Rider at the Gate

by C. J. Cherryh

  And there were the predatory disinclined, who, solitary or in groups, wandered the streets. Guil eyed a handful of underagers watching him just too keenly, gangling youths with skin in which soot seemed deeper than the reach of soap, eyes that tracked coldly, and stared in cold estimation at a rider walking down their street.

  Guil paid steady attention to them, keenly aware of the silence of the ambient that robbed him of warnings, and kept walking, refusing to cross to the other side of the street.

  He walked past, turning his head to glare at them. But he couldn’t hear, once he’d passed. He listened with his ears—warned by no more than a foot moving, spun in the very instant a rock aimed at his back hit his arm. He stared after the fleeing culprits with an impulse which would have given bystanders nightmares if Burn had been with him, but Burn wasn’t.

  They hadn’t stayed, all the same. A few other watchers crossed the street out of his path as he walked on, maybe reading his mood from other signs.

  Hate lived here; despair; and muddle-headed confusion. He saw it in the faces of the old;—he saw it in the faces of midtown children, cleaner than their slum-side counterparts, but many, many of them whiter than soap could make them. They threw no stones. They only stared, listless and bruised about the eyes.

  The preachers said their state was holy and his own was damnation. Himself, he inhaled as little as he could of townsmen paradise and wished for rain to wash the air clean.

  If one of them had ever come to a rider and begged—if one had come to Aby—if one of them had ever just hopped a ride with a truck—but none of them that he knew had ever asked. Anveney folk centered all their hopes on the mines, the metals, the mills; they depended like parasites from the moneyed monster Anveney was. It shook them off and they sank in the mud and died—all the while their faith so feared the intrusion of another, alien thought into their minds they’d die before they worked with a horse.

  And by what he knew, they equally feared the uncertainties of a rider’s life—meaning hunting for their supper. Anveney folk might have no supper. But they seemed reassured that they were sure they would have no supper.

  They suffered no surprises. The poison above the town did make spectacular sunsets… that was all you could say for it; but Guil doubted they appreciated the colors above their gray, sooted walls. He’d touched enough Anveney minds for a lifetime, among those drivers who regularly came back to this town when they had other choices. He’d tried to penetrate their sullen, argumentative insistence on certainties. They afflicted him the same way dire illness did.

  He’d felt an irrational fear ever since he’d passed the guarded town gates, first that the walls were closing in and then that the successive concentric rows of buildings were shifting and entrapping him. Even when the buildings became wider spaced that anxiety persisted, on the broadening way down which, if it were Shamesey, the convoys would come, assembled in the town square with excitement and honking of horns and cheers of passers-by.

  In Anveney, depend on it as one depended there were rich townsmen at the heart of everything, there was a town square, but to his borrowed memory it was all official buildings and rich houses with sealed windows, while convoys assembled and onloaded and offloaded at warehouses outside the town wall, out by the tailings-heaps.

  The buildings came in better repair as the road inclined uphill, the pavings mostly clear of muck. Here a shop stood open-doored, with moderate traffic of buyers, and there, the smell of bread from a bakery wafted out locally stronger than the general stink of the valley air. The bakery stood next a house with bright red doorposts and a red and blue door, a level porch with the rail intact and iron bars on the windows. Touches of color became riot further down the street; red beams with blue trim at the corners of neat yellow and white buildings, a carving of flowers on a wall inset—they all had a dusting of soot, and the flowers were black-edged. But the colors were cheerful.

  The folk who walked here (more idle folk than in the lower town) wore townsmen’s long brown coats and broad, flat hats, men and women with woolen trouser hems innocent of soot. Children waddled about like stuffed dolls in overcoats on this nippish day, children with round scrubbed faces, more color in their cheeks than in the poorer part of town—no few masked in gauze, leaving only the eyes exposed. They stood and gawked at the sight of a rider walking down the street. Their elders stared, too, and drew the children away.

