Cloud's Rider

by C. J. Cherryh

  “There’s no place to camp!” He didn’t mean to attack. But he didn’t have breath to argue, and if Carlo wanted to quibble and object to the only advice he had they were in real trouble. “Shelter’s coming. Be patient.”

  “You’ve been saying that!”

  What came through Cloud wasn’t confidence. It was spooky-feeling, bite and kick.>

  he heard then.

  “Oh, my God,” Carlo said.

  “Easy,” Danny said.

  “It’s behind us! It’s that horse again!”

  “Calm down. It could be the kid. Could be he’s dreaming.”

  “It’s not coming from him! It’s followed us up here! It’s still behind us!” Carlo pointed back the way they’d come with an accuracy his own direction-sense echoed plain as plain. More, Cloud felt it,

  “No!” Danny let go the travois pole without warning to shove against Cloud’s chest and sent a strong

  “You said,” Carlo insisted in rising panic, as if he hadn’t heard. “You said it wouldn’t come up here—”

  He’d thought so. And as strongly as it had come—the image vanished on them.

  “It just wants help.” Randy was weaving in his tracks. “Maybe it could help us.”

  “No,” he said, more strongly than he intended. “Toss the rest of the supplies. Everything but the shotgun and the shells and the food we’re carrying. Food packets might stall it off. —Randy, you get on the travois.”

  “No,” Randy said, but Carlo was already jerking at the ties on the supplies.

  * * *

  Chapter 3

  Ť ^ ť

  The shutters banged and rattled and the flashing on the stovepipe on the barracks roof sang with a rising and falling note. All of Evergreen village was on the other side of the rider camp wall, and neither Ridley nor either of his two barracks mates, namely his wife and his daughter, could completely ignore that fact even in the quiet of the minds over there, a hundred meters isolated from the horses.

  They lived at the very top of the world—well, at least halfway up Rogers Peak, a very respectable mountain in itself, outlier to the towering Firgeberg. And at this top of the place they called home, the horses were in their warm den, the fire was crackling in the fireplace, and Ridley had his feet up, soles to the heat, doing a piece of leather stitching, and didn’t plan to budge out of the barracks tomorrow and maybe the day after that except to see to the horses.

  They could be the only three people on the planet when the wind settled in to blow like this. And he didn’t mind. Summer was full of hard work. Fall was long hunts and a last-minute flurry of activity stocking the winter shelters. It had been a hard autumn this year, a spooky, chancy autumn coming down to bad dreams and cold sweats in the night for no damned reason the last couple of weeks. Personally he was glad to see the advent of a good, hard, beginning-of-season storm.

  Now it was well-earned rest. Predators and prey alike spent more time in their burrows. Some dug deep as the hunger grew and went to sleep, to wake again when the world was new with spring growth and the old year was gone. Autumn was a blood-time, a death-time, hunters’ season, two-footed and otherwise. Autumn was for killing. Winter was for ease and a rider’s own concerns. And for love. There was that, too, passionate in every species that wasn’t numb to the rhythms of the world.

  But a lonely clangor started up in the fierceness of the gusts. The ringing of a distant bell disturbed the peace and kept up in that regular and erratic way that spoke of wind, not a human hand.

  The gate bell had come loose in the blow, was what had just happened, and Ridley could blame Serge, whose job, on the other side of Evergreen camp’s wall, was to guard and maintain the village gate, for not tying it down better—but he couldn’t quite blame Serge for not getting out and climbing after it while the wind was blowing the way it was.

  So there it was, Serge’s Fault, tolling a plaintive cadence in the violence of the storm, and they’d hear the damn thing all night. Pity the Santez and the Lasierre households, who lived nearest the gate, and pity the miner barracks and the logger’s hostel, which were nearer still.

  “The bell’s loose, papa,” Jennie said.

  “Noticed that,” he said.

  “Is it going to ring all night?”

  “I wouldn’t doubt. But I’m not going to climb up after it. Are you?”

