Текст книги "Rider at the Gate"
Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh
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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 29 страниц)
Burn was worried. Burn kept nosing him in the arm, in the back, which didn’t help his balance at all. Burn licked him on the ear.
Then, leaning on a post, and on the same logic, he forced one foot and the other into cold, soggy boots, hoping blood moving would warm them and hold that warmth as long as the wind stayed still. He just, half wet as he was, couldn’t afford to fall.
He slung the two-pack across Burn’s back, put the rifle over, and made his best effort first, belly-down, at getting on.
He just lay there a moment belly-down and crosswise on Burn’s back while his headache left him alone with the images, not quite sure where up or down was, except
The fog cleared. He could see the ground. He thought for a precarious, strengthless moment that he might throw up, but Burn wouldn’t like that. He rested as he was and breathed hard for a minute or so. Burn,
Burn sidestepped. Guil swayed like a sapling in a windstorm, and the whole blurry, double-imaged world swayed out of balance as gun-side and no-gun-side refused to find center. Burn moved across under his center of balance, and got the idea, he thought, that his rider wasn’t at all interested in a run right now.
Burn walked, so sedately a baby could have stayed up. Burn compensated when the world swayed out of balance, which occasionally required a drunken sidestep. The wind blew cold on Guil’s face and his double-vision and the dark traded places occasionally, aftermath of exertion—but the blood pressure finally evened out between his head and his feet. He discovered that a curiously comfortable convenience—he never had appreciated how nice it was that was usually taken care of.
Forgot where they were going at first. What they had to do. Then he remembered he was in wet clothes and wanted a fire; and he remembered about
Eventually his legs grew warm on the insides, but his feet remained chilled. He bore with it. He imaged
Then after what seemed most of a morning, he saw trees growing up against the rise of a rocky face. The road, on which the rain had filled all the old tire-ruts down to a gentle high center and two long puddles beside, tended in that direction.
It dawned on him then, perhaps a sign his brain was less addled, that he had a medical kit. He recalled he’d some bitter-root for tea, which was good for headache. Water certainly wasn’t any problem.
Pans weren’t, either. He had a pan. He’d bought it. He told himself he could have hot tea if he didn’t fall off and drown in the puddles. If he got a fire built. One damn thing after another.
The world shrank away to toys when you looked down from the mountain. The world faded to pale colors, and the mountain became vivid, rocks and evergreen, and more rocks, as if the two worlds hadn’t a chance of existing together, and you traded one for the other. All of Shamesey would have been thumbnail-sized if you could see it from here—but Danny couldn’t. A piece of the mountain was in the way.
And they had to walk a lot more. The horses couldn’t carry them as fast as they could walk. Cloud’s back got tired, and Cloud like the other horses let a rider know when he’d had enough.
So they hiked, carrying the baggage, which the horses wouldn’t carry. The Hallanslakers might be scum, but there was no way even stupid scum could argue with their horses.
An elbow arrived out of nowhere, knocked the wind out of him for a second. He bent and Quig gave him a knee for his thoughts–
Quig’s horse—then allthe horses—dived at Cloud, pushing him to the edge as he fought back.
Then: < Quiet water, > somebody was sending, and < blood> was equally strong in the ambient—the Hallanslakers grabbing horses by mind and mane as fast as they could, as with his feet on the eroding road edge, he got a grip on Cloud’s mane and got through Cloud’s anger in a frantic effort.
His heart was going like a hammer, altitude and panic balled up together in his chest. Air came so short his vision went black at the edges. Couldn’t get a breath. Couldn’t do anything but hold on to Cloud, unsure where his feet were, how close they were to a fatal fall.
Harper was sending
Then Harper said, with absolute coldness, from where he was standing, between them and his own horse—“You keep that horse in line, kid. You hear me. You keep your damn noise down, and you keep that horse quiet or I’ll shoot him. No warning next time. If he starts a fight I’ll shoot him.”
Cloud was mad enough to go at Harper’s throat—Danny felt the muscles bunch, and he leaned against Cloud’s chest, got a hand on his nose and pressed on the nostrils the way a senior rider had told him was a last-ditch way to get a horse’s attention. Air was short enough as was—he shorted Cloud what there was despite Cloud’s instinctive duck of the head, kept a hold so Cloud had to drag him or listen, and, panting and shaking,
Cloud quieted, slowly, and Danny let up the pressure on his nose. Cloud felt
“No. No, Cloud. Quiet down. Quiet.” The rest of the party started on their way,
Jonas had tried to tell him he was being a fool. He hadn’t listened. He wasn’t doing things right; at some basic level he wasn’t doing what the other riders did.
