ALSO BY C.J. CHERRYH C YTEEN:* The Betrayal The Rebirth The Vindication RIMR UNNERS HEAVY TIME HELLB URNER TRIPOINT Published by Warner Books *Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel [fiEBRYfi ASPECT A Time Warner Company Copyright c 1995 by C.J. Cherryh All rights reserved. Warner Books, Inc., 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020 OA Time Warner Company Aspect is a trademark of Warner Books, Inc. Printed in the United States of America First Printing: August 1995 10987654321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cherryh, C. J. Rider at the gate / C.J. Cherryh. p. cm. ISBN 0-446-51781-X 1. Title. PS3563. H358R53 1995 81Y.54~-dc20 Book design by L & G McRee 95-7591 CIP FOR JANE SINE QUA NON Especially the beginning-- INLAND W E SEA N RII~IER Chapter 1 THE FIRST OF THE TRUCK CONVOY HAD SCARCELY TOPPED THE RISE that would lead them down to Shamesey town when three riders broke free of its line and raced up on a gust of autumn wind, past the bell-arch of Shamesey camp and through the open gates behind which over a thousand riders and nighthorses were encamped. These three, strangers all to Shamesey, swept into the camp com- mons without any more warning than that, borderers by their dress and manner, atop nighthorses out of the High Wild. Two of them stopped just inside the gate while the third rode down the main street of the camp, searching. They were a grayness to nighthorse minds, these three from the convoy, two out of range, the third a shifting flutter of images passed to nearby horses and from them to the Shamesey riders' minds, an uneasy sending that masked that pair's intent from the nighthorses, who held no secrets one from the other. But it required no nighthorse sense to know that these three wanted something; more specifically, they wanted someone. 2 --~'--~ C.J. Cherryh A scattered few Shamesey riders, camp-boss Lyle Wesson among them, hearing the disturbance among the horses, deserted their ta- bles in the Gate Tavern and gathered on the encircling porch. Lyle Wesson walked alone down the wooden steps and stood in the dusty tavern yard to meet that third rider, this guide and guard (he perceived so on the whisper of information coming to him from the horses) to a line of trucks now rolling unescorted toward Shamesey. Unwise to leave a convoy unattended even within sight of Shamesey, largest and most secure of all the Finisterre towns; if they had done that, it was a breach of procedures for which these three might pay dearly in subsequent hires. But as the rider from the convoy drew up near them in the tav- ern yard, Lyle Wesson and all the nearby riders saw--imaged in their own minds through the stranger's horse--the blond young man the convoy's guide had come looking for. More, the Shamesey riders felt a terror closely held under the stranger's fa5ade of calm: terror and a gnawing insanity under which these three riders had labored for days. "Stuart is the name you want," the camp-boss said aloud, more than uneasy at the prospect of that unsettled sending set loose through his camp. "He's somewhere about. Get down. We'll stand you and your mates a drink. Someone will find him." The stranger shook his head. "Not here," he said, scantly con- trolled, and leaned heavily on his horse's withers. "Tell him. Out- side." The nighthorse under him threw its head, shook out its black, cloudy mane, and with no more decision of the rider (those around him were in a position to know) it spun and fled back to- ward the two riders who waited at the gate. Those two turned be- forehand and dashed beneath the bell-arch and out onto the road. The third followed them at no less speed. The riders and the camp-boss, who had most immediately felt the fear unraveling the peace, breathed a collective sigh of relief at having that much space between Shamesey and the madness those stranger-riders carried with them. "Find Gull Stuart," the word went out: the boss spoke aloud to the riders he sent on that job, a message without nighthorse image: it was a human attempt to contain that madness. RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 3 ,! But a solitary nighthorse, in the hostile, curious way of its kind, had come near enough to skim the image-rich surface of human thoughts, and gone off, unknown to the camp-boss, to carry what it learned to its den-mates. So the contagion spread, inevitably, through the encampment. It took a man a considerable walk to accomplish the circuit of Shamesey camp, that protective circle of riders and horses who lived between the double palisade walls of Shamesey town's perime- ter, riders who slept in hostels near the horse dens, met in taverns similar to the Gate Tavern, and lived in their separate settlements within that ring. But that image had made the rounds of the bell- gate section of the rider camp and was traveling down the ringroad to the next station before the camp-boss had even climbed the steps to the Gate Tavern. The image had reached the fourth tavern and cluster of hostels long before the bell rang that signaled the arrival of the convoy at Shamesey town gates. It was a smallish, blond man the stranger wanted, a young man, a borderer, the rider of the horse that imaged himself as fire, pain and dark: those who knew Stuart called the creature Burn. The image mutated and acquired opinion as it sped further: a solitary young man, a sullen, prankish horse, both prone to fights; a pair that roused dislike in some quarters of the camp, respect in others--disdain among the Shamesey riders, which image held more of Shamesey opinion of borderers in general than of Stuart in particular. As a result of those acquired opinions, it might have been four and five different men the message sought before the image was halfway through the fifth cluster of brown plank buildings. Nighthorse sendings were like that when they flew through a camp: they were images and emotions, no words. Sometimes a rider or a horse mistook the individual in the message and shaped the image to something more like someone he did know--an image that also passed on, confounding the search: sometimes it found no names in human minds, and sometimes it acquired other, mistaken names as it met the leading edge of the spoken rumor. But the main thread, camp-boss Lyle Wesson's order, running by 4 ~ Cd. Cherryh human word of mouth at various distances behind the nighthorse sendings, held no doubt at all: Gull Stuart and the nighthorse Burn were the rider and the horse the strangers wanted at the bell-gate. They were present in camp; there was danger in the high hills; and, arriving with a truck convoy, some business had come to the gate that strangers who knew Stuart had feared to bring inside the walls---only prudent hesitation, where so many nighthorses were gathered. Bad business. Bad news. A contagion that no one in his right mind would want to receive. In the better part of Shamesey town, the very core of Shamesey-- where wealthy wooden houses were bright with painted flowers and red and blue eaves, where gaslights glowed wanton waste on the street corners even at early twilight--no one even noticed the event, except that the bell had rung which signaled a convoy com- ing in. Merchants left their dinner tables and headed out for the market- place, as late as it was, to spy out what goods had come in and with what prices. Well-dressed children ran out to see the trucks and annoy the drivers. Others in the town center turned out for curios- ity, if nothing else. The better part of Shamesey town would never feel the fear and the distress that ran the circuit of the rider camp, but that was, after all, why the rich built their houses so far from the palisade walls, so that the riders and the world over the hills would never intrude into their peaceful lives. That insulation was the privilege of their wealth, which they gathered from their labor and their trade, and which they planned to enjoy forever, nothing changing, preferring to build atop each other rather than crowd closer to the camp. But in Shamesey slums, the insulating ring of human squalor lying between Shamesey town and Shamesey camp--where the bell meant little but rich merchants getting richer--the residents sensed that nighthorse rumor like a presentiment of storm. It was a sensation so convincing that some stopped their business on the RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 5 streets and others flung up their windows to search the skies in the west, the ordinary direction of bad weather. But when the western heavens showed clear in the final glow of sunset, the slum-folk directed their anxiousness instead down their streets of ramshackle, unpainted board buildings toward the encir- cling walls of the rider camp; and, with the helplessness of the poor who had to live nearest the camp and the images that seeped through those wooden walls, they cursed and spat for fear of night- mares. The Fisher household felt that storm-feeling in their drafty third-floor flat, a flat which lately had new stoppage for those drafts and smelled of fresh paint and plaster. The Fishers paused in their supper and looked toward the window--as Danny Fisher's fork hit the plate and flung beans in an arc across the table. "Hell!" Danny cried, which one didn't ever say under his parents' roof. He wasn't thinking clearly as he began to get up. He only re- alized his intention as he cleared his chair and it scraped on the floor. "Where do you think you're going?" his father demanded. His mother said, "Danny, sit down, finish your supper. The bell's none of your concern." But he couldn't sit down. The feeling was dreadful, as if his mind were going every direction at once, and he had to wonder, didn't his family feel anything? His youngest brother, Denis, shook at his arm, saying, "Danny, Danny, sit down, what's the matter with you?" His mother was upset now, and his father was angry, ordering him to take his seat with the rest of the family and act like a sane human being. But he had to get to the camp. He had to find Cloud. He headed for the door. His father shoved his chair back, too, yelling at him to come back and do as he was told. His father crossed the room in two strides and grabbed his arm hard enough to bruise it. Then his mother was on her feet, and grabbed his father's arm. "Let him alone!" his mother yelled. 6 ~: C.J. Cherryh "The boy can act like he's sane! The boy can sit down and finish his supper!" "We have neighbors!" "Fine, we have neighbors! They all know our son's crazy! It's no news to them!" "Don't you yell at me! Sit down! Everybody sit down and eat your dinner! I'll throw it out if nobody's going to eat it!" Danny didn't feel anything but that dissociation, that terrible coming-apart. He jerked at his father's arm. "Let me go, dammit, I've got to go!" His father's hand cracked across his face. His father started yelling at him, something about God and religion, devils and hell. But devils and hell weren't here. Something else was, something as frightening and far more imminent. Danny freed himself, not because his father couldn't have held him, even lately, but because his father had let go in seeming shock--while his mother pounded on his father's arm with her fist, screaming about 'that creature' and how it would come into town and they'd all die if he didn't let Danny go to it. Denis was bawl- ing, screaming at them to stop fighting. His older brother, Sam, stared at all of them from the table--Sam didn't argue with their father, Sam wanted the machine shop when their father was gone, nothing more, nothing less, so Sam just shoveled down another spoonful of beans. Danny grabbed his coat, his scarf, his hat from the pegs beside the door. "You don't have to come back, you!" his father yelled. "You're damned to hell, dealing with that beast, you know that? You're going straight to hell!" "Shut up!" his mother yelled. "You don't mean that! --Danny, he doesn't mean that!" "Yes, I mean it!" his father shouted, and the fight was in full cry when Danny shot the bolt back, banged the door open and raced down the rickety stairs. He was halfway to the bottom, two steps at a time, before Denis overtook him. Denis got a grip on his coat, screaming at him to stop, he didn't want him to go, papa didn't mean it, he couldn't go RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 7 out there, the devil would get him and drag him and that horse down to hell if he went back there. Danny wasn't even aware of shaking Denis off. "You just go!" he heard Denis screaming after him. "You just go ahead! God's going to send you to hell! Papa says God's going to send you to hell and I don't care!" It was meaningless noise to him. He ran the stairs, rushed out the door and down the street, breathless. People everywhere were stopped, gathered along the walks, look- ing toward the wooden walls of the camp. He'd never felt anything the like: it was bad, it promised the town worse dreams, and people shied away from him in the streets, seeing not a kid who'd grown up in their neighborhood, but a rider's fringed leather, a rider's clear purpose in the midst of the stifling storm-feeling. Trucks jammed Gate Street, which led down to the bell-arch, trucks crowding one another, engines growling in their uphill climb toward the market and the warehouses buried deep beneath the town center: protection for the material wealth--and the vital food supplies that were life to everyone, merchant and slum dweller alike. Only the riders could survive without. Riders could survive without the town; the town could never survive without the riders. Tanker trucks lumbered in the midst of the canvas-covered cargo trucks, huge, long rigs the drivers ordinarily chose to park outside the walls. Tonight they were in the line, seeking shelter from the coming dark. Danny wove past the gawkers at the corner. It was a big convoy, maybe the last before the winter closed the passes. "Don't listen!" a street preacher was shouting. "Heed not the beasts! Death and damnation to the followers of the beasts! Pray! Shut your hearts against the creatures of this world and pray to God for deliverance!" The feeling on Gate Street was overwhelming. Maybe part of it was the exhaust from the trucks: fumes welled up in the narrow street, under a dilapidated overhang of buildings so old and so close that at the gentle imprecisions of the uphill road the tankers ran 8 ~ C.J. Cherryh their tires up over the low curbs and threatened the eaves and peo- ple on the sidewalks. Danny wanted to run. He felt as if he couldn't get enough breath. Diesel stung his eyes and his throat as he walked double- time. Terrible thump. Some driver rear-ended the truck in front. Sec- ond collision, then, as somebody else stopped too short. Panic was contagious. The truckers felt it. "Pray for your children, that they follow not the beasts!" He was strangling in it. Fear raced through the camp, provoking a general surveillance over the main street from the doors of rider hostels and nighthorse dens alike. The camp-boss and the several riders who had first come out to meet the arrivals had set up their own watch over the situation from the vantage of the Gate Tavern porch. Nighthorses who had drifted into their vicinity had shied off into the twilight, spreading the message that the camp-boss was not pleased. The tide of disturbance had rolled all the way through the camp and back again. Consistently now it imaged a thin, smallish man with fair hair, recognizable to some, not to others; it imaged strangers at the gate, and horror in their company. That image stirred hate in some quarters, and that hate roused other angers waiting to explode, tempers set off by nothing more than the darkness of the feeling. Fights broke out that had nothing remotely to do with Gull Stuart. But it was hate for Gull Stuart that had sent Ancel Harper in particular searching after his cousins; and anger and fear flowed through their meeting at Hami's Tavern, a bar mostly claimed by the riders of Hallanslake district. Nighthorses wandered through the open portico of the tavern, and the feeling in that precinct was not good. Hallanslakers, Harper included, knew Stuart. And unlike most of the riders in Shamesey camp, Ancel Harper recognized the threat lurking about the edges of the message. He, unlike most riders, had felt it before and never wanted to feel it again. RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 9 He knew, and controlled that knowledge: a man who dealt with nighthorses learned to keep his past from infecting the present. Nighthorses didn't thipk easily in terms of past or future: a careless rider's own imagination could all too easily become real for his horse, and come from the horse back to him. Stuart hadn't caused what had happenedmnot directly--as Stu- art hadn't caused this newest disaster--directly. But that hardly mattered: Gull Stuart was the kind of man trouble always hap- pened next to, and there wasn't a friend Stuart had in this Hal- lanslaker tavern ... not now and not before some poor sod out there had died with the horror this death had about it. Because that was what lurked at the core and around the edges of the stranger's message: death come singing to as many as wanted to listen. Harper and his associates knocked back two rounds of drinks in quick succession, not the only patrons trying to drown the feel- ing that pulled at old feuds and seethed up through old matters long settled, even among themselves. "Damned fool," Harper said, as the horse-borne image made yet one more round of the camp, but what he imaged in his own mind was, in particular, a young fool, quick to offense, too quick to pull a knife-- Drunk at the time, as Harper himself had been, night camp on the road, hard decisions to be made; and Stuart in no good mood. But neither had Harper or his brother been in a charitable mind to- ward a sullen outsider. Gerry had died years later, of something Stuart hadn't had a thing to do with, just the breaks as they happened in the High Wild. Gerry was dead and Stuart was alive.., nothing to do with each other, those sets of facts, those events that left one man alive, one dead; but it wasn't damned fair, in Harper's thinking, and Harper didn't want to see the f~ce that kept intruding into his mind in constant image, preoccupying his attention like an unwel- come, waking dream. Most of all, he didn't want to feel what he was feeling in the air. He didn't want that sending that was rubbing in the fact of Stuart's presence in the camp like salt into a wound: Stuart, Stuart, Stuart. Damn his trouble-prone, arrogant, son-of-a-bitch ways that I0 ~ C.J. Cherryh plowed ahead into a situation when smarter men said stop, don't go. Men and horses had breaking points, and the High Wild, when a man or a horse grew careless, always won. Minds snapped. Illu- sions became fact. A man wandered right into his death, blithe and believing, until madness sucked his companions down into that delusionary hell with him. So somebody else had died. On Stuart's side, this time. One of Stuart's friends, most likely. Good riddance. Harper carried a scar across his ribs. Stuart had one to match. So had Gerry. Draw, it had been, then--thanks to a trucker's interfer- ence. Hallanslakers had said no go, and maintained a convoy wasn't safe on the mountain. Hallanslakers had had damned good reasons for saying so, including the higher fees they ought to have gotten for doing it; but Stuart, the only outside rider the convoy had hired on, he'd pushed, claimed of course they could make it, and he'd bring them through--for no extra charge, as if money didn't matter. And Stuart, of course, had gotten his way, his way being far more palatable to the trucker boss, so it was go on up the road at the same fee despite the risk or lose their reputation and look like cow- ards to the clients. Two Hallanslakers had died on that haul, swept away down the mountain, thanks to a snapped cable and toppling truck that had nearly taken Gerry out as well. Knocked cold, he'd been, by that free-flying cable that had taken Gerry's partner down. Stuart in the number of the dead? The man whose stupid-stubborn fault it was they were there with that faulty cable? that unstable truck? No such luck. And Gerry hadn't fought Stuart again. Gerry hadn't fought much of anything after that trip, not even after his cracked head healed. Gerry was never the same after that. Gerry had taken hires he shouldn't have taken, loned it across the mountains in a season he shouldn't have. Gerry's sense was gone, thanks to that cable, and Gerry's heart had gone, swept down the mountainside with his partner, and that was that. RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 11 A brother couldn'~t hold him. A brother couldn't stop the change in him. Gerry'd been on his own when he died. He'd chosen that, as others who lost partners chose to die. He'd ridden out to his death. His horse.., they'd had to shoot it when it came to camp without him. They'd had no choice. They'd been lucky: for a mo- ment, it had been sane. The feeling in the camp grew darker, and more angry: nighthorse politics, sexual politics, that shivered on the autumn wind. Death. Sex and death and a rider Stuart knew and slept with. Harper had his knife with him. He knew where Stuart was now, disquieting feeling. He knew that the ripple of query had just got- ten to Stuart. Stuart knew and the ripple came racing back again, through nighthorse minds and human, a feeling like the pause between the l. ightning and the thunder. The camp-boss watched from the Gate Tavern porch as Guil Stuart came walking toward the camp gate, following that reverse tide of rumor. Slight, smallish, dressed in brown fringed leathers: the real- ity behind the image. Stuart's long blond hair was loose, a border- er's vanity--and he carried knives, one in the boot and one on the hip. That was a manner, as the saying had it. A definite manner which gave not a damn about the rules of no-conflict that prevailed in a camp this size.., a manner that flatly challenged the camp- boss to call him on it. But say that Stuart wasn't the only one, and that Stuart carried at least two of his in the open: a clear warning. Say that the camp couldn't enforce the rule: there were riders--especially borderers like Stuart--who had specific reason to guard their backs, generally against other borderers. Borderers, the rider-guides born to the High Wild, were the ones who knew the routes at the extreme points of settled land. They were a necessary fact of rider society--they stayed in Shame- sey camp only during the winters, when the routes were closed to trucks and riders alike; and Shamesey locals, the guards over cattle 12 ~ C.J. Cherryh and town edges, hadn't the knowledge the borderers had of each other. No one local knew who was right and who was wrong in their quarrels, out in the far land where civilized law didn't apply and where those knives settled grievances. So Lyle Wesson, sipping a slow, speculative pint on the porch of the Gate Tavern, kept entirely out of it, not seeing anything in his venue in question. Borderer business. Borderers looking for each other, carrying bad news, was what Wesson picked up. He couldn't identify some of the other feelings he was getting on the backwash out of the farther camp--he didn't like much of what he could identify, so he kept a purely human ear to the matter, awaiting human specifics. More than an ear: Dart, old himself, limping a little (it was arthritis in the hindquarters, an affliction they shared, with the winter nip in the air) left the comfort of the nighthorse den nearest the tavern to stand watch over the commons, too. And as Stuart approached, on foot, Dart imaged --and something so unquiet it shivered along the nerves. "Man's walking," Ndele said, moving out of the doorway to stand at Wesson's elbow. "He's being followed." "A man can't help that," Ndele said. Truth. That Stuart chose to walk and not ride gave Wesson, who disliked and distrusted borderers in general, a better opinion of him: Stuart, for his part, had meant to keep it a human matter. But a living darkness trailed Stuart as he passed them without a word, headed for the three strangers waiting for him just outside the gate. It trailed Stuart through the gathering dusk, regardless of Stuart's intentions, a head-down, angry darkness with which no rider would be willing to argue. Stuart's horse. Defensive. Outraged. Dart flung out a feeling of ill and warning, protecting the porch from that outrage, and trotted across the street, positioning himself between his rider and the source of that dark anger. Opinion all along the street solidified around that pair as they passed through the gates and the strangers' message reached its target. RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 13 No question now: rogue was the word on the wind. That was how humans called it. What nighthorses imaged was something roiling and dark, and that was what Wesson perceived in Dart's image. Rogue horse at least: that impression came through the horses, and maybe--far worse news--rogue rider, somewhere out in the bush. He didn't know where, now, that image was coming from. It had no direction, but it was spreading like wildfire, and even the image was deadly dangerous. It was more than imagination nighthorses shared with human interlopers. Insanity came quite, quite naturally in this season of mating and rivalry. So did death. There began now to be another presence in the uneasy flux of images: a young red-haired woman, a borderer, on a nighthorse that imaged itself as, no qualifier, just the bright and largest Moon. "Aby Dale," Ndele whispered, and Dart's presence carried a gut- deep certainty of the woman's death, and a landscape so real, so par- ticular in detail, that Wesson would swear he'd been there. "She's dead," Ndele said. "A fall. On the rocks. She was with the convoy. She died." More riders gathered, soft movement on the boards of the porch. Images proliferated, rocks running with blood. On that instant young Danny Fisher came skiting in, shied off from the man at the gate, and darted, distracted, along the palisade wall, looking for his horse, Wesson could guess, among the nighthorses that maintained an uneasy vigil at the den near the gate. Wesson caught an& held his breath until the fool kid was clear of the situation. Town kid. Shamesey kid. If the boy had fallen afoul of Stuart, it would have been his business. And Wesson was, personally, very glad it wasn't. Chapter 11 DANNY FISHER CAUGHT THE RUMORS