Rider at the Gate

by C. J. Cherryh

  If Shamesey went without lumber or tin next year, what should he care?

  That more riders could die by the thing that killed Aby, all right, he did care, little that it deserved. He didn’t owe any of them, didn’t get any damn help from them, not even from Jonas. He didn’t know why he shouldn’t let someone else hunt the thing. He could live elsewhere. He could find other hire. No place and no person mattered to him with Aby gone. She had brought him into towns. She’d always been the go-between for him with people.

  But his dreams wouldn’t change until the rogue was dead. And he would dream about it. He’d wonder every night whether it was still out there, still surviving, still sending out the images that lied to horse and rider about what was friend and foe, or where the edge of the road was…

  Walk and walk, and walk, and he found himself walking north across the slope. He found Burn trailing him, aching-tired himself, waiting for a foolish rider to fall down again.

 

  he imaged in his own turn, not consciously thinking. Town was just too close, too dangerous, too loud, too evocative of anger.

  < Hills and grass in the moonlight, > Burn answered him. < Hills and grass. Hills and grass. > Burn shook himself, and snorted. An image of blood and raw meat.

  Burn didn’t forgive. Burn might lose his train of thought and forget. But Burn didn’t know how to forgive.

  It was why he kept walking.

  “Hunt him down,” was Ancel Harper’s word in hastily convoked Meeting, in the tavern yard under the gaslights, in the small hours of the morning. “He’s Shamesey’s problem.”

  No, Danny Fisher wanted to say, and half-choked on the impulse to rise and protest.

  But other, senior, riders stood up from the benches without hesitation and said no, there was no call for such drastic measures.

  “He wanted what’s his,” one of that number said. “His belongings are all in camp. He has a right to ask for them.”

  “He has no right, after what he’s caused,” somebody else shouted, and a dozen riders from Hallanslake got up and added their voices.

  “We come down here to the lowlands for a quiet, safe camp,” the Hallanslake leader said. “I know what I’m talking about. A man running up in the hills is one thing. Coming down to town is another. Stuart’s gotten riders killed. He’s a spook. He’s always been a loner and that horse of his is another. He’s got a grudge and he’s not going to let it go. I tell you, you stop it now! You hunt Stuart out of the district, or you shoot him and his horse!”

  “No,” the general murmur rose in rebuttal; Danny said so, too, under cover of the others, but the Hallanslake rider didn’t give an inch.

  “That’s what you do, that’s what you have to have the guts to do. That’s a borderer up there hovering over this town. He knows what he’s asking for, staying around here, spooking the town into riot. You got fifty, seventy thousand people in town here, a lot of them not liking each other. You want to think, boss-man, about what could happen in the streets the other side of that wall if he panics this town? Stuart’s as crazy as what killed that woman up in the hills—that’s how they go, one to the next—the sickness spreads. You got to shoot both of them, fast, so they don’t know one’s dead! It spreads, boss-man! I’ve been there! I know!“

  No! Danny Fisher thought, and before thoughts could get far:

  “No,” the camp-boss growled, and hammered the table with his fist. Crippled in a fall, and survivor of one horse already, Lyle Wesson might ride when he had to go any distance and he might use a stick when he had to cross between two tables in the tavern, but the strength in the man and the force of mind in old Dart made the skittery, jittery feelings in the air subside instantly, and let a scared junior sink gladly back into his seat with his objection unmade, at the same time the Hallanslakers sat down, sullen-minded and angry and not giving in.

  A junior hadn’t any right to speak ahead of the seniors, except he was Shamesey-born, and they were Shamesey townsfolk who’d shot Guil Stuart tonight, calling Stuart a threat, which wasn’t at all the truth, the way Stuart’s horse wasn’t a rogue. He knew it wasn’t, but more surely, Cloud knew, the rest of the horses knew, and the boss-man knew, so the whole camp had to know. They were here to talk about the rogue that had spooked a convoy off the road on Rogers Peak, and here were Harper and his friends talking as if Stuart was the real threat, right here in Shamesey. The whole camp had lost their minds. Or it was the spooked riders, the ones that had come in with the news. They were here, and maybe the source of what Harper thought he felt. Fear of a rogue had gotten loose in the camp, and after that, it came from everywhere. But a junior couldn’t stand up and say his seniors were all being fooled.

