Текст книги "Cloud's Rider "

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

“Papa’s talking about shooting that horse. Isn’t he?”

“Jennie, do you have lessons to do?”

“I don’t want him to shoot that horse!”

“Jennie—”

“I don’t want him to!”

“I’ll bet I can find you something to do inside if you’ve nothing better to do.”

“I’ll brush Rain.”

“Good. Go do that,” Callie said, frowning, and Jennie ran off to the den.

“I,” Danny said carefully, “just wanted to explain. I don’t know how much Ridley told you about what I said. But I did offer to go out and deal with the horse. I know I shouldn’t have brought the girl here. I knew it then and I didn’t plan to go all the way to the village until I was in a position to talk to the riders here and find outwhat I didn’t know. I made a mistake. A lot of mistakes. I don’t know that does anything—”

“You’re full of dark spots, aren’t you?”

“I don’t intend to be. I know you’d have been within your rights to have tossed me out. I just—”

“Just kind of miscalculated.”

“More than once. But—”

He could seeJennie making another try at Rain, off in the doorway of the den. Jennie was using the manger wall to stand on and the support post to hold on to in case Rain moved out from under her.

But this time Rain didn’t move.

This time Jennie slid on, and got a fistful of mane, and sat there. Cloud, out in the yard, turned his head. The ambient went full of and Danny held his breath between fear that Rain would pitch her off on her head and fear that Callie, catching the scene first from the ambient and from him and then from was going to explode in a shouting fit that wouldn’t help junior nerves at all.

Callie didn’t. Callie was very quiet. He caught intense and enough to upset the neighborhood if it broke loose, but she remained very, very quiet. So did Shimmer.

“Look!” Jennie crowed, and out she rode into the yard, no great burst of speed at all, just an easy amble across the well-tracked snow.

Cloud (Danny remembered those first wild dashes across the hills near Shamesey) had dumped himfrom a flying run twice the first night he’d met him. The memory made his bones ache and made Cloud dance and throw his head.

But Rain had certainly dumped Jennie the requisite number of times during the last several days, and now the young fool of a nighthorse seemed to have figured out that his own wild moves were dumping the youngster off and hurting Jennie—which was a difficult thought for a nighthorse. Trying to get and all sorted out taxed a nighthorse concept of location to the limit.

Rain moved sedately, now, skittish at the same time, and Callie stood there—upset that this was happening at all, Danny was well sure, and upset that something so important was happening while Ridley wasn’t there, and upset with all that going with a colt horse meant to young Jennie’s future.

Shimmer gave out a challenge call that was part and part mirroring Callie’s restrained distress, and at that, her offspring Rain set into a jog trot, not a nighthorse’s best gait, but comfortable—until the horse in question had forty kilos of human bouncing unskillfully on his back.

But Jennie stayed on. Jennie even wanted while other humans could only hold their breath and hope Jennie stayed undamaged.  Rain obliged, running a circle around the den while Jennie clung like a burr.

Danny let go a breath. He didn’t know if his opinion was welcome to Callie, but he knewthe hellish quandary Ridley and Callie were in in the matter of that colt and Jennie: he couldn’t live that closely with them and the kid for this number of days without picking up parental worry and their resolution notto have this pairing– and an initial year which they couldn’t conveniently supervise, if Rain did the ordinary young male nighthorse foray out and away from the local group—out the gate next spring and off in a giddy exploration of the whole mountain, nosing into everything. Spring—spring called to a new pair like them in a way that was just one sensation after another.

He knew. Every rider had to have known, at some point in his life, that first sense-ridden spring—the smells, the colors, the lifethat was breaking on both horse and rider after the long white days of ice and enclosure. And coupled with a winter pairing—when there were so many, many new sensations to get used to—

“Mama! Dan! See me?”

Oh, he A rider could drown all his good sense in it. He found gooseflesh on his arms that had nothing to do with the cold; he felt Callie

But wasn’t just a visual picture. Not any longer. It was an accomplishment. It was a new creature. It had to be dealt with as rider and horse—even a fool junior could understand there was no redoing or undoing it, not now.

“We see you!” Callie called back. “Try not to break your neck!”

Callie was crying. There were tears on her face. But Callie was holding the ambient very quiet, and he gave her all the help he could in that.

