Rider at the Gate

by C. J. Cherryh

 

  For a moment the ambient stifled breath. Then Tara backed off the anger, drove it down to quiet, quiet, quiet.

  “We do what we can,” Guil said. He wasn’t good with words. He sent He sent

  She’d heard her village die. He’d not been on the mountain yet, the only way he could figure it. He didn’t know how she’d stood it.

  came back to him, just walling him out, all but blinding him. Burn threw his head and took small nips at Flicker’s shoulder until gave way to and

  “Her damn choice,” Tara muttered finally, no weakening of her anger, just better control.

  He rode thinking about that for a while, thinking he shouldn’t have given her the gun.

  “Don’t do any heroics,” he said. “My rifle may be able to take it—drop the horse and miss the kid. If the kid survives—best we can do.”

  Not damn easy, if it came at you—and it might, out of the trees at any moment. Aim low and hope you knew where the horse—

  A chill went through the ambient, as if a cloud had gone over the sun. He looked left; and Burn pricked his ears up and laid them flat again.

  The lump of snow among the trees—wasn’t a lump of snow. It was a roof, blown partially clear.

  Tara sent. She knew it inside and out. He heard the soft click as Tara drew the pistol. He became acutely aware of the rifle in his hand, where its balance was. They made a winding approach, through the outflung wall of a snowdrift, on the shelter’s lower side.

  Burn was smelling So was Flicker, he thought. But smelling something more, something confused, and upsetting.

  Smelled it all the way to the shelter.

  The door was clear. It had been opened. But there was nothing there. The place felt empty. There were tracks in the snow, both horse and rider—pointed-toed boots. Village boots. Drag of something in the snow, he wasn’t sure what.

  he thought and, rifle on his arm, slid down from Burn’s back. He walked up to the door. The latch-cord was out. He pulled it, pulled the door open.

  The place was a wreck. Pans on the floor, bed stripped, pottery broken. The place smelled of horse, smoke, burned food. Recent. The front of the mantel was smoked.

  The kid hadn’t known to open the flue. Or hadn’t thought of it until she had a cabin full of smoke.

  There were charred bones on the hearth. Small animal. He was almost certain—it was a small animal.

  He shut the door fast, figuring Tara had seen what he’d seen, smell and filth and all.

  Flicker shied from him. Burn was taking in scents, nostrils flared. The whole place reeked to their senses:

  He grabbed Burn’s mane, got up, and Burn wanted to go back, turned his head downhill. Burn was agitated, thinking for whatever crazed reason. Burn resisted the pressure of his knees, kept turning with him, a fit of refusal that wasn’t like Burn, a fear and a confusion that afflicted Flicker, too, until Tara got her headed around, and moving.

  Then Burn would go. was in Burn’s mind. And

  “Damn fool,” Guil muttered. Burn had almost thrown him on that last fit. He’d slid far enough he’d thought he was going off into a thicket. He gave Burn a thump behind the ribs, wanted if Burn had so much energy to waste. They were on the road Tara imaged as

  Where he imagined the truck had gone off.

  Tara straightened his road a small distance and thinned the trees and showed him the mountainside in her memory: a steep, badly slipped face of the mountain, a road crawling up a long, long curve that was a steep ascent and a hellish downhill, with all the mountain range spread out to see.

  Burn calmed until that hillside conformed to vague memory, and it resonated with and that nonsense. Burn was a smart horse—Burn remembered more than some horses; Burn put things together in spooky ways sometimes, thinking in nighthorse fashion through associations that had to do with smell and mating and group-making that didn’t always find an echo in a human brain. Burn was right now on one of those autumn-hazed treks through the associations in his mind—probably, Guil thought, Burn was disturbed by the ambient smells. A smart horse felt the land-sense in ways that had nothing to do with the look of a place, and this place resonated in the memory he’d used all the way up here.

  Burn was thinking, and and with somewhere in the mix. Burn was traveling with that ready-to-move feeling in his stride that made a rider aware how fast the fool could change direction.

  “What’s he smelling?” Tara asked.

  “Horse,” he said. He wasn’t hearing Flicker that clearly—or hadn’t been. Flicker was Flicker wanted and began to try to turn, except for Tara’s pressure on one side and another. Burn was going willingly ahead. Flicker was confused and increasingly distressed as Burn picked up the pace. Trees were thinning out. They crossed a wide clearance, a place where three roads met, the one they were on, the one down the mountain, and the road Aby’d died on.

  Burn went toward that place of open sky, wide vistas.

  “Guil, that road’s going to be hell up there, bad drifts. That kid’s coming back here. This is where she’s been coming to. Maybe we ought to fall back, just sit and wait. She’s not going up that road much—”

  he was getting from Burn, and then a feeling of so intense he couldn’t breathe for a moment, couldn’t think, because it wasn’t just And he kept going.

