Rider at the Gate
Page 5
The rider let him go, turned to shout at people at the tables, yelling to get the boss, to get somebody to stop it.
He didn’t know Stop what? except for that anger rolling past the camp, toward the road.
He didn’t want any more. He didn’t want to hear it gone over and over, and see that woman die and die again. It was Stuart’s message. It was Stuart’s dead. He wanted Cloud. He wanted
Second burst of gunfire.
The night exploded. He lurched to his feet, he cried out to his horse, “Run!” and he was
He heard Cloud answer, somewhere near, he heard < someone shouting…
< “Open the gates!” >
< Gunshot. >
Close, quivering echo. Pain hit his right leg and it folded. He fell on one knee, and a mass of riders broke around him, followed the man who’d grabbed him, all running toward the shut gates. Bullets were still flying outside, a ringing, erratic volley of shots. The echoes came back off the hills—he’d heard hunters’ rifles echo in that strange, hollow way. All his life he’d heard it. He’d heard it the nights they’d shot at Cloud.
“Hold it!” the call went out from somewhere down the street. “Hold those gates! —Dammit, stop where you are!”
The order went out not only from the camp-boss, it went out from Dart, too, who was never far from the boss-man, and it shot straight to the nerves.
The old man who walked past him and down to the gates was crippled. A stick supported him. The nighthorse that came up near him was one-eyed and scarred, but Dart was one loud horse, a force, with Lyle Wesson to back it, that made nerves twitch and ears prick up. Danny stood still. Movement had stopped, stopped in the image, stopped in reality, out beyond the gate.
But the horse out there on the hill went running, running, and the rider staggered up, pain shooting through his leg. Danny sat down on the bench and shivered in the dying mental echoes of the gunfire.
Stuart had grabbed that mane and was away. The mob that had poured out of the town—an irrational, hating thing, as crazed as the rogue-sending—couldn’t take Stuart now.
His leg still ached, telling him that Stuart hadn’t escaped unscathed. He didn’t know why he shared it, but he felt the pain acutely as he got up, and limped, alone in his area of the street, toward the gates.
< Danny. > He saw himself, his hand clasped to the hurt on the side of his thigh. He felt the condemnation he was due, anger at a junior who had, he realized it now, been dangerously sending out into the ambient.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered when he got to where Lyle Wesson stood, hands clenched on his walking-stick.
“Damned fool,” the boss said. “Did I tell you, or not?”
He tried to image Stuart’s helping him. The image went askew. It was just Stuart, the way he’d been that day on the porch, a stiff, rain-smelling breeze stirring his hair and the fringes of his jacket. A downpour grayed the commons. He’d thought even then that it was no bad thing to be a borderer, free of towns and free of family…
… free of a father who, however he excused it, hit him and consigned him to hell.
He didn’t want the whole camp to know that, but, humiliated, he feared they’d all heard. He thought of
But he wasn’t the only area of disturbance. He heard shouting out in the dark beyond the gates, he heard voices raised in demands. The town wanted the riders to do something. To hunt the rider down. The town came to the camp with its fears for its safety, its peaceful sleep—the rich feared for their right to go on as they always did, oblivious to the Wild beyond their walls, and they demanded—
The town could go to hell, he thought, with a lump in his throat. The town didn’t know. The town didn’t remotely know what he was, or what he saw, every day. He lived in a wider, more vivid, more connected world than he could make his father or his mother or even Denis understand.
Danny Fisher damned sure didn’t belong in this town any longer; he’d felt it, in the echoes of the gunfire that still echoed in his brain.
The lump in his throat grew larger. The leg ached. He wasn’t aware of Cloud, now, but that was the way it ought to be—the camp was settling, minds were growing quieter, the pain in his leg was diminishing…
He was terribly scared when he thought about what had happened, how the whole camp, the whole town had been on the edge of crazy. Everybody was scared now. Even the camp-boss was scared of the craziness that had almost driven them to do things and feel things in one mind.
Mass-hallucinations happened, the borderers reported, in snowed-in winter camps. They didn’t happen in the biggest city in the world, in a gathering so large, so precarious in its size the riders themselves argued whether they ought to put limits on their numbers and draw lots for who stayed.
“Break it up!” the boss yelled out across the commons, and rounded on sobered, scared riders. “Quiet, dammit!”
Himself, in Wesson’s near vicinity, in Dart’s, able to feel the brunt of Wesson’s anger, he wished he were far, far elsewhere.
