
Текст книги "Rider at the Gate"
Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh
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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 29 страниц)
But no question, once the spooks started clawing at that door, she was lucky to have found the trigger once.
With the time the spooks had had to do their work, not likely that the marshal or anybody else in this village was going to turn up out of some similar hidey-hole—the luck to have a door you couldn’t open yourself wasn’t going to be general. He didn’t know about this Tara Chang the kid talked about,
He brought the kids outside—they balked when they saw Cloud waiting, and Cloud snorted and laid down his ears.
“You be polite,” Danny said in as stern a tone as he had. “He’s not used to village kids. His name is Cloud. You let him smell you over. You think nicethoughts about him and me, you hear? Hold out your hands, let him smell them. That way he won’t mistake you for spooks.”
They were scared to death. They thought
He wanted
Most urgent of everything—
He didn’t know, as tired and sore as he was, if he could get up to Cloud’s back on one try, with the rifle and all. But he wasn’t giving the only gun to two jailed kids to hold. He wanted
Then he told Cloud
He shoved the gate, the truck-sized door needing no small push against the accumulation of snow. He brought it to, and the bar dropped, comforting thump.
They were in sole possession, he supposed. He had a look about the gates, checked the latch—felt Cloud bristle up with warning as the boys came running up, gasping and terrified.
“We’re all right,” he said to them. “Gate’s shut. If we don’t open it, nothing can. We just stay far from the walls. What village is this, anyway?”
“Tarmin,” Carlo gasped shakily. “This is Tarmin village.”
The biggest. The most people. The place you’d run to for help. All dead.
But maybe notall dead. Other, awful possibilities came to him as he looked back along the snowy, devastated street.
“Can you think of any other places where somebody couldn’t get out?” Worse and worse thoughts. “Any sick folk? Any old people, crippled people—any babies?”
There were. There had been. The boys were well aware who and where—they were worried, they were sickened at what they saw, and scared, not feeling like outlaws and killers at all; he, God help him, didn’t want to do this. He really didn’t. But when they started telling him where people lived, and thinking of houses, it was clear they knew their village:
At least it wasn’t hard to find a sidearm—he could take his pick, once he began to walk about among the remains. People had come out with guns, they’d died with guns in their hands, all up and down the street. He kept his rifle in the crook of his arm, and walked back along the street with the boys in tow, Cloud following close. He scavenged a pistol and holster just lying in a bloody jacket.
He gave the jacket to the older boy. He kept the pistol. They found scarves, hats, a lot of them chewed. A coat for the younger kid—and a gun. The older boy hesitated at it, afraid to make the move. Danny took it, checked to see it was loaded, and gave it to him.
“Don’t make a mistake. Hear? I’ll nail you.”
The kid didn’t say anything. But the boy wasn’t thinking hostility, either. He was
They went from house to house, after that, and they called out at every house. Danny imaged
They’d done all they could, he told himself. They forced the door to the village store open, and it wasn’t touched. He got a flashlight and some batteries, and he kept thinking about
So he went out again, took the boys with him for backup, and with the boys staying on the porches, he went into open doors with his torch in one hand, and a pistol in the other, went into upstairs halls while Cloud was sending his
That was bad. That was really bad.
And inside one after the other of the houses where they said there were babies—he saw enough to last him. Parents had run to hold their kids when the panic hit. They’d opened the doors to help their neighbors. That was all they needed to do.
You learned to damp things down when you worked with the horses. You learned just—see colors. Patterns. No emotional stuff. You could see anything. It didn’t kill you. Blood was blood, you had it, they had it, bone was bone, everybody was made of it.
He went down the steps, of the last one, the one he’d had to talk himself into—cold, numb. Cloud wanted
A support post got in his way as he came out onto the porch. He swung on it with the flashlight hard enough he bent the barrel at an angle and killed the light. The boys didn’t ask what he’d found.
He walked. He didn’t want contact with Cloud for a while. Cloud walked near him, mad and snappish. The boys must have sensed it, because they trailed along out of reach.
They went back to the store. That was the best place. The only one with no bodies and no blood.
