Cloud's Rider

by C. J. Cherryh

  Cloud on the other hand was faring much better. Cloud sank down after that treatment, , seeking warmth on the evergreen boughs that were the flooring. Cloud was feeling much better and very glad to have blankets thrown over him, then. Danny swiped a salved, horsey back of his hand across his nose and made a last assault with the salve at Cloud’s neck, where he could get warmth to the big artery, with the warming salve under Cloud’s mane and onto Cloud’s throat, which had to be as raw and dry as his.

  Then from somewhere out of the dark came the girl-kid lugging a bucket too heavy for her—a heavy bucket that steamed and smelled, such as his and Cloud’s altitude-ravaged sense of smell could detect, of warm mash. Cloud gave a snort, interested, as the other horses were interested, having had one supper—but, being horses, always willing to eat. Ridley took the bucket and poured a taste into the common trough before he brought the rest to Cloud, who hadn’t gotten up. Ridley set the bucket in front of him.

  Cloud sucked up a mouthful of warm mash, and on the strength of that, found it worthwhile to get to his feet and go head-down in the bucket—maybe not to eat much: Cloud wasn’t a fool, among a canny, self-preserving kind. But certainly Cloud meant to get his promised reward.

  That meant that Cloud’s rider could go to the warm barracks and the fireside, and Danny started toward the door by which he’d come in, back into the snow—but the Evergreen rider pointed with the beam of the electric torch toward a second doorway, one framed by shattered boards.

  Danny didn’t ask. Horses were horses, and boards suffered when the night was full of alarms. He scooped up a handful of snow blown in from the outside door and pressed the icy handful against the bridge of his nose before he went back to that door, through which Ridley and the kid led him into a night-black wooden tunnel.

  “Where did you come from?” the little girl wanted to know, looking back as she walked ahead of them in their little sphere of light; but Ridley said sternly, as he shone the light down the passage: “Get on to the barracks, Jennie-cub. Leave the man alone. He’s got a nosebleed.”

  Man. Man, the senior rider said. People down in Shamesey certainly hadn’t called him that. He’d been struggling all during the trip for Dan instead of Danny.

  And a village rider saw him as a man, an equal, worth respect just for living to get up this mountain.

  That was worth the hike up here.

  Jennie-cub hadn’t gone. She looked back this time upside down, or at least with her head tilted way back as she walked ahead of them. “I had a nosebleed once. What’s your horse’s name? Mine’s name is Rain.”

  “Rain isn’t your horse,” Ridley said. “You wait for Shimmer’s foal, miss. —Get to the barracks and open that door before I tan your backside for good and all.”

  Young Jennie went ahead of them. Light and shadows ran on either side of the little girl, who became a shadow as she skipped ahead of them down a course grown dizzier and dizzier. The walls seemed closer as they went and the air grew more still and dank, smelling of old wood and wet stone and earth.

  Couldn’t feel his feet. Couldn’t see up from down in the shadows. He was passing out of Cloud’s range and his sense of orientation was going.

  He put out a hand along the wooden wall, seeking balance, thinking, I’m going to fall—about the time they overtook Jennie, who pulled open a door on blinding light.

  Warm air met them. He dumped his handful of bloody snow and walked in blind, with Ridley behind him, caught a lungful of the heat inside, and felt himself going as his knees had just turned to jelly.

  Strong arms caught him around the ribs and helped him toward the fire and the light. Carlo and Randy were sitting on the floor against the wall.

  Brionne was lying there too, unbundled from the travois, but still folded in her nest of furs.

  Ridley let him down. He sat against the fireside stones, that being all that was going to hold him up. He had just enough strength to take off his hat and scarf, and a moment later to struggle out of his coat and a couple of sweaters before he smothered. He told himself he wasn’t going to pass out. Wasn’t going to make a spectacle.

  Ridley came and checked his hands in the bright lamplight.

  “Not as bad as could be,” Ridley pronounced his fingers. “A little burn. But not real bad.” Then Ridley unlaced his boots for him and carefully pulled them off. He wasn’t sure he really wanted to know; but they were his feet, he’d no choice, and it wasn’t would-happen, it was already had-happened, whatever the verdict was going to be as the socks came off, one layer after another.