“Damn you all!” the boss said. “Do you know what you did, yet? Have you come to your senses? Quieten down! All of you, quiet!”
He tried, obediently, not to think at all, and the feeling around him grew measurably less raw, less miserable. The ambient tumbled around him with images of < still water> and < quiet sky> and
But he’d seen Shamesey tonight in a way he’d never seen it. Everything he hated about town and everything he feared about the sheer power of so many minds pushing and pulling at him had crystallized tonight.
Maybe it was Stuart’s feeling he still had: it could be. He didn’t know, but walls had come down tonight—walls between people, walls between townsmen and their precious self-deceptions about safety. His family was so glad of the fresh plaster, so glad of reliable food on the table.
But know a thing else about him? They didn’t even want to wonder. They didn’t want to understand their hellhound son.
The preachers said they’d come in ships down from the heavens, the preachers said they’d begun as glorious beings with a God-given mission to subdue the land and make the fields safe for humankind and their cattle… which meant to go out and make towns and fields and roads as many and as fast as they could.
But, doing that, you had to deal with the world as it was, and you had to have the riders, and somebody had to deal with the creatures of the sinful world, which the preachers said were a temptation and evil.
So how did you work it out, that God arranged it so some people had to sin so the rest could go to Heaven?
Because if not for the riders, no town would stand, and human beings wouldn’t ever have survived their first winter against the predators and the nighthorses that loved human minds, loved human senses, and lusted after their company.
And how did you work it out that the whole wide world was out there full of food, and his mother and his father worked so hard to buy what they could take for free if they just went outside the walls.
He wasn’t sure. Just… there had to be riders.
Hear not the beasts, the street preachers said.
And, while the boss-man called the riders fools, an
d while others said they couldn’t just let Stuart go off as crazy as he was acting, and they had to do something to stop him before he killed somebody, his own heart was still aching from what he’d learned and his leg still throbbed with a gunshot that hadn’t come near him. Wages of sin, the preachers would say.
* * *
Chapter iv
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NO SHOT HAD TOUCHED BURN, THE TWO OF THEM RUNNING AND running on Burn’s strong legs. Burn flung off such a dire warning it became total, mind-absorbing thought for both of them…
But came a mortal, moral weariness, finally, on the grassy brow of a hill well and away and above Shamesey town.
Burn’s sides and gut were aching. Burn’s legs shook with exhaustion as he slowed and wandered at a slower pace on the dark and dangerous slopes.
Burn stopped, then, with a shake of his neck and a snort of disgust.
Guil Stuart looked down from the height on the cluster of Shamesey lights, lonesome island in the dark of the Wild… and wished it no good, not Shamesey and not the other coward towns. Burn would run farther if Burn could. Burn’s anger and Burn’s desire for blood was no less because he was exhausted. Neither was his.
But Burn was a self-saving creature, sane for both of them. Burn would never destroy himself in some mad desire to escape what a human brain, in its own weighing of priorities, had begun to realize was no immediate threat to them.
Exhaustion was the enemy. Cold was, in this edge of lowland autumn. He began to realize Burn’s aching lungs and wobbling legs as a distress separate from his own crazed pain, and he slid down from Burn’s bare back to give Burn relief from his weight. He managed, gingerly, leaning on Burn’s sweating side, to take his weight on the wounded leg, which proved to him that at least the bone wasn’t broken.
A bullet-trace, he decided, feeling it over with his fingers; leather breeches had split on a nasty raw gouge across the side of his leg, above the knee. He walked a little distance across the steep, grassy slope of the hill. It was to test the leg, that was what he said to himself.
But he couldn’t rest yet. He couldn’t stop moving. He wasn’t tired enough to sit down and try to absorb the shock in plain sight of those smug, safe, lights. He’d start thinking if the pain stopped, and he wasn’t ready to think. He couldn’t realize anything yet but bits and pieces.
Jonas… Luke… Hawley… they’d carried on and gotten the convoy through. Aby’d ridden point at Tarmin High Loop, coming down Tarmin Climb.
Images came at him. He wanted not, not, not, to see. He walked harder and faster, until the pain was affecting his balance, blurring the city lights and the stars and his recollections alike.
He slipped on the grass.
He grabbed a fistful of grass and ripped it up. Flung the resultant clod at Burn, wanting no images, no thinking.
But the images assailed him anyway, out of his own brain, out of Burn’s, he wasn’t sure.
