Rider at the Gate
Page 22
Then—fool, he thought, remembering in the general haze of his thoughts that he’d bought a slicker—he slung the two-pack around to get at it, and had to take his gloves off.
The slicker was one of those new plastic things that didn’t hold body heat worth a damn, but he hadn’t wanted to carry the weight of canvas, especially on the climb they faced; and the thin plastic at least kept you dry, life and death in the cold seasons, when a soaking and a cold wind could freeze a man faster than he could make a shelter. Cassivey’s man had sworn it was tough—it could double as a ground sheet, and kept you drier than canvas.
If it wasn’t flapping and cracking in the gale. If your fingers didn’t freeze, finding the catches.
He had to drop the rest of the stuff to wrestle it as it snapped and fluttered in the wind, threatening escape from his numbed fingers, but he fastened latches one after the other and held it fast. It smelled worse than Anveney smokestacks, even in the gusting wind, but between that and the coat and the sweater and all, he had to own it kept the wind out. He felt warmer.
He put his gloves back on, gathered up his gear again, took the weight and walked all the way up to the top of the next hill before he ran out of breath and had to stand there leaning on the rifle and gasping and coughing.
But when he cleared the cold-weather tearing from his eyes, he saw clumps of grass around him, sparse, twisted, and brown with the season. He’d almost reached the junction with the boundary road. He was that close.
A flash of lightning blazed through his headache, blinding him, making white edges on the rocks; immediately the thunder crashed around him, total environment, deafening, pain ricocheting inside his temples and behind his eyes.
Then the rain hit in earnest, a deluge so thick it made a vapor on the blowing wind. Rain pooled in the brim of his hat and made an intermittent waterfall off the edge. He kept moving, tightening his scarf about his neck to keep the water from going down his collar. His knees were soaked below the slicker. His feet were beginning to be soaked through despite the oil coating he maintained on his boots, and the last feeling in them was going—no help at all to his balance.
Then
The whole universe opened up, a sense of location, a map of relationship to the whole landscape, and he looked uphill through the veil of rain and twilight. A dark shape was trotting toward him, brisk, angry, shaking itself as it came.
He didn’t sit down. He wanted to collapse right there in the road, his legs were so weak—but he’d only have to get up again, and be all over mud.
Burn stopped alongside him. He leaned against Burn’s rain-slick shoulder, feeling its fever-warmth against his face, with the cold rain coming down on them—stood there, Burn smelling him over and snorting in disgust, finding
Burn was warm. Burn was a windbreak. Burn was solid. Most of all, his sense of the whole world was back. Burn didn’t ask how he’d hit his head. Burn wasn’t curious about done-things, just possibly-to-do things, and if Burn’s rider was hurting, Burn was mad at the hurt and wanted it to go away. Burn wanted
He was too sick to argue. He just wanted up on Burn’s safe back and the two of them away from here and under shelter of some kind, and he didn’t think he could make the jump up—knew he couldn’t, with the two-pack. He slung the weight over Burn’s withers, wishing Burn not to object and still figuring to have an argument, with Burn in that negative mood, figuring possibly to be left in the roadway in the rain,
Burn didn’t sulk at all about the pack. Burn even dropped a leg to make it easier for a wobbly rider… but Burn’s rider couldn’t make it that way. He wanted Burn square on his feet again, and (the arm with the rifle all the way over Burn’s withers and probably jabbing him in God-knew-what places) he couldn’t do more than jump for it and land belly-down like a kid. He slithered a leg over with no grace at all, trying not to hit Burn again with the rifle barrel or knock the pack off Burn’s shoulders—he caught it, squared it, pinned it with a knee and shakily tucked the slicker about him, wet knees and all, Burn standing still as a rock the while, for which he was very grateful.
Burn slowly started moving, testing his rider’s balance. Burn’s heat reached the insides of his legs, traveling upward under the slicker, wonderful, wonderful warmth. He could hug the slicker around him and hope for the warmth below to meet the lesser warmth he’d saved in his upper body, if he could stay upright so long.
He shivered, waiting for that to happen. His legs jerking in spasm bothered Burn, whose thoughts on the matter weren’t coherent, something like
Burn figured it out, though, worried about it, and got mad, imaging
< Rider-stone, > Guil insisted, because there was a shelter where this road joined the boundary road. Intersections were places you could always look for shelter, and where there was shelter of any kind, riders set up a marker, be it wood or stone, in this otherwise desolate land, to carve or scratch over with messages to riders who came on the same road.
Burn agreed, finally, while the rain spattered about them and gullied down the hills. Burn had been waiting for him in that shelter, in a < barren, bad place, > and had only come after him when the weather turned… he already saw the refuge Burn was taking him to,
Didn’t have to say things out loud for Burn. Damn lot smarter than townsmen, Guil thought muzzily. Friendlier than bank-women.
