Rider at the Gate

Chapter VI

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 distracted, 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 the spell of his own imaging:

Guil thought, then, slipping into a moment of weakness,

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.

A lump arrived in his throat.

Burn imaged,

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 continent. 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.

Burn sent him.

Burn had no long memory for distress. Troubles came and they 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 rationed 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.

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 rifles 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-distance, 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 supposed 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 something 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 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, really—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 cooking, 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

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, uncommonly 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 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,”> 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 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.

Burn thought, sulking, and then again, quite cheerfully, the sunlight in his thoughts belying the evening—

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 occasional 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 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 decided, 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 emergency 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, instead 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, daring 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.

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 juniors 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 himself. 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 understood an agreement, thank you. Humans made promises and humans 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 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 frequently 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 forward 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.

< Smell of smoke, > 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 nighthorse—he was sure now it was Froth—led to three riders seated at a campfire and cooking supper.

“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 getting 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 something 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 downwind 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 stupid. 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, crosscountry. 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 behind 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 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 unthinkable 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.

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 unfriendly 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 deserved 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 reliable 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 quarrels. 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 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 interference. 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.”

< Delicious fish frying in fragrant bacon grease.>

“Do you see bacon? Do you see a frying pan?”

Burn sulked.

Effectively enough Burn got the next fish. Guil 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 Guil 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,” Guil 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 following him, and now he asked himself whether the Westmans believed him that such riders had ever been there.

But of course they had to. Riders couldn’t lie to each other.

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 committed 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 another 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, fluttery 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.