Cloud's Rider

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Ask him what brought him up from the flatlands?” Callie asked, coming close to his bed. “What cause to be here in the first place? Was there a convoy down there?”

  “Friend’s partner died up here. He came for her. I came—came for him. He was pretty shaken up.”

  “Names,” Ridley said. “His. Hers.”

  “Guil Stuart. Aby Dale.”

  “Oh, damn,” Callie said with what seemed real sadness, and Ridley’s hand let up its vise grip on his arm. “Not Aby,” Callie said. “We just saw her.”

  “Last convoy down. She was in the way. Just—” He didn’t want to go into all of it. Most of all he didn’t want to think about Tarmin tonight. There was too much white in his mind, and winter was such a dangerous time. Dreams turned real when the wind was howling like that outside, and the horses carried the worst imaginings. “Just—she died. They said—they said a rogue horse spooked the convoy. And Guil came up here to get it.”

  “But it got Tarmin?”

  “Up at the gates—just—people opened doors. I was in the woods looking for Guil, and I heard it go—and—I don’t want to tell this around the kid.”

  “She’s asleep,” Ridley said. “Keep going. Horses aren’t hearing you. You just happened into Tarmin when a rogue happened on the mountain. And where’s this other guy and why isn’t he up here?”

  Rogue horse—was rare as legends and campfire stories. And they shouldn’t believe a pile of coincidences. But he couldn’t begin to tell them the connecting strings without giving them leads to other things. He just strung it together as best he could.

  “Gunshot. This guy—Harper—not from this mountain—he thought—thought, I guess, I mean, he’d seen a rogue once before, or he thought he had, and he wasn’t real right in his head. He really, really hated Stuart. The rogue wasn’t him, you know, it wasn’t Stuart, but everything just got tangled up in his head. I knew this guy was on his track, and Harper—Harper just—just went crazy. Tried to kill Guil.”

  “Before the rogue got Tarmin,” Ridley said. “Is Guil this rogue? Is Harper?”

  “Horse. Rogue horse.” Danny forgot and shook his head. “Harper’s dead. It’s dead. Shot it. Guil shot it.”

  “You’re sure of that.”

  “Yeah.”

  There was a little easing of tension.

  “You came in with a damn spooky feeling,” Ridley said.

  “Yeah.”

  “So what was it?”

  “Horse—followed us. Maybe five, six horses loose down there.”

  “Followed you up the mountain. Through that?”

  “Kids with me—nobody alive down there. None without horses. Can’t go down the mountain, snows down there avalanches ”

  “And?” Ridley asked. “Fisher? You’re not going to sleep until you talk. What happened with the rogue? What happened to that girl?”

  “It was just—” He didn’t want to lie. He didn’t dare tell the truth. “Just—when Tarmin went down—kids hid out. I rode in. Searched for survivors. Babies. Old people. There wasn’t anything. —I felt it go, understand me? I felt it go, I don’t want to remember it in this camp, I don’t want to remember it near the horses.”

  “Damn,” Callie said.

  “I’m all right. My horse is all right.”

  “And those kids?”

  He let his eyes shut, closing out the questions. They could hit him. They could toss him into the snow. He had to keep the lid on things until he could get his story straight. He didn’t need to pretend to drift toward sleep. His mind kept going out on him—and he didn’t trust them—didn’t trust them not to call a horse close to him—outside the wall.

  “What about the rogue horse?” Callie came to stand over him. “How bad is this kid, Fisher? What happened?”

  “Just—” He had ultimately to tell them all the truth. But not tonight. Not tonight. The girl was beyond the wall. The gates were shut. It was daylight. “Just—the kid was affected. Keep her in the village. Don’t bring her near the horses. Had a hell of a time on the road. My horse is all right. Didn’t ever come near the rogue. Couldn’t think about Tarmin, though, I didn’t want to think about it all the way up. And the kids kept remembering it, spooking my horse. Didn’t help. Didn’t help at all.”

  They had no more questions for a moment. He didn’t open his eyes to see, but he thought he’d answered everything.

