Cloud's Rider

Cloud's Rider Page 16

by C. J. Cherryh

  That was generous, very generous. He’d help Ridley for his room and board; he’d cut leather, he’d mend roofs, he’d ride guard on villagers who had to go out, and most of all he’d hunt and gather hides and meat for the village.

  He couldn’t imagine a happier situation than he’d found for himself. He’d had his doubts when he was coming up the mountain, half-frozen; he’d had his doubts in that meeting in there and even walking back from it—but this wasn’t at all a bad place for a young rider to stay for a summer—help Guil out, for that matter, and let his family worry.

  Or not, if they got the phone lines spliced again and if he could get a phone call through to Shamesey. He thought maybe they’d let him do that. Maybe—he had to factor that unpleasantness into the picture, too—he’d be available to guide a number of people down to Tarmin around spring melt. He might well get that job—having been there recently, and not being senior, and Ridley and Callie being burdened down with Jennie.

  He didn’t at all want the job. He’d accepted the one with Guil and Tara. He’d plead that and the villagers could wait.

  Meanwhile Ridley and Jennie had made peace. The ambient was quieter. was the sense of things as Ridley came walking across the yard toward him.

  “I don’t want that,” Ridley said to him. “Girl-kid and a colt horse. What in hell is she going to do?”

  “There were pairs like that in Shamesey. I don’t know—” He didn’t want to discuss sex and an eight-year-old with the eight-year-old’s father. “I don’t know exactly how all of them got along. But I know two mismatches that paired up and they seemed happy.”

  Ridley didn’t discuss it. “Worries us,” was all he said. And about that time went through the ambient like a scream and Ridley and Danny ran as Rain first bolted out of the den in a spray of snow and then came back, and upsetting Cloud and the other horses.

  Jennie was on the ground again with the breath knocked out of her. This time she didn’t get up so quickly—hardly moved until Ridley picked her up and set her on her feet.

  About that time Callie came running, and a guest and a stranger in the rider barracks could only stand and keep his mouth shut.

  The little girl wanted that horse so bad, and was anxious to be with that horse, for reasons a rider who wanted to understand could well figure out and could feel not just in his heart, but in his gut. Equally, Rain wanted her. he was also very upset about and wanted to defend her—it wasn’t Rain’s fault he’d dumped Jennie twice in ten minutes and didn’t quite put it together in his horsey brain that he was the cause of Jennie falling.

  It wasn’t really Jennie’s fault, either. She loved that horse. And Rain loved her, in his adolescent way. Rain, male, in mating season, didn’t know what to do about something light landing on his back, boy-horses being especially skittish in that regard, and young ones more skittish than they’d ever be in the rest of their lives.

  And what did you tell an eight-year-old about her horse’s reasons for dumping her? How much did the kid know and what did her parents want her to know?

  The truth, if they were smart.

  But he damn sure wasn’t going to argue that point with Jennie’s parents. He just hoped Jennie’s skull held out.

  * * *

  Chapter 11

  Ť ^ ť

  It was blue sky and scattered clouds overhead, snow blowing off the trees and sunmelt glistening on the surface of the crags. , was Burn’s occasional impression, and Flicker’s; but nothing close or threatening, nothing that would, Guil thought, make Burn jog, which he truly didn’t want this morning, considering the aches in his side.

  The woman beside him was much more cheerful than she had been when they’d set out. Tara had begun to mope and to lose appetite yesterday—maybe understandable if she had never been anything except a village rider, and unaccustomed to lying snowbound all winter in an isolated cabin.

  But she wasn’t; she’d been a free rider over on Darwin, and the ambient told him it wasn’t the closeness of the cabin that was bothering her. It was an occasional, uneasy, and angry despair that he didn’t want to invade with his advice or even his good will. Right now it felt like approaching storm.