“Slow it down,” Callie shouted to her besotted offspring. “You’re going to take a spill!”

But about that moment washed through the ambient with all the noisy force of a pair of youngsters—God, it deafened. It had to reach Ridley. It had to reach Guil and Tara at the bottom of the mountain. And Danny laughed. He couldn’t help it. Cloud kicked up his heels, and pregnant Shimmer gave a little hop– there was nothing in the whole world like that happiness, and he couldn’t but remember the way came to him—and from clear across the wall.

Ridley knew. Ridley had heard—God, who in all creation hadn’t? Danny had trouble breathing. And an unexpected attack of tears. Jennie and Rain had just that instant gotten—there weren’t words for it—but it was a coming together that made total sense of each other—or at least as far as which body had four feet and which one had two, which one was jogging about the yard and which one was sitting where Jennie had known for weeks she belonged and where Rain wanted her to be. He saw Callie take a surreptitious wipe at her eyes.

“She’s still a baby,” Callie complained aloud, he guessed to him. “So’s the damn horse.”

“A goodhorse. He’ll take care of her.”

“A damn colt!”

“A smart one.”

Then—came a feelingfrom somewhere outside the walls that was and and

There was —Danny couldn’t pin it down. Couldn’t figure it, though it—it wasn’t Ridley.

Which said to him that was the comparison he’d instinctively made.

Another rider.

Another horse.

And notone that was supposed to behere.

Rain had stopped still, head lifted, nostrils flared. Shimmer looked toward the wall. Cloud did.

“Damn!” Callie cried, fists clenched. <“Get outof here! Damn you! Go away!”>

Rain was protecting Jennie: was clear from that quarter, a horse that would fight—no doubt of it, not by Rain’s action or Cloud’s or Shimmer’s. Slip was with all his considerable force. There was no way, no way, Danny thought suddenly, that Jennie could be tempted by the stray, now.

But Brionne could, and Danny started toward the village gate to know whether the ambient was as threatening there as here.

But before he could get there, Ridley was coming back, at a dead run if he could judge. Slip was and Danny stopped, figuring that whatever there was to hear on that side of the wall and near that house where Brionne lodged Ridley would have heard and would tell them.

Jennie slid down as Rain came near the gate and Ridley came through.

“Are you all right?” was Ridley’s first question to his daughter.

“I rode Rain, I rode Rain and he let me!”

Ridley picked his daughter up and hugged her tight.

Rain was throwing out the same that would underlay every communication to a riderless horse from now on– and whatever was wrong out there went away.

Danny didn’t know for sure what had just flared through the ambient. But in the preoccupation of two overwhelmed parents he didn’t know whether they’d heard it at all.

Next thing, papa said at supper that night, Jennie had to learn to mount without the manger wall—

“Just can’t depend on those mangers being everywhere available,” papa said, and Jennie, knowing she was being teased, swatted at her father’s arm.

“You’ll learn,” papa said then. “Got to grow a bit first, though. Eat those potatoes.”

“I want to go out to the den.”

“It’s dark out,” mama said, and then—then there was a difference in mama’s tone. “Well, —finish your potatoes first.” Jennie couldn’t mama. Rain was drowning everything out but him. But there was a difference all the same, and mama was going to let her do something alone she’d never been allowed to do.

Because she belonged where Rain was. It was a thought so wonderful she didn’t linger at all complaining about the potatoes. She bolted them down as fast as she could, got up from table—said, “Excuse me,” the way mama and papa were always scolding her to say. Tonight when she was grown up, she said it just because she wantedto, and tonight all the rules weren’t walls around her, they were part of the familiar way things were and she hadn’t any interest in being a kid and doing things the wrongway. She was Jennie Sabotay, Rain’s rider, and the whole world was different.

She went and got her coat and her scarf, her hat and her gloves, she wrapped up and snugged down her cuffs herself, while her family and Dan sat at the table eating and trying not to watch her too obviously.

But there wouldn’t be a thing in the world mama could find fault with in the way she dressed or acted, not a thing.

“I’ll come back before I get chilled,” she announced, because mama always said that, and tonight she was handling everything for herself.

She hadn’texpected the relief she saw, like everybody at the table had let go a breath all at once, even when the ambient wasn’t including them, just her and Rain and the other horses. She was puzzled.

