Rider at the Gate

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 passed, 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.

Denis came running and grabbed him around the middle, terrified, wanting him. Danny shoved back as Cloud’s fright hit his nerves. He struck out instinctively just to get Denis away from Cloud, screaming: “Get out of here! Get out of here! Go home, you brainless little fool!”

In the next instant he felt the sting in his hand and saw Denis sitting on the ground with a hand pressed to his cheek, all shock and hurt, tears in his eyes.

The shock he felt was what stopped Cloud. That was all that stopped Cloud until he turned and shoved desperately at Cloud’s muscular shoulder, trying to image to Cloud that this wasn’t an enemy, this was a part of him… he ordered Cloud to go away, and Cloud surged against his push in a fit of jealous anger.

“No!” he said, shoving back, and imaged

Cloud sent back.

“Behave yourself!” Nighthorses understood some words, more than a few words, when they wanted to; Danny was mad, now, and Cloud was mad, but he was madder, and scared: it was his brother’s life at stake.

“Denis.” —That did no good. Cloud was angry at the people, angry at the boy, and Cloud didn’t want to know who Denis was: the complexities of human family relations were beyond Cloud’s imagining. Danny shoved hard at Cloud’s shoulder. “Go away if you can’t behave. Cloud, go away. Now!”

Cloud shook his neck, an obscuring flurry and flutter of mane, then backed a step and whirled with a stinging lash of his tail. But he sulked a little distance away from them, temperous and snapping at an equally surly horse in his immediate path.

Danny turned toward Denis then, not wanting to deal with the boy, still trembling as he was with Cloud’s fighting anger.

But Denis wasn’t there. He’d not felt him go. Cloud hadn’t told him. It wasn’t important to Cloud.

Dammit!

There would be murders by morning. When the camp shook to nighthorse dreams, the slum of Shamesey caught the fever. Old feuds, old angers, old resentments, would boil up in the taverns and the houses tonight. The rich sat safely insulated in town center. But no one in or near the camp palisade could be immune from the madness that had broken loose—when all the camp swarmed with images, when all the riders had the same dread of their own dark imaginings.

Clearly a Shamesey kid who’d left the common path had no place in his own home tonight. He couldn’t face his father or his mother or his brothers—especially not Denis… a realization which settled and occupied a numb, vaguely angry spot in his heart.

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.

But now, and for no sane reason, all of a sudden rogue rider was echoing around the ambient, fear spreading out to attack Aby Dale’s partner—as if Stuart had just gone unstable, just like the ghost stories, only because he’d run from the camp and gone out alone. But wasn’t that what you were supposed to do if you couldn’t hold something in: get away from the horses, get calm, get quiet? Stuart wasn’t crazy. Stuart wasn’t any rogue. It wasn’t fair or reasonable for people to think so.

Was it?

he questioned the dark, but Cloud didn’t answer him. Either Cloud had gotten out of range, or Cloud was refusing all dealing with him until he’d gotten himself in hand.

he thought, trying to calm his rattled nerves. He very much wanted Cloud’s comfort right now. He wanted Cloud to be near him—

But nothing came back but Constant, now, came the erotic urges of horses heading into winter rut: sex and rivalry and anger. So much anger, no focus, and so much fear of instability…

He couldn’t even image as disturbed as he was. He looked at the ground as he walked, at the dust, gaslit from the poles in the tavern yard, determined to notice detail. That was the last mindless defense against an invading image. He strove to see individual grains of dust, in the half-colored texture the gaslights and the lantern light gave to the ground. He noticed how the footprints in that dust were different, the town-made boots, and the ones more individual, borderers, the sharp, tri-partite hoofprints of the horses under and over them.

In that preoccupation he came up among the tables where the commons gave way to Gate Tavern territory, under the gaslights, where old Mastraian had his hands full. Mastraian’s town help were bringing out ale by the pitcher-full: nervous kids, slum kids glad to have any job, even one the preachers said risked their souls, and, working along with them, rider kids, as yet horseless, and a few riders so new or so young they welcomed a tavern job to keep themselves and their horses fed—forage being no viable choice in Shamesey’s civilized lowland, where even open pasture had owners.

He was a second-year junior. He was far richer than that. He had his winter account with the camp-boss, money for camp store, the hostel he stayed in, and another account with Mastraian, beyond what he’d given his family in Shamesey—he even carried a little cash in his belt-purse; and the tavern would thank a customer for cash tonight, he was sure, from anyone who carried it—there were just too many customers, over half the camp having followed the disturbance to the gates, for the harried staff to keep tabs.

So he laid down a five on the porchside counter, in exchange for which the counter help handed him an empty mug. He found himself an empty place at a table, shoulder to shoulder at the end of a long bench with other juniors and a couple who didn’t look at all to be juniors, man and woman, maybe even borderers, he wasn’t sure.

