Cloud's Rider

by C. J. Cherryh

  There would be for her with him—he knew he had a lot. His partner wouldn’t have died if he’d had the capacity to follow blindly where she’d wanted him to be.

  When the horses carried sex in the ambient, winter-long, thinking stopped in a rider shelter. Partnership and springtime partings were where thinking took up again—and as recent as Aby’s death was, and as recent as her partners’ deaths were, he thought it possible he’d ride with Tara at least for the summer to come.

  Soft lips ran down his neck, gentle hands down his back.

  —If there weren’t the question about the kids.

  —If she weren’t so hard-minded.

  Hands stopped. The mood crashed.

  “The girl’s a killer,” Tara said.

  That was true. The girl was responsible for everything that had happened at Tarmin—for Tara’s partners gnawed down to bone, still alive. That last was Tara’s image, not his, because Tara didn’t buckle and she didn’t give the kid any slack, not for the loss or the memory of it. She was damn tough.

  And maybe, having lost a partner himself, he needed Tata’s unforgiving mind the way he needed the winter cold to come between him and what he’d lost.

  She came around him, wrapped him tight, held him close.

  Said, into his ear, “The mountain doesn’t forgive, Guil, and I don’t. I wasn’t made that way.” Lips brushed his, gentle and kind, belying the words that passed them. “I told Danny everything— chance to go up, chance to go down—advice to stay. But they won’t let her die. And she should have. She should have, Guil. I’m not talking about justice.”

  The girl was still a danger, in Tara’s mind. It was possible in his experience that the girl would pull out of it—but it was equally possible she wouldn’t, and worse, that she’d go on living and that she’d be a problem around horses that might get worse instead of better. Tara could be entirely right.

  But if they just got through the winter they could ship the girl down to Anveney—if they had to, with the first truck convoy that came up here—where there weren’t horses, where there wasn’t anything alive, including grass, for that matter. It was hell on earth for a rider. But there the girl couldn’t affect anything. There she’d have no power. No means to draw another horse to its death.

  He thought when the storm passed and it looked like a good day he’d ride up the road as far as the first-stage shelter and see if the kids were there, as he hoped to God they’d stayed put. The weather certainly hadn’t invited them moving on.

  But, God, if they had decided to move, he hoped they’d taken straight out. Most of all he hoped that they weren’t up at midway when this hit.

  She punched him gently with her fist.

  “Dammit, Guil.” She propped herself on one elbow in the furs. Her shirt was open. The firelight glowed on her skin. “Told him every damn thing I could, Guil. I swear to you. —Better than anybody ever did for me! Don’t look at me like that.”

  “Somebody,” he said, tracing the line down the middle of her chest with a gentle finger, “should have done better for you.”

  She stared at him. Stared as if she were really mad.

  But the surface of her eyes glistened in the firelight. “My partners in Tarmin did everything they needed to do for me. I don’t need people to do things for me.”

  “I know you don’t,” he said.

  “All right, I’ll ride up and check on the next shelter. I’ll do it. I’ll go tonight!”

  “When the weather clears,” he said, “we’ll go.”

  “I don’t need you to go. It was my doing. I’ll handle it.”

  “When the weather clears,” he said. If Tara said a thing she meant it. Tarmin’s fall had done some brutal things to Tara Chang. Stripped away the veneer of camp life and cast her back to thoughts of her own growing up, in dealing with those kids. She hadn’t admitted that to him.

  But Darwin was a lot in her thoughts tonight when she thought about Tarmin or the kids.

  A hard life. Growing up alone in a world of miners and loggers with no advice, no one to trust.

  He’d been luckier. He’d had a partner from very, very young.

  Then lost her. And almost lost himself.

  Tara had pulled him back from that. But it was off the edge of one cliff and facing Tara’s own drop into darkness. She was maybe a couple of years younger than Aby or than he was—but she was harder than Aby, she was colder. She both anchored him from a slide he could have taken and bid fair to take him down another of her own.

