no one had the energy to talk, just sat huddled up against the wind, the boys probably with the same sick headache, Danny thought, that increasingly pounded behind his sinuses and behind his eyes and around his skull.

  It was altitude causing that. He’d felt it a little down at the cabin with the senior riders, and Guil had warned him it could get debilitating—which he couldn’t afford right now. Mouth was dry. They hadn’t eaten all day. He didn’t think he could swallow the thawed food he carried; eating snow relieved the dryness but chilled the bones, so he just took a little mouthful, after which he shut his eyes—partly to ease the headache and partly just to warm them from the wind.

  But even with his eyes shut, he saw them all from Cloud’s senses, a moving sort of vision as Cloud came trudging back.

  He had so much rather have nursed his headache and caught his breath undisturbed, but he couldn’t let that annoyance go on. He bestirred himself to check over Cloud’s feet for ice-cuts: the threefold hooves had a soft spot high up between the juncture of the three bones, just behind the middle and largest toe. If a horse didn’t feel a buildup of ice freezing on the scant hairs of the inside, developed an ice lump and went on walking on it, so he’d had from experienced senior riders, the horse could go lame. He had to take off his glove and put a knee on the snow, and take armfuls of wet, chilled horse-foot into his embrace, one after the other, probing a bare finger into the crevice, finding no blood.

  So he put his glove back on and broke the ice lumps out of Cloud’s tail—three big sharp ones—by bashing them against his knee with his gloved fist and the hilt of his boot-knife. The way the weather was going they’d form again off the melt that Cloud’s own body heat made, and dealing with Cloud was getting him damp, when that was what he was most trying to avoid.

  Cloud paid him when he was done with a warm rough tongue across the cheek and a whuff of hot nighthorse breath in his face where his scarf had slipped. , swam across his vision like a view of heaven. Cloud wanted him to get up and leave the boys. Cloud thought of

  Cloud loved ham with all his omnivorous heart. It was so vivid he could taste it.

  But so was Cloud’s own case of altitude-generated dry mouth, and when Danny took his glove off to fish for a morsel in the packet he had against his ribs, Cloud couldn’t more than lick it into his mouth and work his jaws about trying to find a that eluded him.

  No words between Danny and his clients, nothing but breathing, a try at massaging the legs, a thump of gloved hands at one’s boot-toes to be sure the feet still picked up sensation. They stayed down so long as Cloud rested, hunkered down in a knot sheltering Randy in Cloud’s wind-shadow, warming the kid and slowly warming up the backs and fronts of their legs.

  Couldn’t do anything about the cold knees except the extra cloth they’d wrapped around—Tara had told them that trick: lots of air space and extra woolen padding. But Randy’s wraps kept coming loose and gathering around his calves. Danny tugged his up again, tugged at Randy’s left one and Carlo fixed the right.

  Then Cloud decided it was time to walk and they lost their windbreak.

  “Kid can’t do it anymore.” Carlo’s voice was all but gone as they got up. “I need help, Danny.”

  “You and me,” Danny said. Talking over the wind hurt his throat, and
if neither of them had understood during that moment of physical closeness that his distance estimate was off, he didn’t want to tell them yet the trouble they were in. Randy was light-boned and chilling faster than they were in the gale-force wind. Carlo, sixteen, Danny reckoned as stronger than he was at a travel-hardened year older—and maybe with the two of them really putting effort into it they could make the cabin up there not too long after dark.

  So Carlo took the left-hand pole of the travois and Danny took the right one. The spot where they’d rested had had only a slight incline, which tended to be true at turns, for very sensible reasons for the truckers.

  But the next stretch was a hellish steep that began on the inside curve for a downhill-bound truck, the kind of place where the builders had tended to do their worst: this turned out to be the worst grade yet, up to yet another wandering road and into the teeth of an icy damp wind.