Chapter xix
THEY WERE THE BLACKSMITH’S SONS. THEIR NAMES WERE CARLO and Randy Goss. And beyond that it was hard to get all the story. They brought Cloud up the low porch of the grocery—the flashlight, by some wonder, still almost worked, at least so they could get an oil lantern lit, and by that light they started a fire in the ironwork stove. It had been dark when the trouble came, the store was shut—the grocer lived next door, the boys said; the door over there had been open, but this one had a keyed lock, and there was no need, Danny agreed with the boys, to open the door into the house.
The awful thing, where they’d been and what they’d seen, was having an appetite. But Cloud wasted no time—Cloud was interested immediately in the cold-locker, not an ears-down kind of notice, but
It was hams. Hams and packets of other stuff. Cloud started imaging
And by the time the biscuits were cooking on the edge of the stove Cloud was completely occupied watching
And no fondness for thieves.
“That’s Cloud’s,” Danny said. “Cloud gets peeved if you steal his supper.”
That brought a sullen look.
“You want a mad horse or a happy horse inside this little place with us?” Danny put it to them. “You cut some more ham right now. We’ll get ours.”
Carlo took a cue fast. The younger kid whined. Carlo hit him with his elbow, said, “Man’s telling you,” and sliced more ham.
Man, Danny thought. Man. Was that what he looked like to these kids?
Damn fool, if he let that reaction get into the air. He checked on the biscuits, decided with Cloud involved, he’d better make more biscuits. It wasn’t real good for Cloud to eat nothing but ham, Cloud’s ambitions to the contrary—it was a lot of what the horse doctors called foreign stuff for him. But Cloud tolerated biscuits just fine.
Cloud didn’t mind
So they settled down on supply sacks in a fire-warmed room and cooked panful after panful of ham, stuffed themselves, stuffed Cloud (harder task) and washed it all down with lowland draft beer, which the boys had never had. The older was smart with it and sipped.
The younger, Randy, gulped his like water and passed out on the sacks after one mug…
Carlo said, after a moment of quiet,
“Got to thank you.”
“Couldn’t leave you,” he said.
“You didn’t say your name.”
“Danny—Dan Fisher.” He’d lost thatchance. Damn. And he needed authority with these kids, for their collective safety. “I felt the rogue attack. Long way off. But I couldn’t tell where it was, or even what it was, at least when it started.”
“My sister,” Carlo began, and trailed off into a long silence, something about a rider den and a stocky man and a leather-jacketed rider that looked like this Tara Chang that Carlo had already talked about.
“Your sister’s a rider.”
“No. She wantedto be. She ran off. And it was her with the rogue. I know it was her. I could feel it. I could see it, right through the walls. She was looking for papa. She kept calling and calling for papa—”
“A rogue horse is apt to wantpeople. And they’re loud.” He was on the edge of what he knew about the subject, but the kid wanted comforting. “It could take an image right from your mind. It’d feel like somebody you knew. People paint their own images—the one they want most, the one they’re most afraid for. And a predator will pick it right up and give it back to you.”
Carlo gave a fierce shake of his head.
Danny let out a slow breath, decided maybe after all Carlo knew what he was talking about.
And he didn’t know why he’d found
Carlo flinched, tucked his knee up fast, rested his chin on his hand and didn’t look at him. Lamplight glistened on Carlo’s eyes. Chin wobbled.
“You have a good reason to shoot somebody?” Danny asked.
But it looked like—house and family. It feltlike house and family. He knew the scene when his own papa hit him. He flinched the same as Carlo and Randy flinched—but, damn, —he’d never shoot papa, he couldn’t do that—he loved him.
Carlo got up in a hurry, scaring Cloud, who snaked out his neck and grabbed a mouthful of coat.
< “Cloud!” Letting coat go. Boy standing. Still water.>
Carlo didn’t stand. Carlo made it away into the shadows, to sit down on a coil of cable. He crouched there with his head in his hands and cried, great noisy sobs.
Carlo—had done the unthinkable. No knowing why. Carlo was hurting—he was hurting all over the ambient, aching for what he’d done.
“Calm it down,” Danny said. “You’re near a horse, dammit. Calm down.”
“I shot him,” Carlo stammered. “I shot my f-f-father.”