  “Jennie’s eight,” Callie said, nothing else, but he understood what she meant. As if a whole village on her hands wasn’t reason enough in itself to worry about him or Cloud in the camp.

  “I’ll leave if you like. Give me a day or so.”

  “Not saying that,” Ridley said.

  Decent, good people. He’d had all the way up here to imagine the godawful situations a lone junior could get into, including finding himself in some shelter alone with a bunch of guys older and rougher and maybe far crazier. Winter came down and bunched people up in shelters at the same time the horses were in rut, and memories and sex flew thick as falling leaves through present time.

  You didn’t want to get in with a rough crowd, damn, you didn’t, and he hadn’t wanted to scare Carlo and Randy about that possibility. He’d held his own nerves together and was so, so relieved to find himself with a solid, sensible lot of people with an ordinary little girl—

  But he’d never never thought about a little kid exposed to the outspillings of his mind he just wasn’t safe

  “Here.” Callie came near, but it was Ridley’s voice, and a smell of vodka. He’d been out, or almost out. They’d had time to go and come back again, and Ridley nudged his hand with a glass. “Drink it.”

  They’d done it to him before, and he’d hit his head on the fireplace. “Drunk won’t help.”

  “Panic won’t either. Just calm down. An eight-year-old in the next room—we’re a little protective. You understand? There’s yellowflower in it. Drink it.”

  Understood Ridley’d shoot him before they let him spook the camp, or hurt the kid or Callie.

  They’d shoot him before they let him go off the mental edge, the way Spook’s rider had gone. Harper should have had somebody a long number of years ago, someone who’d hand him a glass of yellow and figuratively hold a gun to his head and say straighten out or I’ll blow your brains out.

  Might have saved a lot of people.

  Might have saved Harper himself.

  He drank it. At least three fast mouthfuls.

  “You think that horse followed you all the way?” Ridley asked. “Or where did you lose it?”

  “Don’t think it came near the village. But it could be on the road.”

  “Must have a real strong notion what it wants.”

  “Yeah,” he said, and felt a rush of fear—what it wanted.

  “I’d hate to have to shoot it. But I will if it comes around.”

  “Yeah,” Danny said. “I know. Five, six, loose, though.” He had no idea. Predators could have gotten some, but it could be more than six.

  “Bachelors are the fools. Mares with the lot?”

  “Mare down with Tara.” He recalled Stuart, and the cabin, and Tara’s mare, and the vodka and yellow began to hit him like a weight. “Yeah. Tara’s mare. But there’s a stallion with her.” He wanted it quiet, quiet, just barricade it out of his mind. He’d held his sanity this far—but he felt himself not able to hold onto the vodka glass, and it burned his raw throat when he took another sip. “You better take it. I’m going to spill it.”

  Ridley took the glass back. Danny couldn’t even coordinate his fingers to turn it over to him. His head spun, and his temples pounded, and that and the cough went with the altitude.

  He hadn’t slept in a bed since Shamesey.

  Couple with a kid wouldn’t put on him or rob him.

  Nice little girl. Cute kid. He missed Denis—he really missed Denis. Last time he’d met Denis he’d hit him. He’d ridden out of Shamesey without a word to his family. He really wished—wished he hadn’t done that.

  Dark, then. He thought they’d blown out the light.

  The morning—it was mid-morning now, though the sun hadn’t even been a faint suspicion in the sky when the party had come in—
settled down finally to quiet, except for the wind and the snow still going on outside. Ridley made a late, late breakfast for himself and Callie. Jennie was still sleeping like the dead after her unprecedented night wide awake in the den.

  Young Fisher was asleep, too, and might not get out of bed for three or four days, by the look of him. He was anxious to get Fisher over to Peterson and see what else he knew.

  Fear had come up the mountain with those kids. Fear had lent them the strength to do what only a couple of young men could do, in making (Ridley didn’t question that part of the story) the whole trek from midway in one day and most of a night, up that iced slant. It was the kind of thing young folk could do, maybe once in their lives—and that some didn’t survive. And the trouble they brought wasn’t going to bed as quickly or as easily as Dan Fisher had.

