Cloud's Rider

by C. J. Cherryh

  So on that thought she ran, thump-thump, down the boards, and her light and her shadow went ahead of her.

  It was awfully cold. She’d thought she’d just be a minute, and then she wouldn’t need her coat, but a brisk draft was coming through, blowing her hair and chilling right through her clothes.

  Then she heard another, slower thumping on the boards, one-two, three-four feet, and she knew that was where Rain wasn’t ever supposed to be. Rain showed up, his eyes shimmering beneath the bangs that mostly covered his face and his split-lipped nose working, nostrils wide, to be sure who she was in spite of the that was in his mind. She’d scared him with her giant-shadow, and he scared her with his.

  “It’s me,” she said in a quavery voice, but it was always dependent on the rider to be the grown-up, so she talked like mama. “Silly. You can’t turn around. Back up.

  Somebody had left the door open at the den-end of the passage, she thought, and that wasn’t her fault. But when Rain had backed, with her pushing at his chest, all the way back to the den, she saw the door was kicked to flinders.

  Rain was scaring her.

  Rain was thinking about and it hadn’t any shape, or it had a lot of them, and the wind out in the dark was howling like bushdevils. She thought, There’s something out there.

  Or somebody out there.

  But not—not someone like mama and papa. Not like the villagers. Not like anybody she knew who’d be outside.

  She didn’t like it. Rain didn’t. And Slip left the den altogether, an angry darkness headed out into the snow from the open door. Slip couldn’t get out of the camp: the outside gate was always shut. But Slip could get himself clear of every other sending but that and then in a very loud sending let it know it wasn’t welcome, that was what Slip could do. Mom-horse was nervous and angry and Rain would have gone out there, too—but she hadn’t brought her coat and she didn’t want Rain to go out there.

  Because there were things in the winter storms that could come right over the walls and get you, grandma had said so when she was little, when once she had opened the door at night. She never forgot it.

  she thought. She didn’t care if she got in trouble. She thought maybe being safe was better.

  Something was wrong. Ridley knew it in the ambient before he was entirely awake, and came out of bed in a hurry. So did Callie, and the horses weren’t reaching them sufficiently to carry what they thought to each other, but his own horse Slip was loud enough with the situation as it was. Slip was sending and and that had a vague resemblance to willy-wisps. Slip didn’t trust what was running through the ambient right now, something that had to do with and , and

  That wasn’t right. The whole center of the business was

  “Dammit,” Ridley said, heart speeding with the possibilities: that his daughter was outside he had no need to guess. He struggled into his boots and slammed his foot into the heel on his way for the door. Callie was pulling on her pants. He grabbed his sweater off the chair and pulled it on as he reached the door where he kept the shotgun. “Bring the rifle!” he yelled back at Callie. If you met a vermin-rush a shotgun was the only answer. If it was a bear or a cat you’d better have a punch to take it down, because a shotgun was worthless unless it took it in the face, and in the face meant it was coming over you before it dropped. He didn’t know what they had to contend with. The nature of it wasn’t coming clear to him as he headed into the passageway to the den and met a gust of cold air the minute he opened the door.

  He shut the shelter-side door—cardinal rule, not to leave a passageway end unsecured when that door might be the only barrier between you and a breakthrough of vermin.

  Then he ran the wooden corridor, the ambient he was getting coming clearer and clearer, that Jennie was in distress, that Slip was upset—Slip was his horse, and Slip was giving him a rush of impressions of Shimmer was sending her peculiar mare-in-foal antagonism; and , Rain was sending, in close company with

  The door was kicked in. The horses had done that. Jennie was close by it, sending —scared and trying not to show it.

  He had the shotgun in one hand. He heard Callie coming. He hugged Jennie against him with the other arm and tried to hear Slip’s notion of what it was out there, as Callie was trying to hear.

  “I couldn’t see anything,” Jennie said. The kid had no coat. Ridley grabbed a blanket they used for the horses and wrapped it around her. “I heard Jennie said. “I know I shouldn’t come out. But you were

  “You wake me up any time you think of going out, hear?” He made his grip harsh for a moment, and shook her. , was in the ambient, and Callie came through, rifle in hand and in a way that set Shimmer off in a series of and images.