  Fact was, half the riders in the meeting weren’t wholly sober, some were surly—a couple were unconscious, face down on the tables, though a whole lot had sobered when the gunfire went off, and more when the boss-man had said there was Meeting, now, fast.

  He was one who had sobered mightily, even before Wesson’s call—and he’d tried, well knowing that he wasn’t at his sharpest, and far from experienced in a situation like this, to do exactly what the boss had said, namely to keep his mind quiet, because even with the whole Gate Tavern yard and the open commons for the Meeting, even with all the horses except Dart requested out of the gate area so that humans had to say things aloud to each other and not image at all, he wasn’t sure things didn’t leak out and get back and forth to horses and humans anyway, the way they’d certainly done a couple of hours ago, when the horses had all caught the same image at once.

  Ancel Harper said he’d seen a rogue once. He said he’d seen a dozen riders go with it. He said it was like what they’d just felt, only a hundred times worse… he said a rogue could send over an entire valley, and trick you into seeing things where they weren’t, and make you want it bad until it killed you, because that was what it would do when you got close to it.

  Harper said there was one cure, an ounce of lead.

  Harper and the Hallanslakers—Danny had never met anybody like them in camp, riders who just didn’t listen to what people said, who, when they got an image and a horse was near, turned it inside out, to what they wanted. In his mind, they were crazy as the rogue, but he tried not to think that: they also carried knives, and he didn’t think they were an empty threat.

  But by the time he’d figured out what Harper and his lot stood for, there were more moderate voices, older riders, to stand up one by one and severally and demand that the camp-boss should deal with Shamesey town and negotiate Stuart’s right to come back when he was indisputably sane, as riders could clearly judge better than townsmen.

  “Now wait,” another rider stood up to say, now, Yeats, a senior Shamesey rider. “Now, I don’t agree with the Hallanslakers, that we need go shooting at shadows—but I don’t hold we should take Stuart’s side against the town, either. It sets a bad precedent, a bad precedent, backing a rider who breaks the major rules.”

  “Now, wait a minute,” a woman said.

  “Rules,” Yeats said, raising his voice, “as seem clear enough to us. Stuart stayed on in the area, Stuart came near the walls. The watch hadn’t a right to shoot, but they were skittish, they had a crowd out there—”

  “Damn right, they haven’t a right!” came from the back.

  “It was Stuart’s doing that a crowd gathered,” Yeats shouted, “and it was Stuart’s fault! If Stuart had a sane thought left, he should have got the hell all the way out of Shamesey fields when he knew he was losing his hold. But he doesn’t want out of Shamesey district, does he? That’s why he’s stayed out there!”

  “God’s sake, Yeats!” A borderer stood up, wobbly on his feet. “You got his gear and you got his gun—he come back after his gear, you damn fool!”

  “I got the floor! I’m saying we got excitable townsmen all over, we got horses upset, we got riders upset—it shows clear enough what we’ve been saying fo
r three years, now: boss-man, you got to thin the camp down—”

  Riders hooted, from all over the assembly.

  “Yeah, you go first, Yeats!” somebody yelled from back in the crowd, then the drunk borderer was yelling something, not sitting down, and Wesson banged on the porch with his cane. Dart started imaging until at last Yeats and the borderer sat down, and the silence was thick enough you could breathe it.

  Yeats was off on a different issue: the number of riders gathered at Shamesey—and Shamesey riders had argued before against letting the camp get as large, and consequently as unstable, as it was—but the riders that came from outside said it was just Shamesey riders wanting exclusivity on the best jobs and the comforts of the biggest town there was.

  “Jim,” Wesson said, “keep to the Stuart business.”

