Cloud's Rider

by C. J. Cherryh

  Having a fourteen-year-old brother in tow, he’d generally taken a table near the bar, where the bartender and the cook maintained order, except there wasn’t a table at the moment. Randy found a table instead on the border between the young folk and the miners and having his hands full of plate, bread, and pint of ale, he was willing to risk it and sit down—hoping that Danny might stray in, and looking only to see that they were visible from the door.

  Then he saw they’d landed equally directly in sight of Rick Mackey, who was sitting at a table of young village folk. He didn’t like that. Rick and a couple of the young lads had their heads together, looking their direction, and he liked that less.

  Then another table came vacant near them, occupied very quickly by a cluster of the older village girls, who generally hung about in a group and talked under the music, and who, Carlo began to be uncomfortably aware, had had a table before they switched seats to put their heads together and talk behind their hands, with frequent looks in their direction.

  Then one of the girls got up and swayed her way toward them— got part of the way before Rick Mackey was out of his seat, grabbing her arm to have a talk with her.

  Carlo didn’t like the look of that. Especially when the other girls got up from the table and surrounded the argument, shouting at Rick Mackey. The first girl jerked her arm free and, backed up now by her three female friends, all strolled over to his and Randy’s table.

  “Hello,” came the inventive approach from the girl who’d started the march on their table. “You’re Carlo Goss. I know about you from church. But I didn’t come meet you. It was such a crowd.”

  She was pretty. You’re Carlo Goss? as if Randy weren’t even in the reckoning. “Yeah,” Carlo said, and gestured with a move of his hand to Randy, across the table from him. “That’s Randy. My brother.”

  “My name is Azlea Sumner. We own the pharmacy.”

  We, it was. That was fairly pretentious. He wouldn’t have claimed to own the shop down in Tarmin. She was pretty, she was clearly leading the pack of available females in the village, and Rick had just lost his public bid to restrain the contact.

  “Glad to meet you,” he said, though he wasn’t sure about it. “You probably know everything about us.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” she said, and dropped into the seat across the table and next to Randy, chin on hands. “What is there else we should know?”

  A second girl sat down. A third dragged a chair over. Two more looked up chairs. Rick Mackey wasn’t the only scowling face among the young men of Evergreen. Carlo could see that fact past the wall of eligible females, seemingly constituting all the eligible young women in Evergreen. It was promising to be a long, long winter: Randy looked to have figured out there was serious trouble, and cast him a silent appeal for quick thinking.

  “I don’t know,” he said to her question. He wasn’t interested in playing games. He wasn’t interested in her games. If she wanted a roll in the blankets and it didn’t entail the jealous observance of every unattached male in Evergreen, he’d still think twice about Azlea Sumner, whose introduction told him nothing but that her parents had money, and whose converse with him was all designed to get him to give her pieces of information.

  Hell with that, he thought sourly. He wasn’t that hard up.

  “So what happened in Tarmin?” she asked, giving him the long stare at too close a range.

  “A swarm came over the walls,” he said, “and ate everybody but us. Just bones. You could see them in the snow. Just bare bones and little frozen pieces of flesh.” He had another spoonful of stew. “Not a pretty sight.”

  He thought it might drive them all off. It brought grimaces and shivers. It didn’t daunt Azlea Sumner.

  “So you’re heir to the smith’s shop and houses and everything.”

  “Could say, yes.”

  “You must have been very brave.”

  “Lucky,” he said shortly. “Very lucky. So tell me about Rick Mackey. He seems real interested in you.”

  “Oh, him.”

  “He’s a jerk,” Randy said helpfully.

  “Contagious,” Carlo said. “Nice to meet you. Who are your friends?”

  Sumner didn’t exactly plan to introduce her friends. That was clear. Azlea Sumner didn’t like not to be the center of absolute attention.

  Fine. He wasn’t interested in playing, not if Sumner had been standing there stark naked. But he maintained small conversation with her and with her four friends, Cindy, Wilby, Lucia and Nilema. Nilema, last to drag a chair up, seemed by far the nicest of the lot.

