Cloud's Rider

by C. J. Cherryh

  He’d tell Ridley and Callie—soon—about Brionne. Maybe. Or maybe they’d never need to know. If she died—they wouldn’t need to know. He guessed, in the absence of anyone available to ask, being a man meant not spreading the worry about for something two more worriers couldn’t fix.

  So it was his to hold. On his own. If spooky stuff once started to spread where horses and an eight-year-old kid were involved, it could turn scary for sure. And no one would ever figure out who had contributed what to the pot.

  So he answered the villagers’ questions, at a safe remove from Tarmin or the intruder on the mountain slopes, and the Evergreen marshal’s office provided hot tea and the preacher provided cookies until they seemed to have run out of questions.

  He was free and clear.

  “We’d like,” the marshal said then, “for you to come back tomorrow.”

  If there’d been a horse near at that moment of distress it would have told everything in the district he’d just panicked.

  “I told you all I know,” he said.

  “We’d like you to tell the council,” the marshal said. “Won’t take too long. General meeting.”

  There wasn’t a way to say no. It wasn’t as if he had a tight schedule.

  And the weather today had certainly proved a storm didn’t stop Evergreen officials and their meetings.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “No trouble.” He collected his hat, his scarf, his gloves, and a couple of cookies for Cloud, for a peace-making.

  Ridley nipped a few for, he was sure, deserving horses who would expect the same of someone who came remembering , and the same for Jennie and Callie, too.

  “Oh, we provided,” the preacher said, and came up with a whole sackful, which Ridley took with a grin and a thank-you.

  So they went out into the passages with the bag of cookies, and trekked back through the echoing boards toward the camp.

  “What do you suppose they want?” he ventured to ask Ridley, and Ridley shrugged.

  “Got to tell it firsthand,” Ridley said. “The village wants to know. And the miners and loggers, they have their rights to know. It’s just the way they do things. It’s their rules with the miners association.”

  “Huh,” he said, and tried instead, in preparation for coming into camp, to think about cookies—good cookies. And he let himself think how his feet hurt, and he let himself limp and think about his sore knees, which didn’t take any pretending at all.

  They walked back through the passage and past the post-and-jog that was the horse-barrier, after which they were in the rider camp, and through the door that let them out into the yard.

  Jennie ambushed them out of the snowstorm, having been listening to the horses. So did Cloud, who was lurking near the den and not pushing too much against the horses that owned the place. Cloud came trotting over, black turned gray in the driving snow, and when Danny thought of the taste of Cloud switched his ears forward and Cloud’s nostrils dilated.

  Then Cloud caught the notion of in Ridley’s possession. So had Jennie, who danced about Ridley, trying for the bag, as Slip and Shimmer moved in to assert their claim.

  “Pig,” Danny said laughing, when the ambient went to as opposed to cookies his rider had. , Danny sent, and held them out, which seduced Cloud right back before heels started flying around Jennie’s short and unpredictably located self.

  Jennie got cookies along with a scolding from her father about antics around hungry horses, and one of Jennie’s went to Rain, so Jennie naturally had to have another; Slip made off with one, and well, Rain and Slip had had one apiece from her, so she had to have one to give Shimmer and one for Cloud.

  Callie came out into the yard before the bag was gone, and got one, at least, before Shimmer persuaded Callie fairness dictated she was due the other one.

  Danny took his chance and left for the porch while it was all happiness and horses high on sugar. He limped up the steps and went to sit by the fire, figuring Jennie would distract Cloud at least long enough—Jennie was good at scratching chins and had not a troubling image in her young head: Cloud seemed to like her, and that hadn’t been the case with his own brother Denis.

  His feet did hurt. He hadn’t lied so much in that.

  But, God, he wished there weren’t tomorrow to deal with. He’d thought he was free and clear: he’d thought he could go back to camp and dismiss Tarmin from his mind for good and all—at least until spring, when he could get out of here. Dirty trick on their part.