  “It is the Stuart business,” Yeats said. “This is what we’re going to get more of if we don’t thin down the winter-camp and put some restrictions on how many out-of-district riders we’re going to camp here! Shamesey valley’s big enough—build a camp down at the end of the valley! Build it up on the foothills! There’s no way the snows are going to cut off valley roads!”

  “Yeah, on whose land?” somebody yelled. “The town Council isn’t going to give up a foot of pasture!”

  Yeats was right, in Danny’s estimation.

  Unfortunately so was the rider right when he yelled out about the council not giving up any land: rich people decided everything, and the rich people in Shamesey didn’t feel the dreams that came through the camp walls on an uneasy, stormy night, didn’t lose sleep the night through with the autumn urges—only people like his family did, old and young alike, and girls got pregnant and godly folk prayed and sweated and prayed to send the devils away. It was the lowtown folk who’d come out with guns. People like his family. It was people like his father and his mother and his brothers who’d gone stark crazy and shot at Stuart.

  People of the same town-bound, mind-blind sort that he’d used to be, before Cloud called him in his dreams.

  He hoped Denis hadn’t gotten swept up in the crowd that was shooting; he desperately wanted to know where his family was and that they were safe. But he couldn’t go into town tonight. Maybe not for a lot of nights. Couldn’t—a lump formed in his throat—so much as offer his help to his father to keep him safe, when he could do as much for any trucker in the outback.

  “All that’s beside the point,” a borderer stood up to say. “What Shamesey is, Shamesey chose to be. It can’t ever go back to being a small town. We get your trucks through and we got our right to camp here. And the whole damn valley had better get off Stuart’s back. This town had better hope Stuart goes up to Tarmin and finds what’s up there before winter falls, or you’re losing Anveney province, Shamesey boss. That thing that got Aby Dale won’t stay away from the villages up there. And maybe if it gets a village or two, it might come down to Shamesey to hunt around spring melt. When a horse goes bad, it wants human company, and there’s nothing but a bullet through the brain can stop it. So you better quit arguing about how many riders we have in this camp and Stuart and your piddlin’ rules—and start worrying about that rogue horse up there!”

  “That’s saying Stuart’s going to do a damn thing he ought!”

  Ancel Harper stood up to say. “He’s not going to stay away from Shamesey. He’ll be back.”

  “That’s tomorrow’s trouble!” a borderer shouted, and stood up. “And it isn’t proved, Hallanslaker! There’s never been a rogue come into this district!”

  “You’ll see it proved when you’ve seen a man and a horse go bad—and I have, Reney, I’ve seen it, don’t you tell me what’s not proved! I’ve felt it, don’t you tell me what’s like and not like! You want to feel it, Reney? Come outside camp and I’ll show you!”

  “That’s no call to go after Stuart!”

  “I’m telling you he’s a danger. He’s already spooked the town— and he’s not going to let go and go away. You got people out with guns in the town streets, Wesson. You’re going to have people killed over there if you don’t get Stuart shut down—”

  “Hold it, hold it, hold it!” Lyle Wesson yelled, pounding the table. But people had started shouting at one another, and got to their feet, and started yelling at each other about hazards to the camp, about outsiders, which Stuart was, and which the Hallanslakers also were, but the Hallanslakers seemed to have forgotten that point, or Harper had. Harper started yelling at Lyle Wesson that they had to hunt Stuart and his horse, and Lyle Wesson banged his stick down on the table.

  “Shut the hell up!” Wesson shouted. “And let’s talk about the trouble in Tarmin Height. Let’s talk about clearing that road of a hazard, and keeping the thing away from the villages up there on the Loop this winter. That’s our business, if you’d shut the hell up and quit stirring things up, Harper!”

  Tarmin was where Stuart was going, Danny Fisher thought, certain as sure. The skin on his arms stood up in gooseflesh. His legs just moved—and he was standing, and the boss was looking at him. Everyone was.

  “Stuart’s going up there,” he said, too quietly, he thought, but a leaf-fall would have made a sound in that silence. He sat down again, hugged his arms about him and wanted not to make another sound.