IN FULL FORCE AS HE CAME through the gate, in a flood of images both true and half-true. And, stopping along the gate wall in a shiver of shock, he dis- covered the general focus of the trouble was the man who had just walked past him. In that time-stretched moment he realized he knew Stuart-- knew him for a fair man, a borderer, true, but never the bullying sort: far from it, Stuart had sat on a rainy spring evening on Gate Tavern's porch, sharing three drinks with a kid who, at that time, could only pay for one, and telling a towner brat who'd dared-- dared come to a borderer to ask, how he could ever hope get the long-distance convoy jobs he dreamed of. Trips the like of which Stuart was clearly born to--born on, Danny had caught that in the way you knew some things even when the nighthorses weren't near, things that just echoed to you--a muddle-headed junior had trouble distinguishing the sources of what he'd gathered out of that moment. Maybe he'd RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 15 heard them from Stuart himself; maybe he'd recalled small details from casual remarks Stuart had made earlier at the bar--he didn't know, now. But Stuart hadn't grudged information to him. He'd come to Stuart half expecting ridicule--or worse, an indecent proposition, borderers having no good repute among lowland riders. He'd been mortally scared, and desperate, walking up to that table, offering to buy Stuart a drink in return for his question, and Stuart must have picked up on that fear. Stuart had laughed, given him an amused and immediate Calm down, he was spoken for. And because Stuart's Burn and his own Cloud had both been nearby, he'd caught the image of the rider who'd laid personal claim to Gull Stuart ... beautiful, beautiful rider, beautiful seat, maybe glossed by Stuart's memory, he didn't know that either, but he'd been instantly set off his balance and mortified with embar- rassment, because, of course, he'd realized Stuart had read his suspi- cions of him through and through. But now, watching the man walk out the gate alone to face some kind of bad news--news that Danny suddenly, illogically, felt cen- tered on that woman so important to Stuart--he shivered in the unmistakable darkness and skittishness in the horses' minds, and wished he could do something. He felt outraged when someone muttered, 'borderer' in that tone that implied Stuart and trouble deserved each other. It wasn't fair. He almost blurted out something to that effect, ju- nior that he was, but talking out of turn could start what he by no means could finish: it was a group of Shamesey men, six of them, years senior to him, and you didn't contradict the seniors. Then he first heard, aloud, from the same group, the word rogue horse, and almost lost his supper, because it at once echoed off every- thing that had brought him running out of town. Rogue was that going-apart. He'd heard a rider tell about it, a man who didn't need to say he'd talked to somebody who'd personally seen it, be- cause the images had carried a detail and a feeling that haunted a junior's sleep for nights after. But rogue couldn't have anything to do with Stuart, or Burn, or Stuart's beautiful border woman. It couldn't. That awful word didn't 16 ~' C.J. Cherryh happen down in Shamesey lowlands. It was campfire stories, it was ghost tales around the hostel fires in deep winter: other riders had objected just to the telling of the story with the horses at hand. They'd said it was irresponsible to pass that image at night, when things were spookier, a word that belonged up in the highlands, in the extremes of dangers riders and horses faced up there and you al- ways hoped they exaggerated--some creature, a horse or a bear usu- ally, got brain-injured and started doing things a sane one just wouldn't do, sending at a range a sane one couldn't, coming right into encampments to kill, playing canny games with trackers while it hunted its hunters. It didn't for God's sake come down to Shame- sey gates and civilized territory to trouble a town of Shamesey's size. It didn't touch someone he knew in real life, or disturb his fam- ily at their own dinner table. The tail-end of the convoy had just filed by the open camp gate, on its way into the city gates, headlights shining in the twilight, and behind that last truck, he could see Stuart cross the road to meet with the riders waiting there, all mounted, all waiting. He had the most terrible feeling then, like chill, like forewarn- ing.., he suddenly realized he was picking up expectations out of the ambient. Every horse around them was disturbed by what they picked up from human minds, like a buzz of gossip, everyone antic- ipating/dreading/wanting calamity to the man they were watching. The feeling around the gate grew stiflingly close, charged and irra- tional. Rogue, rogue, rogue, kept circling through his mind and maybe others', that dark, nasty feeling that clicked into place with a clear impression of a twilight mountainside, a memory so specific he could have recognized that place if he'd ever been there; different than he'd felt with the man who'd told a story and given impres- sions into the ambient secondhand, right now he felt something... so powerful, so horrible.., so present with them... "Dead," he kept hearing, words, as humans talked. Dead, dead, dead.., while Stuart stood on the other side of the road and out of it was rs had hand. when ds, in ~u al- ' LISH- just right vhile tme- ~ey's ate, :ht, to 7n- of ey C- g. t- RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 17 earshot, arms folded, head down, mostly, so one couldn't read his face as he talked with the mounted riders. Then a sudden crisis hit the ambient. Danny held his breath as Stuart abruptly strode away from the meeting and turned upslope on the grassy hill, heading away from the camp. The three riders who had spoken with Stuart held their horses still, and Danny felt a terrible, smothering fear, so vivid it became his own, and made his heart race. He put out a hand to find something solid. His fingers met rough bark.., his eyes told him it was a tree trunk on the moun- tainside, along that perilous road; but his brain knew it was only the palisade wall. Sight dimmed, senses drowning. Some other rider jostled him, likewise on the retreat. Everyone was clearing the area. Then a wild squeal erupted out of the dark behind the gates, a heart-stopping squalling. "Let him go!" someone shouted aloud.., shouted, in the camp. The sound shocked the air as a nighthorse broke through the thin screen of bystanders, not bolting uncontrolled into the dusk, but treading catfooted, shaking his mane and throwing off such a cold feeling of ill that senior riders crowded each other to get out of its path. it imaged itself, in a violence that raced over raw nerves and ran red. It whipped its tail then, crossed the road and spooked the messengers' horses as it launched itself uphill toward Stuart, running full out. He scarcely saw Stuart catch its mane as it cut across his path on the hill. Stuart swung up and astride, a solid piece with the dark- ness that raced along the shadowy grass of the hillside.., they ran and ran, until Danny couldn't see them any longer with his eyes. Only the feeling of and remained, shivering down his arms and disturbing his heart. Meanwhile the three riders who'd met with Stuart crossed the road, coming quietly toward the camp gates--a darkness them- "~ Cherryh 8 --' c.j selves, mind and body, they and their horses. The men nearest the gates began to push them shut as if they could wall that menace out. For an instant the feeling in the air was horrid, full of death. The gate-closers gave back, mission not accomplished, and the riders came through. Danny shrank back against the wall, breath dammed up, his head swimming with visions of blood and rocks as those riders passed, and his nerves feeling, far worse, the separation, the taking- apart that he hadn't recognized when he'd first felt it in the town. The anguish and the anger of a rider's death rippled and echoed through the area around Shamesey gates like a stone tossed into a quiet pond. Something warm breathed on his neck then, a presence that had slipped up on him quiet as a breeze, a frightened, spooky mind that didn't like what it smelled/saw/felt from the strangers and meant to safeguard his rider from them. He didn't need to ask, and he tried not to image.., which did no good at all: he turned and reached for the refuge of Cloud's mid- night neck, tangled his fist in Cloud's mane, stood there in the shelter of Cloud's warmth, only then beginning to shiver. Cloud was imaging. It was the same image he had seen, the same image the strangers had brought with them through Shamesey camp gates, and the face of the dead rider was, he was increasingly sure, Stuart's border woman. Stuart's grief came shivering through him then, as if it were washing off the hills. The iron bell that tolled for inbound and out- bound convoys began to ring again, distraction to horse and rider senses. They would drink, tonight. They would dance, make love, anything to numb the night. That, in Danny's young experience, was a proper rider funeral. But there was no joy, no celebration of life. Violence boded everywhere about. Murder raced out into the hills and echoed off the slopes, into the streets of the camp. He'd only heard the faint stirrings of that anger, that bitter, killing rage, let loose in the town--disturbing the streets, maybe reaching his family, maybe RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 19 prompting the anger at the table. But here it rang through his bones and stirred the pain of his jaw where his father had hit him. Here it prompted him to rage next to tears. The violence, the con- fusion that had broken forth in the camp, now, in force, threatened all of them. He felt it tugging at his reason. He saw it in the eyes of the small boy who wove his way past the leather-fringed elbows of the rider crowd. He recognized that thin, white face as someone familiar to him and didn't even realize for a heartbeat that he was looking at his own brother Denis. In that moment he saw Denis as he'd never seen his brother before, a thin, scraggy, amount-to-nothing kid. He saw how fear and hard work were setting a mark on Denis that was on their father, on their mother, on Sam. It was death happening, it was the damned, doomed mark of the masses who huddled in walled towns, the sons and daughters of starfarers, as the preachers constantly reminded them, afraid of the world they lived in. Denis came running and grabbed him around the middle, terri- fied, wanting him. Danny shoved back as Cloud's fright hit his nerves. He struck out instinctively just to get Denis away from Cloud, screaming: "Get out of here! Get out of here! Go home, you brainless little fool!" In the next instant he felt the sting in his hand and saw Denis sitting on the ground with a hand pressed to his cheek, all shock and hurt, tears in his eyes. The shock he felt was what stopped Cloud. That was all that stopped Cloud until he turned and shoved desperately at Cloud's muscular shoulder, trying to image to Cloud that this wasn't an enemy, this was a part of him . . . he ordered Cloud to go away, and Cloud surged against his push in a fit of jealous anger. "No!" he said, shoving back, and imaged Cloud sent back. "Behave yourself!" Nighthorses understood some words, more than a few words, when they wanted to; Danny was mad, now, and Cloud was mad, but he was madder, and scared: it was his brother's life at stake. 20 ~ C.J. Cherryh "Denis." --That did no good. Cloud was angry at the people, angry at the boy, and Cloud didn't want to know who Denis was: the complexities of human family relations were beyond Cloud's imag- ining. Danny shoved hard at Cloud's shoulder. "Go away if you can't behave. Cloud, go away. Now!" Cloud shook his neck, an obscuring flurry and flutter of mane, then backed a step and whirled with a stinging lash of his tail. But he sulked a little distance away from them, ternperous and snap- ping at an equally surly horse in his immediate path. Danny turned toward Denis then, not wanting to deal with the boy, still trembling as he was with Cloud's fighting anger. But Denis wasn't there. He'd not felt him go. Cloud hadn't told him. It wasn't important to Cloud. Dammit! There would be murders by morning. When the camp shook to nighthorse dreams, the slum of Shamesey caught the fever. Old feuds, old angers, old resentments, would boil up in the taverns and the houses tonight. The rich sat safely insulated in town center. But no one in or near the camp palisade could be immune from the madness that had broken loosemwhen all the camp swarmed with images, when all the riders had the same dread of their own dark imaginings. Clearly a Shamesey kid who'd left the common path had no place in his own home tonight. He couldn't face his father or his mother or his brothers----especially not Denis... a realization which settled and occupied a numb, vaguely angry spot in his heart. He thought he ought to feel overwhelming remorse, loss, some- thing. He knew in his head why his father had hit him. He even forgave his father in his heart, the way the preachers said he had to do. He knew the desperation his father felt in the face of his middle son's sure damnation, and his middle son's tempting Sam and Denis and their mother to go down that same hellbound road. But that road was his breath of life. What he held dearest and most vital violated everything his father held rational or sacred. He RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 21 couldn't possibly explain to his brothers what he felt when he touched Cloud--his father called it proselytizing for the Devil, leading his brothers into temptation. So he'd personally rejected God. He hadn't meant to. But once he'd begun to hear the beasts, he'd begun to hear the whole world as it spieled down to winter and licentious riot. He'd felt in it the urgency of all life.., even of townsmen and the placid cattle that had come down from the stars with them: delicious feelings, for- bidden feelings his parents didn't talk about and he could only hint at with his friends because they weren't, he'd understood, the feel- ings his friends had. They were constant, they were preoccupying: pictures in his mind and feelings that charged those pictures with sensations that ran over his skin and roused desires he had to seek privacy to deal with. He'd prayed, and the pictures came into his prayers. He'd worked until he sweated, and he felt his own skin alive to the air. He lived now in the flux of beast-sent images that invaded his mind moment by moment. He shivered in the feelings of lust and anger that alternately took his body, the outpourings of disturbed minds, when he should be repenting for hitting Denis and defying his father. Except no matter what his father believed, riders did have feel- ings the preachers would call good. Even the horses had them--a thing no rider could explain to the preacher-men, a thing riders couldn't even tell each other, it just was. When you got a number of horses together and enough riders to pin their thoughts obses- sively on a set of images, they said you could hear beyond the stone's-toss that was a horse's ordinary range. Shamesey regularly proved it. And the pain people felt tonight was because riders couldn't ignore each other. He couldn't ignore the rider alone out there. He couldn't forget the pain that had rung through Shamesey camp, that still rang, in the iron tolling of the bell. The images tumbled one over the other in his skull, the woman, the rocks, the blood. He didn't easily dis- tinguish (they said a rider's ability to judge such things got better, over time) what was his memory of what he'd just seen imaged and what he might be hearing from riders in the camp, or at this very 22 ~ C.J. Cherryh moment, even from Stuart, at a range no nighthorse was supposed to attain. Horses in pain reached inexplicable distances, did things they weren't supposed to know how to do--junior riders said so, around their own fires. He'd never heard a senior rider say it. But that horse's pain, which he thought he'd felt when he'd had his hand directly on Cloud, had gone straight to his nerves in a transferred disturbance of a nature and subtlety he'd never felt be- fore--if that was the source of it. The pain and the anger running the hills out there could be why he'd hit Denis--recoiling from Denis' emotional outburst as he ran to him. Cloud could only see that wild emotion as an attack on his rider--and Denis didn't know: Denis couldn't feel the air around him. A boy who under- stood only Shamesey slum couldn't begin to believe that things in the outside world didn't feel or react the way he did. And Denis was his own world, being twelve-going-on-thirteen, and in that world of all things he believed as so, Denis could only know his older brother had gone crazy with his horse and slapped him to the ground. So much for Danny, Denis would think, go on and go to hell, Denis didn't need him, anyway--he could hear it as if Denis had yelled it at him, without Cloud's help. So, --that was well enough, he couldn't make Denis see it, and Denis had some major adjustments to the world-as-it-was yet to make, some edges yet to be worn off his hellbent sense of right and proper. Denis had it in him. Denis could learn. Denis wasn't Sam. But, God, he didn't need to have hit the kid that hard, no matter that Denis was being an ass. The way his father, equally scared, equally angry, seeing him in danger, had hit him. The camp gates shut, the bar dropped. Cloud, venturing close to him again, spooked off with an angry whuff of breath, the wildness Cloud had before storms, deserting him as the other nighthorses, gathering here and there among the riders, shifted and snorted in the gathering dark. A group of them spooked off the same way Cloud had, a muted thunder down the street toward the farther reaches of the camp. The riders around him turned up their collars against the night wind, thrust their hands into their pockets and, shying from their RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 23 own horses, went back into the commons, onto the street, to go back to their own precincts, or into the tavern to drink and to numb the feeling. To kill the anger, as all strong feelings had to die, quickly, in the huge, unstable assemblage of Shamesey camp. It was the rule. Danny joined the general drift down to the commons, trying to subdue his own bit of that prickling storm-sense, trying to forget the set-to with Denis, trying to forget his father shouting at him and telling him go to hell. Everyone was on edge--his father had, he was increasingly convinced, been feeling the rogue-sending when he'd hit him. His own nerves had certainly been at the snapping- point when he'd hit Denis; and Denis had been on the raw edge, to run at him in fear, risking Cloud's vicinity, when ordinarily Cloud scared Denis out of reach. He'd never seen mind-to-mind panic in action--although the boss-man, Lyle Wesson, had had the universal Talk with him, when first he and Cloud had come into the camp, novices, confused and hostile and scared of everyone and everything. The camp-boss had told him in plain words that, being young, he was bound to be stu- pid with his feelings at least several times, and that he had better get control of his emotions, fast, or find himself out on solitary cat- tle watch for the next three moon-chases. He remembered that brush of Stuart's presence at the gates, now, when his own insides had been in turmoil and his brain hadn't been thinking, just.., he'd wanted, ached for company, the way Stuart ached for company in these precarious autumn days.., and Stuart's border woman was for some reason the image that kept coming at him as if it were his own loss, the unattainable substance of his wishes, a beautiful, fringe-jacketed rider in the High Wild... copper- haired woman with the red leaves on all the hills, the object of more than one of his furtive midnight fantasies. He was disgusted with himself, finding his own juvenile priva- tions echoing off Stuart's earnest grief. It wasn't remotely even for- givable, God! The rider Stuart loved was a mangled corpse in the images running horribly under the surface of the minds around him, Stuart's private pain was echoing at him out of the night and he had thoughts like that. No wonder even Cloud wouldn't stay by 24 ~: C.]. Cherryh him, in the confusion of mating urges he was feeling in his blood-- it was too painful and drove Cloud too crazy, when there was enough craziness natural in the edge-of-winter ambient. He didn't know why he should ache after a woman he'd never even met, a borderer who wouldn't have given a junior a passing glance on his best day. But Stuart had passed that close to him, with horses nearby-- and a human mind, he suspected by now, was a fiittery, fragile thing, very much unsure what belonged to it by experience and what came to it from elsewhere. Or--shuddery thought--if it was Stuart he was still hearing, if it was Stuart's thought coming at them from the hills across the road--by all he knew, by all he'd heard, also at a winter fireside, only rogues could send like that. But Stuart wasn't. His horse wasn't. He wouldn't believe it. Chains of such misfortune were legendary, one rogue triggering the next--but it was stupid ghost stories, that was all. Horses and sometimes bears and cats did legitimately go rogue, that part was real--horses got kicked in the head in some mating-fight, or got a high fever that damaged the brain, and a rogue horse--probably a wild one: there were wild herds on Rogers Peak--had spooked that convoy up in the mountains and sent a rider and her horse off the edge of the road. All that was true. But now, and for no sane reason, all of a sudden rogue rider was echoing around the ambient, fear spreading out to attack Aby Dale's partner--as if Stuart had just gone unstable, just like the ghost stories, only because he'd run from the camp and gone out alone. But wasn't that what you were supposed to do if you couldn't hold something in: get away from the horses, get calm, get quiet? Stuart wasn't crazy. Stuart wasn't any rogue. It wasn't fair or reason- able for people to think so. Was it? he questioned the dark, but Cloud didn't answer him. Either Cloud had gotten out of range, or Cloud was refusing all dealing with him until he'd gotten himself in hand. he thought, trying to calm his rattled nerves. He very much wanted Cloud's comfort right now. He wanted Cloud to RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 25 be near him-- But nothing came back but Constant, now, came the erotic urges of horses heading into winter rut: sex and ri- valry and anger. So much anger, no focus, and so much fear of insta- bility... He couldn't even image as disturbed as he was. He looked at the ground as he walked, at the dust, gaslit from the poles in the tavern yard, determined to notice detail. That was the last mindless defense against an invading image. He strove to see individual grains of dust, in the half-colored texture the gaslights and the lantern light gave to the ground. He noticed how the foot- prints in that dust were different, the town-made boots, and the ones more individual, borderers, the sharp, tri-partite hoofprints of the horses under and over them. In that preoccupation he came up among the tables where the commons gave way to Gate Tavern territory, under the gaslights, where old Mastraian had his hands full. Mastraian's town help were bringing out ale by the pitcher-full: nervous kids, slum kids glad to have any job, even one the preachers said risked their souls, and, working along with them, rider kids, as yet horseless, and a few riders so new or so young they welcomed a tavern job to keep themselves and their horses fed--forage being no viable choice in Shamesey's civilized lowland, where even open pasture had owners. He was a second-year junior. He was far richer than that. He had his winter account with the camp-boss, money for camp store, the hostel he stayed in, and another account with Mastraian, beyond what he'd given his family in Shamesey--he even carried a little cash in his belt-purse; and the tavern would thank a customer for cash tonight, he was sure, from anyone who carried it--there were just too many customers, over half the camp having followed the disturbance to the gates, for the harried staff to keep tabs. So he laid down a five on the porchside counter, in exchange for which the counter help handed him an empty mug. He found him~ self an empty place at a table, shoulder to shoulder at the end of a long bench with other juniors and a couple who didn't look at all to be juniors, man and woman, maybe even borderers, he wasn't sure. 26 ~ C.J. Cherryh A mug and five meant you could sit at a table, pour from the pitchers the servers set out, and drink yourself gradually stupid, which he was determined to, tonight, for the first time in his life. His father would be furious if he knew, and quote the preachers about ale and riot. His mother would be disgusted, and say he was a stupid kid in bad company, squandering money. Of course. Squandering was his mother's word. It didn't matter if it was your money. If you spent money or time on something she didn't like, you were squandering it. He was never so conscious of the wall dividing the camp from the town, and him from his family. He'd never had a hangover. He wondered was it as bad as seniors said. He'd spent more money plastering his family's walls than he'd ever squandered in the Gate Tavern. He'd bought clothes and gear he had to have, nothing ex- travagant. He'd bought sweets fce Cloud... who didn't at least cry over how wonderful the money was and call him a sinner damned to hell in the same evening. The high, reedy sound of a flute had started up, another joined in oscillating discord, and then the drummers started a wild and noisy rhythm. Nobody could be planning sleep in the surrounding hostels tonight. A flood of riders left their tables and started dancing in the commons, some with drinks in hand, men and women in a mingled line. His table mostly cleared in that first wave, and he refilled his mug and joined what was getting to be a rowdy first-dance line. A handful of borderers had started a contest of sorts, the show-outs holding forth inside the meandering lines--lowland riders didn't do the borderers' steps, didn't do the single-dances like that: he wouldn't dare go out with them, but he watched, asking himself if he could keep his balance, if he could do those steps, and trying a couple of them in the line-dance. He found a couple of juniors, both male and girl-less, when the line broke up into sets. They danced through one mug and a re- fill--he didn't know one of them except as Lane, a kid from the far side of Shamesey slum himself. He didn't like Lane much, but that RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 27 was no requisite for sets. They danced themselves breathless and drank half the refill down. Then a couple of borderers, already way too many ales down, were spinning past each other with knives flashing, coat-fringes fly- ing. The sets line bowed out for fear of mishaps, while the drum- mers went crazy, and the hired-help dodged down the line, filling outheld mugs and spilling astonishingly little. (Follow not the beasts, the preachers said. Avoid ale and riot. Dance is the Devil's enticement.) He had his mug refilled without asking--without noticing it was about to happen; and, out of breath, tried a few of the steps he'd seen .... Arms hooked his of a sudden, and he found himself snatched and spun into another set, arms snagged by two sweating men he didn't know, both drunker than he was, and as suddenly found himself spun out onto a dance circle, where two borderers beckoned him in, wanting him, he feared, to play the female third-- "No knives!" he panted, and the two, holding each other up, roared with laughter, grabbed his free arm, and snatched him into a dizzy circle-dance. Then he just concentrated on footwork to the drum, round and round and round, with gulps from the mug in be- tween, matching their consumption the way he matched their steps. Sweat was pouring down his face, despite the chill. He'd picked up the step, and thought he was doing damned well at it. The beat became the whole night, the whole universe, so long as his balance lasted. But after two rounds he'd no breath for anything but to take the good-natured, hard slaps of high country riders on his shoulders and to weave away, thank God, still able to find his way to a table and sit down before he made a public staggering fool of himself. A server filled his mug. He'd lost count of how many he'd had out there. Assured of a stable bench under his backside, he sipped the ale, not because he wanted the alcohol, but to ease a throat raw and dry from panting. Most of the dancers were still going, but the two borderers, after deriding the junior for flagging, had fallen down at other tables. 