  “No.” Jennie was eight and still played. Even runaway bells skittered out of her usually skittery thoughts. She sat on the braided rug and arranged her carved horses and her carved toy trucks. She had the trucks carry blocks for crates around the patterns of the braided rags and under the table legs and back again, until they could arrive at the wood-box, where she had laid an ambush of willy-wisps. That was the knot of horse fur she’d gotten from the sheddings bag and tucked beside the box.

  “So is Serge going to get it?” Thoughts had skittered back to the bell.

  “I don’t think so,” Ridley said to his offspring. “Serge doesn’t want to go climb the ladder, either, does he?”

  Supper was cooking. They had a winter deal, he and his partner Callie, the mother of the Offspring: meals cooked versus trips out to break the ice on the den’s water barrel—plus cleanup of said meal. He’d done the ice-breaking twice today, once at dawn before the blow had started, once before they tucked in for the evening, and Jennie had helped him with a hammer. So Callie cooked and he sat with his feet propped up.

  Jennie ran her convoy into ambush and turned a truck over. “They had a door come open,” Jennie announced happily. “Here’s the willy-wisps. There’s hundreds of ’em. Yum.”

  Gruesome child. Ridley kept putting the whipstitch border on what was going to be a jacket in another three weeks of spare-time work. Winter evenings were good for that, and a fancy jacket traded to a trucker come snowmelt was going to be worth, oh, maybe a tenth what that trucker was going to sell it for down in Anveney or Shamesey, and by the time it got to Carlisle, twice that. But, then, that increase in cost was the life the trucker risked going there, and the lives the riders risked getting him there in one piece, and they were all in the same business. He’d get store money for it: the village supplied their riders with very generous basics, but shirting and such, and shoes for Jennie’s growing feet—they all cost. Leather from the tanner—that, he had a deal on.

  “They’re going to use the radio,” Jennie announced. Her riders and her truckers had been shooting steadily for a noisy minute or two.

  “That’s really stupid,” Ridley said sympathetically. “Are the riders going to tell them that’s stupid?”

  “No, this guy is sneaking and doing it.”

  “He must be new on the job.”

  “Here comes a spook-bear!” Jennie said. “He’s going straight for that radio! Grrr.”

  There were snarls and pow-pow-pows.

  “The bear got him,” Jennie said sadly.

  “Too bad,” Callie said. “But they’re going to have to wait. Dinner’s on.”

  “The bear’s having dinner, too.”

  “Oh, what a nice thought,” Ridley said. “Wash.”

  “I’m not—”

  “If there’s water available, you wash, youngster. Feet go in the den. Feet go on this floor. Hands go on this floor. Hands get washed.” The bell had assumed a steady cadence. A strong gust of wind caught the flashing and made it sing.

  “Nasty wind,” Callie said, setting down bowls.

  “We’re not in it,” Ridley said, and got up and helped with the ladling-out. It was stew, good, thick bear-meat stew. They had a fair bit in the smoke-shed. They had the hides at the tannery, and that was cash, too, come spring.

  There wasn’t a thing wrong with the world this evening.

  “I washed!” Jennie announced.

  He snatched Jennie up. Hugged her tight. Growled, “I’m the bear.”

  Jennie shrieked and kicked with abandon.

  “Supper,” Callie said, unimpressed. “The bear better get the spoons.”

  “If I let you go,” Ridley said, with his arms full of daughter, “will you get the spoons?”

  “All right,” Jennie said, a
nd he let her down. She was growing. She’d landed a couple of solid kicks. The bear thought he’d have bruises.

  Jennie got the spoons. The bear held the bowls while mama ladled out the stew.

  Sleet had given way to snow, drifting puffs on a gentler, darker wind as light faded in what Danny knew now was storm-glow, no longer daylight. The grades where they climbed were a lot gentler. There began to be trees: that gave them encouragement that they might find the shelter. But they’d spent and struggled and spent the strength they had—and now Randy had all but run out of endurance—the kid was still walking, but from Randy now came a muddled lot of and and a disturbed recollection of The kid was drifting into dreams.

  Or nightmares—as he slumped down onto his knees and then onto his face:

  They reached him. Carlo knelt down and turned the kid and held him.

  “Back on the travois,” Danny said.

  “Can’t,” Carlo said. There was panic in his voice. “He’ll go to sleep. He’s too tired. He’s got to get up, that’s all. Come on, kid. Dammit, on your feet! Hear me?”

