Cloud's Rider

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Yes, ma’am.” Earnest got up, hat in hand. “Three thousand and we don’t talk for nothing.”

  Tara did the woodcutting for the coming night. Guil had done the fire-building with the first small load Tara had provided him for the shelter’s fireplace. He also did the cooking and the currying of snow out of nighthorse manes and tails, and he was damned tired of horses wanting in and horses wanting out of the cabin. Horses could stand out there in the next snowstorm if horses didn’t make up their minds.

  Thump. “Dammit, let me in!”

  That wasn’t Burn. Guil left the soup-pot simmering and got up and got the door, admitting a snowy Tara with a huge armful of wood; and, right behind her, head lowered, figuring to warm himself from the cold, but not quite sure whether he wanted in or out, came Burn.

  “Are you coming?” he asked Flicker, who lurked coyly behind Burn’s rump and who put forth a nose, but just at the threshold and while he was waiting with the door, Flicker kicked up her heels and gave the high-pitched squeal of a nighthorse wanting

  Burn wanted out, then, and went right past him with a whip of a snow-caked tail that hit like a pelting of snowballs.

  , he sent in no uncertain force, and got back a completely distracted , and

  There was snow in clumps all over the boards of the floor. And unless one wanted to walk barefoot over unexpected puddles in the evening, there was nothing to do but get the broom and sweep the lumps over to the fire where it might evaporate—melting streaks all the way across the dusty boards. These particular miners were sloppy campers, and they’d not cleaned up, they’d not stocked the cabin with wood against winter emergency—seeing themselves as their only concern—and they’d not left provisions, for the very good reason that it was a flimsy shelter and food inside would have invited predators to dig their way in and destroy the little furniture there was.

  So it was a good idea they’d lugged supplies up the mountain.

  Tara had dumped her firewood beside the fireplace. She’d been across the slope with Flicker and Burn for protection. The shelter had an axe, its one amenity besides the snow shovel and a single pot, and the axe instead of the hatchet they’d brought had meant larger firewood quicker. He’d been hearing the sound of the axe fairly steadily while he was arranging supper, and the pile she’d brought in was enough for the night.

  “Quiet up there,” she said as he picked out a couple of pieces to add to the cookfire. “Just real, real quiet. I sat out there a few moments, being nothing, trying to shape the mountain in my head. And the hole is back. I can’t locate it—but up. Definitely somewhere up.”

  The thing they’d felt before, especially in the nights down in the lonely, lifeless woods at first stage—it came and it went above them. The thought of it showing up made him damn nervous in the afterthought of Tara having possibly taken out up this trail without him. There had continually felt to be places up above them on the mountain—not always the same places—where life didn’t exist. And they still didn’t know why.

  Neither of them had ever seen a swarm on the scale that had happened at Tarmin. Maybe, they’d reasoned when they’d considered the question down at first-stage, creatures drawn into the events at Tarmin hadn’t really ever gotten out of the swarm. Maybe groups were still spooking each other off at minor alarms, moving out of their territories in panic and not yet able to reestablish boundaries for themselves and settle down to a normal winter.

  Their combined experience as riders just didn’t cover what was going on up above them. One heard about rogues—rare as the condition was. But the folklore had never prepared them for the destructive force it had loosed, the lingering spookiness on the mountain even after the rogue was dead. They hadn’t expected the mass movements of game that seemed to go one direction and then the other on the face of the mountain with no reason, with absolute vacancy at the heart of it. Weather had had them pinned down—but it hadn’t been affecting the oddness up there.

  A massive hole in the ambient, this moving darkness.

  “You know, one thing that blank spot could be,” Guil said, tucking a medium-sized piece of wood into the fire below the soup pot. “Big predator.”

  “Nothing ever like this that I ever heard,” Tara said, hugging her arms across her, and added a moment later: “The rogue might have felt like this—in deep winter—if there weren’t a lot of racket.”

  Meaning the natural noise in the ambient that all those lives had made in Tarmin village was gone now. Humans didn’t send far without something to carry it—but an aggregation of living things even like a herd of cattle was noisy.

