Cloud's Rider

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by C. J. Cherryh


  He thought Aby would approve of her.

  And he knew he was being stupid and too cautious. He’d not felt nearly so anxious about Aby’s risks as he did about risk to Tara—Aby having been there, left hand to his right, a fact of the world since they both were kids, and capable of taking care of herself. God, yes, he’d loved her—there’d always be a hole in his world the shape and size and duration of Aby. But the matter with Tara was here and urgent, because the woman was apt to do any damn thing—and he wanted her safe, and didn’t want her to have done things she’d be sorry for, and meanwhile he had things he needed to do and she’d be up here by herself rather than see him go—it had a very Aby-like feel, her stubbornness did. And he wanted to protect her from that—

  The way he hadn’t done with Aby.

  His thinking was in a real mess, was what it was.

  Horseplay outside had come near the cabin. Attention had turned to them, and they were aware of each other like a light switch going on.

  “Dammit!” he said to Burn, caught, and knew it was going to be

  A hand came to rest on his knee, took on weight, patted it hard.

  And the ambient said that Tara wasn’t mad.

  “You aren’t going up there,” she said. “I will.”

  “No. I’ll go.”

  “I said I’d do it. Go by yourself, hell. This is my mountain. You sit here.”

  “No.” They were back to that argument.

  “There’s a short way up there. But it’s a lot of walking, a lot of climbing, and rough ground. You can’t make it.”

  “The kids are on the long way. If I can’t make it, I’ll know it. I’ll stop. I can camp and stay warm.”

  “Listen to me.” The hand on his knee shook at him. “You hear anything?”

  “You and two horses.”

  “And nothing else. Nothing else.”

  He took the point. Soberly.

  “The mountain isn’t over with what happened,” Tara said. “It’s not safe out there. For someone who maybe gets sick, can’t move—”

  “Or just as well somebody that travels alone. With you or behind you, woman. Take your pick.”

  “Your life. Over those kids. They can damn well take care of themselves or they’ve got no business up here.”

  “The kids didn’t have much damn choice about being out of the village,” Guil said. “And can the village up there take care of itself? They could need help. We sent our problem up there.”

  “Where there’s a lot more resources than we’ve got.”

  “And a mountain that’s still in an upheaval. What do they know about it? I want to know where that horse went that drove them out of here.”

  “Damn you, Guil.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  He sat there beside her at the fireside, and then—then the horses outside were mating, and they sat there bundled in their thick clothes, receiving that.

  “Doesn’t help the thinking,” he said on a heavy breath.

  “Not damn much,” she said.

  But the horses wanted in, at that point. Having had their fling they wanted to get warm and muddy up the floor.

  He made supper for the two of them plus horse-treats. He figured he could do that: she’d done everything in the day including putting him on his horse.

  “They’d have gotten caught by weather at the midway shelter,” he said during supper. “They could be holed be there. Suppose we ought to try the road?”

  “Windchill on those high turns is too fierce. Uphill’s easier. Longer. But easier. They can come back down a lot easier than they can go up. Surely they’ve got that sense, if they’re stuck there.”

  “No sign of it yet,” he said.

  “Maybe they made it up before the weather. Just pushed on.”

  Maybe they didn’t make it. He had to think that, too.

  In that case he’d be sorrier than he could say. And he and Tara would be wintering in Evergreen.

  But they had to go there anyway.

  There was nothing right now in the ambient but themselves. There was that silence all around them, a mountain swept clean of life. Or life gone underground, gone into hibernation, as happened in deep, foodless winter.

  But there’d been more food on Tarmin Height, grisly thought, than anywhere he’d ever heard of.

  “You suppose,” he said, “everything’s eaten so much they’ve all gone to burrows?”

  “Possible,” she said. “Possible, too, they remember the rogue, and they’re scaring each other, one to the next. Or possibly—that horse is out there. I don’t think it belonged to my partners. I’d know.”

