Cloud's Rider

Cloud's Rider Page 12

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Isn’t anybody going to feed us?” Randy asked. “Where is everybody?”

  “This is what we’ve got.” Carlo kept his temper down, kept his voice calm and reasoning. The kid had a temper of his own and he didn’t want to provoke it. “The guy they waked up to put us in here wasn’t real happy. He’s the blacksmith. And I get the impression he’d just as soon we weren’t here, but the marshal put us here, and that’s that, I guess, till they straighten things out.”

  “Well, ask him where we can get something.”

  “Kid, —we don’t have any money. Tarmin credit isn’t worth anything because there isn’t a Tarmin anymore. We won’t have any money to live on if we don’t get a job here, and right here in this place with this guy who doesn’t want us here is about the best job I’m going to be able to get, and the best you’re going to be able to get. So eat the damn biscuit. I saved it for you and I’m hungry. There’s the ham you carried up the Climb.”

  Randy took the biscuit, got into his coat pocket, took out the greasy packet of thawed ham and opened it. “Maybe we should have gone to Shamesey.”

  “We don’t know towns. We don’t know anything about the flat-lands.”

  “Danny would be there.”

  “Danny wouldn’t be there. He’s not a town rider. He travels. And maybe he’s done all for us he wants to do.” He remembered that duck of Danny’s head. But going down to Shamesey and asking Danny’s help to do it wasn’t an idea he wouldn’t consider—if all else failed.

  “But—” Randy said.

  “Are you ready for another hike through the snow? Next village? Maybe the next after that?”

  “No.” A quiet, dejected no.

  “If it happens—” Carlo said. “If it happens this place doesn’t have room for us, we’ll move. Then we’ll think about it. —If we have to.”

  Randy took a bite out of the stale biscuit sandwich and washed it down with hot water. The kid looked on the verge of tears. Carlo’s throat was sore, his ears hurt and he was so stiff he could hardly move.

  “I did knock quietly a while back—” Carlo nodded toward the door that didn’t lead outside, but to the smiths’ house, unlike their arrangement down in Tarmin. “The house is catty-angled to that door. In a passageway. And they’re not answering. It’s daylight, but they’re not stirring around much.” Carlo took a look to the side where the outside door showed light in the cracks. “But they weren’t going to fire up today because of the storm. Maybe tomorrow.”

  “On a lousy biscuit?”

  “Best we can do, all right?” He shouldn’t have raised his voice. “I’d say go back to sleep. Your stomach won’t feel hungry that way. If we can’t raise the house and work something out by tomorrow, I’ll go out and see if Danny can slip us something and then we’ll see where we can go or how we deal with these people. All right?”

  Randy considered the half biscuit he had left, much more forgivingly. “You want part of it?”

  “Had mine.”

  “The stuff on the sled was ours.”

  “We threw everything off the sled. Remember?”

  Maybe Randy didn’t remember. The kid looked entirely dejected.

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Best we can do, I’m telling you.”

  Fact was, they’d only had the ham in their pockets because Danny had argued them into it, in case they got separated. He’d just never imagined it might be in Evergreen that they’d need it.

  “I should have asked the riders,” he said to soften the tone. “I should have thought of it when we left the camp, but we had enough carrying you, and I didn’t know where we were going. Didn’t know they’d be so hard-ass and not feed us, to tell the truth. —And right now I don’t want to be gone from here in case the owner comes in to talk to us. It was hard enough getting in here in the first place.”

  “Where’s Brionne?”

  “With the doctor. A widow. Has a big house. She’s all right. Well, —as all right as she’s likely to be.”

  “She doesn’t deserve it.”

  “She’s off our conscience. We did what we could do. We don’t have to worry about her, all right?”

  “Maybe we should go to the camp and ask Danny for our stuff.”

  “I want to be here, hear me? Danny’s there if we absolutely need him—but we don’t know how the rider camp and the village get along. Let’s just not muddy up this deal till we know what we’re doing here.”

  “We’re going to starve.”

  “We won’t starve. I opened the outside door a while ago. The storm’s winding down. I figure they’ll fire the forge tomorrow morning. Then I’ll talk to them.”