  “What are you doing out here?” Callie wanted to know, and Jennie flinched and ducked behind Ridley, holding onto him, staying close to Rain.

  “There’s something out there,” Ridley said. “Hush.” Meaning both of them. A spook in the night with the horses involved wasn’t a situation for a child, but it wasn’t one for a child-mother argument, either. Jennie was spooked enough, and Callie calmed herself down fast—he could feel it in the ambient and he could feel it in Jennie relaxing and being willing then to be near Callie.

  “I don’t want to go back inside,” Jennie said in a faint voice. “I don’t want to be by myself.”

  “Be still,” Callie said, and calmed Shimmer down with with no polite regard of a man and a kid in the ambient: it was something Shimmer and Callie remembered, a physical sensation and a feeling both protective and fierce sent out into the dark and the storm. See your bet and raise you, intruder.

  It was quieter after that. They stood together in the aisle of the den, where the wind could blow through from the open outside door; and Slip came inside, a shadow as fierce as Shimmer and almost as possessive of his territory. Ridley met him in the dark—they kept no lights in the den for fear of fire, and all that they could see of each other was blackness deeper than the dark of the aisle and as deep as Rain’s presence.

  Deeper still as Shimmer left her nook and crowded in, seeking Callie, forming a defensive bond. Get Jennie out, was the first thing that came to Ridley’s mind, feeling that hostility. But Jennie wasn’t a baby anymore; Jennie was a life defending itself with Rain and Rain defending himself with her: in that way they held the night around them, defining it as theirs, not provoking what was out there, but not accepting it, either.

  “There’s someone out there,” Jennie was the first to say. “People out there.”

  Ridley felt it, too, in the same moment, and knew Callie did.

  “Several someones,” Callie said.

  Human and horse, separated off from them in the storm and the snow.

  On the other side of their wooden wall there were hundreds of human minds, deaf to the ambient.

  The other side of their wall was the whole village of Evergreen, full of life that, isolated from the horses, couldn’t hear the dark outside the walls, walled in for the winter, cut off from the world for the season. Snows had come before this one, and the phone lines were down for the winter. The miners had come in. The loggers had. But without a horse in the midst of the strangers out there, they couldn’t have heard them that clearly—they’d have only gotten their existence from small creatures in burrows, and spotty at that. That strong a sending was a stray rider out there, maybe not alone, maybe with some lost group of miners they hadn’t known about: foolish novice prospectors did come up the mountain sometimes with the truckers, and the really foolish ones were secretive, just too nervous about their finds to let riders know they were there so riders could protect them.

  Or it could be some group of miners who’d planned to winter-over underground and had something serious go wrong. He knew of two such that were staying—dug in and well-stocked and betting their lives on keeping the Wild out of their burrows all winter without a rider’s help.

  But sometimes that wasn’t a good decision, and they’d been feeling things generally spooky on the mountain for weeks. There was the ghost of that feeling in the ambient now.


  The question was—where had a rider come from, and why come here and not to the rider’s own village?

  “I can’t pin it down,” Callie said finally, and Jennie said,

  “I’m scared. Rain’s scared, too.”

  “Calm him down,” Ridley said, with no sympathy. “Right now. Think of That was what they’d always taught Jennie to do when the spooky feelings came: that was her calm-image, and came to mind, a timid and shadowy flower, at the moment, a lost in the dark,

  “Callie,” Ridley said, “tell the marshal what we’re picking up. Better put more guards up.”

  “Bitter night,” Callie said. “Awful time to be out.”

  “Sure don’t envy them,” Ridley said. Callie didn’t argue with the need to get the marshal and didn’t argue about who was staying in camp with Jennie while she went through the snow-passages to advise the marshal. Callie just traded him the shotgun for the rifle, as the thing she’d need more if somehow vermin had gotten into the passages, as could happen if things went catastrophic tonight. And Jennie, it turned out, had brought the hand-torch from the barracks: light flared as she turned it on and gave it to her mother.

