His gear right now was adding up to a fair weight, when he included in the makings for biscuits and a slab of cured bacon and the jerky. He’d gone to the suppliers first thing as their doors opened, and asked outright for what a traveler would most need in the High Wild. Jerky was lightweight. A couple of slabs of bacon of course solved the oil problem for the biscuits, so he didn’t have to have a container of that, but there were six kilos of flour and soda to carry for a long stay in the high country, as would be, if the roads became impassable.
Cloud would hunt, when weather and time permitted; but what Cloud caught, he might not want, so he took fishhooks, line and cord. The extra rounds for the pistol, which he couldn’t count on getting in the high country, weighed like sin, but that could provide meat he’d otherwise have to carry up there. He began to ask himself what the balance was between weight he could carry himself and how willing he was to go a little hungrier. Flour weighed more than jerky, value for value. But jerky cost more.
You traded with your traveling companions. But you didn’t ever, Stuart had warned him, want to get down to needing to trade. You never came out ahead.
Spare blade. Razor, for more than shaving, and a good oilstone.
Clean rolled bandages, sewing kit that was for your clothes or you if you needed it; awl and a piece of leather to wrap it in that could become ties if you needed them. Burning glass. Waxed matches. Spare shirt, spare socks, and heavy underwear. You could literally die of a soaking rain and a strong wind up in the hills. He’d heard too many stories about freezing to death after a slip in a mountain stream, or going hypothermia in a rainstorm that wasn’t even cold enough to make snow, because the wind always blew up there, strong and cold, especially when the sun was going down.
He’d heard every horror story in camp, and a lot of it encompassed good advice, he was sure. But he didn’t want to look, either, like the novice that he was, and he’d tried to get his load down to as small and as light a set of packs as he could possibly make, counting he’d maybe been extravagant in food. He didn’t own a proper pack-kit for it, but he’d had enough of canvas sacks that got soaked, last time he’d gone out, and he’d stitched together a real oiled-leather kit—with a great deal of swearing, his fingers repeatedly bloodied by the awl and the needle-butt; no fancy seams, either—oiled twine and thongs instead of proper leatherworking and buckles to connect the bags together. He’d thought he’d save money. But it didn’t, when he loaded it, hang quite the way he’d planned. Worst of all—it was new, raw leather that hadn’t even been rained on.
The Westmans and their cousin Hawley, who’d blazed through the supplier’s before him with definite knowledge of what they needed, had gathered at the den exit, at the main camp gate. They were lean and tanned, they and their gear were weathered alike to a general impression of browns and blacks and tans against the solid black of their horses. They were the sort of experienced-looking riders that convoy bosses probably never even dared ask how many times they’d been to any destination.
But, unexpected and unwelcome witnesses, a cluster of idle younger riders had gathered in the vicinity of the gates, standing with backs against the hostel wall, and Danny found himself far more public than he had ever planned to be as he walked toward the rendezvous by the gates. His private obligation had gotten him a reputation-making hire, he suddenly realized, and he was the center of his age-mates’ attention and gossip—maybe even the object of their envy. He tried not to think that: the horses might betray anything he thought, though he got none of the expected catcalls and heckling from the junior bystanders. He was only aware of the senior riders’ impatience in waiting for him.
“Ready?” Jonas asked and, not waiting for his answer, Jonas vaulted up onto his horse’s back—a flashy move, a show-out move, one Danny hadn’t perfected and Cloud didn’t much like.
Cloud wasn’t even out of the den yet. He wanted Cloud to hurry up. Please.
And true to habit Cloud came sauntering leisurely and calmly out of the log-and-earth den and into the morning sun. Cloud shook himself all over as he reached the daylight, making a haze of dust, Cloud having (depend on it) rolled in it; and for a moment as horse met horse the ambient was full of images, all uneasy.
Cloud moved into the vicinity, refusing to take any orders from Jonas’ horse, flatly, no. Every horse in the trail party was male and older, autumn was nippish in the air, and the Westmans might be a working partnership in which a new horse and rider weren’t necessarily welcome—but that didn’t daunt Cloud in the least—Cloud was
Teeth clacked, snap, just short of a nighthorse rump, as Cloud passed Jonas’ horse to the rear. A foot cocked and slyly kicked back, again a miss, all calculated, all narrowly short of mayhem—just a trial of personalities.
Jonas swatted his own horse across the withers, and the meeting last night flashed across Danny’s mind,
He made a solid try at getting up on Cloud’s back, determined to do it on the first attempt, and determined that Cloud not move away from under him.
