Rider at the Gate
Page 18
And when they reached the cut-off where a horse-trail went west to the rider-stone that sat at the cross-country crossroads, Guil slid down and wished Burn gone to that stone, a route that wouldn’t take him into Anveney itself.
Burn heard his
Burn snorted and ambled off the road, nosing the grass without eating it. Burn left no doubt. Burn didn’t think there were pigs in Anveney.
Burn sulked off a distance, in no hurry. But Burn wouldn’t at all like it once Burn had to smell the smoke.
Burn’s rider, on the other hand, had to breathe the smell from the moment he walked over the rise and caught the wind.
Burn’s rider had to look on a barren land, the smokestacks and the ruin they made, a dusty, barren land oppressive to any sane man’s heart, but clearly some liked it that way.
And utterly silent—a silence that came of leaving not only Burn’s range, but leaving the range of every living creature, because nothing flourished in this land of metal-laden air and dying grass. Walking down the last grassy hill was like walking down into a lake of silence, no easier to tolerate because he’d been here twice before. He experienced the same increasing desolation, the same little catch of breath when he’d had enough and wanted to go back.
No holding of breath would stop the stench or bring the world-sense back. No life. Nothing to hear—not the little creatures of the world that talked constantly to him and Burn; not the noise of a camp, the constant presence-sense that he was used to, in camp and outside one.
It didn’t exist here.
Six huge smokestacks sat on the shoulder of a low hill and a huge town, rivalling Shamesey’s size, sprawled off onto other hills—with little hillocks of tailings around the pits that surrounded Anveney, out across a barren landscape as far as the horizon.
Lakes of incredible poison hues. Smokestacks that lifted the worst and deadliest of the airborne ash above the town, so they said—but only humans, it seemed, could live near those tailings piles, or the run-off basins where the water collected in those pools: white and brilliant blue and bright green, beautiful, if you didn’t know you were looking at death.
Copper-mining, chemical-making… if it was poison and other towns wouldn’t touch it, Anveney would. Let the smoke blow and the water run and seep into the river and run to the sea: Anveney didn’t care.
Anveney supplied all the world with copper, tin, gold, silver, and lead—iron for trucks and guns came from over the Inland Sea, ported in at Carlisle, moved along Limitation River by barge. He’d never been that far east, himself, but he knew coal came inbound there. A handful of lowland riders shepherded those barges along the shorelines and guarded their contracts equally jealously, as their right—but they based themselves at Carlisle, and went only as far as the zone of die-off, so he’d heard. Coal likewise came from across the Inland Sea, smoky stuff to feed the furnaces of the big foundries and refineries and to supply the lights of Anveney, likewise freighted in by barge—while Malvey sat on natural gas and oil, a source of fuel on this side of the sea, a mere six days ride to the south of Shamesey.
But it wasn’t distance that kept Malvey oil out of Anveney, or made them buy their fuel from middlemen in Shamesey. It was townsmen politics. Malvey’s oil heated Shamesey as well as Malvey houses, as it did Tarmin villages, in winter emergency. It ran the generators that ran the electric lights, smoky stuff, too, but its smoke didn’t seem to kill the ground.
Anveney smoke did. Anveney smoke ruined the ground in a wider and wider desolation made, as Shamesey claimed and any fool could see, by smoke and downfalling pollution out of Anveney, smoke that didn’t always blow toward the vacant lands, Anveney’s pious claims to the contrary.
Shamesey, lying southeast, had protested and demanded that Anveney shut down its furnaces on those days when the wind was blowing toward Shamesey and its farmlands—but Anveney consistently refused, first on the grounds that it wasn’t possible, the furnaces couldn’t shut down entirely on a given day; and then demanding that Shamesey pay exorbitantly in grain and fuel for any days the refineries were out of operation.
So the two regions quarreled and counterclaimed—it was news the rider camps cared about, since the fools held trade and rider pay and villages’ winter supply hostage to their ongoing dispute. Anveney didn’t need riders to guard their town at all, Anveney said, because their walls and their guards defended them, even out in the remote mining pits.
The stink and the poison defended Anveney, that was the truth all riders knew, and even townsmen in Shamesey had an inkling. The plain fact was that no creature in its right mind would come near Anveney, first for the stink that clung to everything, in that zone where the smoke spilled its most odoriferous content to earth—and second, for the more alarming effects: a stranger to Anveney felt he had contamination on his skin. He’d been here once, himself, and his skin had itched until he’d bathed in clean water, which argued to him and surely to any creature with a brain that it couldn’t be good. It was why he wouldn’t allow Burn close enough to eat the grass on the edge of this place.
But humans somehow survived here. Humans mined and refined the metals, and when Anveney shipped its ingots and sheet metal outside the envelope of its poison, it still needed riders to guard the shipments.