A mug and five meant you could sit at a table, pour from the pitchers the servers set out, and drink yourself gradually stupid, which he was determined to, tonight, for the first time in his life. His father would be furious if he knew, and quote the preachers about ale and riot. His mother would be disgusted, and say he was a stupid kid in bad company, squandering money. Of course. Squandering was his mother’s word. It didn’t matter if it was your money. If you spent money or time on something she didn’t like, you were squandering it.

He was never so conscious of the wall dividing the camp from the town, and him from his family. He’d never had a hangover. He wondered was it as bad as seniors said. He’d spent more money plastering his family’s walls than he’d ever squandered in the Gate Tavern. He’d bought clothes and gear he had to have, nothing extravagant. He’d bought sweets for Cloud… who didn’t at least cry over how wonderful the money was and call him a sinner damned to hell in the same evening.

The high, reedy sound of a flute had started up, another joined in oscillating discord, and then the drummers started a wild and noisy rhythm.

Nobody could be planning sleep in the surrounding hostels tonight. A flood of riders left their tables and started dancing in the commons, some with drinks in hand, men and women in a mingled line.

His table mostly cleared in that first wave, and he refilled his mug and joined what was getting to be a rowdy first-dance line. A handful of borderers had started a contest of sorts, the show-outs holding forth inside the meandering lines—lowland riders didn’t do the borderers’ steps, didn’t do the single-dances like that: he wouldn’t dare go out with them, but he watched, asking himself if he could keep his balance, if he could do those steps, and trying a couple of them in the line-dance.

He found a couple of juniors, both male and girl-less, when the line broke up into sets. They danced through one mug and a refill—he didn’t know one of them except as Lane, a kid from the far side of Shamesey slum himself. He didn’t like Lane much, but that was no requisite for sets. They danced themselves breathless and drank half the refill down.

Then a couple of borderers, already way too many ales down, were spinning past each other with knives flashing, coat-fringes flying. The sets line bowed out for fear of mishaps, while the drummers went crazy, and the hired-help dodged down the line, filling outheld mugs and spilling astonishingly little.

(Follow not the beasts, the preachers said. Avoid ale and riot. Dance is the Devil’s enticement.)

He had his mug refilled without asking—without noticing it was about to happen; and, out of breath, tried a few of the steps he’d seen…

Arms hooked his of a sudden, and he found himself snatched and spun into another set, arms snagged by two sweating men he didn’t know, both drunker than he was, and as suddenly found himself spun out onto a dance circle, where two borderers beckoned him in, wanting him, he feared, to play the female third—

“No knives!” he panted, and the two, holding each other up, roared with laughter, grabbed his free arm, and snatched him into a dizzy circle-dance. Then he just concentrated on footwork to the drum, round and round and round, with gulps from the mug in between, matching their consumption the way he matched their steps.

Sweat was pouring down his face, despite the chill. He’d picked up the step, and thought he was doing damned well at it. The beat became the whole night, the whole universe, so long as his balance lasted.

But after two rounds he’d no breath for anything but to take the good-natured, hard slaps of high country riders on his shoulders and to weave away, thank God, still able to find his way to a table and sit down before he made a public staggering fool of himself.

A server filled his mug. He’d lost count of how many he’d had out there. Assured of a stable bench under his backside, he sipped the ale, not because he wanted the alcohol, but to ease a throat raw and dry from panting.

Most of the dancers were still going, but the two borderers, after deriding the junior for flagging, had fallen down at other tables.

The sounds he heard now were all of drums and flutes, the sights all whirling bodies, recollections of gaslights spinning past.

Human images, human company… humans couldn’t image to each other without the horses close, and with the horses absent, human minds could grow quiet, exhausted, blind, deaf, and voiceless. The rogue-presence was gone, its burden lifted. Funerals ought to be loud and raucous, and one could hope the dead woman could somehow know they’d thrown a good one—borderer that she was, the camp she’d been intending for her winter-over at least knew she was gone, and, in that, acknowledged they all were mortal. They wished the dead rider a good hereafter, if there was one, or at least wished themselves drink and dance and noise enough to make the dead hear the party.

It might ease Stuart’s mind if he heard the drums out there in the dark. He hoped Stuart did know he and the red-haired woman had friends in camp. He hoped Stuart might come in and have a drink and sit and mourn in sanity, giving the lie to the fools who, in their stupid, idle speculation, put the rogue business on the man who’d only loved that rider—because he’d made them feel it; he’d shoved it at them hard, and their nerves were jangled.

God, he wanted his family to be safe tonight. He wanted to know Denis had made it home to bed before the craziness started in the town, as he very much feared it could. It would be better in town once the dancing had started and angers fell in camp. It would be better for the town if, in the Shamesey taverns, there could be dancing, too, or prayers in the churches, or whatever calmed hearts and tempers—since the preachers said dancing was the Devil’s way.

