Rider at the Gate Read online

  Gerry had died years later, of something Stuart hadn’t had a thing to do with, just the breaks as they happened in the High Wild. Gerry was dead and Stuart was alive… nothing to do with each other, those sets of facts, those events that left one man alive, one dead; but it wasn’t damned fair, in Harper’s thinking, and Harper didn’t want to see the face that kept intruding into his mind in constant image, preoccupying his attention like an unwelcome, waking dream.

  Most of all, he didn’t want to feel what he was feeling in the air. He didn’t want that sending that was rubbing in the fact of Stuart’s presence in the camp like salt into a wound: Stuart, Stuart, Stuart.

  Damn his trouble-prone, arrogant, son-of-a-bitch ways that plowed ahead into a situation when smarter men said stop, don’t go. Men and horses had breaking points, and the High Wild, when a man or a horse grew careless, always won. Minds snapped. Illusions became fact. A man wandered right into his death, blithe and believing, until madness sucked his companions down into that delusionary hell with him.

  So somebody else had died. On Stuart’s side, this time. One of Stuart’s friends, most likely.

  Good riddance.

  Harper carried a scar across his ribs. Stuart had one to match. So had Gerry. Draw, it had been, then—thanks to a trucker’s interference. Hallanslakers had said no go, and maintained a convoy wasn’t safe on the mountain. Hallanslakers had had damned good reasons for saying so, including the higher fees they ought to have gotten for doing it; but Stuart, the only outside rider the convoy had hired on, he’d pushed, claimed of course they could make it, and he’d bring them through—for no extra charge, as if money didn’t matter.

  And Stuart, of course, had gotten his way, his way being far more palatable to the trucker boss, so it was go on up the road at the same fee despite the risk or lose their reputation and look like cowards to the clients.

  Two Hallanslakers had died on that haul, swept away down the mountain, thanks to a snapped cable and toppling truck that had nearly taken Gerry out as well. Knocked cold, he’d been, by that free-flying cable that had taken Gerry’s partner down.

  Stuart in the number of the dead? The man whose stupid-stubborn fault it was they were there with that faulty cable? that unstable truck?

  No such luck.

  And Gerry hadn’t fought Stuart again. Gerry hadn’t fought much of anything after that trip, not even after his cracked head healed. Gerry was never the same after that. Gerry had taken hires he shouldn’t have taken, loned it across the mountains in a season he shouldn’t have. Gerry’s sense was gone, thanks to that cable, and Gerry’s heart had gone, swept down the mountainside with his partner, and that was that.

  A brother couldn’t hold him. A brother couldn’t stop the change in him. Gerry’d been on his own when he died. He’d chosen that, as others who lost partners chose to die. He’d ridden out to his death. His horse… they’d had to shoot it when it came to camp without him. They’d had no choice. They’d been lucky: for a moment, it had been sane.

  The feeling in the camp grew darker, and more angry: nighthorse politics, sexual politics, that shivered on the autumn wind.

  Death. Sex and death and a rider Stuart knew and slept with.

  Harper had his knife with him. He knew where Stuart was now, disquieting feeling. He knew that the ripple of query had just gotten to Stuart.

  Stuart knew and the ripple came racing back again, through nighthorse minds and human, a feeling like the pause between the lightning and the thunder.

  The camp-boss watched from the Gate Tavern porch as Guil Stuart came walking toward the camp gate, following that reverse tide of rumor. Slight, smallish, dressed in brown fringed leathers: the reality behind the image. Stuart’s long blond hair was loose, a borderer’s vanity—and he carried knives, one in the boot and one on the hip.

  That was a manner, as the saying had it. A definite manner which gave not a damn about the rules of no-conflict that prevailed in a camp this size… a manner that flatly challenged the camp-boss to call him on it.

  But say that Stuart wasn’t the only one, and that Stuart carried at least two of his in the open: a clear warning. Say that the camp couldn’t enforce the rule: there were riders—especially borderers like Stuart—who had specific reason to guard their backs, generally against other borderers.