28 ~ C.J. Cherryh The sounds he heard now were all of drums and flutes, the sights all whirling bodies, recollections of gaslights spinning past. Human images, human company ... humans couldn't image to each other without the horses close, and with the horses absent, human minds could grow quiet, exhausted, blind, deaf, and voice- less. The rogue-presence was gone, its burden lifted. Funerals ought to be loud and raucous, and one could hope the dead woman could somehow know they'd thrown a good one--borderer that she was, the camp she'd been intending for her winter-over at least knew she was gone, and, in that, acknowledged they all were mortal. They wished the dead rider a good hereafter, if there was one, or at least wished themselves drink and dance and noise enough to make the dead hear the party. It might ease Stuart's mind if he heard the drums out there in the dark. He hoped Stuart did know he and the red-haired woman had friends in camp. He hoped Stuart might come in and have a drink and sit and mourn in sanity, giving the lie to the fools who, in their stupid, idle speculation, put the rogue business on the man who'd only loved that rider--because he'd made them 2%l it; he'd shoved it at them hard, and their nerves were jangled. God, he wanted his family to be safe tonight. He wanted to know Denis had made it home to bed before the craziness started in the town, as he very much feared it could. It would be better in town once the dancing had started and angers fell in camp. It would be better for the town if, in the Shamesey taverns, there could be dancing, too, or prayers in the churches, or whatever calmed hearts and tempers--since the preachers said dancing was the Devil's way. No question that the slum could hear the drums: many the nights of his life he'd heard the like from that third-floor fiat, lying in his bed, scared of devils. His family would hear the drums and flutes tonight and know there was dancing going on. His mother would be angry and his father would be praying to God to forgive their wayward Danny for dancing and for drinking and for being with low minds, that was what his father called it, words he'd surely gotten from the preachers. Low minds, consorters with the beasts. RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 29 He'd not asked to be a rider. But nobody, not even the boss-man (and he had asked that among the first agonized questions he'd ever dared ask the boss) nobody knew why horses picked somebody, or why, as the boss said, they'd sometimes travel unaccountably long distances in search of someone, the way Cloud had done for him. Cloud had just, in the autumn of his second year, wandered down to Shamesey looking for someone of a description that some- how he guessed he happened to fit. Maybe Cloud had found no prospects in the high villages. Maybe he'd been so persnickety he'd decided to search a really big town, because there were just more to choose from. Cloud had been per- sistent about it once he'd arrived. Cloud had hung around Shame- sey hills, coming down to the town gate at night, scaring hell out of the gate-guards. The whole town had heard that the night-watch had been shooting at a horse, which so far they'd been lucky enough to miss, and the town council had been recipient of an angry ultimatum from the riders, who took strong exception to the firing. At the time, he'd been solidly on the gate-guards' side, fright- ened for his town, believing absolutely in his father's hell, and night after night suffering strange dreams nobody else--he'd tried to figure if he was the only current case--admitted to. He'd been steadily losing sleep and having nightmares about the gates and the gunfire ever since what the kids called the devil-horse had shown up. His dreams had finally grown so vivid and his mind so sleep-cheated and frantic that, after a day of agonizing over the prospect of another night of such dreams, he'd marched down to the camp to protest to any rider he could find that he was a good God-fearing kid, to state that riders were clearly responsible for protecting townfolk, and to ask that rider how to stop hearing it. The rider he'd asked at the safe limit of the gate had taken him, in his extreme reluctance, right inside the camp where he'd never been and straight to the camp-boss, whereupon the boss had looked him up and down for the scrawny, unlikely kid that he was, and drawled, as if there was certainly no accounting for tastes, "The horse wants you, that's all." Then the boss-man had asked him his name, and said he'd be 30 ~ C.J. Cherryh living in the camp, soon--told him plainly that he really didn't have any choice about it, that when a wild horse was sending like that and you started feeling it as that personal, then pretty soon you were going to start hearing everything that came along, every little burrower at meadow's-edge, every bird that perched on the roof-trees.., the world would never be quiet to you, ever after. The boss-man had said that if you got a Call and lost that horse, you'd never, ever sleep again, and probably you'd go crazy.., so he might as well take a hike into the hills and let the horse find him. The boss-man had lied to him, he'd found out. He'd actually had a choice. But in the conviction that he hadn't, he'd walked out of the Gate Tavern and lost his breakfast, right at the camp gate, he'd been so scared of hellfire. Then he'd heard the horse in broad daylight. He'd seen it wait- ing for him in the hills across the road, hills he couldn't even see with his eyes from inside the gate: he'd been getting images that strongly, from that far away. He'd never realized it. Clouds across the stars, that was the way Cloud called himself. Clouds scudding fast, before a storm wind. You couldn't say all of it aloud, with the rain smell and the shivery chill and all, and he'd been completely, helplessly swallowed up in it--he'd seen nothing but that starry sky when he'd begun to climb that same grassy slope that Stuart had run, and met, past that hilltop and another one, a horse that decided, finally, it had found a fool who satisfied its juvenile itches. Found a fool that knew where to scratch, of course. Cloud was a glutton for human fingers. Found a town-bred fool who'd fall off and near break his neck half a dozen times before he quit insisting he was going one way when Cloud knew very well he was going another. It hadn't been easy for a young fool in any sense. Bruised and skinned on various parts of his body, he'd been, when he'd written down a message to his family and sent it by a town kid. He'd thought a lot about hell in the two days he'd waited for an answer from his family. He'd said, in that message: I can make more money being a rider, --because his father arid his mother understood money. RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 31 He'd said, --We can get the apartment fixed. We can buy a new drill, one of those electrics--we can bring in a line. He knew his fa- ther lusted after that, most of all. His mother had written back--he still kept the letter, folded up, in the lining of his coat: Your father hasn't accepted it yet. But he says you can come in. He doesn't want to hear about the horse. Come to supper Sunday. We won't talk about the camp. That had been the agreement, the condition under which he was acceptable at his family's dinner table. That and the money he brought. His evident prosperity. As things were now... A lump started gathering in his throat, and he washed it down with forbidden ale. Now it might be a while before mama could talk papa into Sunday dinners again. Maybe papa's anger would stretch into winter--there wasn't much time left in the year. You couldn't get hire in winter, to speak of, but there was spring when all the goods had to move at once, and if he could somehow come back next spring with a lot of money, papa would be happier. And they might have worried about him, a little, if they didn't hear from him. He could sit in camp all winter and not write. Just let them worry. Let them wonder if he was mad at them. Or if he was all right. Papa just didn't like to think about the drums and the drinking and the fornication, that was what papa called it. He hadn't ever had any chance to fornicate, himself, but it wasn't something you could argue with papa. In papa's mind fornication and wickedness was what went on in the camp, all the time, and after the work of summer and fall, winter was one long misbehavior, that was what papa called it when papa was being delicate in front of Denis. When papa was mad, however, he found that papa had other words, some of which he hadn't heard even from his friends in Shamesey streets, words that made him mad, and made him ask what you learned in church when you got to be his father's age-- he'd never had that in his lessons. But if he'd outraged his father and embarrassed him in front of the church by showing up in rider style, he'd profoundly embar- rassed his mother, who had to face the neighbors and her cus- tomers, and them of course all asking questions--like where the 32 ~ C.J. Cherryh money came from to paint the apartment, and what went on in the camp, and she wouldn't know, she wasn't interested in hearing it from him--but nobody was going to believe she didn't. That was the position he'd put his family in. The preachers said once you started hearing the beasts of the world, you couldn't ever stop, you couldn't come back.., because once you heard one, then you started hearing all the beasts, even the little ones. So you slipped deeper and deeper into damnation and became like a beast yourself. That was one thing the preachers said that had turned out to be true, but not quite the way they'd said: it wasn't like hearing words. Sometimes you'd just see things, when you were riding out and about the hills. You'd see yourself and your horse going down the road, and you'd know you were picking something up from some little creature somewhere, under the bushes or up the hill. And it just wasn't that bad. They were gentle images, most times, a little spooky toward dark, but you learned very quickly to tell what was sending it--and mostly the feelings they brought with them were anxiousness, or curiosity: very few wild creatures wanted to come near a nighthorse. As for the sex his parents imagined ... God, that was a joke. If you were a townbred junior, you just lay in the dark when the im- ages came past you from somebody else, as they did, and you tried to imagine you'd found some rider girl who didn't think you were pond scum, but there weren't many girls among the juniors. Shamesey girls didn't come out to the horses. They were too scared of hellfire, or no horse had ever wanted one. And there were rider girls, but they all had boys they'd grown up with. So that left a Shamesey rider on his own at night. But, oh, there were women who came into camp, full of myster- ies a sixteen-year-old couldn't possibly deal with, women in fringed leather and carrying knives, sun-tanned and wonderful, women who bunked down mostly with senior riders they personally knew... a lot richer than he was, and not needing a junior to tell them his sweaty-palmed aspirations. The horses eavesdropped, at the same time, and sometimes RIDER AT THE GATE ~: 33 spread feelings all through the den, until, if you were in the vicin- ity, God help you .... Cloud was a pushy horse, and devious, and Cloud flirted with all the mares. Cloud drove him crazy sometimes. Like now. He finally knew exactly where Cloud was: in the dark of the den by the gate, not that far out of Cloud's range when Cloud was ex- cited. And Cloud was sniffing after a mare who was more than in- terested. He couldn't stop it. It wasn't even his right to stop it, the boss- man had told him that, and the boss-man could as well have left it off the list of particulars: Cloud would have made him know his rights and dues beyond any doubt at all. The dancing was still going on, a little slower, as everybody ran out of wind, but craziness was running the camp, with the autumn cold in the air. So, of course, when he was so buzzed he staggered, Cloud, with the images of blood and dead females in his head, had to think, tonight, of sex. God, Cloud had no sense of moderation. Nor did the mare. Damnation, the preachers said. A nighthorse had no kindness. Animals had no souls. Cloud had no shame, that was sure, and he didn't know how to be near human beings when Cloud was doing what Cloud was doing at the moment. He'd danced enough and drunk enough; he decided he'd better stagger off to bed, which, wobbly as he was, was just too far, in a cheaper hostel clear around the circuit of the camp. He only needed a place for an hour or so where nobody would bother him, where he could suffer Cloud's mate-courting in private, and sober up enough to walk home, and he didn't want... Oh, God. He had to get up fast, dazed as he was. He couldn't stay in the tavern yard. He stood a moment, while images came and went, to be sure of his feet. Then he wandered through the area of the dance, walked his un- steady way down the street toward the nighthorse den next the gate, which, sense told him, was where Cloud was doing his court- ing. Chapter 111 DANNY DIDN'T WANT TO GO INSIDE THE DEN. HE WENT ONLY AS far as its wooden wall, next the end where the earthworks were piled up to make its sod wall and roof. There he sat down on a pile of moldering canvas, overwhelmed by the night and the images, shoved his arms between his knees and tried to subdue an arousal so intense it didn't let him think. He just stared blankly back at the tavern yard down the street, an island of light, like one of those other worlds the teachers talked about, men and women drinking at the tables, men and women dancing with each other under the gaslights. He saw couples pairing up--one pair very drunk, completely distracted or as far from their own beds as he was. They didn't wait. They just did it in the far side of the hostel, in the alley where they probably thought nobody was watching. He tried not to look, but he did, and worse.., much worse.., he grew angry along with watching them. He wanted to kill somebody at the same time, and RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 35 that j~eling was going through the camp, back again--when it had left them alone for the last hour or so. Stuart... was aware. He suddenly realized that Stuart was watching the camp. Stuart wanted ... he wasn't sure what. The angry feeling was coming through the wooden walls, it was coming through the ground, and his eyes were suddenly full of tears he didn't know he had. He kept wiping them, and they kept coming, while, somewhere nearby, Stuart wanted... Death. Sex. The red-haired woman. He~lt Cloud courting the mare, felt the union, the mare's sensa- tions as well as Cloud's, and he couldn't stand it. He got up from his place by the den wall and paced the street. The urgency and the anger grew less when he was walking. It slowly became endurable. He walked back and forth in front of the den, but the nighthorses were all disturbed, now, arousal was epi- demic, and he found himself walking back down the street toward the tavern, toward company he didn't really want, but there were human minds there, and the feeling near the walls and near the den had been dangerous and full of complex urges he didn't understand. If it was Stuart, it was gone now. Or farther away. But he didn't want to stay that near the horses if it started up again. The dancing had gotten down to drunken singles, monofocussed on the intricacy of the steps, while the single remaining drumbeat had grown erratic. He wove back through the tables, at which some slept, some sat talking in small, sober knots, saner than he was, wiser than he was. He kept getting images, maybe his own memory, he didn't even know any longer, the feelings of a dark body, an intense misery of hurt. Overwhelming awareness as a man brushed past him with a con- tact like electric shock. That man grabbed his arm, faced him about in a fit of temper. He felt the anger, he instinctively flinched from the blow-- But he felt something else flowing through the painful fingers, burning straight into his gut, and he couldn't breathe. "Damn kid," the rider said, as if that meant dirt. He jerked his arm free. The sexual feelings didn't stop. The 36 ~ C.J. Cherryh anger didn't stop. The rider grabbed him a second time, hard, by the wrist. No. Not Stuart. It was the riders who'd talked to Stuart outside. They'd brought the rogue-image inside with them. They'd felt it up on Tarmin Height. They were the source of the fear--and the image. Not Stuart. The riders at the gate had been right to try to shut them out. But you didn't start a fight with anyone with the horses in- volved, not if you could help it, not for anything. Not for your life, if you had the least chance of saving it yourself. The men at the gate had let those three riders in, and the whole camp was in rut and anger and fear. "Easy," the man said. The grip on his wrist hurt, and he was scared, but Cloud wasn't there to rescue him right now, Cloud was deep in the sensations of a den gone mad with mating. "Kid! Dammit/" He tried to get free, tried to draw a breath. The rider wasn't the dark body he felt. He tried to see where he was, ignoring Cloud's presence, ignoring what Cloud was doing. "Friend of Stuart's," the man said. "Friend of his. Get a breath, kid. Get two." The stranger popped him across the face, back- handed, enough to sting. A bench came up against the back of his knees and he fell down onto it. "Dammit, kid, come down. You're sending it, d' you feel it, do you taste it, are you deaf?" The stranger had his attention, now, holding his wrist, trying to pull him out of the fog, but nothing human or sane got through the ambient. There was sex, there was anger, there was grief... they were both caught up in it. A vast, shapeless anger rolled out of the town streets toward the gates. He felt its frustration and its fear; he heard the sounds of voices, heard that sound of human be- ings in a mass, disturbed and angry, outside the camp walls. A shot went off from the gates, from the town, from inside the camp, he couldn't tell--the report rang off walls and echoed off the hills. The rider let him go, turned to shout at people at the tables, yelling to get the boss, to get somebody to stop it. RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 3 7 He didn't know Stop what? except for that anger rolling past the camp, toward the road. He didn't want any more. He didn't want to hear it gone over and over, and see that woman die and die again. It was Stuart's message. It was Stuart's dead. He wanted Cloud. He wanted calling in a night gone mad. Second burst of gunfire. The night exploded. He lurched to his feet, he cried out to his horse, "Run!" and he was he saw he thought. He heard Cloud answer, somewhere near, he heard Close, quivering echo. Pain hit his right leg and it folded. He fell on one knee, and a mass of riders broke around him, followed the man who'd grabbed him, all running toward the shut gates. Bullets were still flying outside, a ringing, erratic volley of shots. The echoes came back off the hills--he'd heard hunters' rifles echo in that strange, hollow way. All his life he'd heard it. He'd heard it the nights they'd shot at Cloud. "Hold it!" the call went out from somewhere down the street. "Hold those gates! --Dammit, stop where you are!" The order went out not only from the camp-boss, it went out from Dart, too, who was never far from the boss-man, and it shot straight to the nerves. The old man who walked past him and down to the gates was crippled. A stick supported him. The nighthorse that came up near 38''-'-' C.J. Cherryh him was one-eyed and scarred, but Dart was one loud horse, a force, with Lyle Wesson to back it, that made nerves twitch and ears prick up. Danny stood still. Movement had stopped, stopped in the image, stopped in reality, out beyond the gate. But the horse out there on the hill went running, running, and the rider staggered up, pain shooting through his leg. Danny sat down on the bench and shivered in the dying mental echoes of the gunfire. was the image that came to him, to everyone, he believed, up and down the street. Stuart had grabbed that mane and was away. The mob that had poured out of the town--an irrational, hating thing, as crazed as the rogue-sending couldn't take Stuart now. His leg still ached, telling him that Stuart hadn't escaped un- scathed. He didn't know why he shared it, but he felt the pain acutely as he got up, and limped, alone in his area of the street, to- ward the gates. He saw himself, his hand clasped to the hurt on the side of his thigh. He felt the condemnation he was due, anger at a junior who had, he realized it now, been dangerously sending out into the ambient. "I'm sorry," he whispered when he got to where Lyle Wesson stood, hands clenched on his walking-stick. "Damned fool," the boss said. "Did I tell you, or not?" He tried to image Stuart's helping him. The image went askew. It was just Stuart, the way he'd been that day on the porch, a stiff, rain-smelling breeze stirring his hair and the fringes of his jacket. A downpour grayed the commons. He'd thought even then that it was no bad thing to be a borderer, free of towns and free of family... . . free of a father who, however he excused it, hit him and con- signed him to hell. He didn't want the whole camp to know that, but, humiliated, he feared they'd all heard. He thought of : that was the earliest image the boss had taught him to send, to be invisible. But he wasn't the only area of disturbance. He heard shouting RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 39 out in the dark beyond the gates, he heard voices raised in de- mands. The town wanted the riders to do something. To hunt the rider down. The town came to the camp with its fears for its safety, its peaceful sleep---the rich feared for their right to go on as they always did, oblivious to the Wild beyond their walls, and they de- manded The town could go to hell, he thought, with a lump in his throat. The town didn't know. The town didn't remotely know what he was, or what he saw, every day. He lived in a wider, more vivid, more connected world than he could make his father or his mother or even Denis understand. Danny Fisher damned sure didn't belong in this town any longer; he'd felt it, in the echoes of the gunfire that still echoed in his brain. The lump in his throat grew larger. The leg ached. He wasn't aware of Cloud, now, but that was the way it ought to be--the camp was settling, minds were growing quieter, the pain in his leg was diminishing... He was terribly scared when he thought about what had hap- pened, how the whole camp, the whole town had been on the edge of crazy. Everybody was scared now. Even the camp-boss was scared of the craziness that had almost driven them to do things and feel things in one mind. Mass-hallucinations happened, the borderers reported, in snowed-in winter camps. They didn't happen in the biggest city in the world, in a gathering so large, so precarious in its size the riders themselves argued whether they ought to put limits on their num- bers and draw lots for who stayed. "Break it up!" the boss yelled out across the commons, and rounded on sobered, scared riders. "Quiet, dammit!" Himself, in Wesson's near vicinity, in Dart's, able to feel the brunt of Wesson's anger, he wished he were far, far elsewhere. "Damn you all!" the boss said. "Do you know what you did, yet? Have you come to your senses? Quieten down! All of you, quiet!" He tried, obediently, not to think at all, and the feeling around him grew measurably less raw, less miserable. The ambient turn- 40 ~ C.J Ch ryh . er bled around him with images of and and But he'd seen Shamesey tonight in a way he'd never seen it. Everything he hated about town and everything he feared about the sheer power of so many minds pushing and pulling at him had crystallized