  But he wasn’t going to become Tara Chang. He wasn’t going to shove Aby into the past and take on the hardened self-sufficiency that was Tara’s answer to loss. He’d rather bleed. And she was scared to. That was what it came down to.

  He drew her close, into his arms. He made love to her, personally, carefully, not the hard fast way that was Tara’s own urging. She was going to feel before he was done, and she could do what she liked about it later, but he wouldn’t be ignorable, he wouldn’t be someone whose name she’d forget if she rode away. Fact was, he wouldn’t forget hers, and he felt for her, and it seemed only fair.

  And whether she thought so or not he was going up there to the first-stage shelter to find those kids. He’d been flat on his back on painkiller and too damned compliant when vital decisions were being made on his behalf, and her patched-together notion of going up there now to check was only to satisfy him, and protect him from the situation she’d protected him from knowing about when it was in the cabin with them.

  That was the impression he got—though he could be wrong about her intentions. He’d see about that, too.

  His own way of grieving hadn’t been quiet or safe. He’d inspired a man to shoot him. Hers seemed to be ignoring the loss of her partners except for a burst of occasional anger. Seemed. That was the word.

  And he didn’t think so: having just been through what she was going through he didn’t believe it. It wasn’t easy to love him—and God knew Aby’d been patient of his faults. It might not be real damn easy to get through the barriers Tara Chang threw up.

  As now he felt the panic under him. He felt the sensations she was feeling the way she felt his—and most of all she wanted haste and satisfaction he wasn’t going to give her that fast or that cheaply. Not between the blankets. Not in letting her seal that shell around herself for the rest of her life.

  Liar, he said to her in his mind. And she bucked and screamed and hit him hard with her fist, forgetting he was the wounded one. She was instantly sorry and didn’t object to what he was doing, just— wanted him to hurry; but he didn’t give her up.

  He wasn’t her partner. But you knew a rider by certain things: he knew the woman that had taken care of that mare of hers when her own hands were hurting so badly from the cold she’d had tears in her eyes. How she’d interrupted grieving over her own hurts to stand in as his partner when many men of good sense would have hung back or turned and run.

  And by everything he’d learned about Tara Chang, he wasn’t going to give her up until she could tell him—in words, at which riders including himself didn’t generally excel—that she’d made up her mind to be as shut down as a rock forever.

  “Damn you!” she said, for what he was doing, not what he was thinking.

  Afterward she lay and shivered, and in her mind still was the firelight. And him.

  Then her lost partner. And him again.

  She had her hand on his arm, and could have pulled away, and didn’t. Just lay there, as he did, the two of them in the firelight. His horse, Burn, helpfully came over and sniffed them over, approving.

  That told him something, too. Burn didn’t like everyone.

  There was probably a glorious view from the turn next and higher, as the wind shifted into their faces again: all the peaks of the great Firgeberg Range were probably right there behind that veil of white, but all they met was wind that scoured what it hit. If they plummeted straight off the edge in their next snow-blinded steps it still wouldn’t give them a view—they’d just fall and fall, Danny said to himself, in white no different from the snow that veile
d the road.

  From a high Shamesey window he’d dreamed boyish dreams of the far crest of the world. From the safety of Shamesey walls he’d seen Rogers Peak send out its winter banner of white and thought it the greatest beauty in the mountains—his mountain, his horizon against the evening sky.

  Well, this was it. He was here. Best view he might ever have. And snow and the fading of daylight were all the view he had.

  One foot in front of the other—hand was numb, arm was numb, and Cloud was getting too far ahead of them, moving into blowing sleet that didn’t let up, up an increasingly sleet-gray road. Randy, walking near him, was dropping behind; Danny realized that in a distracted moment and turned his head, blinded by his scarf, to urge Randy to catch up.

  “Come on,” he yelled. “Keep with us.” He saw their strength giving out, finally, to pull that travois. They’d dumped all the non-essential supplies. Held on to the shotgun and most of the food. Couple of blankets. And Brionne. Randy had to carry himself—but he looked to be losing his battle against the wind.