No question that the slum could hear the drums: many the nights of his life he’d heard the like from that third-floor flat, lying in his bed, scared of devils. His family would hear the drums and flutes tonight and know there was dancing going on. His mother would be angry and his father would be praying to God to forgive their wayward Danny for dancing and for drinking and for being with low minds, that was what his father called it, words he’d surely gotten from the preachers.

Low minds, consorters with the beasts.

He’d not asked to be a rider. But nobody, not even the boss-man (and he had asked that among the first agonized questions he’d ever dared ask the boss) nobody knew why horses picked somebody, or why, as the boss said, they’d sometimes travel unaccountably long distances in search of someone, the way Cloud had done for him.

Cloud had just, in the autumn of his second year, wandered down to Shamesey looking for someone of a description that somehow he guessed he happened to fit.

Maybe Cloud had found no prospects in the high villages. Maybe he’d been so persnickety he’d decided to search a really big town, because there were just more to choose from. Cloud had been persistent about it once he’d arrived. Cloud had hung around Shamesey hills, coming down to the town gate at night, scaring hell out of the gate-guards. The whole town had heard that the night-watch had been shooting at a horse, which so far they’d been lucky enough to miss, and the town council had been recipient of an angry ultimatum from the riders, who took strong exception to the firing.

At the time, he’d been solidly on the gate-guards’ side, frightened for his town, believing absolutely in his father’s hell, and night after night suffering strange dreams nobody else—he’d tried to figure if he was the only current case—admitted to.

He’d been steadily losing sleep and having nightmares about the gates and the gunfire ever since what the kids called the devil-horse had shown up. His dreams had finally grown so vivid and his mind so sleep-cheated and frantic that, after a day of agonizing over the prospect of another night of such dreams, he’d marched down to the camp to protest to any rider he could find that he was a good God-fearing kid, to state that riders were clearly responsible for protecting townfolk, and to ask that rider how to stop hearing it.

The rider he’d asked at the safe limit of the gate had taken him, in his extreme reluctance, right inside the camp where he’d never been and straight to the camp-boss, whereupon the boss had looked him up and down for the scrawny, unlikely kid that he was, and drawled, as if there was certainly no accounting for tastes, “The horse wants you, that’s all.”

Then the boss-man had asked him his name, and said he’d be living in the camp, soon—told him plainly that he really didn’t have any choice about it, that when a wild horse was sending like that and you started feeling it as that personal, then pretty soon you were going to start hearing everything that came along, every little burrower at meadow’s-edge, every bird that perched on the roof-trees… the world would never be quiet to you, ever after.

The boss-man had said that if you got a Call and lost that horse, you’d never, ever sleep again, and probably you’d go crazy… so he might as well take a hike into the hills and let the horse find him.

The boss-man had lied to him, he’d found out. He’d actually had a choice. But in the conviction that he hadn’t, he’d walked out of the Gate Tavern and lost his breakfast, right at the camp gate, he’d been so scared of hellfire.

Then he’d heard the horse in broad daylight. He’d seen it waiting for him in the hills across the road, hills he couldn’t even see with his eyes from inside the gate: he’d been getting images that strongly, from that far away. He’d never realized it.

Clouds across the stars, that was the way Cloud called himself. Clouds scudding fast, before a storm wind. You couldn’t say all of it aloud, with the rain smell and the shivery chill and all, and he’d been completely, helplessly swallowed up in it—he’d seen nothing but that starry sky when he’d begun to climb that same grassy slope that Stuart had run, and met, past that hilltop and another one, a horse that decided, finally, it had found a fool who satisfied its juvenile itches.

Found a fool that knew where to scratch, of course. Cloud was a glutton for human fingers.

Found a town-bred fool who’d fall off and near break his neck half a dozen times before he quit insisting he was going one way when Cloud knew very well he was going another.

It hadn’t been easy for a young fool in any sense. Bruised and skinned on various parts of his body, he’d been, when he’d written down a message to his family and sent it by a town kid.

He’d thought a lot about hell in the two days he’d waited for an answer from his family.

He’d said, in that message: I can make more money being a rider, —because his father and his mother understood money.

He’d said, —We can get the apartment fixed. We can buy a new drill, one of those electrics—we can bring in a line. He knew his father lusted after that, most of all.

His mother had written back—he still kept the letter, folded up, in the lining of his coat: Your father hasn’t accepted it yet. But he says you can come in. He doesn’t want to hear about the horse. Come to supper Sunday. We won’t talk about the camp.

