Rider at the Gate

by C. J. Cherryh

  Denis came running and grabbed him around the middle, terrified, wanting him. Danny shoved back as Cloud’s fright hit his nerves. He struck out instinctively just to get Denis away from Cloud, screaming: “Get out of here! Get out of here! Go home, you brainless little fool!”

  In the next instant he felt the sting in his hand and saw Denis sitting on the ground with a hand pressed to his cheek, all shock and hurt, tears in his eyes.

  The shock he felt was what stopped Cloud. That was all that stopped Cloud until he turned and shoved desperately at Cloud’s muscular shoulder, trying to image to Cloud that this wasn’t an enemy, this was a part of him… he ordered Cloud to go away, and Cloud surged against his push in a fit of jealous anger.

  “No!” he said, shoving back, and imaged

  Cloud sent back.

  “Behave yourself!” Nighthorses understood some words, more than a few words, when they wanted to; Danny was mad, now, and Cloud was mad, but he was madder, and scared: it was his brother’s life at stake.

 

  “Denis.” —That did no good. Cloud was angry at the people, angry at the boy, and Cloud didn’t want to know who Denis was: the complexities of human family relations were beyond Cloud’s imagining. Danny shoved hard at Cloud’s shoulder. “Go away if you can’t behave. Cloud, go away. Now!”

  Cloud shook his neck, an obscuring flurry and flutter of mane, then backed a step and whirled with a stinging lash of his tail. But he sulked a little distance away from them, temperous and snapping at an equally surly horse in his immediate path.

  Danny turned toward Denis then, not wanting to deal with the boy, still trembling as he was with Cloud’s fighting anger.

  But Denis wasn’t there. He’d not felt him go. Cloud hadn’t told him. It wasn’t important to Cloud.

  Dammit!

  There would be murders by morning. When the camp shook to nighthorse dreams, the slum of Shamesey caught the fever. Old feuds, old angers, old resentments, would boil up in the taverns and the houses tonight. The rich sat safely insulated in town center. But no one in or near the camp palisade could be immune from the madness that had broken loose—when all the camp swarmed with images, when all the riders had the same dread of their own dark imaginings.

  Clearly a Shamesey kid who’d left the common path had no place in his own home tonight. He couldn’t face his father or his mother or his brothers—especially not Denis… a realization which settled and occupied a numb, vaguely angry spot in his heart.

  He thought he ought to feel overwhelming remorse, loss, something. He knew in his head why his father had hit him. He even forgave his father in his heart, the way the preachers said he had to do. He knew the desperation his father felt in the face of his middle son’s sure damnation, and his middle son’s tempting Sam and Denis and their mother to go down that same hellhound road.

  But that road was his breath of life. What he held dearest and most vital violated everything his father held rational or sacred. He couldn’t possibly explain to his brothers what he felt when he touched Cloud—his father called it proselytizing for the Devil, leading his brothers into temptation.

  So he’d personally rejected God. He hadn’t meant to. But once he’d begun to hear the beasts, he’d begun to hear the whole world as it spieled down to winter and licentious riot. He’d felt in it the urgency of all life… even of townsmen and the placid cattle that had come down from the stars with them: delicious feelings, forbidden feelings his parents didn’t talk about and he could only hint at with his friends because they weren’t, he’d understood, the feelings his friends had. They were constant, they were preoccupying: pictures in his mind and feelings that charged those pictures with sensations that ran over his skin and roused desires he had to seek privacy to deal with. He’d prayed, and the pictures came into his prayers. He’d worked until he sweated, and he felt his own skin alive to the air.

  He lived now in the flux of beast-sent images that invaded his mind moment by moment. He shivered in the feelings of lust and anger that alternately took his body, the outpourings of disturbed minds, when he should be repenting for hitting Denis and defying his father.

  Except no matter what his father believed, riders did have feelings the preachers would call good. Even the horses had them—a thing no rider could explain to the preacher-men, a thing riders couldn’t even tell each other, it just was. When you got a number of horses together and enough riders to pin their thoughts obsessively on a set of images, they said you could hear beyond the stone’s-toss that was a horse’s ordinary range. Shamesey regularly proved it. And the pain people felt tonight was because riders couldn’t ignore each other.

  He couldn’t ignore the rider alone out there. He couldn’t forget the pain that had rung through Shamesey camp, that still rang, in the iron tolling of the bell. The images tumbled one over the other in his skull, the woman, the rocks, the blood. He didn’t easily distinguish (they said a rider’s ability to judge such things got better, over time) what was his memory of what he’d just seen imaged and what he might be hearing from riders in the camp, or at this very moment, even from Stuart, at a range no nighthorse was supposed to attain. Horses in pain reached inexplicable distances, did things they weren’t supposed to know how to do—junior riders said so, around their own fires. He’d never heard a senior rider say it.

