Cloud's Rider

Chapter 6

Came, in due course, a thumping in the passage leading to the back door. The door opened and Callie—still with young Jennie, which Danny didn’t expect—came in ahead of a big burly man and three other village types in heavy coats.

That would be the marshal and his deputies, he supposed, the law on the other side of the wall—the dividing wall that existed here the same as it existed in substance and in fact in every town and village in the world, dividing the wicked rider camps from the godfearing and righteous townsmen—who couldn’t live without them. He didn’t trust town authorities. On principle of that wall of Theirs and Ours and on principle of his days as a bad boy of Shamesey streets—granting his father was absolutely right to have hit him harder than the deputy had—he had several misgivings about turning Carlo and Randy over to the law, and far more about answering questions.

“These the young folk?” the oldest of the men asked, as his companions shut the door and stopped the gale from the passageway. “ This the young lady?” He had thick gloves on, but he didn’t offer his hand, just took off his hat—he had thinning white hair—while Ridley went through the course of introductions identifying village marshal Eli Peterson, his deputies Jeff Burani and Josh Hartley, and, not a deputy, preacher John Quarles—the hat should have told him.

On the other side, Ridley named Carlo and Randy Goss and their sister Brionne.

Then on an apparent afterthought, as riders knew they were always afterthoughts to townsmen of any stamp, “This is the rider that got them through. Name’s Dan Fisher.”

“One hell of a job,” the marshal said. Danny decided he liked the man. And was almost moved to get up and shake the man’s hand. “Damn,” the marshal said then, “you’re half a kid yourself.” Or maybe not, Danny thought, and stayed where he was, leaning back against the warm stones. His hand hurt too much, anyway.

“You’re saying Tarmin’s gone?” another man asked, him in the black hat, Reverend Quarles.

Danny nodded soberly, with a quiet in the room so deep there was just the fire-sound and the howl of the wind across the roof.

“Lord have mercy,” was the preacher’s reaction, that and a shake of his head.

“Don’t want to talk here,” Danny said. His voice had deepened with hoarseness, and he was having to force it as was. But it made him sound older. “Tomorrow. I’ll come over villageside. Tell you all you want to know.”

“The Lord was surely with these boys,” the preacher said.

Danny remarked to himself that of course the man carefully didn’t say that God could ever possibly be with a rider—just with the village-bred Goss kids. But he was a polite preacher. He’d come into a rider barracks without fuss and didn’t outright insult the roof he was under.

And maybe it was true that God had gotten the Goss boys up the mountain and just had to do it with the help of a damned-to-hell rider because, thanks to original sin, that was the way God regularly did things in the world beyond town walls. Or something like that.

Truth, he’d been halfway religious before he became a rider. He was still trying to figure the ins and outs of the preachers’ religion as it applied to him now that he’d heard the Beast and damned himself—because right and wrong just didn’t work out with neat edges any more when you saw beyond the neighborhood you grew up in, and from what he saw on the outside looking in, it never really had. Not even in the old neighborhood, once you started seeing the rights and the wrongs you’d learned to ignore.

“Nothing left down there?” the second deputy asked—not able to believe the extent of the disaster down there, Danny thought, and didn’t blame him.

“Just the three got out,” Danny said, “them and one Tarmin rider. One border rider camped with her, in the last shelter between first-stage and Tarmin. The two of them’ll come up here, come spring. I—I brought them up.” He didn’t want to go into question and answer. He wanted Brionne away from the horses, behind the solid division of a village wall. “The girl needs a doctor, pretty quick.”

“We’ll see to it,” the marshal said. “Carlo, can you walk, son?”

Sounded like a decent man. Sounded kind. He approved, then.

“Yeah,” Carlo said. “Randy can’t.”

“Might put ’em with Van,” Ridley suggested. “If he’ll take ’em. Under threat of God he might. They’re the smith’s kids, from down in Tarmin. Van needs competition, doesn’t he?”

“We’ll talk to him,” the marshal said.

“We’ll lay the fear of the Lord on him,” the preacher added.

Carlo was meanwhile trying to pull his socks and boots back onto sore and swollen feet—his boots laced with cord, and he had a chance of making it in fairly short order. Randy didn’t even wake

“You want a tea and a shot?” Callie asked the official delegation.

“Thank you, no,” the marshal said. “Better we get these kids settled. This the girl?” The marshal turned back the furs.

There followed that small silence that Brionne’s pretty, doll-like face could well engender.

“Are her eyes affected?”

