Cloud's Rider

Chapter 4

Jennie was supposed to be asleep, but the wind was making a racket and she’d been bored a lot during the day. She was bored now, lying in the dark, in bed. The storm had been going on for a whole day, and she had played games and done chores and played games and she’d had a nap she didn’t usually take any more. She wished there was something to do.

If she got up, mama and papa would scold. If she slipped in to sit by the fire and didn’t make a sound, and just sat and watched the pictures in the coals, or maybe played with her trucks real quietly, mama and papa might not know she was up.

But the bell was still ringing out by the gate. Nobody had fixed it. The night was scary with wind and things going thump, and she began to be convinced that something spooky had waked her. She wasn’t sure what: she thought it might have been a sending, and she wished she knew what that was.

Spook-bears and goblin-cats didn’t ever get inside the walls. Serge Lasierre slept in the village gate house with his rifle on nights when the Wild was acting up, and bears couldn’t get past Serge. Mama and papa had told her that.

But that bell was ringing and ringing. Maybe a bear had gotten Serge and that was why Serge hadn’t fixed the bell.

Maybe out there in the wind and the dark something was really wrong.

She thought it might be Rain calling her. Rain was her horse, well, mostly her horse, though papa said she’d have to wait till Rain made up his mind, and Rain might have to leave the way Leaf had left. But she didn’t think so. Rain was hers, and he and she were friends. And papa knew it even if he didn’t approve.

Rain was, papa also said, a loud horse, because he was only two, and didn’t know but one pitch to be at, —like some little girls, papa had said. And like little girls, anyway, Rain heard things older horses didn’t pay attention to. Hearing everything made Rain spooky sometimes, over shadows and thumps and over things somebody remembered, so Rain’s rider had to be very quiet and not think scary thoughts, even alone in bed at night, in the barracks where the horses didn’t ordinarily hear them.

But in the barracks they weren’t supposed to hear the horses this far, either, unless the horses were upset.

And it wasn’t just Rain, she decided. Mom-horse Shimmer was nervous, too. Shimmer was pregnant again and expecting a foal in the spring, and mom-horse was getting angry, not angry at Rain, but disturbed at something Rain picked up, and that upset papa-horse.

So she wasn’t just making-believe. Papa said don’t ever make-believe near the horses, and said that that was why they built the rider-shelter so far away from the horse-den, so little girls being silly couldn’t upset them.

<Bang!> went the boards. She knew she didn’t hear it with her own ears, but the horses were carrying it to her: papa-horse Slip had kicked out and shaken the side of the den or something.

That was too much. She flew out of bed and grabbed her sweater. < Bang!> went the boards again. Rain was and and thinking

She could tell where her door was because light from the common-room came down the hall even when the fire was banked for the night, and it hadn’t been banked too long, because there was a glow in the room. She had no trouble finding her boots.

<Bang!> Thump! went the logs, one sound in her head and one in her ears. That was real for sure; and she thought about waking up mama and papa; but they were asleep and she didn’t want to make a fuss and be told she was silly or dreaming, which was what mama had said the last time she’d come running to their bed, scared. She’d see first.

So she hurried and opened the door to the snow-passage that led from the barracks to the den, and took down the ’lectric light from its shelf and carried it, shining its light up and around and down the wooden walls and floor, wood planks all shiny with ice where the drips were, and icicled in places.

The dark was scary. Vermin like willy-wisps would burrow under the boards or anywhere they could when it got cold, and they got hungry and they’d make holes in the boards and try to bite your ankles; and you mustn’t ever fall if they bit you, that was what mama said, because they’d swarm all over you and eat you till nothing but bones were left. Granpa when she was little had said they liked toes, especially in the wintertime and especially from little girls who didn’t mind and didn’t do what they were supposed to.

But granpa had gone away with grandma and not come back and now her parents didn’t think they were ever coming back. Mama thought they’d fallen off a cliff. Papa thought maybe granpa’s heart might have given out and grandma wouldn’t leave that place. Things did happen out in the Wild.