Cloud believed him, and threw his head and snorted, looking for
Harper looked back at them, and Danny pressed his hand hard on Cloud’s nose, saying aloud, “Quiet, quiet,” because he couldn’t think straight through his panic.
Everybody else had their horses quiet. They were scum, but they got their horses quieted down. It was just him and Cloud that stayed on the edge of violence. He didn’t know why. He wanted to know, but Cloud couldn’t tell him. Cloud was barely willing to stay with him.
“Come on,” he pleaded with Cloud.
Not likely.
He carefully let go of Cloud’s nose, wanting
He tried to slow his breathing despite the thin air. He tried not to shake. That was harder. But Cloud didn’t do anything else rash, at least—Cloud had calmed enough the bitten spot was hurting, one of those spots Cloud couldn’t reach to lick, so Danny got into his pack while he walked and found the drying-powder, took his glove off long enough to pat a little onto Cloud’s hide.
It made a white and red spot on Cloud’s shoulder and, dammit, it was going to scar. It made him
And Cloud got upset.
Shut up, he said to himself then, desperately wanting
So he concentrated on being quiet, on
Hard to do when you were walking with a batch of scum, but he could, he had to…
Quig didn’t react. It was stupid of him: he had to stop thinking thoughts like that—but Quig didn’t hear him: the horses up ahead were noisy in the ambient, still
He walked with his hand on Cloud’s shoulder, fervently thinking
Their own share of the ambient stayed quiet, Cloud just thinking about
Then:
He couldn’t do what mama’s fingers did. He couldn’t feel the set-point that papa felt.
He hadn’t heard it then. He’d lied and said yes. But he listened instead of talking. That was the best he could do, then.
Burn got him there, bit by slow bit—Burn even managed not to drop him in the mud, passing by the isolated brush as the land began to look healthier, higher up, westward along the road: the wind blew too strong and too cold for open country, even with the slicker and a dry blanket to break the cold. Guil held out, much as he longed just to stop and rest and try an open-country camp; he told himself he could hang on, he could make it, he could last just another hour on Burn’s back—Burn hadn’t complained yet of carrying him, and Burn would let him know when he’d become a load.
Then the topping of a hill showed them not just scattered brush but real trees where the rougher ground began and where the road began to rise. Even Burn thought he could hold out longer, for and
Burn got him to a place deep in the dripping shadow of evergreens, next a stand of quakesilvers and the edge of the wood where redleaf grew, gone to hollow, pithy stems in autumn, the seedpods all scattered.
Those stalks were what he wanted. He slid down, sat down, unplanned, in a hard landing on his backside on the needle-carpet, with the rifle and all the gear. It sent a jolt from his tailbone to the top of his skull and down to his eyes, and blinded him for a moment.
Unfair, he thought. The pain was entirely unfair, after all the rest. But he was here, he’d seen what he needed to see, even if it took a moment for his eyes to clear and bear the daylight again. He sat still, tucked up into a huddle of knees and slicker and pack, the rifle tucked up with him, and imaged, amid the pain,
Burn went over and got
And another, under Guil’s insistence. His head had cleared enough that he could see. He broke them up in chunks, split them with his thumbnail to expose the pith, not trusting himself with the bootknife. Burn nosed into the pile of stalks, still doubtful.
Guil got out the pocket lighter, flicked the wheel, far faster than the burning-glass, more reliable with the broken cloud overhead– and Burn jerked his head back as a little flame jumped from it to the redleaf pith.
He fed his tiny fire more redleaf pith, and then redleaf stalk, and a small pile of only moderately wet evergreen needles swept from off the ground around him.
The headache was still killing him. The pants hadn’t dried, he was icy chill from the hips down, he hadn’t felt anything at all in his feet in at least an hour and the wind was kicking up. But it helped to have something to do. And his fingers at least could be warm in the tiny flame, so long as the wind didn’t scatter his work, or another spate of rain come and drown it.
Burn knocked the deadfall down. Burn was good at destruction. Burn forgot what he was supposed to do—enjoying destroying the tree, Guil supposed, and re-imaged
It arrived. At least half of it did, the stick Burn carried dragging other brush with it in a haphazard string. He wanted Burn to trample it where he dropped it. Burn wouldn’t. Burn went back to get more wood, having figured the rest of it belonged with this part.