  But Randy was by now tired of being ignored, and very clearly didn’t like being kicked under the table when he opened his mouth to say something. Carlo wanted to get Randy out of the tavern. Failing that, he’d like them away from the table.

  Maybe his disinterest came through too obviously, though, because Sumner and her entourage just then spotted some new girl coming through the door of the tavern that Sumner didn’t mind waving to and making a fuss over from a distance.

  It was an escape: Azlea Sumner’s, her friends’, and theirs, though he feared they might steer the new arrival back to their table—in which case he was going to call an early end to supper and pocket a couple of sandwiches on the Mackeys’ tab.

  He was not quite relieved that Sumner and her entourage, having captured the new girl, retreated to the side of the room where Rick and five or six of the boys were standing, all sending foul looks in their direction and sharing some kind of joke.

  “What was she after?” Randy asked. It wasn’t a stupid fourteen-year-old question: Randy knew the obvious that she could be after. He was asking the serious question: What was she after?

  “Finish your supper.”

  “Do you think she’s pretty?”

  “She’s pretty and she thinks trouble is a lot of fun. Not our type. Thanks. We’ve seen real trouble. Eat your supper before something happens and we have to get out of here.”

  “We don’t have to leave for her.”

  “There are situations that could make it smart. Just be smart, little brother.”

  He downed the remnant of his supper, not without an eye to who came and went: Rick left, and he decided then he was going to stay longer. But Rick came back, probably from a piss, and the boys were still holding conversation at a table when, at his own pace, and in peace, he had the last spoonful and chased it with the glass of beer.

  “Time we went home,” he said then.

  “Home,” Randy said unhappily. “It isn’t.”

  “Closest we have, kid. Take it as is.” He got up. So did Randy. They left, past the adult area and out into the snowy evening—too short a walk to resort to the passages, though the evening was snowy and very cold.

  Twilight had gone blued and strange. The sky was overcast. The evergreens that lined the street and stood outside the smith’s shop were black in the dimming of the light, and the whole street was a row of odd, tall-roofed buildings and of snow-frosted evergreen.

  They walked in via the side door.

  And feet slipped. It was a sheet of ice they’d hit and they grabbed wildly at each other and at the door.

  “Damn!” Carlo cried. There was water all over the floor, frozen, where it came near the colder spots near the walls and the doors.

  “What happened?” Randy asked. “What did it?”

  His mind was instead on the path the water had taken, over to the passageway door, and probably right down the steps, where it would make a hell of a slick spot for anyone coming to the house door via the passages.

  But the source of it wasn’t likely melt off the roof, and it wasn’t likely an ordinary winter occurrence.

  “Water tank may have frozen,” he said, though that didn’t seem likely either, in the warmth of the forge, and there weren’t pipes to leak. “See if that’s the problem.”

  He was thinking of that slick spot, himself, and Van and Mary coming home any minute. To forestall a noisy disaster and one with potentially serious effects, he picked up the sand bucket they kept to deal with fires from its place by the fu
rnace. He scattered a little by the door they’d used, and went to the passage. He scattered the largest part of the sand there, and went back up into the forge proper.

  “The tap was open,” Randy said.

  “Open?” he said, not too brightly, but he’d had a beer and a shift of direction. He heard the sound of footsteps coming back from, he could guess, the tavern, not long after he had, via the passages. And sure enough Rick came in, tried the flooring ostentatiously with his heel and yelled, “What in hell’s going on? Where’s the water coming from?”

  “I think you damn well know,” Carlo said.

  “You’re done, boy. This is your stupid fault. No question.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Big threat.”

  He found his temper coming up. And he wouldn’t let it. “All right, all right, big joke.”

  “Beat him up!” Randy said. “You don’t have to take that off him!”

  “Little brother’s got more guts than you have.”

  “Yeah,” he said matter-of-factly.

  About that time Van Mackey and his wife were coming back, and the cursing from the corridor was loud and clear. The sand hadn’t prevented slippage altogether. He went to the door and said, “Watch those steps.”