  “Harper’s horse,” Guil said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “No question in my mind.”

  And long, long after they’d settled down to sleep, tucked down by the fire, in all the blankets they’d brought and found, came a strange, spooky sending that drew an alarm from the horses.

  Ghosty thing, just a shiver over the nerves. Guil lay still, but Tara sat up, and got up, and he stirred onto the side that didn’t hurt and sat up, too.

  The horses were upset.

  “Something’s wrong,” Tara said, with her hands on Flicker’s neck.

  Burn came over and stood right over him,

  Burn was going to defend him, that was clear. A shiver ran up Burn’s leg and over his hide and Burn snorted and hissed at an unseen enemy.

  “Can you make it out?” Tara asked. “It’s not a swarm.”

  “Don’t think so.” He made an effort to get up and did, leaning on Burn’s shoulder. From Burn there was another snort and a violent shake of his mane.

  Not good, whatever it was.

  Tara was came from her and from Flicker, he couldn’t mistake that.

  They were armed. They had supplies. But there was that notice on the board that Danny Fisher had written, that warning.

  The kid hadn’t been a rider that long. The kid hadn’t ever been into the High Wild. And if he’d heard something real damn confusing—he might not know what he heard. But two experienced riders and their horses—

  —didn’t know, either.

  It was a moral question to Danny—whether his responsibility for Carlo and Randy continued or ought to continue; and it was still a common-sense kind of question whether he could get Carlo in some kind of trouble by running over there to inform Carlo on what lawyers were doing, and including Carlo into matters that obviously involved the rich and powerful people in the village. Such people weren’t as rich and powerful as they might be down in Shamesey, granted, but seeing Carlo was accidentally between these people and a lot of money, he’d spent some extensive worry on the matter, at some times concluding he shouldn’t go, then thinking that while some were for protecting Carlo’s rights, some weren’t. And then again thinking—if Carlo was seen not to know, Carlo had a certain amount of protection, in that ignorance—if ignorance was ever protection, and his own experience said it wasn’t as much as the ignorant thought it was.

  Most of all he didn’t know at what point of their own morality these people from the pretty blue-muraled church would conclude they were doing wrong. He was scared of lawyers. He was scared of courts.

  Most of all he didn’t want to mess up Carlo’s future by making a decision that he didn’t have the information to make, and he’d held off till this morning hoping he’d hear some kind of wisdom out of Ridley or Callie during their evening talks.

  “You suppose they’re going to treat the Goss boys all right?” he’d asked finally in desperation. “Are the lawyers honest?”

  “They’re fools,” was all he’d been able to get out of Ridley last night. Ridley was mad about the situation, and that was what Ridley had on his mind: losing people from his village. And to the question of the lawyers being honest— “At poker,” Callie said, which didn’t tell him much about Carlo’s chances with them.

  “You suppose I ought to tell Carlo?” he’d asked Ridley then, deciding on the direct approach.

  “Don’t know what he could do about it,” was Ridley’s answer.

  That put him in mind of what his father had always said about the law, which seemed the onl
y wisdom that applied—just don’t sign anything.

  He’d slept with it, and waked with it, and worried over it.

  His first trip this morning had to be out to the den, and he left the breakfast table, dressed for the cold—a light snow was falling— and took Cloud a biscuit from breakfast. The other horses, crowding him as he came into the den from the open-air approach, were obliged to wait: Ridley encouraged him to do that, saying that waiting their turn was good for them: they’d gotten out of their summer manners, meaning when they regularly had strange horses in the den, and they could learn they hadn’t a right to every biscuit that came into their sight.

  So while Ridley was helping Callie clear the dishes, he fed Cloud his treat and rubbed him down from head to tail and oiled his feet, quiet in his mind for the first time since he’d come to Evergreen.

  Cloud was satisfied, making that curious contentment sound, enjoying the importance of the first and only biscuit of the day. Cloud ducked his head around while he was working and licked the inside of his ear, which Cloud knew he hated.

