Cloud's Rider

Cloud's Rider Page 20

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Why? Of what?”

  “Because there’s folks here poor as poor, there’s miners don’t own anything but a no-pay claim and owe the suppliers their shirts and the nails in their boots. It’s the chance of their lifetimes. These are rough people, kid. And that guy who stopped us on the way out—”

  “Mister Earnest Riggs?”

  “Listen, you. Take it seriously. We’re in their way. We’re owners, you figure it? And more than the Mackeys might want us for partners.”

  “Why?”

  “Kid, figure it. We’re the only way that the Mackeys or somebody else could have a real, legitimate claim to the forge and the house and everything down there. If we sold it to them or if we partnered with them somehow—”

  “Not with the Mackeys!”

  “I’m not going to sell and I’m not partners with them. Just let me handle it. Danny said don’t sign anything. And that’s real good advice, because, to tell you the truth, right now I’m not sure where we’re better off. There’s no guarantee there’ll even be an Evergreen if half the village moves down the mountain and there’s nothing here but miners.”

  “You think they would?”

  “Maybe.” They’d almost reached the forge-shed. He stopped Randy where he and Danny had talked, by the scrap-heap and the big tree. “Listen,” he said. “If they’re up to anything they’ll be eavesdropping on us, especially Rick. So if for some reason you have to talk to me about something Rick shouldn’t hear, you say, ‘I think I’ll go outside.’ Just exactly those words. Hear?”

  “ ‘I think I’ll go outside.’ That’s stupid.”

  “It’s smarter than ‘I want to talk secrets’!”

  “Maybe we could go over to the rider camp. Maybe they’d let us live there till spring. I mean, we’re not afraid of the horses, are we?”

  “Forget it.”

  “If I was a rider we’d have money. And you could be.”

  “I’m a blacksmith. That’s what I want to be. That’s what I want to do. And forget this stupid notion. We’ve got rights to a hell of a lot of property down in Tarmin.”

  “We could sell it and go to Shamesey.”

  “What’d we sell it for? Smiths here have got everything tied up in their property. What’s this business about Shamesey all of a sudden? What’s wrong with here on the mountain?”

  “Rick’s a pig.”

  “Yeah, well, and if we don’t go to Tarmin and take our stuff back pig Rick is going to get our house and live there till he dies of stupidity. I don’t want them to be rummaging through our stuff, either. I don’t want them living in our house. You want that?”

  “No.”

  “Then don’t talk stupid. You only go to the rider camp if something happens to me—”

  “Nothing’ll happen to you.”

  “Oh, ‘nothing will happen.’ ‘Nothing will happen.’ God! Did we look for anything to happen down in Tarmin?”

  “I’m not stupid! Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid.”

  “Then don’t talk like it! You’re a minor! You’re fourteen! If something happened to me, the Mackeys could get custody of you and the property down there, you understand? I don’t want that!”

  Randy ducked his head. “Nothing’s going to happen to you,” he muttered, not because he was stupid, Carlo thought, but because Randy had lost enough, that was what he was trying to say; he didn’t want to go down to Tarmin where everybody was dead; and Carlo hugged him hard.

  “Not if I can help it, no. I’ll take care of you.”

  Randy cried. Randy wasn’t in the habit. And he couldn’t go into the shop like that: Rick would make capital on it, for sure, if Rick happened to be lurking about inside.

  So they stood out in the snow with no one around them until Randy got himself in order.

  It was a chancy evening. Maybe it was the spookiness of a strange place. Maybe it was just suddenly realizing the person he was trying to do everything for was justifiably upset with the choices he was being handed. He pushed the latch up and went with Randy into the warmth and the firelight, our of the wind and the cold—but not clear of the leaden upset in his stomach and the feeling that shivered along his nerves.

  He needed Danny, not just for his professional services, but—because he needed someone who wasn’t his kid brother. Foolish that it was, he’d been vastly surprised Danny had really come across to warn him in the first place.

  And that Danny had crossed all the lines to come tonight.