But at least the ground cover that held out grew more frequent.
* * *
Chapter xiii
« ^ »
THERE WAS DAMP IN THE AIR, DAMP WHICH IN THIS UNEASY SEASON could be melting snow—or could herald another storm. The clouds which had in midafternoon wreathed the summit of Rogers Peak had moved on; and the departing sun, long slipped behind the mountains, had left a pink glow over the snowy rooftops and blued shadows along the snow-banked walls. Cookfires spread an upward smudge on the snow-blanketed evening, and the direction of that smoke said quiet winds, change pending.
“Early winter,” Tara said, on the porch of the rider quarters where, the light being better and the wind being still, she’d pulled the table outside, and she and Vadim diced potatoes for their common supper. She hashed one to bits and lost three pieces overside onto the porch. “Damn.” It wasn’t a good score she was keeping.
“I can finish,” Vadim said. “Take it easy, Tara. Go sit down.”
“I’m fine.”
“I know you’re fine. You need your fingers.”
It made her mad. It shouldn’t. She knew it shouldn’t. She chopped away, hack
ing at the job, trying for self-control. The horses were out of range, collectively, in the den. Flicker was ‘taking it easy.’ Flicker was sore as hell, and had earned her rest and care, having saved both their necks.
The knife slipped. She swore, sucked at a nicked finger.
“Tara, for God’s sake—”
She evaded Vadim’s attempt to see it, or to hold her, kept sucking at it. The taste of blood somehow satisfied the gnawing unease. It was real harm. You could taste it, smell it, feel it, you didn’t have to imagine it. She stood there as Vadim, with misgivings evident on his face, set back to work. For a moment, inside, the world was white. White was everywhere and her heart was pounding.
“Trust you with knives,” Vadim muttered. “I told you—”
She snapped, “I thought Barry and Llew would have started back. They ought to have started back.”
Vadim didn’t look up. A single peeling spiraled down from a potato in Vadim’s strong, capable hands. Finally Vadim said, “They’re big boys. They’ll manage the same as you did. If there’s something out there, they have as good a chance as you did. More. There’s two of them.”
“Bunch of skittery townsmen on their hands,” she said in a low voice. “Oxen. God knows what they’d do. The townsmen damn sure don’t know. There’s that wrecked truck out there. The damn convoy could have told us. Aby could have told us.”
“They phoned.”
“From Shamesey! They let us sit here—”
“They were just four riders, that’s a big convoy, and the horses were already under attack: truck transmitters would have sent them sky high and attracted the trouble to them. God knows what else. Aby did right.”
“They could have tried somewhere on that road!”
“It might have followed them. They couldn’t lead it to a town, and it’d go straight for a transmitter. That’s thousands of people down there. If it fixed on Shamesey—they just couldn’t risk it, Tara. At least they didn’t lead it here.”
“Well, it came here, didn’t it? God, she let us deliver a work crew out there, she let us leave Barry and Llew out there—”
“The rogue could have been anywhere on the mountain. You don’t know it was ever even near you.”
“The hell.”
“You don’t know. Unless you saw it next to you, you don’t know.”
“Well, how do you know, either? You never dealt with one. You didn’t feel what I felt out there. You didn’t even know it was out there until I got to the gate, so tell me who was close to it!”
“I don’t know,” Vadim confessed, concentrating on the potatoes, and she hadn’t meant to raise her voice. Or to say what she said. She was embarrassed.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered.
“No offense. I wasn’t out there.”
“It scared me,” she said—stupid, obvious admission she wouldn’t have made, except she regretted going at Vadim like that. “I’m still spooked.”
“Yeah,” Vadim said, “no blame from me. I’m only sorry I didn’t hear it.”
“Believe me. You aren’t sorry.”
The sending had fallen back before she got to the gate. He’d heard it only from her memory—and she didn’t want to go spreading it, recreating it, carrying it like a contagion in the camp.
Potatoes went in pieces. She was still mad. She couldn’t say why. Every nerve was raw-ended. She couldn’t stand still. She didn’t want to go down to the den, near the horses, but Flicker didn’t understand the reason for that reluctance, Flicker needed her, and she had to go down and rub down Flicker’s sore legs and try to keep a cover on her anxiousness. She’d rather peel potatoes, only she couldn’t do that right, either.
“You didn’t get any kind of shape on it,” Vadim said with a look under the brow. It was a question. Three times now, it was the same damned question. “You still don’t know if it had a rider.”
