Cloud's Rider

Cloud's Rider Page 35

by C. J. Cherryh

  “On villageside and away from my business,” Ridley said. “I don’t try to figure what the Mackeys do. I’m sorry for Carlo Goss. I wish him well and far away. I’ve got my hands full with the younger kid. You’ve got the girl on your side of the wall and I’d say, soon as spring, we pack her on the first truck down with a strong dose of yellowflower and get her somewhere besides Tarmin.”

  “Darcy won’t at all take to that.”

  “Then maybe Darcy can do something with her head. But she didn’t do it on the porch this morning. I tell you, marshal, my horse and I were right out in the middle of that crowd. Same one that went for that boy. There was a reason things went the way they did.”

  “You’re saying—what?”

  “That the miners might have killed him. That that was why things went so bad so fast. Maybe it was why the boy ran for his life and went out those gates rather than stay in the village. He’d felt it once before this.”

  “At Tarmin, you mean?” Peterson was taking acute alarm. And Ridley didn’t want that.

  “The girl can’t do any damage,” Ridley said, “unless there’s a horse near her.”

  “Or a bear or a cat or any damn thing—how in hell do we get her out of here down a road in company with a bunch of riders on horses we’re not supposed to let her near?”

  “Yellowflower. I’m serious. Asleep, she’s fine. Dreams don’t do much. In my observation. —Marshal, I had no choice, even if I’d known. Those kids would have died if I’d sent them on. At least two of them would have. And at Mornay it would have been the same risk if that girl was there, and maybe worse. Mornay’s a smaller enclosure, more chance of sendings getting over the wall—if she were there. Play the hand close and we’ll get her out of here come spring—and I’d advise we do it whether or not she improves. I’d say the village should buy out any share she’s got in Tarmin, pay her and Darcy in goods, and get them both out of here.”

  “Our only doctor, dammit.”

  “Who hasn’t been doing much the last year. And I’m sorry about Faye. I know Darcy blames me. But if Faye’d done what she was told, Faye wouldn’t be dead. That’s hard, and I’m sorry to say so, but that’s the way it is. The kid left the secure area and went off on her own exactly the way the Goss boy’s done—only the boy this morning had urgent reason and Faye was after her own pleasure. Besides her father was in attendance the same as I was and she slipped off from him, too. I’m not personally responsible for either one and in both cases I’m doing what I can—including sending a rider out there to deal with the Goss kid, including coming over here and personally warning you that the doctor’s resentment toward me is reaching the girl, and that the girl does hear the horses and everything of like kind out in the Wild. If you believe one thing I say, believe this: the Goss girl has a real capability for setting off a mob or a village-wide panic of exactly the kind that opened Tarmin’s gates and doors. If the doctor were likely to listen to me, I’d say keep that kid on yellowflower every time we have a problem near the walls. Which having met the doctor’s mind directly this morning I don’t think she will—”

  “You’re saying Darcy hears the horses?”

  “I’m saying all of you did, marshal. Everybody in town.”

  “Not me.”

  “Some of you clearer than others. You were thinking about your job and you didn’t panic. Some were looking for somebody to blame and they did. I’ll assure you Slip didn’t think of going after that boy. But upset, yes, my horse was upset. And a lot of people being upset did exactly what they’d naturally do if they were upset. The law stood firm and the boy ran and the miners chased him. —And the girl threw a tantrum. Am I right? At the far end and down by the gate I was farther than I usually am from the main street when I’m in camp. I’m flat guessing what she did and what you felt. But am I right?”

  “Yeah. You are.”

  “I didn’t have to hear it to make a guess. And what I did hear while I was there wasn’t good.”

  “At that range?”

  “You can pick up a few things. The world’s never quiet. It’s never really quiet while there’s a horse anywhere about. And damn right that girl’s noisy. I’m real serious. My notion is she doesn’t listen worth a damn, but once she’s in contact with the Wild she’s real pushy with her images, real stubborn in what she sees. And it’s not just my horse: it’s everything all over the mountain, things so quiet you don’t ordinarily hear them or if you do you don’t know you’re hearing them. She sends better than some and she doesn’t listen. That may be more than you want to know about the horses, but that’s the worst combination of talents you can own to go around them, and I don’t want Slip near her.”

