Rider at the Gate

Overwhelming awareness as a man brushed past him with a contact like electric shock. That man grabbed his arm, faced him about in a fit of temper. He felt the anger, he instinctively flinched from the blow—

But he felt something else flowing through the painful fingers, burning straight into his gut, and he couldn’t breathe.

“Damn kid,” the rider said, as if that meant dirt.

He jerked his arm free. The sexual feelings didn’t stop. The anger didn’t stop. The rider grabbed him a second time, hard, by the wrist.

No. Not Stuart. It was the riders who’d talked to Stuart outside.

They’d brought the rogue-image inside with them. They’d felt it up on Tarmin Height. They were the source of the fear—and the image. Not Stuart. The riders at the gate had been right to try to shut them out.

But you didn’t start a fight with anyone with the horses involved, not if you could help it, not for anything. Not for your life, if you had the least chance of saving it yourself. The men at the gate had let those three riders in, and the whole camp was in rut and anger and fear.

“Easy,” the man said. The grip on his wrist hurt, and he was scared, but Cloud wasn’t there to rescue him right now, Cloud was deep in the sensations of a den gone mad with mating.

“Kid! Dammit!”

He tried to get free, tried to draw a breath. The rider wasn’t the dark body he felt. He tried to see where he was, ignoring Cloud’s presence, ignoring what Cloud was doing.

“Friend of Stuart’s,” the man said. “Friend of his. Get a breath, kid. Get two.” The stranger popped him across the face, backhanded, enough to sting. A bench came up against the back of his knees and he fell down onto it. “Dammit, kid, come down. You’re sending it, d’ you feel it, do you taste it, are you deaf?”

The stranger had his attention, now, holding his wrist, trying to pull him out of the fog, but nothing human or sane got through the ambient. There was sex, there was anger, there was grief… they were both caught up in it. A vast, shapeless anger rolled out of the town streets toward the gates. He felt its frustration and its fear; he heard the sounds of voices, heard that sound of human beings in a mass, disturbed and angry, outside the camp walls.

A shot went off—from the gates, from the town, from inside the camp, he couldn’t tell—the report rang off walls and echoed off the hills.

The rider let him go, turned to shout at people at the tables, yelling to get the boss, to get somebody to stop it.

He didn’t know Stop what? except for that anger rolling past the camp, toward the road.

<Rogue-feeling. Trucks racing on a road too steep. The lead truck going over, the whole convoy going too fast, the truck missing the turn, falling and falling… like the copper-haired rider… falling down and down among the rocks… >

He didn’t want any more. He didn’t want to hear it gone over and over, and see that woman die and die again. It was Stuart’s message. It was Stuart’s dead. He wanted Cloud. He wanted <Cloud,> calling in a night gone mad.

Second burst of gunfire.

The night exploded. He lurched to his feet, he cried out to his horse, “Run!” and he was <sliding down off Burn’s back,> he saw <dry grass blurring under them in the dark…>

<Horse running,> he thought. <Horse running, running, running in the dark. >

He heard Cloud answer, somewhere near, he heard < someone shouting…

< “Open the gates!” >

< Gunshot. >

Close, quivering echo. Pain hit his right leg and it folded. He fell on one knee, and a mass of riders broke around him, followed the man who’d grabbed him, all running toward the shut gates. Bullets were still flying outside, a ringing, erratic volley of shots. The echoes came back off the hills—he’d heard hunters’ rifles echo in that strange, hollow way. All his life he’d heard it. He’d heard it the nights they’d shot at Cloud.

“Hold it!” the call went out from somewhere down the street. “Hold those gates! —Dammit, stop where you are!”

The order went out not only from the camp-boss, it went out from Dart, too, who was never far from the boss-man, and it shot straight to the nerves.

<Gates open. Riders mixing with angry townsmen, men with rifles, nighthorses sending anger, anger, anger—>

<Still water. Instant ice. >

The old man who walked past him and down to the gates was crippled. A stick supported him. The nighthorse that came up near him was one-eyed and scarred, but Dart was one loud horse, a force, with Lyle Wesson to back it, that made nerves twitch and ears prick up. Danny stood still. Movement had stopped, stopped in the image, stopped in reality, out beyond the gate.

But the horse out there on the hill went running, running, and the rider staggered up, pain shooting through his leg. Danny sat down on the bench and shivered in the dying mental echoes of the gunfire.

<Rider ahorse,> was the image that came to him, to everyone, he believed, up and down the street. <Horse running into the dark.>

Stuart had grabbed that mane and was away. The mob that had poured out of the town—an irrational, hating thing, as crazed as the rogue-sending—couldn’t take Stuart now.

His leg still ached, telling him that Stuart hadn’t escaped unscathed. He didn’t know why he shared it, but he felt the pain acutely as he got up, and limped, alone in his area of the street, toward the gates.

< Danny. > He saw himself, his hand clasped to the hurt on the side of his thigh. He felt the condemnation he was due, anger at a junior who had, he realized it now, been dangerously sending out into the ambient.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered when he got to where Lyle Wesson stood, hands clenched on his walking-stick.

“Damned fool,” the boss said. “Did I tell you, or not?”

He tried to image Stuart’s helping him. The image went askew. It was just Stuart, the way he’d been that day on the porch, a stiff, rain-smelling breeze stirring his hair and the fringes of his jacket. A downpour grayed the commons. He’d thought even then that it was no bad thing to be a borderer, free of towns and free of family…

… free of a father who, however he excused it, hit him and consigned him to hell.

He didn’t want the whole camp to know that, but, humiliated, he feared they’d all heard. He thought of <wind in the grass, wind bending the stalks>: that was the earliest image the boss had taught him to send, to be invisible.

But he wasn’t the only area of disturbance. He heard shouting out in the dark beyond the gates, he heard voices raised in demands. The town wanted the riders to do something. To hunt the rider down. The town came to the camp with its fears for its safety, its peaceful sleep—the rich feared for their right to go on as they always did, oblivious to the Wild beyond their walls, and they demanded—

The town could go to hell, he thought, with a lump in his throat. The town didn’t know. The town didn’t remotely know what he was, or what he saw, every day. He lived in a wider, more vivid, more connected world than he could make his father or his mother or even Denis understand.

Danny Fisher damned sure didn’t belong in this town any longer; he’d felt it, in the echoes of the gunfire that still echoed in his brain.

The lump in his throat grew larger. The leg ached. He wasn’t aware of Cloud, now, but that was the way it ought to be—the camp was settling, minds were growing quieter, the pain in his leg was diminishing…

He was terribly scared when he thought about what had happened, how the whole camp, the whole town had been on the edge of crazy. Everybody was scared now. Even the camp-boss was scared of the craziness that had almost driven them to do things and feel things in one mind.