  Very dirty trick. So in a concentrated effort to empty his head of everything he didn’t want broadcast, he just stared at the stones and the fire and thought about Shamesey, where things were safe, and about Carlo, whose company he missed, and about—but there were reasons he couldn’t go and talk to Carlo.

  The marshal and the village would imagine their questions going to Carlo’s ears, for one thing; they might trust a young rider who was under the orders of a camp-boss they knew, but they’d have no way to know Carlo’s self-restraint, or lack of it.

  He wondered if Carlo would be at the meeting tomorrow. Maybe he’d see him there and have a chance to know how he was getting along.

  But he didn’t want to betray an interest in the question, no more than he wanted to talk about other things he knew.

  * * *

  Chapter 10

  Ť ^ ť

  The weather had settled down after yesterday’s snow—as generally the weather had been more moderate than the storm of the night they arrived.

  It proved, Danny thought as he and Ridley set out down the barracks steps, that it would have been smarter to sit it out in the cabin at midway. Yesterday had been bitter wind, but nothing still like the storm and the ice they’d climbed in, and the weather today was bright blue sky and only a little white bannered overhead from the heights.

  Fool again, he thought. He should have stayed put.

  Maybe.

  But then—that came of flatlanders climbing mountains in the winter. He’d lived through it. He learned from it.

  He asked Ridley what he thought of the weather-chances for the next while and Ridley said, Oh, should clear for at least two days. When he asked how Ridley knew that, Ridley looked puzzled and didn’t answer at once.

  Ridley just knew, that was the real answer. It was complicated, the system Ridley had for knowing, or at least rendering good guesses. And no flatlander was going to be sure of it on a single telling.

  Assuredly, though, it was a day too good and too sunny to take the passages, and they walked through the camp gate into the village on the surface, past a head-high snow-blown drift along the rider camp wall, and matching ones along the sides of two gray, un-painted board buildings. There were deep piles of snow on either side, but that had been shoveled. The village had cleared the short street from the camp and as they came past those two buildings, which Ridley pointed out as warehouses (not surprising: no villager wanted to live in close proximity to the horses), they came out into the village proper, where industrious and, Danny was sure, constant work against the days of bad weather had shoveled all the street clear, making rumpled piles of snow head-high along the way and a truly huge pile on which children were sliding and playing.

  The village as a whole was one street, no more, and the buildings were of unpainted boards, with incredibly steep roofs, a village made quaint and beautiful with a deep, deep coating of snow, and snow-coated trees, of all things, trees right in town, the evergreens that gave the village its name, thick-coated with white where they stood out of the range of children. He was delighted by the trees. And by the fact the snow-piles were white, not brown with mud.

  And maybe the village wouldn’t look so pretty when the rains came and the mud took over, but under its coating of pristine snow it was the prettiest human-built place he’d ever seen, including Shamesey’s middle square where rich folk lived.

  They went toward the mountain—up the street—and Danny began to build a map in his head out of the general one he’d been drawing slowly from Ridley’s chance thoughts and plans. In the cluster of t
he village’s fanciest houses, toward which they were walking, was a long, bright yellow building—one of a very few with paint—which he guessed might be the village offices.

  “Meeting in the church,” Ridley said, as they walked. “Right down there.”

  “In the church,” He was mildly surprised. And alarmed. They let us in there? he almost asked. But that might be rude.

  “Middle building, there. Church is the biggest place in town. Except the tavern down at the other end. So the village council meets here, the court does, any what they call sober meeting. We were over in the left-hand row, endmost, yesterday.”

  The church he’d have definitely taken for offices. In Shamesey they wouldn’t for any reason be asking a couple of riders under the hallowed roof. Practicality of using the space made a logical sense that wouldn’t have mattered to the hellfire and brimstone religious down in the flatlands.

  But he figured level ground in a village tucked tight against a mountain had to be too valuable to leave sitting idle.