  Randy didn’t look happy.

  “Nice house she’s in?”

  “What I hear. Yeah.”

  Randy didn’t say anything else, just tucked up, arms across his chest, and shut his eyes.

  “However this works out,” Carlo said, trying to comfort the kid, “we’ll get some kind of work in this place, and if we don’t like it here, we can stash some money and move on. We’ll be all right. There’s got to be jobs for us somewhere. There’s villages up here, there’s camps on Darwin—”

  “Not much on Darwin,” Randy muttered.

  “We’ll manage,” Carlo said.

  So it wasn’t home, so they were hungry for a day. They’d found a place to sleep. They were out of the storm. They didn’t have Brionne to take care of. And if they had to go somewhere else, Danny might help them. Danny might not really want to—but somehow they could make it.

  He sat down next to the furnace wall. His head ached and his body ached, and he just wanted to shut his eyes. The stones were warm. He didn’t need the blanket. He’d gotten used to the cold.

  Randy waked him once with a coughing fit, had a drink of warm water without complaining and went back to sleep again.

  But, left awake, finding the light had gone entirely from the cracks that had admitted it earlier, Carlo found himself sitting by the forge looking at hands that had taken about all they could bear, and thinking, and growing more and more worried about the situation. He’d argued for going up. Danny had agreed with it, but mostly he’d pushed it—being scared to death of that horse, and Randy’s stupid notions, and his sister’s chance of waking. They could still be down there, fairly comfortable.

  Now they’d gotten into a place where the local smith wasn’t happy to see another smith in town—and might not be willing to take on help.

  Randy looked to him for a way out. Randy slept now, expecting his older brother to do something to get them breakfast next morning.

  But going back to the rider camp wasn’t the answer. The riders couldn’t take them. And close relationship with the village riders wouldn’t give them respectability at all, when their only source of help might end up being the church.

  Maybe, he thought, maybe if he showed the smith he knew what he was doing—firing up without leave would be impertinent, but there was a lot of other work that wanted doing, right in front of him. The smith might in fact be shorthanded, considering the fact that the floor wasn’t swept and that the stock was lying and hanging in no particular order—there was just a lot out of order in this place.

  He was awake, it was night. There was a broom leaning against a support post.

  So he used it.

  There was a slovenly stack of wood and he put it in order without making too much noise. Randy snored, oblivious to the movement around him.

  There were leather aprons and such thrown about and he hung them up on pegs where they logically belonged.

  He located the rag-bin and, ignoring the pain of his frost-burned hands and the stiffness that had set into his fingers, began the kind of cleanup his mother and father had insisted on, wiping up along the edges of the furnace, around the vent. If the forge was ever cooled down, you scrubbed everything you couldn’t get to when it was fired up, that was his father’s and his mother’s cardinal rule. You kept things in order. You set the tools out by kind and by size. If you didn’t know you had it you couldn’t use it, his mother was in the habit of saying. If you didn’t know you had it, you couldn’t sell it. If you didn’t know you didn�
�t have it you couldn’t make a likely item during your downtime so you could sell it next time somebody wanted it in a hurry.

  The surly man in charge might think he didn’t need a couple of assistants, but he at least wasn’t going to turn them down in the mistaken idea they didn’t know how to work or that they didn’t know up from down in the trade or in his shop.

  He’d done all that and sat down to catch his breath and salve his aching hands by the time he heard the opening and shutting of doors somewhere nearby. Inside the house, he thought, which meant—he cast a look at the cracks in the door, confirming the guess—it was daylight again. There was just a smidge of ham left. Randy had eaten all of his, so he saved half for Randy and had enough breakfast at least to take the wobbles out of his legs and the complete hollow out of his stomach, on half the remaining ham and a cup of hot water.

  He heard footsteps coming and going next door. The day was definitely starting, and he was ready to make as good an impression as he could or know he couldn’t have done more than he’d done.

  The door opened—the man they’d dealt with when they’d arrived came in, big man, wide of waist as well as chest, big jaw set in what seemed habitual glumness.

  “You’re still here.” It sounded like a complaint.

  “Yes, sir. Name’s Carlo Goss. That’s my brother Randy. Thank you for the place to stay.”