  Lyle Wesson said, “Going up where, Danny Fisher?”

  “To find what killed her and that truck driver. He’s going up to Tarmin to stop it, just like you said.”

  “He’s shown no sign of leaving, yet,” a Hallanslaker shouted. “What’s the kid got? A phone line to God? Stuart’s a danger to the whole camp! Shoot him and the horse before he comes back! The town may not have a second chance!”

  “No!”

  It was a voice he’d heard before this night—one of the strangers, the one who’d accosted him, the one who’d called him seriously to task for giving way to his panic. “The kid’s right. He’s going up there. Absolutely that’s where he’s going.”

  “So you say!” the Hallanslaker shouted. “We got this town at risk! You’re not going to get any help out of Stuart!”

  And another of his lot: “The Shamesey riders already say the camp’s too large, the town’s too large—you let a rider run amok around Shamesey fields, what do you look to have? Murders in the streets? Bodies stacking up like cordwood? You don’t trust Stuart’ll do any damn thing he ought to. Hell with him handling the Tarmin rogue—he spooked the whole damn town! Shoot him, I say! Then we’ll handle the Tarmin problem!”

  The ambient was miserable. The rider next to Danny got up and left.

  He stayed. He said, standing up again and forcing the words through a throat that seemed too small, “He’s wrong.”

  “Who’s he?” a Hallanslaker asked. “Who is this kid, some kin of Stuart’s?”

  His voice stalled. He cleared his throat with an effort and prayed it wouldn’t crack. “I’m not any kin of his. But he’s already left. He’s not crazy. He’s done what you say and left the town the way he’s supposed to. He just wants quiet for a while.”

  “How do you know?” one of the Shamesey riders asked him, and he retorted,

  “I heard him go.”

  “Heard him go. Sit down, junior, till you know what you hear and don’t hear.”

  He was standing alone against a senior, mad, uncertain of his facts, his face gone hot.

  But another man stood up, Stuart’s friend. “Kid’s right.”

  “Then that’s you and the kid,” Harper yelled, on his feet again, “against all of us!”

  “Four of us,” one of the other strangers said, on his feet, and the other man stood up. People started yelling again, and more and more people were getting up, Hallanslakers and other borderers in a shouting match.

  “All right, all right,” Wesson shouted, banging his stick on the boards. “So shut up! If he goes to Tarmin and deals with it, our problem’s solved, if everybody just calms down. Just shut up and let a man breathe.”

  “Som
ebody better go,” a Shamesey woman said, “somebody better track him to be sure he clears the area.”

  “Somebody better be sure what’s up on Tarmin gets dead,” a Shamesey senior said. “Somebody should have taken care of it when the thing showed. Convoy or not, you had your best chance—”

  “We had three of us left!” the foremost stranger said. “Aby Dale was our convoy boss! We were short-handed as was. We had trucks to get down off that road! You ever been outside a pasture, Shamesey man?”

  hit the ambient. A winter’s day. And the crack of Wesson’s cane. “Shut it down!” Wesson said. “Enough damn should-haves! They didn’t have that option so long as they had the convoy in their charge!”

  “So?”

  Debate started again. Riders swore, and more of them got up and stayed on their feet.

  Wesson banged his stick on the porch rail. “Stuart’s Dale’s partner. He has a right—-first natural right to deal with that thing on Tarmin Ridge. But so have the villagers on Rogers Peak a right to their safety. And so have townsmen down here in the plains a right, and us in their camp, we’ve got rights! If Stuart has gone up there, well and good. But if he can’t do it…”

  “It’s not our responsibility!” the Shamesey rider yelled. “I’m not risking my neck up there!”

  “Yeah, go guard cattle! Nobody asked you!”

  Shouting started again. Danny sat down and sat still, trying not to shiver, trying not to think. Horses had strayed near enough, called by the disturbance of their riders. They made the very air electric with disturbance. But Dart was nearest of all of them, and Dart was damned angry.

  “Shut up!” Wesson yelled. Danny’s fingers were clenched so tight on his seat they ached, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe.