Cloud's Rider

by C. J. Cherryh

  But what would they do with their own? Danny asked himself. What about their own houses, their own jobs and their lives up here?

  And what about the other villages, that they dismissed with a reckoning that Tarmin villagers hadn’t any relatives up here or anywhere, and there was no legal need to notify anybody else?

  So Evergreen was going to get it all?

  Damn, he thought. That was why the marshal had wanted him to come and tell what he knew to this gathering of the important, the powerful, the rich people in the village.

  They were going to organize an expedition come spring, faster than any other village knew anything was wrong in Tarmin except the normal downing of the phone lines in winter storms. They would go down there, not just to loot the place of what was portable, though a lot of that might happen, too, but abandoning their stores and houses, or leaving them, he guessed, to relatives, or maybe just flinging them to the first comer along with all the winter privations of the High Loop, to gain what he understood was the easier weather further down the mountain, where they could be the shippers and run the mills and do the other things that siphoned off profit before it filtered up to the High Loop.

  Did the vermin get everything? he’d been asked yesterday.

  And he’d said, the truth: No, not but what was alive or stored food. And the hides in storage they’d probably get—because the winter hunger was that fierce, and vermin usually gnawed up the hides of whatever fell in the High Wild. What went down anywhere in the Wild was gone before the sunrise, down to the bare bones and few of those. But Tarmin—Tarmin had been so rich and so full of food even the swarm that had occupied it hadn’t scattered the bones. Hadn’t gnawed through all the doors by morning.

  Had by now, he was sure. And what did Tarmin get now? A swarm of humans to follow the vermin?

  Nobody yet seemed to have talked to Carlo about these rights everybody was arguing about.

  Then someone who identified himself as the representative from the miners’ barracks stood up, a thin, bearded man who hooked his thumbs in his belt and said lawyers were all fine and good, but that any miner who staked a claim first was the title-holder.

  “This isn’t a mine!” the mayor said, and the judge said.

  “When value’s added by human hands, it’s not a find.”

  “Beg to differ,” the other lawyer said.

  “Words,” the miner rep drawled. “If we get down there first we stake the claims and then you lawyers can come down there and try to talk us out of ’em.”

  Applause followed that, from a handful, boos from others.

  That kind of wrangling was going to go on for days and months, Danny thought. He wished he could find an occasion to go back to the table, or better yet all the way back to the rider camp. He was more than glad when Ridley, perhaps in the same frame of mind, walked forward from the back rows and said to the assembly and the marshal that they’d go back now and stand available for further questions if the village needed them.

  “That’s fine. That’s real fine. Appreciate your help,” the marshal, Peterson, said, and shook Ridley’s hand. Their departure stopped the debate, and various townfolk and several of the disputants came and expressed their appreciation for the report. “Glad to have you the winter,” one said, which was a lot better than riders got out of Shamesey folk. Then Reverend Quarles came and said, “I know I can’t convince Ridley there, but we’d be happy to see you in Sunday services, son.”

  “Thank you,” Danny said. He was astounded by the offer. “I might,” he said, and found occupation for his hands in keeping the brim of his hat uncrimped. “I might do that.”

  “Any time you, you know, want to talk, I’m just the other side of the wall.”

  “I won’t forget that, thank you, sir.”

  But by then he was sure the preacher’s invitation simply hoped to separate him from Cloud and thereby save his soul, and his partnership with Cloud wasn’t even remotely negotiable. John Quarles and his heaven-blue church was certainly a kinder-spoken and more forgiving preacher than the fire-and-brimstone peddlers down in Shamesey town. In Shamesey as a whole a rider’s leathers and fringed jacket weren’t welcome, not in the town streets and least of all in respectable places. This village as a whole seemed a lot better.

  But he didn’t linger to quibble. He had his escape, and took his leave with Ridley, out the front door through the foyer and down the porch steps.

  It was done, then. He’d told what mattered.

  “Wasn’t too bad,” he said to Ridley. “But what are they going to do? Wait till spring or what?”