  He didn’t want to acknowledge it. She had a gun, an indispensable part of their job. He’d seen a crash coming—he knew it was inevitable, and when it came, it helped that they both had a place to go and something yet to do. It was a dangerous search, a perilous venture for a woman whose method of dealing with her loss had been to shut down and shut in for a while. He’d wanted to go up here from the hour they’d agreed they were going and she’d placed all sorts of interpretations on that haste, from his disapproval of her actions with the kids to a need to prove something to her on her mountain.

  The latter had switched about to her need to prove something to him, and come down to an hours’-long fight, their first real partner-style disagreement.

  But increasingly since their agreement to come up here she’d started thinking about those kids, and about Tarmin, and she was riding on a mission, not just tagging him. He could stay back in the cabin and she’d undertake this to prove something to herself, was what it sounded like to him.

  Angry. She was that. It was an anger flying about and trying to find a place to nest. She blamed the Goss family, not the boys, by the rags and tags he picked out of the ambient. She was mad and she had no place to turn it.

  And if there was one place that anger could still fasten it was the girl who’d opened the gates, whose selfish whim had ridden the streets of Tarmin, looking for satisfaction. That wasn’t just his guess. It was what they’d both gotten out of the ambient while the boys were there, it was what had roused Tara’s outrage even before the girl had waked, and that outrage had almost pulled the trigger in the instant when sensible fear had drawn the gun—and Danny Fisher had intervened to the hazard of his own life.

  She’d put the brake on the temper—and lost her forward motion. Lost the moral justification to do what in her mind wanted doing.

  Lost her way, in a world suddenly lacking everyone she’d known.

  Well, and there was him, out of his head with painkillers.

  And there was this chance, today, to try again to deal with those kids.

  The blue sky and the cold air, though, could lighten anyone’s mood. He was too sore to have Burn frisking about like a fool and too sore to think about climbing up and down—but on a day like this Burn found it very hard to behave, and jolted him now and again. Tara’s Flicker had her mind divided between Tara’s purpose and the skittish self-awareness of a mare in heat—which just didn’t raise the common sense to any high level.

  Hell of a set they were, as they trekked up the road.

  “I’m fine,” Tara said shortly, so he knew she’d picked up—not the literal thoughts—but the mood and the images flitting about his brain.

  “Good,” he said.

  She didn’t say anything for a long, long space. Then: “Real quiet for a sunny day.”

  “Might be the horses scaring them,” he said, because the little creatures that ordinarily filled the ambient with their flittery images, the minds that gave a sense of shape to the land, would shut down and lie quiet if a horse was hungry and hunting—or they’d all project being elsewhere, which could turn a whole section of the mountain queasy and treacherous.

  But a while later he caught a number of strange, deliberate images he’d seen before, which at first he thought were wild creatures, and then he realized it was Tara right beside him, trying to call the lost horses out there, naming their names in the ambient, names not all of which he knew.

  Flicker had a chancy, there-and-not-there kind of presence in the first place, light flashing through leaves, and Tara’s presence when she rode Flicker’s senses

  Hard sometimes to say what was due to the horse and what was the rider’s own difficult-to-corner nature. It wasn’t unusual for a horse and a rider to grow alike. It wasn’t unusual for two of the same disposition to pair up. And that was certainly what he had beside him.

  While Burn, male, whose essence was ,
with a in mating season, was no stable presence in the ambient himself. Guil thumped him occasionally in the ribs to keep his attention to what was going on in the visible world, not wishing and the consequent It was sharp enough as was.

  But the curve on that part of the road that faced the rest of the Firgeberg Range was a cure for any glum mood, a glorious sight which he was seeing for the first time—Aby would like it, Guil thought, just as natural as breathing: the snow-covered peaks, the blue sky, and snow-brightened forest as far as the eye could see.

  But the fact came down on him then like a hammer blow, that Aby’d known it very well. She’d died here, and sights like this were the last she’d looked on.

  “Damn,” Tara said.

  “What?” He thought she’d seen something and he cast about with his vision and his hearing, not horse-sense.

  “Just damn,” Tara said, and he knew he’d been far too loud with that realization of his and tried to shut down.