  “You had an obligation to tell us about the girl before we made certain decisions!”

  “What would you have done different—besides not put that girl with Darcy?”

  “That’s about it.”

  “Then that’s the one we’ve got to deal with, isn’t it? If the Goss boy takes to that loose horse—it could be settled and we could have a peaceful winter, once that attraction is away from her. I told Fisher get him on to Mornay if he can catch him, and that’s still the best thing to do.”

  “Do you hear him now?”

  “I’m not near the horses.”

  Villagers never seemed to get that straight. Or cases like the Goss girl confused them. He just wished Darcy Schaffer’s house was on the other side of the street because, knowing there was trouble in the village, Slip was a curious and a suspicious horse who might put out extra effort to know what That Girl was up to.

  And that meant horses carrying the girl’s troublesome images further than ordinary into the Wild. Get a panic started among the horses and they’d hear it in distant Anveney.

  “Well, keep me posted,” Peterson said.

  “I will,” he said, uneasy in knowing the man on the villageside who knew him best and who had the village version of his job didn’t really to this day know what the abilities and the limits of the horses were. John Quarles was, ironically, his other best phone line to the village—but John just trusted the Lord and didn’t try to understand things. You went and told Peterson when you wanted somebody on villageside to worry. You told John when you wanted somebody to nod sagely and assure you things would be all right.

  Neither worked in this case.

  So he had had nothing to do but go back to the camp, and to stay around the den where he could keep his finger on the pulse of the ambient, and that meant currying Slip, since his hands were idle, and trying to keep him calm. Callie and Jennie did the same, all of them hanging about the den where rumors could fly—or be sat upon, fast, before they spread to the village on the impulse of several nervous horses.

  The younger Goss boy, Randy, hung about there, too, being very quiet.

  And very unhappy.

  “You think he’s still alive?” Randy asked finally, coming up to him as he was brushing Slip’s tail.

  “Pretty sure so,” he said. “Pretty sure he’s with that horse.”

  “I hope he is,” Randy said. And he heard from the kid right then and and knew that both choices came with real pain.

  “A rider’s pretty damn selfish,” he said to Randy, “when it’s him and his horse. If you can let that horse go, he’d never be yours. That’s the truth, kid.”

  “If Danny finds Carlo he’ll get him to Mornay.”

  “He’ll get him there if he can. You stay here. No going back to the Mackeys.”

  “I’ve got to get the house down in Tarmin. That’s Carlo’s house.”

  “If Carlo’s gone to be a rider, son, there’s nobody but the Mackeys to go with you.”

  “But he wants to be a blacksmith.”

  “Not now. You hear it out there.” Couldn’t hear it now too distinctly: horse-sense said it had gone on in the general direction of Mornay, which was very good news. “You don’t ever unchoose that. Lose one horse—you’ve got to find one and some horse has got to find you, or you’re better off dead.”

  There was a long silence, Randy sitting on a rail by the manger, wiped his eyes. “He won’t want me if he’s got that horse.”


  “Not the same way, maybe. A horse happens along and a partner happens along both for reasons you don’t exactly choose to happen, and sometimes who happens and why just doesn’t make sense to you. Don’t say won’t. Don’t say can’t. Say—there’s something waiting for you.” It was what he’d said to himself before he met Callie. It was what he’d said to Jennie. And Jennie had proved that true, no question about it.

  The boy looked up at him. “You think? You think maybe?”

  “I think you better be ready if it comes. Can’t say when. Neither could your brother. Just think good thoughts about him now and most of all think about him staying on that horse. It won’t leave him. But it’s bad country to get thrown. Worry about that if you want to worry about something.”

  “He’ll show Rick Pig. He’ll come back and he’ll show him.”