But she had Rain and it was a clear night. She went out the outside door, and shut it tight, and walked down the porch—mama was always saying not to run on the steps, she’d slip on the ice. So she got all the way down to the yard. But by that time Rain was outside the den, coming to meet her, and she hadn’t another thought but Rain’s thoughts, the way snow smelled and the way things looked—Rain had never really seen the stars, either, that shethought were wonderful, and Rain seemed a little confused where and what they were.

But mostly Rain wanted with him, and wanted everyone else away.>

Callie was trying not to be disturbed about the situation. She was doing, Danny thought, a very fine job of holding it in, and he wasn’t about to disturb what he perceived as a delicate balance.

“I’ll go to bed,” he said quietly, that being the only refuge he’d discovered where he could take his influence out of the family.

“No,” Callie said. “You were trying to say something this afternoon. What?”

He honestly couldn’t reconstruct where he’d been in his approach to Callie. Or what he’d said. “Just that—I hoped not to disrupt your lives. That I never meant to.”

“She’s gone,” Callie said. “She’s made her choice. There’s nothing to do about it.”

“Seems to me,” Ridley said quietly, “she isn’t gone, and the colt was on his way to making a choice. She’s that age. So’s the horse. Fisher, you’ve probably seen more pairings than either of us have. Seventeen and all.”

Shamesey being the huge camp that it was, Ridley was right: you saw about everything in every combination of human and horse there’d ever been—some good, some you wondered about. “Good horse,” Danny said ever so faintly. “That’s just a real good young horse.” He had another notion, realizing as he did tonight that neither Ridley nor Callie might ever have seenanother pairing besides their own. “What I know—begging your pardon—if I could say—”

“What?” Callie snapped.

“It—sort of indicates to me that when Spook showed up… Rain might have gotten just a little more protective of her. I think it would havehappened. But when an older horse came around looking for a rider, I think that pushed Rain into claiming hisbefore he could risk losing her—and so he hada rider to help him fend this other horse off.” The last thing he wanted was to lecture seniors regarding horses and theirdaughter. It was real dangerous territory to venture.

“Damn glad it’s not the other horse,” Ridley muttered.

“What in hellare we going to do?” Callie asked. “What are we going to do this spring?”

“Split up if we have to. You go with her. Or I do.”

Meaning if—almost when—young Rain took out with wanderlust.

And it didn’t call for a junior’s opinion at all. But he had at least an alternative. And Callie had asked him to stay at the table.

“There’s also me,” he said, and waited a half a breath for an explosion. He didn’t want to make the offer he made—he didn’t want to tie Cloud down even to a village and even for the summer: he felt like a traitor in that regard. But he was at least partly responsible for the danger he’d brought, and he saw at least a small way to patch it. “I know you think I’m the devil, but if she goes out this spring, I’d stay here through the summer. Or I’d ride with her and you stay here. I’ve got a little brother. I knowkids her age. I’d stay with her and see she got back here safe before winter.”

He wasn’t getting any reaction from them. He decided he’d said enough and maybe enough to offend them. Callie looked like a thundercloud. Ridley—he wasn’t sure.

There was an ambient. But it was all

“It’s to think about,” Callie said. And then added: “It’s not you in question. It’s that horse out there. It tried to get Jennie.”

“It didn’t,” Ridley said. “It can’t, now.”

“It’s still got to be stopped.”

“I agree,” Danny said. “It has to be.”

They hadn’t said what they’d do about Jennie this spring when horses started to wander or whether they even accounted his offer as serious or other than self-serving. But he didn’t entirely expect they would say anything. It was an eventuality they didn’t want to think about, and he wasn’t the person Callie would want with her daughter, not at all.

He got up to refill the teapot.

The ambient stayed as it was, a contented kid, contented horse, both silly, both louder than anything on the mountain. That horse if it was out there had to know it had lost Jennie as a prospect.

Maybeit would be discouraged. But it had lost Rain as a rival, too. And that might well figure in the situation.

“There’s something you can do now,” Ridley said. “Which is asking a bit. But there’s three riders at Mornay—that’s the next village down the road—and they could spare one.”

“You want me to ride to Mornay.”