What did you say to a statement like that? What did you follow it with? He knew Carlo didn’t want to have shot anybody. The moment was there over and over again,
< Quiet.>
He scared Carlo. Carlo looked up at him, stunned and shaken.
“Horse,” Danny said. He was all but sure of it. “The horse was sending.”
“What horse?”
“The rogue. It was spooking around out there near the village when you had your quarrel. It was there. You knowit was, but you don’t know you know. I’m hearing it in your memory. Only I’ma rider. I know what a horse sounds like. Iknow what I’m hearing in what you’re sending me.”
Carlo wiped his face, still staring up at him out of the shadows,
“You hear me real damn good,” Danny said, knowing he was laying it on thick and knowing he was out of his depth, but he couldn’t afford a kid going off the mental edge in this place. This was a kid who’d listened to the preachers. He’d been there, once, and he knew how to make it sound better, at least. “People don’t ever really send, you know that. Not even riders. We all say we do, but really only the horses hear us and pass things back and forth. Some people can hear better, or they think images better, or maybe they’re just quicker to put things into shape. A rider’s brain just sorts pictures out better than some—something like. That’s what I’ve heard, anyway. I’m not as good at it as some. But Ican talk in words. I know riders you don’t hear two words out of in days. And I know how to pick out a rogue-sending. Trust me in that.”
“My sister could hear the horses.” Carlo’s voice shook.
Carlo didn’t likethis sister, this sister
“I hate to say your sister was wrong,” Danny said. “But Idon’t hear the horses all the time. If I’m far from Cloud—I don’t. She may have thought she did. If you hear one across town—that’s a real upset horse. A rogue—she’d maybe hear. But so did you, that’s the fact.”
“I didn’t hear it when she left.”
“Yeah, but you heard it later. And she was tryingto hear, what I pick up from you. —Listen to me.” The kid was close to panic. His own nerves were shaky. He wanted it
Carlo’s jaw worked. Hard. Carlo took another swipe at his eyes with a hand shaking like a leaf.
You couldn’t push the argument too far. For what he knew the kid was guilty as sin. But the hazard of the kid blowing up was an unease sitting like lead at the pit of his own stomach—and the ambient began to ease.
“Want another beer?” Danny asked, and got up and filled Carlo’s mug from the keg.
Carlo came and took it. Cloud came up behind him—
Cloud gave him a sniff-over, trying to figure what was the matter with him. Carlo held his beer and stood very wisely quiet.
Cloud went back to his ham-grease and biscuits.
“Cloud protects me,” Danny said. “He’s making sure you’re not sick. They don’t understand everything we do. He wouldn’t like it if you were sick.”
Carlo was shaking so he spilled beer on his hand.
“You’re all right,” Danny said. “We’ll get out of here. You and the kid each with a rifle and a sidearm and supplies and all, I’ll walk you out to somewhere.”
“There’s Verden.”
“No village up here is real safe right now. This place at least isn’t real noisy in the ambient. The rogue may go for something louder. Or easier. We’re not going to open the gates.”
“Our mother did it.”
“What?”
“Opened the village gate. She heard Brionne. She wanted Brionne.” Carlo sipped his beer, staring unblinkingly into it. Swallowed hard, as if that wasn’t all that was going down. “Brionne sure came home, didn’t she?”
God, Danny thought, and didn’t say anything. The ambient for a second was full of
Danny shoved at the ambient.
“From where?”
“Shamesey.”
“That’s where you’re from? Clear from there?”
“Yeah.”
“Him, too?”
“Know it’s a him? Know it’s a rider?”
“Yeah.” Carlo looked puzzled. “I mean, I guessed.”
“What color’s his hair?”
Carlo looked entirely uneasy. “Blond,” he said.
“See?”
“I don’t want to. God!” ‘
“Yeah, I figure you don’t want to, but there isn’t any choice—if you come near a horse, you’re going to see things. You prime yourself to go towardmy horse, you got it? Not away. If anything goes wrong, you don’t spook off on your own—it’ll get you sure. Same with Randy. You better listen real hard to the ambient and don’t be afraid of it. Drivers with a big truck around them, they can sort of ignore it and follow the rig in front, but on foot, you’re down there with the spooks and the vermin. —Hey. You got your brother for a responsibility. You’ll do it. You haveto.”