  “Listen,” Tara said. “You won’t let me alone. I won’t let you alone. Want to go back? Want to avoid this?”

  “No.” He didn’t like the exposure of his thoughts—not when he was thinking how Aby had begged him to come up on this route with her. And he hadn’t.

  “Yeah,” Tara said. “You can be standoffish and you’re fine.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “Pretty view.”

  “Just letting you know.”

  “Had it coming.”

  “Pretty day,” Tara said.

  “Yeah.” The ambient was still quieter than it ought to be.

  Maybe, they’d said to each other, the swarming that had taken Tarmin had dislodged wildlife from their territories and driven them further down the mountain.

  Or onto the north face of the mountain, where the road wasn’t so well maintained—where the road wasn’t maintained at all, in fact: he’d come up that way, and he knew its deteriorating condition.

  Burn took a moment to bump against Flicker and take a nip at her neck. Flicker gave a little kick. , Guil imaged, and Tara: , to calm it down.

  They gave their horses’ legs a rest after the next turn of the road— slid down and sat down on the rocks, instead of walking as they usually would: he still wasn’t feeling up to a hike. The horses sniffed around the rocks and raked at a burrow where there might be vermin, and caused a minor rockfall onto the snow.

  But there wasn’t any reaction in the ambient. There was nothing there. It was as lonely as it had been.

  He needed a hand up when they were ready to move again. Tara made a stirrup of her gloved hands for him, and got up herself, rifle and all, with a skip on the snowy ground and a hand on Flicker’s back. Which was pretty to watch—but an annoyance to a man who was in the habit of doing that and knew any such move would have him lying flat on his back.

  They rode sedately, words now and again, long silences, as the road climbed, as the sun passed overhead and finally began to sink behind the mountains.

  The day lasted longer in this pass than it did where their cabin sat surrounded by tall trees. The gold of the departing sun crept up the snow, up tops of the rocks and the tips of the evergreens, and vanished altogether as all the world turned to blue shadows, snowy rocks, snow-blanketed evergreens and the untracked expanse of the road that had received a layer of honest snow.

  And before the light was gone—they’d set their pace quite slow for his sake—a turning of the road brought them to the first-stage cabin, nestled against the mountain shoulder, set in among such trees, with snow blocking the door.

  The ambient was utterly quiet as they rode up on it.

  The kids weren’t there.

  “Well,” Tara said, and the sigh went out into the world as a breath of steam and in the ambient as “They’re down or they’re up from here.”

  He’d personally bet on up, and that they’d used the cabin. He was and Burn was , too, picking up a scent of that blurred on the wind.

  Bat at this hour they’d no choice but dig their way inside, unless they personally planned to spend the night in the open—and, borderer though he was, and accustomed to open-air camps, he really wasn’t averse to a warm fire and a decent supper and a warm, soft bed.

  Burn and Flicker did a lot of the digging of that drift at the door. Tara had to do the last part with the shovel that was racked just under the eaves.

  “You stay put,” she said when he thought he could take a turn. “God. Fool.”

  The woman had a way with words.

  And truth was, he couldn’t do much but sit there, with his side warning him he’d pushed the limit in the riding he’d done.

  But when she’d gotten through the snow enough to get the door open, he got up. She used her boot heel to get the last of the ice away from the door edge—ice that indicated that door had been shoveled clear once—and pulled the latch-cord.

  He wasn’t used to having partners do all the work. He walked in behind Flicker and ahead of Burn, who had their own right to look things over, and who would be in with them all night.

  But not now. Burn and Flicker made one circuit of the place, sniffed it over as , smelling nothing that was there now as a rival to what was most important on Burn’s mind, which was Flicker.

  And out they went again, right past him with a scrape and thump of hooves and a thump and bang of the door they knocked into on their way out to their own winter antics.

  He dodged. Even before he thought about fire or comfort or food or rest, he was interested in the rider board, the square of smoothed wood that sat atop the stone mantel. Tara had gone straight to it.