“If,” Ridley said, “if we don’t get that horse in the next couple of days, weather permitting. And supposing it comes back. We could go out with the hunters—escort you out to the first shelter between us and them and you make the trek over to Mornay and come back with help.”

So Ridley wasn’tjust getting him to go winter over at the next village.

Counting that one of them had a pregnant mare, one was a stranger to the area and one of them was an eight-year-old just this week trying to figure out how to get onto her horse—getting help from another village was a real good notion.

“Sure,” he said. “Sure, I’ll do that.”

“That’s saying we have to,” Ridley said. “Chances are—Rain’s settling with Jennie may put an end to it. I hope so.”

“Drink to that,” Callie said, and got up and got the spirits bottle. She poured three glasses, gave one to Ridley, second to him—which she sipped beforehand. Third for herself.

Proof enough, Danny said to himself, and didn’t hesitate to drink it when Ridley proposed, “To the Offspring and the horse.”

“We did it,” was Callie’s second. “She’s still alive and we are.”

Jennie was staying out in the den and she might be out there the whole night. He didn’t think Callie would get a wink of sleep. Maybe not Ridley. At the least they’d take turns.

And they talked about having gotten Jennie to a major turning in her life.

But he didn’t think they expected it would be easy after this.

Nor that they wanted help waiting up for the kid. So he excused himself to his bed and lay there listening to an ambient as new and full of foolishness as could be.

Thinking of Cloud and himself. And beginnings of life and not endings for a change.

Darcy had made supper that evening and Brionne ate half a dish of beef pasta and a whole cookie and half of another for dessert.

But Brionne said very little—or what she said was so quiet that Darcy couldn’t hear.

Once it sounded like, “I want to go home.”

And another time, “Go away!”

But when Darcy started to leave Brionne said, “Where are you going?”

Darcy came back and sat down by the side of the bed. The girl had been dreaming awake, she thought. Not really sleeping, but not entirely aware, either. There was a strange feeling to the night—her own elation with the child’s waking, or the unaccustomed feeling of life in this room, or just the knowledge that the days would change now. Everything had stopped at some time around Mark’s death, and no day had brought anything different from the last. And now every day brought a possibility of things changing.

Now she went to bed at night thinking about tomorrow, and what she’d do, and what she’d try. She hadn’t done that kind of planning in—a long time.

And tonight she lay abed thinking of Mark as she sometimes did, just thinking about him in the dark and the things she’d tell him– and wanting to tell him about all the things that had happened.

But there was so much, there was so very much she’d done that thinking about it became a job in itself, and made her sleepy.

Her edge-of-sleep thought seemed infected with cheerfulness. With recklessness and sheer anticipation that just wasn’t like her.

She felt equal to anything. That in itself was unprecedented.

If the girl had come a year ago Mark wouldn’t have died. Mark would have wanted to live if he’d seen this child, if he’d seen how much she was like Faye. But more, if Mark had feltthe things she felt tonight, he’d never have wanted to die.

Right at the edge of sleep she pretended that Mark had seen her and that Mark was sleeping in the bed beside her. She knew better, of course, but she could think that for the night, the way she could tell herself that the empty room had a child again and that mistakes were all revised, and that she had a chance to do right all the things that had for a year been so wrong.

There was a tomorrow again. She’d run to the very edge of the money she had on account. She’d not collected fees for things she’d done on call, or at least not pursued any of the late ones—because she’d not cared.

But tomorrow she’d open the lower-floor shutters and open her office again, and she’d take patients. The miners always had complaints and aches and pains. Miners always had money on account.

And she’d buy Brionne such pretty things.

Things feltbetter. Maybe it was going to church. Maybe it was just getting another number of days between them and disaster and church days were markers.

But, sleeping in a proper cot alongside his brother in the warmest place in Evergreen village, with the banked coals making a comfortable glow and the stones lending warmth to a peaceful night, Carlo let go a sigh that seemed to stand for so much that had been piled up on him, so much debt, so much fear, so much anxiety.

Things were working out. Rick wasn’t happy—least of all in the public scene this morning, with them being welcomed by the congregation and all. Ordinarily he’d have found it excruciating notice on himself, and had, for the duration, but it meant something. It meant something vitally important, to have the preacher’s backing and to know that they weren’tto blame for that horse that had scared hell out of the village.