tonight. Maybe it was Stuart's feeling he still had: it could be. He didn't know, but walls had come down tonight--walls between people, walls between townsmen and their precious self-deceptions about safety. His family was so glad of the fresh plaster, so glad of reliable food on the table. But know a thing else about him? They didn't even want to wonder. They didn't want to understand their hellbound son. The preachers said they'd come in ships down from the heav- ens, the preachers said they'd begun as glorious beings with a God-given mission to subdue the land and make the fields safe for humankind and their cattle ... which meant to go out and make towns and fields and roads as many and as fast as they could. But, doing that, you had to deal with the world as it was, and you had to have the riders, and somebody had to deal with the crea- tures of the sinful world, which the preachers said were a tempta- tion and evil. So how did you work it out, that God arranged it so some people had to sin so the rest could go to Heaven? Because if not for the riders, no town would stand, and human beings wouldn't ever have survived their first winter against the predators and the nighthorses that loved human minds, loved human senses, and lusted after their company. And how did you work it out that the whole wide world was out there full of food, and his mother and his father worked so hard to buy what they could take for free if they just went outside the walls. He wasn't sure. Just... there had to be riders. Hear not the beasts, the street preachers said. And, while the boss-man called the riders fools, and while others said they couldn't just let Stuart go off as crazy as he was acting, RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 41 and they had to do something to stop him before he killed some- body, his own heart was still aching from what he'd learned and his leg still throbbed with a gunshot that hadn't come near him. Wages of sin, the preachers would say. Chapter IV NO SHOT HAD TOUCHED BURN, THE TWO OF THEM RUNNING AND running on Burn's strong legs. Burn flung off such a dire warning it became total, mind-absorbing thought for both of them .... But came a mortal, moral weariness, finally, on the grassy brow of a hill well and away and above Shamesey town. Burn's sides and gut were aching. Burn's legs shook with exhaus- tion as he slowed and wandered at a slower pace on the dark and dangerous slopes. Burn stopped, then, with a shake of his neck and a snort of disgust. Guil Stuart looked down from the height on the cluster of Shamesey lights, lonesome island in the dark of the Wild... and wished it no good, not Shamesey and not the other coward towns. Burn would run farther if Burn could. Burn's anger and Burn's de- sire for blood was no less because he was exhausted. Neither was his. But Burn was a self-saving creature, sane for both of them. Burn RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 43 would never destroy himself in some mad desire to escape what a human brain, in its own weighing of priorities, had begun to real- ize was no immediate threat to them. Exhaustion was the enemy. Cold was, in this edge of lowland au- tumn. He began to realize Burn's aching lungs and wobbling legs as a distress separate from his own crazed pain, and he slid down from Burn's bare back to give Burn relief from his weight. He man- aged, gingerly, leaning on Burn's sweating side, to take his weight on the wounded leg, which proved to him that at least the bone wasn't broken. A bullet-trace, he decided, feeling it over with his fingers; leather breeches had split on a nasty raw gouge across the side of his leg, above the knee. He walked a little distance across the steep, grassy slope of the hill. It was to test the leg, that was what he said to himself. But he couldn't rest yet. He couldn't stop moving. He wasn't tired enough to sit down and try to absorb the shock in plain sight of those smug, safe, lights. He'd start thinking if the pain stopped, and he wasn't ready to think. He couldn't realize anything yet but bits and pieces. Images came at him. He wanted not, not, not, to see. He walked harder and faster, until the pain was affecting his balance, blurring the city lights and the stars and his recollections alike. He slipped on the grass. he saw in his head. And did, sideways, hard, on one hip. He grabbed a fistful of grass and ripped it up. Flung the resul- tant clod at Burn, wanting no images, no thinking. 44 ~: C.J. Cherryh But the images assailed him anyway, out of his own brain, out of Burn's, he wasn't sure. He thrust himself up to his feet, wide-legged, staggered further, wanting the pain, cold wind on tracks on his face... That was the instant, the very instant-- He didn't want to see it. Jonas, he had no doubt, would have been up there riding point with Aby if he'd known any danger in the area. But Jonas and Haw- ley and Luke had been riding tail-guard, all of them worrying about the trucks, some of the driver-apprentices riding on the running- boards to watch the treacherous edge, to call out warning where the tires were--he'd seen that road himself, in Aby's mind, at night, when they lay close and safe and warm-- "The horse went with her?" he'd asked Jonas, when he'd talked with Jonas and his partners outside the camp gates, because he'd known, he'd known all of it he could possibly face in Jonas' first thought, and believed in that first heartbeat that Aby had died in a slide, not uncommon on the road. "It wasn't a slide," Jonas had said, then, grimly, arms folded, eyes downcast to the withers of his horse, and he saw RIDER AT THE GATE i~ 45 And immediately--maybe not Jonas' intentionmhe'd gotten all that the nighthorses had seen, all that the riders knew. He'd felt for himself the disintegrated horror of the sending that riders and truckers and horses had picked up at the edge of that woods on Tarmin Height. Riders never used loud voices. Sometimes you got almost out of the habit of speaking aloud or parceling out thoughts in human words. Sometimes you forgot you had a voice, or what to do with it. He'd have screamed at Jonas to shut up, let him alone. He'd for- gotten how to make such sounds at need. Or, rider-born, never learned how at all. "Stuart?" Jonas Westman had said, maybe wanting to tell him more than he had already said, but he couldn't bear it. And Jonas had known, and thought as Jonas would, when things went wrong. "Guil. We'll hunt it. We'll get it .... " But he'd already started to run--run and run to clear the vicin- ity, run until his lungs hurt, until pain and lack of wind had wiped his mind clear. Run until Burn had caught him, and carried him away up the steep hill. He'd had no idea even where he rode, after that. And he'd thought ... his first sane thought ... that he had, for numerous reasons, to go up to Tarmin before the snows closed the passes. That had made sudden, necessary sense to him. Kill the rogue that had killed Aby and haunted the convoy down the mountain. Jonas didn't want to go back. Jonas had enough bad dreams. And he'd known, when he'd thought that far, in the carefully guarded, piece-by-piece way he dared let conclusions form in his mind now, that he needed his rifle, that he'd left in his hostel room. All he owned was there. 46 ~ C..J. Cherryh (Main gates opening, to Shamesey town itself. The night-guard with their long rifles... > The gun and the gear he needed was all he'd asked, his own be- longings, when he'd gone toward the gates. He thought, at least now, that he'd only wanted that, and that he'd never harbored any darker intentions against the camp. But the town had come out to resist him--for no reason. The night-watch had shot at him out of fear. The riders of Shamesey camp had kept within their gates--for fear of him. That should tell him something of what sane people felt in his anger and his intentions, and maybe the townsmen had been right. He didn't trust himself to try another approach to the town, least of all to talk to Jonas, whose decisions had been coldly, professionally correct. Save the convoy. Get it safe. The dead could wait for the scavengers. Even Aby. The hazard of autumn was in the wind and the grass, in the cold which seeped from the air into the bones, like solitude, like chill, like foreknowledge of luck turning brutal and foul. And his anger was too profound, too broad, too unreasoning to be only his anger. Other resentments had gotten loose in Shamesey camp. Other rea- sons had risen up and taken on life in the town. It was no place for an angry man to stay. He wiped at his face. The ache in his leg so long as he walked absorbed all his logical thinking, a cherished, protective pain. He wasn't thinking at all clearly in such weather. Nighthorse instincts were in the way, coloring everything, making everything raw emo- RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 47 tion ... even before the rifle shot had resounded off the walls, even before the blinding red and the pain had washed across his mind. Just... he couldn't think clearly now what to do. He was think- ing Burn's thoughts, and they were all anger; all selfish.., bit- ter.., anger.., at the town that wasn't at fault for wanting lum- ber and comforts for the winter. He wanted someone to die, he wanted to see it, he wanted to do it with his own hands... He wanted Shamesey town to know a woman had died so that they could have light and heat and repair for their walls, and they could go to hell for it. But she was only a rider, only a damned-to-hell rider, it didn't matter to them, they didn't need to care. Shoot the horse if a rider went like that. Make sure it was dead. That was all they'd want to know. He could take to the hills, go south, not north, and he and Burn could forget what they couldn't mend--they didn't need to avenge Aby's death. It just was. What had killed Aby and Moon had no re- lation to anything, no grudge, no personal reason. It just was. And if in winter snows it came down the mountain, if it haunted the road next season, if it killed villagers or townsmen, what did he care? If Shamesey went without lumber or tin next year, what should he care ? That more riders could die by the thing that killed Aby, all right, he did care, little that it deserved. He didn't owe any of them, didn't get any damn help from them, not even from Jonas. He didn't know why he shouldn't let someone else hunt the thing. He could live elsewhere. He could find other hire. No place and no person mattered to him with Aby gone. She had brought him into towns. She'd always been the go-between for him with people. But his dreams wouldn't change until the rogue was dead. And he would dream about it. He'd wonder every night whether it was still out there, still surviving, still sending out the images that lied to horse and rider about what was friend and foe, or where the edge of the road was .... Walk and walk, and walk, and he found himself walking north 48 '~: C.J. Cherryh across the slope. He found Burn trailing him, aching-tired himself, waiting for a foolish rider to fall down again. he imaged in his own turn, not consciously thinking. Town was just too close, too dangerous, too loud, too evocative of anger. Burn answered him. Burn shook himself, and snorted. An image of blood and raw meat. Burn didn't forgive. Burn might lose his train of thought and forget. But Burn didn't know how to forgive. It was why he kept walking. "Hunt him down," was Ancel Harper's word in hastily convoked Meeting, in the tavern yard under the gaslights, in the small hours of the morning. "He's Shamesey's problem." No, Danny Fisher wanted to say, and half-choked on the impulse to rise and protest. But other, senior, riders stood up from the benches without hesi- tation and said no, there was no call for such drastic measures. "He wanted what's his," one of that number said. "His belong- ings are all in camp. He has a right to ask for them." "He has no right, after what he's caused," somebody else shouted, and a dozen riders from Hallanslake got up and added their voices. "We come down here to the lowlands for a quiet, safe camp," the Hallanslake leader said. "I knd~ what I'm talking about. A man running up in the hills is one thing. Coming down to town is an- other. Stuart's gotten riders killed. He's a spook. He's always been a loner and that horse of his is another. He's got a grudge and he's not going to let it go. I tell you, you stop it now! You hunt Stuart out of the district, or you shoot him and his horse!" "No," the general murmur rose in rebuttal; Danny said so, too, under cover of the others, but the Hallanslake rider didn't give an inch. "That's what you do, that's what you have to have the guts to do. That's a borderer up there hovering over this town. He knows what RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 49 he's asking for, staying around here, spooking the town into riot. You got fifty, seventy thousand people in town here, a lot of them not liking each other. You want to think, boss-man, about what could happen in the streets the other side of that wall if he panics this town? Stuart's as crazy as what killed that woman up in the hills--that's how they go, one to the next--the sickness spreads. You got to shoot both of them, fast, so they don't know one's dead! It spreads, boss-man! I've been there! I know? No! Danny Fisher thought, and before thoughts could get far: "No," the camp-boss growled, and hammered the table with his fist. Crippled in a fall, and survivor of one horse already, Lyle Wes- son might ride when he had to go any distance and he might use a stick when he had to cross between two tables in the tavern, but the strength in the man and the force of mind in old Dart made the skittery, jittery feelings in the air subside instantly, and let a scared junior sink gladly back into his seat with his objection unmade, at the same time the Hallanslakers sat down, sullen-minded and angry and not giving in. A junior hadn't any right to speak ahead of the seniors, except he was Shamesey-born, and they were Shamesey townsfolk who'd shot Gull Stuart tonight, calling Stuart a threat, which wasn't at all the truth, the way Stuart's horse wasn't a rogue. He knew it wasn't, but more surely, Cloud knew, the rest of the horses knew, and the boss- man knew, so the whole camp had to know. They were here to talk about the rogue that had spooked a convoy off the road on Rogers Peak, and here were Harper and his friends talking as if Stuart was the real threat, right here in Shamesey. The whole camp had lost their minds. Or it was the spooked riders, the ones that had come in with the news. They were here, and maybe the source of what Harper thought he felt~ Fear of a rogue had gotten loose in the camp, and after that, it came from everywhere. But a junior couldn't stand up and say his seniors were all being fooled. Fact was, half the riders in the meeting weren't wholly sober, some were surly--a couple were unconscious, face down on the ta- bles, though a whole lot had sobered when the gunfire went off, and more when the boss-man had said there was Meeting, now, fast. 50 ~ C.J. Cherryh He was one who had sobered mightily, even before Wesson's call--and he'd tried, well knowing that he wasn't at his sharpest, and far from experienced in a situation like this, to do exactly what the boss had said, namely to keep his mind quiet, because even with the whole Gate Tavern yard and the open commons for the Meeting, even with all the horses except Dart requested out of the gate area so that humans had to say things aloud to each other and not image at all, he wasn't sure things didn't leak out and get back and forth to horses and humans anyway, the way they'd certainly done a couple of hours ago, when the horses had all caught the same image at once. Ancel Harper said he'd seen a rogue once. He said he'd seen a dozen riders go with it. He said it was like what they'd just felt, only a hundred times worse.., he said a rogue could send over an entire valley, and trick you into seeing things where they weren't, and make you want it bad until it killed you, because that was what it would do when you got close to it. Harper said there was one cure, an ounce of lead. Harper and the Hallanslakers--Danny had never met anybody like them in camp, riders who just didn't listen to what people said, who, when they got an image and a horse was near, turned it inside out, to what they wanted. In his mind, they were crazy as the rogue, but he tried not to think that: they also carried knives, and he didn't think they were an empty threat. But by the time he'd figured out what Harper and his lot stood for, there were more moderate voices, older riders, to stand up one by one and severally and demand that the camp-boss should deal with Shamesey town and negotiate Stuart's right to come back when he was indisputably sane, as riders could clearly judge better than townsmen. "Now wait," another rider stood up to say, now, Yeats, a senior Shamesey rider. "Now, I don't agree with the Hallanslakers, that we need go shooting at shadows--but I don't hold we should take Stu- art's side against the town, either. It sets a bad precedent, a bad precedent, backing a rider who breaks the major rules." "Now, wait a minute," a woman said. "Rules," Yeats said, raising his voice, "as seem clear enough to RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 51 us. Stuart stayed on in the area, Stuart came near the wails. The watch hadn't a right to shoot, but they were skittish, they had a crowd out there--" "Damn right, they haven't a right!" came from the back. "It was Stuart's doing that a crowd gathered," Yeats shouted, "and it was Stuart's fault! If Stuart had a sane thought left, he should have got the hell all the way out of Shamesey fields when he knew he was losing his hold. But he doesn't want out of Shamesey district, does he? That's why he's stayed out there!" "God's sake, Yeats!" A borderer stood up, wobbly on his feet. "You got his gear and you got his gun--he come back after his gear, you damn fool!" "I got the floor! I'm saying we got excitable townsmen all over, we got horses upset, we got riders upset--it shows clear enough what we've been saying for three years, now: boss-man, you got to thin the camp down--" Riders hooted, from all over the assembly. "Yeah, you go first, Yeats!" somebody yelled from back in the crowd, then the drunk borderer was yelling something, not sitting down, and Wesson banged on the porch with his cane. Dart started imaging (Still water. Still grass,, until at last Yeats and the bor- derer sat down, and the silence was thick enough you could breathe it. Yeats was off on a different issue: the number of riders gathered at Shamesey--and Shamesey riders had argued before against let- ting the camp get as large, and consequently as unstable, as it was--but the riders that came from outside said it was just Shame- sey riders wanting exclusivity on the best jobs and the comforts of the biggest town there was. "Jim," Wesson said, "keep to the Stuart business." "It is the Stuart business," Yeats said. "This is what we're going to get more of if we don't thin down the winter-camp and put some restrictions on how many out-of-district riders we're going to camp here! Shamesey valley's big enough--build a camp down at the end of the valley! Build it up on the foothills! There's no way the snows are going to cut offvalley roads!" 52 ~ C.J. Cherryh "Yeah, on whose land?" somebody yelled. "The town council isn't going to give up a foot of pasture!" Yeats was right, in Danny's estimation. Unfortunately so was the rider right when he yelled out about the council not giving up any land: rich people decided everything, and the rich people in Shamesey didn't feel the dreams that came through the camp walls on an uneasy, stormy night, didn't lose sleep the night through with the autumn urges only people like his family did, old and young alike, and girls got pregnant and godly folk prayed and sweated and prayed to send the devils away. It was the lowtown folk who'd come out with guns. People like his family. It was people like his father and his mother and his brothers who'd gone stark crazy and shot at Stuart. People of the same town-bound, mind-blind sort that he'd used to be, before Cloud called him in his dreams. He hoped Denis hadn't gotten swept up in the crowd that was shooting; he desperately wanted to know where his family was and that they were safe. But he couldn't go into town tonight. Maybe not for a lot of nights. Couldn't--a lump formed in his throat--so much as offer his help to his father to keep him safe, when he could do as much for any trucker in the outback. "All that's beside the point," a borderer stood up to say. "What Shamesey is, Shamesey chose to be. It can't ever go back to being a small town. We get your trucks through and we got our right to camp here. And the whole damn valley had better get off Stuart's back. This town had better hope Stuart goes up to Tarmin and finds what's up there before winter falls, or you're losing Anveney province, Shamesey boss. That thing that got Aby Dale won't stay away from the villages up there. And maybe if it gets a village or two, it might come down to Shamesey to hunt around spring melt. When a horse goes bad, it wants human company, and there's noth- ing but a bullet through the brain can stop it. So you better quit arguing about how many riders we have in this camp and Stuart and your piddlin' rules--and start worrying about that rogue horse up there!" "That's saying Stuart's going to do a damn thing he ought!" RIDER AT THE GATE -~-- 53 Ancel Harper stood up to say. "He's not going to stay away from Shamesey. He'll be back." "That's tomorrow's trouble!" a borderer shouted, and stood up. "And it isn't proved, Hallanslaker! There's never been a rogue come into this district!" "You'll see it proved when you've seen a man and a horse go bad--and I have, Reney, I've seen it, don't you tell me what's not proved! I've felt it, don't you tell me what's like and not like! You want to~el it, Reney? Come outside camp and I'll show you!" "That's no call to go after Stuart!" "I'm telling you he's a danger. He's already spooked the town-- and he's not going to let go and go away. You got people out with guns in the town streets, Wesson. You're going to have people killed over there if you don't get Stuart shut down--" "Hold it, hold it, hold it!" Lyle Wesson yelled, pounding the table. But people had started shouting at one another, and got to their feet, and started yelling at each other about hazards to the camp, about outsiders, which Stuart was, and which the Hal- lanslakers also were, but the Hallanslakers seemed to have forgotten that point, or Harper had. Harper started yelling at Lyle Wesson that they had to hunt Stuart and his horse, and Lyle Wesson banged his stick down on the table. "Shut the hell up!" Wesson shouted. "And let's talk about the trouble in Tarmin Height. Let's talk about clearing that road of a hazard, and keeping the thing away from the villages up there on the Loop this winter. That's our business, if you'd shut the hell up and quit stirring things up, Harper!" Tarmin was where Stuart was going, Danny Fisher thought, cer- tain as sure. The skin on his arms stood up in gooseflesh. His legs just moved--and he was standing, and the boss was looking at him. Everyone was. "Stuart's going up there," he said, too quietly, he thought, but a leaf-fall would have made a sound in that silence. He sat down again, hugged his arms about him and wanted not to make another sound. Lyle Wesson said, "Going up where, Danny Fisher?" 54 "--' c.J Ch ryh . er "To find what killed her and that truck driver. He's going up to Tarmin to stop it, just like you said." "He's shown no sign of leaving, yet," a Hallanslaker shouted. "What's the kid got? A phone line to God? Stuart's a danger to the whole camp! Shoot him and the horse before he comes back! The town may not have a second chance!" "No!" It was a voice he'd heard before this night---one of the strangers, the one who'd accosted him, the one who'd called him seriously to task for giving way to his panic. "The kid's right. He's going up there. Absolutely that's where he's going." "So you say!" the Hallanslaker shouted. "We got this town at risk! You're not going to get any help out of Stuart!" And another of his lot: "The Shamesey riders already say the camp's too large, the town's too large--you let a rider run amok around Shamesey fields, what do you look to have? Murders in the streets? Bodies stacking up like cordwood? You don't trust Stuart'U do any damn thing he ought to. Hell with him handling the Tarmin rogue--he spooked the whole damn town! Shoot him, I say! Then we'll handle the Tarmin problem!" The ambient was miserable. The rider next to Danny got up and left. He stayed. He said, standing up again and forcing the words through a throat that seemed too small, "He's wrong." "Who's he?" a Hallanslaker asked. "Who is this kid, some kin of Stuart's?" His voice stalled. He cleared his throat with an effort and prayed it wouldn't crack. "I'm not any kin of his. But he's already left. He's not crazy. He's done what you say and left the town the way he's supposed to. He just wants quiet for a while." "How do you know?" one of the Shamesey riders asked him, and he retorted, "I heard him go." "Heard him go. Sit down, junior, till you know what you hear and don't hear." He was standing alone against a senior, mad, uncertain of his facts, his face gone hot. RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 55 But another man stood up, Stuart's friend. "Kid's right." "Then that's you and the kid," Harper yelled, on his feet again, "against all of us!" "Four of us," one of the other strangers said, on his feet, and the other man stood up. People started yelling again, and more and more people were getting up, Hallanslakers and other borderers in a shouting match. "All right, all right," Wesson shouted, banging his stick on the boards. "So shut up! If he goes to Tarmin and deals with it, our problem's solved, if everybody just calms down. Just shut up and let a man breathe." "Somebody better go," a Shamesey woman said, "somebody bet- ter track him to be sure he clears the area." "Somebody better be sure what's up on Tarmin gets dead," a Shamesey senior said. "Somebody should have taken care of it when the thing showed. Convoy or not, you had your best chance--" "We had three of us left!" the foremost stranger said. "Aby Dale was our convoy boss! We were short-handed as was. We had trucks to get down off that road! You ever been outside a pasture, Shame- sey man?" hit the ambient. A winter's day. And the crack of Wes- son's cane. "Shut it down!" Wesson said. "Enough damn should- haves! They didn't have that option so long as they had the convoy in their charge!" "So.