  “Mmn,” Ridley said. “Going to lose a little skin. —Feel that?”

  “Yeah.” It felt as if Ridley drew blood. Then Ridley stripped the other foot. He felt those toes, too. It hurt so much tears began running down his face. His ankles hurt. His knees hurt. There wasn’t any part of him that didn’t hurt, and Carlo and Randy didn’t look any better off.

  “Wasn’t sure for a long time that you were human,” the woman said, squatting down near him. “Lot of spookiness out there tonight. Lot of spookiness the last week or so. You know anything about it?”

  “Yeah.” His gut knotted up. He started thinking frantically what he could say. “But get these kids to the village first.”

  “You go,” Ridley said (he thought) to Callie, and a second later said, “Jennie can go with you. It’s all right.”

  The woman for her part wasn’t enthusiastic about leaving Ridley alone, Danny decided, small threat that he and Carlo were. Carlo looked to be fading out, Randy was asleep, and Brionne—Brionne was a bundle of furs the other side of the fire.

  They’d gotten her here.

  And hadn’t they done something good in that? Even heroic?

  Even if he had been stupid and missed not just one shelter but both of them in the storm?

  And as for himself, at the definite end of his stupid years, his do-anything, dare-anything childhood, and grown older and wiser all in one disastrous climb—he fingered his nose and his ears, wondering if they were frostbitten and whether he’d be scarred for life from this adventure, or whether he could just swear to God he’d learned and didn’t need to do anything this stupid again.

  The woman put on a coat and prepared to leave as Ridley pressed a warm teacup into his hands, wrapped in a cloth. That was, the pain in his hands told him, a very, very good idea.

  Meanwhile the little girl—Jennie—came near, leaned over and asked, “What’s your horse’s name?”

  “Cloud,” he said, grateful for such simple, answerable questions. “My name’s Dan Fisher. I’m from Shamesey.”

  “From Shamesey!”

  He was aware her father was listening. And her mother. His voice was down to a hoarse thread. “Yeah.”

  “What brought you to the mountain?” Ridley asked, with clear suspicion, and the woman hesitated in leaving.

  “Friend of mine needed help.”

  Ridley went to the cabinet and took out a bottle. It was spirits. Ridley came and poured a generous dollop into Danny’s tea. And he went over and poured some for Carlo, too, who was sitting up and looking dazed, but likewise lifting up a cup.

  “And what brought you all the way up here?” Ridley asked, and Carlo blurted out,

  “Because there’s nothing left down there. Tarmin’s gone.”

  You didn’t need the horses to feel the shock in their minds: fear, disbelief, that Tarmin, the biggest village on the mountain, their main depot for shipments going or coming didn’t exist anymore.

  “Tarmin is gone,” Danny said, to draw all the questions back to him and not to Carlo. He sipped the fortified tea to gain time for a breath and a second thought. The woman stood in her jacket, and Jennie, likewise dressed for the cold, came and huddled against her legs.

  “What’s he saying? What happened, mama?”

  “So what is the story?” Ridley asked him, dead calm, as controlled as a rider needed to be. The horses couldn’t hear them here. At least, they shouldn’t be able to.

  And he needn’t tell even half of it. He’d given his caution, in asking that the kids leave th
e camp. They hadn’t. He said only, “Somebody opened a gate. I don’t want to give the details—don’t know the range from your den—”

  “Is your horse all right?” Ridley asked. The senior rider here, boss-man in this camp, had an absolute right to ask that question. He had a kid lying on his hearth stiff and gone somewhere she couldn’t get back from. He had a strange horse in the den with their horses. He had a village locked in for the winter, with all its people. He had a daughter as well as a partner to protect.

  And if they themselves hadn’t been hallucinating, he had a horse out there in the woods whose distress had waked the wild things in their burrows and relayed its sending God knew how far, disturbing the mountain a second time in less than a month.

