Текст книги "Cloud's Rider "

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

The direct consequence was that a storm which hadn’t even been a cloud-line on the horizon yesterday morning at first-stage had set in hard during the night of their stay at midway. They’d seen it first boiling above the distant peaks of the central massif when, coming up from that first-stage shelter at dusk last night, they’d rounded that last curve. The midway shelter had been there in front of them and, a fact with which he reproached himself now, he’d never thoughtto turn around and go back right then, when, yes, they were tired, and they’d walked all day; and, yes, there was a horse down below they didn’t want to deal with—but it might have been better than this.

Last night the wind had howled about the midway cabin, literally shaking the walls of a structure poised on the edge of nothing at all. Their fire had refused to stay lit against the draft coming down the chimney. His information from Tara as well as Carlo and Randy said the road above midway and below was subject to deep, impassable drifting once winter set in. After the small stack of wood ran out in that barren, treeless steep the snow might block them from leaving, and they could freeze to death in a cabin that even with the intermittent fire last night had been colder than hell’s attic.

Even knowing thathe’d not seriously thought of turning them around and leading them back to first-stage—because he’d been unwilling to face that damned stray horse.

He’d had too much sympathy for it—since it was itself a refugee from the Tarmin disaster, lost, bereaved, more desperate than they were. Riders had died down on the lower reaches of the mountain, and horses had survived—meaning hurt horses, horses missing riders—and the one haunting the vicinity of the first-stage cabin when they’d arrived hadn’t been too sane to start with, if it was the horse he most feared—a good chance it was that horse, considering where it was hanging out, where a rider had died who was, no question, crazy.

And the chance of Brionne waking up when it was prowling around the outside of their cabin—or worse, intercepting them on the trail—and having a crazy girl anda crazy horse on his hands– along with Cloud, who’d fight it for their protection—

He’d felt the darting, fragmented– thing—that wasthe rogue the night Tarmin had gone down. He’d seen and felt her half-waking in the cabin with Guil and Tara, and he had nodesire whatever to deal with her awake and within reach of a horse that could carry her thoughts outside herself. She’d gone out cold after that brief incident the night they’d joined Guil and Tara—and nobody, not even her brothers, invited her to come to again. If it had been Tara who’d gone with the Goss kids to the first-stage shelter, he suspected now that Brionne wouldn’t have lived past midnight; for the horse, Tara might have had pity. But Tara had taken him aside for a moment before he left and said, aloud and in private, that if Brionne died, he should come back.

He’d been—not horrified, but at least disturbed, and knew right then he was talking to a rider forged in a fire he’d no concept of.

But after a handful of nights at first-stage with that horse outside he’d begun to weigh what one life was really worth relative to all the others. He didn’t at all have the cold-heartedness to have shot her; he didn’t right now have the conviction to see that travois take a plunge down the mountain; but he’d gotten scared enough by now that the thought did come to his mind.

Sleet kept coming at them, falling from the sky, swept up off the road, blown down on them—he didn’t know, but thunder above them suggested it wasn’t all blowing off the heights. The light was a gray and sickly color, and he didn’t like to look to the left, because there wasn’t any dimension to it. They reached a place where the darkness of Cloud’s tail streamed first sideways and up and around and sideways again—and when they reached it in Cloud’s wake, wind literally blew him and Carlo a little sideways on the icy surface.

He found traction in patches of snow. He began counting thirty, forty steps in that struggle against the wind. It was an effort to keep his knees pulling straight. His scarf slid down. He grabbed it and stuffed it into place as best he could.

Carlo jolted down to one knee. Wind straight off the backbone of the continent had scoured the roadway here to bare, frozen, lumpy rubble, and there they were, braced, not at a good angle, on what looked and felt like ice.

“Are you all right?” Randy’s thin shout came from behind, and Danny didn’t want to look back for fear of losing the scarf, maybe his hat, which he had tied down as hard as he could. Carlo carefully got back to both feet.

Treacherous ground, treacherous wind. “Change hands!” Carlo yelled against the blast, and if Carlo was losing his grip on that side, Danny wasn’t going to question it, no matter the difficulty of making that changeover here. He was losing feeling in his own fingers. He began, as Carlo asked, to effect the change of sides, reaching for the far pole, edging across on slick ground.