>" Debate started again. Riders swore, and more of them got up and stayed on their feet. Wesson banged his stick on the porch rail. "Stuart's Dale's part- ner. He has a right--first natural right to deal with that thing on Tarmin Ridge. But so have the villagers on Rogers Peak a right to their safety. And so have townsmen down here in the plains a right, and us in their camp, we've got rights! If Stuart has gone up there, well and good. But if he can't do it..." "It's not our responsibility!" the Shamesey rider yelled. "I'm not risking my neck up there!" "Yeah, go guard cattle! Nobody asked you!" Shouting started again. Danny sat down and sat still, trying not 56 ~ C.J. Cherryh to shiver, trying not to think. Horses had strayed near enough, called by the disturbance of their riders. They made the very air electric with disturbance. But Dart was nearest of all of them, and Dart was damned angry. "Shut up!" Wesson yelled. Danny's fingers were clenched so tight on his seat they ached, and for a moment he couldn't breathe. But the lead stranger, unlike others, hadn't sat down. "Boss- man." He held the center of attention, his arms folded, face grim and downcast. "Friends should go after him. If he goes over the edge.., friends should make sure of him and do what has to be done. Or help him get that thing. We're ready to go up there." "You naming yourselves?" Wesson asked. "Three of us," the man said. "Jonas and Luke Westman, Hawley Antrim, all out of the MacFarlane. We'll take his belongings to him, we'll catch up with him and we'll bring him back sane. We'll have that thing out of the heights. Aby Dale was a close cousin of Hawley's." "Settled, then," Lyle Wesson said. Discontent prickled through the air, a quiet muttering, no one satisfied.., or someone utterly dissatisfied. "Beds and quiet," Lyle Wesson said, levered himself up with his cane, and abandoned the porch for the inside of the tavern, where the powers in the camp repaired to talk about things juniors didn't need to know--Danny knew that much about the politics of Shamesey camp. And he supposed it would happen now the way the boss said. He hoped it would. He looked askance at various individuals of the re- treating crowd, hoping he hadn't made a permanent and grievous mistake by speaking out like that and setting himself up to argue with his seniors. He didn't know why he'd done it, except his fa- ther always said he never could keep his mouth shut. He walked away across the yard, onto the commons and the street, wanting Cloud, wanting the steadiness and the quiet Cloud could give him. He intended to take Cloud back to the den far around at the hostel where he stayed. But he felt a restraining hand on his arm--and looked around in RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 5 7 panic. He'd not heard the rider who, soft-footed and shadowless in the dark, had overtaken him. "Why'd you speak up for him?" It was the leader of the strangers. The one who'd spoken most. "I don't know. Stupid, maybe." "You know him." "He helped me once. We talked. He didn't have to. He gave me good advice." "The leg hurt?" He didn't know how the man knew. He wasn't limping. He started away into the shadows of the street without another word, but he didn't see the den, he saw (rider on the hill.~ He heard ~gunfire echoing off town walls,v and flinched from the shot so badly he almost fell. The rider wanted his attention. And got it, with that transmit- ted memory. "Jonas is my name," the stranger said. "Jonas Westman. You heard him louder than we did. Why?" "I don't know!" "Kids do sometimes. Kids don't know to stop. Don't know to wall things out. Don't know when they're hearing and when they're making it up." "I didn't make it up. It hurt." "You could be a help to us. You could be a real help. Stuart knows you. You can hear Stuart. You want the high country. We can take you there." He didn't know how the man knew what he wanted--or whether Cloud, who longed for the High Wild, had betrayed him.., because when the man offered, he suddenly wasn't think- ing only about helping Stuart, he was thinking about why he'd gone to Stuart with his question in the first place, he was remem- bering that longing he had that wasn't logic, just a condition--like dreaming about the unattainable stars. And Cloud wanted to go. Cloud wanted to take him up to the High Wild where Cloud had come from--Cloud hated Shamesey, hated the cattle, hated the town and hated the smell and the crowding; and that town was all his very junior, townbred rider could give him. '"" ryh 58 ~ C.J. C her He wasn't sure Cloud wasn't listening now. He felt that all-over tingle of longing that wiped out every clear consideration to the contrary. "You have a partner in camp?" Jonas Westman asked. "You got leave to take? Anybody to go with you?" Rider conversations ran like that, when the horses were too close, mediating half of it. He didn't know he'd agreed. It played hob with negotiations. And Jonas Westman knew his answer: he caught the echo back from Westman, a kind of confused imaging, The kid would have been scared. No. He'd have run to see, the stupid kid. "No kin in camp," he said, reasoning that Denis was beyond his reach. Or his harm. "In town, yeah, family, --but I could drop dead. I'm nothing to them." The borderer had to know the ambivalence in the anger. The hurt. The offended pride. He'd not made friends in camp. The ju- niors from Shamesey district, even the rider kids, were all too touchy, too protective. Everything in juniors felt raw, exposed, feel- ings left open to every passing opinion--and he was, right now, scared of this Jonas Westman in the same way he'd been scared going to Stuart with his questions. And as careful as he'd been, Stuart had had to slap him down, and remind him to mind his own edges, just the same as this man was telling him--this man who'd learned everything about the aching ambition of his young, debt-plagued life in two short sec- onds, while he still knew nothing whatsoever about Jonas Westman except that he called Guil Stuart a friend and was, if things went wrong up there, willing to shoot Stuart and Stuart's horse both. But this wasn't a bad man. He didn't think so. They'd been spooked. But they'd tried to keep the terror bottled up and not to let it loose: they'd certainly helped settle things down at the meeting. "You going?" Jonas asked. "Yessir," he said, feeling he'd just stepped off a cliff. Pride didn't let him go back on that, not even when the agreement was just a second out of his mouth. "Depending on my horse." RIDER AT THE GATE -----~ 59 "Always depending," the senior rider said. "That's a given. Come on. Let's talk." It was harder and harder to back out, when he found himself trekking along with the stranger through the edge of the gaslight, knowing he'd talked himself into something Cloud wouldn't let him back out of. He was sure now that Cloud knew and wasn't say- ing no, not to the proposition nor to the company he was in. he kept seeing, and Cloud's name, in its endless variations. Cloud's freedom from Shamesey smokes and the minds of cattle. How could Cloud's rider say no to that? Chapter V THE SUN WAS COMING. THAT WAS THE SURE PROOF THAT THE world had rolled on without much giving a damn. Something died, something became something else's supper, something brand new saw the dawn, and the world was still here. Guil Stuart became aware of that fact, sitting, blanketed in grass, against Burn's warm and breathing side, and watching the stars go out above the plains that began at Shamesey town--watch- ing what, in the mountains, you couldn't see: the edge of the world, where the illusory daylight began, unraveling the night along a long seam of light. Almost cloudless morning. Nice day. His leg hurt. Damn stupid, walking on it. It didn't want to bend now. He supposed it would, once he warmed up: his legs were numb and his backside was feeling the chill seeping up through the grass mat from the ground beneath. His hands were icy cold... he'd come away with no hat, no scarf, no gloves, and he'd waked RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 61 with a pale rime of frost on the ground, on the leaves of knifegrass he'd cut for a lap-robe, and on the toes of his boots. If he moved, he might lose the grass he'd so meticulously arranged, which would expose his arm and shoulder to the icy cold, while the other arm, the one against Burn's body, was comfortably warm, so he chose not to move, and not to disturb Burn's sleep. It seemed not but an hour or so ago that they'd settled to rest, unable to go on, Burn aching from the effort and unwilling to take another step. Burn had settled on the ground to sleep, not Burn's habit when the ground was this cold, but Burn's legs were tired. So, having been so bright as to have left his pocket matches and his glass with his guns and his trail gear (God, it was slovenly camp habits he'd fallen into lately, having no glass and no matches on him; but, hell, he hadn't expected to be on his own in the Wild in what he stood in, either) he'd done the best he could. He'd cut the tall plains grass for a mat to keep Burn's belly warm and for a cover for himself. He'd been too tired to weave strip-and-tie mats--the cold hadn't been that bad, and his eyes had kept shutting while he worked. But he'd worked up a sweat doing it. And hurt the leg, like a fool. But it was numb with the morning cold, not too bad. The side of him next to Burn was downright warm. If he didn't move, Burn wouldn't. Aby died, and the morning after, the uncaring sun came up, and the man who, alone in the world, ought to be broken-hearted, was busy preserving his own warm spot in the frosty dawn, moving his toes in his boots to be sure they would move.., first small venture of his mind out of its deliberate search for pain and distraction, and it wasn't so bad, the world wasn't, the cold wasn't, the sun wasn't. It was incredible it all went on, but it did, and he found he did, miraculously sitting on the other side of a black pit he just couldn't look into yet. He wasn't interested to look. Aby was gone and there wasn't anything profitable in that dark, crazed night past, the night he could remember only because some fool townsmen had tried to blow his leg off. Fool rider, far more to the point. He'd risked Burn, going down 62 ~ C.J. Cherryh there in the mood he was in, and he was bitterly angry with himself for that. He'd lost all his gear but the knives he carried, but, hell, he deserved to lose it for what he'd done, and Shamesey could keep it for good, before he'd go whimpering back to Shamesey camp gates, saying he was all right now and could he have his guns back? He knew why the gate-guards had fired at him--it wasn't a justi- fied fear: he hadn't been beyond controlling himself until they'd shot at him, but that didn't matter in townsman accounts They just wanted what they wanted, thought what they wanted to think, and they could go to hell and keep what they wanted. His frame of mind didn't matter much to the camp-boss either, who just wanted peace in his camp, and no troubles. Wesson might even agree to take him back into camp, but there'd be somebody tagging him the entire winter, and there'd be quarrels lurking. He'd been surprised to find Harper and his cronies in camp when he'd gotten there. He hadn't liked it, and he wasn't limping back there to try to restrain his temper in Harper's case, not this season. Figure that Harper would push until he got something There was too much between them. Death happened. Riders died. Mostly they died young and by surprise, a nasty quick accident in storm or slide or some hole in a river-bottom. Moon had gone along with Aby, which was the best way, rider and horse at once, nothing untidy, a minimum of pain... Aby couldn't leave Moon. That pair couldn't be split. He could take to the road and go on down toward the coast, to Malvey town. He knew riders who might winter there, and he liked them better than he knew or liked folk in huge Shamesey camp. Ava Cassey might be at Malvey, freckled Ava, who... . . who wasn't Aby, dammit, who was far short of Aby's mea- sure, and who, good-natured as she was, didn't deserve to put up with a man constantly moping about that fact. The horses didn't leave you much illusion. No polite lies. No self-deceit, for that matter. A lump gathered in his throat. The stinging in his eyes wasn't the cold. The rime-ice showed white crystals on the grass as the sun slowly widened its eye--showed white on his boot-seams, on his RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 63 toes, but Burn was a warm lump against him, and under Burn's mane he had a warm place for his fingers. He sat there watching the sun come up, watching the sky be- come pinkly opaque, and the autumn grass go to golds and pale browns, with here and there the dark brown seed-spikes of what was, in summer, gold and red-flowering fireweed. The frosts came steadily now. Most mornings like this one showed rime. Green and gold-green died. The browns and the reds came into their own season, on the foothills first, then on the rolling plains. So very few times anybody could count on seeing that change. You thought you'd see it forever. You thought you were immortal. But what had Aby gotten? Twenty-six times the seasons turned, twenty-six autumns, twenty-six times to see the fireweed die and the snows fall, and three and four and five of those times being a clingy brat kid who didn't pay attention. You got only so many nights to see the stars. You got only so many sunrises. Shouldn't a man go out from under roofs and look at them? Maybe that was the poison in towns like Shamesey, or grim, gray Malvey, where factories smoked the pristine sky. Only so many times to make love. Only so many frosty morn- ings. A man should wake up and know he couldn't buy one, not for all the townsmen's money. The days came to you and you didn't know how many you'd get. He couldn't know, for instance, if he'd ever see the seeds of those brown spikes grow up gold again, or the flowers flaming red. He should have looked more carefully at the summer fields. He should pay attention to the frost this morning. He should look at the wispy pink of the clouds and know he was using up his ration of them. That was the happiest thing Burn knew. By which he knew that Burn was awake and pigs were in danger. "Haven't got any bacon," Guil muttered, and moved a hand to Cherryh 64 .0. c.J scratch beneath Burn's abundant mane. "Wish I had." He could taste it. He began to ask himself was it fair to Burn to go up to the privations of the highlands for the winter, and not to go back to Shamesey town, to comfort he could, at cost to his pride, bargain for. Burn imaged. Burn had such faith in him. He didn't know where to procure the death of pigs. Except... there was a place on the way to the upland, the high passes. There was a factor Aby'd taken hire with; and there was, in the way of towns, a bank in Anveney. They said if you put funds in at Shamesey you could get them out at Anveney; or down in Malvey; or clear to Darwin. He'd never tested that idea before. He'd always carried all he owned, until he got to camp, put funds in with the camp he'd win- ter in--and had this year; but there was an account he and Aby held, Aby's idea; and he'd put his carrying-cash in it, the way Aby had said. He'd been relatively sure he could get that out again at Shamesey, if he walked into that Shamesey office and said hand it over.., now. The Shamesey camp-boss had said it was as good as having it on account with him, and as safe. He'd doubted it. But he'd done it, the way Aby asked him to. He was less sure about Anveney, and this business of getting money out where he hadn't put money in. But maybe what Aby be- lieved was true. Shamesey had phone lines up to Anveney. Wher- ever the phones worked--and they worked, intermittently, at least, in the lowlands, until the first ice-storm of the winter--the money was supposed to be available. Merchants certainly seemed to do it . . . although townsmen looked out for each other and cheated riders when they could. Well, he could see. He could try. There was that man in Anveney whose shipping business Aby had worked for on a regular basis--it had been Cassivey goods in that inbound convoy, he'd seen the flags. And knowing that was the job Aby had taken, he wanted to ask Cassivey some questions, too, like what in hell had been so last- RIDER AT THE GATE ii~ 65 rush important a convoy had to go up there, risking the weather, risking the movement of creatures who always became more active and more dangerous when winter was threatening and the urge to mate and feed up fat took prey and predators alike. But that led to darker thoughts he didn't want to think, and to anger he didn't want to entertain. Burn just thought of bacon and wheat-cakes frying, in abundant grease. Danny didn't own a rifle. He had a pistol, fifty years old, a good one, though the ammunition was of a large caliber that was hard to come by. He'd paid for it what you'd pay for a good rifle, but a high country rider didn't encumber himself with much else, and he'd thought it would be a good idea to have the firepower, for his sake and Cloud's. He'd bought that before he'd promised anything on the replastering and the paint for his family. In the same way he'd gotten a good flat-brimmed hat to keep himself from sunburn, and a good, heavy coat, with a lining gone to rags and the elbows patched, and with a new patch and some stain on the side, of which the second-hander didn't know the cause ... but it was far better than the new ones he could have afforded. It was beautiful, buttery-beige cowhide and had fringes as long as his hand. He'd bought new, bullhide boots to fend off the brush, boots made for his feet, and fit for walking, when Cloud decided that he'd had enough of carrying a healthy young man. He owned, besides that, one truly good knife; and, of course, his trail kit, with fold-up pans for eating and cooking. Plus a couple of second-hand blankets, with frayed edges, but he'd hemmed those up, which had given him a lot of practice with his stitches.., you could see a considerable difference between where he'd started and where he'd finished. And he couldn't, especially on this cold dawn, forget the where- from of all of it, because Guil Stuart had given him a list, once upon that rainy afternoon, of the gear he most urgently had to have, and told him besides how to get the best quality and who to deal with, and when to take second-hand and when not. Because, Stuart had said, that's a high country horse you've got, 66 ~ C.J. Cherryh and if you really want to go, he'll take you there someday. Likely he'll take you there even if you don't want it. Count on it, if you take my advice. Count on it just as surely, too, as he'd discovered his very first long convoy trip, that Cloud wasn't any pack-animal. He'd stowed his stuff, except his pistol and a single reload of ammo, in the sup- ply truck, and kept on good terms with the drivers, because Cloud wasn't the one of the two of them that was going to carry any packs, thank you: Cloud didn't like anything but his rider on his back, and Cloud didn't tolerate loads of gear on his rider. His gear right now was adding up to a fair weight, when he in- cluded in the makings for biscuits and a slab of cured bacon and the jerky. He'd gone to the suppliers first thing as their doors opened, and asked outright for what a traveler would most need in the High Wild. Jerky was lightweight. A couple of slabs of bacon of course solved the oil problem for the biscuits, so he didn't have to have a container of that, but there were six kilos of flour and soda to carry for a long stay in the high country, as would be, if the roads became impassable. Cloud would hunt, when weather and time permitted; but what Cloud caught, he might not want, so he took fishhooks, line and cord. The extra rounds for the pistol, which he couldn't count on getting in the high country, weighed like sin, but that could pro- vide meat he'd otherwise have to carry up there. He began to ask himself what the balance was between weight he could carry him- self and how willing he was to go a little hungrier. Flour weighed more than jerky, value for value. But jerky cost more. You traded with your traveling companions. But you didn't ever, Stuart had warned him, want to get down to needing to trade. You never came out ahead. Spare blade. Razor, for more than shaving, and a good oilstone. Clean rolled bandages, sewing kit that was for your clothes or you if you needed it; awl and a piece of leather to wrap it in that could become ties if you needed them. Burning glass. Waxed matches. Spare shirt, spare socks, and heavy underwear. You could literally die of a soaking rain and a strong wind up in the hills. He'd heard too many stories about freezing to death after a slip in a RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 67 mountain stream, or going hypothermic in a rainstorm that wasn't even cold enough to make snow, because the wind always blew up there, strong and cold, especially when the sun was going down. He'd heard every horror story in camp, and a lot of it encom- passed good advice, he was sure. But he didn't want to look, either, like the novice that he was, and he'd tried to get his load down to as small and as light a set of packs as he could possibly make, counting he'd maybe been extravagant in food. He didn't own a proper pack-kit for it, but he'd had enough of canvas sacks that got soaked, last time he'd gone out, and he'd stitched together a real oiled-leather kit--with a great deal of swearing, his fingers repeat- edly bloodied by the awl and the needle-butt; no fancy seams, ei- ther---oiled twine and thongs instead of proper leatherworking and buckles to connect the bags together. He'd thought he'd save money. But it didn't, when he loaded it, hang quite the way he'd planned. Worst of all--it was new, raw leather that hadn't even been rained on. The Westmans and their cousin Hawley, who'd blazed through the supplier's before him with definite knowledge of what they needed, had gathered at the den exit, at the main camp gate. They were lean and tanned, they and their gear were weathered alike to a general impression of browns and blacks and tans against the solid black of their horses. They were the sort of experienced-looking riders that convoy bosses probably never even dared ask how many times they'd been to any destination. But, unexpected and unwelcome witnesses, a cluster of idle younger riders had gathered in the vicinity of the gates, standing with backs against the hostel wall, and Danny found himself far more public than he had ever planned to be as he walked toward the rendezvous by the gates. His private obligation had gotten him a reputation-making hire, he suddenly realized, and he was the cen- ter of his age-mates' attention and gossip--maybe even the object of their envy. He tried not to think that: the horses might betray anything he thought, though he got none of the expected catcalls and heckling from the junior bystanders. He was only aware of the senior riders' impatience in waiting for him. "Ready?" Jonas asked and, not waiting for his answer, Jonas 68 i~ C.J. Cherryh vaulted up onto his horse's back--a flashy move, a show-out move, one Danny hadn't perfected and Cloud didn't much like. Cloud wasn't even out of the den yet. He wanted Cloud to hurry up. Please. < Riders leaving. > And true to habit Cloud came sauntering leisurely and calmly out of [he log-and-earth den and into the morning sun. Cloud shook himself all over as he reached the daylight, making a haze of dust, Cloud having (depend on it) rolled in it; and for a moment as horse met horse the ambient was full of images, all uneasy. Cloud moved into the vicinity, refusing to take any orders from Jonas' horse, flatly, no. Every horse in the trail party was male and older, autumn was nippish in the air, and the Westmans might be a working partnership in which a new horse and rider weren't neces- sarily welcome--but that didn't daunt Cloud in the least--Cloud was Teeth clacked, snap, just short of a nighthorse rump, as Cloud passed Jonas' horse to the rear. A foot cocked and slyly kicked back, again a miss, all calculated, all narrowly short of mayhem--just a trial of personalities. Jonas swatted his own horse across the withers, and the meeting last night flashed across Danny's mind, skinnier and plainer and more junior than he thought he was. He'd learned their names last night, when he'd agreed to come with them: Jonas and Luke Westman and Hawley Antrim, who was somehow a cousin of theirs and related to Aby Dale. Their horses... they imaged themselves, and no rider could totally figure a strange horse's name on meeting: but in their riders' word-names, they were Shadow and Froth and Ice respectively, a chilly set of impres- sions in the ambient. He laid a hand on Cloud's neck. Shadow had annoyed Cloud, and Danny really, desperately hoped that Cloud wasn't going to make him start out the trip walking, in the company of senior riders, with all the juniors lined up at the gate to watch. He made a solid try at getting up on Cloud's back, determined to do it on the first attempt, and determined that Cloud not move away from under him. RIDER AT THE GATE 69 To his relief he landed square on, and immediately Cloud took a snap at Froth's rump, moving closer, momentary jolt. But Jonas had started riding toward the gates, and the others fol- lowed, the horse called Froth not without a snap back at Cloud in retaliation. Danny kept thinking, as he followed the three out the gates of Shamesey camp. Nobody got thrown, nobody bit any- body: he let the three senior riders go well ahead as they rode in leisurely fashion past the gates of Shamesey town. He thought then--he was suddenly sure that he should have sent a note to town, telling his parents where he was and what he was doing. For one thing, it would make his parents worry about him for a satisfactory several months. --Off hunting a rogue horse. Don't worry. Back before summer. Love, Your Son. He really, truly wished he'd done that. They deserved it. His fa- ther deserved it. And, thinking that, he lagged farther and farther