He thought he ought to feel overwhelming remorse, loss, something. He knew in his head why his father had hit him. He even forgave his father in his heart, the way the preachers said he had to do. He knew the desperation his father felt in the face of his middle son’s sure damnation, and his middle son’s tempting Sam and Denis and their mother to go down that same hellhound road.
But that road was his breath of life. What he held dearest and most vital violated everything his father held rational or sacred. He couldn’t possibly explain to his brothers what he felt when he touched Cloud—his father called it proselytizing for the Devil, leading his brothers into temptation.
So he’d personally rejected God. He hadn’t meant to. But once he’d begun to hear the beasts, he’d begun to hear the whole world as it spieled down to winter and licentious riot. He’d felt in it the urgency of all life… even of townsmen and the placid cattle that had come down from the stars with them: delicious feelings, forbidden feelings his parents didn’t talk about and he could only hint at with his friends because they weren’t, he’d understood, the feelings his friends had. They were constant, they were preoccupying: pictures in his mind and feelings that charged those pictures with sensations that ran over his skin and roused desires he had to seek privacy to deal with. He’d prayed, and the pictures came into his prayers. He’d worked until he sweated, and he felt his own skin alive to the air.
He lived now in the flux of beast-sent images that invaded his mind moment by moment. He shivered in the feelings of lust and anger that alternately took his body, the outpourings of disturbed minds, when he should be repenting for hitting Denis and defying his father.
Except no matter what his father believed, riders did have feelings the preachers would call good. Even the horses had them—a thing no rider could explain to the preacher-men, a thing riders couldn’t even tell each other, it just was. When you got a number of horses together and enough riders to pin their thoughts obsessively on a set of images, they said you could hear beyond the stone’s-toss that was a horse’s ordinary range. Shamesey regularly proved it. And the pain people felt tonight was because riders couldn’t ignore each other.
He couldn’t ignore the rider alone out there. He couldn’t forget the pain that had rung through Shamesey camp, that still rang, in the iron tolling of the bell. The images tumbled one over the other in his skull, the woman, the rocks, the blood. He didn’t easily distinguish (they said a rider’s ability to judge such things got better, over time) what was his memory of what he’d just seen imaged and what he might be hearing from riders in the camp, or at this very moment, even from Stuart, at a range no nighthorse was supposed to attain. Horses in pain reached inexplicable distances, did things they weren’t supposed to know how to do—junior riders said so, around their own fires. He’d never heard a senior rider say it.
But that horse’s pain, which he thought he’d felt when he’d had his hand directly on Cloud, had gone straight to his nerves in a transferred disturbance of a nature and subtlety he’d never felt before—if that was the source of it. The pain and the anger running the hills out there could be why he’d hit Denis—recoiling from Denis’ emotional outburst as he ran to him. Cloud could only see that wild emotion as an attack on his rider—and Denis didn’t know: Denis couldn’t feel the air around him. A boy who understood only Shamesey slum couldn’t begin to believe that things in the outside world didn’t feel or react the way he did. And Denis was his own world, being twelve-going-on-thirteen, and in that world of all things he believed as so, Denis could only know his older brother had gone crazy with his horse and slapped him to the ground. So much for Danny, Denis would think, go on and go to hell, Denis didn’t need him, anyway—he could hear it as if Denis had yelled it at him, without Cloud’s help.
So, —that was well enough, he couldn’t make Denis see it, and Denis had some major adjustments to the world-as-it-was yet to make, some edges yet to be worn off his hellbent sense of right and proper. Denis had it in him. Denis could learn. Denis wasn’t Sam.
But, God, he didn’t need to have hit the kid that hard, no matter that Denis was being an ass.
The way his father, equally scared, equally angry, seeing him in danger, had hit him.
The camp gates shut, the bar dropped. Cloud, venturing close to him again, spooked off with an angry whuff of breath, the wildness Cloud had before storms, deserting him as the other nighthorses, gathering here and there among the riders, shifted and snorted in the gathering dark. A group of them spooked off the same way Cloud had, a muted thunder down the street toward the farther reaches of the camp.
The riders around him turned up their collars against the night wind, thrust their hands into their pockets and, shying from their own horses, went back into the commons, onto the street, to go back to their own precincts, or into the tavern to drink and to numb the feeling.
To kill the anger, as all strong feelings had to die, quickly, in the huge, unstable assemblage of Shamesey camp. It was the rule.
Danny joined the general drift down to the commons, trying to subdue his own bit of that prickling storm-sense, trying to forget the set-to with Denis, trying to forget his father shouting at him and telling him go to hell. Everyone was on edge—his father had, he was increasingly convinced, been feeling the rogue-sending when he’d hit him. His own nerves had certainly been at the snapping-point when he’d hit Denis; and Denis had been on the raw edge, to run at him in fear, risking Cloud’s vicinity, when ordinarily Cloud scared Denis out of reach.
He’d never seen mind-to-mind panic in action—although the boss-man, Lyle Wesson, had had the universal Talk with him, when first he and Cloud had come into the camp, novices, confused and hostile and scared of everyone and everything. The camp-boss had told him in plain words that, being young, he was bound to be stupid with his feelings at least several times, and that he had better get control of his emotions, fast, or find himself out on solitary cattle watch for the next three moon-chases.
He remembered that brush of Stuart’s presence at the gates, now, when his own insides had been in turmoil and his brain hadn’t been thinking, just… he’d wanted, ached for company, the way Stuart ached for company in these precarious autumn days… and Stuart’s border woman was for some reason the image that kept coming at him as if it were his own loss, the unattainable substance of his wishes, a beautiful, fringe-jacketed rider in the High Wild… copper-haired woman with the red leaves on all the hills, the object of more than one of his furtive midnight fantasies.
He was disgusted with himself, finding his own juvenile privations echoing off Stuart’s earnest grief. It wasn’t remotely even forgivable, God! The rider Stuart loved was a mangled corpse in the images running horribly under the surface of the minds around him, Stuart’s private pain was echoing at him out of the night and he had thoughts like that. No wonder even Cloud wouldn’t stay by him, in the confusion of mating urges he was feeling in his blood— it was too painful and drove Cloud too crazy, when there was enough craziness natural in the edge-of-winter ambient.
He didn’t know why he should ache after a woman he’d never even met, a borderer who wouldn’t have given a junior a passing glance on his best day.
But Stuart had passed that close to him, with horses nearby— and a human mind, he suspected by now, was a flittery, fragile thing, very much unsure what belonged to it by experience and what came to it from elsewhere.
Or—shuddery thought—if it was Stuart he was still hearing, if it was Stuart’s thought coming at them from the hills across the road—by all he knew, by all he’d heard, also at a winter fireside, only rogues could send like that. But Stuart wasn’t. His horse wasn’t. He wouldn’t believe it. Chains of such misfortune were legendary, one rogue triggering the next—but it was stupid ghost stories, that was all. Horses and sometimes bears and cats did legitimately go rogue, that part was real—horses got kicked in the head in some mating-fight, or got a high fever that damaged the brain, and a rogue horse—probably a wild one: there were wild herds on Rogers Peak—had spooked that convoy up in the mountains and sent a rider and her horse off the edge of the road. All that was true.