Carlo didn’t feel sure. Carlo stayed scared. But he looked aside at the sleeping boy, and said, finally, “Yeah.”
“I got a kid brother, too,” Danny said, which was about as sentimental as he meant to get. But Carlo Goss was pulling together real well. Real well. He hoped it lasted.
“Yeah,” Carlo said again, and went and got another beer.
Couldn’t blame him. Carlo was getting wobbly on his feet with two. But there wasn’t damned much—
Cloud’s head came up. Stark, concentrated look toward the wall. Toward the outside.
Not a sending.
From upthe street, not down. But nobody could be stirring out there. It feltlike a presence. It kept shifting.
Shifting. A horse. A rider. Side of the camp.
Shit!
He grabbed his coat and hauled it on in feverish haste—the coat first, because you couldn’t aim worth a damn shaking your teeth out. He pulled on his gloves, he grabbed the rifle.
Carlo and Randy were < scared.>
“You got a handgun,” Danny said. He was scared himself, but he had to move too fast to think on it.
“Don’t go out there,” Carlo begged him. “Please don’t go out.”
“That’s a gate open. Somebody’s out there. If they open the big gate, we could have the damn rogue in our laps. You stay here. The kid’s passed out. You stand over him. You know what the marshal’s wife did. Just don’t be too early—or too late.”
“Yeah.” Carlo’s teeth were chattering. Danny went to the door and Cloud followed him, ears up.
It didn’t feel like
“Everybody all right?” Danny asked. He thought there might be more
Jonas had been scared. Jonas Westman—had just been
“There’s ham and biscuits,” Danny said, very pleased to be able to say that to this man, coolly, in full ownership of the premises and the situation. “It’d take me about fifteen minutes, supper in hand. Or if you’d rather—”
“You left the rider gate open.”
Trust Jonas to land on the one mistake. “Hope you closed it.”
“Stuart with you?”
As if he couldn’t be where he was without senior help. “Haven’t seen him. You?”
“No luck,” Jonas said.
Carlo was behind him. With that three-sixty degree, back of his head surety of multiple riders restored to him, Danny thought about
He hadn’t thought
“That your friend?” Carlo asked.
“Did it feel like it?”
“No,” Carlo said.
“Friends of my friend. Real sons of bitches. But they’re all right sons of bitches. They’re high country riders. Borderers. We’ve got help.”
Carlo didn’t quite seem to trust it. Carlo stayed scared, and worried about
“I’m not going to tell him. It could slip—won’t guarantee that it won’t. But village law’s not rider law.” He had a thought and got Carlo’s attention with a knuckle against the arm. “These guys? Don’t let them bluff you.”
Carlo didn’t like to hear that. He cast a nervous glance as if he could still see Jonas.
“They’ll try,” Danny said. “They’re not leaving you and the kid here. Or if they do—depend on it, I’mnot running. Think of
They made biscuits—Carlo had never cooked in his life, but he tried; Randy waked with all the commotion and sat up bleary-eyed.
“Riders are here,” Carlo told him. “We’re going to be all right, Randy. You hear?” Randy sat there looking numb and shaky, maybe a little sick from the beer—the ambient was queasy and scared, but Cloud wouldn’t put up with it. Cloud thought
Going to be all right was a little early, too. Cloud’s rider didn’t count on it, because Jonas was an argumentative son of a bitch and Cloud’s rider wasn’t going to take it.
Well, Cloud’s rider thought—maybe Danny Fisher could tuck down a little and listen to Jonas, whose disagreeable advice had kept him alive. He’d learned a bit. He’d been desperate enough to learn, and he could try being—not ducked down and quiet, but maybe not quite so touchy.
He didn’t have to feel as if Jonas was threatening him. He’d had guns aimed at him. Jonas was a lot different.
Jonas, who was coming in asking for supper and shelter in what was, Jonas could figure, hiscamp, which he’d set up and where Jonas was asking charity.