Things happened, too, in dark passages, where the light made scary shapes on the boards around and underfoot and overhead. She wasn’t supposed to be in the passage before mama and papa were awake. She might get in trouble.

But now she’d mostly done it, anyway, and she was already going to get in trouble—so she figured she might as well find out if Rain was all right, before papa and mama woke up and stopped her and she got in trouble for having done nothing at all.

So on that thought she ran, thump-thump, down the boards, and her light and her shadow went ahead of her.

It was awfully cold. She’d thought she’d just be a minute, and then she wouldn’t need her coat, but a brisk draft was coming through, blowing her hair and chilling right through her clothes.

Then she heard another, slower thumping on the boards, one-two, three-four feet, and she knew that was where Rain wasn’t ever supposed to be. Rain showed up, his eyes shimmering beneath the bangs that mostly covered his face and his split-lipped nose working, nostrils wide, to be sure who she was in spite of the that was in his mind. She’d scared him with her giant-shadow, and he scared her with his.

“It’s me,” she said in a quavery voice, but it was always dependent on the rider to be the grown-up, so she talked like mama. “Silly. You can’t turn around. Back up.

Somebody had left the door open at the den-end of the passage, she thought, and that wasn’t her fault. But when Rain had backed, with her pushing at his chest, all the way back to the den, she saw the door was kicked to flinders.

Rain was scaring her.

Rain was thinking about and it hadn’t any shape, or it had a lot of them, and the wind out in the dark was howling like bushdevils. She thought, There’s something out there.

Or somebody out there.

But not—not someone like mama and papa. Not like the villagers. Not like anybody she knew who’d be outside.

She didn’t like it. Rain didn’t. And Slip left the den altogether, an angry darkness headed out into the snow from the open door. Slip couldn’t get out of the camp: the outside gate was always shut. But Slip could get himself clear of every other sending but that and then in a very loud sending let it know it wasn’t welcome, that was what Slip could do. Mom-horse was nervous and angry and Rain would have gone out there, too—but she hadn’t brought her coat and she didn’t want Rain to go out there.

Because there were things in the winter storms that could come right over the walls and get you, grandma had said so when she was little, when once she had opened the door at night. She never forgot it.

she thought. She didn’t care if she got in trouble. She thought maybe being safe was better.

Something was wrong. Ridley knew it in the ambient before he was entirely awake, and came out of bed in a hurry. So did Callie, and the horses weren’t reaching them sufficiently to carry what they thought to each other, but his own horse Slip was loud enough with the situation as it was. Slip was sending and and that had a vague resemblance to willy-wisps. Slip didn’t trust what was running through the ambient right now, something that had to do with and and

That wasn’t right. The whole center of the business was

“Dammit,” Ridley said, heart speeding with the possibilities: that his daughter was outside he had no need to guess. He struggled into his boots and slammed his foot into the heel on his way for the door. Callie was pulling on her pants. He grabbed his sweater off the chair and pulled it on as he reached the door where he kept the shotgun. “Bring the rifle!” he yelled back at Callie. If you met a vermin-rush a shotgun was the only answer. If it was a bear or a cat you’d better have a punch to take it down, because a shotgun was worthless unless it took it in the face, and in the face meant it was coming over you before it dropped. He didn’t know what they had to contend with. The nature of it wasn’t coming clear to him as he headed into the passageway to the den and met a gust of cold air the minute he opened the door.

He shut the shelter-side door—cardinal rule, not to leave a passageway end unsecured when that door might be the only barrier between you and a breakthrough of vermin.

Then he ran the wooden corridor, the ambient he was getting coming clearer and clearer, that Jennie was in distress, that Slip was upset—Slip was his horse, and Slip was giving him a rush of impressions of Shimmer was sending her peculiar mare-in-foal antagonism; and Rain was sending, in close company with

The door was kicked in. The horses had done that. Jennie was close by it, sending —scared and trying not to show it.

