Текст книги "Rider at the Gate"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

If Shamesey went without lumber or tin next year, what should he care?

That more riders could die by the thing that killed Aby, all right, he did care, little that it deserved. He didn’t owe any of them, didn’t get any damn help from them, not even from Jonas. He didn’t know why he shouldn’t let someone else hunt the thing. He could live elsewhere. He could find other hire. No place and no person mattered to him with Aby gone. Shehad brought him into towns. She’d always been the go-between for him with people.

But his dreams wouldn’t change until the rogue was dead. And he would dream about it. He’d wonder every night whether it was still out there, still surviving, still sending out the images that lied to horse and rider about what was friend and foe, or where the edge of the road was…

Walk and walk, and walk, and he found himself walking north across the slope. He found Burn trailing him, aching-tired himself, waiting for a foolish rider to fall down again.

he imaged in his own turn, not consciously thinking. Town was just too close, too dangerous, too loud, too evocative of anger.

< Hills and grass in the moonlight, > Burn answered him. < Hills and grass. Hills and grass. > Burn shook himself, and snorted. An image of blood and raw meat.

Burn didn’t forgive. Burn might lose his train of thought and forget. But Burn didn’t know how to forgive.

It was why he kept walking.

“Hunt him down,” was Ancel Harper’s word in hastily convoked Meeting, in the tavern yard under the gaslights, in the small hours of the morning. “He’s Shamesey’s problem.”

No, Danny Fisher wanted to say, and half-choked on the impulse to rise and protest.

But other, senior, riders stood up from the benches without hesitation and said no, there was no call for such drastic measures.

“He wanted what’s his,” one of that number said. “His belongings are all in camp. He has a right to ask for them.”

“He has no right, after what he’s caused,” somebody else shouted, and a dozen riders from Hallanslake got up and added their voices.

“We come down here to the lowlands for a quiet, safe camp,” the Hallanslake leader said. “I know what I’m talking about. A man running up in the hills is one thing. Coming down to town is another. Stuart’s gotten riders killed. He’s a spook. He’s always been a loner and that horse of his is another. He’s got a grudge and he’s not going to let it go. I tell you, you stop it now! You hunt Stuart out of the district, or you shoot him andhis horse!”

“No,” the general murmur rose in rebuttal; Danny said so, too, under cover of the others, but the Hallanslake rider didn’t give an inch.

“That’s what you do, that’s what you have to have the guts to do. That’s a borderer up there hovering over this town. He knows what he’s asking for, staying around here, spooking the town into riot. You got fifty, seventy thousand people in town here, a lot of them not liking each other. You want to think, boss-man, about what could happen in the streets the other side of that wall if he panics this town? Stuart’s as crazy as what killed that woman up in the hills—that’s how they go, one to the next—the sickness spreads. You got to shoot both of them, fast, so they don’t know one’s dead! It spreads, boss-man! I’ve been there! I know!“

No! Danny Fisher thought, and before thoughts could get far:

“No,” the camp-boss growled, and hammered the table with his fist. Crippled in a fall, and survivor of one horse already, Lyle Wesson might ride when he had to go any distance and he might use a stick when he had to cross between two tables in the tavern, but the strength in the man and the force of mind in old Dart made the skittery, jittery feelings in the air subside instantly, and let a scared junior sink gladly back into his seat with his objection unmade, at the same time the Hallanslakers sat down, sullen-minded and angry and not giving in.

A junior hadn’tany right to speak ahead of the seniors, except he was Shamesey-born, and they were Shamesey townsfolk who’d shot Guil Stuart tonight, calling Stuart a threat, which wasn’t at all the truth, the way Stuart’s horse wasn’t a rogue. He knewit wasn’t, but more surely, Cloud knew, the rest of the horses knew, and the boss-man knew, so the whole camp had to know. They were here to talk about the rogue that had spooked a convoy off the road on Rogers Peak, and here were Harper and his friends talking as if Stuart was the real threat, right here in Shamesey. The whole camp had lost their minds. Or it was the spooked riders, the ones that had come in with the news. Theywere here, and maybe the source of what Harper thought he felt. Fear of a rogue had gotten loose in the camp, and after that, it came from everywhere. But a junior couldn’t stand up and say his seniors were all being fooled.

Fact was, half the riders in the meeting weren’t wholly sober, some were surly—a couple were unconscious, face down on the tables, though a whole lot had sobered when the gunfire went off, and more when the boss-man had said there was Meeting, now, fast.