  And sure enough, he saw a wealth of information. He’d had Danny Fisher tell him what he used for his own sign was a letter that started his name—the only letter he’d learned to read in his life, in identifying Danny’s mark—and it was there, that letter in the middle of what he could agree was a cloud. There was the sign that said Danny was convoying three people, and nothing that said anything about a death in their number, so he guessed the girl had lasted to get this far.

  There was a sign that said village, there was some writing—unusual on a rider board—and the slash that meant dead: the kid was giving warning in case no other message got to some of the villagers who might come down this road expecting to get help at Tarmin.

  The kids could have gone on down the mountain without wasting time here—and that would have taken them on to Shamesey and the help of senior riders who in no way would allow that girl near the camp. They’d take her deep inside the town, where sendings didn’t happen. But he’d never been easy with that notion. Shamesey was just too unstable.

  And sure enough that wasn’t the way they’d gone. The directional sign said they were going up the road, not down.

  There was one more sign: danger coupled with bad horse.

  “One of the horses came in here,” he said. “Damn.”

  He didn’t know what Tara thought about it. They were getting a lot of horsey loveplay and chasing at the moment: the ambient was muddy with it and they weren’t hearing each other except with words.

  But Tara just sank down by the fireplace as if the wind had gone out of her, and ducked her head against the heels of her hands.

  It wasn’t a time to push. He knew clearly what he wanted. But he didn’t say it. He could at least lift the kindling from the stack. He brought that over and knelt and got a fire going, one match, with the tinder the shelter offered in a hanging box by the fire.

  Light began to glow in the hearth. She’d turned her head and the light showed a dry and composed face.

  “Kid’s got a horse giving him trouble,” she said in a level voice. “He’s taken his party out of here, he’s gone up in the theory it won’t follow him up, but it might follow him down. He wouldn’t come back to us.” She had a dry stick in her hands, broke it and tossed the ends into the fire.

  It cost him to get up or down. He didn’t want to get up and move away if he was going to need to sit down to talk to her. Trying to solve things without the horses to carry feeling and memory was like dealing blindfolded and half mute.


  And he knew what he’d make up his mind to do in a second if he were in one piece. And he asked himself whether he had a chance in hell of making it on his own.

  With her help—he could. But he was in a position of asking for the help of someone he knew wasn’t happy about the situation she’d created and who was very likely going to take it as a criticism from someone who’d twice intervened to stop her from shooting Brionne Goss, for reasons about which he now felt very queasy.

  “Kids could be in trouble,” was his opening bid. “They pushed it getting out of here. No question they’ve been caught in the storm.”

  “In which case they froze or they made it.”

  “Danny’s pretty levelheaded.”

  She ducked his opinions for a moment by ducking her head down, knees drawn up, elbows on knees. She was sorting things out. He knew. He waited.

  And the head came up. She shook her hair back and set her jaw. “You’re saying go up there.”

  He didn’t answer for his own long moment. The fire beside them grew. Tinder went red and dropped down as ashes.

  “We didn’t figure on one of the horses coming this way,” he said then. “That’s forced them out of here. That’s put them on the road.”

  “Danny understood,” Tara said slowly, “that the real chance was in his waiting here. And that eventually—as kindly as possible— she’d die. But if a horse called—if she woke up—”

  “A healthy horse won’t come near her. One that isn’t—”

  “They’ve gone up. To Evergreen.”

  There was a truck off the mountain, where Aby had died. There was a box of gold in that truck, that a company down in Anveney wanted really bad—a company that had hired him to recover it and to get it on to Anveney. But he’d stopped caring about it. He’d revised a lot of things in his head when Aby’d died, and when he’d found out what had happened up here.

  A lot of death—around him and Tara both.

  Meanwhile Tara had become important to him, just a constant amazement to him to see her, to look at another living being in all this isolation and see the firelight on her hands, on her face, to discover, day by day, another set of living thoughts in the void where Aby’d been—and to know that if she rode off from him—he’d feel he’d lost—hell, he didn’t know.

 

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