  But that horse’s pain, which he thought he’d felt when he’d had his hand directly on Cloud, had gone straight to his nerves in a transferred disturbance of a nature and subtlety he’d never felt before—if that was the source of it. The pain and the anger running the hills out there could be why he’d hit Denis—recoiling from Denis’ emotional outburst as he ran to him. Cloud could only see that wild emotion as an attack on his rider—and Denis didn’t know: Denis couldn’t feel the air around him. A boy who understood only Shamesey slum couldn’t begin to believe that things in the outside world didn’t feel or react the way he did. And Denis was his own world, being twelve-going-on-thirteen, and in that world of all things he believed as so, Denis could only know his older brother had gone crazy with his horse and slapped him to the ground. So much for Danny, Denis would think, go on and go to hell, Denis didn’t need him, anyway—he could hear it as if Denis had yelled it at him, without Cloud’s help.

  So, —that was well enough, he couldn’t make Denis see it, and Denis had some major adjustments to the world-as-it-was yet to make, some edges yet to be worn off his hellbent sense of right and proper. Denis had it in him. Denis could learn. Denis wasn’t Sam.

  But, God, he didn’t need to have hit the kid that hard, no matter that Denis was being an ass.

  The way his father, equally scared, equally angry, seeing him in danger, had hit him.

  The camp gates shut, the bar dropped. Cloud, venturing close to him again, spooked off with an angry whuff of breath, the wildness Cloud had before storms, deserting him as the other nighthorses, gathering here and there among the riders, shifted and snorted in the gathering dark. A group of them spooked off the same way Cloud had, a muted thunder down the street toward the farther reaches of the camp.

  The riders around him turned up their collars against the night wind, thrust their hands into their pockets and, shying from their own horses, went back into the commons, onto the street, to go back to their own precincts, or into the tavern to drink and to numb the feeling.

  To kill the anger, as all strong feelings had to die, quickly, in the huge, unstable assemblage of Shamesey camp. It was the rule.

  Danny joined the general drift down to the commons, trying to subdue his own bit of that prickling storm-sense, trying to forget the set-to with Denis, trying to forget his father shouting at him and telling him go to hell. Everyone was on edge—his fat
her had, he was increasingly convinced, been feeling the rogue-sending when he’d hit him. His own nerves had certainly been at the snapping-point when he’d hit Denis; and Denis had been on the raw edge, to run at him in fear, risking Cloud’s vicinity, when ordinarily Cloud scared Denis out of reach.

  He’d never seen mind-to-mind panic in action—although the boss-man, Lyle Wesson, had had the universal Talk with him, when first he and Cloud had come into the camp, novices, confused and hostile and scared of everyone and everything. The camp-boss had told him in plain words that, being young, he was bound to be stupid with his feelings at least several times, and that he had better get control of his emotions, fast, or find himself out on solitary cattle watch for the next three moon-chases.

  He remembered that brush of Stuart’s presence at the gates, now, when his own insides had been in turmoil and his brain hadn’t been thinking, just… he’d wanted, ached for company, the way Stuart ached for company in these precarious autumn days… and Stuart’s border woman was for some reason the image that kept coming at him as if it were his own loss, the unattainable substance of his wishes, a beautiful, fringe-jacketed rider in the High Wild… copper-haired woman with the red leaves on all the hills, the object of more than one of his furtive midnight fantasies.

  He was disgusted with himself, finding his own juvenile privations echoing off Stuart’s earnest grief. It wasn’t remotely even forgivable, God! The rider Stuart loved was a mangled corpse in the images running horribly under the surface of the minds around him, Stuart’s private pain was echoing at him out of the night and he had thoughts like that. No wonder even Cloud wouldn’t stay by him, in the confusion of mating urges he was feeling in his blood— it was too painful and drove Cloud too crazy, when there was enough craziness natural in the edge-of-winter ambient.

  He didn’t know why he should ache after a woman he’d never even met, a borderer who wouldn’t have given a junior a passing glance on his best day.

  But Stuart had passed that close to him, with horses nearby— and a human mind, he suspected by now, was a flittery, fragile thing, very much unsure what belonged to it by experience and what came to it from elsewhere.

  Or—shuddery thought—if it was Stuart he was still hearing, if it was Stuart’s thought coming at them from the hills across the road—by all he knew, by all he’d heard, also at a winter fireside, only rogues could send like that. But Stuart wasn’t. His horse wasn’t. He wouldn’t believe it. Chains of such misfortune were legendary, one rogue triggering the next—but it was stupid ghost stories, that was all. Horses and sometimes bears and cats did legitimately go rogue, that part was real—horses got kicked in the head in some mating-fight, or got a high fever that damaged the brain, and a rogue horse—probably a wild one: there were wild herds on Rogers Peak—had spooked that convoy up in the mountains and sent a rider and her horse off the edge of the road. All that was true.

  But now, and for no sane reason, all of a sudden rogue rider was echoing around the ambient, fear spreading out to attack Aby Dale’s partner—as if Stuart had just gone unstable, just like the ghost stories, only because he’d run from the camp and gone out alone. But wasn’t that what you were supposed to do if you couldn’t hold something in: get away from the horses, get calm, get quiet? Stuart wasn’t crazy. Stuart wasn’t any rogue. It wasn’t fair or reasonable for people to think so.

