Rider at the Gate

by C. J. Cherryh

  But the lead stranger, unlike others, hadn’t sat down. “Boss-man.” He held the center of attention, his arms folded, face grim and downcast. “Friends should go after him. If he goes over the edge… friends should make sure of him and do what has to be done. Or help him get that thing. We’re ready to go up there.”

  “You naming yourselves?” Wesson asked.

  “Three of us,” the man said. “Jonas and Luke Westman, Hawley Antrim, all out of the MacFarlane. We’ll take his belongings to him, we’ll catch up with him and we’ll bring him back sane. We’ll have that thing out of the heights. Aby Dale was a close cousin of Hawley’s.”

  “Settled, then,” Lyle Wesson said.

  Discontent prickled through the air, a quiet muttering, no one satisfied… or someone utterly dissatisfied.

  “Beds and quiet,” Lyle Wesson said, levered himself up with his cane, and abandoned the porch for the inside of the tavern, where the powers in the camp repaired to talk about things juniors didn’t need to know—Danny knew that much about the politics of Shamesey camp.

  And he supposed it would happen now the way the boss said. He hoped it would. He looked askance at various individuals of the retreating crowd, hoping he hadn’t made a permanent and grievous mistake by speaking out like that and setting himself up to argue with his seniors. He didn’t know why he’d done it, except his father always said he never could keep his mouth shut.

  He walked away across the yard, onto the commons and the street, wanting Cloud, wanting the steadiness and the quiet Cloud could give him. He intended to take Cloud back to the den far around at the hostel where he stayed.

  But he felt a restraining hand on his arm—and looked around in panic. He’d not heard the rider who, soft-footed and shadowless in the dark, had overtaken him.

  “Why’d you speak up for him?” It was the leader of the strangers. The one who’d spoken most.

  “I don’t know. Stupid, maybe.”

  “You know him.”

  “He helped me once. We talked. He didn’t have to. He gave me good advice.”

  “The leg hurt?”

  He didn’t know how the man knew. He wasn’t limping. He started away into the shadows of the street without another word, but he didn’t see the den, he saw He heard and flinched from the shot so badly he almost fell.

  The rider wanted his attention. And got it, with that transmitted memory.

  “Jonas is my name,” the stranger said. “Jonas Westman. You heard him louder than we did. Why?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Kids do sometimes. Kids don’t know to stop. Don’t know to wall things out. Don’t know when they’re hearing and when they’re making it up.”

  “I didn’t make it up. It hurt.”

  “You could be a help to us. You could be a real help. Stuart knows you. You can hear Stuart. You want the high country. We can take you there.”

  He didn’t know how the man knew what he wanted—or whether Cloud, who longed for the High Wild, had betrayed him… because when the man offered, he suddenly wasn’t thinking only about helping Stuart, he was thinking about why he’d gone to Stuart with his question in the first place, he was remembering that longing he had that wasn’t logic, just a condition—like dreaming about the unattainable stars. And Cloud wanted to go. Cloud wanted to take him up to the High Wild where Cloud had come from—Cloud hated Shamesey, hated the cattle, hated the town and hated the smell and the crowding; and that town was all his very junior, townbred rider could give him.

  He wasn’t sure Cloud wasn’t listening now. He felt that all-over tingle of longing that wiped out every clear consideration to the contrary.

  “You have a partner in camp?” Jonas Westman asked. “You got leave to take? Anybody to go with you?”

  Rider conversations ran like that, when the horses were too close, mediating half of it. He didn’t know he’d agreed. It played hob with negotiations. And Jonas Westman knew his answer: he caught the echo back from Westman, a kind of confused imaging, The kid would have been scared.

  No. He’d have run to see, the stupid kid.

  “No kin in camp,” he said, reasoning that Denis was beyond his reach. Or his harm. “In town, yeah, family, —but I could drop dead. I’m nothing to them.”