  “They’re going to be down that mountain like willy-wisps,” Ridley said, “some maybe if the weather holds good, hoping to get a jump on the others, and if they leave down the road, I’m damn sure not guiding them, and if they go overland I’m not rescuing them. They’ve lost their damn minds.”

  Village riders were very different from town riders, he’d begun to figure that. Ridley cared about Evergreen. Shamesey riders, who hadn’t any sense of personal attachment, just drew pay for guarding herds and fields, or they got hire as he had with the convoys that took commerce back and forth between the towns. But if people Ridley knew were fools, Ridley might still go after them—that was how he understood the man, and Callie as well.

  Jennie complicated things. Immensely.

  And walking back from the meeting in which neither he nor Ridley had told all the truth—for what he suspected were very different reasons—he said to himself he had to talk to Carlo very soon and tell him what the thinking was in the village, in case no one got around to explain to Carlo what his rights were, because Carlo, being an outsider like himself, didn’t have anybody but him to do that. But he couldn’t run from here to there or people would draw fast connections.

  A rider visiting a villager was going to occasion talk. No way not. But he could at least be smarter about it than that.

  He watched the village kids throwing snowballs up and down the street. There were shrieks and name-calling, and no harm done.

  Sleds plied the street further down, children amusing themselves on a white surface—while in Shamesey, snow meant muddied and dirty piles along the sidewalks. Here there were such snow-hills, but they were clean and clearly fair game for sledders.

  On the way to the meeting he’d seen what was beautiful in Evergreen; in there, in that church, he’d seen what wasn’t.

  But maybe they weren’t to blame for what they were doing. Ridley was mad and Ridley didn’t like the talk in there, but, he realized suddenly, the villagers in that church were proposing things that were going to hurt the village and draw off people the village needed, that had to be Ridley’s view of things.

  And what was the truth? The notion in these people’s minds must have started small—just the notion that the staging area for everything they relied on was gone—and they were legitimately scared for their lives and safety up here.

  So he couldn’t blame them too much at all for their plans, and he doubted Ridley did. When he thought about it—why shouldn’t they take what was down there? They were overexcited and maybe a little quick to protect their own interests above others, but he didn’t think they were bad people.

  He didn’t know what it would be to be a kid in this sparkling and white wintertime world that riders who went with the trucks would never see. Maybe a little more innocent—maybe less. He didn’t figure their minds. He’d be leaving come spring and probably wouldn’t spend another such winter—he’d be on his way and guiding the trucks and earning his living.

  “Where’s the smith’s place?” Danny asked as they walked this street imperilled by snow-battles in which two riders enjoyed a curious immunity.

  Ridley pointed a gloved hand toward the end of the village. “Near the gate, third building back.”

  It wasn’t the building he’d guessed it was. It was much less conspicuous. “What are the big ones?” he asked.

  “Miner barracks. Tavern.”

  Of course. If miners and loggers came in for the winter, they had to have somewhere to stay. In
Shamesey there were several hotels for the truckers who didn’t rent space in private homes.

  For good and certain they didn’t stay near the horses in the rider camp.

  “This house here, now,” Ridley said, and indicated a painted, prosperous-looking house on their way: the owner evidently didn’t believe, unlike most everyone else up and down the street, that a little space of sun was the signal to unshutter and enjoy the light. “This is the doctor’s. This is where they took the girl.”

  “Huh,” he said, but nothing else. He didn’t want anything to do with the matter. And didn’t want to discuss Brionne in any detail. But Ridley said further, as they walked toward the rider-gate, that narrow portal that led into the camp:

  “She lost her daughter.”

  “The doctor did?”