Rider business. A horse didn’tcome within his responsibility. Wasn’t fair for Danny to get tagged with it—but if the preacher didn’t see blaming him and Randy for that horse, that left Rick Mackey as the only one with that notion. And precarious as his and Randy’s situation was, he wasn’t about to rush forward to claim the blame.

He just—just hoped to God it went away.

He didn’t want to be listening to it when they shot it.

He had a fistful of pillow, doing violence to it without realizing it, and let it go, and let go another sigh, this time consciously, purposefully releasing all the pent-up worry.

He ought to take care of the rest of the pending business he had in town, pay off all the emotional debts and pin down the uncertainties.

Meaning going finally and finding out about their sister, what the doctor thought of her chances, what the outlook was, what the debtmight be that she’d accumulated. He was responsible for her. He had to be. There was no one else.

Chapter 15

That’s right, darling. Take another spoonful. There’s sugar in it.”

The girl swallowed down the cereal, and after three or four such spoonfuls, the girl heaved a little sigh and blinked and blinked again. “You’re in Evergreen, honey,” Darcy said. She offered that information every time she thought the girl might have come close to hearing anything or truly absorbing the things she said—because there’d been that moment of lucidity—and then it had gone for the rest of the day. But she knew that if it had come once, it could come back—to the right lure, to the promise of safety and comfort. “You’re in the village up the mountain. My name’s Darcy. How are you doing?”

“I’m tired,” the girl said unexpectedly and matter of factly. But Darcy didn’t let herself show surprise at all.

“I imagine you are, honey. Do you want some more?”

“All right,” the girl said, and ate the rest of the bowl before she shut her eyes and seemed to drift away.

Darcy was trembling as she set the spoon and the bowl down. She sat there by the girl’s bedside telling herself she might really have won this one, and seeing in that wind-burned face, still lovely after the long trek up the mountain, and the hands all broken-nailed and cut, the evidences of a suffering and struggle her Faye had never known except in the few minutes of her death.

This child would never know privation in Evergreen, not while she was taking care of her. This child would grow up safe and have all the things a beautiful young girl should have, and she’d see to it.

She went downstairs and went on tidying up. She arranged things in Mark’s office, and sterilized the instruments in boiling water, against the arrival of clients.

Then she went out on the snowy balcony of the second floor and opened the storm shutters. People about in the winter evening, the few who weren’t using the tunnels in the light snow-fall, stopped in the street and looked up. No one spoke.

But two—two, while she watched, came from the street onto the walk, and stamped their boots on the porch and disappeared under the angle of the porch roof.

She heard a knocking at her door. Miners, she thought. Maybe clients.

It was bitter cold out on the balcony and she gladly went inside and down. She opened the door and set herself in the doorway in such a way that they couldn’t just brush past her without explaining themselves, because some such clients were the sort that deserved sending right down to the pharmacist with an order for sugar pills or strong purgative.

“Ma’am,” the tall one said. “Are you the doctor?”

“Yes.”

“My name’s Carlo Goss. This is my brother Randy. How’s our sister doing?”

The girl’s brothers. It came to her like a thunderstroke that theseboys could take the girl away. It wasn’t fair. They couldn’t. Not now. They hadn’t even asked how she was. They didn’t care—

But in the same heartbeat and in deep confusion she had to amend that harsh judgment. They’d carried the girl to her with heroic effort. There were frost burns on their faces. How did they love her enough to do that—and not come to see her?

“She’s doing pretty well,” she said—hardly a breath having passed in those thoughts. Their arrival disturbed her for reasons she didn’t even want to look at in herself. She didn’t want to let them through the door to talk to them, much less admit them to the girl’s room– but she couldn’t say go away. They had rights. They could go to the marshal and complain, and Eli would have to come back and say, Darcy, you have to let them see her, and how would that look? And how would that feel?

“Come in,” she said. She wondered whether she should ask them to take off their coats. She wondered whether she should offer tea. She wanted them outof the way, out of this house, but how fast could she push them and how much could she keep secret that wouldn’t ultimately get back to them and color how they dealt with her?

Friendly. Friendly seemed the best approach. Court the boys. Make them comfortable so they couldn’tturn on her.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked. “Would you like to sit down?”

“To see our sister,” Carlo said—and very businesslike, very much in possession of his rights over the situation. She was afraid.