  Randy might have answered his hail just now. Danny couldn’t entirely hear. His ears were aching to match the duller ache racketing around the walls of his skull. But Randy didn’t overtake them until Carlo stopped and beckoned and cursed and refused to go on until Randy trudged past them again.

  On that steeper grade, Randy struggled to keep walking. Feet skidded on snow-packed rubble as often as they gained upward. More than once the kid slipped to his knees and got back up in what had become an exercise of raw, desperate courage. Danny’s hand that held the left-side travois pole was going numb even through the gloves, and his running argument with Cloud about and had degenerated to a litany of calls on God as his feet slipped and his heart jumped—supposing the preachers’ Beast-hating God had a little concern to spare for a stranded and hellbound rider.

  Carlo had his feet go out from under him, wrenched the travois down and almost took Danny off his feet, and that was the way it went: slow going for a long, long distance as rubble fill bridged a rift in the mountain flank. Wind blew the ends of Cloud’s tail straight sideways below the point where muscle and bone had it tucked tight into Cloud’s rump.

  Then tail and horse alike faded into white ahead of them. Randy was momentarily a gray, ghostly figure and then gone, too.

  It was like walking into a wall. Ice particles stung exposed skin. They couldn’t see, and what Cloud sent made Danny sure Cloud couldn’t, either. By the end of the next switchback and the change of the wind from their flank to their backs Danny couldn’t feel his grip on the travois pole at all. His chest hurt, his head hurt, his lungs hurt, and the constant slipping and the scares it set into him didn’t help his labored breathing or his pounding, front-of-the-skull headache.

  Carlo was bearing up somehow, but Randy—

  Randy by now was walking on instinct, not mentally there, Danny was increasingly afraid. He watched Randy, who’d stopped when they had, wander off to the left and to the right again, averaging their course, but not holding a steady line. The thoughts that surfaced from the boy were increasingly erratic, things about home and and going somewhere Danny couldn’t figure.

  Cloud was struggling with the increasingly frequent idea of coming from the kid. , was Cloud’s opinion of villagers walking this road— describing the feature Cloud most despised on the creature Cloud most despised on the planet, adding and for villagers who confused his navigation.

  Foot slipped. Randy went momentarily to all fours and got up again, amid from Carlo, who surely knew the score. They couldn’t, Danny thought, afford another test in this gale with Randy already chilled—couldn’t just pile him on the travois in the open, either, if he was chilling. He kept looking for a tall rock, a snowbank, any place where he and Carlo could shelter Randy and stabilize the travois for long enough to pack Randy in the furs with his sister—if she wasn’t frozen.

  Randy lagged back by them. Danny turned his head and in the fuzzy side vision his frozen lashes and the edge of his scarf afforded him realized the boy was no longer trudging beside him and Carlo. He looked back, fighting the scarf and the wind for vision. Randy was standing still, slowly disappearing into a veil of white.

  “Randy!” Carlo yelled back at him. Carlo’s voice was mostly gone, too, but he yelled: “Randy, come on! Keep up, dammit, you lily-livered stupid kid!”

  It wasn’t exactly the encouragement Danny would have offered, but he guessed Carlo knew his brother, because Randy started walking, and as they went at a slower pace, caught up, and Carlo shoved at him one-handed as he passed, cursed him and made him madder.

  Couldn’t have the kid quit. They were—he’d tried to reestablish a time-sense—maybe an hour from the shelter and the end of this road. It was getting toward dark.

  Get the kid to a level spot, pack him on—he and Carlo could pull that weight.

  Couldn’t be that much longer. The shelter was supposed to be right at the crest, a broad truck pull-out, so that trucks in convoy from the High Loop could park and the drivers could sleep in them before or after that notorious steep. Villagers appreciative of the means by which their goods had moved provided soft bunks, even heated showers in the summer, Tara had said so. Tara had promised them—he could see the image she’d cast him.

  and away from this rocky face, which meant firewood available if they had to wait out a succession of storms.