  But the kids—including the problem the girl posed—were disposed of to the village side of the wall, out of the reach of their horses, Fisher wouldn’t stir for thunder, and that was enough to let him and Callie at least draw breath and have their breakfast and a following cup of tea in quiet, mental and otherwise.

  All the same Callie had to go look in on Jennie—just checking.

  And that, from Callie’s partner, required at least a look up when Callie came back. He generally disapproved Callie’s hovering over the kid. Today there was reason.

  Callie—who was used to reading his mind, literally so when Slip and Shimmer were in question—didn’t tell him Jennie was all right when she came back into the main room. Callie didn’t give him a bit of information, meaning he’d have to go look in for himself or he’d have to ask her, dammit.

  “She all right?”

  “She’s fine.” Callie went to the fireside and poured herself a cup of tea.

  It was their hardest argument, how much exposure to the realities of life, sex, and death was too much too soon for their daughter, and when they shouldn’t baby her. It was certain as sundown and sunrise that Jennie would take off on a horse and go long before either of her parents thought she was ready. Kids always did. Young horses didn’t know their young riders were too young, or that two horse years and eight human years didn’t exactly make a mature decision.

  They’d been worrying about Rain. But with this arrival in the camp they knew there could be much worse going on. He’d heard of rogues, and in the tales that ran among riders, if you got one in a district you could have others.

  And dammit, Fisher offered to trek out of here, but the kids he’d escorted were here. There was no way in good conscience to pass that mess on to Mornay village, which was smaller than Evergreen and less equipped than they were to handle the kids.

  Especially the girl.

  Tarmin gone?

  There’d been five riders down there. Five riders hadn’t been enough, against what had come down on Tarmin.

  And these kids survived?

  “It’s quiet out there,” Callie said as she joined him by the fire. “I’d think the horses would have been out and about.”

  If there were any intrusion into their hearing, that was what Callie meant, specifically—if that loose horse Fisher had talked about had come in. There’d been a disturbance before they’d put Fisher to bed, a little queasiness in the ambient—but it might have been a bushdevil, something stirred out of a burrow nearby. They hadn’t heard anything they could be certain of.

  “Just hope the quiet lasts,” he said as Callie warmed her cup with a dollop from the pot. He truly didn’t want to have to kill a horse— but, dammit, he was defending a daughter. “If that stray comes in— I don’t know. The horses down the mountain may attract it back down. I hope so.”

  “It could have been us, you know that?” Callie had been upset since he’d brought Fisher into the barracks. He’d seen it in every line of her body. She’d been dealing with the village kids—including the girl. “What got Tarmin could have come to Evergreen instead.”

  “Well, the last rider in Tarmin must have done something right. It’s dead. He swears they did get it, Callie.”

  “If we’ve heard the truth,” Callie said. “We’re leaning an awful lot on Fisher’s word.”

  “He’s got no motive to lie.”

  “The hell he hasn’t! He brought that girl up here, in her condition—what kind of judgment is that?”

  He had to think of Jennie. “I’m not sure I could have let her die. And she was getting worse.”

  “And they’ve got a horse after them. We have his word the rogue is gone. We don’t know that’s not what chased him up the mountain! He had walls down there, shelters near Tarmin—and why did he leave there? Because the girl would have died? Or because something was chasing him?”

  “We have his word it ever existed in the first place, Callie. If he was a thoroughgoing liar, why would he have to tell us anything?”

  “In case the phone lines aren’t down for the winter here. In case we’d already got a message from Tarmin! In case we listened to him and caught how damn scared he is! In case we asked why he didn’t go down the mountain if that’s where he’s from? Look at the girl, for God’s sake! He said—when she came out of it—she shouldn’t be near the horses. What did he mean by that, except that she’s not safe here, she was spooking him and his horse, and I don’t think she’s safe even in the village!”

  He didn’t have an answer for that—not one Callie couldn’t knock down. Callie wasn’t a trusting woman. And she’d formed conclusions it was well to listen to.

  “The lines going down early this year,” she said. “Maybe it wasn’t just the ice on the lines, you know? As crazy as things have felt for weeks, the way things felt out there when he was coming in with those kids—oh, I believe him when he says there was trouble at Tarmin. I don’t believe him when he says the rogue situation’s done with. And he’s under this roof and that girl’s just the other side of the camp wall!”

