Rider at the Gate

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Kid,” Jonas said sharply, and laid a hard hand on his knee. Shook at him.

  “Sorry.” He knew he’d slipped this time, and dangerous men were close to anger with each other all around him, a long lonely way from anywhere.

  “No,” Jonas said. “We’re not angry, boy. Hawley has a right to the money. He’s her kin. He evidently proved it to the bank.” “Just, it’s a damn complication.”

  another sending imaged. But the sending stopped in anger.

  “Everybody calm down,” Luke said. “Just calm down.”

  “The damn kid’s a distraction,” Hawley muttered.

  “You went in there,” Jonas said, “you took that money out.”

  “I had a right!”

  “You could have by-damn said, Hawley!”

  “I’m on that account. Look, I’m her cousin.”

  “Dammit, Hawley!”

  “If you had a word you could have said it, Jonas. You knew I was going to the bank. What did you think I was going to do? I got the card. She give me the card.”

  “Calm down,” Luke said. “Hawley, it’s all right. You did all right.”

  “Yeah, all right,” Jonas said. “If he goes there, if he knows about the money—”

  “I had a right!” Hawley said.

  “You had a right,” Luke said. “There’s no question you had a right. —Danny, you want to get up and move the horses back? Do us a favor?”

  “Yes, sir,” Danny said, and got up—the horses were crowding in, snappish and pushy with the argument. He gave a shove at Cloud. That was easy, another, harder push on Cloud’s shoulder, Cloud’s understanding that they were both to leave the fireside, but dealing with the other horses was a scary matter. The seniors’ horses didn’t want any town kid pushing them around, didn’t want to take orders from him—

  He walked in among them and suddenly a queasy darkness flittered through his mind, shapes and shadows and a violence that sent him a step back, disoriented. was in the ambient, from two sides. “Cloud!” he said, and made a futile grab at Cloud’s mane as horses squealed and heads darted past him, teeth bared, big bodies swinging about perilously close to him as shoulder hit shoulder.

  Another spin. Cloud and Shadow. Heels flew past him and he jumped back barely in time.

  “Shadow!” Jonas shouted.

  It just stopped, horses jogged past each other in abortive attack. Shadow’s teeth snapped on empty air. Cloud’s heels kicked up and managed to miss.

  He was shaking. he insisted, furiously, and but he couldn’t call their true names in his head, not with the knowledge their riders had; and meanwhile their riders were having an argument at the fireside. They wanted him out of the way because he was loud—and the horses were on edge, with each other and with Cloud on general principle. He tried to calm tempers all around, imaging but he couldn’t call the silent names, not the way their riders could.

  He’d seen Shadow’s name when the fight started, that fluttering succession of treacherous shadow-shapes. It was a dreadful name— he truly didn’t mean to think in that hostile way of Jonas’ horse, but it wasn’t a name that slid easily past the nerves. He’d mistrusted that horse from the first moment he’d dealt with it, and he didn’t turn his back on it—he was scared of that horse in a way he’d never had to be scared of a horse.

  And in the aftermath of the encounter he’d just had, when he recalled Shadow’s heels flying past his head, he was twice afraid. He didn’t want to think of what could have happened to him if he’d not moved fast enough or if the fight had gotten serious with him in the midst of the horses.

  Which wasn’t the way to deal with horses at all. He fought his townbred nerves. He tried to separate them out, put Cloud to one side and keep the other three from snapping at each other or him, and they kept getting around him to make another sniping attack.

  “Here.” Luke Westman came to help him, clapped him on the shoulder, which did nothing to help his knees, and shoved Shadow out of a not-entirely-inquisitive approach with the back of his fist—swatted Shadow hard on the rump when he didn’t retreat. came into Danny’s head—he for God’s sake hadn’t thought it, he was scared even to think of hitting that horse—Luke had launched that threat into the ambient on his behalf, Behave or the kid will hit you.

  He didn’t think it a help. But Luke waved Froth away from him and came close up on Cloud.

  “What’s his name?” Luke asked, meaning the inside name, the real name Cloud called himself—but he wasn’t sure that Cloud wanted Luke to know that name. Cloud was laying his ears back and wrinkling his nose as was, and he didn’t answer Luke. He just shoved at Cloud’s chest and wanted him apart from the seniors and their horses.

  “Be careful of him,” Danny said. “Cloud, behave. Don’t bite.”

  “He won’t bite,” Luke said, taking something from his pocket.

  He held it out. Froth muscled in and got the treat. Candy. Cloud wanted it. But Ice sneaked his head in and got the next one Luke magicked out of his pocket.

  Cloud sulked, and then Shadow intruded, slipped up behind Froth and Ice so slyly and so smoothly Danny didn’t see him until Shadow’s neck snaked out and Shadow nipped the third candy Luke’s pocket produced. Cloud was outraged.

  But immediately Luke’s other hand was out, offering one to Cloud… < sweet, delicious sweet > was the image in the ambient, from Luke and the horses, Danny realized, and felt Cloud wanting it, inching toward it. Sugar-candy was what he’d promised Cloud for good behavior, when he hadn’t had one, and there it was, not from his hand, but from Luke’s.