  And in the silence on Rogers Peak they ought to have been able to hear very, very for across the mountain right now, not any specific creature, just—presence. Life. It was possible the villages were aware of that silence. It was possible they weren’t. Too many people—like too much light—came with settlements. You couldn’t see the fainter stars. You couldn’t get a fair listen to this thing.

  Kids, on their own, making their way perhaps as slowly as they were against hostile weather, could blunder right into it. It had worried him through the days that they were pinned down at first-stage. It worried him now that there was snow coming down with fair vigor out there. He didn’t want to be wintered in here. He truly didn’t.

  Tara moved to have a look at the soup, and stripped the gloves off hands that just weren’t used to the amount of wood-cutting she’d had to do lately, hands that, in the firelight, showed raw sores the gloves hadn’t prevented.

  He captured a hand and had a closer look.

  “It’s all right,” Tara said, and freed it for a look under the lid of the soup-pot. Then added: “It’s all right—just like your head.”

  Wicked woman. Halfway up the mountain looking for kids she maintained she didn’t want to find about half of every day. She’d taken the risk, committed herself, given a damn; she was in danger of outright charity—figuring she could have stayed put and not budged from first-stage and not helped. She’d worked hard out there; holding and being held felt very good right now, in the absence of anything else to do, to make it clear he was very appreciative of the stack of firewood he hadn’t had to cut. His head hurt. Her hands hurt. If they held a competition they could probably find other spots, but at least the couple of stitches she’d put in his side, front and back, some days ago, had held up during today’s climb, and they were doing pretty well for a couple of fools.

  Meanwhile the horses were cavorting around the rocks out there and one just hoped, as the ambient went scary with from one of the two fools, that they didn’t fall off a snow-buried cliff.

  “Supper’s ready,” he said into her hair. “I made the whole mess of potatoes up. Figuring we can carry it.”

  “Temperature’s just floating out there. It may go above freezing tonight. If it does—it’s going to be just real nasty conditions. An early winter, but a slow one setting in. We could get real damn tired of potatoes.”

  “Beats bushdevil.”

  “By a bit,” she agreed, and having found interest enough to be hungry, she served up the soup that was destined for supper and breakfast-to-come, and they settled down to one more night with the temperature still hovering. He’d cut up the whole supply of potatoes which the kids had left at first-stage and they’d carried it up with them: the perishables left there would have frozen soon, as they’d slightly frozen on the climb, in spite of the protection in which the stores had been buried. Tara had escorted a cart out with that load of perishables not too long before the disaster, supplies the road workers should have used fast, but, Tara had said grimly, certainly nobody down on first-stage level was going to need them— including two more of Tarmin’s riders, friends of hers, besides the ones who’d died in Tarmin.

  So at least they went to someone’s use, and if they got bad weather they’d at least have potato soup for days before they ever had to resort to what might be very thin hunting on this face of the peak. But if they got their wish and the weather turned to deep cold and reliable freezing, their next night’s supper, frozen, could pack up an
d go with them up the mountain, for an open-air camp or for very fast moving in their effort to get up to Evergreen. Then they could find out, in the best news they could expect, that the kids had made it alive and didn’t need their help, or that the kids were stranded down at midway and were going to need help.

  Better if the kids had been able to go this direction. But Tara couldn’t have shown Danny Fisher this route: Tara wasn’t totally sure of it herself. Experienced horses could deal with the trail they were using—but he’d hate to have sent Fisher and a young horse up the trail they’d taken. On second-hand landmarks they’d never have found the mining shack.

  Their own horses of course wanted into the cabin, now that potato and ham soup had entered the ambient in a very vivid way. Tara did the getting up and let in two snow-caked horses.

  And the instant two humans settled down again to their supper Burn leaned his head on his rider’s shoulder in ambitious anticipation of tasty bits, namely all the ham and considerable amounts of the sauce. Flicker moved in on Tara in the same way, to look doleful and coy from the front.