  The borderer had to know the ambivalence in the anger. The hurt. The offended pride. He’d not made friends in camp. The juniors from Shamesey district, even the rider kids, were all too touchy, too protective. Everything in juniors felt raw, exposed, feelings left open to every passing opinion—and he was, right now, scared of this Jonas Westman in the same way he’d been scared going to Stuart with his questions.

  And as careful as he’d been, Stuart had had to slap him down, and remind him to mind his own edges, just the same as this man was telling him—this man who’d learned everything about the aching ambition of his young, debt-plagued life in two short seconds, while he still knew nothing whatsoever about Jonas Westman except that he called Guil Stuart a friend and was, if things went wrong up there, willing to shoot Stuart and Stuart’s horse both. But this wasn’t a bad man. He didn’t think so. They’d been spooked. But they’d tried to keep the terror bottled up and not to let it loose: they’d certainly helped settle things down at the meeting.

  “You going?” Jonas asked.

  “Yessir,” he said, feeling he’d just stepped off a cliff. Pride didn’t let him go back on that, not even when the agreement was just a second out of his mouth. “Depending on my horse.”

  “Always depending,” the senior rider said. “That’s a given. Come on. Let’s talk.”

  It was harder and harder to back out, when he found himself trekking along with the stranger through the edge of the gaslight, knowing he’d talked himself into something Cloud wouldn’t let him back out of. He was sure now that Cloud knew and wasn’t saying no, not to the proposition nor to the company he was in.

  he kept seeing, and

  Cloud’s name, in its endless variations.

  Cloud’s freedom from Shamesey smokes and the minds of cattle.

  How could Cloud’s rider say no to that?

  * * *

  Chapter v

  « ^ »

  THE SUN WAS COMING. THAT WAS THE SURE PROOF THAT THE world had rolled on without much giving a damn. Something died, something became something else’s supper, something brand new saw the dawn, and the world was still here.

  Guil Stuart became aware of that fact, sitting, blanketed in grass, against Burn’s warm and breathing side, and watching the stars go out above the plains that began at Shamesey town—watching what, in the mountains, you couldn’t see: the edge of the world, where the illusory daylight began, unraveling the night along a long seam of light.

  Almost cloudless morning.

  Nice day.

  His leg hurt. Damn stupid, walking on it. It didn’t want to bend now. He supposed it would, once he warmed up: his legs were numb and his backside was feeling the chill seeping up through the grass mat from the ground beneath. His hands were icy cold… he’d come away with no hat, no scarf, no gloves, and he’d waked with a pale rime of frost on the ground, on the leaves of knifegrass he’d cut for a lap-robe, and on the toes of his boots. If he moved, he might lose the grass he’d so meticulously arranged, which would expose his arm and shoulder to the icy cold, while the other arm, the one against Burn’s body, was comfortably warm, so he chose not to move, and not to disturb Burn’s sleep.

  It seemed not but an hour or so ago that they’d settled to rest, unable to go on, Burn aching from the effort and unwilling to take another step. Burn had settled on the ground to sleep, not Burn’s habit when the ground was this cold, but Burn’s legs were tired.

  So, having been so bright as to have left his pocket matches and his glass with his guns and his trail gear (God, it was sl
ovenly camp habits he’d fallen into lately, having no glass and no matches on him; but, hell, he hadn’t expected to be on his own in the Wild in what he stood in, either) he’d done the best he could. He’d cut the tall plains grass for a mat to keep Burn’s belly warm and for a cover for himself. He’d been too tired to weave strip-and-tie mats—the cold hadn’t been that bad, and his eyes had kept shutting while he worked.

  But he’d worked up a sweat doing it. And hurt the leg, like a fool. But it was numb with the morning cold, not too bad. The side of him next to Burn was downright warm.

  If he didn’t move, Burn wouldn’t.

  Aby died, and the morning after, the uncaring sun came up, and the man who, alone in the world, ought to be broken-hearted, was busy preserving his own warm spot in the frosty dawn, moving his toes in his boots to be sure they would move… first small venture of his mind out of its deliberate search for pain and distraction, and it wasn’t so bad, the world wasn’t, the cold wasn’t, the sun wasn’t. It was incredible it all went on, but it did, and he found he did, miraculously sitting on the other side of a black pit he just couldn’t look into yet.