He was one who had sobered mightily, even before Wesson’s call—and he’d tried, well knowing that he wasn’t at his sharpest, and far from experienced in a situation like this, to do exactly what the boss had said, namely to keep his mind quiet, because even with the whole Gate Tavern yard and the open commons for the Meeting, even with all the horses except Dart requested out of the gate area so that humans had to say things aloud to each other and not image at all, he wasn’t sure things didn’t leak out and get back and forth to horses and humans anyway, the way they’d certainly done a couple of hours ago, when the horses had all caught the same image at once.

Ancel Harper said he’d seen a rogue once. He said he’d seen a dozen riders go with it. He said it was like what they’d just felt, only a hundred times worse… he said a rogue could send over an entire valley, and trick you into seeing things where they weren’t, and make you want it bad until it killed you, because that was what it would do when you got close to it.

Harper said there was one cure, an ounce of lead.

Harper and the Hallanslakers—Danny had never met anybody like them in camp, riders who just didn’t listen to what people said, who, when they got an image and a horse was near, turned it inside out, to what they wanted. In his mind, theywere crazy as the rogue, but he tried not to think that: they also carried knives, and he didn’t think they were an empty threat.

But by the time he’d figured out what Harper and his lot stood for, there were more moderate voices, older riders, to stand up one by one and severally and demand that the camp-boss should deal with Shamesey town and negotiate Stuart’s right to come back when he was indisputably sane, as riders could clearly judge better than townsmen.

“Now wait,” another rider stood up to say, now, Yeats, a senior Shamesey rider. “Now, I don’t agree with the Hallanslakers, that we need go shooting at shadows—but I don’t hold we should take Stuart’s side against the town, either. It sets a bad precedent, a badprecedent, backing a rider who breaks the major rules.”

“Now, wait a minute,” a woman said.

“Rules,” Yeats said, raising his voice, “as seem clear enough to us. Stuart stayed on in the area, Stuart came near the walls. The watch hadn’t a right to shoot, but they were skittish, they had a crowd out there—”

“Damn right, they haven’t a right!” came from the back.

“It was Stuart’s doing that a crowd gathered,” Yeats shouted, “and it was Stuart’s fault! If Stuart had a sane thought left, he should have got the hell all the way out of Shamesey fields when he knew he was losing his hold. But he doesn’t want out of Shamesey district, does he? That’s why he’s stayed out there!”

“God’s sake, Yeats!” A borderer stood up, wobbly on his feet. “You got his gear and you got his gun—he come back after his gear, you damn fool!”

“I got the floor! I’m saying we got excitable townsmen all over, we got horses upset, we got riders upset—it shows clear enough what we’ve been saying for three years, now: boss-man, you got to thin the camp down—”

Riders hooted, from all over the assembly.

“Yeah, you go first, Yeats!” somebody yelled from back in the crowd, then the drunk borderer was yelling something, not sitting down, and Wesson banged on the porch with his cane. Dart started imaging until at last Yeats and the borderer sat down, and the silence was thick enough you could breathe it.

Yeats was off on a different issue: the number of riders gathered at Shamesey—and Shamesey riders had argued before against letting the camp get as large, and consequently as unstable, as it was—but the riders that came from outside said it was just Shamesey riders wanting exclusivity on the best jobs and the comforts of the biggest town there was.

“Jim,” Wesson said, “keep to the Stuart business.”

“It isthe Stuart business,” Yeats said. “This is what we’re going to get more of if we don’t thin down the winter-camp and put some restrictions on how many out-of-district riders we’re going to camp here! Shamesey valley’s big enough—build a camp down at the end of the valley! Build it up on the foothills! There’s no way the snows are going to cut off valley roads!”

“Yeah, on whose land?” somebody yelled. “The town Council isn’t going to give up a foot of pasture!”

Yeats was right, in Danny’s estimation.

Unfortunately so was the rider right when he yelled out about the council not giving up any land: rich people decided everything, and the rich people in Shamesey didn’t feel the dreams that came through the camp walls on an uneasy, stormy night, didn’t lose sleep the night through with the autumn urges—only people like his family did, old and young alike, and girls got pregnant and godly folk prayed and sweated and prayed to send the devils away. It was the lowtown folk who’d come out with guns. People like his family. It was people like his father and his mother and his brothers who’d gone stark crazy and shot at Stuart.

People of the same town-bound, mind-blind sort that he’d used to be, before Cloud called him in his dreams.