  They both could be quite hard-hearted until, dammit, they were through. Then they poured out a couple of bowls on the hearthstones—quite a suitable platter for horses, and very unlike their dumping of snow and drip of melt onto the floor, there wasn’t a smidge of soup left to mop.

  Guil put a cover on the pot, determined to keep horse noses out of their several days’ supply. And they sat, after the horses had cleaned the stones, watching patterns in the fire. Burn and Flicker settled down to mutual grooming and Tara—

  Suddenly Tara thought of She thought of stopping, looking uphill, trees and white.>

  She seized his hand, hard. “Think of something else. Now!”

  It was the earliest childhood calm-down.

  , she added.

  The horses lifted their heads, hungrily and vividly interested in , though they were stuffed with hay and grain and had ham and potatoes to chase that.

  Tara laughed.

  Laughed and laughed, out of proportion to the image.

  Guil knew where she was headed, the collapse after long and impossible strain. He sent her and Tara lay on the floor holding her stomach, the spasms were so intense. She’d sober up— and break out laughing again until laughter gave way to helpless sobs for breath.

  Then came just hard breathing, and panic—panic that she’d stopped up since that night she’d spent

  hit the ambient, , the way Flicker would send when Flicker wanted to hide. Guil tried to take hold of her: mistake. She shoved hard at him. It hurt his side.

  That got through to her. It hadn’t on other occasions. It brought her out of herself. “I’m sorry,” she said, and threw her arms around him while he was trying to get his breath back.

  Panic in the ambient ebbed.

  But was out there. The horses had forgotten all about fish, and lovemaking. They stood stock-still, heads lifted, nostrils straining for smells that were only in the ambient,

  And something—

  Something that was and and

  Guil didn’t think about the pain. He was on his feet with his hands on Burn’s neck. Tara had done the same with Flicker, wanting

  Guil wanted the same from Burn. There was no cabin here. There was just

  For a long time they stood like that, not letting the ambient go, not letting anything but those images into the night. There were no humans or horses here, there was no fire, there was no shelter, there was nothing but forest and snow.

  When they let go, carefully and little at a time, the ambient was quiet. It wasn’t there, either.

  Darcy drifted, almost asleep when a terrible wail broke through the dark of the upstairs.

  Then a sudden shriek, a thump and a second thump.

  Darcy leapt up in a tangle of blankets, fought her legs free and ran for the balcony, thinking of the stairs and the chance of the girl turning toward them in the dark and unawares.

  “Faye!” she cried, and intercepted the girl on the balcony, held her in her arms as she gasped for breath.

  “Mama,” the girl cried. “Mama, mama, mama, he shot my horse, he shot my horse—”

  “Shot your horse— What are you talking about, honey?”

  “They shot him, they shot him, and I hate him—I hate her!”

  “Who?”

  “I’ll find them—I’ll find them! I’ll make them sorry,”

  “Hush, hush, child.” Darcy hugged the trembling body against her own, shivering in the winter cold, and guided her back to the safety of her own room, holding her arm, talking to her gently. “I was afraid you’d fall. There’s stairs to watch out for. You’re on the second story. You mustn’t get up and walk in the dark. Call me if you’re want to get up in the dark.”

  “It was my horse!” the girl sobbed. “I want them dead!”

  “Hush.” Darcy set her frail charge down on the edge of her bed and sat down herself on the edge of the mattress, tucking the girl up in the quilt. “There’s a love. You’re safe. There’s no one to hurt you here.”

  “I hate them! ”

  “Hush.” Darcy combed the soft, tangled curls with her fingers. “Hush. You mustn’t talk like that.” She didn’t know about horses. She didn’t understand what the child was dreaming about, but it scared her, it was so unexpectedly off the map. “You were dreaming, honey. It was just a dream. You mustn’t talk about horses. It makes the preacher worry. And we shouldn’t worry the preacher, should we, honey?”

  “I prayed to God for my horse! And he was mine!”