  Randy wouldn’t wake up. Not even when Carlo hit him.

  “He’s cold,” Carlo said. was thick in the ambient. “He’s gotten cold. —Can’t Cloud carry him? Can’t you get him to?”

  “He can’t,” Danny said. “He can’t. He’s worked as hard as we have. Let the kid rest. Calm down. Loosen the ties, we’ll bundle him in again.”

  “He’ll die!”

  “He’ll die if you scare hell out of him—the kid’s doing all he can.” He jerked ties undone and opened the furs, in which Brionne was still warm, to let Carlo lift Randy, half-aware as he was, onto the travois.

  Carlo wasn’t saying anything now about being tired. There was just fear. Randy didn’t want the cords tied down. “No!” he said— scared, Danny didn’t need the ambient to understand, that the thing could finally get away from them.

  “We won’t let you go,” he said. “It’s almost flat here.” He tied a couple of rumbling knots, securing the kid in the only real warmth there was, and got up.

  still came to them, a flash of white, daylight vision. It hadn’t stopped for their supplies.

  “Best we can do,” Danny said as calmly as he could. “Keep going. Got to be a shelter—a door we can shut.”

  “I don’t think it’ll hurt us,” Randy said from beneath muffling furs. “I could talk to it. It’s lonely. I could try—”

  “Forget it! We don’t need a horsefight on top of everything else!” He was growing short-fused himself. And scared. Randy wanted a horse, Randy, like his sister, wanted a horse to such a degree that Cloud didn’t like to be in closed spaces with him, and that lost horse out there wasn’t in any sense one for any green villager kid to take on. When creatures in the Wild started doing the unusual they were usually sick—and for a horse to follow them up a mountain through the wintry hell they’d been through? Damn sure it wasn’t behaving like a normal horse.

  “It wouldn’t fight Cloud,” Randy said. “I know. If you could just bring it in—I could talk to it. That’s what it wants, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s not sane, if it tracked us up here, and it will fight Cloud.”

  “It won’t.” Fourteen-year-old logic. “If it thought I was its rider it’d come for me, wouldn’t it? I can do it—”

  “Shut up and listen to the rider, you hear me?” Carlo’s voice cracked and broke as he stood up. “We’re in trouble, we’re in real serious trouble, here, kid. Don’t beg trouble. Keep quiet. Think at it and I’ll hit you. I mean it!”

  “Let’s move,” Danny said, and got up. Cloud had come back and wanted , ignoring the existence of boys or travois.

  Worse, Cloud had his mind on the road behind them, and kept looking that way, ready for a horsefight, sending out the impression of and all over the mountainside.

  It had to be the same horse that had been down at the first-stage cabin. Randy was right that if it had fastened on one of them and saw its rider among them, it would follow through hell and ice— and he was surer and surer which of a number of horses it was: a horse that had always imaged itself as a succession of horses, as something twisting and horselike and scary, and there and not-there. It was the unhealthiest image he’d ever gotten from a supposedly sane horse, and that was what, in the way of nighthorses, it called itself, no human naming it.

  was the human name he’d put to it. He’d never learned what Ancel Harper had called it before he fired on the wrong rider. Harper, the , the source of , might get pity in hell. Not from him. Not after he’d ridden with the man. And if it wanted Brionne Goss—that was worse news than Harper.

  “Walk,” Danny said.

  Carlo had found another small reserve of strength. So had he. He hadn’t much left.

  But thank God for the snow finally giving them consistent traction. Cloud’s three-toed hooves, which shaped themselves very readily to rock, flexed enough so honest dry snow didn’t pack in the clefts of those feet: Cloud was sure-footed and confident now, so were they, and they were finally making time, through trees that indicated they’d turned away from the blasted areas and gone across a natural slope of the mountain.

  They should come to the cabin.

  At any moment now.

  * * *

  Chapter 4

  Ť ^ ť

  Jennie was supposed to be asleep, but the wind was making a racket and she’d been bored a lot during the day. She was bored now, lying in the dark, in bed. The storm had been going on for a whole day, and she had played games and done chores and played games and she’d had a nap she didn’t usually take any more. She wished there was something to do.