  He had no feeling in his left hand. With his free right, he gave a furious wipe across his eyes to free his eyelashes of the accumulating ice—and in that moment Randy slipped on a runoff trace of ice and shot past him downhill.

  He dropped and grabbed the kid, and Randy’s weight spun him, the travois, and Carlo all to the left and onto the ice. Carlo—he thought it was Carlo—by a miracle or a dug-in boot-toe held onto the other pole of the travois, flat on the ice, and didn’t let them skid more than a body length further.

  Danny lay still with a gloved fistful of Randy’s sleeve and a second precarious grip on the side of the travois. For all he knew the rig might be only balanced on one pivot, ready to slide again if he moved.

  He really hadn’t been scared in the instant he’d grabbed Randy. Now a shudder went through him that passed to quaking shivers, a blinding acuteness of headache, and an inability to get his breath.

  He couldn’t let himself panic. Couldn’t. He’d saved Randy. His eyelashes had mostly frozen shut and he couldn’t judge where they were on the road or how close to the edge or how steep it was below them.

  “Just stay put,” he said to Randy, who was starting to struggle. “Catch your breath. Don’t move, dammit.”

  Cloud would realize their predicament. Cloud would give him vision if he waited. It wasn’t just iced rubble where Randy’s momentum had carried them. It was slick as glass. And Cloud was coming back now, worried, picking his way, fearfully imaging

  , he sent back, frightened for Cloud’s safety more than their own at the instant; he could see through Cloud’s eyes, but that warning wasn’t going to stop Cloud long from a rash approach if they didn’t move immediately to get out of their predicament.

  “What’s holding us?” he asked Carlo, and Carlo managed to say,

  “My foot. On the snow. On our right.”

  “Can you pull us?”

  “No! You’ll slide!”

  His brain had started working. He had both hands occupied at the moment—but at very worst he had a knife in his right boot, if he could grab it and use it fast enough to hold on the ice; but he didn’t want to do that if he had an alternative. He worked and found a little, little toehold for leverage. “Randy. You take hold of my arm. You crawl over me. Onto the travois. Over to Carlo.”

  “Can’t.” He could hardly understand the kid. “Can’t.”

  “Calm down. Grab my arm. Then the rifle—the strap’s solid around me. Just crawl right over my back.”

  The kid moved. Grabbed his arm—grabbed the rifle barrel and Danny pressed his face against the ice and hung on as the kid clambered over him. Everything shifted, slid sideways—the travois turned slowly in the
shift of weight and by God knew what effort of Carlo’s arms, angled him slowly toward the snowbank.

  Danny got a foot onto it and let Carlo drag him and Randy both to the snow, where he could get a knee under him and get up, and they could walk.

  Carlo had saved them, saved the damn travois and his sister—and he trudged uphill with Carlo, pulling the travois with Brionne and Randy to the snowy spot where Cloud waited for them.

  “Up.” Carlo hauled Randy up by one arm then and let him go. “Walk on the snow. Hear?”

  Randy tried, but the scare and the cold of the ice had taken all the shaky strength Randy had left. The kid was exhausted, trying to walk, but staggering left and right, knees shaking under him. Danny got a dizzy feeling and felt pain he thought was Randy’s.

  “We’re in real trouble,” Carlo gasped. “Aren’t we?”

  “Shelter’s going to be soon,” Danny said. “It’s got to be.”

  “Maybe it isn’t, you know?” There was a wobble in Carlo’s voice. “Maybe we got off the track somewhere.”

  “There isn’t anywhere we can get off. They cut the road out of the mountain, they shore it up with logs—there aren’t any side roads.”

  “You’ve never been up here!”

  “I’ve seen it, trust me that I’ve seen it.”

  “I saw what you saw!”

  “Don’t take it for granted.” A senior rider had said it to him once, when he was a week with his horse, and he hadn’t believed it then, but he fell back on it now as the only authority he had. “You don’t pick up the details I do. Tara told me plain enough what the road is.”

  “Maybe we ought to make a camp. We could find a place in the rocks—we’re not going to get snowed under in a blow like this.”