back, away from the casual images the three seniors let flow back and forth, be- cause he didn't want to think about his family in their range, or eavesdrop on their business, either, feeling himself on scant enough tolerance. He'd be on trial with them for the first while, he was sure: they thought he was useful because he could hear Guil Stuart farther than he was supposed to. They said it was because he was a snot- nosed junior who couldn't control what he thought, and in spite of the fact that that was his use, he didn't intend to broadcast every- thing in his head all the way to catching Stuart, or annoy them with his junior-rider insecurities spilling over at them. So, first to keep from thinking of home, and then to keep from thinking about the trip ahead and the chances of trouble, he looked at the grass moving in the breeze. He noted the footprints of a timid scavenger that had crossed the road last night. Field-rats, he thought. Somebody had been careless with the garbage. Probably the garbage-wagons had spilled over when they went out yesterday to the dump. Out there--the province of truly junior riders--you got vermin so thick the ground moved. '-" Cherryh 70 ~ C.J Cloud's skin twitched. Garbage-guard was a job he'd never done but a week. He'd have starved first. Cloud didn't want to think about it, and switched his tail energetically, thinking instead of until his head was crowded with those thoughts. He'd meant to look back at least once while they were near enough, but he'd decided not: the juniors might be watching from the gate. He did only when they rode past the shoulder of the hill, when the road wound around it and he knew it was his last chance before it cut off sight of Shamesey town. But all he could see from there was the wooden wall, the pas- tures, the fences out across the valley. He saw the cattle-keepers taking the cattle out for their daily pasturage, far in the distance. The junior cattle-guards were the lit- tle moving dots of darkness far in the lead. The herds of cattle and sheep and pigs went out like that every day, rain or shine, until the snow fell. He might be doing that all winter, instead, earning a few coins, or, at best, riding winter watch on the phone lines that ran along the road to Anveney and down the coast to Malvey, watching for breaks and guarding the crews that kept them working., The lines ran beside them as they traveled, following the road. They were all that let you believe that human civilization stretched out into the Wild. The shadows of them went on and on across the land, a convenient perch for birds that preyed on vermin in the grass. He saw them, dots along the wire, as the sun grew higher. He heard their buzzing cries. He sometimes had that strange out- of-body notion that he was watching himself ride along with three other riders; but that wasn't a bird sending that impression: that was some creature a little closer to the earth and with a bigger brain than any bird had. It was watching them from the rocks that cropped out of the grass on the west side of the road. The cattle- guards might need to look sharp, later in the day. The riders ahead of him didn't speak. He had other, less spooky images, sometimes: Cloud's, of the High Wild, he was sure that was what he was seeing, Cloud switched his tail as he walked, quite certain where he was going now, quite content with the direction, but not--not communicative or sociable with the horses ahead of them. Cloud was uneasy, Danny thought, and saw the twitch of Cloud's ears, the backward slant of them that accompanied a thought of Danny shivered. He slapped Cloud with his hand to distract him. "Don't be like that. They're older, is all, you silly sheep. Don't pick a fight. There's three of them." Cloud wasn't happy with the riders or their horses. He wasn't sure Cloud understood what they were after, coming out here, ex- cept the chance to go into the highlands--which Cloud did ap- prove. Cloud, he thought on the instant, didn't see any real reason to be following the tails of three other horses. Cloud could take him where he wanted to go. Cloud didn't need a guide. And in that thought, also, he suffered a clear, cold realization where he was, on the dusty road far from Shamesey town and Shamesey camp, headed north into territory he knew was dangerous for the weather alone--to be stuck there probably for the whole winter, in company with three strangers he'd only just met, of a class of people reputed for wildness and strange manner, and whose only recommendation was being friends of a man, also a borderer, whom he only remotely knew. < Rider dead in the rocks. > "No," he muttered, disquieted. He toed Cloud in the ribs. Cloud tossed his head, threw a cow-kick to jolt his rider. He couldn't ask why Cloud thought that way. He couldn't find an image to argue with, nothing but the same dead-rider image that Cloud threw him. he tried to in- form Cloud. 72 ~ C.J. Cherryh Cloud threw his head and sulked. So Cloud was just generally disappointed in their company, dis- approving of anything but "We can't," Danny said. "We promised. And maybe Stuart can't get this thing by himself. This thing's bad, it's real bad, Cloud." He didn't want to think about it, but he wondered if Cloud had any real idea what they were chasing up into the hills, or how it connected to the dead rider. And the wondering alone connected it. Cloud imaged, so vividly, so threateningly for a moment he couldn't see the riders ahead of him or the hills or any- thing. "Somebody's got to get rid of it." Cloud's ears came up. With a kick and a toss of his head, Cloud dived uphill off the road, jolted slantwise across the hill as Danny grabbed a double fistful of mane. "Stop it!" Danny yelled. But Cloud didn't stop it. Cloud had the mountains in his mind, and that was all he wanted to see. "Dammit!" Danny yelled. "Cut it out, Cloud! Stop!" Cloud didn't stop. Danny imaged, and began to figure where he and Cloud could part company without his breaking an ankle. He slid to one side, displaced their center of weight, and hung on to Cloud's mane, put his feet down a couple of times, sliding on the grass, be- fore Cloud sulked to a slower pace. Danny planted his feet hard, on the grass, and skidded, holding on to Cloud's mane, his packs swinging around him as he jolted over a series of uneven spots on the hill. Cloud just kept plowing ahead, dragging him with him, imag- RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 73 ing while he returned raw anger, that was most of it, and, when he wasn't fighting for footing. He was deter- mined to win the fight, determined he wasn't going to give in with the seniors watching from below, not if he had to walk for the next three days. But Cloud was mad, too. Cloud took out on a particularly steep uphill and Danny braced his feet the harder--until his feet hit a rock. His grip on Cloud's mane jerked Cloud's forequarters around, threatening to bring them both down. At once he gave up his grip on the mane, which put the down- hill under him--he fell through empty space, curled to protect his head, landed with his baggage under his back and skidded down- hill over the slick, dusty grass. He fetched up finally on a small grassy hump, momentarily out of slope to slide on, with the laughter of the strangers ringing out from below the hill. His feet were pointed upslope--between which he saw Cloud standing staring down at him. He rolled over, struggled against the downhill slant to get his feet under him, and got up, with the thong-tied packets banging about his arms, without the weight of the pistol in its holster. He saw it downslope, beyond him, and he slouched down the hill in a fit of temper, recovered it to its holster and sulked on down to the road, walking aslant on the hill, because the Westmans and Haw- ley, having had their laugh, were going on, leaving him to sort it out, and he had to overtake them, afoot or ahorse, they clearly didn't care. He was mortified. He didn't look back to find out where Cloud was. He limped on down toward the road, intending to intercept them, still finding bits of dry grass to pick out of leather seams and brush out of his hair. Cloud couldn't resist making him look the fool. It was one thing when he dumped him in front of the juniors. It was another, when he was working, when matters were serious and he was out on the road. He was furious with Cloud. The seniors were clearly dis- gusted with him. Their riding on meant they were testing him, whether he could get himself together and catch up. And then he either misjudged where he should intercept the 74 ~ C.J. Cherryh others, or misjudged how fast he had to follow, because by the time he reached sight of the road, having crossed over the shoulder of the hill--they were nowhere in sight. He went downslope, not believing that they would have left the road and turned off cross-country, but not sure of that until he saw their tracks in the dirt of the roadway. So he followed them, having no suppositions whatsoever that Cloud was going to leave him. Cloud was up there in the hills, not far, probably watching him, but he wasn't going to acknowledge that fact. So Cloud wouldn't carry him. Then Cloud could trail him along the heights of the hills, playing his little games while he fell farther and farther behind the Westmans, and while the Westmans laughed at Cloud's foolish junior rider, that was all Cloud had gained. Meanwhile he was hurt. He'd bruised his backside, his shoulders, and all but knocked the wind out of himself. He had itchy grass down his collar that he couldn't reach. He'd hurt his ankle when he hit the rock that caused his fall, and it was probably swelling. He might be lame for life. He hoped Cloud was satisfied, making him look like a fool, which Cloud had to do every damned time it was really important to convince somebody that he knew what he was doing, and he hoped Cloud really enjoyed his temper tantrum. Cloud's rider was humiliated, and bruised, and ready to guard cat- tle for the rest of their lives. Which would probably happen to them. He'd fall so far behind the other riders he'd never catch up. He and Cloud would have to limp back to Shamesey camp alone, their reputation would be ruined, all the high country riders would know he wasn't to be re- lied upon, the juniors would laugh at them, and they'd never, ever, ever make it to the mountains. He wasn't sure Cloud heard him that far up the hill. He was too mad to care. The other riders were out so far ahead now he no longer tried to overtake them. He could only hope they stayed on the road, and didn't put him to tracking them across open country, at which he wasn't as good as he needed to be. RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 75 He could lose them if they got off the road and he'd be out in the dark alone with the goblin cats and the willy-wisps. He was damned mad. came to his mind. Maybe that was his thought. Fine, he said to himself, and sulked along, limping with his sore ankle on the rutted road, a mere track the trucks maintained, drag- ging chain on the undercarriages to keep the weeds down. It was a fine road for trucks. It was perfectly fine for nighthorses. It was a damned sorry mess for human feet. It was a damned long walk, measured in telephone poles and sore joints, and in the tracks of the riders in front of him, riders doubt- less laughing at him. And he was more and more sure that Cloud was up there on the heights, as steep as the hills had risen above this section of road. Maybe the other riders could stop for noon break, but he didn't dare stop, for fear of not overtaking them before dark. He kept thinking, irritably, (Rain falling.> Cloud understood that. (Rain falling on hills. Rain falling on rocks and grass. Rain falling on Cloud. > And eventually, when his steps were growing shorter and shorter, and his tailbone decidedly hurt with every step, he saw a dim image of (boy with a silly lot of baggage swinging about him, far, far below the hilltop. > he sent. He'd learned stubbornness from Cloud. (Danny getting down from Cloud. Danny falling down the hill.) (Danny going off over Cloud's shoulder, > he sent back, the maddest he'd ever been at Cloud. (Danny getting down.> The argument kept up, until he changed tactics, thought about pain and sore feet and bruises, thought (snow, > and (still water. ) Then he was aware of Cloud's presence closer than had been. Cloud met him as the road took a bend and a climb, Cloud stand- ing on the hillside, and then walking along, head down and ears flat. Danny threw him only the most casual of glances, and limped, badly, thinking about 76 ~ C.J. Cherryh Dirty trick. He heard Cloud behind him, then. He didn't have to look. He could see himself, ahead of Cloud, limping along with the stupid baggage. He heard Cloud closer, a whispering in the grass, a soft breath- ing. Cloud imaged. he thought, and Cloud shoved him between the shoulders. Cloud thought. Unfair, of course. Humans couldn't image on their own, but hu- mans were tricky and inventive when they got the knack of it. Cloud peevishly dashed raindrops onto their still reflection. Cloud understood his tactic. But Cloud couldn't drown the reflection. Cloud wasn't as mad as the human in question was determined--and the human in ques- tion wasn't stopping or getting into details. Danny just kept limp- ing ahead, in the tracks of horses nice enough to carry their riders. Cloud thought. Cloud could combine images when two thoughts crossed in his head. And they clearly had. Cloud came up beside him and slumped along pace for pace. They walked along maybe half an hour before Danny thought and Cloud stopped and waited for him to climb up. He didn't do so well getting up this time. He hadn't the strength for a swing on Cloud's mane, he just planted his arms across Cloud's back, jumped up and landed belly-down, tangled in the strings of his baggage, to work his way across Cloud's back in a maneuver he would be humiliated to do in front of the strangers he was trying to overtake, while, annoyed by a knee in his kidneys, Cloud began to amble on his way, giving him no grace whatsoever. But Danny didn't argue. Cloud was going his direction. RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 77 he thought, to please Cloud. Cloud imaged, "Cloud. Behave. Dammit." He'd not had so much trouble out of Cloud on the regular hire they'd taken. He'd worked with other riders. He didn't know why Cloud should take so profound a dis- like to horses that were going to guide them to the High Wild, that would be their protection by their experience and their riders' guns once they reached an area they might not be able to cross safely on their own.., granted anything went amiss. Cloud persisted sullenly. Then Cloud threw his head and looked back, just the red-edged corner of a nighthorse eye, cast along their backtrail. Nostrils widened. Cloud imaged, and stopped joking. Did we miss them? was Danny's first thought--stupid thought. There were multiple nighthorse tracks under Cloud's feet at the moment. They were following three horses. But Cloud was looking behind them. He thought of the horse who'd gone out the gate, following Stu- art: Cloud persisted. Cloud didn't think it was one horse he was hearing back there. Line riders, Danny thought. Inspecting the phone lines. But it wasn't the day they usually went out, when he thought of it--unless they had a break in the line that shut down the phones, which would bring somebody much faster. So who among the riders would go? Danny asked himself and Cloud, trying to see if Cloud could recognize the horses. But Cloud didn't answer his perplexity, except with this same dark image of more than one horse, on ambiguous ground, except that there was Cloud's wind-image in it, the sweeping of the im- ages, coming and going, distorting to many and back to a conserva- tive two or three. Danny asked. 78 ~ C.J. Cherryh Cloud shifted footing, snorted to clear his nostrils of stray scents and sniffed again. was all Cloud could give him, but this time they had riders, less certain an image--just the illusion of shadows atop shadows. Not wild horses, then. Not likely, unless Cloud was getting not the scent but the desire of the horses for humans. A wild lot wasn't something to meet in the autumn. And they did go on the move in this season. Danny suggested. But Cloud didn't, Cloud only started uphill and off the road, where Danny didn't want to go. Danny swatted Cloud's shoulder, wanting was Cloud's thought. And Cloud picked up the pace. Danny thought, not the still-water of silence, but Cloud didn't think so. And maybe it was true: they were so close the scent-image came to them on the wind from their backs, and strange riders were almost certainly back there--it was too persis- tent to be anything Cloud just remembered. But the wind came to them treacherously as it did in the foothills, reversing its ordinary direction in places, coming almost east to west, when nearly the opposite was the rule on the road--and they could only trust the wind would shift again. A human knew that. He wasn't sure Cloud did. What ruled Cloud's decision was likely the surety that he didn't smell humans in the direction he took and he did smell them at their backs. Trouble was what they had to reckon it. Towns were the safe zones. You didn't trust what you ran into in the Wild--not solitary riders or groups of riders. That was the law Danny Fisher knew. Maybe it was a townsman way of thinking, but Cloud lit out at that fast-traveling pace Cloud could hold for long, long runs-- Cloud had learned that humans didn't put their noses down and RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 79 smell tracks, but they saw them and they understood them by processes that had never occurred to Cloud. That was what Cloud reasoned--maybe as far as the fact that nighthorses without humans didn't use roads. And Cloud wasn't staying around to meet them. Chapter V1 GUIL STUART SWEATED LIGHTLY IN THE NOON SUN, WATCHED THE brown grass pass under his dangling feet and Burn's three-toed hooves, and avoided the thoughts bobbing to the surface of a dis- tracted, several times jolted mind. He rode northerly still, not using the road, but overland, up over the rolling, grassy hills, on the same course which he had begun to choose in their first panic flight. Burn had other ideas, making a slow, quiet intrusion into his vision. Burn imaged for him, the characteristic two stones with the old rider signs, that exact view of the mountains, so for a moment Guil didn't find himself on this road at all, but well south of Shamesey town, high in the hills where the Domerlane left the MacFarlane High Trace, the mountain ridge towering on the right. Burn sent, and, falling enthusiastically under RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 81 the spell of his own imaging: (Mountains,> Guil thought, then, slipping into a moment of weakness, (mountains clean with snow in the winter, game run- ning on the slopes. Mountains above the MacFarlane. Kantung Peak. > Then, abruptly: because that ugly image leapt into his mind whenever it found the chance. He stopped it. He thought of water. He thought of bubbles on the surface. Burn recalled pleasantly. Guil resisted the imaging at first. But he did recall that day with pleasure. He remembered Aby laughing, playing keepaway with Moon and Burn. (Dodging on the moonlit hillside. Moon darting this way and that for pockets. > A lump arrived in his throat. Burn imaged, (holding hands. Taste of honey, smell of dew and grass and Moon and Aby and Guil. Moon and Burn mating. Guil and Aby mating, sweet smells, good feelings everywhere. > The whole moonlit moment rebuilt itself, lived vividly and faded into the present sun and chill breeze, as if it were the same day. Wind and grass, sun on autumn colors. On the left hand the mountains loomed up, the Firgeberg, the backbone of the conti- nent. The wind came down from the foothills with a chill that shivered through the grass, cold and clean enough to wipe away the stink and madness of Shamesey camp. (Hunting,> Burn sent him. (Heart beating quick, quick feet moving ahead of us, chasing willy-wisps through the brush. Deli- cious. > Burn had no long memory for distress. Troubles came and they 82 ~ C.J. Cherryh went. Horses died. Horses were born. As long as it wasn't Burn, Burn didn't stay concerned. One more sunrise. One more sunny afternoon on the hills. A ra- tioned number of them. But Burn also had no memory for money. Money ran counter to Burn's sense of the world, and Burn forgot where bacon came from. Burn's rider was supposed to have it, that was all. < Cattle. > Guil sent. Burn thought, much more cheerfully. Burn imaged the slow rolling of hills northward. And they argued for a while about the connections of Anveney town, banks (a concept Burn refused to deal with, as a repository for things worth bacon: naturally one would immediately get what was worth something, and not leave it anywhere) and humans (not high in Burn's thinking right now, since humans had lately had ri- fles shooting at them). Burn was vastly put out by humans and would be put out so long as Guil's leg hurt, because it made Burn's leg hurt. Almost. Well, close enough. When they rode alone Guil could sink into trains of almost- thought and exist in Burn's realm of sun-on-back, humans-at-dis- tance, food-the-day's-necessity and sex-on-opportunity. Sometimes in the high hills you ran into a partnership like that, one where you couldn't talk to the man except through the horse; and Guil sup- posed in the long run they were happy enough--never work, never come into a town, they'd barter sometimes, food and skins for clothes or a knife. Usually when you met them, the human half wanted to trade, the horse was skittish--and the rest of the time you just got a spooky feeling in the brush, the intimation of some- thing that might have been there for a moment, might have looked you over in a slightly predatory or slightly fearful way .... wild things did that sometimes, before they ran. He was glad enough to sink into that kind of nowhere at least RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 83 for the day. The leg ached when he didn't. The stomach complained it was empty when he didn't, and he didn't care he was hungry, re- ally--he hadn't energy left to care. But somewhere toward evening Burn found the stream that crossed the road well north of Shamesey, a smallish stream--Guil was relatively sure it was the same one--cold in this season; and Burn wanted to cool his legs and drink and--definitely--find something to eat. So Guil sat down there and tended the wound he had gotten, the ugly rip that by now was somewhat scabbed and not wholly clean. He took off the breeches and sat on the bank, dipping up water to wash the wound and numb the pain, which was so miserable once he'd worked the pants off that Burn took himself from the vicinity, went a distance down the stream and slammed his three-toed foot down on something that wriggled. Burn ate it then, alternately washing it in the stream. It was not particularly nice; it was not the sort of thing Burn saved for cook- ing, and Burn had the grace to keep his tidbit out of range of a queasy stomach to eat it. "I don't suppose you could catch a fish," Guil said aloud, and thought < fish. > Burn snorted, and wandered off along the stream, nosing into this and that, sampling the water. Burn came back to him with, He wasn't that desperate. < Plate-fungus. > No. He was disgusted. he imaged, and got up to put his pants on. Burn came back to him, took him up again, uncom- monly patient still with this carrying business. Burn imaged, having settled on that goal, imaging a good winter and enough to eat. He dreamed in that still sunlit but nippish ride, of the valley where he had been a boy, in the first spring he remembered. He 84 ~ C.J. Cherryh wondered where it was, and whether it was what he remembered. He thought of it, in bad times. And perhaps he did gloss it a bit, being light-headed with pain and hunger, with the meadows spangled with starflowers and the delirious yellow spikes of mollyfingers, in green lush grass; but that was the way he liked to remember it--which was probably, he'd long said to himself, why he'd never found it. Burn took up his dream readily enough, embellished it with the restless longings of his own kind: a valley, a far, far different place from the safe, smoky dens of Shamesey hostels, where riders and horses lived in such muddy, smelly, close quarters. A clean winter, a wide winter, with all the white valley to hunt. Tarmin. Then this place. "Promise," Guil said. "I promise." Burn twitched his ears back and forth. "Don't know 'promise,' do you? Probably it's good you don't." <"You don't,"v echoed back to him. Burn could image sounds he didn't know, so far as his horsey brain could remember them. Or cared to remember them. Then a visual image. (Mollyfingers and green grass. > Mollyfingers didn't grow in the lowlands. They wouldn't grow where factories sent up smoke, or in places like Anveney, where men ripped copper and lead out of the earth and made beautiful, poisoned pools, bright blue and milky white. ~Cattle,3 Burn thought, sulking, and then again, quite cheer- fully, the sunlight in his thoughts belying the evening--(mol- lyfingers and clean new grass. 