The travois bucked up under a gust, spun, half over, girl and supplies and all, and tried to sail up and out of their hands as Carlo struggled to hold it.

“Look out!” Randy cried against the deafening buffet of the wind, and Carlo desperately elbowed aside his brother’s help with: “Dammit, get out of the way! I can handle it!”

Randy bid fair to get himself, Brionne, andCarlo blown off the roadway. The kid tried to grab the side pole, Carlo tried instead to kneel and bear the travois down to the ground with his weight; in the crossed signals, thinking to the last instant he was going to see the whole thing and both boys go spinning down the icy incline toward the cliff edge, Danny kicked Randy’s leg from under him and yelled, “Sit on it, dammit!” in what voice he had left.

Randy flung himself atop Brionne and coincidentally the travois as he fell—as Danny and Carlo both fought the travois flat with their weight across him, all three of them atop.

It skidded.

Danny dug his boot-toes in and it kept going until his toe hit a lump of icy rock on the roadway.

He didn’t move for a minute after that, just panted a series of deep breaths through the icy and soggy scarf, lying on Carlo, lying on Randy, lying on Brionne.

Then, waiting his time between the blasts of wind and bracing first his other toe and then the foot carefully on the surface, he got up, let Carlo up, and snarled “Stay down,” at Randy.

And again, when Randy tried to get up, “ I said stay down, dammit!”

Randy and his stubborn helpfulness was ballast. Carlo was real help. Danny took one pole, Carlo took the other, and with Randy’s weight safely disposed on the travois, they struggled upslope.

There’d stopped being sky and earth and this time he couldn’t tell himself they’d just walked into a gusty area. This was the wind picking up and sleet coming down so thick they breathed it.

There was one thing—one thing Tara hadn’tknown: that there’d been a horse loose that Brionne could have latched onto—and that fear of it would send them out of the safety she’d planned and into a rush up the mountain. Onhis best judgment.

Now look where he was.

What in hell were two senior riders expecting him to do with the job he’d been handed?

Not what he was doing, damn sure.

“Lousy, lousyweather,” Guil Stuart said from the vantage of the cabin he shared with Tara Chang and two nighthorses. His horse, Burn, and Tara’s Flicker (two names having nothingto do with each other, since Burn imaged himself as fire and dark and Flicker’s name was sunlight in rapid flashes) were out cavorting in the storm, chasing some hapless creature they’d roused out of hiding—hapless since it had fallen afoul of nighthorses looking for fresh meat. Guil limped back to stand at the fireside where Tara was mending the bullet hole in his coat and, staring at the embers of a comfortable fire, he thought about a handful of kids he’d rather have counseled stay put, maybe back at Tarmin rather than first-stage.

He and Tara had disagreed on that point. But the village down the road (or what was left of it) might not have been much safer for the boys to hole up in than the first-stage shelter.

Tarmin would have been readily accessible and closer to them, there was that.

But Tara might have been right to insist the kids move out of their vicinity altogether. Cloud was a young male. With Burn possessive of Flicker and Cloud in the mix—there was no telling. But the fact of winter and horses in rut had been only a part of the consideration: the other part was a girl who could trigger an explosion out of all three of the horses, a girl Tara for both considered and unconsidered reasons didn’t want near her.

That was the part of the reasoning that weighed on his mind.

It was remotely possible that the kids hadn’t gone on to first-stage, that they’d trekked on down toward Shamesey before the snows came and were down by now and making their way across the flatlands.

And that, in cold clear consideration, scared hell out of him.

Tara didn’t need Flicker’s attention to know, not what he was thinking, but the subject he was thinking about. She frowned at him and glanced up. The next stitch pushed too hard and sent the needle through into her finger. She sucked the wound, scowling.

But she didn’t ask and he didn’t say anything—or intend to dwell on it in range of the horses. He wasn’t usually one for recriminations. A decision was a decision was a decision, as they said down south, which was his usual range.

He didn’t know as much as he wished he knew about Tara Chang orher mountain. But that was the way of winters. You ended up in some small cabin or in some encampment, pinned down and pent in for the season with whatever other rider, sane or not, known or not, was in the vicinity, and on many points of his present situation he couldn’t complain, especially considering that otherwise he’d have been flat on his back, wounded, and alone.

