Cloud's Rider

by C. J. Cherryh

  He could say now that they’d made it. And he’d have wished to talk to Danny before he left, but Danny’d had his head down, ducking things that they’d agreed not to talk about, he guessed, or what he might have to be grateful for, which seemed all there was left to talk about.

  Thanks, he’d have said, at least, if he’d had his wits about him, and if that duck of Danny’s head hadn’t stopped him cold. When the rider woman had said he and Randy probably wouldn’t lose toes he’d been so grateful for Danny Fisher’s persistence and bullying toward the last that he’d sat there and sniveled like a five-year-old.

  His eyes burned. He wanted just to sleep, and it was so still, so quiet in this place. The whiteout—

  He suffered a mental slip, chin on his chest, thinking

  At next blink it was And

  No, they were in the forge shed. He and Randy. The preacher and the marshal had said they had a place for Brionne, and he and Randy should go on where the deputy took them, warmest place in Evergreen, someone had said.

  And it was. From the branching of the dizzying wooden passages they’d parted with the marshal, taken a separate lantern which he lit and carried for the deputy who carried Randy, and they’d gone far down another spur to a side tunnel where it seemed even the earth was warmer.

  Knock on the door, the deputy had said, having his hands full with Randy, and he’d knocked. They’d waited. He’d hammered with his fist, though it hurt like hell, figuring people were asleep, and the deputy had carried Randy all the way from the rider camp.

  It had taken three such assaults before he heard steps inside, and finally the door opened on a sleepy, burly man in his underwear, who’d gazed blearily past the lantern he carried while they stood in the dark of the tunnel.

  “These kids hiked up from Tarmin,” the deputy had said. The deputy had gone on to say they were the smith’s kids from down there, and that the marshal wanted them to have a job, at which Mackey acted as if he’d slam the door in the deputy’s face.

  But the deputy had gotten his hand against the door, and without saying anything about why they’d walked up from Tarmin, said something about the tavern and the miners and young boys not being safe in there. Details blurred. The passage doorway had. Carlo had been thinking he hadn’t the strength to go through another round of where to lodge them.

  But Mackey had said then that they weren’t firing up the forge in this blizzard anyway and they could stay there till he could talk to the marshal in person. After which Mackey slammed the door.

  They hadn’t mentioned the details about Tarmin. The marshal had said not to tell Mackey anything but the absolute least they could say. They didn’t want that public yet, because, the deputy had said, the village had so much stake in Tarmin, and there were people who might take advantage of the situation.

  The deputy had brought them through the side door over there, into the forge, this vast shed with stone walls, a blackened timber roof, a stone floor that looked like a solid piece of the mountain itself. The forge was banked and almost dark, but even so the warmth in the air here was considerable.

  His greatest desire in the whole universe had been to sit down and peel out of his coat and sweaters and the knee-wraps and all of it, and he’d done the same service for Randy, then covered Randy in his coat, thinking he might need it. At some point—he didn’t even remember—the deputy had left. With the lantern. He’d thanked him. He thought. His thinking wasn’t clear at all.

  Randy made a sudden sound in his sleep and flailed an arm from under the coat Carlo had settled over him. His eyes came wide open. “Where are we?” Randy asked in panic. “Where are we?”

  “Warmest place there is,” Carlo said. “It’s all right. Nothing to do but sleep.” He didn’t know even whether it was day or night. He thought it might be daylight, but he hadn’t been able to tell in the passages. Mackey might have been asleep, or sleeping late—but if people had come in after risking their necks on that road he thought the man could have been civil about a knock on his door. “Storm’s still blowing,” he said to Randy. “Hear it?” He sat down as close to Randy as he could, while the wind kept on howling like devils outside and thumping at the flue.

  “We aren’t home, are we?”

