<Rain,> he sent. He’d learned stubbornness from Cloud.
< Danny getting down from Cloud. Danny falling down the hill.>
<Danny going off over Cloud’s shoulder, > he sent back, the maddest he’d ever been at Cloud.
<Danny getting down.>
The argument kept up, until he changed tactics, thought about pain and sore feet and bruises, thought <snow,> and < still water. >
Then he was aware of Cloud’s presence closer than had been. Cloud met him as the road took a bend and a climb, Cloud standing on the hillside, and then walking along, head down and ears flat. Danny threw him only the most casual of glances, and limped, badly, thinking about < woods and rocks and the dead rider. >
Dirty trick.
He heard Cloud behind him, then. He didn’t have to look. He could see himself, ahead of Cloud, limping along with the stupid baggage.
He heard Cloud closer, a whispering in the grass, a soft breathing.
<Rain,> Cloud imaged.
< Raindrops on still water, > he thought, and Cloud shoved him between the shoulders.
<Cattle,> Cloud thought.
<Water still, reflecting Danny and Cloud. >
Unfair, of course. Humans couldn’t image on their own, but humans were tricky and inventive when they got the knack of it.
Cloud peevishly dashed raindrops onto their still reflection. Cloud understood his tactic.
But Cloud couldn’t drown the reflection. Cloud wasn’t as mad as the human in question was determined—and the human in question wasn’t stopping or getting into details. Danny just kept limping ahead, in the tracks of horses nice enough to carry their riders.
<Cattle,> Cloud thought. <Cattle. Cattle. Cattle in Shamesey camp. Cattle dropping manure in the street.>
Cloud could combine images when two thoughts crossed in his head.
And they clearly had.
Cloud came up beside him and slumped along pace for pace. They walked along maybe half an hour before Danny thought <Danny riding,> and Cloud stopped and waited for him to climb up.
He didn’t do so well getting up this time. He hadn’t the strength for a swing on Cloud’s mane, he just planted his arms across Cloud’s back, jumped up and landed belly-down, tangled in the strings of his baggage, to work his way across Cloud’s back in a maneuver he would be humiliated to do in front of the strangers he was trying to overtake, while, annoyed by a knee in his kidneys, Cloud began to amble on his way, giving him no grace whatsoever.
But Danny didn’t argue. Cloud was going his direction.
<Mountains in the winter,> he thought, to please Cloud. <Snowy rocks. >
<Three snobbish nighthorses from the rear,> Cloud imaged, <with cattle tails. >
“Cloud. Behave. Dammit.” He’d not had so much trouble out of Cloud on the regular hire they’d taken. He’d worked with other riders. He didn’t know why Cloud should take so profound a dislike to horses that were going to guide them to the High Wild, that would be their protection by their experience and their riders’ guns once they reached an area they might not be able to cross safely on their own… granted anything went amiss.
<Cattle,> Cloud persisted sullenly.
Then Cloud threw his head and looked back, just the red-edged corner of a nighthorse eye, cast along their backtrail.
Nostrils widened.
<Horses,> Cloud imaged, and stopped joking.
Did we miss them? was Danny’s first thought—stupid thought. There were multiple nighthorse tracks under Cloud’s feet at the moment.
They were following three horses. But Cloud was looking behind them.
He thought of the horse who’d gone out the gate, following Stuart: <Burn.>
<Horses,> Cloud persisted. Cloud didn’t think it was one horse he was hearing back there.
Line riders, Danny thought. Inspecting the phone lines.
But it wasn’t the day they usually went out, when he thought of it—unless they had a break in the line that shut down the phones, which would bring somebody much faster.
So who among the riders would go? Danny asked himself and Cloud, trying to see if Cloud could recognize the horses.
But Cloud didn’t answer his perplexity, except with this same dark image of more than one horse, on ambiguous ground, except that there was Cloud’s wind-image in it, the sweeping of the images, coming and going, distorting to many and back to a conservative two or three.
<Trucks?> Danny asked.
Cloud shifted footing, snorted to clear his nostrils of stray scents and sniffed again.
<Horses,> was all Cloud could give him, but this time they had riders, less certain an image—just the illusion of shadows atop shadows.
Not wild horses, then. Not likely, unless Cloud was getting not the scent but the desire of the horses for humans.
A wild lot wasn’t something to meet in the autumn. And they did go on the move in this season.
<Cloud running,> Danny suggested. But Cloud didn’t, Cloud only started uphill and off the road, where Danny didn’t want to go.
Danny swatted Cloud’s shoulder, wanting <going on road. Us in bushes with bad horses. >
<Dark horses streaming along the road,> was Cloud’s thought.
And Cloud picked up the pace.
<Water,> Danny thought, not the still-water of silence, but <Cloud wading. Cloud-wavery-scent image running away in water. >
Cloud didn’t think so. And maybe it was true: they were so close the scent-image came to them on the wind from their backs, and strange riders were almost certainly back there—it was too persistent to be anything Cloud just remembered. But the wind came to them treacherously as it did in the foothills, reversing its ordinary direction in places, coming almost east to west, when nearly the opposite was the rule on the road—and they could only trust the wind would shift again.
A human knew that. He wasn’t sure Cloud did. What ruled Cloud’s decision was likely the surety that he didn’t smell humans in the direction he took and he did smell them at their backs.
Trouble was what they had to reckon it. Towns were the safe zones. You didn’t trust what you ran into in the Wild—not solitary riders or groups of riders. That was the law Danny Fisher knew. Maybe it was a townsman way of thinking, but Cloud lit out at that fast-traveling pace Cloud could hold for long, long runs— Cloud had learned that humans didn’t put their noses down and smell tracks, but they saw them and they understood them by processes that had never occurred to Cloud.
<Tracks in dust. Wavery riders on solid horses on road.>
That was what Cloud reasoned—maybe as far as the fact that nighthorses without humans didn’t use roads. And Cloud wasn’t staying around to meet them.
Chapter VI
GUIL STUART SWEATED LIGHTLY IN THE NOON SUN, WATCHED THE brown grass pass under his dangling feet and Burn’s three-toed hooves, and avoided the thoughts bobbing to the surface of a distracted, several times jolted mind. He rode northerly still, not using the road, but overland, up over the rolling, grassy hills, on the same course which he had begun to choose in their first panic flight.
Burn had other ideas, making a slow, quiet intrusion into his vision.
<Domerlane road,> Burn imaged for him, the characteristic two stones with the old rider signs, that exact view of the mountains, so for a moment Guil didn’t find himself on this road at all, but well south of Shamesey town, high in the hills where the Domerlane left the MacFarlane High Trace, the mountain ridge towering on the right.
<Winter snows,> Burn sent, and, falling enthusiastically under the spell of his own imaging: <Domerlane camp and female horses. >