  (“The mountain can surprise you.” Tara Chang had even said it in words, plain as she could make it. “Don’t commit to that road unless you’re sure you’ve got several days running of clear weather. Ring around the greater moon means stay put. If you don’t see cloud in the east—” (“She means a weather system past us,” Guil Stuart had interjected at that point. And Tara had said: “The troughs from the west and over the mountains run about four days apart.” And Guil: “But sometimes they lie, too.”) “If you don’t see clouds in the east,” Tara had said without looking at Guil, “and not too far east— don’t budge from that shelter.”)

  Well, he’d seen no ring around the moon when they’d left the first-stage shelter. He’d seen clouds just past them in the east.

  This morning when they’d left—hell’s bells, he hadn’t been able to see the moon, in a sleet-storm that his other source of advice, Carlo and Randy, who had spent their lives on the mountain, said could be the leading edge of a real blizzard coming down.

  He’d listened most to Tara telling him how to move when the choice was move—and not enough, he realized now, to both Guil and Tara telling him he should wait for a clear, established trough between major storms—that was what Guil had meant, not any stupid counting. He’d known all his life that there tended to be a four-day gap between storms that reached Shamesey.

  But down there you saw them coming. He’d not imagined that up here you didn’t see the weather. They were almost on the continental divide—and the consequence of being on the east of the mountain ridge meant the weather came up hidden by the mountain until it broke right over your head.

  The direct consequence was that a storm which hadn’t even been a cloud-line on the horizon yesterday morning at first-stage had set in hard during the night of their stay at midway. They’d seen it first boiling above the distant peaks of the central massif when, coming up from that first-stage shelter at dusk last night, they’d rounded that last curve. The midway shelter had been there in front of them and, a fact with which he reproached himself now, he’d never thought to turn around and go back right then, when, yes, they were tired, and they’d walked all day; and, yes, there was a horse down below they didn’t want to deal with—but it might have been better than this.

  Last night the wind had howled about the midway cabin, literally shaking the walls of a structure poised on the edge of nothing at all. Their fire had refused to stay lit against the draft coming down the chimney. His information from Tara as well as Carlo and Randy said the road above midway and below was subject to deep, impassable drifting once winter set in. After the small stack of wood ran out in that barren, treeless steep the snow might block them from leaving, and they could freeze to death in a cabin that even with the intermittent fire last night had been colder than hell’s attic.

  Even knowing that he’d not seriously thought of turning them around and leading them back to first-stage—because he’d been unwilling to face that damned stray horse.

  He’d had too much sympathy for it—since it was itself a refugee from the Tarmin disaster, lost, bereaved, more desperate than they were. Riders had died down on the lower reaches of the mountain, and horses had survived—meaning hurt horses, horses missing riders—and the one haunting the vicinity of the first-stage cabin when they’d arrived hadn’t been too sane to start with, if it was the horse he most feared—a good chance it was that horse, considering where it was hanging out, where a rider had died who was, no question, crazy.

  And the chance of Brionne waking up when it was prowling around the outside of their cabin—or worse, intercepting them on the trail—and having a crazy girl and a crazy horse on his hands— along with Cloud, who’d fight it for their protection—

  He’d felt the darting, fragmented—thing—that was the rogue the night Tarmin had gone down. He’d seen and felt her half-waking in the cabin with Guil and Tara, and he had no desire whatever to deal with her awake and within reach of a horse that could carry her thoughts outside herself. She’d gone out cold after that brief incident the night they’d joined Guil and Tara—and nobody, not even her brothers, invited her to come to again. If it had been Tara who’d gone with the Goss kids to the first-stage shelter, he suspected now that Brionne wouldn’t have lived past midnight; for the horse, Tara might have had pity. But Tara had taken him aside for a moment before he left and said, aloud and in private, that if Brionne died, he should come back.

  He’d been—not horrified, but at least disturbed, and knew right then he was talking to a rider forged in a fire he’d no concept of.

  But after a handful of nights at first-stage with that horse outside he’d begun to weigh what one life was really worth relative to all the others. He didn’t at all have the cold-heartedness to have shot her; he didn’t right now have the conviction to see that travois take a plunge down the mountain; but he’d gotten scared enough by now that the thought did come to his mind.

