Cloud's Rider

Cloud's Rider Page 33

by C. J. Cherryh

  Ridley Vincint was the rider’s name, and the horse, by that fact, would be Slip. That was all she knew about riders—except that this man had been the escort supposedly watching over Faye, and she considered him directly to blame, and she didn’t forgive him for that, or for speaking harshly to Faye, as others reported, on that day. She tried not to think about that as he rode close enough to let the horse sniff the air and sniff the blood around the porch rail. She watched it, thinking doggedly of snow, which was what she’d always been taught to do if she was around a horse or any creature of the world, just think of snow and it wouldn’t be interested in her, and it wouldn’t—horrible thought—spread her private thoughts and her private fears to the neighbors.

  The door behind her opened. She knew who it was without turning around, but turn she did as, in her nightgown, Brionne came out, with a thunderously unhappy look. The child hadn’t even shoes on her feet, for God’s sake.

  And suddenly the horse gave a snort and reared up, so the rider had to fight to stay on.

  “Get the kid inside!” Ridley said harshly.

  “Stop it!” Brionne cried. “I won’t! You can’t tell me what to do!”

  The horse backed away, shaking its head, having just smelled something, evidently, about the porch. The crowd scattered from it in panic.

  All but the marshal and Jeff Burani, who stood their ground, Jeff with his hand on his gun.

  “It’s her,” Ridley said. “He doesn’t like the girl. Get her out of here. Get her back inside!”

  “Honey,” Darcy said, in the grip of so much craziness she didn’t know whether to protest or do what the rider said. The bare feet decided the matter. She flung an arm around Brionne to restrain her and had to hold tight to prevent her going to the rail.

  “It’s just like Tarmin!” Brionne cried. “You’re just like the riders there! Go away! I hate you! I hate you and your horse! Get away from me!”

  Darcy pulled her away and argued her back through the blood-spattered door into the house. For a moment—for a moment she thought she was having an asthmatic seizure or a heart attack. There was a tightness in her chest, and Brionne broke away from her toward the interior of the house, crying that she was going to get dressed and go back out there and talk to the rider if she wanted to, that she was embarrassed in front of the whole village.

  “They’re awful!” Brionne was crying. “I hate them! I hate them!”

  Darcy didn’t know what to do. She went back outside, trying to recover her breath and her wits in the cold air. Ridley and his horse were still there, in a large circle of spectators, a very large vacant circle, that had formed again near her porch.

  “I can’t get anything,” Ridley was saying. “It’s just dark. My horse is starting to get upset. The girl remembers Tarmin too clearly. I’ll have to take him back to some distance. I’ll see if I can pick up any trail on the perimeter.”

  “This is the craziest damn thing,” marshal Peterson said; and about that time John Quarles arrived, and came up on the porch, blessing the place with holy water, a process Darcy would have skipped on most days, but right now it was her house that had been denied, her doorway where yet one more life had ended, and holy water and John’s willingness to face the devil both came welcome, with Ridley on his horse still in her sight, and Brionne inside swearing she was going to come out again, to what earthly good in this horrific business she had no idea.

  But after riding all the way around the house, with much of the crowd both drifting after him and rapidly reforming their apprehensive circle when he came back, Ridley showed up again at the porch to talk to the marshal.

  “I don’t get any scent of anybody with blood about them. Just here on the porch. And I’ve got to get my horse out of here. This isn’t good. I’d suggest you give the girl something to quiet her down. She’s loud in the ambient. Dangerously loud. I can’t hear anything.”

  “Meaning you can’t find any thing,” Darcy said. “Don’t tell me the problem’s with the girl, Mr. Vincint, damn it, I won’t hear it!”

  It was certainly the closest she’d ever stood to a horse, and she was afraid—terribly afraid, all of a sudden. She didn’t know whether it was a sending or what, but Ridley Vincint made his horse turn or it turned, or something pushed it back. It looked—if an animal could have such a look—crazed; and snapped at her, not to strike, because she was out of range, but to make clear its hostility.