  “We’re in Evergreen,” he assured Randy, and chafed Randy’s shoulder. It did look like home, mostly. The place was put together a lot the same, except the forge faced differently. It smelled the same. Cindery heat. Hot metal. Fire. The stone walls and floor of the place accepted and gave up heat slowly and it wouldn’t chill too much despite the uninsulated roof above soot-blackened timbers. There was a metal tank that sat elevated on a masonry wall, probably taking rainfall and snow-melt from the roof. He got up, hobbled over and got a forge-warmed drink of water for Randy in a cup he’d found sitting near the tap.

  Then he threw on a couple of logs he didn’t think the smith would miss, less for the heat than to have brighter light until Randy could get his wits about him and know for sure where they were.

  But Randy quickly faded out again, exhausted. And, so tired himself he could fall on his face, and completely unable to sleep, Carlo paced. Then drew off water in a quenching bucket and set it beside the fire to get warmer.

  Pain brought tears to his eyes even yet when he dipped his hands in that lukewarm water; he pulled his boots off and endured the heat in the stone pavings just off the hearth of the forge. He waked Randy again and put him through the same routine, warm water and warm stones, though Randy broke down and cried and complained.

  Randy was due that. He’d been hard on Randy on their way up the mountain. He’d done what their father would have done and said the words their father would have said because those were the things Randy was used to. It took that, to get Randy’s attention and put the fear of God into him.

  His father would tell him, the same way he’d told Randy: The weak die, kid.

  They hadn’t died. Their father was dead.

  And they were where they’d stay—maybe for the rest of their lives, if things worked out to get them a job in this forge. Riders came and riders went when they decided to leave, and he knew Danny would go with the spring breezes. But not the blacksmiths’ kids. They were the kind to put down roots. They’d never looked to leave Tarmin. And here—was a staying place. They had to think that. They had to work to get on Mackey’s better side and make their lives better than they’d been.

  The wind found a plaintive note, on a loose shingle, maybe. It was a lonely sound. He didn’t hear the bell that had called them in, and hadn’t in a long while. He guessed someone must finally have secured it so it didn’t ring.

  He’d never hear it after this without remembering that thin, wonderful sound that had given them the strength and the direction to keep trying.

  Now there were walls, the world was ordered again, and they were back inside a zone of safety the riders with their horses, in their camp, maintained for a village that sustained them—

  Only now he knew how fragile that zone was. He knew now that the riders’ protection could be broken, and he didn’t know if he could ever feel quite so safe here as he’d been before in his ignorance of the Wild.

  He’d heard the sendings as the rogue prowled the darkened street, looking for mama, looking for papa—and the whole town died, house by house, swarmed over by vermin and larger predators that had held the village for hours. He and Randy had clung to each other, tried not to hear, tried not to think—

  It hadn’t gotten in. It had tried the door. But it couldn’t get in.

  And they couldn’t get out. That was what had saved them.

  His heart jumped.

  It was there again, that vision, that one, time-stopped moment. That overwhelming confusion. It had nothing to do with Tarmin. The horse belonged to a dead man—but Danny said horses didn’t understand death when it came too suddenly and too isolated from other minds. It was looking, was what. Looking for its rider. Looking for a rider. It was hard to say.

  What if the smithy was up against the village wall? He had no sense of location, havi
ng come here through the tunnels. He didn’t know. He didn’t have his orientation to the village, he couldn’t even imagine what it looked like, and in a handful of days with Danny Fisher, he’d gotten used to seeing things and hearing things, even to finding it a shortcut to speech when he and Danny and Randy couldn’t, in that hellish wind, make themselves heard.

  He pressed his fingers against his eyes. But that didn’t work. It wasn’t in your eyes. It was in your brain, inside, where you couldn’t run, couldn’t ignore it.

  Go away, he wished it. Go away, you can’t get in here.

  Randy stirred in his sleep. But went on sleeping. And the world got quiet again.

  The preachers said once you started listening to the Beast you couldn’t ever really stop, and if you came near horses or anything native to the world, they’d talk to you and you’d have to hear—they’d haunt you, and you’d dream wicked, godless, animal dreams.

