Текст книги "Rider at the Gate"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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RIDER at the GATE

C. J. Cherryh

FOR JANE

SINE QUA NON

Especially the beginning—

Chapter I

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 commons 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.

A scattered few Shamesey riders, camp-boss Lyle Wesson among them, hearing the disturbance among the horses, deserted their tables 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 tavern 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 facade 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 controlled, and leaned heavily on his horse’s withers. “Tell him. Outside.” 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 toward the two riders who waited at the gate. Those two turned beforehand 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 Guil 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.

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 perimeter, 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 human word of mouth at various distances behind the nighthorse sendings, held no doubt at all: Guil 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 coming in.

Merchants left their dinner tables and headed out for the marketplace, 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 curiosity, 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 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 encircling 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 nightmares.

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 realized 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.

“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 bawling, 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 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, looking 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 their tires up over the low curbs and threatened the eaves and people 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. Second 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 Guil Stuart.

But it was hate for Guil 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.

He knew, and controlled that knowledge: a man who dealt with nighthorses learned to keep his past from infecting the present. Nighthorses didn’t think 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 happened—not directly—as Stuart hadn’t caused this newest disaster—directly. But that hardly mattered: Guil Stuart was the kind of man trouble always happened next to, and there wasn’t a friend Stuart had in this Hallanslaker 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 feeling 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 toward 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 face that kept intruding into his mind in constant image, preoccupying his attention like an unwelcome, 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.

Damnhis trouble-prone, arrogant, son-of-a-bitch ways that 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. Illusions 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 interference. 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’dpushed, claimed of course they could make it, and he’dbring 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 cowards 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.

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 moment, 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 knewwhere Stuart was now, disquieting feeling. He knew that the ripple of query had just gotten to Stuart.

Stuart knew and the ripple came racing back again, through nighthorse minds and human, a feeling like the pause between the lightning 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 reality behind the image. Stuart’s long blond hair was loose, a borderer’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 wereriders—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 Shamesey camp only during the winters, when the routes were closed to trucks and riders alike; and Shamesey locals, the guards over cattle 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.

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 particular 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 and 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 ii

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 discovered the general focus of the trouble was the man who had just walked past him.

In that time-stretched moment he realized he knewStuart– 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– daredcome 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 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 Guil 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 embarrassment, because, of course, he’d realized Stuart had read his suspicions 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 centered 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, junior 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 everything that had brought him running out of town. Roguewas 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, because 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 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 always hoped they exaggerated—some creature, a horse or a bear usually, 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 ithunted its hunters. It didn’t for God’s sake come down to Shamesey 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 family 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 forewarning… 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 anticipating/dreading/wanting calamity to the man they were watching. The feeling around the gate grew stiflingly close, charged and irrational.