  Was it?

  he questioned the dark, but Cloud didn’t answer him. Either Cloud had gotten out of range, or Cloud was refusing all dealing with him until he’d gotten himself in hand.

  he thought, trying to calm his rattled nerves. He very much wanted Cloud’s comfort right now. He wanted Cloud to be near him—

  But nothing came back but Constant, now, came the erotic urges of horses heading into winter rut: sex and rivalry and anger. So much anger, no focus, and so much fear of instability…

  He couldn’t even image as disturbed as he was. He looked at the ground as he walked, at the dust, gaslit from the poles in the tavern yard, determined to notice detail. That was the last mindless defense against an invading image. He strove to see individual grains of dust, in the half-colored texture the gaslights and the lantern light gave to the ground. He noticed how the footprints in that dust were different, the town-made boots, and the ones more individual, borderers, the sharp, tri-partite hoofprints of the horses under and over them.

  In that preoccupation he came up among the tables where the commons gave way to Gate Tavern territory, under the gaslights, where old Mastraian had his hands full. Mastraian’s town help were bringing out ale by the pitcher-full: nervous kids, slum kids glad to have any job, even one the preachers said risked their souls, and, working along with them, rider kids, as yet horseless, and a few riders so new or so young they welcomed a tavern job to keep themselves and their horses fed—forage being no viable choice in Shamesey’s civilized lowland, where even open pasture had owners.

  He was a second-year junior. He was far richer than that. He had his winter account with the camp-boss, money for camp store, the hostel he stayed in, and another account with Mastraian, beyond what he’d given his family in Shamesey—he even carried a little cash in his belt-purse; and the tavern would thank a customer for cash tonight, he was sure, from anyone who carried it—there were just too many customers, over half the camp having followed the disturbance to the gates, for the harried staff to keep tabs.

  So he laid down a five on the porchside counter, in exchange for which the counter help handed him an empty mug. He found himself an empty place at a table, shoulder to shoulder at the end of a long bench with other juniors and a couple who didn’t look at all to be juniors, man and woman, maybe even borderers, he wasn’t sure.

  A mug and five meant you could sit at a table, pour from the pitchers the servers set out, and drink yourself gradually stupid, which he was determined to, tonight, for the first time in his life. His father would be furious if he knew, and quote the preachers about ale and riot. His mother would be disgusted, and say he was a stupid kid in bad company, squandering money. Of course. Squandering was his mother’s word. It didn’t matter if it was your money. If you spent money or time on something she didn’t like, you were squandering it.

  He was never so conscious of the wall dividing the camp from the town, and him from his family. He’d never had a hangover. He wondered was it as bad as seniors said. He’d spent more money plastering his family’s walls than he’d ever squandered in the Gate Tavern. He’d bought clothes and gear he had to have, nothing extravagant. He’d bought sweets for Cloud… who didn’t at least cry over how wonderful the money was and call him a sinner damned to hell in the same evening.

  The high, reedy sound of a flute had started up, another joined in oscillating discord, and then the drummers started a wild and noisy rhythm.

  Nobody could be planning sleep in the surrounding hostels tonight. A flood of riders left their tables and started dancing in the commons, some with drinks in hand, men and women in a mingled line.

  His table mostly cleared in that first wave, and he refilled his mug and joined what was getting to be a rowdy first-dance line. A handful of borderers had started a contest of sorts, the show-outs holding forth inside the meandering lines—lowland riders didn’t do the borderers’ steps, didn’t do the single-dances like that: he wouldn’t dare go out with them, but he watched, asking himself if he could keep his balance, if he could do those steps, and trying a couple of them in the line-dance.

  He found a couple of juniors, both male and girl-less, when the line broke up into sets. They danced through one mug and a refill—he didn’t know one of them except as Lane, a kid from the far side of Shamesey slum himself. He didn’t like Lane much, but that was no requisite for sets. They danced themselves breathless and drank half the refill down.

  Then a couple of borderers, already way too
many ales down, were spinning past each other with knives flashing, coat-fringes flying. The sets line bowed out for fear of mishaps, while the drummers went crazy, and the hired-help dodged down the line, filling outheld mugs and spilling astonishingly little.

  (Follow not the beasts, the preachers said. Avoid ale and riot. Dance is the Devil’s enticement.)

  He had his mug refilled without asking—without noticing it was about to happen; and, out of breath, tried a few of the steps he’d seen…

  Arms hooked his of a sudden, and he found himself snatched and spun into another set, arms snagged by two sweating men he didn’t know, both drunker than he was, and as suddenly found himself spun out onto a dance circle, where two borderers beckoned him in, wanting him, he feared, to play the female third—

  “No knives!” he panted, and the two, holding each other up, roared with laughter, grabbed his free arm, and snatched him into a dizzy circle-dance. Then he just concentrated on footwork to the drum, round and round and round, with gulps from the mug in between, matching their consumption the way he matched their steps.

  Sweat was pouring down his face, despite the chill. He’d picked up the step, and thought he was doing damned well at it. The beat became the whole night, the whole universe, so long as his balance lasted.

  But after two rounds he’d no breath for anything but to take the good-natured, hard slaps of high country riders on his shoulders and to weave away, thank God, still able to find his way to a table and sit down before he made a public staggering fool of himself.