Cloud's Rider

by C. J. Cherryh

  He grabbed a fistful of Randy’s shirt and jerked him hard. “You acted the fool, kid. What do you want? What’ll satisfy you? We need this job!”

  “He called you a coward!”

  “Yeah. So what?”

  “So you could beat him!”

  “I know that. He doesn’t. Pretty clearly I matter to him. He doesn’t matter to me.” He let Randy go and started picking up wood. “He shouldn’t matter to you. Be useful. Feed the fire.”

  “He’s going to make trouble for you.”

  “Kid, you know how close you came to him hitting you to provoke me? Did you figure that out or do I have to say it in smaller words?”

  “I’m not scared of him. I’d have ducked.”

  “Yeah, sure. You listen to me. You’d better be scared of him. That guy is stupid. You should be afraid of stupid people. You don’t know what they’ll do. Don’t get into fights with stupid people.”

  “You could beat him!”

  “Yeah, and you tell me where our food and board’s coming from.”

  “There’s that horse out there in the woods. I could—”

  “No.”

  “I could be a rider and I’d make a lot of money.”

  He was disgusted—he was sick at his stomach only thinking of Randy going out looking for that horse. “Did you learn from your sister, or didn’t you?”

  “I’m not stupid.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t talk like it.” He grabbed up scattered logs and took them to the fire, not willing to argue, not with feet that hurt, hands that hurt, ears that hurt and knees that said a biscuit and a piece of ham yesterday wasn’t enough to keep a guy going stoking furnaces.

  “You’re scared of him.”

  “Yeah. Sure. Grow up.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that!”

  “I mean it. Grow up. This is serious.”

  “You could still beat him up.”

  “That’d be real useful, wouldn’t it? We’re in no damn position to start trouble, we’ve no place to live, it’s the middle of the winter, we’ve no tools, nothing to our names—figure it out, kid. He wants me to fight him. Doesn’t that give him everything he wants?”

  “You could still beat him!”

  “Then what?”

  Randy sat and scowled and hugged his stomach.

  “So what’s the matter?”

  “I’m still hungry,” Randy said.

  “So stoke the fire. I’ll go next door and talk to the man about cash and where we get some kind of breakfast. —Which we don’t get by bashing his son. Got it?”

  Randy didn’t answer him. His answer wasn’t the way Randy wanted the world to be. Randy was going to sulk about it because Randy’s belly hurt. Sometimes he wanted to bash Randy hard until Randy used the brains he had.

  But that wasn’t the answer, either. Getting the fire started and getting an ember bed going was ahead of breakfast, at least if he was going to ask for an advance on their earnings.

  Wouldn’t hit Randy. No matter what. He’d hit Randy to keep him alive on the way up. But he wouldn’t do it here. Randy had seen too much of hitting. A whole lot too much.

  And finally Randy quit sulking and got up and brought a few logs for the fire.

  * * *

  Chapter 9

  Ť ^ ť

  “No, sir,” Danny said to the question from the marshal, “there was a rogue horse and it’s dead. I know it’s dead. That’s all I can say.”

  “And it got inside,” the preacher said.

  “Reverend, it did, but it wasn’t all that did. It was just vermin everywhere. I don’t claim to know much. I’m a junior rider, only two years out, but the things they say about the vermin going in waves when there’s a big kill, I saw it. There was blood all over—” You didn’t talk about the ambient with religious townfolk or villagers, and, he guessed, least of all with a preacher. “All over. Willy-wisps were running from under my horse’s feet, there was a lorrie-lie going over a wall getting away from us, bodies, bones—it was a real mess. I was out on the mountain when—when my horse started getting upset. When I rode into Tarmin gates, it was night, the gates were wide open. The kids were the last ones alive. They’d held out behind a locked door, and that’s all I know. A lot of other people just—lost their good sense and went outside when—” Sometimes you just couldn’t explain it any other way. “—when they heard the goings-on. Sometimes—sometimes you’ll paint your own image on things. You’ll hear neighbors, people you know. That’s true. It was pretty scary when I rode in.”