  “What in hell happened here?” Van Mackey came stamping up through the doorway and looked at a forge floor glistening with standing water and ice. “The tank give way?”

  “The kid left the tap askew,” Rick said with a sneer.

  “No,” Carlo said. “No, sir, I don’t think so.”

  “Like hell,” Rick said, and his mother, in the doorway behind Van:

  “Shut up.”

  “Me shut up! The damn brat flooded the place! It’s pure luck nobody broke their—!”

  “I want to talk to you,” Van said.

  “For what? They left the tap open.”

  “Liar!” Randy said, but Carlo didn’t say a thing, thinking all in a flash that if Rick’s ploy didn’t work and Rick’s papa beat hell out of him and Rick wanted to come back at him, Rick had better not come at Randy.

  Because he knew now how to get Rick, every time. Rick was devious but not bright, and anything that went wrong around here was not going to be the fault of two boys Rick’s rather wanted on the good side of. Rick was about to get the shit beaten out of him and hadn’t figured yet why that was.

  Rick’s papa ordered his son into the corridor, shut the door, and an argument started that could melt the ice out there. Van was shouting, the wife was shouting—Rick was shouting his innocence.

  Then there was a lot of slamming of doors and shouting and screaming, the subject of which they couldn’t hear but Carlo could guess.

  Randy stared. Randy just stared.

  “I guess he’s getting it good,” Randy said finally. There wasn’t the triumph Randy might have showed. It sounded pretty bad in there.

  Carlo understood that, in his own gut. Sounded like home. Their own household. The sounds were the same, the yelling was the same—only this time he was safe outside and just listening to it, and Randy was hearing it, and remembering.

  The old cold fear was back. Not of Rick Mackey. Just—fear, the same fear he’d had when his father had used to corner him and Randy. They’d never done right. They’d learned a whole lot of lessons in the forge that had everything to do with avoiding blame and nothing to do with justice or ever satisfying their father.

  He didn’t want to hear it. He squeezed Randy’s shoulder and thought he’d like to go back to the tavern and have another beer, and maybe not lie down to sleep with the upset in the stomach he was feeling right now.

  But he couldn’t. He had Randy to think of, and he had a damned fool girl trying to make a play for him for reasons his sixteen years told him weren’t on the up-and-up. And, dammit, he hadn’t seen Danny since he’d yelled at Danny and Danny had walked off.

  He heard a door slam. He heard someone leave the house in a fit of temper and hoped to God whoever was bound out didn’t skid on the ice. But whoever it was went out, and didn’t break his neck, and he’d bet it was Rick or Van going to the tavern—where he consequently didn’t want to be.

  “Time to get to sleep,” he said. “Get some rest.”

  “I’m not sleepy.”

  “Then we can pitch pennies, for who gets to fill the water tank.”

  “Rick’ll have to fill it. Betcha.”

  “Might be. But if he doesn’t, you do.”

  “Wait a minute,” his little brother said. “Where’s the deal that you do it?”

  “You’re learning,” he said. “Not much, but you’re learning.”

  “Hell,” Randy said, and Carlo cuffed Randy’s ear, not hard, but because he was the senior brother and somebody had to tell a fourteen-year-old not to cuss, not to drink, and not to be impressed with Azlea Sumner.

  Fact was, he didn’t feel like sleep, either. And he had some actual pennies, or at least change chits from the tavern, since, the barman said, the village was short on coin and tavern chits would buy you stuff anywhere in town.

  Best use for them was pitch-penny.

  And he played against his brother until they’d both calmed down and gotten sleepy; and finally they lost one of their pennies in the forge, and that was it. He told Randy give it up and go to sleep, and he sat down after he’d gotten Randy into his blanket and tucked into his own, with his back against the warm stones.

  Van came in late. He knew it was Van. He heard the shouting break out again.

  He really wanted a couple of beers. Tonight after a lapse of a number of nights he had the vision back again, the gunshot, the sound, the anger—

  God, the anger. It was the Mackey house that conjured it for him, but it was there and it was real. It colored the space behind his eyes with red, and filled his ears with his mother’s screaming.