  “Are you saying we should put him out? The little I did catch from him while we were in the den—I believe he’s honest; I also think he’s young, he’s skittish, he’s holding stuff in, but I don’t think he’s actually lying to us. I think he’s told us what he feels safe telling and I don’t blame him for not letting all he remembers loose on a night like that.”

  “I wish I thought he wasn’t lying.”

  “Wish I had an answer for you,” Ridley said. But he didn’t.

  And by now he’d had time to realize that not only did they have a winter problem, they were facing a spring and summer and years down the road problem, and the very scary prospect of not just Evergreen but all the villages on the mountain going into next autumn without supplies.

  Much of their supply source for equipment and half their trade with the lowlands was a company down in Anveney town that might—who knew the minds of townfolk?—be very reluctant to send even the usual number of trucks up here without some hard dealing. The main source they had for food was Shamesey. Oil and gas came from the south. One truck lost, when Aby Dale had died— that happened. But Tarmin gone?

  That was the staging area for all trucks going up to the High Loop and it was the depot for supplies, the warehouses for trade goods that were just too heavy to ship up: warehouses for everything coming down off the mountain and everything that had to be sent up—some items by oxcart, as things moved when the villagers were paying the freight; and some by truck, when the trucks hauling company loads had space and the item wasn’t too heavy.

  Food for the High Loop villages stayed in warehouses in Tarmin before it moved up the Climb by oxcart. They were going to be eating a lot of bushdevil and willy-wisp if they couldn’t get lowland beef and pork. Flour already cost twice what it did in Tarmin, which was already three times its cost in the lowlands.

  Gasoline and freight costs could easily quadruple for Evergreen.

  And the oxen that made those runs—the only transportation for goods that didn’t run at Anveney’s cost for fuel—he didn’t need to ask young Fisher what their fate had been once those gates were open. They were gone. The men that drove those teams were gone along with everything else edible that wasn’t cased in steel or
locked behind it.

  Tarmin gone meant no local goods moving until they replaced the oxen and the drivers. And oxen with experienced drivers didn’t exist except over on Darwin Peak—a far journey—or down in Shamesey district, which had a long-running feud with Anveney, which had no oxen. Anveney was Rogers Peak’s primary contractor—and the best source of people with the nerve to leave the big towns and venture into the High Wild.

  “I tell you,” he said, “we’d better spend less time sitting in camp this winter, do a little extra hunting, store whatever we can. It’s going to be a long year.”

  Callie shot him a look that said he’d caught her attention. “Think Cassivey will deal hard?”

  That was the company in Anveney.

  “Will snow fall this winter?” was his counter. “He’s a townsman. I tell you, if we don’t get some ox-teams up here it’s going to be a cold, damn expensive next winter, or we’re going to make a lot of trips with wheelbarrows up and down that road.”

  “Shamesey’s going to know we’re in trouble. And they’ll jack the price. It’s not going to be easy this summer.”

  “They’ll rebuild Tarmin,” he said, and as he said it a thought came to him, the glimmering of an idea that, yes, Tarmin had to exist: Anveney and Shamesey were as dependent on Rogers Peak as Rogers Peak settlements were on them, and even if they had help from Anveney’s most desperate—it wasn’t townsmen from the flat-lands that were going to be able to bring it back to life.

  * * *

  Chapter 8

  Ť ^ ť

  Hearing Randy stirring, Carlo stretched the kinks out of his back; he’d been sleeping fitfully, coatless and in his stocking feet, leaning against the stones of the low furnace wall. The stretch stopped in a dry-air cough.

  “You all right?” Randy asked.

  “Yeah.” Carlo took a drink from the metal cup and then took a stale, crumbling biscuit off the fireside wall and offered it to him. “You want a biscuit? Saved it from the rider camp. There’s no tea, but there’s hot water. Tastes awful but it feels pretty good on the throat.”

  Randy didn’t look enthusiastic—less so when Carlo got up and poured him a cup of hot water from the pot he’d set on the coals.