  He’d reached town center, where he was sure the bank must be, an open square with all too many silent minds and staring eyes for his liking, a marketplace not like friendly village markets, with their open stalls where riders sometimes came to deal and rub shoulders with townsmen, but shops with most of the goods indoors, requiring the buyer to commit himself and go inside. The nature of the buildings gave him no cue what business they did.

  A woman passed near him, hatted and coated into shapelessness. “I’m looking for the bank,” he said to her, and she evaded him and his question with a brisk thumping of thick heels down the walk.

  He suffered a flare of anger, and half-smothered it before he remembered that Burn wasn’t there to spread it around the area—but he couldn’t hear a damned thing, either, not cues, not intentions, not directions to where money changed hands.

  A merchant in thick sweaters was tending his out-front display goods, offering them to passers-by, woolens, as happened—fine knit-work in muted colors; and, offered inside (a sudden realization of the logic of such indoor shops), they’d smell better. He thought if the prices were reasonable, if he had money left after finding a gun, he might come back and buy one of those warm sweaters.

  In that case, the man could damned well direct him. “The bank,” Guil said, raising his voice to be sure he couldn’t easily be ignored. “Sir, I’m looking for the bank.”

  A scowl, as the man arranged a sweater on a cardboard cutout of a man. A reluctant nod across the square to buildings on the other side. “Bank,” the man said. That was all.

  “Thanks,” Guil muttered, jammed his hands deeper into his pockets and walked across the square, past waddling, gauze-masked children and clusters of their glum elders who stopped their gossip to stare. God, he wanted out of this place.

  He couldn’t swear to what building the man had indicated. He thought the likeliest candidate for a repository of money was the important-looking building with the bars on the windows: it didn’t look to be selling anything, there being no displays, but there was writing on the windows and the door, and though he couldn’t read, he’d never known anybody to write on windows of a private house.

  The door was open, seeming to invite entry. So he walked in, onto a bare board floor, facing a grillwork, an armed guard, and a single young man at an undefended desk out front, while the rest of the employees sat at desks securely behind those formidable bars, which led one to wonder which ranked higher.

  “Is this the bank?” he asked the guard.

  “Seems so,” the guard said, looking him over. Then the young man at the desk, a thin, nervous fellow, said: “Help you, rider?”

  That was the most politeness he’d had in Anveney. He walked over to the desk, folded his arms, said, dubiously, “They say I can draw out money here I put in at Shamesey.”

  “Yes, sir. If you’ve the account number and proper identification.”

  You could have blown him over with a light breeze. It couldn’t be this easy. “I know the number. I memorized it. My name’s Guil Stuart.”

  “You’re supposed to have a card. Do you have one?”

  Yes, they’d given him a card. He’d very few places to store such things. He fished in his inside breast pocket, not entirely sure he had it, but he found a little white paper, a little the worse for wear. He hoped they didn’t mind wrinkles.

  The desk man looked at it and said: “Seems in order. Would you step through to a desk, sir?”

  Sir, yet, from a townsman. Guil received the card back, decided he should keep it out, and as he followed the young man, heard a
click that put him in mind of guns. It made his nerves twitch. But the guard had only opened the bars and let him in to the area where the men and women sat at safer desks.

  “Help you?” the nearest woman asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and came and offered her the evidently important card. “I’d like to take out some money.”

  “Certainly,” the woman said as she looked at the card.

  “I put it in at Shamesey,” he said, still unconvinced the bank was going to work, or, more to the point, that it was going to work for a rider.

  “That’s fine, sir, the lines are up. No trouble at all.” A waved gesture at the chair beside her desk. “Sit down. I’ll be right back.”

  The woman got up, taking the card with her, which he didn’t like, and walked back to a door she closed behind her.

  Fancy townswoman. Nice clothes. Flimsy shoes that never saw mud. Behind that door was evidently the place of moneyed secrets and decisions, and Guil told himself that Aby had been right and this banking thing evidently did work. He’d personally had the feeling, putting hard-earned cash into the bank at Shamesey—a place where they took your money at an outside window, and you stood in the street—that he might be throwing it away. He’d never remotely thought that he’d be collecting it and Aby’d be gone.