“Come along upstairs,” she said, then, constrained to cooperate.

“Nice house,” the younger brother said as if he was estimating the value of the set-abouts.

“Thank you,” she said, while her mind was racing over what they wanted and whether they meant to take Brionne and what she could do about it. She winced at bringing two such enemies into the heart of the house, into things that were hers and Mark’s and Faye’s, where they could see what she had and maybe calculate it wasn’t as fine as where they’d come from and wasn’t really a house they’d want their sister in. But she had no choice but take them up the stairs and into Faye’s bedroom.

There they took off hats and gloves and loosened scarves. They brought deep cold with them. It clung to their clothing, on which snow didn’t melt. They brought noise. They brought foolish fears into her heart—even to think of them taking her back. The brothers didn’t know how to deal with her. They didn’t understand how to take care of the girl—they’d failed. They stood above a sleeping sister—having failed.

And then—then—maybe a creak of the floorboards, or maybe just a sense the girl at times seemed to have—she opened her eyes and stared at them.

“Carlo?”

“Yeah,” he said, and got down on one knee and took her hand. “Hi. How’re you doing, Brinny?”

Dreadful nickname.

“All right,” she said. Her hand rested listlessly in her brother’s as he squeezed it.

“You slept all the way up,” the younger brother said, and squatted down by the older. The girl lay on her prop of pillows and gazed into their faces.

“I don’t remember.” Her hand moved on the lace and yellow ribbons of the coverlet. “Isn’t it a pretty room?”

“It’s real pretty,” the older boy said and squeezed her hand again. “—Listen, Brinny-boo, we’re down by the gate. Got a job in the smith’s setup here. We live there. We’re fine. Randy and I are fine. You need anything?”

“Where’s mama?”

“Mama and papa are gone, Brinny. So’s aunt Libby. They’re all dead. Nothing left of Tarmin but us.”

The blue eyes clouded. She turned her face into the pillow and tore her hand from her brother’s fingers.

“Brinny?”

“I want mama.”

“Yeah. I know, I know.” Carlo patted her shoulder as he got up from his knees and looked at Darcy. “I don’t know what I can pay you right now, ma’am, but I will, as soon as I come by any money. As could happen.”

“I’d like her to stay here. No charge. I have the room. I don’t mind her using it.”

“That’s awfully kind of you.”

“I’d be glad to take care of her.” She became desperate, fearing she’d led herself into a dangerous dead end of reason, and having lost all her sense of what anyone truly wanted, she had nothing left to throw to the hunters but a tidbit of her privacy, to make them think they were friends and to make logical to them her position. “I had a girl about her age. She died. The house has been real empty. The girl needs someone all the time—a stable environment. She can’t be moved to still one more strange place.”

“If Brionne could live here, if you were willing to do that for her, we’d be grateful. We might be able to help out, do some fixing up and all. Next spring—next spring it looks like we’ll be able to give you some kind of payment.”

That didn’t matter to her. Money didn’t matter. Their separation from Brionne was the currency she wanted. It was wonderful news.

“I’m well set,” she said, and walked out to the head of the stairs, luring them to follow as she kept talking. “I can take care of her. Of course you’ll come and see her.” By spring—by spring if they changed their minds and wanted their sister back, she’d argue the child was too delicate to travel with them and live in a ravaged village. It was a stupid idea for them to go back there, and by what she’d heard of Tarmin, though the buildings might be intact and all, they’d still have to get supplies there. By the time the boys were in any fashion set to want her back she’d have Brionne attached to her, that was what she’d do. So they’d never get her back. By that time Brionne wouldn’t even think of going—to brothers she hadn’t been tearfully glad to see.

“We’d really be grateful,” Carlo Goss said; and the younger brother said, as they followed her down the stairs:

“Carlo and me get along all right. But it’s pretty rough down at the forge.”

“I’m sure you’re right.” She knewthe smith, his surly brat. And his wife, as vicious and self-seeking a woman as ever she’d met– only woman in town who could have made Van Mackey worse than he was. “Your sister owes her life to you. It was a miracle you got up the Climb at all.” She reached the front door and, since they had never taken their coats off and seemed in a hurry, gave them no grace at all of invitations to stay and talk. “You come back whenever you want. You’ll know she’s just down the street.”