  It was an impressive building when they came up on its wide-roofed porch, and they went in through a foyer with religious pictures over a painted blackboard with a notice that the Wagstaffs had had a girl and that they needed volunteers to patch a leak in the church roof.

  He took off his hat. Ridley did, and they walked on through.

  The inside of the church was painted bright blue, with a huge mural, not too badly rendered, of God letting down the Landing Ship in His hands, and of green and gold fields, and white villages all over. And mountains with villages above the encircling clouds.

  It was certainly a lot more cheerful then the murals in his parents’ church, where an angry God sent lightning down and black beasts slunk along the edges with fangs and claws and glowing red eyes that gave sinful children a lot of bad dreams.

  In Evergreen, God had a smile on His face, and nighthorses stood on the edge of the green land, looking curiously up at the vision of God with an attitude real horses took.

  He let go a sigh without thinking about it, and wasn’t so scared of this church and this preacher, who maybe wasn’t going to threaten him with Hell; he found the courage to go and meet the cluster of villagers who were enjoying the tea and cookies at the rear of the hall. Ridley walked in the lead, in search of cookies, Danny suspected, but first came a round of introductions and hand-shaking, and to his absolute embarrassment, villager admiration for a young rider who, an older woman said, holding his hand and shaking it an uncomfortably long time, was a real brave boy.

  “There’s the ones that came with me,” he said, constrained, if somebody was about to hand out benefits and good will, to remember those that needed it worse and far more permanently than he did. “I’m fine. The Goss boys lost pretty well everything.” He didn’t see them in the meeting. He thought he should at least speak for them.

  “Lord bless,” the woman said, and introduced him to the district judge, Wilima Mason-Hodges, a gray-haired woman who couldn’t shake his hand: hers were full of teacup and cookies, but she nodded in a friendly way and introduced him to a Mr. William Hodges Dawson, attorney and proprietor of something about or near the tavern.

  At that moment the marshal and his deputy wanted the mayor and Wilima Hodges, and Danny was left to mumble through an uneasy conversation with the lawyer, who wanted to know what the status was of the Anveney-Shamesey quarrel and whether the negotiations were making any progress.

  He said what he knew. If the blacksmith Carlo was staying with was part of this meeting, nobody mentioned the fact to him—and he didn’t think that by the less-than-good things he’d heard about the Mackeys that anybody had bothered to invite them—though he would think the blacksmith ought to be a fairly substantial businessman.

  Meanwhile Ridley was discussing Jennie’s homework with a man that might be the village teacher: Jennie was getting lessons and did know how to read, over Jennie’s loud protests, from what Danny had picked up, and if there was one odd small thing in which he’d won Callie’s approval, it was the demonstration about the second evening that he could read, and telling how he’d read since before he was her age, and how useful it was, disposing of Jennie’s contention that it was just her parents’ heartless decision to restrict her freedom.

  Dawson the lawyer asked about his connections in Shamesey. “Mechanic shop,” he said. “My father’s a mechanic.”

  Then the marshal called out that everybody should take their seats, and Danny took refuge at Ridley’s side with the thought that Ridley would know what was proper.

  The proper thing seemed to be to stand there, and the assembly turned out to fill the front four rows of the seats. Reverend Quarles got up and offered a quiet, thankfully brief prayer respecting the dead down in Tarmin and the survivors that had gotten up to Evergreen.

  After that the mayor got up and straightway said, “Rider Fisher, if you’d come and tell us what you witnessed down in Tarmin.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, and walked up to the front of the meeting, hat in hand, to stand and talk while others sat down, but he’d talked in meeting in the riders’ camp down in Shamesey, so it wasn’t his first time to talk to so many people—and these weren’t drunk, crazy, or armed.

  And he figured he should at least cover all the details he had given the marshal in his office, how the Wild had gotten over the walls one night down at Tarmin, that only one Tarmin rider had survived from the camp, and that the Goss kids had lived till he rescued them.

  But he began to sweat, then, hoping he hadn’t opened a question on that matter.