Anveney both needed what its poisoned soil wouldn’t grow or graze, and held its own goods back if it didn’t get the price it wanted. Other towns wanted copper to make the wires for the phone system, which never worked when you needed it—but at least it didn’t draw predators like the radio did; townsmen wanted the phones enough to keep paying riders to fix the lines and guard the crews that put up poles that fell down in the ice storms all winter.
Lately Anveney and its little network of high-country mining camps with their copper and such had all made one union, and wouldn’t sell except at their prices. This was the next escalation of the smoke wars.
So now Shamesey, latest he’d heard, was trying to arrange some kind of terms with Malvey, since Anveney was as desperate for food as Shamesey was for electrics and copper sheet for rich families’ roofs. Shamesey reasoned that if Anveney got hungry enough it might shut down its smoke when the winds blew southerly. Shamesey had made alliance not only with Malvey and its union, but with other, smaller towns in the grain belt, which dealt with Shamesey markets, and began to hold back grain and to create stockpiles of copper against Anveney’s price-fixing and smoke-dumping, saying that Shamesey could do without copper longer than Anveney could do without bread.
It was a damned stupid situation. Guil had heard both sides of the argument all his life, at varying degrees of immediacy, and didn’t comment, as riders didn’t generally voice opinions on town politics to their employers or to the truck drivers, whose trade was gossip as well as cargo. Talk like which side was right confused the horses and worried riders, when towns got to quarreling—nobody needed more ill feeling near the horses than they naturally had coming at them, but when the smoke wars heated up, things generally grew uncomfortable; and the smell of Anveney, both the stench and the town-wide atmosphere of fear and grievance, made it hard for a rider not to have opinions. Bad enough the refinery
jobs at Malvey, including the chance of blowing sky-high in a truck accident.
But… Aby had argued, in her dealings with Anveney, the pay’s good and I can camp out till they arrange the papers and get the trucks to the gate. I don’t have to go into town but once a trip.
Well for her, he supposed, wondering once, in Aby’s near company, how good in the blankets this Anveney shipper might be.
Gotten his ear boxed, he had—deserved it, he was sure; Aby’d been only half joking when she immediately after pushed him into the blankets and never did answer the question.
Come with me, she’d urged him again, last spring. Talk Burn into it. You’ve got to see the country up there.
I do see it, he’d said. She’d imaged him her route again and again.
And she’d said, pleading with him: With your own eyes, Guil. You’ve got to feel it. You’ve got to be there.
But he’d refused. He’d made his commitment to Malvey; he’d elected to run his risks with the fuel tankers up to Darwin. He had his hard-won customers down south that he didn’t want to let into the hands of anybody else, for fear they might call on that somebody else next time.
And truth be told—he’d grown a little tired of her evasions.
So now he was walking to Anveney town alone, his eyes feeling the sting of the smoke when the wind gusted a fickle current down-valley.
Anveney’s Garden, riders called the place, the area all around and northeast of Anveney, where the soil lay completely bare and prone to erosion, gullies leading to gullies leading to a wash that ran down to a river that ran through barren banks a long, long way before the inpouring of other streams began to put more life into Limitation River than death could take out. Even that far, neither riders or horses would eat the freshwater fish, which grew strange lumps on their bodies.
No riders wintered over in the district, that he knew of, either. During the summer if you looked over from the Tarmin main road, you could generally find a plume of smoke in the hills, a handful of riders resting up for a day or two, waiting for some convoy to organize; they’d wait in that still-green zone, always outside the dead fields.
Only a few weeks ago, Aby had been among them.
* * *
Chapter xi
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BRIONNE’S FEET WERE COLD, HER FINGERS WERE COLD. SHE TUCKED her hands in her pockets and kept walking, brushed by evergreens which dumped the burden of their boughs and spattered wet snow onto the melting crust.
It was a beautiful morning. It wasn’t golden anymore. She’d walked through that angle of the sun. But it was a shining morning, still. Glistening white, the sun gleamed in snow-melt off tall branches. It was the kind of morning that would lead to glossy melt by afternoon, and a freezing icy crust again by night, in Brionne’s young experience. The snow tomorrow morning would crunch underfoot and make hollow shells where footprints were— and you’d slip walking around the edges of the house where the run-off made thick ice. She knew. She loved the snow.
And when the kids of Tarmin village gained permission to go outside the walls it had always been with riders all about, but Tarmin wasn’t afraid of goblin cats. Tarmin folk and riders both went out to skate on the mountain lake, and Tarmin children, when the riders were near, went out to build snow forts and sometimes, especially if you were lovey with boys, just to walk to the Rim and see the valley, with rider pairs to watch them.
It was scary being out on her own. But she wasn’t truly afraid. Her horse surely knew she was looking for it, her horse was only testing her in making her walk so far from the walls, and if there should be a goblin cat, her horse would never let it come close to her. If there was a nest of willy-wisps, her horse would hear her call and come to her rescue, if she couldn’t, as a rider could, drive them away simply by imaging as loudly as she could.
I’m here, she called to her horse, not with her voice, but the way the riders spoke, the pictures you made in your mind.
