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 that feeling 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 felt Cloud courting the mare, felt the union, the mare’s sensations 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 epidemic, 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 contact 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 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 involved, 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, backhanded, 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 beings 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.
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
Second burst of gunfire.
The night exploded. He lurched to his feet, he cried out to his horse, “Run!” and he was
He heard Cloud answer, somewhere near, he heard < someone shouting…
< “Open the gates!” >
< Gunshot. >
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 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.
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 unscathed. 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, toward the gates.
< Danny. > 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 consigned him to hell.
He didn’t want the whole camp to know that, but, humiliated, he feared they’d all heard. He thought of
But he wasn’t the only area of disturbance. He heard shouting out in the dark beyond the gates, he heard voices raised in demands. 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 demanded—
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 happened, 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 numbers 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 tumbled around him with images of < still water> and < quiet sky> 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 hellhound son.
The preachers said they’d come in ships down from the heavens, 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 creatures of the sinful world, which the preachers said were a temptation 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, and they had to do something to stop him before he killed somebody, 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.