  Up and up the road. Into the daylight.

  “Guil!” he heard someone shouting at him.

  Burn was thinking, and and back to all while traveling with that light-footed gait that made a rider know Burn could dive any direction.

  A horse arrived beside him. It roused no alarm. But for a moment his vision was

  Then he saw—

  He saw

  “No!” a woman yelled, and and charged in front of him. A horse shouldered Burn and Burn reared.

  He dismounted—no recourse but that as Burn recovered his balance. He landed on his feet and in that split second of landing the vision of was

  Tara was on foot—Tara was beside him. A gun went off next his ear, rattled his brain, and then was coming at them, coming from a human, female mind, wanting

  Moon. He had no doubt. Burn, beside him, knew. Burn sent out a troubled keep-away and Moon stopped. The blonde kid urged Moon forward with and but Moon stopped again.

  He only then remembered the rifle in his hand.

  “Give me the pistol!” he snapped at Tara and held out his hand.

  It was he heard her calling to him, he saw

 

  He grabbed the pistol that arrived in his hand. He let go the rifle. He walked forward,
 
  <—making love.>

  It was a hurt horse. A thirteen-year-old kid with a wish, on a horse in mortal pain. He saw it for a blink, but he said to Moon, He didn’t see the cuts and the tangles and the blood.

  He said, “Good girl, don’t spook on me, you know me, it’s it’s
just Guil. Let Let her get off. That’s right—I’ll help you. Come on.”

  He reached out his right hand, for the girl’s hand that reached to him.

  He fired with the left, the gun right under Moon’s jaw.

  He grabbed the icy fingers, snatched the girl against his chest and spun away as Moon went down—he held the kid crushed against him, blind to anything but the mountain—he couldn’t see, either, for the blur of ice in his eyes, couldn’t feel the ambient for the sudden silence he’d made, the murder of what he loved.

  He knew Tara was back there, Burn was there. He began to hear. He couldn’t see until he blinked and a shattered sky and a shattered mountainside whipped into order. The girl was in his arms, live weight, but there was utter silence in the ambient and his ears were still ringing. He only saw Tara with the rifle, Tara sighting toward him—

  Second blink. He began to feel the ambient again.

 

 

  His foot skidded on ice. His balance was shaky. He saw the edge of the road under his right side and veered away from it. He set the girl on her feet, pulled the blanket about her, but she just stood staring into nothing, blue eyes in a tangled blonde mane. He shut her fist over the ends of the blanket, took her by the other hand and walked
 

  Something slammed into him, spun him half about in shock, about the time he heard the crack of the rifle echo off the mountain. He kept turning, trying to keep his balance, not knowing where he’d fall—

  The rifle-crack rang off the mountain from behind them. Tara spun toward the sound and dropped to one knee, with the far figure of rifleman and horse the only anomaly in her sight of woods and snow. She fired on instinct at the distant figure, pumped another round, and looked for her target—

  But there was only a horse. And the darkness of a body lying by it.

  The man didn’t get up. She stayed still, rifle trained on that target until her leg began to shake under her. washed up at them; but Flicker imaged and at that distant horse—Flicker took out after it, ignoring her frightened

  Burn imaged Burn was hesitating back and forth, sending snow flying—

  She didn’t want to shoot it. Didn’t want to. She wanted

  But it wouldn’t. Damn it. It wouldn’t. She put three shots near it. She didn’t want another rogue on the mountain; but then Flicker charged into her line of fire, and she couldn’t shoot. Burn followed, balance tipped, wanting

  She staggered to her feet, gasping for breath that wouldn’t come, Flicker and Burn both going for the horse.

  At the last moment it turned and ran back down the way it had come; Flicker and Burn stopped in their charge, circled back a little and maintained a threatening posture.

  That horse’s retreat told her the man she’d shot was dead. That Flicker and Burn both stopped told her the horse was reacting as it should, in ordinary fear and confusion. It hesitated in its retreat, probably querying its master. Burn called out a challenge that echoed in the distance.

  Then it launched into a run, shaking its mane, going farther down the road. Nighthorses didn’t altogether understand death. The total silence of a mind confused them dreadfully—in which thought—

  She turned to see Guil getting up, leaning to one side, trying to stand. The girl just stood there, staring at nothing.

  She started running. She saw from Guil’s face he was in shock, even before the horses came running back to them, and she caught washing through the ambient.

  “Stay down,” she said to Guil, and made him sit. Burn sent out threat, and ready for but she didn’t admit guilt and she didn’t retreat: she started unfastening Guil’s coat, looking for damage, and Guil was coherent enough to wish

  She could feel the wound as if it was in her own side—felt entry and exit, as the numbness of impact gave way to that was going to be hell in another hour. Right now it was still a little numb.