Instead he was recovering tolerably quickly, situated with plenty of supplies on the forested bottom road of Tarmin Climb, with someone willing to cut firewood and shovel the door clear till he mended enough to take his turn. He’d be here, he supposed, and fairly content, till water ran downhill again.

He could have had the kids for help. That was true. But instead of that, he was holed up with a woman who’d been a good fill-in partner to him in a bad situation, a woman who’d saved his life, as happened, and the only actual fault he’d seen in her was an ironclad notion of what was sensible and what wasn’t—well, that and a slight unwillingness to change her mind.

“If they stayed in that first shelter on the Climb,” Tara said out of long silence, “they’re fine. ”

“I hope they did. ” He didn’t say that Danny Fisher was a lowland kid from the biggest town in the world, and that the things Danny Fisher didn’t know not only about this mountain, but about any mountain at all, were frightening. Tara’s instruction to the kids, her giving them a map of the way up, had been sensible. Charitable. Responsible.

And the foresight of riders who’d helped make the roads up here had provided ample shelters for riders, summer and winter. If you didn’t use them for as long as they were designed for, and didn’t use caution in leaving them, you had yourself to blame, no one else.

Problem was—they were kids. And kids didn’t notoriously do well with waiting things out.

But stupidity wouldn’t have carried Fisher as far as he’d gotten, and he trusted the kid’s resourcefulness and common sense—as far as the kid’s knowledge went.

That was a warmsnow going on.

He decided he would sit down. With a hand on the fireplace stones he flexed his knees gingerly and did that.

The horses had just caught their prey. They’d begun a game of tag that had everything of humor and blood and wicked behavior about it, but that was Burn for you. Burn was from the borders of inhabited land. So was he. Flicker would have killed their supper. Burn played games with it.

In that, they were different. He found he had a soft heart for some things. He didn’t admit to it, exactly, but Flicker’s rider was a far harsher judge of humans and horses. Tara would have shot the girl—in the heat of the moment, granted, and Tara hadn’t in fact shot her. But she nearly had. And the day she’d pitched those kids out the door with a map of the higher road he’d been putting up a pretense of sanity right up to their leaving. Now he couldn’t entirely reconstruct what had happened or what he’d urged them to do.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Tara said.

They were deaf to the ambient—or at least their share of it. They might be hearing the horses, but the horses weren’t paying any attention at all to them. Which meant two humans trying to figure each other out just went by guesswork.

“Thinking Burn’s a son of a bitch. ”

“Bushdevil. ” That was Tara’s guess about the prey. It might be that. It was small and dark and fast in the snowy brush, and it dug fast, but a horse’s tri-hooved feet dug fast, too. Even match.

There was a little silence.

“They’ll have dug in,” Tara said. “The kids will. ”

“Probably,” he said. “The kid’s resourceful. ”

Tara had bloodied her finger. Third time.

He reached out and stopped further carnage.

“Give yourself a break. Easy. ”

“Dammit,” she said.

He really didn’t do well at argument. He carried the hand to his mouth and nipped the finger himself.

“Ow!”

When maybe she’d expected tender sympathy. No luck. She jerked to get loose.

Didn’t work. His hand was stronger.

“I’ve got the needle,” she said, and held it up.

And stuck it away in the mending and rose onto her knees and gently against him as he tugged her other hand.

They’d been lovers.

They might be again, testing the extent of his healing, —except Flicker caught the bushdevil and there was the distinct taste of blood in their mouths.

Burn caught the prize then and threw it with a toss of his head.

“Ugh,” Tara said.

Horse mood was contagious. Outrageous play was one thing. Carnivorous mischief was a difficult but not impossible background for lovemaking.

Next thing, the two would want to be let in from the storm.

It seemed to Carlo Goss that it had taken more than an hour for them just to make the next switchback on the road, walking mostly on ice. He couldn’t always figure out whether they were turning or going straight—he couldn’t see Cloud right now—couldn’t see a black nighthorse, the whiteout was so total in the patch of roadway they were climbing. He couldn’t see Danny next to him or even the ground under his own feet until the gray shadow of a crag on their left side hove up between them and the wind.

Then he could make out Cloud’s rump, snow-spattered shadow horse, tail sprinkled with honest snowflakes, materializing slowly in front of them in a world otherwise white. He could feelCloud all along. But except for Danny on the other pole of the travois and Randy atop it, and the ends bumping heavily along the roadway, he couldn’t have sworn where the ground was.