  There were dismayed shakes of heads. The preacher gave a sad sort of sigh and mouthed something that looked like merciful God. And they didn’t have anything to say right off.

  He’d taken the excuse of his feet to avoid a walk out to the den— or over to the marshal’s office—and it was partially, but not insurmountably, true that he was lame. At least he was still limping and sore as hell, and neither Ridley nor Callie had pushed him to do anything for the last number of days but eat, sleep, and sit by the fire and tell stories and play kid-games with Jennie.

  He’d dreaded this meeting fit to give him nightmares.

  But he was embarrassed to go on claiming that feet that had gotten him up the Climb couldn’t quite get him over to the marshal’s office, or that the small crack on the head was still affecting him that badly. On the day he’d for good and all agreed to walk over to the village side of the wall, a howling cold had set in, and he’d really, really hoped they might cancel the meeting at the last minute, but Evergreen, having its snow-passages, didn’t let a little thing like that stop them. Ridley had brought him through the dank, timber-smelling dark of the tunnels and so over to the village side—so that to this hour, having avoided the horses who might have carried him some sort of mental map from Ridley, he was quite helplessly disoriented and still had no idea at all what the village looked like.

  The marshal’s office where he sat was just a desk, some pigeon-holes stuffed with various papers, a board hung with keys, and a door that could lead to the marshal’s house, or the village jail, or even the courtroom. The mayor was there. The preacher, who seemed to be a particular friend of the marshal, had shown up to ask questions. So had one deputy—Burani was his name, he remembered that—and a couple of other people, one man, one woman, both gray-haired, whose position and reason for being here Danny couldn’t figure, so he didn’t know entirely what they wanted, whether they were people who had relatives down in Tarmin or what.

  On that ground, he didn’t want to say anything indelicate—that was his mother’s word—about the dead down there, or paint the situation too vividly. He just wanted to let them know what the kids had been through without saying too much.

  Those were two of the anxious points he was skirting around. And he kept having to remind himself, as he’d never had to remind himself down in Shamesey, that he could lie comfortably, that as closely as he’d lived with other minds in all the wide open space of the mountains, and as small and claustrophobic as the villages felt to a Shamesey rider, both things were illusion. Cloud and the rest of the horses were far enough away when he was in the barracks, let alone on this side of the wall, that he was as safe from Cloud carrying unintended images as he had been in Shamesey town before he ever met Cloud.

  That kind of privacy wasn’t always true in Shamesey’s huge camp, where a thousand horses wandering around among the barracks meant anything you thought could travel. But here, without Cloud near him, he could lie with all a townsman’s skill at it—and if he could get his mind onto other tracks and calm down, once this meeting was past, he could afford to go near the horses again in Ridley’s company—he was sure Ridley had been wondering why he wouldn’t go out to the horses, and why he’d get uneasy when Cloud or one of the other horses came up near the windows of the barracks, as they’d done. He’d fed Cloud treats from the porch.

  He’d tried to keep his thoughts on very mundane things—and didn’t know how successful he was.

  Until, dammit, he was absolutely ashamed to face Cloud, who couldn’t know why he wasn’t out there when the food buckets came out. Cloud was stiff and sore an
d being put upon by the other horses, particularly by Slip, who was boss horse in the camp. Cloud didn’t understand being left alone in the den or cared for by Slip’s rider while his own rider was lying about the barracks.

  Meetings on the porch weren’t enough any longer. Not as of today. His feet that had walked him over to the marshal’s office could support him while he worked in the den. The headaches had stopped, and even young Jennie had to have picked that up out of the ambient. He just didn’t have any more excuses.

  Not that for any guilt of his own he didn’t want to tell the village the truth; but there were details he was still convinced he had to be as careful of as a loaded gun. What he’d seen in Tarmin was nothing to show Jennie, for one major consideration: he was carrying a lot of memories he didn’t want to relive, and least of all to give a little girl nightmares winter-long.

  There were also matters of Carlo’s and Randy’s business he didn’t want to bring up—things that didn’t help Tarmin and couldn’t help the dead.