He had the shotgun in one hand. He heard Callie coming. He hugged Jennie against him with the other arm and tried to hear Slip’s notion of what it was out there, as Callie was trying to hear.

“I couldn’t see anything,” Jennie said. The kid had no coat. Ridley grabbed a blanket they used for the horses and wrapped it around her. “I heard Jennie said. “I know I shouldn’t come out. But you were

“You wake me up any time you think of going out, hear?” He made his grip harsh for a moment, and shook her. was in the ambient, and Callie came through, rifle in hand and in a way that set Shimmer off in a series of and images.

“What are you doing out here?” Callie wanted to know, and Jennie flinched and ducked behind Ridley, holding onto him, staying close to Rain.

“There’s something out there,” Ridley said. “Hush.” Meaning both of them. A spook in the night with the horses involved wasn’t a situation for a child, but it wasn’t one for a child-mother argument, either. Jennie was spooked enough, and Callie calmed herself down fast—he could feel it in the ambient and he could feel it in Jennie relaxing and being willing then to be near Callie.

“I don’t want to go back inside,” Jennie said in a faint voice. “I don’t want to be by myself.”

“Be still,” Callie said, and calmed Shimmer down with with no polite regard of a man and a kid in the ambient: it was something Shimmer and Callie remembered, a physical sensation and a feeling both protective and fierce sent out into the dark and the storm. See your bet and raise you, intruder.

It was quieter after that. They stood together in the aisle of the den, where the wind could blow through from the open outside door; and Slip came inside, a shadow as fierce as Shimmer and almost as possessive of his territory. Ridley met him in the dark—they kept no lights in the den for fear of fire, and all that they could see of each other was blackness deeper than the dark of the aisle and as deep as Rain’s presence.

Deeper still as Shimmer left her nook and crowded in, seeking Callie, forming a defensive bond. Get Jennie out, was the first thing that came to Ridley’s mind, feeling that hostility. But Jennie wasn’t a baby anymore; Jennie was a life defending itself with Rain and Rain defending himself with her: in that way they held the night around them, defining it as theirs, not provoking what was out there, but not accepting it, either.

“There’s someone out there,” Jennie was the first to say. “People out there.”

Ridley felt it, too, in the same moment, and knew Callie did.

“Several someones,” Callie said.

Human and horse, separated off from them in the storm and the snow.

On the other side of their wooden wall there were hundreds of human minds, deaf to the ambient.

The other side of their wall was the whole village of Evergreen, full of life that, isolated from the horses, couldn’t hear the dark outside the walls, walled in for the winter, cut off from the world for the season. Snows had come before this one, and the phone lines were down for the winter. The miners had come in. The loggers had. But without a horse in the midst of the strangers out there, they couldn’t have heard them that clearly—they’d have only gotten their existence from small creatures in burrows, and spotty at that. That strong a sending was a stray rider out there, maybe not alone, maybe with some lost group of miners they hadn’t known about: foolish novice prospectors did come up the mountain sometimes with the truckers, and the really foolish ones were secretive, just too nervous about their finds to let riders know they were there so riders could protect them.

Or it could be some group of miners who’d planned to winter-over underground and had something serious go wrong. He knew of two such that were staying—dug in and well-stocked and betting their lives on keeping the Wild out of their burrows all winter without a rider’s help.

But sometimes that wasn’t a good decision, and they’d been feeling things generally spooky on the mountain for weeks. There was the ghost of that feeling in the ambient now.

The question was—where had a rider come from, and why come here and not to the rider’s own village?

“I can’t pin it down,” Callie said finally, and Jennie said,

“I’m scared. Rain’s scared, too.”

“Calm him down,” Ridley said, with no sympathy. “Right now. Think of That was what they’d always taught Jennie to do when the spooky feelings came: that was her calm-image, and < flower> came to mind, a timid and shadowy flower, at the moment, a lost in the dark,

“Callie,” Ridley said, “tell the marshal what we’re picking up. Better put more guards up.”

“Bitter night,” Callie said. “Awful time to be out.”