  Both of them were moving a little more freely now, on feet less tender and joints less sore, and, able to go to Cloud and do such basic, ordinary things, Danny felt a great knot of tension that had been in him unravel. Conclusions hard to come to in the guarded ambient in the barracks were far clearer to him when he’d gotten out here to ordinary work.

  The truly difficult things were over and done with, the emergencies were all settled, and there was almost nothing to do but brush Cloud’s tail and feed Cloud and bring him biscuits.

  Cloud liked that idea. If there’d been females available, the winter would be absolutely perfect. But, next best thing to please his horse, Danny thought about , and expected Cloud to approve that idea.

  Cloud wasn’t as enthusiastic about it as he might have been. Cloud lifted his head and looked toward the walls and shivered.

  Danny found that very odd. He stopped the brushing with his fist still full of Cloud’s tail, and he looked in that direction without even thinking he’d done it.

  He’d never been wintered-in anywhere before. Shamesey didn’t have weather to require it, although a lot of riders arrived there to winter-over and the trade died down: Shamesey never felt isolated.

  But Evergreen village suddenly seemed very small and very fragile against the mountain shoulder. It dawned on him then for the first time that there just wasn’t any human civilization in the world farther out on the edge than Evergreen and the little string of villages down its lonely road. Over on the other side of the mountain— there was just the Wild, where humans who’d dropped down from the sky had never visited, not on their farthest rides. No villages, no trails, no camps, no riders. Civilization just stopped—maybe just around the shoulder of the rock outcrops on the road they’d ridden. Civilization stopped in the mountains he’d not been able to see from his whited-out vantage on that high turn. Nobody had been out there. Ever.

  Cloud’s skin twitched. Cloud snorted and the other horses acted bothered, but the ambient was otherwise quiet, and Cloud settled to being brushed again, rocking gently to the strong strokes Danny put into it.

  A rider just shouldn’t think about spooky things, he told himself, not up here, not when the wind had started to blow out of the unsettled Wild.

  The snow was coming down thick and hard when he walked out of the den with the notion increasingly sure that in this edge-of-the-world place friends were hard come by.

  The end of winter might not see him better settled in the barracks than the beginning had: he had every legitimate right to be in the rider camp for the winter, but he still found himself in an awkward position as an intrusion in the common room of the barracks— which turned out to be a family’s living room: not that it was supposed to be that, but there just wasn’t another child Jennie could play with—even as easy as the rider camp’s relationship with the village seemed, that line was one people wouldn’t send their children across—and the barracks that in some places was a very rough and careless environment, was unquestionably a family living arrangement in Evergreen, an arrangement in which a teenaged visitor of outside origins was undeniably suspect in motives and personal habits. He didn’t think even Callie thought he’d do something so awful as have designs on Jennie; but clearly Callie didn’t leave him alone with Jennie, He wasn’t friends with Callie. He never would be, he strongly suspected. He probably would never be friends with Ridley, on Callie’s account.

  He didn’t know what his relationship was with Carlo, and why he hesitated so long and resisted so much going over there, whether he didn’t want to get the rebuff he’d had from some of his old townside friends, or whether he was beginning to believe Callie that he was a fool in the path of rational people, and he was scared to give Carlo advice on something he really didn’t understand any more than Carlo did.

  He was spooked about the law, was one thing. His early association with it hadn’t been that of an honest and upright citizen

  And he held too damn many secrets to sleep sound at night—Callie not even trusting him to keep to his bed. He’d tried turning down the vodka last evening.

  Funny thing, Callie had said her feelings would be hurt if he didn’t drink it. So he had drunk it, all but certain now his very deep sleep and morning lethargy had something to do with it. People who’d do that to you—maybe they didn’t want you wandering across the line between camp and village. That was the other matter that had him spooked—but at least this morning he knew for sure what he’d suspected about his nights there.