  If she got up, mama and papa would scold. If she slipped in to sit by the fire and didn’t make a sound, and just sat and watched the pictures in the coals, or maybe played with her trucks real quietly, mama and papa might not know she was up.

  But the bell was still ringing out by the gate. Nobody had fixed it. The night was scary with wind and things going thump, and she began to be convinced that something spooky had waked her. She wasn’t sure what: she thought it might have been a sending, and she wished she knew what that was.

  Spook-bears and goblin-cats didn’t ever get inside the walls. Serge Lasierre slept in the village gate house with his rifle on nights when the Wild was acting up, and bears couldn’t get past Serge. Mama and papa had told her that.

  But that bell was ringing and ringing. Maybe a bear had gotten Serge and that was why Serge hadn’t fixed the bell.

  Maybe out there in the wind and the dark something was really wrong.

  She thought it might be Rain calling her. Rain was her horse, well, mostly her horse, though papa said she’d have to wait till Rain made up his mind, and Rain might have to leave the way Leaf had left. But she didn’t think so. Rain was hers, and he and she were friends. And papa knew it even if he didn’t approve.

  Rain was, papa also said, a loud horse, because he was only two, and didn’t know but one pitch to be at, —like some little girls, papa had said. And like little girls, anyway, Rain heard things older horses didn’t pay attention to. Hearing everything made Rain spooky sometimes, over shadows and thumps and over things somebody remembered, so Rain’s rider had to be very quiet and not think scary thoughts, even alone in bed at night, in the barracks where the horses didn’t ordinarily hear them.

  But in the barracks they weren’t supposed to hear the horses this far, either, unless the horses were upset.

  And it wasn’t just Rain, she decided. Mom-horse Shimmer was nervous, too. Shimmer was pregnant again and expecting a foal in the spring, and mom-horse was getting angry, not angry at Rain, but disturbed at something Rain picked up, and that upset papa-horse.

  So she wasn’t just making-believe. Papa said don’t ever make-believe near the horses, and said that that was why they built the rider-shelter so far away from the horse-den, so little girls being silly couldn’t upset them.

  went the boards. She knew she didn’t hear it with her own ears, but the horses were carrying it to her: papa-horse Slip had kicked out and shaken the side of the den or somet
hing.

  That was too much. She flew out of bed and grabbed her sweater. < Bang!> went the boards again. Rain was and and thinking

  She could tell where her door was because light from the common-room came down the hall even when the fire was banked for the night, and it hadn’t been banked too long, because there was a glow in the room. She had no trouble finding her boots.

  Thump! went the logs, one sound in her head and one in her ears. That was real for sure; and she thought about waking up mama and papa; but they were asleep and she didn’t want to make a fuss and be told she was silly or dreaming, which was what mama had said the last time she’d come running to their bed, scared. She’d see first.

  So she hurried and opened the door to the snow-passage that led from the barracks to the den, and took down the ’lectric light from its shelf and carried it, shining its light up and around and down the wooden walls and floor, wood planks all shiny with ice where the drips were, and icicled in places.

  The dark was scary. Vermin like willy-wisps would burrow under the boards or anywhere they could when it got cold, and they got hungry and they’d make holes in the boards and try to bite your ankles; and you mustn’t ever fall if they bit you, that was what mama said, because they’d swarm all over you and eat you till nothing but bones were left. Granpa when she was little had said they liked toes, especially in the wintertime and especially from little girls who didn’t mind and didn’t do what they were supposed to.

  But granpa had gone away with grandma and not come back and now her parents didn’t think they were ever coming back. Mama thought they’d fallen off a cliff. Papa thought maybe granpa’s heart might have given out and grandma wouldn’t leave that place. Things did happen out in the Wild.

  Things happened, too, in dark passages, where the light made scary shapes on the boards around and underfoot and overhead. She wasn’t supposed to be in the passage before mama and papa were awake. She might get in trouble.

  But now she’d mostly done it, anyway, and she was already going to get in trouble—so she figured she might as well find out if Rain was all right, before papa and mama woke up and stopped her and she got in trouble for having done nothing at all.