“Sure don’t envy them,” Ridley said. Callie didn’t argue with the need to get the marshal and didn’t argue about who was staying in camp with Jennie while she went through the snow-passages to advise the marshal. Callie just traded him the shotgun for the rifle, as the thing she’d need more if somehow vermin had gotten into the passages, as could happen if things went catastrophic tonight. And Jennie, it turned out, had brought the hand-torch from the barracks: light flared as she turned it on and gave it to her mother.

“Clever child,” Callie said. “Deserve your ears boxed, is what.” Callie left at a fast pace. The light died as Callie disappeared through the shattered passage door.

Shimmer wanted to follow Callie into that passage and did, though she wouldn’t get past the barrier that sealed off the village passages from the horses and would have to back out; while close in the company of Slip and Rain, Ridley put his arm around Jennie. The reprimand for taking the emergency light had slid off without a sting: worry about the situation hadn’t slid off at all. They hadn’t brought up a fool. Jennie knew things were serious, knew they weren’t her fault, and worried because things were happening that weren’t ordinary or right.

It didn’t make sense that anyone was out there. Ice wind was what they called storms like this on Rogers Peak. If one got started, you didn’t run the risk: you tucked in and kept low until the wind stopped.

This rider—these presences in the storm—hadn’t done that.

And in the last of autumn the mountain had been carrying frequent disturbance to them, night visions of fire and blood, game on the mountain seeming to run in surges, abundant one day, gone the next, with no ordinary sense to the movements. The seniors had said things like that happened worst of all when it was setting on a bad winter. The wild things sensed the weather coming—so the seniors had said.

And there were stories how when the vermin got to moving in waves, they’d surged right over defenses and right down some miner’s burrow. You stopped it fast and drove them back with shotgun blasts, or you went under for sure.

He didn’t want to think about that with Jennie and Rain there: any young horse was noisy and spooky enough without encouragement—and in Rain’s case, increasingly uncomfortable to have around the den. The colt would be waking the village on his own if Jennie didn’t keep him quiet, and it was all but dead certain Rain was the culprit that had initially spooked Shimmer and Slip by picking up a far sending like that.

“Silly lad,” he said, and patted Rain’s neck, while Slip was standing close by, great fool that he was, sending and at the same time seeking shelter in the human presence.

Rain was, he decided, no small part responsible for the rolling panic that had now sent Callie over to scare hell out of the marshal and his deputies, and, remotely possible, Rain might be the entire reason the autumn had felt as spooky as it had. Rain was weaned this fall, he was coming on puberty this winter, and a young horse in that mood was all ears and all sensation. Rain kept the neighborhood disturbed, and with mating season on them, was having sensations beyond the understanding of an eight-year-old, even if she had seen Slip and Shimmer getting babies.

Slip, who’d have chased a young male out of his territory without hesitation in the Wild, was just, seniorlike in the band, increasingly out of patience with a noisy youngster. That might be all it was, and all that was out there might just be a late-season arrival with nothing really frightening about it—because they had two spooky minds to contend with, Jennie as well as the skittish colt. Jennie was worried about which Jennie didn’t like,

“Everything villageside is quiet,” Ridley reminded her—because she was trying to listen into that dark where Callie had gone, and Jennie wasn’t used to that side of the wall: Jennie had had the noise of horses and human minds around her since before she was born. The relative silence of villageside was scary to her.

“They’re deaf over there,” Jennie remembered. “But they hear us. Do they hear that horse out there?”

“Probably,” he said. “But if they don’t, you can bet your mama’s going to wake them up. Your mama’ll wake the marshal up, first.” He felt Jennie shiver. “Cold?”

“A little.”

He had her sit on the grain-bin and tuck up her legs in the blanket. Rain came and licked Jennie’s face and hair. He couldn’t feel the noise from outside so keenly now, maybe because Rain was distracted from it.

Or maybe not. It came and it went, maybe with the attention of a horse out there.

It wasn’t a safe feeling. That was one thing he knew.