“She won’t shut them without the bandage,” Danny muttered, tucked down in his spot. “She’s been like that. Beast-struck.” That was what the town preachers called it if someone went out like that and wouldn’t come back. It happened, legendarily, to townfolk who either got stranded out in an area with beasts, or who, in the safety of town, had started hearing them. He’d never known a case but this one. Legendarily, it happened to the innocent faced with the beast-mind. Practically—it happened to truckers and such that got caught out and survived. So he’d heard. Most didn’t survive.

He watched the preacher sign God’s mercy over her. But they were finally leaving. With Carlo managing to lever himself up by way of the wall behind him and to carry himself; the marshal’s deputies picked up Randy.

The marshal himself picked up Brionne, furs and all, like a father carrying a baby.

She was thirteen. She was blond. Blue-eyed. Even with her hair tangled and the scratches on her arms she looked like a saint in a painting.

Danny tried not to pay attention to any of it after that, just praying to God for them to get her the other side of that wall with nothing whatsoever happening while they were carrying her like that. Carlo asked for Randy’s boots and socks, and Danny just shut his eyes and ducked his head, wishing them to get moving, telling himself there wasn’t any good saying good-bye to Carlo and Randy— he’d be here all winter if Ridley didn’t order him out into the snow, and they weren’t his business now. He wasn’t in their acceptable social class, and once the desperation wore off he didn’t expect Carlo or Randy to have much more than a polite word for him when and if they next met.

The door shut.

So he didn’t have to be responsible for them anymore. He’d meet Guil and Tara up here when the thaw came—whenever a thaw came to the High Loop, which was probably well toward summer in the lowlands. He’d do the job they’d hired him for and then he’d go down to Shamesey and let his family know he was alive.

And—give it about an hour into Sunday dinner before his father started preaching at him about hell and his horse and he wanted out of there.

In that light, maybe stuck on a mountaintop for several months wasn’t so bad.

But he missed his father anyway. He thought now it wouldn’t matter if his father yelled at him. He’d had guns pointed at him— which sort of put his father’s well-meant yelling in perspective. He missed his younger brother Denis. He even missed his other brother, Sam, and that was how lonesome he was.

Definitely he missed his mother. He’d like one of her suppers right now.

He’d like her making tea (mama’d never, ever put spirits in it, though) and stirring up biscuits and bringing him his supper in his bed with the flowered quilt and the dingy plaster and the cracks, three of them, that had used to run across the ceiling. He could really appreciate the old apartment tonight.

The cracks were fixed now. The place didn’t look like the home he always remembered when he was far absent from it.

But that was fine. His family did right well on the money a rider son gave them. As long as they didn’t exactly take him back to their bosom God wouldn’t damn them for dealing with him and their neighbors would go on associating with them.

He believed, well, a mishmash of things that didn’t fit. But there wasn’t anything he could do about being what he was, not since the night he’d started hearing Cloud in his dreams, and the day he’d gone down to the rider camp to ask the riders to do something about the wild horse that (not at all his fault, of course) he was hearing night after night while the Shamesey gate-guards were shooting at it—and not having a bit of luck: a threatened horse was real good at imaging he was where he wasn’t.

A horse was good at snagging a fool, too. Helluva lot of chance he’d had. Cloud had come looking for human company and he was what answered. He’d been—

—happy. Happy, dammit, since that day. Most times.

All the attractive commotion was gone, now. Young Jennie was running out of energy—whining at her mother.

He thought then—he thought—he really didn’t feel too energetic, himself, and that the room was getting much too hot. He was getting a little sick at his stomach, to go with the blinding headache that had never yet left him. So he thought he’d get up from where he was sitting and see if he could get an answer out of Ridley, whether he could sleep here the night—that was all he was interested in right now, a place to lie down.

He drew his bare feet up, braced a hand on the fireplace rock, got up—

Felt his center of balance off and went down backward, stupid thing to do. He knew he was going to hit his head on the fireplace.

And did. Hard.

Embarrassing move. He was blind for an instant, and then knew he’d fallen so his neck was bent forward and his legs were tucked and sort of crossed, so not only had he added to the headache, it wasn’t easy to find anything with his hands to help him up again—just— couldn’t find up from down. He heard the to-do he’d made in the room as he set a hand on the hearth stones, trying to figure out the position he’d gotten into.

Strong hands pulled him away from the fire before he put his hand quite in it. That had to be Ridley, who hauled him up onto his knees and got him on his feet.

“Is he hurt?” the kid asked, all concerned, and the woman said they’d better put him to bed.

“Is he going to die?” little girl sounded worried. Or excited. But Ridley said,

“He’ll be all right. Out of the way. Out of the way!”

Ridley provided balance. All he had to do was get up and sort out his right foot from his left, the way he’d done on the mountainside, just one step after another, all the way to what he hoped was a clean and empty bed.