  “And her husband, right after. He was a good man. A real good man. All the kids were going skating—they do, when the weather’s been socked in for weeks: special outing. You know kids. Bouncing off the walls by then. Callie and I, every month or so we take ’em out to the pond just up the road, and sometimes you’ll see kids from Mornay join us. And there were some then. Faye, that was the kid’s name—she was fourteen the week before—Faye got to talking to a boy from Mornay, and she was kind of at that age, you know, skated off from the rest, she and the boy, just kid stuff, just flirting. It was about this time last year. The ice wasn’t solid in the west end—the waterbabies keep it churned up there by their burrow, where the falls comes out, and it wasn’t at all safe. I spotted the kids. I yelled—”

  Ridley shook his head. Clearly it was a bad memory. And Danny didn’t know what to say. Maybe Ridley just wanted to talk about it, or wanted him to know something essential about the girl he’d shepherded in and what her situation was. He didn’t look at Ridley, just walked beside him.

  “They skated off the other way from where I was,” Ridley said. “Playing games. She hit the thin ice. I yelled at her to go flat, and she maybe started to, but the ice split, and the fool boy tried to grab her—which put twice the weight on it. They both went under. He climbed out. She didn’t come up. Her father went in looking for her, without a rope, and he nearly drowned. The marshal and his deputy got her out, sucked into the waterbaby den, right where the water flows out. Just too late. Wasn’t anything to do. Sometimes the drowned ones will come around. But this one didn’t.” Ridley shook his head. “Her father went along quiet till spring and the ice started melting, just made his call on an old man who’d died, and then he went home and locked the office door and blew his brains out.”

  “Damn.”

  “Yeah,” Ridley said. “Darcy Schaffer, that’s his wife, she’s the surgeon for us and all the miners, only doctor we’ve got since her husband died, but she just isn’t opening her doors. I don’t know how the marshal talked her into it. I know what they were thinking when they took the girl there. But—”

  “Hard on her, then, if the girl dies.”

  “Yeah,” Ridley said. “Real hard. I’ll tell you, she was in the house when her husband killed himself. Middle of a storm, the windows were shuttered—she never unshuttered them after, just stayed like that since last spring. If you get a cut that’s not near your heart, you go to the druggist, that’s all. The Sumners—they own the pharmacy—they’ve gotten real good at first aid. And,” Ridley said with a sigh, “single women and doctors both being scarce here on the peak, God knows there’s been a lot of men on her doorstep this year—one guy, a real nice fellow, everybody thought sure she’d take to—and one night this last summer three drunk loggers carved each other up on her porch, trying to get clear space to talk to her on the subject. Didn’t impress her in the least. She’ll see to a birthing or go over to Irma Quarles’ place—the preacher’s mother. She’s got a chronic lung condition, and Darcy’ll come out and see her, but that’s about the limit.”

  “Doesn’t sound as if the woman needs more grief,” Danny said, thinking to himself that he wouldn’t give a spit in hell’s furnace for the chance Brionne Goss would wake up and answer to the doctor rather than to her own brothers.

  And God help the doctor if she did. God hope she never did.

  But that was an ugly thought, an ugly wish, and he didn’t want to think it, because they were reaching the gate that led into the rider camp, where the horses might pick it up.

  He buried his thoughts real fast in the meeting, and the argument, and the lawyers, none of which Cloud would understand, as Ridley pulled the chain that lifted the latch on the gate—a simple affair, a gate with a free-standing post that a human could walk around and a horse couldn’t—same arrangement as in the board and earth tunnel that ran as a snow-covered mound and windbreak beside them, like a little hill, the only structure that went right through the camp wall—or that the camp wall humped over. They went through into the rider camp, to home, at least for the next several months, into that warm bath of the horse-carried ambient, with , and , on either hand, human and horse.

  That caused a nighthorse excursion out into the cold, Cloud and Ridley’s Slip immediately, and Rain, who seemed to have his inquisitive nose into every event. More leisurely out of the dim light and close warmth came pregnant Shimmer, and then with a thump of a wide-flung barracks door, came the human offspring, half into her coat and trailing a scarf, onto the porch and down the steps, to be caught by her father and swung aloft.

  “Getting too big,” Ridley complained, setting her down; and Jennie said, “I bet Danny can lift me.”

