Rider at the Gate

by C. J. Cherryh

  Because that was her dream. Some wild one would come searching for her, a wild horse, maybe the king horse, more beautiful than any horse had ever been, and that wild horse would know immediately that she had qualities no one in town, no one even among the riders remotely imagined she had. Neither of her brothers, and no Tarmin rider, not her mother or her father, no one in all the world knew what she imagined and what she imaged, otherwise—because she told secrets to the horses in her mind, the way the riders did. She saw their images from farther away than her brothers, or anyone, and she didn’t run away scared the way they did just of the shallow ideas they could pick up: she could talk to the riders’ horses—she could talk even to strangers’ horses that came with the truck convoys. Oh, the riders who didn’t know her were always anxious about her walking about inside their gates, but she immediately made friends with the horses. She brought them sugar-treats and sat and talked for hours to them in the way horses liked humans to talk. They imaged her in their minds as and < sugar> because they loved her.

  And in this dream she had, that wild horse came, not an ordinary horse, like Flicker and the others that served the riders, but the most beautiful, the most special horse came treading softly over the snow, eyeing her sidelong from under its long forelock, and saying its secret name in her mind, which she could just almost hear…

  But she waked, for no reason, with that Name still just echoing at the edge of her sight.

  It wasn’t just a dream. It wasn’t. She lay awake in her parents’ house in which you could always smell the soot and the stench of hot iron, and even with her eyes open she could feel a strange, wild stirring in her mind. She lay still, afraid that the dream would escape her, and she wanted very much to hold the textures of it, the feeling of it in her heart.

  The vividness of it stayed a long, long time. She could shut her eyes and have it back, that place, that moment, that vision.

  She hugged the feeling to her, knowing now it was real, undoubtedly outside the walls, one of the wild ones. She heard it calling and calling to her.

  The preacher man said if she said her prayers every night God wouldn’t let the beasts talk to her, and she wouldn’t have to worry about anything in the world if God was taking care of her. The preacher man said she could tell God if she was afraid and God would blast the beasts that wanted to talk to her.

  But if she willfully talked to the beasts, they told her in church, if she did begin to seek them out, she’d surely go to hell.

  But the smell of hell was in papa’s forge, and the substance of her heart’s desires were out there, with the snow, the beautiful clean snow.

  Mama certainly wasn’t going to be happy if she ran away to become a rider. Mama had much rather she marry a rich lowland merchant. Mama would be worried about her ruining her skin and her hands.

  Papa would call her his pretty angel and ask the traveling preachers to pray for her soul and hope for the horse to run away— but she grew so willful she knew she’d pray against papa, because she wanted to be a rider, and papa couldn’t stop her from anything she wanted, he never had. She’d do as she pleased, and mama would be mad and papa would be worried, but in the end she’d have her way, and they’d accept her—or if they stayed mad, she’d run away for good and not come back except occasionally, remote and grand in her fringed leathers, with the look of distant places about her.

  And she’d talk to mama and papa if they were nice, but her brothers and their friends would stare daggers at her and she’d look right back and scare them with the images she could send. The neighbors would all be envious about the money she would make. And the Tarmin riders who said stay away from the horses, they’d respect her, they’d be sorry they’d ever scolded her, and her horse would be finer than theirs, the convoy bosses would pick her because she’d look better than all the rest, and she’d have a reputation far and wide over the mountains—go with Brionne, they’d say, Brionne’s the best. She’d ride out the gates of Tarmin camp with the convoys and she’d wear a knife with a white shell handle like one she’d seen, with a beaded fringed jacket, black as her horse, and bright blue beads: she liked blue beads—and it was all true, it was all possible, because a wild one had come, exactly the way she’d known it would.

  She couldn’t get up yet. It was still dark between the shutters and mama would wake up instantly if she heard her moving about. So she lay abed savoring the feeling and the planning—she lay listening for a long time, longing for daylight to shine through the seam of the shutters, so she could go out and look for the horse she knew was waiting for her—oh, it couldn’t go away with the dawn. It had to wait.

  Mama and papa wouldn’t just let her go. But mama and papa wouldn’t of course hear the horse that was calling so loudly out there, and if they heard it they would never suspect it came for their daughter. Her brothers were a little cleverer, mostly because they spied on her all the time, and they’d surely tell, so she couldn’t let on she was going anywhere special—most of all she couldn’t let on she was excited, even if she could hardly contain it. She’d say she was going to the shop, that was all, and if she was clever and fast, they wouldn’t know when she slipped away from them.

  It was forever until that first faint light came.

  Then, impatient, her breath hissing in the cold of her room, she slipped out from the covers, dressed quickly in warm ordinary clothes, struggled into two of everything, one too small and one a little too large, watching in the mirror so she didn’t look as bundled up as she knew she needed to be to face the outside cold.

  And, secretly dressed for blizzards, she sweltered through breakfast in the crowded, overheated kitchen, where mama had been baking biscuits: it was bacon and of course the biscuits, and she saved both pieces of bacon and stole a couple of whole biscuits for the horses—some of it, she thought then, hugging the thought to her… for her horse. She took two more, when nobody was looking, because she might be out all night.