  Fact was, he knew he was badly shaken in his ability to keep his thoughts private—and knowing Cloud would spill everything in his mind to the local riders made it likely that was exactly what would happen, early and fast, with the worst possible implications.

  And if things went wrong, it could conceivably touch off a panic in the village or in the camp, and possibly get Cloud hurt by the other horses. Carlo and Randy, under constant threat of the unknown, that horse, their memories—they’d been throwing off high voltage emotional upset nonstop, so intensely so that it had been the ambient, with Cloud’s spookiness in the mix in the hour they’d come in, Cloud being upset as hell about Brionne being near him, about the weather, about the horse nosing about, about the general spookiness in wild things all over the area—which he guessed had traveled up here before they did: Callie had said they’d felt it—and if he started trying to explain all that—he didn’t know where it would lead. Callie and Ridley had been forgiving, had been hospitable to him, had made no threats of making him move on, and had treated him very well, give or take Callie hadn’t quite entirely decided he was reliable: not that Callie was mad at him, because Callie didn’t seem the sort, but that Callie thought he was unreliable, possibly not too bright, and maybe lying.

  Mad would have been easier to deal with. Callie’s conclusions about him were going to take some long, consistent work to counter, and what he had yet to tell them wasn’t going to make Callie happier with him.

  Trouble was, there wasn’t, to this hour, any neat, sure answer to what he’d brought up here except the essential piece of comfort he’d given them: his sure knowledge that the rogue was dead.

  But if he let rumor get loose about Brionne or let people go flaring off on suppositions, Carlo and Randy weren’t safe—let alone their sister. And disturbing Brionne, and threatening her, and maybe rousing her to a pitch of fright at which she could reach a horse’s attention—

  God only knew what could happen if she came to and panicked, and some of it got to the horses. Gates could come open. People could spook and take up weapons or bolt for imagined safety, or take actions he just couldn’t foresee. He hadn’t talked yet to Ridley or Callie on that score, and while Callie was watching him, he was watching her, and telling himself that while Ridley seemed a calm and reasoning man, a woman who judged that fast and who condemned that quickly might not be the woman he’d trust with a handful of kids who needed forgiveness.

  Well, hell, he didn’t anticipate needing to trust her, unless something went wrong.

  So he and Callie were at a standoff and it was likely to last a while.

  And he sat on a hard chair in the marshal’s office, with Ridley sitting near him, and he answered question after question from the marshal that trod near the center of his concerns: “Does Shamesey know what happened? What did they report down there?”—all the while he was hoping to God none of these people thought to question the locked door story about how Carlo and Randy had survived, never asked whether Brionne was with them, or asked why other locked doors in town hadn’t worked to keep out the vermin.

  So far he was lying with a skill his father would be ashamed of.

  But, God, if he could just figure out what to tell and what not to—what they needed to know in order to protect themselves and what they didn’t—

  He’d warned them, hadn’t he?

  He’d told them not to let Brionne near a horse. He’d told them about the one that had followed them.

  He’d handled everything his seniors had trusted him to handle. Hadn’t he?

  And getting this business out of the way would make him calmer. A lot calmer. So he could deal with Cloud and act normal. And maybe he could think more clearly what to do next.

  Except—

  Except every night they drank a glass of vodka and he wouldn’t swear his wasn’t tampered with. He slept soundly. He didn’t remember his dreams. Maybe he was just that tired. Maybe they just didn’t want him walking about or going out to the den at night.

  “Do you happen to know prices on fuel oil down in the flat?”

  “Don’t know that,” he said. “I know it’s gone up a little.” The authorities of Evergreen village, deprived of the warehouses down in Tarmin, were worried about their supply and what kind of base cost they were facing: he knew that from overhearing Ridley and Callie on the same topic. “But I do know that it was a good wheat crop this year. Oats, too.”

  There was a slight relief in tense, worried faces. He could give them good news in a lot of regards, because the bitter Anveney-Shamesey quarrel had taken a quieter course. The hoarding that had been going on in Shamesey during the spring and even into the summer was cooling down—he knew: his parents had been laying in supplies, and then weren’t. Probably it was the same story on both sides of the long-standing argument, Anveney with its metals and Shamesey with its grain sometimes downwind of Anveney’s smokestacks.