  “Not on your life,” Danny said, far from willing to provoke jealous competitions with father and daughter. “I’m not as big as he is. I’m a junior rider.”

  “I’m a junior rider, too,” Jennie said.

  “Yeah,” Ridley said. “When you get a horse, miss, and you don’t count Rain.”

  “I love Rain,” Jennie cried, “and Rain loves me!”

  And before that could flare into an argument Callie came out with her coat wrapped around her, asked if they’d break the ice on the barrel.

  “I can!” Jennie declared, and was off with Rain kicking up his heels across the yard.

  So he and Ridley followed and took a heavy log and broke up the ice as Callie went back inside.

  Came a heavy thump behind their backs and a burst of nighthorse hooves on the frozen snow. As Ridley looked up and Danny turned Jennie was on the ground flat on her back beside the porch and Rain was still dancing off with his tail in the air. Ridley ran, he ran, but Jennie was already getting up, brushing herself off.

  “Have you lost your mind?” Ridley asked. “Stay off him!”

  The pieces of the situation were all there to figure: the porch, the skittish and indignant colt—who’d probably been willing to have Jennie on his back until it felt weird. She’d used the porch edge for a mounting-block, the corner post of the porch for a handhold, and Rain had shied right out from under her—luckily she hadn’t hurt her back—or her head; it was crusted snow below and a thick coat and a heavy knitted cap. She’d just had the breath knocked out of her, minor crisis, a lot of gasping and trying, red-faced, not to cry.

  “See?” Ridley said, angry; Ridley already had not had a good morning, in the meeting, and Jennie cried and stormed and went running off to Rain.

  To Rain, not to her mother who was working indoors. Danny marked that fact.

  So, he thought, did Ridley.

  “Damn!” Ridley stormed off toward the den, to his daughter and to Rain, with Slip trailing after. The ambient was full of and Rain was thinking , Shimmer was thinking , and Slip and Cloud were understandably on edge.

  But it was peace-making Ridley was after, and Danny saw him standing in the doorway of the den, leaning against the post, talking to his daughter.

  Maybe Ridley believed he could stop nature and growing up from taking its course. Danny didn’t know. Maybe Ridley was trying to explain the facts of life to an eight-year-old.

  They’d talked about maybe taking Rain to another camp next spring. Maybe Rain leaving of his own accord when the foal was born—a colt horse often did take out on his own at that point. But to say so to Jen
nie that well could be the frown, the downcast look, the refusal to look at her father.

  He felt sorry for the kid. And the colt.

  And while he was thinking it, Cloud nudged him in the side. Cloud thought if human hands were otherwise unoccupied they could be

  He did. Cloud rewarded his charity by licking his ear.

  He was ever so glad to have the interview in town behind him. Now he had absolutely nothing in front of him but a winter in this camp, with the reserved but congenial company of Ridley and Callie, and he didn’t need to worry. Down in Shamesey his family might worry about him—and figure he was staying out the winter because of the fight they’d had in parting. They might even guess he’d gone off into the hills and gotten snowed in—

  Fornicating all winter in some village was what his father would think.

  Less chance than Rain had, was the fact.

  And his own family would miss him. The money he’d brought would have run out come spring. They’d be back on what profit his father and mother earned from their own business, but they’d survive very handily till he got back; they had before. And then maybe he’d come back with enough in his pockets to set his father up with the kind of tools the shop needed.

  Most of all he’d finally paid off his promise to Cloud, who’d wanted this winter in the High Wild, from the beginning of their partnership, two years ago, when a crazy young horse had played tag with gunmen atop Shamesey walls getting the rider he wanted, which for some reason happened to be Danny Fisher. Cloud had surely been foaled in the mountains, the camp-boss had told him that, and he thought it might have been on Rogers Peak itself, in the wild herd— he had no images of villages out of Cloud and never had had any. Cloud had wanted his winter in the High Wild, and, Cloud having brought him up this mountain, well, here they were: their duty was done to the village folk, Ridley said he could work for his keep and even said he’d talk to the marshal, meaning he’d go on the village tab.