  “Clever child,” Callie said. “Deserve your ears boxed, is what.” Callie left at a fast pace. The light died as Callie disappeared through the shattered passage door.

  Shimmer wanted to follow Callie into that passage and did, though she wouldn’t get past the barrier that sealed off the village passages from the horses and would have to back out; while close in the company of Slip and Rain, Ridley put his arm around Jennie. The reprimand for taking the emergency light had slid off without a sting: worry about the situation hadn’t slid off at all. They hadn’t brought up a fool. Jennie knew things were serious, knew they weren’t her fault, and worried because things were happening that weren’t ordinary or right.

  It didn’t make sense that anyone was out there. Ice wind was what they called storms like this on Rogers Peak. If one got started, you didn’t run the risk: you tucked in and kept low until the wind stopped.

  This rider—these presences in the storm—hadn’t done that.

  And in the last of autumn the mountain had been carrying frequent disturbance to them, night visions of fire and blood, game on the mountain seeming to run in surges, abundant one day, gone the next, with no ordinary sense to the movements. The seniors had said things like that happened worst of all when it was setting on a bad winter. The wild things sensed the weather coming—so the seniors had said.

  And there were stories how when the vermin got to moving in waves, they’d surged right over defenses and right down some miner’s burrow. You stopped it fast and drove them back with shotgun blasts, or you went under for sure.

  He didn’t want to think about that with Jennie and Rain there: any young horse was noisy and spooky enough without encouragement—and in Rain’s case, increasingly uncomfortable to have around the den. The colt would be waking the village on his own if Jennie didn’t keep him quiet, and it was all but dead certain Rain was the culprit that had initially spooked Shimmer and Slip by picking up a far sending like that.

  “Silly lad,” he said, and patted Rain’s neck, while Slip was standing close by, great fool that he was, sending , and at the same time seeking shelter in the human presence.

  Rain was, he decided, no small part responsible for the rolling panic that had now sent Callie over to scare hell out of the marshal and his deputies, and, remotely possible, Rain might be the entire reason the autumn had felt as spooky as it had. Rain was weaned this fall, he was coming on puberty this winter, and a young horse in that mood was all ears and all sensation. Rain kept the neighborhood disturbed, and with mating season on them, was having sensations beyond the understanding of an eight-year-old, even if she had seen Slip and Shimmer getting babies.

  Slip, who’d have chased a young male out of his territory without hesitation in the Wild, was just, seniorlike in the band, increasingly out of patience with a noisy youngster. That might be all it was, and all that was out there might just be a late-season arrival with nothing really frightening about it—because they had two spooky minds to contend with, Jennie as well as the skittish colt. Jennie was worried about , which Jennie didn’t like,

  “Everything villageside is quiet,” Ridley reminded her—because she was trying to listen into that dark where Callie had gone, and Jennie wasn’t used to that side of the wall: Jennie had had the noise of horses and human minds around her since before she was born. The relative silence of villageside was scary to her.

  “They’re deaf over there,” Jennie remembered. “But they hear us. Do they hear that horse out there?”

  “Probably,” he said. “But if they don’t, you can bet your mama’s going to wake them up. Your mama’ll wake the marshal up, first.” He felt Jennie shiver. “Cold?”

  “A little.”

  He had her sit on the grain-bin and tuck up her legs in the blanket. Rain came and licked Jennie’s face and hair. He couldn’t feel the noise from outside so keenly now, maybe because Rain was distracted from it.

  Or maybe not. It came and it went, maybe with the attention of a horse out there.

  It wasn’t a safe feeling. That was one thing he knew.

  * * *

  Chapter 5

  Ť ^ ť

  With the storm-light all around them, and with the snow coming down on a steady wind, the woods took on an illusory sense of peace, a wind-swept, chill peace that bid fair to swallow down the weary— the mountain proving too vast, the snowy night and the wind trying to fold them in—fatally so. What had been traction was getting to be a knee-high barrier to horse and human.