  “I’m going back to the camp,” Ridley Vincint said, and the horse gave a furious whip of its tail and headed back down the street toward the outer gates, quickly graying out into the snowy distance of the street.

  In the same moment the Goss boys were coming up the street ahead of a flood of miners and loggers from down by the barracks, and they passed each other, Ridley and the horse fading out, the newcomers growing brighter and more solid in the haze, until the Goss boys, arriving out of breath, forced their way through what by now looked like the whole village gathering to know what had happened.

  God, she hated scenes. She’d had her fill, in Faye’s death, and after that in Mark’s. She hated to be the object of gossip, and she knew now she was the winter’s topic for good and all, and maybe worse than that. She could only think in one term now—how it affected everything she hoped for, all she intended: her respectability to parent a daughter.

  And the respectability of her dealings with Earnest Riggs.

  The Goss brothers reached her porch and climbed the steps and that, too, was a scene bound to stick in neighbors’ minds. The Mackeys were coming, too, with hateful Mary Hardesty marching in the lead, and there was no way to go inside and let them and the marshal talk out here in front of the whole village without her knowing what they were saying. She found herself trembling, fearing that the boys were intending publicly to fault her care of Brionne, fearing that someone, somehow, in investigating what might have become of Earnest Riggs, might uncover the financial dealings she’d had with him—God knew who he’d have talked to.

  Someone had gotten wind of money—she was sure of the motive and daren’t say anything to the marshal about it. If it got about that she was involved—

  She didn’t know what to say.

  “What’s happened?” the oldest boy wanted to know. “What’s going on here?”

  “Drunken fools,” she said, that being the position she decided to take—total ignorance. But the marshal gave the long account.

  “Earnest Riggs,” Eli Peterson said. “The rider didn’t find any trace of him. His bunk wasn’t slept in. Found only his hat, lying sheltered on the porch.”

  “He was at the tavern last night,” somebody yelled from the crowd below the porch.

  “Ernie was always at the tavern,” another voice yelled. “He’s probably got in a fight and he’s sleepin’ one off!”

  “Not with this,” Peterson said. He scratched his chin and looked back at the snowy street. “I’m not finding him, the rider didn’t find him. And there’s a hell of a lot of blood. I’m taking a survey of everybody, searching all the sheds and such.”

  “Ask Carlo Goss!” somebody yelled. “He picked a fight with him yesterday. He threatened Riggs. Threatened to kill him! And he was up and about way late—I saw him!”

  “That’s a lie,” the younger boy yelled back. “That’s a lie, Rick Pig! He wasn’t anywhere last night but with me. And you were passed out drunk!”

  “Goss said he’d kill him!” That was assuredly Rick Mackey from near the fringes. “Riggs was talking loose about his sister and he said he’d kill Riggs. Now he’s done it. Naturally his brother’d give him an alibi.”

  “Carlo Goss?” Peterson said, and all of a sudden the Goss boy just jumped off the porch and broke his way through the crowd and ran.

  “Carlo!” the younger boy yelled after him.

  But Carlo Goss was running breakneck down the street, disappearing into the snowfall.

  “Get him!” Peterson yelled. “Bring him back here!” And that was a mistake. A number of miners took out running, chasing the boy, shouting encouragement to each other.

  Then the younger brother ducked past
people trying to stop him and ran after all of them, in the same moment Brionne, this time shod, came out onto the porch. Darcy put an arm around her as, in the distance, Carlo Goss failed her expectation he would go to the rider camp.

  No, the boy was going farther than that, as she could see from her elevated vantage. The miners hadn’t overtaken him. Randy Goss had taken that side street and gone off toward the rider camp. But Carlo, almost faded out in the snow, came to the village gates, and as she strained to see clearly what was going on, or whether Serge, who kept the gate, would catch him—he vanished altogether.

  He’d opened the lesser gate and gone outside the walls—maybe to reach the rider camp across to their outside gate. Maybe he’d hoped to draw the miners away from his brother, and then go where they wouldn’t—because from what she could see, nobody else passed that gate.

  Gunfire echoed back. Someone had gotten up the steps and shot.