  He couldn’t let their father hit him again. He couldn’t let their father hit Randy.

  You damn pig! was the last thing his father had ever said. The night had exploded—just—exploded. He didn’t know when he’d picked up the gun. He didn’t know why he had. He didn’t know anything but his mother screaming—screaming at him a second time across the village crowd gathered in front of the marshal’s office. Murderer, she’d called him.

  He was, he knew that. He was eldest. He’d picked up the gun. Their father always kept it by the fireplace, and he’d grabbed it up, he must have—but he hadn’t wanted to pull the trigger. His anger had.

  Just like your father, their mother would say when he lost his temper as a child. Just like your father.

  Meaning the first time he’d lost his temper as a man against a man—

  He’d shot his father.

  Danny offered reasons and said he wasn’t a killer, that it was the rogue sending anger into the village—but he knew it was his fault; and he didn’t want to fight Rick. He didn’t want to fight anybody, ever again. Just do his job, that was all he wanted.

  “You awake?” Randy asked out of the dark, while the fight went on the other side of the wall.

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t like it here. Why can’t we go to Danny?”

  “Because we’re not riders.”

  “I could hear the horses. I could hear it plain as plain the other night. I liked it.”

  “Yeah. Well, that’s not for us.”

  “You say. You say. You don’t know what I am. You don’t run my life!”

  “Yeah, well, kid, I’m just trying to get you to grown-up and then you can find a horse if you want one. But meanwhile I need you. I need you. Does that matter at all?”

  “That’s a cheat. You don’t need me.”

  “Who the hell else am I doing this for? Who’d I haul up this damn mountain besides—besides our sister, who’s not my reason.” Luckily it was dark. Tears didn’t show. “Kid, I’m tired. I’m really tired.”

  “You should have beat hell out of him.”

  “Well, I don’t want to. And that’s my business.”

  “I could catch that horse.”

  “You’re a damn fool.” Of a sudden he had a terrible notion of Randy actually going out the gate, and he sat
up on his cot, swung his feet off the side and grabbed hold of Randy’s arm. “Don’t you think about it! Don’t you think about it, or damn you to hell, Randy Goss! Don’t you double-cross me like that and get yourself killed— because that’s what will happen!”

  “I’m not going to,” Randy said. “Let go. That hurts.”

  He’d held too hard. He bent over and hugged his brother. Ruffled his hair in the dark. “I love you,” he said. He didn’t know if he’d ever said it to anybody. He didn’t know if anyone had ever said it to him. “You’re a good kid.”

  “Not a kid,” Randy complained.

  “Not grown yet, either. I want to see you get there. All right?”

  “Yeah,” Randy said, embarrassed, Carlo was sure, and he got back on his own cot and pulled the covers over him.

  Randy should have something good out of his life. Randy was smart. He was quick with people—like in church. Randy’d realized what he had to do, and he’d done it with a passion, and made people like him.

  That was a gift. That was a real gift. He wished he had it.

  Hell with this horse business, Randy was cut out for dealing with people and having a wife and kids he’d spoil rotten, if he just figured out that was the way families were supposed to work.

  Because there was goodness in Randy. Randy was going through that stage of being too tough to think straight, but there was a good kid there, a good heart that deserved friends like he’d been lucky enough to have, guys that were dead down in Tarmin, names that just—didn’t exist anymore.

  He gave a long breath, realizing it was the first time he’d been able to think calmly about what had happened, having learned fast in all those days with Danny how to keep his mind off troubling subjects—and now really believing that nobody in the village could possibly hear his thoughts.

  He hadn’t realized until now he’d been scared of that. But he had been. Fear was a good teacher.

  And when Danny had said he’d confessed to the riders all those things he’d not admitted out loud, he’d just blown up. Just blown up, in total startlement. Danny hadn’t come back. He didn’t know how Danny took it. Danny hadn’t come back, and he and Randy went to church where Danny couldn’t go. What had thrown them together was unraveling, and Danny probably thought—