  “We weren’t there when it happened,” Danny said, the horse-and-rider we, but he wouldn’t elaborate more than he had to, either— didn’t quite lie, just leaned very heavily on Ridley’s assurance the horses in the den were beyond their ordinary range of picking up human beings.

  Which could change if one horse picked up a suspicion of human distress in the rider barracks—and they had a young horse out there, an unridden horse of their own, at a stage notorious for being loud and hearing even humans unnaturally far.

  So he concentrated entirely on the cup in his hands and sipped it this time not to keep his voice from cracking, but to save his mind from wobbling from the very narrow path of information he had to hold.

  “I came in after the fact. These three—they’re all that lived through it. They’re brothers and sister. We’ve been trying not to think of it near the horses. Couldn’t do anything for the girl down there. She’s caught in it, deeper and deeper. She used to react to things. She doesn’t now. I understand there’s supposed to be a doctor in the village.”

  The woman pressed Jennie against her legs. Danny found his hands shaking so he burned himself as the tea slopped over. He didn’t look at their faces. He didn’t want to. A mind that wasn’t right wasn’t ever anything to bring near the horses.

  A mind that wasn’t right wasn’t anything to leave within range of anything of the Wild. And Brionne’s mind, above all else that was wrong with her, wasn’t right. They were senior riders. They had to recognize the kind of shock she was in and know that she was dangerous. He’d meant to be out in a shelter tonight—come to Evergreen on a clear, quiet day with no emergency in the situation. But that wasn’t what had happened. Things were done—choices were made around a set of facts that involved several lives, facts he didn’t want to let loose just for the asking—because the truth could cause a panic that itself could get people killed.

  “Was it her,” Ridley asked, “making that spook-feeling out there?”

  No, he thought: direction and location had been in the sending: that was what had made it so damn real. It had convinced Cloud.

  “No,” he said aloud. “I’m pretty sure it was behind us. A horse. Rider’s died. With the sister’s condition—I didn’t want to stay where it was.”

  “Go get the marshal,” Ridley said, meaning, Danny thought, get the little kid out of here and get Brionne the hell out of reach of the horses. The woman took the kid and went out the door to the passageway they’d used—a second and third passage had gone off from there, he remembered them in the light from the door.

  Ridley went meanwhile and warmed Carlo’s cup with tea from the pot. Randy was sleeping like the dead, on his stomach, his hand up near his face, head on his arm—he didn’t wake for anything. Poor kid, Danny thought, and hoped there was better luck for the brothers. They’d earned it.

  Ridley came and poured tea into his cup. And in that closeness and the quiet of the ambient Danny took the chance. “There’s more to it than I’ve said. We’re all right. But get the girl out of here fairly soon.”

  “What have you brought us?” Ridley asked sharply, and Danny ducked his head to cough—he’d been wanting to since he tipped his head back, and he didn’t want to look Ridley in the eyes.

  “Dammit.” Ridley dropped down on his haunches to meet him eye to eye in that privacy of the fire-crackle and the wind outside; and the ambient still stayed quiet and numb as he finished his coughing fit with a swallow of tea that still had spirits in it. “What’s going on down there?” Ridley asked. “What’s a Shamesey rider doing here, for God’s sake? What’s the real story?”

  “Rescuing a friend,” Danny repeated. He heard the indignation in Ridley’s voice. He knew he deserved it. “It’s a long story. Get the kids safe and I’ll talk.” He took another sip of the spirit-laced tea, saw Carlo staring into his cup as if it held answers, and saw Randy sleeping.

  Brionne didn’t change. Thank God. He was all but counting the minutes until they could bring someone in and get Brionne out of the camp. And very rapidly now the very last reserve of strength was running out of him. He sipped the tea and his hands began to shake.

  Feeling was coming back to his feet. They hurt. His hands did. His face did.

  “The whole damn season’s felt bad,” Ridley said in a more moderate tone. It wasn’t like a statement. It was a peace offering he didn’t deserve, from a man he deserved worse of, in a situation he couldn’t, right now, discuss. This was, Danny thought, a good-hearted and forgiving man. A man more reasonable than he deserved to have to deal with—he hadn’t wanted to go all the way to Evergreen. But he had. And now he had to deal with the consequences.