  He wasn’t interested to look. Aby was gone and there wasn’t anything profitable in that dark, crazed night past, the night he could remember only because some fool townsmen had tried to blow his leg off.

  Fool rider, far more to the point. He’d risked Burn, going down there in the mood he was in, and he was bitterly angry with himself for that. He’d lost all his gear but the knives he carried, but, hell, he deserved to lose it for what he’d done, and Shamesey could keep it for good, before he’d go whimpering back to Shamesey camp gates, saying he was all right now and could he have his guns back? He knew why the gate-guards had fired at him—it wasn’t a justified fear: he hadn’t been beyond controlling himself until they’d shot at him, but that didn’t matter in townsman accounts. They just wanted what they wanted, thought what they wanted to think, and they could go to hell and keep what they wanted.

  His frame of mind didn’t matter much to the camp-boss either, who just wanted peace in his camp, and no troubles. Wesson might even agree to take him back into camp, but there’d be somebody tagging him the entire winter, and there’d be quarrels lurking. He’d been surprised to find Harper and his cronies in camp when he’d gotten there. He hadn’t liked it, and he wasn’t limping back there to try to restrain his temper in Harper’s case, not this season. Figure that Harper would push until he got something. There was too much between them.

  Death happened. Riders died. Mostly they died young and by surprise, a nasty quick accident in storm or slide or some hole in a river-bottom. Moon had gone along with Aby, which was the best way, rider and horse at once, nothing untidy, a minimum of pain… Aby couldn’t leave Moon. That pair couldn’t be split.

  He could take to the road and go on down toward the coast, to Malvey town. He knew riders who might winter there, and he liked them better than he knew or liked folk in huge Shamesey camp.

  Ava Cassey might be at Malvey, freckled Ava, who…

  … who wasn’t Aby, dammit, who was far short of Aby’s measure, and who, good-natured as she was, didn’t deserve to put up with a man constantly moping about that fact. The horses didn’t leave you much illusion. No polite lies. No self-deceit, for that matter.

  A lump gathered in his throat. The stinging in his eyes wasn’t the cold. The rime-ice showed white crystals on the grass as the sun slowly widened its eye—showed white on his boot-seams, on his toes, but Burn was a warm lump against him, and under Burn’s mane he had a warm place for his fingers.

  He sat there watching the sun come up, watching the sky become pinkly opaque, and the autumn grass go to golds and pale browns, with here and there the dark brown seed-spikes of what was, in summer, gold and red-flowering fireweed.

  The frosts came steadily now. Most mornings like this one showed rime. Green and gold-green died. The browns and the reds came into their own season, on the foothills first, then on the rolling plains.

  So very few times anybody could count on seeing that change. You thought you’d see it forever. You thought you were immortal. But what had Aby gotten? Twenty-six times the seasons turned, twenty-six autumns, twenty-six times to see the fireweed die and the snows fall, and three and four and five of those times being a clingy brat kid who didn’t pay attention.

  You got only so many nights to see the stars. You got only so many sunrises. Shouldn’t a man go out from under roofs and look at them?

  Maybe that was the poison in towns like Shamesey, or grim, gray Malvey, where factories smoked the pristine sky.

  Only so many times to make love. Only so many frosty mornings.

  A man should wake up and know he couldn’t buy one, not for all the townsmen’s money. The days came to you and you didn’t know how many you’d get.

  He couldn’t know, for instance, if he’d ever see the seeds of those brown spikes grow up gold again, or the flowers flaming red. He should have looked more carefully at the summer fields.

  He should pay attention to the frost this morning. He should look at the wispy pink of the clouds and know he was using up his ration of them.

 

  That was the happiest thing Burn knew. By which he knew that Burn was awake and pigs were in danger.

 

  “Haven’t got any bacon,” Guil muttered, and moved a hand to scratch beneath Burn’s abundant mane. “Wish I had.” He could taste it. He began to ask himself was it fair to Burn to go up to the privations of the highlands for the winter, and not to go back to Shamesey town, to comfort he could, at cost to his pride, bargain for.