  Sleet kept coming at them, falling from the sky, swept up off the road, blown down on them—he didn’t know, but thunder above them suggested it wasn’t all blowing off the heights. The light was a gray and sickly color, and he didn’t like to look to the left, because there wasn’t any dimension to it. They reached a place where the darkness of Cloud’s tail streamed first sideways and up and around and sideways again—and when they reached it in Cloud’s wake, wind literally blew him and Carlo a little sideways on the icy surface.

  He found traction in patches of snow. He began counting thirty, forty steps in that struggle against the wind. It was an effort to keep his knees pulling straight. His scarf slid down. He grabbed it and stuffed it into place as best he could.

  Carlo jolted down to one knee. Wind straight off the backbone of the continent had scoured the roadway here to bare, frozen, lumpy rubble, and there they were, braced, not at a good angle, on what looked and felt like ice.

  “Are you all right?” Randy’s thin shout came from behind, and Danny didn’t want to look back for fear of losing the scarf, maybe his hat, which he had tied down as hard as he could. Carlo carefully got back to both feet.

  Treacherous ground, treacherous wind. “Change hands!” Carlo yelled against the blast, and if Carlo was losing his grip on that side, Danny wasn’t going to question it, no matter the difficulty of making that changeover here. He was losing feeling in his own fingers. He began, as Carlo asked, to effect the change of sides, reaching for the far pole, edging across on slick ground.

  The travois bucked up under a gust, spun, half over, girl and supplies and all, and tried to sail up and out of their hands as Carlo struggled to hold it.

  “Look out!” Randy cried against the deafening buffet of the wind, and Carlo desperately elbowed aside his brother’s help with: “Dammit, get out of the way! I can handle it!”

  Randy bid fair to get himself, Brionne, and Carlo blown off the roadway. The kid tried to grab the side pole, Carlo tried instead to kneel and bear the travois down to the ground with his weight; in the crossed signals, thinking to the last instant he was going to see the whole thing and both boys go spinning down the icy incline toward the cliff edge, Danny kicked Randy’s leg from under him and yelled, “Sit on it, dammi
t!” in what voice he had left.

  Randy flung himself atop Brionne and coincidentally the travois as he fell—as Danny and Carlo both fought the travois flat with their weight across him, all three of them atop.

  It skidded.

  Danny dug his boot-toes in and it kept going until his toe hit a lump of icy rock on the roadway.

  He didn’t move for a minute after that, just panted a series of deep breaths through the icy and soggy scarf, lying on Carlo, lying on Randy, lying on Brionne.

  Then, waiting his time between the blasts of wind and bracing first his other toe and then the foot carefully on the surface, he got up, let Carlo up, and snarled “Stay down,” at Randy.

  And again, when Randy tried to get up, “I said stay down, dammit!”

  Randy and his stubborn helpfulness was ballast. Carlo was real help. Danny took one pole, Carlo took the other, and with Randy’s weight safely disposed on the travois, they struggled upslope.

  There’d stopped being sky and earth and this time he couldn’t tell himself they’d just walked into a gusty area. This was the wind picking up and sleet coming down so thick they breathed it.

  There was one thing—one thing Tara hadn’t known: that there’d been a horse loose that Brionne could have latched onto—and that fear of it would send them out of the safety she’d planned and into a rush up the mountain. On his best judgment.

  Now look where he was.

  What in hell were two senior riders expecting him to do with the job he’d been handed?

  Not what he was doing, damn sure.

  “Lousy, lousy weather,” Guil Stuart said from the vantage of the cabin he shared with Tara Chang and two nighthorses. His horse, Burn, and Tara’s Flicker (two names having nothing to do with each other, since Burn imaged himself as fire and dark and Flicker’s name was sunlight in rapid flashes) were out cavorting in the storm, chasing some hapless creature they’d roused out of hiding—hapless since it had fallen afoul of nighthorses looking for fresh meat. Guil limped back to stand at the fireside where Tara was mending the bullet hole in his coat and, staring at the embers of a comfortable fire, he thought about a handful of kids he’d rather have counseled stay put, maybe back at Tarmin rather than first-stage.

 

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