  Was it really out there, that horse? Or was it his remembering it? Sendings were like memories, some vivid enough to wash right over your vision and make you see and smell and hear something else. And horses thought. Horses reasoned. Danny said horses didn’t hold a purpose long and they forgot what they were about unless a human being was there to remember for them. Danny said when humans had come to the world horses had come to them because they were curious, and they carried riders now because they were outright addicted to human minds.

  A horse could remember things so long as he had a rider.

  That was why the rogue had been so deadly dangerous—because it had had Brionne on its back.

  He pressed his fingers against his eyes until he saw red flashes.

  The preachers said the Wild separated man from God and led you into bestialities. Sex, and blood-lust, and just not hearing God anymore when God talked to you.

  He actually wasn’t sure God had ever talked to him. But he knew beyond a doubt that Cloud talked to him in his head. He knew that Danny Fisher had. Randy had. Randy, who’d been saying things about dealing with that spook-horse. About wanting to be a rider.

  So had Brionne.

  So had Brionne.

  He wanted to go to church and smell the candles,and the evergreen boughs.

  He wanted to hear about God’s mercy and have his mind and his thoughts his own again, and his dreams safe from horse-sendings.

  Danny had said you didn’t hear the horses if you weren’t near them. That people might send a little—they must—but they were deaf as stumps without a horse to send to them. You didn’t hear other humans without a horse or something in the bushes—and if you did it was bad, because little creatures didn’t have the brain to intrude real easily. Sending sight was their real defense and their hunting tactic. If you got something strong coming at you—it was big, and big regarding anything in the Wild meant predator.

  He just wanted peace from all of it.

  He began to shiver. He thought that was a good sign, maybe a sign he could be horrified again, and not just accept images as they came. But the shivering made his travel-bruised joints hurt and it might disturb Randy. In the warmth and the smells of the forge, he could blink and think he was in his father’s forge in Tarmin and that nothing he remembered had ever happened—but that was dangerous, too: it wasn’t that forge, and Tarmin didn’t exist anymore. Nothing could ever bring Tarmin back the way it was. It was lost.

  Nothing could bring their beliefs back, or their innocence certainly not his. Maybe Randy’s. He hoped Randy had a chance to forget.

  And for him—he’d find a niche for himself. A smith could always find work—he and Randy had nothing but what they stood in, but they had no debts, either. They could work slave wages if they didn’t fit in here, just stay until they had a stake, then move on with a truck convoy in the summer to wherever some settlement needed a fair-to-middling smith. A whole village could grow up around a couple of enterprising craftsmen, where miners and loggers could know they could get equipment fixed, and some cook set up shop, and they put up walls to protect the facilities— and then—then miners and loggers came to do their drinking and their rest-ups because it was a safe place. That was the way a lot of villages had begun.

  And the two of them would do all right. Randy was at that gawky, all-elbows-and-thumbs stage that didn’t in any sense look the part of a smith, but Randy would put on muscle given another year, the same as he had, by working the bellows. You did that, you did the rough work, get the job going—the master smith would step in to finish it. Damn right, you put on muscle fast.

  Hands weren’t in good shape. If Mackey who owned this place gave him a chance he’d rest up. But if not, if not—he’d take what he could get. He was fighting for survival in this place just as surely as he had been on the road that brought them here. The house, the forge, the money and the respectability so Randy could have a wife and kids and a normal life, getting as far as possible from what had happened down there. That was what he’d fight for.

  Everything right this time. He’d see to it.

  Danny set himself on the edge of the bed, and Ridley tipped him back into it while Callie watched from the open doorway.

  “Made it to the mattress this time,” Ridley said, and flung at least five kilos of blankets atop him.

  “Yeah,” he said. They’d had warming bricks on the mattress. He felt apt to pass out from the heat.

  But he’d done that already and had a sore spot on his head to prove it. His eyes wanted to shut, heat or not, and he wished they’d just go away.