And there came… oh, so suddenly you’d never know it had happened… the view of a girl in a red coat, with a blue scarf—of course that was herself. Of course it was. And sometimes, the riders said, you could get that kind of image from willy-wisps, but it didn’t feel scary like willy-wisps, it felt…
… so, so lonely.
She pushed aside a branch to pass between two trees, and suddenly was sure where she was going, so sure she half-ran the next wooded slope, arrived at a clear space in the woods, and in that clear space the sun fell, and in that sunlight… the most beautiful horse, its mane so thick and long it cascaded down its black shoulder, and all the clearing touched by sun that made its coat shine like silk.
Her horse regarded her with one forelock-obscured eye, dipped its head and pawed the snow anxiously before it took a tentative step forward, its three-hooved foot taking ever-so-light a step before Brionne dared commit herself.
“Are you mine?” she asked, and went on, breathlessly, feeling a little foolish to be talking with no human to hear. “My name’s Brionne. I’m thirteen. I live in Tarmin village. I heard you last night. What’s your name?”
Another step.
“I’m not afraid, you know. I talk with the riders all the time. I talk with their horses. There’s Quickfoot and Flicker and…”
A third step. A fourth. Brionne forgot everything, every word.
The horse stretched out its neck and Brionne quickly pulled her glove off and held out her hand… felt the chill of the air on her bare skin, saw the horse wrinkle its black nose and bare its teeth. The center ones were large and square and yellowed—jarringly real—out of time with this white glisten of morning. The corner ones were longer and sharp; and for a moment staring at them she doubted her safety—but she stayed still when the horse’s nose approached her outstretched hand.
The velvet black lip came down as it reached her fingers. She laughed shakily as she felt the hot, moist breath puff over her hand, she touched the delicately molded softness of the horse’s nostrils as it breathed in her scent.
Another step, hers or the horse’s, or maybe it was both, and she could touch with her fingertips its long forelock. Another step, and she could run her fingers through that incredible long mane and put her arm about the horse’s neck and shoulder, and hug it tight. Its mane was like finest, softest, floatiest wool against her cheek, stirring with any wind. Its winter coat was warm and silky. She let go a shaky sigh, feeling shivery just feeling it.
She knew the horse should tell her its secret name then. “Brionne,” she said, thinking about herself, the way her horse had, imaging
Then she couldn’t see the woods around her. She saw only
Of a sudden Flicker’s hindquarters buckled and she sat down hard and fast, knocked a post askew with her rump, and Tara dropped the pan she was carrying, hot water all down her leg, and ran to Flicker, flung herself onto her knees on the wet straw and put her arms about Flicker’s neck.
There was no more
Tara shook, holding to her, pillowing her head against Flicker’s back. Flicker shifted a little, matter-of-factly seeking a more comfortable position for her forelegs, and Vadim and Chad talked to each other in human words, quietly relieved, wondering if they should try to get Flicker up again.
Tara overheard and thought < Flicker lying down.> Flicker’s legs were tired, and if her legs were too weak and went to sleep under her and they had to bodily lift her, fine, they had the gear—they could do that; and Flicker had moved her forelegs on her own. That was a good sign. Only let Flicker stay down as long as she seemed to need to.
She thought of
g attention to such small irritants, and that was a good sign, too.
Tara just stayed where she was, didn’t want to move, put her head down against Flicker’s ribs and lay there, heart pounding so loud she could hear it, then slowing as she went drifting instantly close to sleep.
Didn’t feel the terror now. Just sleepy. Just tired. Just aching.
Just loved, by friends around her. And sleep was very easy.
Clouds billowed out of the high smokestacks—each of the six of them with its own color and stench. The smoke, black and yellow, was thick enough to create an impression of permanent storm hanging above the town and its environs. Most of the foulness went above and beyond Anveney, but the stinking clouds passing overhead still rained on the town a kind of gritty soot and a yellow, powdery dust that an ignorant rider feared wasn’t only sulfur, although sulfur was certainly one of the taints on the wind.
That rain of ash coated the walls and roofs and buildings in a runny multiplicity of stains. Soot gritted and cracked underfoot, and you sneezed the stuff out once your nose and lungs had had enough. Anveney buildings near the edge wanted repair, not just paint, like Shamesey slum buildings, but essential repair to the ravages of weather and listless years. Shutters hung atilt on upper floors, excrescent rooms overshadowing the walks were propped from below with timbers and, sagging further, with mere boards, at all angles. Porches on upper levels likewise sagged, suspended by chains and cables, a supported slum so bizarrely contrived that whole buildings must rock to the winter gales.
When folk had once built these dwellings, the main street, at least, had had paving stones, limestone quarried north of Anveney. The last of them had not quite sunk beneath the mire; and the filth that swam atop made slick spots in the road where water gathered in rainbow puddles.
The poor of Anveney town mined, that was the system. The ones on the streets were the discarded, the jobless destitute, the old, the crippled, the sick, who sat about on doorsteps—