  “Stop that,” Peterson said to his deputy, and Burani walked down off the porch, went out into the street and fired his pistol into the air, at which Darcy’s nerves jumped, and Brionne jumped, and the crowd got quiet.

  Did they shoot him? she was wondering. Maybe it was suicide. Maybe Carlo Goss had had words with Riggs. Maybe Riggs had come to him trying to solicit more money, and the boy had gotten mad and killed him.

  The marshal was shouting to Jeff Burani to go to the riders and get them to go out after the elder boy, and Burani lit out running on the course Randy Goss had taken.

  Maybe Carlo had gone toward the rider camp’s outside gate and some overzealous miner had shot him from the wall. Riders wouldn’t necessarily turn him in—not until the marshal had made a case that it was village business and none of theirs.

  She hugged Brionne against her side, in the blood-spattered venue of her porch, in the wreckage of the winter’s peace. Brionne was what she kept. Brionne was hers.

  “Sorry the girl had to see this,” marshal Peterson said. “Honey, if your brother didn’t do this, we’ll find out. I just want to ask him some questions.”

  “He could do it,” Brionne said bitterly. “He shot our father. He shot papa, Mama died. He was in jail down there. He deserved to be.”

  “Honey,” Darcy began, hoping to stem the bitter flood, but Brionne wasn’t finished.

  “I was scared of him,” Brionne cried. “He was hateful. He was always hateful. He never wanted me to have anything. And he shot papa, I know he did!”

  The whole snow-blinded sky was screaming, a condition against which the gunshots were faint noise, and it didn’t stop. Ridley couldn’t get his bearings except by sight, and that was diminished to an insignificant sense in the noise and the fright that raged in Slip, in Shimmer and Rain and Cloud—Jennie was terrified and trying to protect Rain, and in the stubbornness and the skip-to-any-belief character of a youngster, might be the strongest of them. Jennie didn’t equivocate—Jennie didn’t care about anything but what Jennie wanted, and that was , including all the horses.

  But her father knew she was no match for that thing in the village, not in age, not in angry tenacity. Ridley kept by Slip’s side, trying to keep him calm, and tried to be the stable center of their camp— but he’d compromised himself. He’d persisted against better sense, he’d tried with all he had in him to do the job his village asked him, even with that darting, unhealthy there, and he knew he hadn’t made sense to the marshal or to the doctor when he’d suddenly known he couldn’t make headway either against the search or the girl who so doggedly possessed that place. He’d had to get Slip and himself away from there.

  There was in that place, there was and and that Slip imaged it as so quickly you couldn’t track it,

  The rider camp gate had opened for them and now it was shut— Jennie and Callie and Dan had opened it for him, the horses all bunched and sending and so strongly that presence enfolded him, snatched him into harmony with one breath, one thought, and

  Now, slowly, they became and

  But something had come into reach, and it was and first and foremost.

  “Randy Goss,” Dan Fisher/Cloud identified that presence, and they weren’t afraid of it, skittish and angry mess that they all were. Dan was steady and Ridley held fast as Dan wanted

  Ridley didn’t want anything to do with the intruders in his village. He wanted But he was sane, now, and he had a partner and a daughter with him that he wasn’t going to let down. He separated Dan out of and let him go, even while he walked to the door of the den and Slip and the rest of trailed him.

  He wanted no part of the boy who came toward them—the girl’s brother, it was. The young one. Who blurted out, spilling images right and left,

  <“Carlo’s run. Miners chasing him.> You got to help him!”

  Dan didn’t stop to question further. He wanted and he ran alone for the gate, and into the village.

  Ridley didn’t know what they were supposed to do with a village boy. The boy was crying and trying not to show it. And Jennie was upset, and wanting near her, where her hands could feel him.

  Shimmer was and hanging back behind the others, both more and less afraid. Shimmer would kill if the kid made the wrong move, and on the instant of the realization how fragile Shimmer’s truce with the situation was, Ridley moved, and Callie moved, him to take the boy under his protection and Callie to hold Shimmer’s temper under her calming hands.