So Guil cracked up the sticks he could reach and stuck them in the feeble fire. And cracked others, the bark, the ragged pieces, whatever there was.
Burn brought him a live quakesilver branch with the last sodden autumn leaves still on, but, hell, by now the fire could handle the sap-rich wood. He threw in whatever Burn brought and the fire grew. The heat grew. He felt it against his soaked knees.
And faithful to his promise, with
A second supper—was baked potatoes and sausage, which took no thought, no effort, and nobody in Tarmin camp was much interested in food. Tara ate. She didn’t taste it. A quiet, worried day, it had been. She supposed that she ought to report to the village that Chad and Vadim were still out, but the village was wrapped up in its own grim business over the blacksmith’s murder, and there was still the chance—still the chance—that the boys would turn up before she had to explain to the marshal.
She took potato and grain mash with sausage bits out to the horses and listened into the gathering dark, standing between Flicker and Luisa’s horse, patting Mina’s Skip on an insistent nose as she set down the pan.
Then she did something she’d never willfully done, and drew Flicker’s attention first—that was effortless. But she wanted to hear
Flicker heard the usual little spooks around the edges. Tara kept listening, putting her attention out to the ambient, and nudged into Green; and still it was spooks, a lorry-lie, maybe.
Skip’s attention came in without much noise at all, and of a sudden they were reaching far, far out, listening for
What came instead was a disturbance of other minds, and she tried to shut it out, but it was noisy, much too noisy:
She didn’t know what that was. She didn’t like it. She didn’t want panic in the village, some villager picking up on her query outside the walls.
She drew away from the horses, wished
Not a ripple in the ambient from Vadim and Chad. But, she said to herself, the likelihood was that the boys would come riding back with some gruesome story they truly didn’t want to take to the grieving family. That in itself could keep the boys out a little longer—if they found something they couldn’t get quiet in their own minds: a rider didn’t put as first priority the friends waiting and worrying about him. A rider had loyalty to his horse first; his actual working partner second; his partner’s horse third; his responsibilities to his hire somewhere after that; and his lovers wherever they crossed the ranks of partners or friends—
Which meant neither Vadim nor Chad would desert the other out there, where two horses might stand off what one horse couldn’t, and where two minds might find a calm one mind couldn’t recover.
But it damned sure left three women in Tarmin camp pacing the floor and sweating out the hours, while reasons for them to hold back bad news at least from the Goss family had evaporated on a gunshot: the Goss family was shattered. Chad and Vadim couldn’t know that unless they heard her sending. And there was no sign they had.
The sky was headed for its second full dark, and cloud was moving in, girding Rogers Peak now with a gray, impenetrable ceiling—heralding earlier dark, the chance of snow, and a chance of storm, if that cloud just kept coming, as well it could—this eastern face of the mountain had better weather, but it gave you surprises you didn’t take lightly.
The shadows had already gone blue and vague. Tara took the by now well-worn trail toward the porch, not quickly. But the feeling of harm was in the air.
She walked as far as the wooden steps, had her foot on the first when the summons bell rang a gentle request for attention on the village side, and the rider gate opened.
Townsmen came in, the mayor and the marshal.
Mina and Luisa had heard the bell. They came out onto the porch, hugging sweatered arms against the cold as the delegation trudged closer across the cracking, potholed ice.
“Need to talk to Vadim,” the marshal said.
Tara took a deep breath. “Not here.”
“Where is he?”
“Out looking for the Goss kid.”
“He didn’t say—”
“There wasn’t a need to say.”
“Not a need!”
“He’s doing his job, that’s all. He and Chad. They’re looking around out there. What can I do for you?”
“Talk,” the mayor said. “Inside.”
Light was fading fast. A wind was getting up. Tara nodded, uncertain in her capacity as senior rider—it was unprecedented that village authorities should ever have the urge to cross through that gate unless it was something involving the whole village-rider agreement, but she nodded, and Luisa and Mina went inside as she preceded the mayor and the marshal up the steps and into the lamplight.
“Tea?” Mina asked.
“We’ll make this brief,” the mayor said. Bay was his name, and by his manner he didn’t intend to sit, take off his coat, or ask any hospitality. “We’ve got a meeting going on right now. Judicial meeting. Andy Goss’ son shot him. The older boy. Carlo. He doesn’t deny it.”