He hoped Denis hadn’t gotten swept up in the crowd that was shooting; he desperately wanted to know where his family was and that they were safe. But he couldn’t go into town tonight. Maybe not for a lot of nights. Couldn’t—a lump formed in his throat—so much as offer his help to his father to keep him safe, when he could do as much for any trucker in the outback.

“All that’s beside the point,” a borderer stood up to say. “What Shamesey is, Shamesey chose to be. It can’t ever go back to being a small town. We get your trucks through and we got our right to camp here. And the whole damn valley had better get off Stuart’s back. This town had better hope Stuart goes up to Tarmin and finds what’s up there before winter falls, or you’re losing Anveney province, Shamesey boss. That thing that got Aby Dale won’t stay away from the villages up there. And maybe if it gets a village or two, it might come down to Shamesey to hunt around spring melt. When a horse goes bad, it wantshuman company, and there’s nothing but a bullet through the brain can stop it. So you better quit arguing about how many riders we have in this camp and Stuart and your piddlin’ rules—and start worrying about that rogue horse up there!”

“That’s saying Stuart’s going to do a damn thing he ought!”

Ancel Harper stood up to say. “He’s not going to stay away from Shamesey. He’ll be back.”

“That’s tomorrow’s trouble!” a borderer shouted, and stood up. “And it isn’t proved, Hallanslaker! There’s never been a rogue come into this district!”

“You’ll see it proved when you’ve seen a man and a horse go bad—and I have, Reney, I’ve seen it, don’t you tell me what’s not proved! I’ve felt it, don’t you tell me what’s like and not like! You want to feelit, Reney? Come outside camp and I’ll show you!”

“That’s no call to go after Stuart!”

“I’m telling you he’s a danger. He’s already spooked the town– and he’s not going to let go and go away. You got people out with guns in the town streets, Wesson. You’re going to have people killed over there if you don’t get Stuart shut down—”

“Hold it, hold it, hold it!” Lyle Wesson yelled, pounding the table. But people had started shouting at one another, and got to their feet, and started yelling at each other about hazards to the camp, about outsiders, which Stuart was, and which the Hallanslakers also were, but the Hallanslakers seemed to have forgotten that point, or Harper had. Harper started yelling at Lyle Wesson that they had to hunt Stuart and his horse, and Lyle Wesson banged his stick down on the table.

“Shut the hell up!” Wesson shouted. “And let’s talk about the trouble in Tarmin Height. Let’s talk about clearing that road of a hazard, and keeping the thing away from the villages up there on the Loop this winter. That’s our business, if you’d shut the hell up and quit stirring things up, Harper!”

Tarmin was where Stuart was going, Danny Fisher thought, certain as sure. The skin on his arms stood up in gooseflesh. His legs just moved—and he was standing, and the boss was looking at him. Everyone was.

“Stuart’s going up there,” he said, too quietly, he thought, but a leaf-fall would have made a sound in that silence. He sat down again, hugged his arms about him and wanted not to make another sound.

Lyle Wesson said, “Going up where, Danny Fisher?”

“To find what killed her and that truck driver. He’s going up to Tarmin to stop it, just like you said.”

“He’s shown no sign of leaving, yet,” a Hallanslaker shouted. “What’s the kid got? A phone line to God? Stuart’s a danger to the whole camp! Shoot him andthe horse before he comes back! The town may not have a second chance!”

“No!”

It was a voice he’d heard before this night—one of the strangers, the one who’d accosted him, the one who’d called him seriously to task for giving way to his panic. “The kid’s right. He’s going up there. Absolutely that’s where he’s going.”

“So you say!” the Hallanslaker shouted. “We got this town at risk! You’re not going to get any help out of Stuart!”

And another of his lot: “The Shamesey riders already say the camp’s too large, the town’s too large—you let a rider run amok around Shamesey fields, what do you look to have? Murders in the streets? Bodies stacking up like cordwood? You don’t trust Stuart’ll do any damn thing he ought to. Hell with him handling the Tarmin rogue—he spooked the whole damn town! Shoot him, I say! Then we’llhandle the Tarmin problem!”

The ambient was miserable. The rider next to Danny got up and left.

He stayed. He said, standing up again and forcing the words through a throat that seemed too small, “He’s wrong.”

“Who’s he?” a Hallanslaker asked. “Who is this kid, some kin of Stuart’s?”

His voice stalled. He cleared his throat with an effort and prayed it wouldn’t crack. “I’m not any kin of his. But he’s already left. He’s not crazy. He’s done what you say and left the town the way he’s supposed to. He just wants quiet for a while.”