“Get off,” he said to his brother, then, because the wind wouldn’t catch the travois during the transaction here and his knees were growing rubbery with fighting both the slope and the constant slippage.

Randy slowly took his weight off the rig, so the load was lighter by him, at least.

“Breath,” Carlo requested, then.

“Minute,” Danny said.

The grade was too steep to do other than stand, but he needed the rest. His legs were shaking under him, and he tried to ease the strain on them as they stopped and stood on an icy steep where if they once entirely let go of the travois where it was, it and his sister would toboggan down a giddy stretch of rubble and ice and soar high and wide on the winds before it fell.

But in all this trek Brionne had never waked.

Never wouldwake, in his guilt-ridden thoughts and guiltier hope. His sister had beena rider for a brief number of days—she’d been a rider on a horse the whole district and clear down to Shamesey had known had to die—the horse Guil Stuart and others had come up here to get before it took a village out.

They hadn’t been in time.

His sister had ridden a rogue horse home; she’dgotten it through the gates that defended Tarmin from the Wild. And in the confusion of that horse’s maddened sending, sane villagers had opened doors, rushed to the aid of stricken children, dying neighbors– abandoning their only defenses in the process. In the confusion and the threat the rogue sent into the ambient, the best and the bravest impulses that humans owned had sent neighbors running, blinded by things they thoughtthey saw and cries they already heard—running, some in panic, some to save others—while a swarm of vermin, coming through those opened gates and those doors no one had the sanity left to shut, gnawed them down to bone. The swarm had made the whole village prey; the virtuous, and the fools, and the innocent. Brionne had ridden through it, immune to the swarm, on the deadliest killer of all—wanting them, wanting revenge, wanting—God knew what—

And after the carnage, after the horse was gone, his sister had just started slipping away, not eating, not speaking, eventually not reacting to the world at all. For a few days down at first-stage, they’d been able to make her drink—but last night at midway she hadn’t even done that for them. The horses down below wouldn’t tolerate her. Cloud wouldn’t. They imaged whenever they had to deal with her, and it was nothing– nothing—a sane mind wanted to feel again.

Right now his sister didn’t move, didn’t think, didn’t know and probably wouldn’t care if she went off that edge. Not only would she not drink since last night, she wouldn’t blink this morning to save her eyes from the cold. That was how fast she was sinking. They’d tied a bandage around her face to keep her eyes from freezing– Danny’s idea—and a scarf around that, and then folded the skins around her with the fur side in. He could sense Danny and Randy through Cloud’s sendings plain as plain, constant and alive—but his sister wasn’t there. Just wasn’t there.

And he didn’t know whether he even grieved for her.

He wantedto. But maybe that was only to prove he could, after so much death.

He wanted to get her safely to Evergreen.

But he most of all wanted to get her to the doctor in Evergreen, so that if there was a scrap of a human mind left in her that could be suffering, he’d have brought her to die in a civilized and comprehensible environment, not in some bare-boards cabin on ground too frozen to bury her—where—he didn’t want to think about it– the scavengers would leave of her… nothing more than was left in Tarmin now.

Beyond getting her to the doctor, he didn’t know. God forgive him, he wished every night since they’d gotten her back that she’d just drift peacefully deeper and not wake up the next morning. Even unconscious, she’d driven them out of every refuge they had—and when that lost horse had shown up down at first-stage, the last place where they could have been safe, he’d knownit was his sister it had come for.

He hated her—and he couldn’t let her go. There was the whole story in those two facts. Danny was probably asking himself how he’d ever gotten them for his responsibility. This morning Danny had been uncertain about setting out, and he’dargued with him—

He didn’t remember all that he’d said, but he’d bent every argument to get them on their way before that horse found them, —the way he’d wanted them to get out of first-stage, because that horse haunting the fringes of the woods down there had come up near the cabin walls that last night, calling and calling for a hapless, foolish girl who’d, please God, passed beyond answering it or any horse.

Because what in hell did they do if Brionne came to and they were in that little cabin with a horse who—Danny tried to keep the lid on that feeling, but he knew—might kill her and maybe him and Randy in spite of everything they could do to stop it? He couldn’t blame Cloud for protecting his rider. And he didn’t want Brionne to wake and answer that lost horse down there, either. He’d felther stirring, down at first-stage, that last night.