  Cloud’s mouth was watering,

  Cloud was going to—

  “Fingers!” Danny said, earliest manners-lesson Cloud had had to learn, where treats stopped and a rider’s fingers began.

  But Luke had curled his hand around to hide the treat for a second, then showed it again, just halfway, teasing, did it twice, blink of an eye, had something else out of his other pocket, in his other hand, that Shadow got before Shadow created a fuss.

  Cloud’s head darted out, Luke’s hand wasn’t there, and Cloud jerked… except there was the candy again, quick as a blink, right there,

  Cloud nabbed it, jerked away, and backed off, jaws working on his prize. Hostile. Enjoying the sweet. Thinking he’d gotten away with it.

  “He’s fine,” Luke said. “You ought to let that horse of yours around people more. It’s good for him.”

  Danny didn’t know what he felt: he was glad Luke hadn’t lost a finger, glad it hadn’t sparked a horse-fight— that Cloud had fallen for it…

  “Kid,” Luke said. “What is your grief?”

  “Nothing.” He couldn’t own to what he felt. He didn’t know why he was mad, except Luke knew he’d promised Cloud that candy and Luke had no right.

  “Nothing,” Luke echoed him, and was in the ambient now, horses milling about, Luke growing irritated with him, Danny felt it. “Kid, —why’d you take up for Stuart?”

  That came from out of nowhere, when he was ready for an accusation. “I don’t know.”

  “Man did you a petty little favor. You’re traipsing clear to hell paying him. Why? What’s it to you?”

 

  “Who hit you? A relative?”

  “None of your damn business.”

  “Yeah, none of our b
usiness. Till you screw up and need somebody to come after you, none of our business.”

 

  “Like Stuart?” Danny retorted. “Me? I don’t even know him, all right? I don’t see where he screwed up. He was doing fine till you came along with your lousy news.” A lump came into his throat. So he found one man who’d talk to him like a human being, one man in the whole universe who helped him who didn’t have to. He’d thought a couple of nights ago he’d found another in Jonas. He’d thought he’d found somebody else who stood by his friends. Which was a joke.

  That didn’t sound like friends to him. And he’d had friends, one or two, no matter what Jonas said—well, at least the boys he’d hung around with in town, until he’d gone and taken up with Cloud.

  They’d even tried to get past that, his town friends had. At least they’d tried. Gone on seeing him and hanging about with him, when he came back into town, maybe to shock their other friends, but, hell, it was more than he could say for Jonas and the rest of them, sitting smug on their horses, watching Stuart lose his grip on sanity in the upset they’d brought him.

 

  Suddenly it was a resolve and a certainty to him: he couldn’t stand any more of their company. He stalked back to the fireside, grabbed up his gear and started hanging thongs from his shoulder and stuffing gloves in his pocket as he walked back to Cloud—

  “Can’t take it?” Jonas sniped at him, from the fireside. “This the way you honor contracts? Is this what you do to drivers you’re hired to?”

  It was an attack the same way his mother attacked him. He was used to it. He jammed his hat on, reached for Cloud’s mane, the lump in his throat grown to painful size.

  “Kid!” Different voice, Hawley’s. It made him flinch out of the flashy swing up he intended, but it wasn’t going to stop him: he chose the steadier, belly-down mount he knew he wouldn’t fail.

  So he wasn’t good. So he got up like a kid. He was on Cloud’s back, and Cloud turned away from the fire.

  “Kid. Use your damn head. Where are you going?”

  “What do you care?” he thought, and Luke came and tried to get into his path. was in the ambient; but Jonas said,

  “We don’t need him. If he wants to tag us he can follow. That’s all.”

  He’d expected more interference. He’d frankly expected more concern. He sat there on Cloud’s back staring down at Jonas, mad, damned mad, and Jonas stared back at him.

  “You’re a magnet for that thing, kid,” Jonas said. “You know that? You and that horse—making all that noise. You care about that horse? No?”

  “Go to hell,” he said. He wished he hadn’t. But he’d said it. Now he couldn’t slink back to the fire. He stared down at all of them from Cloud’s back, then wanted and not Just

  “Doesn’t solve your problem, kid,” Jonas’ voice pursued him into the dark.

  But Cloud took him onto the road and upped the pace to a trot, downhill into the dark of a clouded night, with a wind cold and keen as a knife.

  He already wanted to go back to the fire. He knew he wasn’t fool enough to ride straight uphill to Tarmin Height, first and alone, taking Cloud into what an experienced rider like Aby Dale hadn’t been wary enough to survive.

  But he couldn’t find a way to go back and duck his head and take it anymore—he couldn’t see getting Cloud hurt in a horse-fight, either, and he saw it coming if he didn’t give in: Jonas was pushing for it, because Jonas intended to run him the way he bossed Luke and Hawley, and once you started taking Jonas’ orders, he had the strong suspicion, it got harder and harder to break away from what Jonas wanted. A small group riding together wasn’t at all like Shamesey camp, where there was a whole thought-deaf town to escape to when you felt thoughts crowding in on you; and when the town got too bad to tolerate, which usually took a few hours, there was Cloud to come back to.