“ Howdo you know?” one of the Shamesey riders asked him, and he retorted,

“I heard him go.”

“Heard him go. Sit down, junior, till you know what you hear and don’t hear.”

He was standing alone against a senior, mad, uncertain of his facts, his face gone hot.

But another man stood up, Stuart’s friend. “Kid’s right.”

“Then that’s you and the kid,” Harper yelled, on his feet again, “against all of us!”

“Four of us,” one of the other strangers said, on his feet, and the other man stood up. People started yelling again, and more and more people were getting up, Hallanslakers and other borderers in a shouting match.

“All right, all right,” Wesson shouted, banging his stick on the boards. “So shut up! If he goes to Tarmin and deals with it, our problem’s solved, if everybody just calms down. Just shut up and let a man breathe.”

“Somebody better go,” a Shamesey woman said, “somebody better track him to be sure he clears the area.”

“Somebody better be sure what’s up on Tarmin gets dead,” a Shamesey senior said. “Somebody should have taken care of it when the thing showed. Convoy or not, you had your best chance—”

“We had three of us left!” the foremost stranger said. “Aby Dale was our convoy boss! We were short-handed as was. We had trucks to get down off that road! You ever been outside a pasture, Shamesey man?”

< Ice,> hit the ambient. A winter’s day. And the crack of Wesson’s cane. “Shut it down!” Wesson said. “Enough damn should-haves! They didn’t have that option so long as they had the convoy in their charge!”

“So?”

Debate started again. Riders swore, and more of them got up and stayed on their feet.

Wesson banged his stick on the porch rail. “Stuart’s Dale’s partner. He has a right– -firstnatural right to deal with that thing on Tarmin Ridge. But so have the villagers on Rogers Peak a right to their safety. And so have townsmen down here in the plains a right, and us in their camp, we’ve got rights! If Stuart has gone up there, well and good. But if he can’t do it…”

“It’s not our responsibility!” the Shamesey rider yelled. “I’m not risking my neck up there!”

“Yeah, go guard cattle! Nobody asked you!”

Shouting started again. Danny sat down and sat still, trying not to shiver, trying not to think. Horses had strayed near enough, called by the disturbance of their riders. They made the very air electric with disturbance. But Dart was nearest of all of them, and Dart was damned angry.

“Shut up!” Wesson yelled. Danny’s fingers were clenched so tight on his seat they ached, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe.

But the lead stranger, unlike others, hadn’t sat down. “Boss-man.” He held the center of attention, his arms folded, face grim and downcast. “ Friendsshould go after him. If he goes over the edge… friends should make sure of him and do what has to be done. Or help him get that thing. We’re ready to go up there.”

“You naming yourselves?” Wesson asked.

“Three of us,” the man said. “Jonas and Luke Westman, Hawley Antrim, all out of the MacFarlane. We’ll take his belongings to him, we’ll catch up with him and we’ll bring him back sane. We’ll have that thing out of the heights. Aby Dale was a close cousin of Hawley’s.”

“Settled, then,” Lyle Wesson said.

Discontent prickled through the air, a quiet muttering, no one satisfied… or someone utterly dissatisfied.

“Beds and quiet,” Lyle Wesson said, levered himself up with his cane, and abandoned the porch for the inside of the tavern, where the powers in the camp repaired to talk about things juniors didn’t need to know—Danny knew that much about the politics of Shamesey camp.

And he supposed it would happen now the way the boss said. He hoped it would. He looked askance at various individuals of the retreating crowd, hoping he hadn’t made a permanent and grievous mistake by speaking out like that and setting himself up to argue with his seniors. He didn’t know why he’d done it, except his father always said he never could keep his mouth shut.

He walked away across the yard, onto the commons and the street, wanting Cloud, wanting the steadiness and the quiet Cloud could give him. He intended to take Cloud back to the den far around at the hostel where he stayed.

But he felt a restraining hand on his arm—and looked around in panic. He’d not heard the rider who, soft-footed and shadowless in the dark, had overtaken him.

“Why’d you speak up for him?” It was the leader of the strangers. The one who’d spoken most.

“I don’t know. Stupid, maybe.”

“You know him.”

“He helped me once. We talked. He didn’t have to. He gave me good advice.”

“The leg hurt?”

He didn’t know how the man knew. He wasn’t limping. He started away into the shadows of the street without another word, but he didn’t see the den, he saw He heard and flinched from the shot so badly he almost fell.