“There were circumstances,” Tara began, but the mayor cut her off.
“The whole village knows the circumstances. The boy hated his father.”
“Loved his father,” Tara said, though she wasn’t quite sure she understood love as villagers had it. It feltthe same. “It was his sister he hated.”
The mayor and the marshal didn’t look impressed, just nervous.
“This is a bad time to be down to three riders,” the mayor said. “This is a real bad time.”
“You can’t find anything out sitting inside the walls.” She found herself unwillingly defending Vadim’s decision, and had a sudden dark thought: Damn. Damn! They’re hunting it. That’swhat they’re doing.
“No word of the road crew either?”
“No word,” Tara said, “no word from Vadim and Chad, either. I’ve listened.”
The mayor looked as if he’d swallowed something unpalatable. The village couldn’ttell the riders how to run their affairs. They weren’t obliged to like it. Or to accept howriders knew things.
“Is there a possibility,” the marshal, Delaterre, asked, “that the girl was murdered? That the boy had something to do with that?”
“Absolutely not.” Tara was appalled. “The boy’s not a killer. I can swear to that. Brionne, on the other hand—”
“Possible that the boy enticed her outside, knowing the danger out there right now, in the hope she wouldn’t—”
“Marshal, the girl’s a spoiled brat—she sneaked out the gates. Sheknew the danger out there same as anybody over five. The boy and Goss himself were in our camp looking for her.”
“Goss hit the boys,” Mina said. “Goss beat them.”
She was twice shocked. Mina neverspoke her mind in front of villagers.
“There’s no evidence,” the marshal said. “The wife is testifying against the boy—”
“The wife helped,” Mina said shortly. “They beat hellout of the boys. Brionne could do no wrong.”
The horses weren’t anywhere near. The ambient through the camp was all but dead still, quiet, hushed. Even villagers might feel it.
“Will you give a deposition to that effect?” the mayor asked.
“I swear.” Mina held her hand up. “I swear right here. You’re witnesses. You can swear for me in court. A rider doesn’t need to go there.”
There was silence in the room, just the crackle of the fire. The rattle of a shutter in a rising wind.
“They’d no business,” the mayor said, “the senior riders going off the way they did. The village is their first job.”
Tara frowned and plunged ahead. “I’ll tell you something, mayor Bay. There’s something out there scared hell out of my horse. But the Goss girl went out on her own, looking for a horse sheheard. That’s what happened.”
“We’re not sure,” the marshal said. “You said it. The boys hated the sister.”
They were wanting to think ill of the boys. They had their case made. She didn’t need the ambient to see that. And it turned a corner she hadn’t expected. She stuck her hands in her pockets and waited for clarification.
“You saw the girl leave?” the marshal asked. “Or not?”
“Didn’t see, didn’t hear,” Tara said. “We had a sick horse. Mine. It was too noisy to hear anything in the camp. Not in the village. Not if that kid was listening to the Wild.”
The mayor and the marshal looked uncomfortable—villagers didn’t want details about the horses, or anything else in the Wild. They wanted their walls to prevent that.
“Meaning you wouldn’t know. You’re guessing.”
“We wouldn’t know,” Tara said. “That’s the point. But footprints went out the gate.”
“Alone?”
“Goss and his kids all accepted it was the girl.” She remembered queasily that they didn’t immediately see in their minds what she saw. She tried to build the picture for men that didn’t see. “The snow hadn’t been tracked. Just the ice-melt from the den roof. The tracks. The gate being pulled inward made a scraped mark. About as wide as a girl needed. Tracks going out, about her size feet, no tracks going back.”
“Where are these tracks?”
“Gone now. Horses tracked over them, all over out there.”
“That’s real convenient,” the mayor said.
“Mayor Bay, there’s one way out that gate. Horses had to take it to go out to look for her. And that’s what the boys are doing– looking for her.”
“Single tracks?”
“Pointed-toed boots.” She had a good mental image of the boys’ feet. Their tracks. Her brain saved things like that. “The boys’ boots are square-toed. The blacksmith’s—his were round. These tracks were smaller and lighter. No rider wears boots like that.”
“Andy Goss identified them?”