  He sat and he sat, feeling awkward, waiting for the woman to come back, and wondering finally if there was trouble with the phone lines. Wondering if there was some glitch-up, maybe the condition of the card—a few rainstorms had blurred the ink in spots, and he hoped it hadn’t blurred anything important.

  Finally, finally, the woman came slinking back, not so crisp, far from cheerful, and not alone. A frowning older woman walked behind her, an older woman who scarcely got rid of her scowl as she extended—as Guil was getting up—the offer of a businesslike handshake.

  The young woman said: “This is Yolande Newater, Mr. Stuart, president of Anveney Trust.”

  “Ma’am,” Guil said, and suffered his hand to be shaken by a cold, boneless grip.

  “Mr. Stuart,” Newater began. “There seems to be an embarrassing problem.”

  His stomach went sour. He recovered his hand, folded his arms, tried to keep his temper under control. “That’s the card they gave me when I put the money in. That’s my name. I put money in at Shamesey. They said I could get it anywhere there was a bank and a telephone.”

  “Yes, sir. It should be. However.”

  He frowned, not understanding this ‘however.’ Frustration boiled up, maybe too fast. He tried to hold it in. “I put in five hundred sixty and change.”

  “Yes. I’m not disputing your word, Mr. Stuart, or the card. Shamesey Bank confirms your deposit. I just talked to them.”

  Amazing idea. Just talked to a bank in Shamesey. He’d never been the subject of a phone call before.

  He didn’t think he liked it, in present instance. “So where’s my money?”

  “I trust—” Newater looked intensely uncomfortable. “I trust you know the co-holder was reported deceased.”

  “Dead.” He didn’t like vague big words for plain nasty facts. “Dead. I know.”

  “There was a new employee at the counter,” Newater began. Then: “This is awkward.”

  “Just say it. You lost the money?”

  “We don’t lose money, Mr. Stuart. There was a legitimate claimant.”

  “What’s a claimant?”

  “A next of kin.”

  “Next of kin. Hawley Antrim?”

  “Mr. Antrim came in with identification. He was listed…” Newater held out her hand and the other woman, silent, standing by her desk, snatched up a paper and handed it to Newater. “Right here, as Ms. Dale’s next-of-kin.”

  She showed it to him, as if it was some special proof that cleared her. It was marks on paper, so far as he was concerned, and he wanted it out of his face.

  “Hawley Antrim walked into this place and said he wanted the money. He wanted the money?”

  “Either party can close the account. The right descended to Ms. Dale’s legitimate heir. Mr. Antrim was listed on the appropriate paper—”

  “The hell with any appropriate paper! He had no right!”

  “As Ms. Dale’s heir—”

  “He’s a cousin! I’m her partner!”

  “It’s not that way on the document, Mr. Stuart. There’s recourse through the court, if you care to sue Mr. Antrim, but that’s not our business. We have to disburse funds to the persons on the card.”

  “I gave you the damn card! My name’s on it, right?”

  “It is. But—”

  “Then give me the damn money!”

  The junior woman jumped. Newater frowned and said in a shaky voice, “Mr. Stuart… this is clearly an emotional situation. I ask you—”

  “I’m asking you for my damn money, woman. You had no call to give it to Hawley Antrim.”

  “Clearly the terms of your partnership weren’t defined in our records. I’m in no position to evaluate the deceased’s intentions in writing regarding another party. I can only follow what information Ms. Dale put on her card when she set up the account.”

  “Aby couldn’t read.”

  “She clearly answered questions. One of those questions involves heirs and succession in the account.”

  “She didn’t know about any succession. You and your words, they wouldn’t mean anything to her, she wouldn’t know what any succession was, any more than Hawley does. That son of a bitch just walked in here and said he wanted Aby’s money, wasn’t that what happened?”