  Borderers, the rider-guides born to the High Wild, were the ones who knew the routes at the extreme points of settled land. They were a necessary fact of rider society—they stayed in Shamesey camp only during the winters, when the routes were closed to trucks and riders alike; and Shamesey locals, the guards over cattle and town edges, hadn’t the knowledge the borderers had of each other. No one local knew who was right and who was wrong in their quarrels, out in the far land where civilized law didn’t apply and where those knives settled grievances.

  So Lyle Wesson, sipping a slow, speculative pint on the porch of the Gate Tavern, kept entirely out of it, not seeing anything in his venue in question.

  Borderer business. Borderers looking for each other, carrying bad news, was what Wesson picked up. He couldn’t identify some of the other feelings he was getting on the backwash out of the farther camp—he didn’t like much of what he could identify, so he kept a purely human ear to the matter, awaiting human specifics.

  More than an ear: Dart, old himself, limping a little (it was arthritis in the hindquarters, an affliction they shared, with the winter nip in the air) left the comfort of the nighthorse den nearest the tavern to stand watch over the commons, too.

  And as Stuart approached, on foot, Dart imaged —and something so unquiet it shivered along the nerves.

  “Man’s walking,” Ndele said, moving out of the doorway to stand at Wesson’s elbow.

  “He’s being followed.”

  “A man can’t help that,” Ndele said.

  Truth. That Stuart chose to walk and not ride gave Wesson, who disliked and distrusted borderers in general, a better opinion of him: Stuart, for his part, had meant to keep it a human matter.

  But a living darkness trailed Stuart as he passed them without a word, headed for the three strangers waiting for him just outside the gate. It trailed Stuart through the gathering dusk, regardless of Stuart’s intentions, a head-down, angry darkness with which no rider would be willing to argue.

  Stuart’s horse. Defensive. Outraged.

  Dart flung out a feeling of ill and warning, protecting the porch from that outrage, and trotted across the street, positioning himself between his rider and the source of that dark anger.

  Opinion all along the street solidified around that pair as they passed through the gates and the strangers’ message reached its target.

  No question now: rogue was the word on the wind. That was how humans called it. What nighthorses imaged was something roiling and dark, and that was what Wesson perceived in Dart’s image.

  Rogue horse at least: that impression came through the horses, and maybe—far worse news—rogue rider, somewhere out in the bush.

  He didn’t know where, now, that image was coming from. It had no direction, but it was spreading like wildfire, and even the image was deadly dangerous. It was more than imagination nighthorses shared with human interlopers. Insanity came quite, quite naturally in this season of mating and rivalry. So did death.

  There began now to be another presence in the uneasy flux of images: a young red-haired woman, a borderer, on a nighthorse that imaged itself as, no qualifier, just the bright and largest Moon.

  “Aby Dale,” Ndele whispered, and Dart’s presence carried a gut-deep certainty of the woman’s death, and a landscape so real, so particular in detail, that Wesson would swear he’d been there. “She’s dead,” Ndele said. “A fall. On the rocks. She was with the convoy. She died.”

  More riders gathered, soft movement on the boards of the porch. Images proliferated, rocks running with blood.

  On that instant young Danny Fisher came skiting in, shied off from the man at the gate, and da
rted, distracted, along the palisade wall, looking for his horse, Wesson could guess, among the nighthorses that maintained an uneasy vigil at the den near the gate. Wesson caught and held his breath until the fool kid was clear of the situation.

  Town kid. Shamesey kid. If the boy had fallen afoul of Stuart, it would have been his business. And Wesson was, personally, very glad it wasn’t.

  * * *

  Chapter ii

  « ^ »

  DANNY FISHER CAUGHT THE RUMORS IN FULL FORCE AS HE CAME through the gate, in a flood of images both true and half-true.

  And, stopping along the gate wall in a shiver of shock, he discovered the general focus of the trouble was the man who had just walked past him.

  In that time-stretched moment he realized he knew Stuart— knew him for a fair man, a borderer, true, but never the bullying sort: far from it, Stuart had sat on a rainy spring evening on Gate Tavern’s porch, sharing three drinks with a kid who, at that time, could only pay for one, and telling a towner brat who’d dared— dared come to a borderer to ask, how he could ever hope get the long-distance convoy jobs he dreamed of.