  He didn’t mention this time either how there’d been a fight between riders down the mountain, didn’t mention riders dying or Spook or other horses being loose; but neither had Ridley brought that matter up yet, even to him back at the camp, after he’d heard his account at the marshal’s office. He didn’t know why they’d called him and not the Goss boys to question—though maybe they had talked to Carlo and Randy.

  He reckoned himself the least involved of anyone, not even being from Rogers Peak, and probably the most impartial witness, and he figured if Ridley at this hour wanted any question raised about rider business whatever, Ridley was the boss in the rider camp, and that meant they should ask Ridley.

  Which was exactly what he meant to say if they asked him anything of that sort: he’d resolved that matter early on.

  But before he’d received any signal that they were finished with questions, one gray-haired man asked Judge Hodges about the legalities of inheritance, and Dawson stood up in the audience and said there were rights like for any salvage.

  Then a woman who seemed to be another lawyer in the village said that, no, the Goss kids could have rights to the whole town.

  Then the lawyer who seemed to be the judge’s relative, Dawson, said maybe to the smiths’ shop, but not to anything else.

  Danny drew in a breath and sidled from the conspicuous center to the aisle and then near the door, really wishing to be away from here, and just listened while people who didn’t even have relatives in Tarmin argued bitterly about rights to it, and then—

  Then the notion dawned on him that Carlo and Randy could be rich.

  That was a good thing, he supposed, if they survived the honor, counting some of these people, the miners and loggers, he supposed, looked real rough. But he didn’t think Carlo and Randy wanted ever to go back to Tarmin to live.

  But not just Carlo and Randy had a right. The preacher stood up, called Brionne Goss “that poor child,” and “that pure soul,” and said how “there must have been a state of grace on the Goss family to have those brave children survive, as proof of His infinite mercy.”

  Being by now used to being damned, Danny stood with his hat respectfully in his hands and waited to be bypassed if the preacher was polite, and he thought this one with the pretty blue church was far nicer than preachers down on the plains.

  The preacher added, “And God chose this brave young rider to guide them.”

  That meant God had somehow ended up guiding a rider into the bargain—past tw
o perfectly good shelters and on to Evergreen, half-killing them in the process.

  No, that was sacrilegious. Maybe they wouldn’t have made it at all if they’d stayed in those shelters. Maybe something terrible would have happened to them or that horse would have caught up to Cloud and Cloud would have gotten killed. Then they’d have been stuck there helpless. He could easily construct sufficient disaster in his mind to explain why God would have had them bypass the shelters. There was a scared small spot in him that was still devout in his mother’s and his father’s religion, mortally scared of his own lately-come-by irreverence.

  But after that Dawson and the other lawyer and the judge were out of their seats and a couple of other people began arguing.

  He was glad, then, not to be named too directly. He wished he dared go back after another drink of hot tea back on that table. His throat was still sore when he talked for any length of time and the lawyers had started dicing things in terms of village law and inheritance law, over what, while he stood there on sore feet, really began to sound like some sort of compromise where Carlo and Randy— and Brionne if she ever waked up—were entitled either to money or to their parents’ property, but not to the whole town and all the salvage in it.

  That was still a lot of inheritance. And by all they said he didn’t think they had ever talked to Carlo and Randy.

  One person stood up and said technically there couldn’t be salvage since there hadn’t been a wreck.

  But, the judge argued, there couldn’t be next of kin to consider, either, since with the exception of the Goss kids all the next of kin of Tarmin folk had died right there. Nobody in Tarmin had married outside the village that anybody in Evergreen knew about, and it was first come first claimed, so the one faction maintained.

  God, it was a gold rush. Except the prize was buildings. Stores. Houses. Personal goods. Equipment, all lying intact down there— because the vermin wouldn’t have destroyed that. The people in this church were talking about inheritances because they were priming themselves to go down the mountain as soon as they could and lay claim to vacant stores and houses in Tarmin—