To his relief he landed square on, and immediately Cloud took a snap at Froth’s rump, moving closer, momentary jolt.
But Jonas had started riding toward the gates, and the others followed, the horse called Froth not without a snap back at Cloud in retaliation.
< Still water, > Danny kept thinking, as he followed the three out the gates of Shamesey camp. Nobody got thrown, nobody bit anybody: he let the three senior riders go well ahead as they rode in leisurely fashion past the gates of Shamesey town.
He thought then—he was suddenly sure that he should have sent a note to town, telling his parents where he was and what he was doing. For one thing, it would make his parents worry about him for a satisfactory several months.
—Off hunting a rogue horse. Don’t worry. Back before summer. Love, Your Son.
He really, truly wished he’d done that. They deserved it. His father deserved it.
And, thinking that, he lagged farther and farther back, away from the casual images the three seniors let flow back and forth, because he didn’t want to think about his family in their range, or eavesdrop on their business, either, feeling himself on scant enough tolerance.
He’d be on trial with them for the first while, he was sure: they thought he was useful because he could hear Guil Stuart farther than he was supposed to. They said it was because he was a snot-nosed junior who couldn’t control what he thought, and in spite of the fact that that was his use, he didn’t intend to broadcast everything in his head all the way to catching Stuart, or annoy them with his junior-rider insecurities spilling over at them.
So, first to keep from thinking of home, and then to keep from thinking about the trip ahead and the chances of trouble, he looked at the grass moving in the breeze. He noted the footprints of a timid scavenger that had crossed the road last night. Field-rats, he thought. Somebody had been careless with the garbage. Probably the garbage-wagons had spilled over when they went out yesterday to the dump. Out there—the province of truly junior riders—you got vermin so thick the ground moved.
Cloud’s skin twitched. Garbage-guard was a job he’d never done but a week. He’d have starved first. Cloud didn’t
want to think about it, and switched his tail energetically, thinking instead of
He’d meant to look back at least once while they were near enough, but he’d decided not: the juniors might be watching from the gate. He did only when they rode past the shoulder of the hill, when the road wound around it and he knew it was his last chance before it cut off sight of Shamesey town.
But all he could see from there was the wooden wall, the pastures, the fences out across the valley.
He saw the cattle-keepers taking the cattle out for their daily pasturage, far in the distance. The junior cattle-guards were the little moving dots of darkness far in the lead. The herds of cattle and sheep and pigs went out like that every day, rain or shine, until the snow fell.
He might be doing that all winter, instead, earning a few coins, or, at best, riding winter watch on the phone lines that ran along the road to Anveney and down the coast to Malvey, watching for breaks and guarding the crews that kept them working.
The lines ran beside them as they traveled, following the road. They were all that let you believe that human civilization stretched out into the Wild. The shadows of them went on and on across the land, a convenient perch for birds that preyed on vermin in the grass. He saw them, dots along the wire, as the sun grew higher. He heard their buzzing cries. He sometimes had that strange out-of-body notion that he was watching himself ride along with three other riders; but that wasn’t a bird sending that impression: that was some creature a little closer to the earth and with a bigger brain than any bird had. It was watching them from the rocks that cropped out of the grass on the west side of the road. The cattle-guards might need to look sharp, later in the day.
The riders ahead of him didn’t speak. He had other, less spooky images, sometimes: Cloud’s, of the High Wild, he was sure that was what he was seeing,
Cloud was uneasy, Danny thought, and saw the twitch of Cloud’s ears, the backward slant of them that accompanied a thought of
Danny shivered. He slapped Cloud with his hand to distract him. “Don’t be like that. They’re older, is all, you silly sheep. Don’t pick a fight. There’s three of them.”
Cloud wasn’t happy with the riders or their horses. He wasn’t sure Cloud understood what they were after, coming out here, except the chance to go into the highlands—which Cloud did approve.
Cloud, he thought on the instant, didn’t see any real reason to be following the tails of three other horses. Cloud could take him where he wanted to go. Cloud didn’t need a guide.
And in that thought, also, he suffered a clear, cold realization where he was, on the dusty road far from Shamesey town and Shamesey camp, headed north into territory he knew was dangerous for the weather alone—to be stuck there probably for the whole winter, in company with three strangers he’d only just met, of a class of people reputed for wildness and strange manner, and whose only recommendation was being friends of a man, also a borderer, whom he only remotely knew.