That had been the agreement, the condition under which he was acceptable at his family’s dinner table. That and the money he brought. His evident prosperity. As things were now…

A lump started gathering in his throat, and he washed it down with forbidden ale. Now it might be a while before mama could talk papa into Sunday dinners again. Maybe papa’s anger would stretch into winter—there wasn’t much time left in the year.

You couldn’t get hire in winter, to speak of, but there was spring when all the goods had to move at once, and if he could somehow come back next spring with a lot of money, papa would be happier.

And they might have worried about him, a little, if they didn’t hear from him. He could sit in camp all winter and not write. Just let them worry. Let them wonder if he was mad at them. Or if he was all right.

Papa just didn’t like to think about the drums and the drinking and the fornication, that was what papa called it. He hadn’t ever had any chance to fornicate, himself, but it wasn’t something you could argue with papa. In papa’s mind fornication and wickedness was what went on in the camp, all the time, and after the work of summer and fall, winter was one long misbehavior, that was what papa called it when papa was being delicate in front of Denis.

When papa was mad, however, he found that papa had other words, some of which he hadn’t heard even from his friends in Shamesey streets, words that made him mad, and made him ask what you learned in church when you got to be his father’s age— he’d never had that in his lessons.

But if he’d outraged his father and embarrassed him in front of the church by showing up in rider style, he’d profoundly embarrassed his mother, who had to face the neighbors and her customers, and them of course all asking questions—like where the money came from to paint the apartment, and what went on in the camp, and she wouldn’t know, she wasn’t interested in hearing it from him—but nobody was going to believe she didn’t. That was the position he’d put his family in.

The preachers said once you started hearing the beasts of the world, you couldn’t ever stop, you couldn’t come back… because once you heard one, then you started hearing all the beasts, even the little ones. So you slipped deeper and deeper into damnation and became like a beast yourself.

That was one thing the preachers said that had turned out to be true, but not quite the way they’d said: it wasn’t like hearing words. Sometimes you’d just see things, when you were riding out and about the hills. You’d see yourself and your horse going down the road, and you’d know you were picking something up from some little creature somewhere, under the bushes or up the hill.

And it just wasn’t that bad. They were gentle images, most times, a little spooky toward dark, but you learned very quickly to tell what was sending it—and mostly the feelings they brought with them were anxiousness, or curiosity: very few wild creatures wanted to come near a nighthorse.

As for the sex his parents imagined… God, that was a joke. If you were a townbred junior, you just lay in the dark when the images came past you from somebody else, as they did, and you tried to imagine you’d found some rider girl who didn’t think you were pond scum, but there weren’t many girls among the juniors. Shamesey girls didn’t come out to the horses. They were too scared of hellfire, or no horse had ever wanted one. And there were rider girls, but they all had boys they’d grown up with. So that left a Shamesey rider on his own at night.

But, oh, there were women who came into camp, full of mysteries a sixteen-year-old couldn’t possibly deal with, women in fringed leather and carrying knives, sun-tanned and wonderful, women who bunked down mostly with senior riders they personally knew… a lot richer than he was, and not needing a junior to tell them his sweaty-palmed aspirations.

The horses eavesdropped, at the same time, and sometimes spread feelings all through the den, until, if you were in the vicinity, God help you…

Cloud was a pushy horse, and devious, and Cloud flirted with all the mares. Cloud drove him crazy sometimes.

Like now.

He finally knew exactly where Cloud was: in the dark of the den by the gate, not that far out of Cloud’s range when Cloud was excited. And Cloud was sniffing after a mare who was more than interested.

He couldn’t stop it. It wasn’t even his right to stop it, the boss-man had told him that, and the boss-man could as well have left it off the list of particulars: Cloud would have made him know his rights and dues beyond any doubt at all.

The dancing was still going on, a little slower, as everybody ran out of wind, but craziness was running the camp, with the autumn cold in the air. So, of course, when he was so buzzed he staggered, Cloud, with the images of blood and dead females in his head, had to think, tonight, of sex. God, Cloud had no sense of moderation.

Nor did the mare.

Damnation, the preachers said. A nighthorse had no kindness. Animals had no souls.

Cloud had no shame, that was sure, and he didn’t know how to be near human beings when Cloud was doing what Cloud was doing at the moment. He’d danced enough and drunk enough; he decided he’d better stagger off to bed, which, wobbly as he was, was just too far, in a cheaper hostel clear around the circuit of the camp. He only needed a place for an hour or so where nobody would bother him, where he could suffer Cloud’s mate-courting in private, and sober up enough to walk home, and he didn’t want…

Oh, God.

He had to get up fast, dazed as he was. He couldn’t stay in the tavern yard. He stood a moment, while images came and went, to be sure of his feet.

Then he wandered through the area of the dance, walked his unsteady way down the street toward the nighthorse den next the gate, which, sense told him, was where Cloud was doing his courting.