3 Twilight was getting scarily deep scarily fast in the folds of the hills, with the sun already over the mountain rim. Maybe the riders Cloud had smelled behind them had stopped for camp by now. Danny hoped that the Westmans had. They'd come back to the road finally. He'd found their tracks where the dust was thick, and where a horse's toe had scored the oc- casional rock. He could track at least that well: from an old rider on his one long trip he'd picked up enough of the art at least to read whether a horse or a man was running or walking, how loaded his RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 85 quarry was, and--if a human was involved--how tall that human was and maybe what the gender was. But he knew precisely the riders he was tracking; and he was scared, to tell the truth, not alone now of the riders they'd feared behind them, but of a night alone out where he'd never been alone before if they didn't catch up before they ran out of daylight. He caught little strange vignettes of himself and Cloud seen from low to the earth or high on the hill or out of the brush, so he knew that small hunter eyes were watching them, nothing big, nothing that would bother a horse--yet. He had his pistol by him and he de- cided, considering having fallen on the hill and having had it slide free, that a tie-down would be a very good idea, but he wasn't going to tie it in the holster now, thank you, he wanted to be able to draw it very quickly, and not shoot himself or Cloud, if an emer- gency happened. He was afraid his hands would shake if he had to aim. He was afraid of shooting in panic and hitting the men he was tracking. A townbred junior rider had no business alone out here, he was increasingly convinced--he'd never been alone in the dark in the Wild before, and he didn't know what was watching them from the brush. The Westmans might have slowed down just a little, he said to himself. They might have helped, damn them, when he'd fallen, in- stead of laughing and riding on. They'd asked him to come with them out here. Jonas had said he'd improve their chances of finding what they were looking for-- so why had they let Cloud dump him? Damned funny joke, maybe. But he didn't think so. Neither did Cloud. Cloud sent an uncomfortable hostility, dar- ing the Westmans or their horses to stop anything Cloud wanted. "You embarrassed me," Danny muttered to the darkness under him, blacker than that gathering around them. He couldn't make Cloud understand ideas like that, he didn't think so, at least. Senior riders said that horses did come to understand, eventually, about human thinking--but a young horse was full of horse notions, and it wasn't until they were ten or fifteen or so that they began to take up on fine points like embarrassment. Or the politics of humans with each other. 86 ~ C.J. Cherryh Well, so maybe young humans didn't pick up on things like human politics too well either, the way he didn't understand why older and wiser riders would have left him. Why boys his own age would have done it, he could figure just fine: plain stupidity. But he didn't think that was the case with the Westmans, who were borderers like Stuart, who understood what the dangers were. So borderers played rough jokes on each other, and expected ju- niors to take more than they dared hand back, the way every other senior did.., but they were friends of Stuart, and Stuart hadn't laughed at him. He tried to think it was some sign of trust that they did leave him, and figured he'd catch up, and figured he'd take care of him- self. Maybe it was a sign of respect, or an expectation of him---or something. Cloud thought. Cloud hadn't missed that. Cloud didn't like it in the least. Cloud didn't like Jonas Westman or his horse. Cloud vehemently didn't like the Westmans. Cloud certainly hadn't indicated anything about that when Cloud had nudged him into going. Maybe it had always been Cloud's notion that they could kite up to the High Wild and desert the Westmans to their business with Stuart, but that wasn't the way Danny Fisher under- stood an agreement, thank you. Humans made promises and hu- mans had to do what they said they'd do, and that was that. Maybe he hadn't made Cloud understand that point, or maybe Cloud didn't want to understand. Or maybe, with somebody following them, it was time for Cloud to use his nose and his horse-sense and get them out of danger. Whoever was following them could be somebody who didn't like the Westmans. It could also be somebody who didn't like Stuart, like that bunch in the meeting ... and they'd cut your throat soon as look at you: Danny had that feeling, and Cloud didn't disagree. Whatever went on among riders, there was usually--and always before in his experience--a convoy and a lot of riders, or at least a boss of some kind, to buffer the feud, and if nothing else, to give one rider or a group of riders excuse to ride apart from one another RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 87 and keep out of each others' thoughts. But here there wasn't any convoy boss to provide a young rider fearful of being put upon by his seniors the least small contact with town law. He was off with people where there just wasn't law at all... where seniors ran off and left you at a pace faster than any convoy was ever going to travel. He'd thought of helping somebody, their friend, no less, and this was the pay he got. The preachers said, Do unto others. And it wasn't working that way. It was darker and darker. There were singers in the grass he couldn't identify, there were images that could come from a goblin cat pretending to be something small and harmless for all he knew .... Cloud snorted suddenly, and flashed into mind. Danny took a fistful of mane and a deathgrip on his pistol butt. Cloud was imaging the smell, that kind of fluttery darkness a horse made on the landscape ahead of them, which was growing more fre- quently wooded than he liked, and generally uphill for a long while now. the image was, in Cloud's better nightsight: a shape against the brush. But Cloud didn't act disturbed, just disgusted, and jolted for- ward into a trot. Danny sent, or thought he was sending: he was holding on with his grip on Cloud's mane and his knees tight on Cloud's sides, so nervously tight that Cloud shook his mane and snorted the scent out of his nose. was Cloud's comment. Then they went jolting right off the road and through brush that made Danny have to duck his head and hold onto his hat with the hand that was supposed to be holding the pistol in its holster. Cloud sent then, even Danny could smell it; and he could see the nighthorse as a blackness going quickly through the stand of trees in front of them. Danny had a terrified thought that it might be the rogue come downland... But smoke led to fire and the gleam of fire through the brush to the stray nighthorse who had clearly come out to look them over as they approached; and the nighthorsemhe was sure now it was Froth--led to three riders seated at a campfire and cooking supper. 88 ~ C.J. Cherryh "Well," Jonas said, hardly looking up. "Made it, did you?" was his own quick thought, no more pleasant than Cloud's. But you didn't do that with a senior, you said, meekly get- ting down, "My horse and I worked it out." He wasn't sure he wanted now to say anything about people following them. He wasn't sure he wholly trusted present company to be friends of his, any more than the people behind them, but the thought that he might say some- thing was enough, with the horses all about. "What riders?" Jonas asked, with no levity whatsoever. "I don't know," Danny said. "I didn't stay to ask. We were down- wind as we caught scent of them..." "But you don't know whether they got wind of you." "Possible they did, sir. I don't know." They thought he was stu- pid. He wouldn't exaggerate what he did know: it was too serious a matter. "We kept the wind with us and got out of there, cross- country. Cloud thinks there were more than two, less than ten, that's all we could tell." Hawley was stirring the coals with a stick. He flung it into the fire. There was silence, and a confused group image of the meeting, of the principal rider who kept arguing to shoot Stuart. "Harper," Jonas said. "Damn him." It was undeniably the right image. Danny recognized the face. He didn't know what more than the business at the meeting lay be- hind Jonas' knowledge of this Harper, but he got a confused image of a fight, blades flashing, fringes flying--imprecise target in a knife fight, that was what the fringes were good for, he'd heard that. Borderers. And he wondered if they were going to put out the fire at the news and run for it, maybe higher into the hills, and off the trail. It was what he might do if he were Jonas and he thought Harper and several of his friends were behind him with hostile intent. "Sit down," Jonas muttered. "We're not budging." "Yes, sir," he said, and sat down and shed his baggage on the ground beside him. It was dirtier and more scuffed than it had been in the morning. Maybe it looked a little less like a novice's gear. By some miracle he still had the gun in its holster and it made sitting RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 89 uncomfortable. He took it off, and decided, in the smell of bacon and sausage starting to cook, and the sight of tea on to boil, that he was very glad they weren't going to budge. But he thought he should figure out what the rules were. "Do I put in, or cook my own, or what, sir?" "What're you carrying's the question." "Bacon and biscuit-makings mostly." "You can put in tomorrow. We made enough. You got jam?" "Yessir," he said, thinking then that he'd been too judgmental, and they'd figured all along that he'd make it. "Got jerky, too. Fair deal of it." "Save it. You mix up the breakfast dough, leave it set the night. There's clean water. You wash up." "Yes, sir." That was Luke Westman who gave him that order, and it was fair. "So what about this Harper, sir?" "There's time," Hawley said. "There's plenty of time to settle with that one." How? he wanted to ask. Did they mean have a fight, or wait in ambush and shoot them, or what? "Scared ?" Jonas asked. He hadn't planned to shoot anybody. Jonas had talked about it in meeting as something they'd do if there wasn't a choice ... but it hadn't seemed what they had any intention of doing. And now there was this Harper following them, who might, Danny thought with a lump in his throat, shoot them as easy as thinking about it. Harper had been all too eager to go shooting at people and horses right up near Shamesey walls, which was un- thinkable and dangerous as hell to the camp and the whole town. It didn't encourage him to think that Harper was any more reasonable out of reach of those walls. No camp-boss out here and nobody to tell town law what had happened between a group of stray borderers with feud on their minds. There was a real chance he might not get home next spring. Things could happen out here, very final things, he began to take that into truly serious account--things nobody would ever know about except the ones that pulled the triggers. 90 ~ C.J. Cherryh He just didn't know right now why these men had ever needed a junior in their midst, or what good he really was to anybody. He wished he hadn't come. He wished he'd asked somebody like Lyle Wesson what his mature judgment was of his going off like this, somebody who might have said Don't do it, kid, you don't count for anything out there. He got a dark, chilly feeling then. There was one of the horses he couldn't pin down--Froth was easy to identify, agitated most of the time and full of temper; and Ice just didn't communicate much. And that left the horse named Shadow, just the faintest thought, just the skitteriest images, a hostility you couldn't get hold of. Shadow didn't like him and didn't like Cloud, that much he picked up, and Shadow was always there, behind the other two, lurking behind Froth's jittery everywhere images and Ice's un- friendly quiet... Shadow didn't swear like Cloud did, Shadow just sent hostility slipping out around the edges of what was going on, so maybe it was easier to feel unwanted, and easier to feel danger in the night. That last was surely Cloud, and Shadow didn't like it. "Keep it down," Jonas Westman said, while their supper cooked. "We've no need for that, boy. Calm that horse of yours." "Yes, sir," he said, asking himself what about the situation de- served calm, and how, the same as at home, everything got down to being his fault. They didn't have any preachers here to say so. But it seemed a re- liable commodity, guilt. You could get it here cheap, handed out like come-ons to a sale. "Not my damn fault," Danny muttered. "Cloud and I can go by ourselves if you don't need us." "Did I say that?" Jonas asked. And Hawley Antrim, Ice's rider: "Nobody said that. Just calm down. Horsefights feed off quar- rels. And we don't need that kind of trouble." "Yes, sir," he said. Everybody was sir, being senior. And they weren't telling him in any sense what they were doing waiting here, or whether they'd found any sign of Guil Stuart. He knew he RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 91 hadn't come across any tracks but the ones he'd been following. But he'd been up in the hills a good deal of the time. "Gone overland," Luke Westman said. "Same's we could, but we know where he's going." "We don't need to hurry." Jonas said, put another stick on the fire, and adjusted the frying pan. "Stuart won't appreciate interfer- ence. He's an independent type. We let him handle the business up-country, if he can." It seemed dangerous to him, and not too helpful to Stuart. He wanted not to have an opinion, but they kept coming up. He kept his eyes on the fire and tried to keep his mouth shut. "Don't trust us?" Hawley asked. Nosy question. It scared him just thinking about it. There were a lot of ways a junior could get into trouble with men like this, as rough as this. He didn't want trouble. They had Stuart's gear in those extra packs they shared out, everything he owned. Hawley carried Stuart's rifle, having none of his own. At least he thought they meant to deliver it all to Stuart. "Easy on the kid," Jonas said. "He's noisy enough. Quiet mind, kid. Quiet. Think about supper. You'll be fine." You could get fiber from knifegrass. You stripped off both the edges with your fingernails and you braided the strands you got. You could braid as many strands together as you had the skill for, and Guil just round-braided it as he rode, with a little wrap of nighthorse hair when a piece quit and the end wouldn't quite stay tucked on the splice. The result was a tough cord. You wouldn't break it by pulling on it--it'd cut right through the skin of your hands. It was also fine-gauge enough that it made a fair fishing line; a notched large thorn, carefully scored about for the cord to tie on, made a decent small hook, a dry twig tied into the line a convenient float, while he was sitting on the bank of a fair-sized stream. He dropped a rock into a shallow to trap a handful of minnows, baited his hook, cast near a low branch that touched the water, and waited. Burn thought. "Pest! You had yours. This is my fish." 92 ~ C.J. Cherryh "Do you see bacon? Do you see a frying pan?" Burn sulked. Effectively enough Burn got the next fish. Gull filleted it while he was waiting for another to bite. Burn couldn't manage the bones, but he so loved the taste, almost as much as Burn loved sugar-cured bacon. Fish wasn't bad, raw. He drew the line at other things. He hadn't the makings for fire, hadn't the energy for fire-making, even given that he did, now, have the cord for a bow-drill; raw fish was good enough. And he found a number of spotty-neck shellfish along a rocky edge, which were also fine eaten raw. Burn got a couple of them, which pleased Burn mightily--a knife left them in ever so much nicer condition than cracking them open under nighthorse feet, and Burn liked for his to be washed in water before eating--in beer, if it was available. It wasn't. Burn sucked down his dessert and resumed his proper watchful duty, protecting the two of them from goblin cats, feral nighthorse pairs in autumn lust, and other potential hazards, while idly nipping the tops off tasslegrass, eating only the seed-bearing part, the extravagance of autumn. Meanwhile Gull limped about, cutting soft-needled branches along the wooded streambank. He heaped up a fragrant pile of them in a sheltered spot, and when he had a large enough pile, Burn helpfully sat down in the middle, rolling out a nesting spot. "Get up, dammit! My bed, Burn." "Oh, hell," Gull muttered, and went on cutting branches, to make their bed wider. Danny lay down to sleep tucked in blankets, near the coals. There never yet had been a whisper from the riders he was sure were fol- lowing him, and now he asked himself whether the Westmans be- lieved him that such riders had ever been there. But of course they had to. Riders couldn't lie to each other. RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 93 At least, juniors couldn't lie very well. To anyone. He hadn't picked up on everything that was going on, that was sure. He wasn't wholly surprised when Cloud came over and settled down on the ground next to him, sharing the fire warmth, sharing his own warmth, sharing his muddled, half-asleep nighthorse thoughts with him, that ran mostly along the general content of the ambient. A ghosty was in the brush watching them, not a specific thing, just one of three very different creatures that townsmen gave the same name to, and he didn't know much better. Cloud knew what it was, Cloud wasn't spooked by it, and no cattle-guard needed be, except sometimes the little creatures would spook the cattle just to have them away from their territory. The ghosty wanted them to go away, too, probably. But it was scared of Cloud. Danny just wished other things were. And he was glad that Cloud spent the night close to him. They were clearly on the uphill now, headed into the foothills of the Firgeberg. They were commit- ted to the mountains. To all else it meant. He really, really wished to keep his mind quiet and let the senior riders rest. Hawley was on watch, he was aware of that. So was Ice, and he didn't think much would get past that horse. He didn't think the senior riders believed that Harper, if that was who it was, intended to do them harm. Harm to Stuart was an- other matter. But as long as they stayed their pace, the common thought he picked up was and It wouldn't help for him and Cloud to have another argument. He wanted Cloud to know that. He wanted Cloud to agree to stay with him. He wasn't sure what Cloud's answer was. He shut his eyes, but that made pictures behind them, of the hillside and the dark, flut- tery smell-shapes following them. He stared into the dying coals and that was better. At least the shapes the burning edges made were all random and without motive. Chapter Vll SLEET BEGAN TO COME DOWN IN EARNEST, WHITE DUST RATTLING against the evergreens--not an unusual occurrence if it were mid- summer on Tarmin Height: the Firgeberg spawned occasional sleet year-round. But when a flurry came on an autumn morning after quakesilver leaf-fall, a rider, however well prepared, looked anxiously to the sky above the woods and the mountain for a hint of what might be rolling in. That was Flicker's thought, but Flicker's rider thought snow would not come yet. Tara Chang sent back, riding along the wooded road. Flicker tossed her shaggy head, shook her mane and still thought differently, sending unease out into the air. They'd intended hunt- ing if they had the chance: they'd escorted the road crew out to RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 95 their camp yesterday, they'd turned them over to Barry and Llew, who were stuck out there shooting dice for penny stakes, their horses equally bored, making sure nothing ate the road crew, who were all Tarmin folk, and who'd generally, but not universally among the riders, be missed. If the sleet spooked them, the crew they'd just delivered safely would be insisting that Barry and Llew take them right back home, and the whole crew would be chasing her heels all the way back to Tarmin, after yesterday's trek getting foot-dragging fools in an ox- cart out there .... But she didn't blame them: one didn't take chances once the weather began to turn, and the road crews had one of the nastier jobs, crawling out and around slide zones, shoring up the road with timbers they had to drag by ox-power out of the woods--they managed with oxen, because they couldn't waste fuel for trucks up here, where it didn't come by nature--or at all cheaply. The village tanks, since the last convoy out of Anveney, were full-up, and they'd stay that way until they needed the emergency heaters in the village common hall for days when the ice closed in and the wood ran low. Tarmin year-round burned wood for its stoves, and by au- tumn had barns full of hay that kept the goats alive and the oxen strong for such winter-hauling as the weather demanded. And they never waited until the last minute to see to those stores. Tarmin always remembered the story of Parman Springs, which they'd been telling as long as Tara had heard stories: a rider coming into Parman Springs one winter had turned up with every last building taken down and burned but one--and the wall breached. Not a living human being was ever found, just a little scatter of bones. That had been back in the boom days, when every lowland fool with a notion of instant riches had flooded up into the mountains, and the disasters had come yearly, when new-made camps either set themselves with no regard to the avalanche traces on the slopes, or never asked themselves why several big boulders sat on the fiat they'd chosen; when stubborn lowland-bred miners had used trans- mitters for non-emergencies and thought that rifles could deal with the consequences. 96 ~ C.J. Cherryh The survivors had stayed to log and do the little winter mining that paid off, winter being the heaviest mining time because the temperature in the shafts was constant and bearable in months when logging, which sometimes paid better, was all but impossi- ble. Verden, the other side of Verden Ridge, on the High Loop, was all underground, the whole settlement having discovered what its digging was really good for. They piped fresh air in and vented smoke out--precariously, to her mind--up a complex arrangement of flimsy tin pipes. Spooky place, and dirty. It depressed even miners, from what she heard in Tarmin. Riders didn't like it and wouldn't go inside. She had, once, out of curiosity, and come out again anxious for sun- warmed air, having no desire to do it twice. She wanted the sky over her head. Truth be known, she liked the snow, she liked the quiet months of isolation that the weather en- forced in the High Wild, when there was precious little work for riders but hunting and trading off the take to the town butchers and the tannery for the nasty end of it. She'd no steady partner, but she'd two lovers and no shortage of intelligent company, and a cou- ple of junior female partners who weren't permanent, but who might become so. The juniors were partnered with each other, were in more than autumn lust with the boys--the boys, as they called the senior riders--and whatever they called them, 'the boys' damn sure beat their competition over on Darwin. So she'd shared-in and found herself as happy as she'd been in her life, settling in with a group of riders, all of whom, senior or junior, she could count on in any pinch. She'd gone hungry and she'd slept alone in her junior years, completely on her own since her mother died--and after five years of hell, first as a junior and then as a se- nior riding Darwin Ridge, she'd ridden into a camp on Rogers Peak too easy to live in and too hard to leave. She'd become pinned down. Tied. Permanent, in a way she'd once, in her footloose youth, sworn she'd never be. Flicker was definitely interested in camp and food and nighthorse company, out of the skitter and scatter of her thoughts. Flicker was also glad enough to know where such things always resided--glad, too, RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 97 to be going back to civilization all in one long push today, and not minding the long walk. Flicker never liked road guard and Tara had had her own fill of it this fall. It was boring, and this late in the year it meant standing around in windy places in the sleet where there was nothing to eat, and nothing to do but shift from one cold foot to the other and try to keep the wind from blowing up at your underside. Until even a rider might hope, after a few weeks on duty, for a goblin cat or some such to make a meal of the crew, so she could go home. But a rider didn't make such jokes around nervous villagers. A rider just sat and watched the ambient with nighthorse senses, try- ing to keep a restive horse from equally bored and very vivid amusement. So, having served their time in purgatory on the last trip to Ver- den, and Llew and Barry having gotten the short end of the draw, she and Flicker were homeward bound through the spitting sleet. Flicker was putting on her winter coat early this year--had been at it for a month, and the sleet stuck to the longer hairs of her body, and to her ears and mane. Flicker had voluntarily picked up the pace since that fleeting thought of pork roast: she was enthusiasti- cally bound for Tarmin, and way-stopping at one of the two lonely storm shelters on their way, then having the next day to turn around and ride out through the snow to restock it (there being no rest for a Tarmin rider when a shelter wanted stocking) was not in Tara's plans, either. If they traveled late, they could make it on in with no real need of a way-stop. It was the first winter squall of the season lurking up there about the peak, but not a serious one, she had the skill to bet knowledgeably on that outcome--and the skill to cover that bet and save them both if things went wrong. No mere storm was going to stop them for more than a nasty cold night in the open if they misjudged, and they'd winter-camped many a night out in her starving junior years over on Darwin, where the weather was, if only in her memory, very much worse. But there'd been a spooky feeling on Tarmin Climb--the worse with the wind howling about the rocks. The road crew there had 98 ~ C.J. Cherryh found an accident, a wrecked truck, logs strewn all to hell and gone up and down the rocks at that hairpin that started the only 20 per- cent grade on the Climb, a notorious turn, and not the first truck that had ever lost it all on the curve. That section was old road, hard to improve because of where it was located, and often as crews from Tarmin and the higher Ridge villages shored the slip zone up with timbers and fill, it eroded. It was a battle with the weather and the wear of the trucks' brakes on a grade the road crews couldn't improve without blasting a whole lot of mountain down and maybe, by what she'd heard, making matters much worse. So it was one more load of timber and rock to go up there to sta- bilize that roadbed before winter snows and spring melt made little runnels into major slips. The crew was running a race with the winter and it looked like they might lose this one, though they damn sure could get cut timbers in plenty from the wreck down there. Dead truckers, for sure--that there had been fatalities was evi- dent both from the condition of the truck and the fact of scavengers numerous about the vicinity. It was possibly as much as a month old, or maybe more recent, part of the last convoy Tarmin had han- dled, which had joined its High Loop segment