  He still felt warmed by that gesture, in ways no fire could touch. He looked forward to getting together with Danny maybe next Saturday—and he’d gladly have gone over to the rider camp himself this evening—if he didn’t have Randy and his silly notions in tow.

  But Randy—Randy just didn’t have anybody else. Fourteen was a hell of an age. Everybody was looking at you (as if they had the time), you were obsessed with your own stupidity and you were just so damn knowledgeable about what other people were thinking— fact was, nobody was interested in your opinions and it was a hell of a time to lose every friend you owned. Randy was going through his own grief, and it hurt, too.

  Randy sat down and sulked on the stone wall where the heat was, and he could just walk over and hit the kid. That was what he felt like. God, he hated that expression.

  “I could be a rider,” Randy muttered.

  It was the one thing that just sent whiteout over his reasoning. “No,” he said for the hundredth time. “No. You can’t.”

  “You won’t even talk about it!”

  “I just told you not to talk in here!”

  “It’s not about that. It’s about what I want to do!”

  “Well, you’re not going to.”

  “Who made you my papa?”

  He crossed the intervening space in two strides and grabbed the kid by the shirt.

  And didn’t—didn’t hit the kid. Their father had done far too much of that. For a lifetime.

  Randy stared at him, surly, full of his own notions, full of confidence he could go out there and tame a horse that might be a killer like the last one.

  “Damn fool is all,” he said, and walked off and got a rag and wiped soot off the water barrel. There was always soot in this place. The chimney didn’t draw as well as theirs down in Tarmin. They breathed it. It got on their clothes, on everything they touched.

  “You’re always so damn right!” Randy said. “You aren’t, you know? Somebody else knows something besides you.”

  He didn’t say a thing, even an advisement to shut up. He didn’t go back and hit the kid. That was what Randy was following him, begging for—so he’d be in the right.

  That was the kind of argument Randy had grown up understanding.

  Now he was the villain. He didn’t know what to do about that.

  He truly didn’t know what to do.

  Danny sat by the fire and braided leather coil for Ridley’s leather-work—which was really very good. He’d mastered round-braiding now, himself, though he still counted and got confused if Jennie interrupted him.

  Jennie thought she’d learn, and after a while of his instruction, turned out to have more fingers than she thought.

  Jennie was growing discouraged, and short-tempered, about the time Callie decided to send the kid to bed.

  “I want to stay up,” the refrain began. Which didn’t work.

  “To bed,” Callie said. “Or you don’t go outside tomorrow.”

  Jennie got up, put away her leatherwork and solemnly kissed Ridley, and Callie, and then, new idea, came over and put a big kiss on Danny’s cheek.

  “Good night,” he said calmly, aware that Callie was vastly upset at that inclusion. “Pleasant dreams.”

  “Night,” Jennie said, and flitted off with Callie hot on her track.

  Ridley didn’t say a thing. And Callie might have, to Jennie, but when the door shut and Callie came back, things were quiet—give or take horses out at the wall, bickering with something in the dark. Wasn’t unusual, Ridley had said on an earlier night. It kept the horses from being bored.

  “Might do some hunting tomorrow,” Ridley commented. “Feels more normal out there tonight.”

/>   “Normal’s come and gone all season,” Callie said. “Everything on the mountain still feels upset.” Callie was pouring vodka, two glasses, and a third one ready.

  “None for me, thanks,” Danny said. “Had my limit tonight over at the tavern.”

  Callie frowned a little, and didn’t pour the third. She and Ridley had theirs.

  So Callie couldn’t doubt, now, that he knew very well why he’d gone out so thoroughly the moment he went to bed every night. But he tried to act oblivious to any hard feelings over it. He didn’t look in Callie’s direction.

  “So how are the boys doing?” Ridley asked cheerfully—Ridley was very much the peace-maker in the house, and if he’d headed at the matter of the yellowflower in the drink every night he was sure Ridley would have a perfectly cheerful way of putting it that they’d feared he might slip around the barracks at night and threaten sleeping children.

  “Mackey’s found out there’s money to be had,” Danny said, and added with not quite double meaning regarding his own situation in their company, with drugs dropped nightly—but politely—in his drink: “and Mackey’s being real nice to them.”