  “If he comes back with that horse he’ll take orders like any rider in this camp, kid. The way he’ll take orders over at Mornay if Danny can get him there.” He liked the boy. But you never let a kid think he was on equal footing when you might have to lay the law down and make it stick. “You get one thing straight: you don’t do anything toward the village without consulting the camp-boss, including insulting the village folk. That’s the first lesson you learn, or you better clear out and stay out of my sight, right down that road you took to get up here. Danny Fisher ran that line right close, and I know why he did it; and he knows he’s on my tolerance. So you get it straight: if you stay in this camp, you do what you’re told and you do it when you’re told, and if you don’t, Slip here will tell me.”

  “Yes, sir,” Randy said.

  “Good you learn that.”

  * * *

  Chapter 20

  Ť ^ ť

  The afternoon had gone to that strange daylight afternoons had in the woods, in the mountains, and the trail was going the same way it had—Cloud’s burst of speed flagged in a high altitude gasping for breath. Out of condition, Cloud was. Born up here, maybe, but they were both a little soft, and settled to an unheroic amble through the woods, along the road to Mornay. He walked at times, rode at times. Cloud had carried him quite a lot to start with, and he didn’t want to push Cloud to foolishness in his enthusiasm: it was possible to get a whole list of ailments from too much exertion at altitude and he’d heard them all from Ridley as well as Tara and Guil.

  Miraculously, in Danny’s opinion, there hadn’t been any more Carlo-shaped holes in the snow, and the horse was traveling at a fair clip along the road, faster through the trees, which was generally a good idea, considering the habit of lorrie-lies and other such tree-dwellers that liked to fall on you from above. Cloud did much the same as he tracked Carlo and Spook.

  He was resolved not to scare the horse twice. It hadn’t been the brightest move he’d made, coming up on that horse ambivalent about shooting. Now he was sure he wouldn’t. He tried, because Cloud could be a fairly loud horse when he wanted to be, to encourage Cloud to send out friendliness and goodwill to the ambient at large and an image of But no, Cloud wouldn’t. was the best he could manage, and Cloud gave a shiver and a twitch, just thinking about

  There were tracks of game—though sign was rare, and totally absent along one area of the road, well-shaded and sheltered from the snow-fall, where he would have thought small tracks might have persisted. Nothing but themselves was moving about—he didn’t pick up the view of things at ground level that the little spooks sent. But the snow had fallen thick and swirled in under the trees, while the little game, undisturbed by hunters, was in burrows. The silence was deep and wide across the mountain, a kind of breathless slumber, except for the track Spook laid down and the track he laid over it.

  He thought that Carlo might be heading to Mornay on his own: Carlo might never have traveled in his life, but he was well familiar with the fact of the shelters. When in his first days with Cloud, and inexperienced as he was of the Wild, he’d taken out to the open, he’d had far better weather and no such shelters in reach.

  , he thought,

  Cloud shook his dark abundance of wooly mane and whipped his tail about.

  , Cloud sent into the ambient, and Danny tried to think of That didn’t make him or Cloud more comfortable. But he didn’t want to challenge the whole ambient the way Cloud was minded to do, and he wanted When Cloud let him up he wanted , just because it seemed to him—

  He wasn’t sure. He couldn’t put a name or a label to it—and nighthorses weren’t the only large hunters on the mountain. He’d long since put curves of the mountain face between him and Evergreen—a lot of them. And now, just since the last sharp curve, the nape of his neck prickled as they rode, which sometimes meant something watching—and sometimes didn’t. Sometimes it was just a human’s own imagination padding along behind him, never there when the rider looked back, and never close enough to leave tracks in the rider’s sight.

  Which was ridiculous. If anything had been behind them, Cloud’s vision would have spotted it, Cloud’s horse-sense would have located it, Cloud’s knowledge of the Wild would have identified it with far more surety than a human could.

  He just decided, in all that silence, not to call out to Carlo aloud as he’d sometimes done, and not to send so loudly as he’d been urging Cloud to do. He rode along through a shadow that deepened as they passed into woods. But past a little wooded spot and around a little curve, he found open road ahead.