  “I think,” he said to their further questions, “that that’s got to bring prices down. I don’t know that much,” he added, “but my father’s a mechanic in Shamesey, and I do kind of know what he pays for supplies, and what wire’s running per foot, and so on.”

  The woman was interested, not alone in the price of wire.

  “You’re out of the town itself.”

  “I was born in town. Grew up there. Mostly.”

  Evidently not all the information he’d given had gotten passed on—or they hadn’t understood. There were all kinds of riders. Most were born to the life. A few, like him, weren’t. And a man could say he was a Shamesey rider without saying he had ties actually inside the town itself—which he did truly have.

  But after they knew that, the cautious atmosphere warmed considerably. He’d become a human being in their eyes, he guessed, though he wasn’t exactly flattered by it. With town connections, he became nearly as respectable as—well, at least as respectable as their own riders were, which didn’t seem to be too bad a relationship. He wasn’t, like Stuart, a borderer, a rider of the far Wild, half wild himself and unobservant of town manners. He was, instead of a foreboding arrival out of the storm, a rider of some background, even understandable to them.

  He didn’t, however, react to their reaction: he might have, a few weeks ago—before he’d been really on his own, before he’d dealt with the things he had to deal with. Now a distance had come between him and towns and villages of every stripe, a kind of uncaring deadness where it came to town sensibilities and an increasing unwillingness to give a damn where it came to a village accounting him righteous.

  So he didn’t come across with a sudden burst of truth for them— he still didn’t want to damn Carlo and Randy. Horse business was rider business. Townfolk didn’t understand, wouldn’t understand, couldn’t judge why anyone down below had done anything—and the conspiracy of silence among riders he’d gotten accustomed to down in Shamesey evidently held here, because Ridley hadn’t said a word about a loose horse, either.

  And they didn’t ask about Tarmin anymore. They diverted themselves into meticulous questions about the prices and the ma
rket down in Shamesey, which he could answer, his father’s shop’s prosperity or lack of it being tied to prevailing costs.

  In the past couple of days, he said to himself, among things Ridley hadn’t told them—Spook-horse hadn’t shown up. That was a benefit. Spook-horse hadn’t come into range or made itself a trouble to the village and, by the lack of questions this morning, apparently nobody had heard it.

  That could mean the horse had gone down the mountain again, or in feckless grief slipped off a cliff and broken its neck, or that, with the only humans it wanted out of reach, it had just given up and frozen to death in the storm. He was more sorry for it than scared now that he had the solidity of village walls between Cloud and a horse that wanted company enough to fight for it.

  And even to this moment he wasn’t entirely sure they’d not all imagined it, on the strength of Randy’s desires and his and Carlo’s fears—all hallucinating the creature, including the riders in Evergreen. Real and not-real had gotten very disconnected during the last of their hard journey, enough so that they’d missed not one but two shelters, and he could well believe they’d imagined its presence and scared each other into some very stupid and fortunately survivable choices. Ridley and Callie declared they’d heard something exceedingly faint that had disturbed the morning they’d arrived, but he’d been nursing a headache and couldn’t figure whether he heard it or whether his apprehensions were contagious, maybe from young Jennie’s apprehensions of that she’d caught from her parents or from him. And then he’d drunk the vodka and gone out.

  Well, if Ridley hadn’t told them, he wouldn’t mention it, not until that horse did pose a danger. Which it hadn’t.

  And until and unless Brionne Goss came to, nothing from down in Tarmin meant anything but hurtful gossip to anyone in Evergreen. That might be a very high and wide decision for a junior rider to take on his own advisement, but, dammit, the two boys he’d guided up here had been through hell enough, they weren’t bad on the scale of bad he’d met in his short experience; and if he could make their acceptance by this village more likely just by keeping his mouth shut on the details of Tarmin’s fall and watching the situation, yes, he’d take that option. He was wintering here in Evergreen and the truth was always available from him to the village on a moment’s notice if it became critical for them to know before he left.