  “Brionne! Done your lessons?” mama asked when she snatched her new red coat and her scarf and hat to follow papa out the door.

  She stopped in the clutter of boys and noisy footsteps. She was momentarily at a loss. Mama insisted she learn accounts and excused her brothers to be rowdy. And mama couldn’t keep her in. Not today.

  “I’ll have it all this afternoon,” she said, very quickly, and was fast enough to shut the door so that she didn’t hear mama’s scolding; and, not hearing, of course wasn’t obliged to do what mama wanted.

  But it was not to papa’s forge she was bound, putting on her hat and her coat while she hurried in her brothers’ wake through the new-fallen snow. She veered out of their track at the corner of the house, and, still buttoning buttons, went running a zigzag course down the tracked public walk, then across the street and along the front of the bakery.

  She couldn’t hear the horse calling now, but the wild ones came mostly at night. They gave a village bad dreams; but the people they favored to hear them clearly would begin to waste away with longing to go after them, that was what all the stories said. Even people who were afraid of them had to go out to them when the Calling came, and if they didn’t find their horse soon, they might perish in the snow and the cold.

  But she wasn’t afraid. She’d waited for her Calling. She welcomed it with all her heart.

  She turned the corner at the baker’s, where the water tanks were, and ran from there to the Little Gate, which let riders come from the camp into the town, though on purpose it was too small to let the horses pass it.

  The Little Gate had no lock, only a pull-latch, and she came and went there as she pleased, always a little careful that the watchman down at the big main gate didn’t look this way and see her, because he’d surely take her straight to her parents.

  But Tuck at the main gate would be having his breakfast, she was confident of that, besides that the Little Gate wasn’t really Tuck’s business at all, least of all one to make him come out in the morning cold. She slid the la
tch aside, slipped over to the rider camp, and pulled the gate silently to behind her.

  Once when she was seven the other kids had dared her to slip through the Little Gate. She’d told them she was scared, and of course never let on to them the secret that she’d done it already a hundred times. She’d never once let on that she could talk to the horses, either, because if she did, then her brothers would have told their parents everything she did forever. Then they’d have had the preacher to pray over her, and they’d have watched her ever so much closer.

  Now that she was older, her parents knew that she occasionally went to the camp and that occasionally she talked to the riders, especially when her father had some work to do and she delivered some message to or from, as she loved to do.

  But her mother lectured her severely about rider men and immoral thoughts, which embarrassed her, and would have mortified her if the riders had ever, ever heard her mother talk like that. Riders weren’t at all the way mama said. They never hurt her nor even said an indelicate word nor thought an indelicate thought in her presence. They treated her like their sister. They talked far nicer than her brothers, and the men especially would talk to her and tell her stories.

  Which made the women, like Tara and Mina, mad. They were probably jealous, or at least they protected what they had, namely the men, from her influence. She didn’t mind. She took it for a kind of compliment that they were so worried. And Vadim and Chad were the handsomest men she knew, just ever so nice to watch, and now—

  Right now she most wanted to find Vadim. He was usually up and about early, and she knew Barry and Llew and Tara were away working on the road: she always knew what went on in the camp.

  But she was equally sure that Vadim and Chad and Mina and Luisa were in camp, and with any reasonable luck, Vadim or Chad might be outside working, so she wouldn’t have to deal with Mina.

  She wanted to ask Vadim if they’d heard anything last night. She was bubbling over with excitement about her dream, and she knew, she just knew that he’d be happy for her and tell her if there were any secret things she should do or say to call the wild one in.

  If just Vadim and Chad were there, she could ask their advice and know they’d listen and tell her what to do, whether her horse was waiting out beyond the walls and she should go to it, or whether her horse might have gone away by now. She might have to wait until night, and she might have to stay in the rider camp— they might hide her, so her parents couldn’t keep her in.

  Because now she belonged—and as she came toward the den, she tried to feel what the riders called the ambient: that meant the images that were going on. But she could only get an impression of snow, and of course snow was the weather—it was snow lying everywhere, snow thick on the roofs, a blanket of almost untracked white across the yard from the shelter to the horse den this morning, and the sun coming up in a golden glow above the palisade wall—so, so like her dream.

  By the tracks she expected just Vadim, but, just by something odd in the ambient, perhaps by her newly quickened senses, she suspected something strange even before she slipped into the entry of the horse den—walking carefully, carefully between the shoulder-level entry walls, because they’d cautioned her about startling the horses.

  She was astonished and dismayed to see Tara back, Tara, looking exhausted, with her arm over Flicker’s back, and Chad and Luisa sleeping in a stall, on pallets on the wood-chip bedding the horses used.

  Odd, she thought. It was very odd, them sleeping in the den. She was completely unprepared for Tara to glare at her out of the deep shadow and equally unprepared for a sudden wash from somewhere across her vision, like a veil of blinding white.

  “What in hell are you doing here?” Tara snapped out of that whiteness.

  Brionne was so shocked she stood stark still until Tara and dark flashed back on her.

  “Get out, go home. Dammit, get out of here!