Cloud was first in. Boss horse. Cloud should be
He’d fairly well built the picture when assorted footsteps arrived on the porch and Jonas’ bunch knocked, wanting entry.
Danny opened the door. “Pretty crowded in here. Room and food for your horses if they’re quiet.”
“Come on in,” Danny said, and held the door, imaging
“Were you here when it happened?” Jonas asked, taking off his hat.
“They were.” Danny nodded toward the two boys, and made the introductions: “Jonas Westman, Luke Westman, Hawley Antrim– Carlo and Randy Goss. Only ones alive. Their sister Brionne’s on the rogue.”
That got attention. Hats that had been coming off in courtesy to the house got tucked in hand and everybody stared at Carlo and Randy for a heartbeat, then wanted
He filled in the blonde hair, the red coat, the fact it was a kid looking for dead parents.
“Shit,” Hawley said. Hawley was upset. Something about
Jonas bumped Danny’s arm. “Kid opened the gates?”
He didn’t want to think. He didn’t. He said, “Carlo, ham’s burning.” It wasn’t. But it was close. Cloud was on the far side of the room, by the cold locker door; Cloud was closest to the stove, and put his nose out, smelling
“Kids are upset enough,” Danny said under his breath, and Jonas didn’t push it. “Bad time,” Danny amplified the image of
“You shouldn’t have left that side gate. The outside rider gate was standing open wide.”
Damn. But he had it coming. Jonas was telling him what he had done that was stupid. That wasn’t an unfriendly act in this country.
“Yeah,” he said. “I didn’t think. I knew it the second I knew somebody was there. Scared hell out of me.”
Jonas was standing close in the crowded quarters. Jonas laid a hand on his shoulder, squeezed it. He wasn’t sure he liked it, wasn’t sure what it meant. Jonas had turned his back and gone over to investigate the stovetop cooking, where Carlo looked to have too few hands available for too many pans and Danny still wondered what that had meant—from Jonas’ disposition. Hawley was sitting on a barrel, the source of a glum pressure in the ambient: upset with what he’d seen outside in the street and trying to keep it quiet.
Luke—Luke was sitting on pile of sacks talking to Randy, asking him questions in Luke’s quiet way. Randy sneezed, exhausted, probably sick from the beer, and stared at Luke somewhere between reassured and scared: too many horses, besides which Shadow and Cloud together weren’t an easy presence in a confined space.
But four horses, four armed riders and two village boys, well-armed and fed, holding a wide walled perimeter with a lot of fuel against the cold were much better odds than he’d hoped for against the rogue. They didn’t needanother village until spring, if they had to hold out.
“Is there a phone?” Jonas asked. And it was like the business with the gate: he just hadn’t thought—they were still in the process of getting a camp in order. But he hadn’t thought.
He said, calmly, “Carlo, where’s a phone?”
“Mayor’s office,” Carlo said.
“Do what we can,” Jonas said. “We’re all right. But villages up on the High Loop need to know.”
“Yeah,” Danny said. He was embarrassed about the phone. But he didn’t know how to use one, anyway. It wasn’t quite as bad a mistake as he’d made with the gate. “I’ll go see about it. What building and what do you do with it?”
The morning came crisp and clear, sunlight striking the tops of the evergreens—Guil put his head out of the shelter, shut the door and took his time in the warmth. He had two dry blankets, dry fire-warmed boots, everything warm from the fireside, and Burn and he had breakfast on the bacon they’d brought and on the dry supplies the villages supplied the riders that served them: biscuits and sugar syrup, firewood already cut, an assortment of small blades and cords and such that riders might need—you took out, sometimes you put in, if you had a surplus; it was just an oddments box, always on the fireside. They made the shelters so much alike on purpose—so you didn’t have to wonder. There were bandages. There were matches. You left them alone if you didn’t need them.
He sterilized his own needle in the lamp-flame and got a nasty splinter out of the heel of his hand, a few minor ones out of his fingers. He’d lantern light and firelight this morning, the room was warm—he’d had time to warm himself and his dry blanket last night and even wash off before he went to bed on a decent supper. Then he’d gone out, just out, until he waked with the fire gone to coals and staggered out to put a couple of more small logs on.