  And if everybody in the world pushed them too far they could go out to the hills and hunt for three and four days and not need anybody. He’d managed to stay out of trouble. He’d never gotten Cloud into a fight. He wasn’t about to. Not three on one. Jonas knew it. Jonas kept pushing.

  Bad decision maybe, that had made Jonas drag him along; so Jonas had thought better of it, and maybe Jonas had found out he wasn’t going to knuckle under easily—but was Jonas going to say he was wrong and manage the situation as civilly as possible until they went their separate ways? Hell if he was. Jonas couldn’t take somebody who didn’t think Jonas had done right by Stuart. Maybe that was Jonas’ conscience talking to him. Maybe it was just that Jonas was born a son of a bitch. It didn’t matter.

  He had to wonder how Stuart’s partner had gotten along with the man. Why Aby Dale was lying dead up there on the ridge and they’d gotten away safe.

  Then they’d gone over to Anveney to draw Aby Dale’s money out of the bank before they broke the news to Stuart at Shamesey. That was two, three days to make that detour, with some trucks that had to go that direction, he was sure—riders had to take their charges where they were hired to go, and that had to be the case. Hawley hadn’t told Jonas about taking the money. That was a point in Jonas’ favor. But hell, it hadn’t been exactly a straight line they blazed with their bad news, had it? And there were telephones. If they were running a race with the weather getting up there, they could have phoned. They could have told Stuart without the rogue-image in the ambient with him at the time. Maybe he thought of that because he was a town-kid. But they knew there were telephones. Now Stuart’s friends had his money the way they had his gear, to give to him, of course. And Stuart was out there with nothing, and going all the way up to Anveney, to the bank, he supposed, to find it out.

  His throat ached. His chest hurt. Cloud slowed to a walk, mad, too, thinking until Danny reached down and patted his neck.

 

  Sometimes the images that came up were outright stupid. He didn’t know why he put those three men in the apartment with his family. They didn’t belong there.

  He was mad at them and mad at his family. Luke asked who’d hit him, which was none of Luke’s business.

  So what if he was mad that papa had hit him: he knew why papa had hit him, which Luke didn’t understand: papa hit him when papa couldn’t talk, the same reason he’d hit Denis—it was just something men in his family did, and it never meant you didn’t love somebody, it just meant you’d gotten to that point your throat wouldn’t work and the words weren’t there, which was when you loved somebody a whole lot and they did things you didn’t understand.

  Sometimes thoughts came up that didn’t make sense, as if they’d always lived in different spots in his brain and suddenly, because some nosy fool went asking into things he’d no right to ask, these separate things got together in scary combination, notifying you things didn’t match up right, they couldn’t make sense, and maybe the only safe way to deal with thoughts like that was to send them apart from each other before they messed up something in your life you couldn’t put back the way it was.

  Same way he’d found he was at odds with what the preachers said, once there was Cloud. And he was going to hell, but he still thought about God.

  Same way he loved his family, and got madder at them than he ever could at Luke and Jonas, and Luke and Jonas made him mad at his family all over again. Luke and Jonas were messing with what he thought, messing with what he was, that was what they were doing—trying to bend his mind around to directions he couldn’t figure. Luke thought he was
like Stuart. Luke didn’t think Stuart was a good thing to be. Neither did Jonas. Probably Hawley didn’t.

  He was Aby Dale’s cousin, which he guessed explained why Aby Dale had been with them this trip and not with her partner, Stuart. But it didn’t explain the other things. Hawley hadn’t said about the money. He’d kept that even from Jonas. It wasn’t easy to keep secrets with the horses around. He couldn’t do it. But some senior riders had that reputation—he’d run into them, and you didn’t know that they were different from other people, you just wouldn’t know, that was the problem—but word got around about some, that they lied really well. He just wished it had gotten around about Jonas and Hawley before he’d been so gullible.

  And hell if he or Cloud would come and eat out of Luke’s hand. He was mad that he’d almost liked Luke. He wouldn’t give in to Luke’s tricks.

  Cloud hadn’t either, not really. Cloud had just gotten his candy and backed off, still mad, still free of debts. Cloud just always knew things. Cloud was smarter than people sometimes. Cloud wanted to kick the men to the moon, was all, end of problem.

  Cloud thought, pleased with the thought, going along quite energetically—but he wanted Cloud to slow down on the road. They’d gone far enough they wouldn’t hear him, no matter how loud he was.

  Not far enough down the road to run into trouble, either, if there was anybody back there.

  Jonas, damn him, knew he’d be following them tomorrow— Jonas had flatly said so. There was just one way up from here, he was on it, and they thought they could have him back any time they wanted to slow down and let him overtake them.

  The hell with that, he thought. Jonas could get used to not getting what he wanted.

  Cloud was quite happy with and But when, on his thought of Cloud began thinking