coming off that downhill and turned on down to the lowlands, outrunning the win- ter. Of the driver and his backup they'd not even find the bones in- tact by now. Unless somehow they'd jumped clear or b%en rescued the day it had happened, they were gone. The scavengers that night would have made quick work even of personal effects, and the con- voy boss doubtless knew the names and next of kin of the dead truckers, so there was no point risking necks. The road crew had hallooed and banged on pans when they'd discovered the wreck, making absolutely sure that there wasn't some survivor holed up in the truck cab---occasionally such miracles happened; but you didn't really expect them. There hadn't been any response, and she heartily agreed with Barry and Llew: it was just too dangerous, for no real hope of sur- vivors after so long a time, and considering that silence, for a rider to go climbing down that slide where no horse could defend him against what else might be interested in the wreck. Death drew RIDER AT THE GATE ----"'- 99 predators as well as scavengers, or one became the other very quickly when they found themselves a nice soft-skinned prey that didn't image back. Next spring when the weather was better and all of nature was calmer, they'd salvage it for metal. Flicker imaged slinky little shadows. Flicker didn't like rhe roadwork or the carrion-eaters. was Flicker's thought. Flicker hated little things that ran out under her feet on narrow trails. Then Flicker stopped cold in her tracks, so suddenly Tara jolted a little forward and caught herself with her hands against Flicker's suddenly rigid neck, wondering what in the world Flicker had heard besides the sleet rattling among the evergreens. Immediately the ambient had gone unpleasant. That was Flicker's opinion: she felt that tingling along her nerves, but there might be something more specific she couldn't sort out of Flicker's nervousness. "Damn," she muttered--she didn't like things she couldn't fig- ure from Flicker. She thought, urgently, with authority, Flicker wasn't budging. Tara kicked her gently in the ribs, but Flicker just stood. Second kick. Harder. Something was in the area. Something was sending in a way she couldn't quite pick up, maybe just a ghosty, doing its I'm-not-here. Maybe Flicker was just spooky with the weather. "Come on." Third kick. Flicker came unstuck from her momen- tary paralysis and started on her way, step and step, one, two, three, four, her hoof-toed feet scuffing the leaves louder than the sound of the sleet in the branches. Flicker was imaging something that just whited out. Tara didn't understand. She'd never known Flicker to do that be- fore. Not her usual soft flutter of light, but a glaring as Flicker traveled with that about-to-move floating feeling that advised a rider to keep alert for a sudden jump or a shift of direction. If it was a beast sending that unease she'd felt for a moment, it was one she didn't know. And she'd thought she knew everything in the woods of Darwin and Rogers both. 100 ~ C.J. Cherryh she imaged. But she couldn't get through that sending. Flicker kept her steady pace. Tara kicked her lightly, once, twice; and Flicker moved up to that trav- eling shuffle nighthorses could keep for hours. That got them out of the area faster, at least, assuming it was something that laired nearby, not tracking them. Tara slipped the tie-down off her pistol and thumbed the safety off, riding with a fistful of Flicker's mane in the uneasy, constant feeling that Flicker might dive right out from under her. It was a long while later the feeling slowly localized, as some danger--she was reasonlessly, absolutely certain--lying behind them, which meant they had finally gotten far enough ahead they had achieved that separation; but Flicker forged ahead for a time longer as if she was nose into some heavy wind. Then the feeling just lifted. Flicker shook herself as she walked, snorted, kept going at a slightly slower pace. Tara suggested. She loved the High Wild and the woods. She enjoyed riding alone . . . but now and again came one of those small, cold moments when the woods seemed foreign and lonely, when the sounds all seemed right, but muffled and faint, and when before and after seemed to change places. Flicker didn't agree with her image. She couldn't tell what Flicker thought. she thought then, shakily, telling her- self it was only some particularly clever small creature--a spook, a fast-moving one, maybe not a kind she was used to. But she couldn't convince herself of that. Maybe she'd gotten scared at something and scared Flicker with her own human imagi- nation. That could happen up here, especially in the woods, especially with the snow flying and whiting out the details of things. Hu- mans had to have edges. Humans had to know the connections of things, and human minds made them up if they didn't get them. There were stories about riders who'd spooked themselves and their horses into serious trouble, losing track of the land and where the drop-offs were; but she wasn't a scatterbrain, she wasn't inexperi- enced, and neither was Flicker. RIDER AT THE GATE :~' 101 She just didn't like what she'd felt back there, she still didn't get a clear image out of Flicker--and she'd never in her life felt Flicker do what she'd done. It was a cold, cold morning, overcast about the mountain ridge above them, as the road wound in slow, gentle ascent toward the rising wall of Rogers Peak. It was a mountain Danny had grown up seeing from his third- story window, a peak drifting disconnected from the earth in misty distance above Shamesey walls--a place a town kid had regarded as remote as the stars the preachers talked about. He'd never imagined himself in those days as a rider---certainly never thought he'd be traveling to that mountain, hunting rogue horses, or rescuing vil- lagers. But the closer they'd traveled, the more solid the mountain became, not a daydream now but an environment of stone and gravel and grass, under a high dark wall of evergreen. The more solid the mountain became, the more the business they'd come to do seemed both too close and too unreal to him. He heard nothing wrong. He felt nothing besides themselves and the occasional spook, the impression of being watched that was just the Wild, that was all. It went on all the time, nothing threatening-- even reassuring, a sign that large predators weren't in the area. It was definitely colder, a knife-edged wind where the road wound into the open, the sort that made one's ears ache, and Danny, like the others, rode with a lap of his scarf over his head and his hat on tight. He looked back now and again as the road offered a downward view of the land, wondering anxiously if he might see any trace of the riders Cloud had heard lower down--which didn't at all seem to worry Cloud now. Cloud was feeling energetic, snorting, flaring his nostrils and watching every flutter of leaves and wind-wave across the grass--grass which was giving way to an advance guard of scattered evergreen, not just occasional stands of trees, but the edge of real forest, at which Danny had looked all his life, seeing it only as a darkness on the mountains. Cloud moved here and there on the track, generally annoying the three other horses, while Jonas and the others pointedly ignored his presence. The other horses 102 ~ C.J. Cherryh were trying to be peaceful, Danny thought: they seemed to realize that Cloud was excited about the mountains and were forgiving of his behavior. He wanted no more trouble. He'd had a go at the land alone, it was damned spooky out there even without the remotest hint of whatever might be on their backtrail, and he hoped Cloud would be content finally, now that they were headed upland. He'd at least calmed himself enough he could be sure he wasn't sending out a constant broadcast of his concerns, and he was sure that made Cloud calmer. But he couldn't but look over his shoulder from time to time. "They're not going to be that careless," Jonas said finally. "Yes, sir," he said meekly. Yes, sir, after being left on his own in the wild seemed the best answer to anything and everything Jonas or any of the others said to him. He was not going to get into trou- ble again. He was not going to afford these men an excuse to look down on him. Cloud had to try to bite Shadow just then. Had to, though Cloud deliberately pulled the nip short of Shadow's flank---deliber- ate provocation, status-battle, and nighthorse tempers flared for a jolting moment. "Boy," Jonas said. "Yes, sir," he said, embarrassed, taking Cloud's rebellion for his fault, which only made Cloud madder. "You have a problem, boy. Do you think you can fix it, or do you want to ride home now?" was his immediate and mortified thought. "He's just never worked with a group. I'll pull back some." "You going to spend your life pulling back some, or what, boy?" "My name's Dan, sir." It had to be Cloud's influence. His face was burning. His heart was beating hard. He might pull back from making a direct and personal challenge of Jonas' authority--that was farthest from his mind; but he wasn't going to tuck down and take it from all of them for the rest of the trip, either, and that was one boy too many for Karl Fisher's son. "You asked me to come along to help find Stuart, and I take that for a promise. But I don't RIDER AT THE GATE it~ 103 pick up anything right now. So I'll ride back behind till I do, thanks." "Got you," Hawley said dryly. "Kid's got you, Jonas. It was your idea to bring him. I told you." Jonas wasn't happy. Or didn't look it. Danny started to signal behind Cloud's ribs with his heels. Cloud fell back on his own, sul- lenly imaging (fight. > But wasn't what came from Jonas or from Shadow. Some impression slid past him, something nebulous and fast and without edges, a piece of something he didn't understand, and Jonas dropped back, too, in clear intention to speak with him, as Cloud and Shadow went unwillingly side by side. "Kid," Jonas said. It was an improvement on 'boy.' And Danny caught an impression, now, of a meeting among the three men after he'd left them last night--that and talk on the trail, yesterday evening. "I didn't figure the complications, a kid getting into this. Maybe you'd better go back." "I don't want to, sir." The juniors would know--he broadcast the fear of that humiliation without in the least wanting to. He tried to image himself on convoy, instead, riding guard with senior riders. He'd done that: it was the truth. "I can pull my own weight, I've no question." "I have. You can't stay on your horse. That's bad news up there." "Now, ease off, Jonas." Luke Westman had dropped alongside, on Jonas' other side. "I can recall the day." Jonas sent him a surly look. But everybody got the image, Jonas taking a tumble right over Shadow's neck. And Hawley had to laugh. Danny ducked his head and thought urgently, desperately, de- vout as a prayer in church, that Jonas looked important and profes- sional and--his traitor mind added--rakish, experienced, absolutely unflappable at disasters, the way he'd like to look. That brought a silence from Jonas, further guffaws from Hawley and Luke, and he'd rather have died, right then, fallen right off Cloud's back and died right on the road at their feet. "His horse is a damn problem," Jonas said--and just once Danny got something of an image: he didn't know 104e.~ C.J. Cherryh the road. "Danger to the kid, is what that horse is. Same as the kid is a danger to him." Threaten Cloud, disparage Cloud? Not to his face. He wasn't going to put up with it. he thought, to that idea. "Ouch," Hawley said, and Jonas and Luke were frowning, while Hawley shook his head and imaged "Damn strong, is what he is," Luke said. "Noisy horse. Must have learned from that old sod Wesson. --But bullying your way through doesn't serve you well out here, kid. Take a strong dose of quiet. You aren't in town now, and strong sending like that can bring all sorts of attention. --Don't go surly with us. That's good advice." "You want me to leave?" He was mad, he'd been insulted all he was willing to bear, he'd embarrassed himself. He couldn't stand it. "Go backtrail in that kid-fit, boy," Jonas said, "and you'll find trouble that won't give a damn about your sweet feelings. Throw some water on that temper of yours, first off. Your horse doesn't need that kind of trouble. You're no help to him. You keep him agi- tated. You twitch, all the time. Knees. Feet. Elbows. Let the horse for-God's-sake alone ten minutes in an hour." Damned outsider didn't know what Cloud needed and didn't need. He did. "I said, throw some water on it. You're a fool. If you want to fight about it, you and I can get off right here and settle who's tak- ing orders and who's giving them." "I never said--" "You don't have to say anything, town-kid. You shout it. You didn't grow up with the horses, you never have got it through your head that full-throttle isn't the way to take a steep, and you haven't had anybody give a damn enough to tell you how damn noisy you are, have you?" flashed to mind, and mad as he was, he was embar- rassed, sure the man was reading it all out of his mind, somehow. Which was stupid: the horses couldn't figure human experience. The horses wouldn't know how his father dealt with him. Horses didn't clearly know what a father was, scarcely recognized a mother... RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 105 God. Cloud jostled under him, angry at his distress, he realized, and he tried to calm Cloud with his hands. He couldn't organize his thoughts. They were scattering every which way... "Kid. Get down. Get off." "I don't want to fight you." He was scared of Jonas. He'd die in a knife-fight, he had no question. He didn't know how to fight except with his fists. And Cloud didn't want him to fight--Cloud shied off on the road toward the edge, ears flat. "I didn't say fight, I said get the hell off. I want to talk to you, fool kid." He wasn't sure. It might be a trick. Probably to humiliate him. Cloud wasn't pleased. Cloud thought and argued with him to get in range of Jonas. But the other riders were trying to calm the ambient and keep the horses apart. Then Jonas was sliding down. So he did, floppy baggage and all, ready to "Just walk with me," Jonas Westman said, and waved his arm in the direction they were generally going. He still thought it still might be Jonas' intent to drop him. But they could shoot him if they meant him real harm and not just to deal out the knocks juniors took. He tried, shakily, to calm Cloud down. "Kid," Jonas said. "No trick. Talk. Come on." He wasn't sure what Jonas had to say to him was going to be better than hitting him. It was probably going to be direct and rude and it was probably going to make him mad, and he didn't know if he could stop Cloud now that he wasn't on Cloud's back. "Easy." Jonas put his hand on Danny's near shoulder as he came close enough, Jonas let it rest there while they walked, the two of them, while Shadow and Cloud trailed after. Danny threw a look back to be sure Cloud was all right, but Hawley Antrim had his horse between. Cherryh 106 "-" c.J Jonas squeezed his shoulder. Hard. "Kid. Easy. You're not the only kid in the damn world, you've just got to damp it down a lit- tle. It's not hard. Be not-here. Be quiet as you can, take a breath or two. Quit moving. Keep your elbows and knees and feet for God's sake quiet, anybody ever tell you?" "I don't want to go back. I owe Stuart." "Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's fine. Nobody ever showed you the finer points, did they?" "He did." "Yeah, well, that's well and good, too. But there's more than that. If I send you back to town now, and I ought to, I never bar- gained for Harper and his night-crawlers, but you'll be mad as hell, you'll get in with that bunch, and you don't want to understand, Danny-boy, just how bad it can get in bad company. They're not good men." Something slid like a ghosty right over his mind. He couldn't grab it. He wasn't even sure it wasn't a ghosty, and he was scared, feeling the silence that Jonas Westman could muster, and knowing ... knowing that this was the man who'd upended all of Shamesey camp and half the town when he'd come in looking for Stuart. This was the man with the horse that imaged itself con- stantly changing, shifting--you didn't know what you had. You didn't know what Jonas thought, not really, not ever. "Easy," Jonas said, and that hand was still there, pressing hard, almost to the point of pain. "Easy. What you've got to learn to do, kid, is quiet down, don't give people so much help hearing you. You can do it. Easier for you. You're older than that horse. What is he, three, four?" He didn't want to talk about Cloud. The man had insulted Cloud. Had insulted him. "My name's Dan... --Dan." "That's fine. When we know each other I'll use it. Shut up, shut down, stop being scared." "I'm not--" "Hell you aren't. Scared of us. That's foolish. You ought to be scared of who's on our tail. You ought to be scared of the job where we're going. You ought to be scared as hell of Stuart, if he doesn't RIDER AT THE GATE ~ I07 get himself quieted down, are you hearing me, kid? You get a damper on it or you flame out of control all the time. If you do that, you won't have many friends, no mates.., that's Stuart. That's Stuart, boy. That's why he's where he is. That's why he's got enemies. That's why he's got damn few friends, tell the truth." "He's all right." "He never did me any harm." "How long have you and that horse been together?" "Couple of years." One and a half was a couple, wasn't it? "I'm not stupid." "Yeah. Fine. Easy to say, harder to prove. I've got a temper. We've all got tempers. But a horsefight doesn't serve anybody, least of all the horse, trust me on that." He didn't want Cloud hurt. He was scared he'd gotten Cloud "into--- "Calm down." The grip on his shoulder did hurt. "Boy." "My name's Dan." "That's fine. We've all got names. Don't be so definite. Be smoke. Be fog. I can teach you, if you're not like Guil. If you'll lis- ten. Otherwise you'd better ride back and stay safe." "Damned fool," Jonas said. "Not a choice." "I told him I would," he muttered. "Cloud wants to go. It's where he's from. Even Wesson says. You can't send me back. If I leave you got no say where I go." Second painful squeeze. "Town-brat. You don't know what you're up against. You can't imagine the high country in winter." "I know about it. I know it's hard up there." "You also know there's a rogue up there that's killed a rider ten years in the business. You know you're damn bait, kid, that's all you've got sense to be, the way you shout into the dark. That's why I brought you. Wise up." "So I can do one thing real well. My name's Dan." "Danny. All right. A little less pride, a little more clear think- ing. Do you have to go up there being bait? Or do you think you can do better than that?" "Maybe." If Jonas had something to teach him about slipping 108 ~ C.J. Cherryh around things, he could learn it. If Jonas was just being nasty, he didn't care. Staying with Jonas got him up there to Tarmin Ridge, up in the honest-to-God high country. Any mountain would have done. That was what he most wanted. "You just calm down. Calm--down. Hear?" "Yes, sir." "Damn lot to learn, Danny Fisher," Jonas said then, and dropped his hand from his shoulder, the two of them walking along in front of the horses. "I'd rather Dan," Danny muttered. "It's Danny. It's kid when you foul up. You earn Dan." Still made him mad. But he quieted it down. He imaged and "All right," he said. "I can do that. When I want to." "Good," Jonas said, and didn't seem to dismiss him. Danny didn't know what to do with himself then--whether to go back to Cloud, fall back and leave the man alone.., or what. "Name's Jonas," Jonas said. "I earned it. --You tried talking, kid?" "Yes, sir." His father had pounded 'sir' into him. It got you off without being hit. "Jonas," Jonas said. "That's Luke, that's Hawley. Try not to shout, damn you." "I'm sorry, sir. I--" "Jonas. Try it." "Yes, sir." That wasn't it, either, but it just fell out. His tongue tied up. He wanted Jonas to let him go, he wanted . . . Cloud moved up on them. So did Shadow. So did Ice and Froth with their riders. Danny imaged. He couldn't keep the negatives out of his thinking. was the best he could do consistently. He felt like a fool. And knew everyone heard him. Cloud sent. "Kid," Jonas said. Best he could do. RIDER AT THE GATE ~ 109 ~Danny giving Cloud sugar-lumps. In camp,~ he had to amend that, because his pockets were empty of sugar-lumps. (Danny sit- ting with men. eCattle,~ Cloud still imaged. (Cattle rear ends.) "Cut it out," Danny muttered, not looking at Cloud, but Cloud knew that tone and knew the thoughts in his head with a very clear understanding when he was getting on his rider's nerves. Cattle everywhere. "Sorry," Danny said to the men around him, and went back and patted Cloud on the shoulder, walked with his arm under Cloud's neck, patting him under his mane. Cloud kept sulking, but that was because Cloud was getting his way. "You behave," Danny mut- tered. When things got bad, he used words, mystery words, things Cloud didn't know, and Cloud got frustrated, because Cloud knew something was going on Cloud couldn't have, couldn't see. Cloud hated the town. Cloud hated his family. Cloud hated townsmen. Cloud hated people around them. Cloud wanted just him. Alone. That was scary. That was real scary, when he realized that small truth. The sleet came down thickly now, whiting over the dark shapes of evergreens, sticking on Flicker's black coat, dusting Flicker's mane and up-pricked ears. Pace, pace, pace down the trail at a steady clip; the images from Flicker were still all spooky, distracted, wavery-- like smell-images, but stranger than that, and Tara Chang told her- self she wasn't going to stop at the storm-shelters. They'd make it, no matter how heavy the storm grew. She wasn't bedding down tonight alone in a log shack out in the middle of the woods. She was determined about that matter long in advance of getting there. But it was a serious decision. It might be a spooked, unwise de- cision, with the sleet having turned to honest snow by the time they passed the shelter on the trail. The shelter sat unoccupied, Tara knew that in the same way she knew the ambient and saw no smoke from the chimney. She had no doubt it was stocked and ready for winter--Chad and Vadim had escorted the teams out with the winter supplies the first leaf-turn: 110 ~ C.J. Cherryh clean blankets, grain, preserved meat in strong, pilfer-proof tins, medicines, cordage, anything a storm-trapped rider might need. She might be foolish. The way ahead of them was turning as white as Flicker's frantic imaging, and there was safety in those thick log walls and those heavy shutters, if one could keep the doors barred. The shelter would hold her and Flicker both, no question. But no shelter could help if a rider, in the grip of predator-sent illusions, chose to unbar a door or open a shutter. If you got your- self besieged indoors by a persistent predator, illusions came through walls, through shutters, through barred doors, illusions to confuse a horse and beguile a fool human into lifting a latch. Flicker snorted and shook herself, never slacking pace as they moved on down the road. Tara agreed by doing nothing and they both committed themselves to the try for at least the next shelter, if not for home. It was a very uneasy feeling in Tara's several looks back, as the shelter lay farther and farther behind them, as woods closed between and the storm showed signs not of abating, but of getting worse. It might well have been a mistake, Tara thought. Not necessarily a fatal one, but a rider didn't get too many such mistakes for free, not in a long life. Staying the night there might have been a mis- take, too. She didn't know. She had no way to judge now, either the weather or the uneasiness about the Wild that still crawled up and down her nerves. As bad as the weather was looking now, the road crew she'd just taken out to their work might indeed be coming back, all of them, scared by the same storm--so if she'd stayed at the shelter, she might not have been alone for more than the night. If the road crew did decide to winterize the equipment and break camp, Barry and Llew would push through the night if necessary, at whatever pace they could with the ox-teams. They'd offload everything, cache even the supplies, if they didn't like the look of the weather; and the stolid-seeming oxen could move fast, if they moved unladed, not as fast as nighthorses, bur they might be headed for that shel- ter, all the same. If she were in charge instead of Barry, the way it was looking RIDER AT THE GATE ~ I I I now, no question they'd chuck it and leave that exposed mountain flank before the drifts built up. Barry, though, was a get-the-job-done man. Village-bred, not a born rider. Villagers liked to deal with him. He made sense to vil- lage-siders, and Barry had agreed with this jaunt out to flirt with the weather and been willing to sit out there freezing his fingers and toes off. Not to mention other useful parts. A cold gust blew up the skirts of her coat, found its way into her bones, and she buttoned the weather-bands tightly around her glove cuffs, then took her hat off to get a closer fit on the scarf that protected her ears from frostbite. She slid the chin-cord tight when she put it on again, and turned her collar up. She had a knitted hood in her inside pocket. It made her face itch and she hated it. Most of all it restricted her side vision, and she wanted to know what was around her, on the edges of her vision, even if it was misty white and the misted shapes of trees. But, Flicker imaged, whiting out the world except the trail in front of them, as if they were nowhere in the universe but this small patch that was real; and Flicker kept up a steady pacing gait, creating the world constantly ahead of her. Spooked, she said to herself. Too much thinking on disaster in this perilous season. She imaged until she realized she was doing it. She imaged and without running it past her thinking brain, and Flicker couldn't tell the difference. Panic her own horse into a heart-attack, she could--like some fool first-year rider----come in with her tail tucked and the willies lurking in every tree. She knew better, and she told Flicker But that shelter was a long ways behind them now, and the next chance lay a good distance ahead.