  “Hush, hush, it’s not a thing to say. You’ll scare people. They won’t understand it.”

  There was a shaky sob. “I want my mama.”

  “Yes, honey. I know, I know. But your mama’s gone, honey. I’ll take care of you.” She stroked Brionne’s hair and Brionne rested her head against her shoulder. Brionne’s arms went around her.

  “I’ll find a horse,” Brionne heaved a huge, shuddery sigh.“One will come for me. I’ll call it and it’ll come.”

  Now that the panic was past, she was only halfway appalled: some children did fantasize about horses. Occasionally they listened to bushbabies or hung about near the rider camp trying to pick up images—a spate of curiosity at about age seven or eight, a spate of trying to pick up sexual images around adolescence. Shocked parents came with fair regularity asking what to do—and Brionne was old enough for the second phase. But it might equally well represent a bright and imaginative child’s wish for independence, for a romantic event to transform her life from the settled routine she saw as her growing up.

  Or even escape—from the very dreadful events down at Tarmin.

  She’d done her own daydreaming, at such an age. She didn’t believe in the preacher’s God, never had, from her mother’s knee, and her wish for escape had been from an apprenticeship rigorous and humorless. If a horse had ever called her in her youth she supposed she’d have gone out the gates without a qualm.

  So she resolved to deal with the child’s fantasies with far more humor and heartfelt understanding than her own mother had had for anyone.

  To begin with she didn’t call the girl a fool, or depraved.

  “That’s just all right, honey. Maybe you’ll call a horse for me, too, and we’ll ride all over the mountain.”

  “You’re not scared of me?”

  “Nothing scares me.”

  The girl’s arms hugged her tight, tight a moment. “I love you.”

  She hadn’t expected that. It was very difficult to get the unaccustomed words out of her throat, but she did.

  “I love you, too, honey.”

  They sat like that a while. Darcy’s feet went numb from cold. She didn’t mind. Her arms were warm.

  At last the girl heaved a vast sigh. “It’s so quiet now. It’s gone away.”

  “What’s gone away?”

  “The horse out there. Now I can’t hear anything. It’s scary, everything’s so quiet. Can we light a lamp?”

  “Sure. Sure, honey. You want to come with me? I’ll light the lamp in your room.”

  There was a young
horse in the rider camp. She didn’t remember. She thought there was. She didn’t know the status of it. She just hadn’t hung about for gossip because she hadn’t wanted the reciprocal questions into her business.

  But if imagining horses and being scared of the dark were the only complaints the girl had after the climb up the mountain she’d done very well indeed.

  A normal, natural little girl.

  That was all.

  * * *

  Chapter 16

  Ť ^ ť

  The curiosity in the tavern had died down. It was a weekday night, and a crowd even so—in Tarmin it had been only Saturday-night crowds of this size and noise level, but Tarmin hadn’t had the winter influx of miners and loggers who had the credit to spend, no kitchen to cook in, and no families to restrain the consumption or the spending. There was music, a ring of tolerable guitar players among the miners in from one of the camps, who were leading a still suitable for youngers singalong interspersed with soulful ballads.

  Most of all, native to Evergreen, there was good food: the miners had high standards, that was a famous and dependable fact; and the guy who ran The Evergreen in the winter months had to be a good cook or he wouldn’t have lasted the week.

  Carlo and Randy picked up dishes of the nightly buffet and went hunting for a table. The snowfall was getting thick outside, and when Carlo would have thought that families would have been home on such a night, the place was crowded not only with miners, but with Evergreen villagers, including Van Mackey and Mary Hardesty, and Rick, plus a number of other village families and folk looking for society.

  The end nearest the door was family territory, the left end nearest the fire was miner’s territory, the right was loggers’ district, the liquor was flowing from the bar that divided the room—except that there was between the town and both miners and loggers a no-man’s-land of kids deeming themselves old enough to drink, both too old and not old enough to sit with their parents, not welcome either (Carlo understood the unspoken rules) in the outsiders’ section where the almost entirely male village transients congregated for serious winter-break drinking.