  “It could be worse,” she said, and shoved his hands away. There was a fair amount of blood, but it didn’t look to have hit the gut: it had gone through muscle and it was swelling fast. Guil kept trying to get his knee under him, but she stuffed her scarf into his shirt around his middle and started wrapping it as tightly as she could.

  It helped the pain. She could feel it. He was going to want to get to the shelter back there and lie still a while. She answered his confused memory of the gunshot with

  “Kid get hit?” he asked in a thready voice.

  She cast a look at the girl who was still just standing there, holding the blanket. Staring at nothing. There was nothing in the ambient. Not from her.

  “Didn’t touch her. Hang on, all right. Don’t faint. All right?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and pulled his coat to and started getting his knees under him—the fool was going to get up, and he couldn’t stand; but he got the rifle and leaned on that before she could get her arm under his.

  Burn was right there, nosing him in the face, in the shoulder, anxious and about to knock him over. He swatted Burn weakly with his hand and wanted

  She had a wounded man on a mountain road bound and determined to pick up a girl who weighed most of what she did, and she didn’t give a flying damn if the girl stood there and froze.

  But he did. She left him to the wobbling assistance he could get from the rifle; she grabbed the kid herself and dragged her with them, with a wary eye toward the downhill road, in case she’d been mistaken about the man being dead, in the unlikelier case the horse had been mistaken.

  In the far distance she saw a group of riders coming up.

  she thought. She didn’t know who she’d shot down there. She hadn’t stopped to ask. Jonas was her saner guess. But it didn’t make sense.

  Guil stood beside her, leaning on the rifle, trying to reason out who it was, too, and coming up with no better answer:

  “Three of them,” she said. “Maybe it wasn’t Jonas down there, Guil.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. The ambient was confused and muddled with his thoughts. Things from downland. Things from the village. From a long time ago, maybe. The shock was catching up to him, and he found a snow-covered lump of rock to rest on, rifle in one hand, his elbow tight against his side.

  Burn came up close by him. Tara went and got the kid by the wrist, got the pistol from where it was lying in the snow, hauled the kid to the side of the road behind Guil and made her get down behind the rocks, out of the way of flying bullets.

  She kept the pistol in her hand as the riders kept coming. She didn’t need Guil’s recognition to know them. She had a clear image of and a notion of blowing them to hell if she didn’t like the answer to her questions.

  “Whoever shot you,” she said to Guil without taking her eyes off the riders, “I got him. Whoever it was—I got him. Guil.”

  Flicker moved in. Made a solid wall behind them, with Burn. A wall giving off to the oncoming riders.

  Guil put the rifle butt on his leg. Lowered it, slowly, and the three riders stopped a fair distance down the road.

  “Guil?” the shout came up. “Guil Stuart?”

  “Yeah,” Guil shouted back, and hurt from the shouting. “So what’s your story, Jonas? What’s the story? Does it say why Aby’s dead? Does it say why I shot Moon, Jonas? Does it say you’re a lying son of a bitch thief, Jonas? I know why you’re up here. I know what you’re after, and you don’t go up this road. You go to hell, Jonas!”

  “Hawley wants to ta
lk to you, Guil.”

  Burn wanted Burn was

  But Guil sent, Wanted and Tara held herself ready to grab Guil and haul him down behind the rock in the next instant, had her target picked, in Jonas Westman, but she kept the pistol at her side, while Flicker sent ready as Burn was, if they got the encouragement.

  “Who’s that I shot?” she yelled down at them.

  “Guy named Harper,” Jonas called up. “Nothing to do with us.”

  It was somebody Guil knew. A lot of confused memories hit the ambient, an old fight. Another mountainside. Another edge of the road. She didn’t believe it had nothing to do with present circumstances.

  She waited.

  She left Hawley to Guil. She still had her eye on the others.

  Guil waited. Kept the rifle generally aimed at Hawley, as Hawley came up within easy range.

  Then he brought it on target.

  Hawley stopped. Hawley looked scared. With reason. Ice had followed him up the slope and arrived beside him, the way Burn stayed by him. Ice was loyal.

  So had other things been.

  “Moon’s dead, Hawley. It was Moon gone rogue, you know that?”

  “No. I didn’t. I swear I didn’t, Guil. It couldn’t have. I felt it!”

  That, in the ambient, was the undeniable truth.

  But it was the truth as Hawley’d seen it.

  “You left Aby’s horse, Hawley, you left Moon hurt, you left her crazy. Moon maybe had a chance—she was a good horse, she never did a damn thing against the villages until she took up with that damned stupid kid, Hawley! You got yourself down that mountain and you left Moon on her own, the way you left Aby lying there for the spooks!”

  “I saw that horse go over!”

  That was the truth, too. He blinked, he at least considered a doubt of Hawley’s guilt. It was what Hawley had seen.

  But it wasn’t what he’d just faced up the hill. It wasn’t the truth lying there in the roadway, with a bullet in its brain.