  “Man’s not to trust,” Ridley said, as if there wasn’t a double meaning in the village, and as if they trusted him implicitly. “Between you and us.”

  They talked a while, mostly about hunting. And Callie was quiet.

  Callie certainly wasn’t happy he hadn’t drunk the vodka, Callie wasn’t happy about him being included in Jennie’s good night. He didn’t know what to do about it, except to make sure he didn’t have wicked dreams strayed horses could carry and that whatever Callie’s fears he didn’t walk in his sleep and shoot up the barracks tonight.

  He wished Callie trusted him. It was very hard to keep Ridley’s kind of cheerfulness when he knew all the while Callie was probably planning to know right where her gun was from her side of the bed tonight.

  And maybe a little of his thinking leaked out, the horses being stirred up. He wasn’t sure. But Callie frowned the darker and Ridley talked on about last year and the hunting.

  It was the craziest kind of conversation he’d ever tried to navigate.

  Go at Callie’s distrust head-on? Say, —Callie, I swear to you, I won’t murder people in their beds?

  Not if he didn’t want a confrontation. And he didn’t.

  That got around to serious wondering—like—what had he missed while he was out cold, and had that horse been hanging around, and was there a solid reason for Callie to hate him and Ridley to be nice to him?

  “Going to bed,” he said. “Ridley, if you want to go hunting, I’d sure like to exercise Cloud, before he takes to digging under the wall.”

  “Hope it stays quiet out there,” Ridley said. “Yeah, hunting would be a relief.”

  “Yeah.” On the thought that there was still more being said while things were being said than any sane person could track, Danny got up and quietly left for his own barracks room, shut the door and started undressing in the dark by the light that came down the hall and under the door.

  He’d liked dealing with Carlo. He’d liked being where he was appreciated. Didn’t any human being?

  He was getting out of his shirt when he heard

  A cold sweat came over him. He reached after his gun—he’d disposed his pistol on the bench beside the head of the bed when he came back from the yard, as he usually did, and he caught it up the instant he’d gotten his shirt back on. His rifle was over in the corner next the shelves—and he knew at the same time his brain was handling those locations that Cloud was , that it was a sending and that it wasn’t one of their horses.

  “Mama? Papa?”

  Scared kid, in another room. He didn’t blame her. He heard a door opened and bare feet running down the passage—Jennie was ahead of him as, mostly into his shirt and carrying his gunbelt in one hand and his rifle in the crook of the same arm, he opened the door onto the hall and followed the kid to the main room.

  “It’s not Cloud,” he said as he found Ridley and Callie putting on coats.

  “That damn horse is back!” Callie picked up the shotgun. “It didn’t go downhill! I told you it never went downhill!”

  “Let me see if I can deal with it,” Danny said. “Maybe I can get its attention.”

  “Don’t you dare open that gate!” Callie said.

  He didn’t say, I’m not a total fool. Or, What do you think? I won’t risk my horse.

  He just went for his sweaters and his coat, against the cold out there.

  “Funny damn thing,” he heard Callie say to Ridley, “that it shows up the night he’s wide awake.”

  He was stunned. He tried to cover it, but he knew he’d stopped moving for a heartbeat.

  Then he flung open the main door and went out onto the porch, beset with a image.

  His waking wasn’t the question on his mind: Brionne’s was.

  Carlo sat in the glow of a banked fire, blanket hugged about him. His teeth were chattering and he couldn’t find the presence of mind to get back under the covers.

  It might have been a particularly vivid nightmare—except it was still going on.

  As if it was its name, for God’s sake. As if that was what it called itself. The way Cloud was storms, or summer puffs of white.

  As if in the reaches of a shocked and grieved mind, it had been born anew there, in that place, at that moment.

 
  The world wasn’t flat anymore. He could see and hear—the way he had on the Climb, and he sat there and shook—

  Then it was gone. Just gone.

  And the world flattened out again—crashed into flatness and dullness that left his heart beating hard. He sat there thinking of the journey up the mountain, thinking how that sense had been their guide in such desperate, blind moments—recalling how Cloud had beaconed them up that road and they’d known there was mortal danger every time that sense went out.