And, God, he didn’t want her near a horse.

He knew, too, he shouldn’t be thinking about it. He tried to stop. He’d learned from Danny how to listen to Cloud and see not just flashes of damning illusion but clear pictures in his head.

The preacher down in Tarmin had always said if you listened to the Wild you’d be attracted to thoughts of sex and blood that came and went for no reason. And he’d feltthem—but he wasn’t even sure what the preacher feared: he couldn’t have explained to anyone how noisythe world was when he was around Cloud—and how scarily quiet it was, even in the howling wind, when Cloud was out of range. He’d gotten to depend on that presence for safety—and it wasn’t just hearing some ravening Beast, as the preachers called it– it was hearing everything, it was an intensity of smells he didn’t smell, colors he didn’t see—most of all a sense of wherenessthat he couldn’t explain in words, a jumble at first that made you think you were off balance alt the time, but that just—slowly turned into a sense of where things were and how far everybody was from each other and who they were and how they felt—that in this place was an assurance you were still on the mountain and not walking off it.

Thatwas the sense you could really get hooked on, and the preachers didn’t know that one—or maybe they did and weren’t telling you that because it was just too attractive, the way Brionne had gone off into it and gotten herself into a place she couldn’t– maybe didn’t want to—get out of.

That was the other side of it—you were bound to a creature that wasn’t human. And if it should die—

The world began to flatten out: Cloud had begun to pull out of range, growing more vague as the snow came between them. He knew then he’d been thinking very dangerous, scary things.

“Pull, dammit,” came from out of the fog beside him.

He pulled harder, and as they came closer to Cloud the world re-expanded. That was the way it seemed.

At the same moment came a sudden shovein what Danny called the ambient, a flash of and an awareness of

Danny wanted him quiet. Danny didn’t want him interfering with his horse. Danny was

Foot skidded. Body reacted. Heart caught up late. He was too tired, too out of breath. He’d never walked this far in his life, never imagined what it did to feet and legs to walk up incline after incline with no letup.

The wind came at them from the side in a sudden gust. They couldn’t seeCloud, but Cloud was still there, still aware of them—

Two hours on a good day, Danny had said. He couldn’tbe that wrong.

Chapter 2

Storm brought early twilight to a cabin that, on the east slope of a tall mountain, lost the sun in mid-afternoon, and it meant peaceful horses now that they’d run themselves silly in the gale—now that, moreover, they’d eaten something humans found entirely noxious, that left a faint aroma about them of bushdevil musk as they were let in for shelter.

It didn’t stop two horses from starting a little neck-nipping and tail-lifting in the middle of their two-footed partners’ supper in a very small cabin. Then there were the throaty rumbles and the explosive snorts that presaged lovemaking, which had its effect on two humans tryingto concentrate on griddle-cakes and hash, an early supper and an early bedtime, by their intentions.

Guil hadn’t been in the mood for the last several days—a hole in the side tending to discourage a man. Tara had suffered the love-making in the ambient in lonely resolution and was not resigned to do so tonight; he caught that impression quite clearly through the taste of hash, the smell of dead bushdevil and the musk two amorous nighthorses generated on their own. She had set her mind on making an advance just real soon now—limited to milder activity, it might be. Acknowledging he was doing well to be on his feet.

He was going to finish the hash. His horse could wait. Her horse could wait. Tara could wait. He’d all night.

Tara made valiant attempts to slow down with supper.

But the horses didn’t wait, and he didn’t taste the last of the hash. Neither, he thought, did she.

One thing about horses, once didn’t satisfy them. They saved it most of the year for this season, though they’d not reject a little offseason recreation. But in winter, given time and opportunity and a couple of humans to care for their essential survival, they had only one thing to do besides eat and sleep. It was the force that bound herds together for the winter. It was the social impulse that shuffled the deck for pairings, that ended by spring in pregnant mares and smaller, saner groups, four or five, that hung together for the season.

And by the time two humans had wended their way through essential and polite human processes—Burn and Flicker were through the first round and far from finished for the evening.

Long winter nights. Long season.