  And there—he was ever so glad to see—just past those last trees, a wall of logs. The Evergreen-to-Mornay shelter was ahead. He’d sworn to himself he wouldn’t have to tell Ridley he’d missed this one in a snowstorm, and, thank God, despite the snow-fall, he hadn’t.

  The road went past it. But the trail he was following didn’t go there. It veered off down a broad gap in the trees that led past the shelter, and just kept going.

  Damn, he thought. A logging track, and Carlo had taken it, shying off from the cabin. He stopped Cloud, and stood looking down it. Snow-fall was thick enough the trail disappeared into white haze, along with the farther trees.

  It might be stupid to follow. But he had gear and a gun, and Carlo didn’t. He could stay on his horse, and he wouldn’t bet on Carlo’s chances if that trail led down to rough ground.

  It was a question how hard to push Carlo, how hard to make him run. He didn’t want to create a disaster. It might be smarter to hole up for the night, use the supplies in the cabin to make a good hot supper and hope Carlo could smell it on the wind.

  But when he rode up to the shelter, in which the ambient gave him no feeling of occupancy—just a wooden structure half-buried in snow—he kept thinking that with the snow coming down the way it was and a half-crazed horse under him—

  God, what chance did have but him?

  Cloud turned without his willing it, with the notion of , too, and a feeling about the precinct that came on a gust of wind. was Cloud’s thinking at the moment; and Or it was something very like. Cloud blew steam in an explosive clearing of his nostrils and shook his mane in disgust at what he was smelling. Cloud had a notion of and , and that boiled up to the top of the ambient in a scary way he’d never before felt from Cloud.

  “All right,” he said, patting Cloud on the shoulder, agreeing on the trail in front of them.

  The overcast had gone very gray and dim above them. They might be fools to be going away from shelter.

  But he hadn’t gone too far at all before they crossed another such clearcut, and came on a bowl-shaped little nook where a big forested crag thrust out from the mountain, rock veiled in snow, bristling with evergreens. It was one of those unexpected vistas the mountain could give you, just unfolding from around a turn. A broad patch was clear of trees and brush, and the immaculate flatness of ice showed where the wind blew the snow clear.

  A mountain pool, frozen over. Tall evergreens stood about its banks.

  He knew where he was: the pond Mornay and Evergreen shared for excursions.

  The pond where the doctor’s daughter had drowned.

  Unlucky place, he thought, scanning that scene from Cloud’s moving ba
ck like a painting on a wall—loggers hadn’t taken the trees here, only cut a trail through, about wide enough for the ox-teams that dragged the logs up to the roads: a pile of cut logs where a trail went off across the mountain awaited the teams that wouldn’t come next spring. Surprised by early winter, he thought, as Cloud pace-pace-paced along the track that a single horse had left along the side of the pond.

  Cloud felt skittish, looking left and right and moving faster than his rider thought prudent. A was in the ambient, something Cloud couldn’t identify, and Danny was acquiring the same nervousness.

  Another glance toward the pond showed a lump in a snow-hazed treetop.

  , he thought. His knowledge of the predators of the Wild was all secondhand, but it could account for Cloud’s faster pace.

  Didn’t pick up anything, though. Old nest, he thought. Old and abandoned. If—

  Cloud shot forward so suddenly in he almost went off. In the same moment he caught as the ambient did an uncanny ripple of and and nothing was the same as he’d seen it a moment ago.

  Trick, he thought in a wash of panic. could do that. He’d never heard lorrie-lies did.

  Suddenly it didn’t feel lonely out here. It felt—dangerous. It felt—occupied. Alive. And scary of a sudden. Very scary. might be an illusion some hunter got from his mind.

  had that talent, too.

  He didn’t quarrel with Cloud’s sudden rush. Not now.

  The way ahead was a white gash through the dark of trees, a path dropping lower on the mountain, steep and almost all an inexperienced rider could do to stay on—a logging cut, Carlo thought it was. He didn’t know why the horse had shied from the cabin and taken him in this direction, but he was scared beyond clear thinking by the situation as well as the route they were taking. He kept feeling oppressive danger in the place, not on either hand, but above them—and that worried him more than it would have if Spook’s fear had been of all the trees.

 

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