  Flicker had waked up, and again all Brionne saw for the instant was She couldn’t orient herself in the world. She couldn’t find a backward step. She was trying to do what she was told, and felt behind her to see whether there was a post in the way. She only saw fighting with the imaging, she saw Vadim through the < white, > and the other horses… then Chad and Luisa and gloomy, sullen Mina.

  “Flicker’s sick,” Vadim said. The haze of white was thick and cold, very much like snowfall. But where Vadim stood was dark, and solid ground. “This isn’t a good place for kids right now. Do what she says, go on home.”

  “I brought biscuits and some bacon.” She decided to be generous. It was important to her to have the riders like her. Even Tara. “Would Flicker like it?”

  “No,” Flicker’s rider said sharply. Tara was purely jealous, Brionne thought angrily; that was why Tara was mad. Tara was always stand-offish, and protective of Flicker—and of Vadim and Chad, too. She’d always had an inkling there was something going on between Tara and Vadim and his partner which her mother would call very immoral, and Vadim and Chad both hung about with Mina and Luisa, too—she suspected things she felt very uneasy about in the ways of the camp.

  But Flicker did truly look not to be well, and the feeling in the air ran up and down Brionne’s nerves—so maybe Tara was just mad and distracted and yelling at everybody. Brionne backed away, bumped a post and felt her way around it.

  “Go home, Brionne,” Chad said gently. “It’s not a good time to be here.”

  She was hurt, all the same.

  Angry. It was all Flicker in their attention. They were supposed to be so sensitive to the horses, and they didn’t even know that she had special news, they didn’t know why she’d come—

  But then, maybe Flicker was occupying all their attention. They looked as if they’d not gotten much sleep last night. Even Vadim seemed cross with her. It was a dreadful disappointment.

  So she retreated outside into the dawn and scuffed her way across the snow-carpeted yard, wondering what she was to do if she didn’t have their help.

  And what if, because Flicker happened to be sick and the riders were being surly and Tara was jealous of her, her horse got discouraged and heard Tara’s nasty temper and didn’t come back? It was Tara who was against her: she knew it was Tara’s fault. Tara was always telling her get out and leave the horses alone, and she wouldn’t even put it past Tara to pretend Flicker was sick just so she could get everybody’s attention on her.

  Clearly Tara was having things her way right now. The riders were all out there in the horse den or out on the road fixing washouts, and Tara had the center of attention right now in camp.

  But just then, just when she was thinking that, she felt that strange prickly feeling the horses sometimes made on your skin when they were trying to get your attention.

  Maybe, she thought, feeling that strangeness running up and down her arms, maybe it’s still out there.

  Maybe it didn’t go away last night.

  Maybe it’s still waiting.

  And nobody at all guarded the main rider gate, that, with a simple inside drop-latch, led to the outside and the snow.

 

  Danny woke with that vivid impression, different from a dream, as Cloud moved to gain his feet. He scrambled to his feet, too, struggling with the blanket and the springy mat of evergreens under them.

  Cloud didn’t recognize the horses—didn’t know who he heard, but Danny felt direction as Cloud did, and looked toward the road beyond the screen of evergreens.

  The Westmans were in the other direction, and the riders coming from the downhill of the road were near enough to have waked Cloud—nighthorses wouldn’t miss them in the ambient if they got any closer at all: the group of horses was louder in the ambient than one horse was, but there was no way they could stay hidden as those riders went past, and they had a steep wooded hill at their backs, a sheer drop across the road…

  ntain. Men following us up the road.>

  Cloud bet on but Danny thought then, and patted Cloud’s shoulder, because Cloud was on the edge of spooking out into the open to argue with the intruders. Danny insisted, frantic with apprehension, and took a firm grip on Cloud’s mane, a grip which unexpectedly he needed, because Cloud took that hold for him mounting up, and ducked into it and bolted for the road.

  “Cloud!” Danny gasped, trying to stop him, but Cloud plowed ahead.

  Danny’s feet were sliding. He was about to lose Cloud. He took a bounce on the uneven, root-crossed ground and made it to Cloud’s back in a single move, to his own astonishment, as Cloud burst through the buffeting screen of branches and onto the roadway, uphill.

  He was leaving his blanket and all his baggage behind. He’d at least slept with his gun, scared of the isolation, but he couldn’t stop; he clung desperately as Cloud headed uphill, with the sheer drop off the road on their right hand. He tried to get Cloud to go thinking that he could take the steep, wooded way over the rise of the hill and come down again after the oncoming trouble had passed them.

  Cloud was willing. Cloud bolted through a battering of evergreen branches, took the uncertain footing of laddered roots and rock, and wove among the trees, headed aslant up the rise.

  A shot splintered bark off a trunk beside them: Cloud veered uphill, and he slewed entirely off Cloud’s back on the downhill side, still hanging onto Cloud’s mane, trying to get footing to swing up again.

  “You!” somebody yelled, and he looked downslope as Cloud backed and tried to maneuver on the hill. A man came riding up on him, the horse imaging Danny dragged his pistol out of its holster, maintaining his grip on a fistful of mane on a horse that didn’t know which direction to face.