  “So what in hell are you doing up here? Tarmin, is it?”

  What did he say? Protect the marshal’s information and say there was trouble down in Tarmin, but not say what? And that they’d run from it? What was the man to think?

  “Tarmin’s wiped out,” he said. “We’re the only survivors.”

  “Damn-all,” Mackey said. “That the truth?”

  “Yes, sir. It is. Gates came open.” He didn’t say how. He tried to obey the marshal’s instruction by not saying enough. Making it sound like mischance. “Snow was coming down. The whole town was overrun with vermin. We were smiths down there.”

  “Huh.” The man shook his head, scratched his chest and walked over and picked up a piece of wood. Threw it on the fire, scattering ash over the freshly swept stones. Tossed another on, carelessly, scattering more soot. “Sad story. Not my business.”

  Not his business. Tarmin was dead, everybody he knew was dead, and it wasn’t Van Mackey’s business?

  Carlo drew even deep breaths, asking himself whether the whole truth could have shaken the man, but he’d never know. Randy was waking up and he went over to take hold of his brother’s arm and drag him up to his feet where he had the ability to jerk him hard, in the chance Randy had heard the exchange or might hear something else to inspire an outburst of indignation.

  Meanwhile the man was poking up the fire, opening the main flue, starting up for the day, as it seemed.

  “Randy,” Carlo said, “this is the man who owns the place. This is the man who’s put us up for a day or so. Say good morning to Mr. Mackey.”

  “Morning,” Randy mumbled.

  The man didn’t say anything. Didn’t even look at him.

  “What’s the matter with him?” Randy asked, aside.

  “Quiet,” Carlo said. “Don’t say a thing.”

  “So what’s he say? Are we staying here?”

  He gave Randy’s arm a hard squeeze and Randy took the cue and shut up. Mackey went on poking about the fire. Somebody else came in, a young man maybe Danny’s age, maybe older than that, with the same large-gutted figure as Van Mackey, not quite as far advanced, and the same sullen jaw—brown hair cut way short, so you could see the scalp through it, and it stood up on end. The guy stood there with his hands in his pockets until Van Mackey gave a sharp order for him to work the bellows. Then he ambled over and gave the bellows a couple of shoves, waking up the fire.

  “You actually work in the forge?” Van Mackey asked.

  “Yes, sir. Pretty good, myself.”

  “Lot of work in Tarmin?”

  “Not now,” fell out of his mouth. He wished it hadn’t. But the man didn’t react to that, either. Bad joke. Bad mood, dealing with this glum son of a bitch who clearly didn’t like the sight of them.

  “Mend a wheel?” Mackey asked.

  “Truck or cart. Make a wheel, or a barrel. Minor mechanics. Some welding on the trucks.”

  “Welding takes equipment.”

  “We had it.”

  “What’s the kid do? Eat and sleep?”

  Randy sucked in a breath to answer. Carlo squeezed his arm hard. “Fix-ups. Scrub. Inventory. Small chain, kitchen stuff.”

  “Skinny kid.”

  “Stronger than he looks,” Carlo said, thin-lipped. Randy was about to explode. “I’m sorry we got dumped on you without warning, Mr. Mackey, but we can work.”

  “Got help.”

  If he meant the other guy it didn’t look prosperous.

  “I’m good. Food and a room. That’s all we ask.”

  “Food and you eat and sleep in the forge.”

  A grim-looking woman had meanwhile come through the door and stood staring from the doorway. “And you cook it,” the woman said. “And do your own damn laundry. No dishes from the house.”

  “Take it or leave it,” the man said.

  “That stinks!” Randy exclaimed, and Carlo jerked the arm hard enough to hurt, with, “Shut up,” and “Yes, sir, but we need at least a small cash wage.”

  “No wage.”

  “Thirty a week or I look elsewhere.”

  “You won’t find elsewhere. You’re lucky you’re not outside in the snow, kid.”

  “Twenty-five. The two of us.”

  “Fifteen,” the woman said.

  “Twenty.”

  “That’s ten for you and five for the kid and first time either of you’s drunk on the job you’re fired. That’s the deal.”