  But they didn’t. They hadn’t. They’d gotten him up after they’d determined he might be concussed, they’d kept him awake sitting in the chair in the common room, talking about the camp, talking about local custom—anything but Tarmin and the trip up—being sure, they said, that he didn’t have a skull fracture.

  He’d heard that staying awake after a crack on the head was a fairly good idea. But Cloud had dumped him harder than that and his skull had survived. He was just godawful tired. But if his fingers and toes all made it through the event, and they seemed to be going to, he was happy.

  And they hadn’t thrown him out into the snow. And they let him go back to bed.

  “Pretty good job you did,” Ridley said, lingering at his bedside— which made him wonder if they were going to continue the sleepless treatment. It was morning outside. He was relatively sure it was bright morning. And he so wanted to go to sleep.

  “Yeah,” he said. Yeah covered most everything. And he’d already forgotten the question.

  Callie’s voice: “Damn good for your first time in the mountains.”

  “I had a fair map,” he said. You didn’t ever, as a junior, attempt to take credit for what a senior had done—or pretend to have done what you hadn’t. “And good advice.” Which he wished he’d understood at the start rather than the end of the trek. But he’d lived to learn.

  So had the kids.

  “Who gave you the advice?”

  “Tarmin rider.” His heart rate kicked up a notch. He’d wondered when they’d start asking on the matter of Tarmin, and here it came. The ambient was quiet, the horses were snug in their den, the dark-eyed little girl with the lively curiosity was safely in her room. They might be about to go after answers on the subject they’d danced all around for at least an hour.

  And if they didn’t like what they heard—they could still throw him out.

  “Who?” Ridley asked. “Who survived?”

  “Tara Chang.” He thought by their expressions it was a name they knew. “The others—didn’t make it. Friend of mine—Stuart—he’s down there. With Tara. Near Tarmin.” He wasn’t tracking well. The mind was trying to sink into deep, deep wool. He tried to sort out what they must assume. What he’d said and not said.

  “How did she survive? What happened down there?”

  “Dead.” His tongue was getting thick. He was thinking about and , but there wasn’t any horse to carry the ill-assorted baggage of his mind and he was both protected by and held to words that wouldn’t contain half his thoughts. The kid was in bed, but if a horse got curious, even asleep
she might pick something up. He hadn’t remotely counted on a kid in the camp—even if he’d come in to consult in advance what to do with Brionne, there’d have been the kid—

  Which, with what he remembered, didn’t make him comfortable winter company. Maybe he should hit the road.

  But he hadn’t told them—

  “Fisher.”

  “Don’t want to think now. Tomorrow.”

  Ridley sat down on the bedside and Ridley’s hand closed hard on his shoulder. “Hate to be inhospitable, Fisher, but we have a village missing. The horses are out of range. So just tell us the rest of it.”

  You couldn’t swear when a horse was listening. You could just swear to when it was sending. He was scared of being pushed, scared of spilling just enough to make them want more and more and more, until they got more than they wanted to hear, for more than he wanted to give. He was scared of spilling stuff that was his, and stuff that was the Goss kids’ business, and Tara’s and Guil’s as well.

  But he was in real sorry shape to survive now if the Evergreen riders told him go on, get away from their village—just another day, he’d be all right—

  Something had stalked them here—he thought it had. But he couldn’t swear to it. It was so, so dangerous, imagination. A rider kept it in his pocket and only took it out on sunny days with no shadows.

  Ridley’s hand insisted and hurt his shoulder, shaking at him gently. “I want answers now, Fisher. Hear me?”

  “Yeah.” He didn’t even remember exactly what information of all he held that Ridley had actually asked. “What was the question?”

  “To what happened down at Tarmin.” Ridley’s mild voice grew angrier. “To who you are, where you came from, how the hell you got up here in the first place, and how safe is your horse?”

  That was the most dangerous accusation. Cloud’s safety. That question scared him. He shook his head, and even the pillow hurt the back of his skull. “Horse is fine. No problem with us.”