“I didn’t get any shape,” she said—snapped, and didn’t mean to. “Flicker was too strong. I told you. I couldn’t reach past her.” She’d said that over and over. But she hadn’t said, and she did say, “Truth is, I didn’t ever think of it.”
“Under the circumstances,” Vadim said. “Yeah. No question.”
Another potato went to bits under her knife. She didn’t look up. Vadim said, “Just thank God Flicker is a noisy sod. She kept it out. Whatever it was, she kept it clear of us, if it ever did come close last night.”
Come up to the walls? She hadn’t thought about that, either: her impression of distance and location of the danger behind her at the last had been so absolute she hadn’t questioned it. She’d feared it— at the gate. But everything had threatened her, then.
And with Flicker down, trying to get Flicker’s mind off it—she hadn’t had time for questions.
But she’d had to call and call for Vadim’s attention. Pound at the gate, while no one in the camp or the village was aware of the danger—God, for the same reason they wouldn’t have heard the rogue—because Flicker hadn’t relayed anything. Flicker had shut everybody near her down cold, sending
“Flicker shut us out,” she said. “You couldn’t hear it, either.”
“The thought crossed my mind,” Vadim said. “Flicker could have blocked most anything from us in the den with her. The village didn’t spook, at least—so it didn’t come closer or it was quiet except for someone listening for it. But there’s no point looking for tracks. The snow didn’t stop till dawn.”
That was true.
“Hell,” she said.
“If it had a rider,” Vadim said.
The whole conversation was sending chills down her nerves. She didn’t know who’d started it. Vadim was camp-boss. It was his job to find out things. He was doing that. He’d already reported to the marshal and the mayor what she’d encountered in the woods. The marshal said don’t tell the town anything: the marshal and the mayor were afraid of panic and had kept the phone call quiet. But she couldn’t fill in more detail than she’d given. “I don’t think so,” she said. “No.”
“But you never did see it. Never did even imagine seeing it.”
“I’m not one of the kids,” she said, again too sharply. She was disquieted by the thought of touching anything that wild, that unstable. It hadn’t gotten past Flicker’s determination. But a nighthorse was the most powerful thing on the planet.
A nighthorse was… far and away the most powerful thing.
“Could be one of the wild ones,” she said. “A fall, a fever.”
“And it could be anywhere in the hills,” Vadim said.
“It was here, I felt it. It was behind me. I know where it was. No, it didn’t come to the gate. I was scared, was all.”
She remembered
“The wild ones will go down to lowland pastures any day now,” she said. “If there should be something with that band—maybe it’ll go down, too. Or maybe it’ll follow.”
“They’d try to drive it off. They’ll kill it if they can. They won’t let it follow them.”
She didn’t think Vadim knew any more than she did—what the wild ones might do or be able to do against a threat like that. Vadim had grown up on Rogers Peak, born to Tarmin; she’d been a free rider, but only on Darwin Peak, ranging between Darwin settlements, and they were both guessing, she knew for a fact. The long riders—they told such stories, around safe firesides. That was collectively all they
knew.
“It’d go for people,” she said. “That’s what they say. I don’t know if that’s always true, but, God, if it does, there’s all the villages around the loop, besides Barry and Llew out there in that damn road camp. —Vadim, —”
“You made it in. They can make it in.”
“I was lucky!”
“You make your luck. If you heard it, they heard it, and they’ll take precautions.”
“Fine. Fine. But what if it’s smarter next time? What if the thing shows up on—”
A bell rang—the one at the village side of the Little Gate. Some villager was coming to request something of the riders, God knew what, maybe another trek out to the road crew. Maybe the marshal with worse news—maybe with a notion the weather was going to turn. She hadn’t looked at the glass since noon.
She watched as the blacksmith passed through the gate and shut it. His name was Andy Goss. His teenaged sons trailed him as he made a straight line for the porch where they stood. It sure didn’t look like a delivery.
“You seen my daughter?” the blacksmith asked, coming up out of breath.
“Not since morning,” Vadim said. And Tara remembered Brionne Goss coming into the den this morning—the kid never had understood No or Don’t or Leave my horse alone. Wonder that some horse hadn’t bitten hell out of her. Then let the father howl.
But not since morning—
“For what?” the blacksmith asked, still hard-breathing, sweating despite the cold.
“She brought a biscuit for the horses. Wanted to talk. We said it wasn’t a good time. She left.”
“Then where’d she go?” The blacksmith was angry. “We got the whole village searching, door to door. When was she here?”
The outside gate, Tara thought with a chill. The spook in the woods. The kid’s hanging about the horses… “Crack of dawn.” It was approaching twilight. “You’ve searched the village? You’ve searched all the village?”
“Everywhere.”