  Danger of losing their way.

  Danger of freezing to death.

  He found himself with a lump in his throat, vision blurred in tears that just—spilled over and ran down his face. He wiped at them with a hand shaking so he almost couldn’t find his face.

  Randy hadn’t wakened at that sending. Thank God. But he wasn’t sure—wasn’t at all sure about Brionne.

  He’d thought he’d been able to hear Danny and Cloud, and maybe others they were near. It was that loud. It went that far. Danny said there was a limit and you couldn’t hear that far, but if it reached him it might reach Brionne.

  God! he didn’t want that.

  Spook-horse was gone, Danny was all but sure—headed away from the village before he and Ridley ever got out to the walls. The horses were all out in the yard, upset, lifting their heads with nostrils flared, sending into the night.

  Meanwhile nobody at the village gate had fired a shot. Danny had his rifle. Ridley had his. But they’d had no target. Danny knew he had to shoot it if he couldn’t get it to come to hand and become part of the herd—and he had a sense, with Rain as much disturbance as he already was, that it wasn’t going to be practical to do that.

  Cloud and Slip and Rain came near them, , and pregnant Shimmer kept sending until the nerves shivered with it.

  “Too late,” Ridley said in distress.

  “Listen,” Danny said. “Callie’s right: I don’t want to open this gate—Cloud would take after him for sure. I’m going to go over to the village, the little door—there is a little gate, isn’t there?”

  “Yes. But you’d be a fool to go out there on foot.”

  “Been one before this. My horse will back me up from inside the camp, with a wall between us so he can’t get out—and he’ll keep my head clear. Damn if I’ll shoot that horse without a try to bring him in—if it’s the horse I think it is, he knows me. I might have a chance to get him to come to me—”

  Ridley caught his arm. “No.” And when he made an effort to break that hold: “Don’t take what Callie says as against you. She’s worried about Jennie, understand?”

  Ridley was worried
about Jennie. Ridley, like Callie, would rather not have had Brionne Goss over in the village, which Danny knew was his fault—and he didn’t want to discuss it, now of all times.

  “Just let me go. I know what I’m doing! I know that horse, I knew his rider. He may just be coming to Cloud, to a horse he knows— or to me. I don’t want that horse shot if there’s a chance otherwise—”

  “Neither do I!” Ridley yelled at him, but he let go his hold, and Danny took the chance and ran, with the notion of in his wake.

  A wall of darkness darted in front of him, came up on hind legs and plunged aside with Cloud was beyond upset, and more so when he dodged and ran from Cloud’s intervention. Cloud chased him clear to the rider gate, close enough to breathe on him as he ducked through where Cloud couldn’t go, and Cloud let out an indignant squeal and hit the post.

  He didn’t know if Cloud understood that he wanted Cloud to go toward the rider camp’s outside gate—he heard a nighthorse squall of outright rage and a sending that burned out into the dark full of and against any horse that harmed his rider.

  Danny ran for the village main street, rifle in hand—pulled a sharp right by a big pile of shoveled snow and ran down a deserted snow-veiled street toward the village main gates.

  “Here!” the gate-guard exclaimed, running down the wooden steps from the watch-tower. And maybe the guard had expected Ridley. He seemed momentarily confounded.

  “Need outside!” Danny gasped. “Loose horse—outside! Little gate! Watch my back—just—don’t shoot—don’t fire a gun!”

  The guard didn’t look wholly convinced—but he maintained a defensive position against any unexpected inrush of vermin as, fully sure vermin weren’t there, Danny flung up the weighted bar of the little gate, inward opening, wide enough only for a single human being, no more. It was for crews to go out to clear the outward-opening main gates. A horse might make it. Barely.

  But there was no horse.

  No vermin, either, just a gate-sheered wall of waist-deep snow blocking his path. He had to hold his rifle up and fight his way through it to get out, half climbing, half kneeling, until in calf-deep snow he could go along the outside wall toward the rider camp’s outer gate.

 

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