He thrust himself up to his feet, wide-legged, staggered further, wanting the pain, cold wind on tracks on his face…
That was the instant, the very instant—
He didn’t want to see it.
Jonas, he had no doubt, would have been up there riding point with Aby if he’d known any danger in the area. But Jonas and Hawley and Luke had been riding tail-guard, all of them worrying about the trucks, some of the driver-apprentices riding on the running-boards to watch the treacherous edge, to call out warning where the tires were—he’d seen that road himself, in Aby’s mind, at night, when they lay close and safe and warm—
“The horse went with her?” he’d asked Jonas, when he’d talked with Jonas and his partners outside the camp gates, because he’d known, he’d known all of it he could possibly face in Jonas’ first thought, and believed in that first heartbeat that Aby had died in a slide, not uncommon on the road.
“It wasn’t a slide,” Jonas had said, then, grimly, arms folded, eyes downcast to the withers of his horse, and he saw
And immediately—maybe not Jonas’ intention—he’d gotten all that the nighthorses had seen, all that the riders knew. He’d felt for himself the disintegrated horror of the sending that riders and truckers and horses had picked up at the edge of that woods on Tarmin Height.
Riders never used loud voices. Sometimes you got almost out of the habit of speaking aloud or parceling out thoughts in human words. Sometimes you forgot you had a voice, or what to do with it.
He’d have screamed at Jonas to shut up, let him alone. He’d forgotten how to make such sounds at need. Or, rider-born, never learned how at all.
“Stuart?” Jonas Westman had said, maybe wanting to tell him more than he had already said, but he couldn’t bear it. And Jonas had known, and thought
But he’d already started to run—run and run to clear the vicinity, run until his lungs hurt, until pain and lack of wind had wiped his mind clear.
Run until Burn had caught him, and carried him away up the steep hill.
He’d had no idea even where he rode, after that. And he’d thought… his first sane thought… that he had, for numerous reasons, to go up to Tarmin before the snows closed the passes. That had made sudden, necessary sense to him. Kill the rogue that had killed Aby and haunted the convoy down the mountain. Jonas didn’t want to go back. Jonas had enough bad dreams.
And he’d known, when he’d thought that far, in the carefully guarded, piece-by-piece way he dared let conclusions form in his mind now, that he needed his rifle, that he’d left in his hostel room. All he owned was there.
The gun and the gear he needed was all he’d asked, his own belongings, when he’d gone toward the gates. He thought, at least now, that he’d only wanted that, and that he’d never harbored any darker intentions against the camp.
But the town had come out to resist him—for no reason.
The night-watch had shot at him out of fear. The riders of Shamesey camp had kept within their gates—for fear of him.
That should tell him something of what sane people felt in his anger and his intentions, and maybe the townsmen had been right. He didn’t trust himself to try another approach to the town, least of all to talk to Jonas, whose decisions had been coldly, professionally correct. Save the convoy. Get it safe. The dead could wait for the scavengers. Even Aby.
The hazard of autumn was in the wind and the grass, in the cold which seeped from the air into the bones, like solitude, like chill, like foreknowledge of luck turning brutal and foul. And his anger was too profound, too broad, too unreasoning to be only his anger. Other resentments had gotten loose in Shamesey camp. Other reasons had risen up and taken on life in the town. It was no place for an angry man to stay.
He wiped at his face. The ache in his leg so long as he walked absorbed all his logical thinking, a cherished, protective pain. He wasn’t thinking at all clearly in such weather. Nighthorse instincts were in the way, coloring everything, making everything raw emotion… even before the rifle shot had resounded off the walls, even before the blinding red and the pain had washed across his mind.
Just… he couldn’t think clearly now what to do. He was thinking Burn’s thoughts, and they were all anger; all selfish… bitter… anger… at the town that wasn’t at fault for wanting lumber and comforts for the winter.
He wanted someone to die, he wanted to see it, he wanted to do it with his own hands…
He wanted Shamesey town to know a woman had died so that they could have light and heat and repair for their walls, and they could go to hell for it.
But she was only a rider, only a damned-to-hell rider, it didn’t matter to them, they didn’t need to care. Shoot the horse if a rider went like that. Make sure it was dead. That was all they’d want to know.
He could take to the hills, go south, not north, and he and Burn could forget what they couldn’t mend—they didn’t need to avenge Aby’s death. It just was. What had killed Aby and Moon had no relation to anything, no grudge, no personal reason. It just was. And if in winter snows it came down the mountain, if it haunted the road next season, if it killed villagers or townsmen, what did he care?