Absolutely no doubt in her mind. “The father had just found out,” Tara said reluctantly, “how much the boys hated the sister. They were standing near the horses. They heard more than they wanted to hear about each other. I was there. I heard it. I couldn’t help hearing.”
“You’d better come across,” the marshal said. “Give a deposition, too.”
“I’ve sworn to things before,” Tara said. She didn’t like village justice. And it didn’t take a rider’s word. “I saw what I saw. And heard what I heard. I agree with her. Write it. I’ll sign your paper.”
“Better you should swear to it over village-side,” the mayor said. “Tonight. Where the village can hear. We want this case disposed. Feelings are running high over there.”
A damned hurry, Tara thought, and looked at Luisa and Mina, and drew shrugs there. But the Raths, the mother’s family, were damned well-to-do. Deacons of the church. Pillars of the village council.
“All of you,” the mayor said.
“Got to get our coats,” Luisa said.
“All right,” the marshal said and, with the mayor, headed for the door and out, no hesitation.
“What did you mean,” Tara asked Mina, an urgent whisper, “the wife helped, the wifebeat the boy? For God’s sake, you don’t know that for a fact! —Do you?”
Mina shrugged. “Goss is dead. What good’s it going to do to shoot the boy, too? He’s not a bad kid. Goss beat the boys—and what was shedoing for sixteen years?”
It was logic. She had to admit that. Save the salvageable. Villagers couldn’t tell truth from untruth in a rider’s mind. They couldsave the boys. And the Raths weren’t going to like it.
She grabbed her scarf and hat, and went out with Luisa and Mina, the three of them resolved on a lie, and no horse near to tell the mayor or the marshal.
No horse near to tell them what was going on outside, either. They crossed the icy yard behind the villagers and entered together through the village-side gate… it was farther than they liked to be from the horses, Tara felt it and she felt the same from Luisa and Mina.
But they walked, all the same, and heard a commotion out in the winter cold, saw lanterns lit, and a steamy-breathed crowd gathered under the lanterns.
They proved more conspicuous than they liked, as they walked into that crowd in the mayor’s wake, and followed (Tara supposed they were to follow, and nobody stopped them) all the way to the porch of the marshal’s office and the village lock-up, which was mostly for midwinter drunks, if they got to breaking up the village’s single bar.
This time, though, there was a gathering of the village officers, the clerk and the justice in front of a lot of the village—men, women, and children—and now the mayor and the marshal and, lastly, themselves, up the steps and onto the wooden porch that fronted the marshal’s house and the jail and the court office, that being all the same building. They’d hung lanterns from the porch-posts and set a table and a chair between them. The judge sat at the table. The village clerk sat at a right angle to him, to do writing.
“Say what you said to us,” the marshal said, and Tara couldn’t feel Mina panic, but she saw the flinch. Mina said it again, in a quiet voice:
“The kid had cause.”
“Louder,” the mayor said, and shouted for quiet, and the judge bashed the table with a metal hammer and said he wanted quiet in the hearing. There was the hammer on the judge’s table. Lying near it, jumping when he hammered for order, there were two large-caliber bullets.
Thatwas the way it was. Tara was appalled; and she nudged Mina, saying: “Tell it good.”
So Mina spoke up. “Goss and his wife beat the boys. He could have killed them. It was real clear. They didn’t want Brionne back.”
A woman’s voice—Goss’ wife, Mindy Rath, Tara saw, off to the side of the porch: “They did it!” the woman shouted. “They were always bad boys! They were always a trouble in the house! I want my Brionne! I want my Brionne! What have you done with her, what have you done with her, Carlo? You put her outside the gate, didn’t you? You lied to her, you made her go out there!”
“That’s not so,” Tara said. The magistrate was pounding with the hammer, and the bullets fell off onto the porch. The clerk scooped them up again and put them on the table.
“Say it again, rider Chang,” the marshal said. “Say it louder.”
“I’ll say it,” Luisa said, and raised her voice. “She’s wrong. There were tracks going alone out the gate! Tara saw them!”
The crowd broke out in murmurs, in calls of “Liar!” from the wife, and “Hearken not to the beasts!” from one of the village religious enthusiasts.
“Say what you know!” the mayor said. “Rider Chang?”
People were shouting. The elder boy shouted, too, all but crying, “I didn’t want to shoot him, he made me shoot him!”
Right then Tara got the same impulse Mina had confessed to; and drew in a guilty breath, and remembered at the same instant that nobody could hear what she thought.