  Trips the like of which Stuart was clearly born to—born on, Danny had caught that in the way you knew some things even when the nighthorses weren’t near, things that just echoed to you—a muddle-headed junior had trouble distinguishing the sources of what he’d gathered out of that moment. Maybe he’d heard them from Stuart himself; maybe he’d recalled small details from casual remarks Stuart had made earlier at the bar—he didn’t know, now.

  But Stuart hadn’t grudged information to him. He’d come to Stuart half expecting ridicule—or worse, an indecent proposition, borderers having no good repute among lowland riders. He’d been mortally scared, and desperate, walking up to that table, offering to buy Stuart a drink in return for his question, and Stuart must have picked up on that fear. Stuart had laughed, given him an amused and immediate Calm down, he was spoken for.

  And because Stuart’s Burn and his own Cloud had both been nearby, he’d caught the image of the rider who’d laid personal claim to Guil Stuart… beautiful, beautiful rider, beautiful seat, maybe glossed by Stuart’s memory, he didn’t know that either, but he’d been instantly set off his balance and mortified with embarrassment, because, of course, he’d realized Stuart had read his suspicions of him through and through.

  But now, watching the man walk out the gate alone to face some kind of bad news—news that Danny suddenly, illogically, felt centered on that woman so important to Stuart—he shivered in the unmistakable darkness and skittishness in the horses’ minds, and wished he could do something. He felt outraged when someone muttered, ‘borderer’ in that tone that implied Stuart and trouble deserved each other.

  It wasn’t fair. He almost blurted out something to that effect, junior that he was, but talking out of turn could start what he by no means could finish: it was a group of Shamesey men, six of them, years senior to him, and you didn’t contradict the seniors.

  Then he first heard, aloud, from the same group, the word rogue horse, and almost lost his supper, because it at once echoed off everything that had brought him running out of town. Rogue was that going-apart. He’d heard a rider tell about it, a man who didn’t need to say he’d talked to somebody who’d personally seen it, because the images had carried a detail and a feeling that haunted a junior’s sleep for nights after.

  But rogue couldn’t have anything to do with Stuart, or Burn, or Stuart’s beautiful border woman. It couldn’t. That awful word didn’t happen down in Shamesey lowlands. It was campfire stories, it was ghost tales around the hostel fires in deep winter: other riders had objected just to the telling of the story with the horses at hand. They’d said it was irresponsible to pass that image at night, when things were spookier, a word that belonged up in the highlands, in the extremes of dangers riders and horses faced up there and you always hoped they exaggerated—some creature, a horse or a bear usually, got brain-injured and started doing things a sane one just wouldn’t do, sending at a range a sane one couldn’t, coming right into encampments to kill, playing canny games with trackers while it hunted its hunters. It didn’t for God’s sake come down to Shamesey gates and civilized territory to trouble a town of Shamesey’s size.

  It didn’t touch someone he knew in real life, or disturb his family at their own dinner table.

  The tail-end of the convoy had just filed by the open camp gate, on its way into the city gates, headlights shining in the twilight, and behind that last truck, he could see Stuart cross the road to meet with the riders waiting there, all mounted, all waiting.

  He had the most terrible feeling then, like chill, like forewarning… he suddenly realized he was picking up expectations out of the ambient. Every horse around them was disturbed by what they picked up from human minds, like a buzz of gossip, everyone anticipating/dreading/wanting calamity to the man they were watching. The feeling around the gate grew stiflingly close, charged and irrational.

  Rogue, rogue, rogue, kept circling through his mind and maybe others’, that dark, nasty feeling that clicked into place with a clear impression of a twilight mountainside, a memory so specific he could have recognized that place if he’d ever been there; different than he’d felt with the man who’d told a story and given impressions into the ambient secondhand, right now he felt something… so powerful, so horrible… so present with them…

 

  “Dead,” he kept hearing, words, as humans talked. Dead, dead, dead… while Stuart stood on the other side of the road and out of earshot, arms folded, head down, mostly, so one couldn’t read his face as he talked with the mounted riders.

  Then a sudden crisis hit the ambient. Danny held his breath as Stuart abruptly strode away from the meeting and turned upslope on the grassy hill, heading away from the camp.