“No,” he muttered, disquieted. He toed Cloud in the ribs. Cloud tossed his head, threw a cow-kick to jolt his rider.
He couldn’t ask why Cloud thought that way. He couldn’t find an image to argue with, nothing but the same dead-rider image that Cloud threw him.
Cloud threw his head and sulked.
So Cloud was just generally disappointed in their company, disapproving of anything but
“We can’t,” Danny said. “We promised. And maybe Stuart can’t get this thing by himself. This thing’s bad, it’s real bad, Cloud.” He didn’t want to think about it, but he wondered if Cloud had any real idea what they were chasing up into the hills, or how it connected to the dead rider. And the wondering alone connected it.
“Somebody’s got to get rid of it.”
Cloud’s ears came up.
“Stop it!” Danny yelled.
But Cloud didn’t stop it. Cloud had the mountains in his mind, and that was all he wanted to see.
“Dammit!” Danny yelled.
Cloud didn’t stop.
Danny planted his feet hard, on the grass, and skidded, holding on to Cloud’s mane, his packs swinging around him as he jolted over a series of uneven spots on the hill.
Cloud just kept plowing ahead, dragging him with him, imaging
But Cloud was mad, too. Cloud took out on a particularly steep uphill and Danny braced his feet the harder—until his feet hit a rock. His grip on Cloud’s mane jerked Cloud’s forequarters around, threatening to bring them both down.
At once he gave up his grip on the mane, which put the downhill under him—he fell through empty space, curled to protect his head, landed with his baggage under his back and skidded downhill over the slick, dusty grass.
He fetched up finally on a small grassy hump, momentarily out of slope to slide on, with the laughter of the strangers ringing out from below the hill. His feet were pointed upslope—between which he saw Cloud standing staring down at him.
He rolled over, struggled against the downhill slant to get his feet under him, and got up, with the thong-tied packets banging about his arms, without the weight of the pistol in its holster. He saw it downslope, beyond him, and he slouched down the hill in a fit of temper, recovered it to its holster and sulked on down to the road, walking aslant on the hill, because the Westmans and Hawley, having had their laugh, were going on, leaving him to sort it out, and he had to overtake them, afoot or ahorse, they clearly didn’t care.
He was mortified. He didn’t look back to find out where Cloud was. He limped on down toward the road, intending to intercept them, still finding bits of dry grass to pick out of leather seams and brush out of his hair.
Cloud couldn’t resist making him look the fool. It was one thing when he dumped him in front of the juniors. It was another, when he was working, when matters were serious and he was out on the road. He was furious with Cloud. The seniors were clearly disgusted with him. Their riding on meant they were testing him, whether he could get himself together and catch up.
And then he
either misjudged where he should intercept the others, or misjudged how fast he had to follow, because by the time he reached sight of the road, having crossed over the shoulder of the hill—they were nowhere in sight.
He went downslope, not believing that they would have left the road and turned off cross-country, but not sure of that until he saw their tracks in the dirt of the roadway.
So he followed them, having no suppositions whatsoever that Cloud was going to leave him. Cloud was up there in the hills, not far, probably watching him, but he wasn’t going to acknowledge that fact.
So Cloud wouldn’t carry him. Then Cloud could trail him along the heights of the hills, playing his little games while he fell farther and farther behind the Westmans, and while the Westmans laughed at Cloud’s foolish junior rider, that was all Cloud had gained.
Meanwhile he was hurt. He’d bruised his backside, his shoulders, and all but knocked the wind out of himself. He had itchy grass down his collar that he couldn’t reach. He’d hurt his ankle when he hit the rock that caused his fall, and it was probably swelling. He might be lame for life. He hoped Cloud was satisfied, making him look like a fool, which Cloud had to do every damned time it was really important to convince somebody that he knew what he was doing, and he hoped Cloud really enjoyed his temper tantrum. Cloud’s rider was humiliated, and bruised, and ready to guard cattle for the rest of their lives.
Which would probably happen to them. He’d fall so far behind the other riders he’d never catch up. He and Cloud would have to limp back to Shamesey camp alone, their reputation would be ruined, all the high country riders would know he wasn’t to be relied upon, the juniors would laugh at them, and they’d never, ever, ever make it to the mountains.
He wasn’t sure Cloud heard him that far up the hill. He was too mad to care. The other riders were out so far ahead now he no longer tried to overtake them. He could only hope they stayed on the road, and didn’t put him to tracking them across open country, at which he wasn’t as good as he needed to be.
Rider at the Gate Page 8