  “It’s crazy,” the boy gasped. “It’s crazy out there. They want to kill him, and he didn’t do it!”

  “We’ll prove it, then,” Ridley said: the village called on them and the horses to untangle conflicting testimonies, sometimes outright scaring the guilty into confession—but they weren’t usually as clear to the mind as this boy’s impressions came,

  came very loud just then. couldn’t be still against the challenge that was pouring around them, and the boy just stared toward the rider-gate until Dan came running back, out of breath, with—

  “He’s gone outside!”

  “You’ve got to go after him!” the boy cried. “Danny, you got to find him—he didn’t do it! I was with him! They’re lying!”

  “You,” Dan said, already running for the barracks, “stay in the camp.”

  Dan intended to go find the kid. Ridley had no doubt of that— at the same time that another certainty was running over his nerves, and shivered through the ambient.

  “That damn horse!” Callie cried.

  Dan Fisher was headed to get his gun and his gear. It didn’t take him long to run back again. Fisher was going after the horse and the boy—and he, dammit, had a camp and a village in his charge with a real problem outside his walls and a worse one in the middle of the village. He was staying behind, he had no question of it, same as if a chain bound him here.

  While the ambient rang with loneliness and terror.

  “Get the Goss kid on to Mornay if you reach halfway,” he told Fisher, as Fisher swung up on Cloud’s back, and the rest of them headed around end of the den to help open the gate. “In Mornay he’s out of reach and out of trouble. Sort it out in the spring.” They reached the gate and he flung the bar up. Callie and Randy and Jennie pushed it wide. “There’s one shelter on your way—he’ll surely know it, if he gets there! Hope to hell he doesn’t go on the logging trails!”

  “Yes, sir,” Fisher said.

  “Go fast! If you catch him before halfway come back and we’ll organize a trek over. If it’s a long run—good luck to you! Come back when you see a chance and bring us word how you are!” He gave a slap to Cloud’s rump and Fisher was off.

  That left him with one rider fewer. And one scared kid more.

  Breath wouldn’t come any longer. Legs wouldn’t run anymore. Carlo sprawled downslope, plunged through snow and into snow until the mountainside finally gave him up again, just casually tumbled him out of a snowy embrace and into the snow-drifting air.

  He lay on his back, facing the light—a light coming through the branches of evergreens, out in the deep woods, alone, with the snow coming down on his eyes, and himself with no inclination even to blink. He’d been lucky so far. Luck wouldn’t
last. Wild things didn’t go on the move much while the snow was coming down. That was why he’d lived this long. He thought he was afraid. He was too numb, now, to know what he thought.

  He couldn’t let the accusations go the way they had the last time, with Randy swept up and jailed with him. Couldn’t go to the rider camp gate. The mob would have piled up there and trapped Randy—God hope that he’d run there. He’d led them off from that, and then he’d seen the outside gate, and meant to go to the camp from the outside, and get Danny to help him.

  But he’d forgotten that when he got there. With all the woods in front of him, he’d just run and run and run, free of all of them, drunk on it, not using his brain—

  He wasn’t hurt. He wasn’t being chased anymore. He was back in the snow, in the woods out of which he’d come to Evergreen village, as if it closed a circle, somehow, and set things back at the point of change.

  Foolish thought. Delirious thought. He was in dreadful danger, having run out here unarmed and alone—he’d done something self-destructive and stupid, and he didn’t understand himself.

  Except he was back on the road. When the day of the climb up here, despite the pain, proved the best day he’d lived, what could he say about himself? He knew the rest of the life ahead of him, shut in the forge, working with and for the Mackeys, wasn’t alluring. The only time he’d ever felt free and doing something for himself was the association he’d had with Danny.

  Now his future didn’t even look to be going back to Tarmin, to live his life down there. It looked to be jail. Again. Locked up. With Rick Mackey to lie and swear he was guilty. Give Rick credit for brains. Not much. But enough to get everything he wanted.

  Maybe that was why he’d gone crazy for a moment—until he went off a cliff. The fall and the landing was a sobering thing, that could persuade him he ought to go back and face the charges and try to prove he was innocent.

 

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