  “Yeah.” Agreement seemed safest, agreement with everything the local riders said at least until he could use clear-headed judgement.

  Meanwhile Carlo had edged over to try to see to his brother, lifting the blanket they’d wrapped him in to look at his feet, and that movement was a distraction for the conversation. “How is he?” he asked Carlo across the intervening space.

  “I don’t know.” Carlo let the blanket down. Randy didn’t stir through any of it, and Carlo made a fast swipe at his eyes. Carlo’s hand was shaking.

  Ridley got up and squatted down again to take a look at Randy’s hands and feet and ears. He looked at Carlo’s, too, while he was at it.

  “Better than yours,” Ridley said. “Work your fingers. Fist.”

  Carlo tried. Ridley made a doubtful expression. “Horse medicine,” Ridley said, and got a small grimy pot off the shelf and squatted down and rubbed salve into Carlo’s hands. “Hands and feet. You take the pot with you, son. It’s cheap. We’ve got buckets of it for the horses. Use it. Marshal’s going to find a place for you. You think you need a doctor?”

  “No.” Carlo shook his head fast, and Danny could read his mind without Cloud’s help: Carlo didn’t want to be under the same roof with his sister. Didn’t want Randy there, either. “Smith,” Carlo said. “Our folks—” His voice faded and came back again. “They were the smiths down in Tarmin. Need—need to find work if we can.”

  “Ours might take you on.” Ridley maintained a tight reserve. “But those hands aren’t going to be fit for smith-work for a while.” He patted Carlo gently on the leg and got up to pace the floor—another not too difficult guess, that Ridley was aching for Callie to get back safely with the marshal and a means to get his problem out of the camp.

  Danny drank his tea and kept his mouth shut, feeling even with the pain in his feet and hands and ears that he could pass out where he was sitting—but he held on: if something happened, he wanted to be awake. He wanted to know what disposition village authorities would make of the boys and Brionne, who came under village law.

  He didn’t. He was in Evergreen, looking at the authority that governed the rider camp, and what Ridley said in these walls had to be law—including the possibility that Ridley would tell him get out of the village and go somewhere else, weather or no weather. A camp boss always had that authority, and he had to respect it.

  But, God, he didn’t know where he or Cloud would get the strength to go on.

  * * *

  Chapter 6

  Ť ^ ť

  Came, in due course, a thumping in the passage leading to the back door. The door opened and Callie—still with young Jennie, which Danny didn’t expect—came in ahead of a big burly man and three o
ther village types in heavy coats.

  That would be the marshal and his deputies, he supposed, the law on the other side of the wall—the dividing wall that existed here the same as it existed in substance and in fact in every town and village in the world, dividing the wicked rider camps from the godfearing and righteous townsmen—who couldn’t live without them. He didn’t trust town authorities. On principle of that wall of Theirs and Ours and on principle of his days as a bad boy of Shamesey streets—granting his father was absolutely right to have hit him harder than the deputy had—he had several misgivings about turning Carlo and Randy over to the law, and far more about answering questions.

  “These the young folk?” the oldest of the men asked, as his companions shut the door and stopped the gale from the passageway. “This the young lady?” He had thick gloves on, but he didn’t offer his hand, just took off his hat—he had thinning white hair—while Ridley went through the course of introductions identifying village marshal Eli Peterson, his deputies Jeff Burani and Josh Hartley, and, not a deputy, preacher John Quarles—the hat should have told him.

  On the other side, Ridley named Carlo and Randy Goss and their sister Brionne.

  Then on an apparent afterthought, as riders knew they were always afterthoughts to townsmen of any stamp, “This is the rider that got them through. Name’s Dan Fisher.”

  “One hell of a job,” the marshal said. Danny decided he liked the man. And was almost moved to get up and shake the man’s hand. “Damn,” the marshal said then, “you’re half a kid yourself.” Or maybe not, Danny thought, and stayed where he was, leaning back against the warm stones. His hand hurt too much, anyway.

  “You’re saying Tarmin’s gone?” another man asked, him in the black hat, Reverend Quarles.