  “We’ve missed the shelter,” Carlo said.

  “We’ll get there.”

  “I think it’s behind us.”

  “What do you want? Go back and run into that horse?”

  “You said it wouldn’t follow us!”

  “Yeah, well, best guess.”

  “It can’t be this far!”

  “So hire another rider!”

  “Don’t give me an answer like that! What are we going to do?”

  “If we’ve missed it,” Danny said, struggling for calm, “—if we have missed it, there’s another shelter.”

  “There’s another! God, it’s hours on! It’s getting late! The sun’s gone! We could miss the shelter ahead of us, too, Danny! What are we doing?”

  “We don’t know we’ve missed the first one!”

  “There’s logging trails that spur off this road. We could be off on one of them!”

  “I know. I know about them. There’s three. We never bear right into the trees. That’s what Tara said. All I can say. Keep walking.”

  “Dammit,” Carlo said. “Dammit.”

  “Yeah,” he said. He ran out of breath for talking. The shadow that was Cloud was pulling ahead of them again, nothing but a grayness in the ambient and a grayness in the softly felling snow.

  They’d pull and breathe, now, pull and breathe, Randy on the travois, half-aware, neither of them who were pulling having breath to talk. But that ominous sending came to them now and again and drove them to greater effort. Danny was sick at his stomach, he’d had a nosebleed, which he only realized because the blood showed up dark on his glove and , which confounded itself with the dreadful image chasing them.

  We’re in trouble, was all Danny could say to himself. It had assumed a rhythm along with the pulling: We’re in—real bad—trouble.

  “We’d better look for a spot to tuck down,” he said to Carlo. “Dig in and stay. We’re out of options.”

  It meant Brionne was going to die for certain. But they were down to Randy’s life. And down to their own. There were trees. He had a hatchet.

  “Damn that thing!” Carlo cried, stumbling to a stop. “I’ll shoot it!”

  That was Cloud answering the challenge. Cloud had swung about, also stopped in his tracks, head up, ears flat, nostrils catching the night wind, and Danny dropped the travois and grabbed Cloud by the mane, imaging He was scared Cloud was going to take out chasing that sending, and Cloud did drag him a distance through the s
now, until weariness had its effect and Cloud came to his senses.

  Cloud stood shivering after that. But Cloud knew his rider was beside him at that point, snorted loudly, and listened when Danny imaged

  Cloud agreed, also wanting , and Danny let go all but a single handful of his mane and walked past Carlo without a word, because Cloud’s state of mind was as precarious as it could possibly be right now.

  “Hey!” Carlo’s ragged voice came from behind him. It was a moment before Carlo could overtake him, pulling the travois alone to the point where he stopped—Carlo was and

  “What are you doing?” Carlo cried. Carlo ran out of strength in that last effort and dropped to his knees.

  He didn’t know what he was doing. He had Cloud headed in the right direction. That was where his thoughts were. But he took one pole, Carlo hauled at the other, and they pulled in Cloud’s track.

  From Randy there was nothing but the image of

  Trees were consistently on either side of them, arguing they had somehow missed the shelter and, almost indistinguishable from drifts, there were banks of snow-covered undergrowth that argued whatever this track was, it was used enough to keep the brush down. Trucks in this country dragged chain from their undercarriage to maintain the roads clear of brush and keep the ruts from making high centers; this was surely a road of some kind—if it wasn’t theirs, if they had gotten diverted onto a logging trail, it might lead to a camp, deserted in this season as the miners headed for villages for the winter, or even dug-in miners, fools so crazy for digging they wouldn’t leave for the winters.

  But there’d be a shack strong enough to sleep in, if they could find it in the blowing snow. If they could just get a place to tuck in, even a deep place in the rocks, then they could wait it out—and hold off the horse that was stalking them.

  Only if they could get Cloud into it. Only if they could keep him from challenging that horse. He might win.

  He might not.

  They perceived something else near them, too, something angry and curious that wasn’t a horse. Wildlife was disturbed by the intrusion. Wild things were waking from storm-slumber.