  Newater said, aside, hurriedly, “Lila, call Peter.” And to him: “If you’ll just sit down, Mr. Stuart, —”

  As ‘Lila’ dived away like a scared cat, running for help: he had no trouble figuring, and he looked about to see where ‘Lila’ was going, jumped as Newater touched his sleeve—he wasn’t used to being touched. “Look,” he said. “Fair’s fair. We can argue later. I lost my gear. I need a couple hundred. You just give it to me, and we’ll talk when I come back. Minimum, I need a hundred. Rifle and shells.”

  “I beg pardon.”

  “I need a gun.”

  There was appalling, appalled silence from the woman. A shocked stare.

  “I am a rider, ma’am. I need the gun to go up to Tarmin. Give me the hundred and we settle it next spring.”

  “Mr. Stuart, the right to the money passed to her next of kin. I can show you right on the authorization card—”

  “Then some damned fool asked her the wrong question, that’s what I’m telling you. They asked her her relations, they didn’t ask her her partner who’s sharing the account!”

  “She had that option. She chose to list Mr. Antrim.”

  “She didn’t damn choose!” A hand grabbed his arm from behind. He turned around with the simultaneous knowledge it was a man, and he didn’t question whether the grip meant business: he assumed it did and he grabbed a shirt, twisted, stuck out a foot and the man hit the floor. Hard.

  The man, the door guard, went for the gun at his hip from that disadvantage and Guil didn’t stop to think—he kicked the hand before it had the gun clear, and the gun went spinning across the floor, the injured hand flew up to be cradled by the other hand, and townsmen were screaming and diving everywhere. Iron bars clanged and shut.

  “Hell,” Guil said, not pursuing anybody. The man with the sore hand was still lying on the ground, the barred doors were shut. Guil walked over where the gun was, figuring not to leave that in play, and the middle-aged fool scrambled up and tried to jump him from behind.

  He didn’t shoot the man. He didn’t pull his knife. He didn’t hit the man with the gun. He just dodged, the man being low to the ground in his dive, shoved him fairly gently as he passed, and the man hit the ground as all of a sudden a bell began to ring.

  The man probably realized now he’d been a fool. He sat up on the board floor looking foolish, there wasn’t a bank worker in sight except him, and Guil held the gun by the trig
ger-guard, so anybody could see he wasn’t holding it on the man.

  “I’d give you this back,” he said, “except I’m tired of hitting you. You want to open the door?”

  “Can’t,” the guard said sullenly.

  “Then get—”

  Runners thundered up to the open outside door, jammed up in the doorway and sorted themselves out with leveled rifles, aimed toward them through the bars.

  Guil dropped the gun from two fingers. Thump, onto the boards.

  Somebody, then, had to go outside and around back to get a key from Newater.

  Ignoring the leveled rifles, Guil rested his rump against a table and stared glumly at the guard, who was getting to his feet, encouraged by the firepower.

  Guil was mad. He was damned mad. He was scared, deep down. He had to get out to meet Burn by sundown, or Burn was going to get dangerously restless. He didn’t think the guard was going to back his story. And it didn’t look good from where he stood.

  “He’s got a knife,” the guard said.

  “You know,” Guil said disgustedly, “you’d be a lot smarter to wait to tell them that, until they find the key.”

  “Hand the knife out,” one of the uniformed police said.

  “You can come get it.”

  “I said hand it over.”

  Hell, he thought, he wouldn’t improve the ambient by arguing the point with four rifles aimed at him. He walked over to the bars and took out the knife, tossed it out through the bars.

  “He’s a borderer,” a cop said. “He’s got more than one.”

  “You want the other?” He bent and took it from his boot, tossed it out. “That’s all.”

  “Don’t believe it,” the cop said.

  Steps sounded fast behind him. He turned to side-step the fool rushing him, and something jabbed him in the back of the head. Stars exploded. The guard hit him, knocked him against the bars: hands grabbed him, held him.

  Second crack across the head. He jerked to get free and more hands than two men had grabbed him through the bars and held him there. The guard hit him in the gut.