Tara, fortunately, was taking the same precautions the mares did in bad seasons. He didn’t know if she had the first time they’d made love: he hoped so. But bitterweed was something the shelters kept, right along with the tea, the salt, and the flour. Horses wouldn’t touch it until there was nothingelse left to eat: it prevented foals in years when there wasn’t forage and it kept riders from getting pregnant—maybe from siring as well: he’d heard it speculated on but never proved.

He’d drunk the damn tea, too, though, out of basic courtesy, because it tasted really bad, sugar didn’t half cure it, and he didn’t think anybody should have to suffer it alone.

Fact was, he likedthis woman. He hadn’t said too much yet and some things the horses didn’t carry in quite the human way or the human sense: nuances of emotion were real chancy. But he felt safe with her, felt as though if things went wrong he’d have solid, clear-thinking backup, and that on good days it’d be good just to know she existed in the world.

Wished she’d felt differently about the kids, that was the only thing. He was really, really disturbed about that, and hadn’t, in the dose of painkiller Tara had shoved down him, had his wits thoroughly about him when she’d taken a wide decision in the matter of their own welfare for the winter. Tara didn’t hesitate on a threat. Just didn’t. She’d been a Darwin rider before she’d come to Tarmin, a hell of a lot rougher life than this mountain had been, and there were a lot of shadow-spots like that with her.

There would be for her with him—he knewhe had a lot. His partner wouldn’t have died if he’d had the capacity to follow blindly where she’d wanted him to be.

When the horses carried sex in the ambient, winter-long, thinking stopped in a rider shelter. Partnershipand springtime partings were where thinking took up again—and as recent as Aby’s death was, and as recent as her partners’ deaths were, he thought it possible he’d ride with Tara at least for the summer to come.

Soft lips ran down his neck, gentle hands down his back.

–If there weren’t the question about the kids.

–If she weren’t so hard-minded.

Hands stopped. The mood crashed.

“The girl’s a killer,” Tara said.

That was true. The girl was responsible for everything that had happened at Tarmin—for Tara’s partners gnawed down to bone, still alive. That last was Tara’s image, not his, because Tara didn’t buckle and she didn’t give the kid any slack, not for the loss or the memory of it. She was damntough.

And maybe, having lost a partner himself, he needed Tata’s unforgiving mind the way he needed the winter cold to come between him and what he’d lost.

She came around him, wrapped him tight, held him close.

Said, into his ear, “The mountain doesn’t forgive, Guil, and I don’t. I wasn’t made that way. ” Lips brushed his, gentle and kind, belying the words that passed them. “I told Danny everything– chance to go up, chance to go down—advice to stay. But they won’t lether die. And she should have. She shouldhave, Guil. I’m not talking about justice. ”

The girl was still a danger, in Tara’s mind. It was possible in his experience that the girl would pull out of it—but it was equally possible she wouldn’t, and worse, that she’d go on living and that she’d be a problem around horses that might get worse instead of better. Tara could be entirely right.

But if they just got through the winter they could ship the girl down to Anveney—if they had to, with the first truck convoy that came up here—where there weren’thorses, where there wasn’t anything alive, including grass, for that matter. It was hell on earth for a rider. But there the girl couldn’t affect anything. There she’d have no power. No means to draw another horse to its death.

He thought when the storm passed and it looked like a good day he’d ride up the road as far as the first-stage shelter and see if the kids were there, as he hoped to God they’d stayed put. The weather certainly hadn’t invited them moving on.

But, God, if they had decided to move, he hoped they’d taken straight out. Most of all he hoped that they weren’t up at midway when this hit.

She punched him gently with her fist.

“Dammit, Guil. ” She propped herself on one elbow in the furs. Her shirt was open. The firelight glowed on her skin. “Told him every damn thing I could, Guil. I swear to you. —Better than anybody ever did for me! Don’t look at me like that. ”

“Somebody,” he said, tracing the line down the middle of her chest with a gentle finger, “should have done better for you. ”

She stared at him. Stared as if she were really mad.

But the surface of her eyes glistened in the firelight. “My partners in Tarmin did everything they needed to do for me. I don’t needpeople to do things for me. ”

“I know you don’t,” he said.

“All right, I’ll ride up and check on the next shelter. I’ll do it. I’ll go tonight!”

“When the weather clears,” he said, “ we’llgo. ”

“I don’t need you to go. It was my doing. I’ll handle it. ”