Rider at the Gate

Cloud moved into the vicinity, refusing to take any orders from Jonas’ horse, flatly, no. Every horse in the trail party was male and older, autumn was nippish in the air, and the Westmans might be a working partnership in which a new horse and rider weren’t necessarily welcome—but that didn’t daunt Cloud in the least—Cloud was <young, strong male horse. >

Teeth clacked, snap, just short of a nighthorse rump, as Cloud passed Jonas’ horse to the rear. A foot cocked and slyly kicked back, again a miss, all calculated, all narrowly short of mayhem—just a trial of personalities.

Jonas swatted his own horse across the withers, and the meeting last night flashed across Danny’s mind, <himself, from Jonas’ view,> skinnier and plainer and more junior than he thought he was. He’d learned their names last night, when he’d agreed to come with them: Jonas and Luke Westman and Hawley Antrim, who was somehow a cousin of theirs and related to Aby Dale. Their horses… they imaged themselves, and no rider could totally figure a strange horse’s name on meeting: but in their riders’ word-names, they were Shadow and Froth and Ice respectively, a chilly set of impressions in the ambient.

<Cloud by calm water. Quiet, pebbles under the surface.> He laid a hand on Cloud’s neck. <Danny riding. > Shadow had annoyed Cloud, and Danny really, desperately hoped that Cloud wasn’t going to make him start out the trip walking, in the company of senior riders, with all the juniors lined up at the gate to watch.

He made a solid try at getting up on Cloud’s back, determined to do it on the first attempt, and determined that Cloud not move away from under him.

To his relief he landed square on, and immediately Cloud took a snap at Froth’s rump, moving closer, momentary jolt.

But Jonas had started riding toward the gates, and the others followed, the horse called Froth not without a snap back at Cloud in retaliation.

< Still water, > Danny kept thinking, as he followed the three out the gates of Shamesey camp. Nobody got thrown, nobody bit anybody: he let the three senior riders go well ahead as they rode in leisurely fashion past the gates of Shamesey town.

He thought then—he was suddenly sure that he should have sent a note to town, telling his parents where he was and what he was doing. For one thing, it would make his parents worry about him for a satisfactory several months.

—Off hunting a rogue horse. Don’t worry. Back before summer. Love, Your Son.

He really, truly wished he’d done that. They deserved it. His father deserved it.

And, thinking that, he lagged farther and farther back, away from the casual images the three seniors let flow back and forth, because he didn’t want to think about his family in their range, or eavesdrop on their business, either, feeling himself on scant enough tolerance.

He’d be on trial with them for the first while, he was sure: they thought he was useful because he could hear Guil Stuart farther than he was supposed to. They said it was because he was a snot-nosed junior who couldn’t control what he thought, and in spite of the fact that that was his use, he didn’t intend to broadcast everything in his head all the way to catching Stuart, or annoy them with his junior-rider insecurities spilling over at them.

So, first to keep from thinking of home, and then to keep from thinking about the trip ahead and the chances of trouble, he looked at the grass moving in the breeze. He noted the footprints of a timid scavenger that had crossed the road last night. Field-rats, he thought. Somebody had been careless with the garbage. Probably the garbage-wagons had spilled over when they went out yesterday to the dump. Out there—the province of truly junior riders—you got vermin so thick the ground moved.

Cloud’s skin twitched. Garbage-guard was a job he’d never done but a week. He’d have starved first. Cloud didn’t want to think about it, and switched his tail energetically, thinking instead of <mountains. Evergreens. Looking down on the plains> until his head was crowded with those thoughts.

He’d meant to look back at least once while they were near enough, but he’d decided not: the juniors might be watching from the gate. He did only when they rode past the shoulder of the hill, when the road wound around it and he knew it was his last chance before it cut off sight of Shamesey town.

But all he could see from there was the wooden wall, the pastures, the fences out across the valley.

He saw the cattle-keepers taking the cattle out for their daily pasturage, far in the distance. The junior cattle-guards were the little moving dots of darkness far in the lead. The herds of cattle and sheep and pigs went out like that every day, rain or shine, until the snow fell.

He might be doing that all winter, instead, earning a few coins, or, at best, riding winter watch on the phone lines that ran along the road to Anveney and down the coast to Malvey, watching for breaks and guarding the crews that kept them working.

The lines ran beside them as they traveled, following the road. They were all that let you believe that human civilization stretched out into the Wild. The shadows of them went on and on across the land, a convenient perch for birds that preyed on vermin in the grass. He saw them, dots along the wire, as the sun grew higher. He heard their buzzing cries. He sometimes had that strange out-of-body notion that he was watching himself ride along with three other riders; but that wasn’t a bird sending that impression: that was some creature a little closer to the earth and with a bigger brain than any bird had. It was watching them from the rocks that cropped out of the grass on the west side of the road. The cattle-guards might need to look sharp, later in the day.

The riders ahead of him didn’t speak. He had other, less spooky images, sometimes: Cloud’s, of the High Wild, he was sure that was what he was seeing, <sun shafting down through tall trees. >

<Pastures ringed by those same trees, and rocks covered with snow.> Cloud switched his tail as he walked, quite certain where he was going now, quite content with the direction, but not—not communicative or sociable with the horses ahead of them.

Cloud was uneasy, Danny thought, and saw the twitch of Cloud’s ears, the backward slant of them that accompanied a thought of <clouds gathering gray and dark. Clouds flashing with lightnings.>

<Cloud in the den last night, Cloud with images of high hills. >

<Lightnings flashing. Wind blowing. >

Danny shivered. He slapped Cloud with his hand to distract him. “Don’t be like that. They’re older, is all, you silly sheep. Don’t pick a fight. There’s three of them.”

<Rain falling on the riders ahead. Soaking rain.>

Cloud wasn’t happy with the riders or their horses. He wasn’t sure Cloud understood what they were after, coming out here, except the chance to go into the highlands—which Cloud did approve.

Cloud, he thought on the instant, didn’t see any real reason to be following the tails of three other horses. Cloud could take him where he wanted to go. Cloud didn’t need a guide.

And in that thought, also, he suffered a clear, cold realization where he was, on the dusty road far from Shamesey town and Shamesey camp, headed north into territory he knew was dangerous for the weather alone—to be stuck there probably for the whole winter, in company with three strangers he’d only just met, of a class of people reputed for wildness and strange manner, and whose only recommendation was being friends of a man, also a borderer, whom he only remotely knew.

<Rider dead in the rocks. >

“No,” he muttered, disquieted. He toed Cloud in the ribs. Cloud tossed his head, threw a cow-kick to jolt his rider.