  And they were the source of all the advice he had.

  Maybe they had their own set of problems. He had his.

  So he found no need to tell them he was going.

  He cast a look toward the barracks veiled in blowing snow, and no one was stirring—he’d given the excuse of going out to the den—he didn’t have to give them excuses, and there was no reason he couldn’t go over villageside on his own, absolutely no reason. Ridley was camp-boss, and could forbid him, but then he’d be out that gate and elsewhere.

  They’d say later, Where did you go and what did you do? not as if they had a right to ask.

  And he supposed, as he walked toward the camp gate and toward the village, that if he told Carlo what he knew, things were going to get out that could speed up the gold-rush mentality that was working among the rich. And that could rouse a little of the anger he knew was stored up and waiting for him when he finally did let loose what he knew about the Goss kids.

  It wasn’t a happy situation he’d landed in. In some measure he’d like to walk up to the barracks, fling open the door and lay out in two minutes everything he had to say.

  But once you let a matter out of the proverbial bottle, it was out.

  And panic wasn’t at all a thing to let loose in a place like this, with all the High Wild around them—at least that was the only wisdom on a situation like this he’d ever gotten from anyone. Panic in the ambient was like blood-smell on the wind.

  There were two other people who knew everything he knew. And Carlo began to be not only somebody he owed the truth to—Carlo began to be the only human being in Evergreen that he’d rely on.

  So never mind what the village marshal wanted, or what Ridley expected. With a quiet walk through thick snow-fell over to the gate of the camp and past the restraining post into the village side, he was gone, on his first foray into the village alone, into the quiet of the villageside ambient, this time without Ridley’s voice to fill the silence.

  He found it spooky to walk among utter strangers. He felt cut off, deaf in a very important sense. Passersby became a threat to him in a way merchants and chance encounters in his own neighborhood in Shamesey town had never been. He didn’t know these people. For the first time in his life he was in a place where he didn’t know people either by long experience or by the thoughts they shed.

  Which was stupid. He wasn’t in danger and neither was Cloud.

  But he’d sure felt safer when Ridley were with him.

  Right now
—he’d feel safer with eight-year-old Jennie for a guide, which told him how entirely silly he was being: the street was mostly deserted, and while a rider in his leather breeches and fringed jacket was as conspicuous as a horse walking down the street, he was in a mostly deserted neighborhood in heavy snow, and it wasn’t exactly as if he was walking among hostile crowds.

  The few venturers outside their passage system did stare. One man even said hello. A couple of girls—he thought they were girls—walking along bundled into shapeless coats talked behind their hands while they approached and giggled as they came close. “Hello,” he said, defiantly taking the offensive in the deadness of the ambient; “hello,” one said, and then they went into a spasm of teenaged giggles and raced off down the street.

  Very young, he said to himself in all the maturity he’d assumed. Too silly. He wasn’t interested. Much.

  He passed the public tavern Ridley had mentioned—Ridley hadn’t said whether in so small a camp he and Callie ever crossed over for an evening of what his father called ale and riot—or whether it was going to be a dry winter. It looked like a comfortable sort of building, with lights glowing behind glass windows, with tracks on the snow going up onto the porch and inside.

  Then, next to a rusting and untidy stack of iron scrap and old truck parts mostly buried under snow, was a huge evergreen tree, and the smiths’ shop.

  The double doors were shut, as came as no surprise. But he took the handle and turned it and pushed, testing whether the place was open, and as it proved to be, walked from the snowy outside white into the shadowy, smoky heat of a large, low forge-shed.

  “Yeah?” said a burly young piece of trouble who turned up standing right beside him.

  In the same moment, across a low stone wall, he’d seen the ones he was after. Carlo and Randy were working at the forge, Randy with his hand on the bellows lever and Carlo with a set of tongs in his gloved hand—which, if Carlo’s fingers felt like his, Carlo wouldn’t find comfortable.

 

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