The rider wanted his attention. And got it, with that transmitted memory.

“Jonas is my name,” the stranger said. “Jonas Westman. You heard him louder than we did. Why?”

“I don’t know!”

“Kids do sometimes. Kids don’t know to stop. Don’t know to wall things out. Don’t know when they’re hearing and when they’re making it up.”

“I didn’t make it up. It hurt.”

“You could be a help to us. You could be a real help. Stuart knows you. You can hear Stuart. You want the high country. We can take you there.”

He didn’t know how the man knew what he wanted—or whether Cloud, who longed for the High Wild, had betrayed him… because when the man offered, he suddenly wasn’t thinking only about helping Stuart, he was thinking about why he’d gone to Stuart with his question in the first place, he was remembering that longing he had that wasn’t logic, just a condition—like dreaming about the unattainable stars. And Cloud wanted to go. Cloud wanted to take him up to the High Wild where Cloud had come from—Cloud hated Shamesey, hated the cattle, hated the town and hated the smell and the crowding; and that town was all his very junior, townbred rider could give him.

He wasn’t sure Cloud wasn’t listening now. He felt that all-over tingle of longing that wiped out every clear consideration to the contrary.

“You have a partner in camp?” Jonas Westman asked. “You got leave to take? Anybody to go with you?”

Rider conversations ran like that, when the horses were too close, mediating half of it. He didn’t know he’d agreed. It played hob with negotiations. And Jonas Westman knew his answer: he caught the echo back from Westman, a kind of confused imaging, The kid would have been scared.

No. He’d have run to see, the stupid kid.

“No kin in camp,” he said, reasoning that Denis was beyond his reach. Or his harm. “In town, yeah, family, —but I could drop dead. I’m nothing to them.”

The borderer had to know the ambivalence in the anger. The hurt. The offended pride. He’d not made friends in camp. The juniors from Shamesey district, even the rider kids, were all too touchy, too protective. Everything in juniors felt raw, exposed, feelings left open to every passing opinion—and he was, right now, scared of this Jonas Westman in the same way he’d been scared going to Stuart with his questions.

And as careful as he’d been, Stuart had had to slap him down, and remind him to mind his own edges, just the same as this man was telling him—this man who’d learned everything about the aching ambition of his young, debt-plagued life in two short seconds, while he still knew nothing whatsoever about Jonas Westman except that he called Guil Stuart a friend and was, if things went wrong up there, willing to shoot Stuart and Stuart’s horse both. But this wasn’t a bad man. He didn’t think so. They’d been spooked. But they’d triedto keep the terror bottled up and not to let it loose: they’d certainly helped settle things down at the meeting.

“You going?” Jonas asked.

“Yessir,” he said, feeling he’d just stepped off a cliff. Pride didn’t let him go back on that, not even when the agreement was just a second out of his mouth. “Depending on my horse.”

“Always depending,” the senior rider said. “That’s a given. Come on. Let’s talk.”

It was harder and harder to back out, when he found himself trekking along with the stranger through the edge of the gaslight, knowing he’d talked himself into something Cloud wouldn’t let him back out of. He was sure now that Cloud knew and wasn’t saying no, not to the proposition nor to the company he was in.

he kept seeing, and

Cloud’s name, in its endless variations.

Cloud’s freedom from Shamesey smokes and the minds of cattle.

How could Cloud’s rider say no to that?

Chapter v

THE SUN WAS COMING. THAT WAS THE SURE PROOF THAT THE world had rolled on without much giving a damn. Something died, something became something else’s supper, something brand new saw the dawn, and the world was still here.

Guil Stuart became aware of that fact, sitting, blanketed in grass, against Burn’s warm and breathing side, and watching the stars go out above the plains that began at Shamesey town—watching what, in the mountains, you couldn’t see: the edge of the world, where the illusory daylight began, unraveling the night along a long seam of light.

Almost cloudless morning.

Nice day.

His leg hurt. Damn stupid, walking on it. It didn’t want to bend now. He supposed it would, once he warmed up: his legs were numb and his backside was feeling the chill seeping up through the grass mat from the ground beneath. His hands were icy cold… he’d come away with no hat, no scarf, no gloves, and he’d waked with a pale rime of frost on the ground, on the leaves of knifegrass he’d cut for a lap-robe, and on the toes of his boots. If he moved, he might lose the grass he’d so meticulously arranged, which would expose his arm and shoulder to the icy cold, while the other arm, the one against Burn’s body, was comfortably warm, so he chose not to move, and not to disturb Burn’s sleep.