  “Can you get drunk on that?”

  “We don’t need ’im.” That from the younger one. “Tell ’em go to hell.”

  “I’m competition,” Carlo said, arms folded. “Somebody might set me up.”

  The man might have glowered. You couldn’t tell past the usual expression. He walked over and took out a rod from the sorting he’d done. Let it fell back. “This ain’t Tarmin. Wages are lower here. Fifteen, and you eat and drink down the street. Buy your own food and don’t let me catch you drunk in here or leaving food lie about or I’ll lay you out cold. Hear me?”

  “Yes, sir.” Fact was he didn’t drink, or hadn’t until Tarmin went down and he’d met Danny Fisher.

  “All right. Done deal. You fire up. Going to make up some logging chain, heaviest gauge. Any problem?”

  “Easy.” The son of a bitch never had acknowledged the cleanup he’d done. He couldn’t resist walking over, confidently laying hands on a bar the right size, which he’d set in order out of the jumble of bars, and carrying it back to the forge.

  “Huh,” the man said, and he and his wife left.

  The other one stayed, the young guy, who sauntered over to the forge.

  “You better get it straight,” the young guy said. “There’s one job here. You just do what you’re told, collect your pay and don’t give him or me any backtalk or you’re out in the cold. Hear?”

  Carlo faced him. The guy poked him hard in the chest.

  “You hear me?”

  “Yeah. I hear you.”

  “You want a fight?”

  “Not actually, no.”

  “Hit him,” Randy said.

  He didn’t want a fight. “Name’s Carlo Goss,” he said. “This is Randy. You’re ?”

  “Mackey. Rick Mackey. This is my place. Long as you keep that clear. That’s my old man. And you’re not staying.”

  “Fine. Come spring, we’ll likely be out of here—if we make enough. Not staying where we’re not welcome. Meanwhile I compete with you or I work for you. Your father’s smart to hire us.”

  “Fancy talk. ‘Compete,’ hell! You learn those words down the mountain, fancy-boy?”

  “Sure didn’t learn ’em here.” Maybe that ill-considered retort went right over Rick’s head. At least it wasn’t a remark Rick could answer without thinking about it, maybe over several hours; and he truly didn’t want an
argument. “Look,” he said, and dropped down to a grammar his mother would have boxed his ears for. But Rick probably wouldn’t catch that change of gears, either. “I got work to do. Which I’m getting paid for.” He went on to the woodpile and started gathering up wood, trusting Randy to keep his mouth shut and restrain himself from provoking the situation.

  Rick wasn’t excessively enterprising, he picked that up, Rick wasn’t inclined to move or think at high speed, and Van Mackey couldn’t get him to work; Rick was probably the reason the place looked like a sty before he’d cleaned it up, though for all he could tell, nobody who lived and worked here might even see the difference.

  “Your brother a coward?” he heard behind his back.

  “He can beat hell out of you,” Randy said.

  Both fools. If he warned Rick not to hit his brother that meant that Rick was of course, being Randy’s mental age, immediately going to have to hit Randy. Then he was going to have to hit Rick. So he said nothing and trusted Randy to dodge if the ox upped the ante.

  “The kid says you can beat me,” Rick said to him, and nudged him in the shoulder as he walked to the furnace.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Fight doesn’t prove anything. Waste of time.”

  “You’re a coward.”

  “Yeah, fine.” He had his arms full of potential weapons, and he didn’t want to put himself in position for Rick to badger, but Rick stepped between him and the forge.

  So he dumped the load. Rick skipped back as logs bounced everywhere about his shins and his feet, and Rick stumbled back against the furnace, in danger of bad burns. Carlo reached out and grabbed him forward, got swung on for his pains and let him go.

  “You all right?” he asked with all due concern—which wasn’t much.

  “Go to hell.”

  He didn’t even answer. Rick grabbed his shoulder and tried to swing him around, and he broke the hold, a move which popped a button on his shirt and gave Rick a straight-on stare, which evidently exceeded Rick’s plan of action.

  “You better not steal nothing,” Rick said, and left, sucking on the side of a burned hand.

  The door slammed shut.

  “You should have fought him!” Randy cried.

 

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