  Burn imaged.

  Burn had such faith in him. He didn’t know where to procure the death of pigs.

  Except… there was a place on the way to the upland, the high passes. There was a factor Aby’d taken hire with; and there was, in the way of towns, a bank in Anveney.

  They said if you put funds in at Shamesey you could get them out at Anveney; or down in Malvey; or clear to Darwin.

  He’d never tested that idea before. He’d always carried all he owned, until he got to camp, put funds in with the camp he’d winter in—and had this year; but there was an account he and Aby held, Aby’s idea; and he’d put his carrying-cash in it, the way Aby had said. He’d been relatively sure he could get that out again at Shamesey, if he walked into that Shamesey office and said hand it over… now. The Shamesey camp-boss had said it was as good as having it on account with him, and as safe.

  He’d doubted it. But he’d done it, the way Aby asked him to.

  He was less sure about Anveney, and this business of getting money out where he hadn’t put money in. But maybe what Aby believed was true. Shamesey had phone lines up to Anveney. Wherever the phones worked—and they worked, intermittently, at least, in the lowlands, until the first ice-storm of the winter—the money was supposed to be available. Merchants certainly seemed to do it… although townsmen looked out for each other and cheated riders when they could.

  Well, he could see. He could try. There was that man in Anveney whose shipping business Aby had worked for on a regular basis—it had been Cassivey goods in that inbound convoy, he’d seen the flags.

  And knowing that was the job Aby had taken, he wanted to ask Cassivey some questions, too, like what in hell had been so last-rush important a convoy had to go up there, risking the weather, risking the movement of creatures who always became more active and more dangerous when winter was threatening and the urge to mate and feed up fat took prey and predators alike.

  But that led to darker thoughts he didn’t want to think, and to anger he didn’t want to entertain.

  Burn just thought of bacon and wheat-cakes frying, in abundant grease.

  Danny didn’t own a rifle. He had a pistol, fifty years old, a good one, though the a
mmunition was of a large caliber that was hard to come by. He’d paid for it what you’d pay for a good rifle, but a high country rider didn’t encumber himself with much else, and he’d thought it would be a good idea to have the firepower, for his sake and Cloud’s. He’d bought that before he’d promised anything on the replastering and the paint for his family.

  In the same way he’d gotten a good flat-brimmed hat to keep himself from sunburn, and a good, heavy coat, with a lining gone to rags and the elbows patched, and with a new patch and some stain on the side, of which the second-hander didn’t know the cause… but it was far better than the new ones he could have afforded. It was beautiful, buttery-beige cowhide and had fringes as long as his hand. He’d bought new, bullhide boots to fend off the brush, boots made for his feet, and fit for walking, when Cloud decided that he’d had enough of carrying a healthy young man.

  He owned, besides that, one truly good knife; and, of course, his trail kit, with fold-up pans for eating and cooking.

  Plus a couple of second-hand blankets, with frayed edges, but he’d hemmed those up, which had given him a lot of practice with his stitches… you could see a considerable difference between where he’d started and where he’d finished.

  And he couldn’t, especially on this cold dawn, forget the where-from of all of it, because Guil Stuart had given him a list, once upon that rainy afternoon, of the gear he most urgently had to have, and told him besides how to get the best quality and who to deal with, and when to take second-hand and when not.

  Because, Stuart had said, that’s a high country horse you’ve got, and if you really want to go, he’ll take you there someday. Likely he’ll take you there even if you don’t want it. Count on it, if you take my advice. !

  Count on it just as surely, too, as he’d discovered his very first long convoy trip, that Cloud wasn’t any pack-animal. He’d stowed his stuff, except his pistol and a single reload of ammo, in the supply truck, and kept on good terms with the drivers, because Cloud wasn’t the one of the two of them that was going to carry any packs, thank you: Cloud didn’t like anything but his rider on his back, and Cloud didn’t tolerate loads of gear on his rider.