It seemed not but an hour or so ago that they’d settled to rest, unable to go on, Burn aching from the effort and unwilling to take another step. Burn had settled on the ground to sleep, not Burn’s habit when the ground was this cold, but Burn’s legs were tired.

So, having been so bright as to have left his pocket matches and his glass with his guns and his trail gear (God, it was slovenly camp habits he’d fallen into lately, having no glass and no matches on him; but, hell, he hadn’t expected to be on his own in the Wild in what he stood in, either) he’d done the best he could. He’d cut the tall plains grass for a mat to keep Burn’s belly warm and for a cover for himself. He’d been too tired to weave strip-and-tie mats—the cold hadn’t been that bad, and his eyes had kept shutting while he worked.

But he’d worked up a sweat doing it. And hurt the leg, like a fool. But it was numb with the morning cold, not too bad. The side of him next to Burn was downright warm.

If he didn’t move, Burn wouldn’t.

Aby died, and the morning after, the uncaring sun came up, and the man who, alone in the world, ought to be broken-hearted, was busy preserving his own warm spot in the frosty dawn, moving his toes in his boots to be sure they would move… first small venture of his mind out of its deliberate search for pain and distraction, and it wasn’t so bad, the world wasn’t, the cold wasn’t, the sun wasn’t. It was incredible it all went on, but it did, and he found hedid, miraculously sitting on the other side of a black pit he just couldn’t look into yet.

He wasn’t interested to look. Aby was gone and there wasn’t anything profitable in that dark, crazed night past, the night he could remember only because some fool townsmen had tried to blow his leg off.

Fool rider, far more to the point. He’d risked Burn, going down there in the mood he was in, and he was bitterly angry with himself for that. He’d lost all his gear but the knives he carried, but, hell, he deserved to lose it for what he’d done, and Shamesey could keep it for good, before he’d go whimpering back to Shamesey camp gates, saying he was all right now and could he have his guns back? He knew why the gate-guards had fired at him—it wasn’t a justified fear: he hadn’t been beyond controlling himself until they’d shot at him, but that didn’t matter in townsman accounts. They just wanted what they wanted, thought what they wanted to think, and they could go to hell and keep what they wanted.

His frame of mind didn’t matter much to the camp-boss either, who just wanted peace in his camp, and no troubles. Wesson might even agree to take him back into camp, but there’d be somebody tagging him the entire winter, and there’d be quarrels lurking. He’d been surprised to find Harper and his cronies in camp when he’d gotten there. He hadn’t liked it, and he wasn’t limping back there to try to restrain his temper in Harper’s case, not this season. Figure that Harper would push until he got something. There was too much between them.

Death happened. Riders died. Mostly they died young and by surprise, a nasty quick accident in storm or slide or some hole in a river-bottom. Moon had gone along with Aby, which was the best way, rider and horse at once, nothing untidy, a minimum of pain… Aby couldn’t leave Moon. That pair couldn’t be split.

He could take to the road and go on down toward the coast, to Malvey town. He knew riders who might winter there, and he liked them better than he knew or liked folk in huge Shamesey camp.

Ava Cassey might be at Malvey, freckled Ava, who…

… who wasn’t Aby, dammit, who was far short of Aby’s measure, and who, good-natured as she was, didn’t deserve to put up with a man constantly moping about that fact. The horses didn’t leave you much illusion. No polite lies. No self-deceit, for that matter.

A lump gathered in his throat. The stinging in his eyes wasn’t the cold. The rime-ice showed white crystals on the grass as the sun slowly widened its eye—showed white on his boot-seams, on his toes, but Burn was a warm lump against him, and under Burn’s mane he had a warm place for his fingers.

He sat there watching the sun come up, watching the sky become pinkly opaque, and the autumn grass go to golds and pale browns, with here and there the dark brown seed-spikes of what was, in summer, gold and red-flowering fireweed.

The frosts came steadily now. Most mornings like this one showed rime. Green and gold-green died. The browns and the reds came into their own season, on the foothills first, then on the rolling plains.

So very few times anybody could count on seeing that change. You thought you’d see it forever. You thought you were immortal. But what had Aby gotten? Twenty-six times the seasons turned, twenty-six autumns, twenty-six times to see the fireweed die and the snows fall, and three and four and five of those times being a clingy brat kid who didn’t pay attention.