  The three riders who had spoken with Stuart held their horses still, and Danny felt a terrible, smothering fear, so vivid it became his own, and made his heart race.

  < Autumn leaves. Rocks. Blood. >

  He put out a hand to find something solid. His fingers met rough bark… his eyes told him it was a tree trunk on the mountainside, along that perilous road; but his brain knew it was only the palisade wall.

 

  Sight dimmed, senses drowning. Some other rider jostled him, likewise on the retreat. Everyone was clearing the area.

  Then a wild squeal erupted out of the dark behind the gates, a heart-stopping squalling.

  “Let him go!” someone shouted aloud… shouted, in the camp. The sound shocked the air as a nighthorse broke through the thin screen of bystanders, not bolting uncontrolled into the dusk, but treading catfooted, shaking his mane and throwing off such a cold feeling of ill that senior riders crowded each other to get out of its path.

  it imaged itself, in a violence that raced over raw nerves and ran red. It whipped its tail then, crossed the road and spooked the messengers’ horses as it launched itself uphill toward Stuart, running full out.

  He scarcely saw Stuart catch its mane as it cut across his path on the hill. Stuart swung up and astride, a solid piece with the darkness that raced along the shadowy grass of the hillside… they ran and ran, until Danny couldn’t see them any longer with his eyes. Only the feeling of and remained, shivering down his arms and disturbing his heart.

  Meanwhile the three riders who’d met with Stuart crossed the road, coming quietly toward the camp gates—a darkness themselves, mind and body, they and their horses. The men nearest the gates began to push them shut as if they could wall that menace out.

  For an instant the feeling in the air was horrid, full of death. The gate-closers gave back, mission not accomplished, and the riders came through.

  Danny shrank back against the wall, breath dammed up, his head swimming with visions of blood and rocks as those riders passe
d, and his nerves feeling, far worse, the separation, the taking-apart that he hadn’t recognized when he’d first felt it in the town. The anguish and the anger of a rider’s death rippled and echoed through the area around Shamesey gates like a stone tossed into a quiet pond.

  Something warm breathed on his neck then, a presence that had slipped up on him quiet as a breeze, a frightened, spooky mind that didn’t like what it smelled/saw/felt from the strangers and meant to safeguard his rider from them.

  He didn’t need to ask, and he tried not to image… which did no good at all: he turned and reached for the refuge of Cloud’s midnight neck, tangled his fist in Cloud’s mane, stood there in the shelter of Cloud’s warmth, only then beginning to shiver.

  Cloud was imaging. It was the same image he had seen, the same image the strangers had brought with them through Shamesey camp gates, and the face of the dead rider was, he was increasingly sure, Stuart’s border woman.

  Stuart’s grief came shivering through him then, as if it were washing off the hills. The iron bell that tolled for inbound and outbound convoys began to ring again, distraction to horse and rider senses. They would drink, tonight. They would dance, make love, anything to numb the night. That, in Danny’s young experience, was a proper rider funeral.

  But there was no joy, no celebration of life. Violence boded everywhere about. Murder raced out into the hills and echoed off the slopes, into the streets of the camp. He’d only heard the faint stirrings of that anger, that bitter, killing rage, let loose in the town—disturbing the streets, maybe reaching his family, maybe prompting the anger at the table. But here it rang through his bones and stirred the pain of his jaw where his father had hit him. Here it prompted him to rage next to tears. The violence, the confusion that had broken forth in the camp, now, in force, threatened all of them. He felt it tugging at his reason.

  He saw it in the eyes of the small boy who wove his way past the leather-fringed elbows of the rider crowd. He recognized that thin, white face as someone familiar to him and didn’t even realize for a heartbeat that he was looking at his own brother Denis. In that moment he saw Denis as he’d never seen his brother before, a thin, scraggy, amount-to-nothing kid. He saw how fear and hard work were setting a mark on Denis that was on their father, on their mother, on Sam. It was death happening, it was the damned, doomed mark of the masses who huddled in walled towns, the sons and daughters of starfarers, as the preachers constantly reminded them, afraid of the world they lived in.