Rider at the Gate

But when the western heavens showed clear in the final glow of sunset, the slum-folk directed their anxiousness instead down their streets of ramshackle, unpainted board buildings toward the encircling walls of the rider camp; and, with the helplessness of the poor who had to live nearest the camp and the images that seeped through those wooden walls, they cursed and spat for fear of nightmares.

The Fisher household felt that storm-feeling in their drafty third-floor flat, a flat which lately had new stoppage for those drafts and smelled of fresh paint and plaster. The Fishers paused in their supper and looked toward the window—as Da

“Hell!” Da

“Where do you think you’re going?” his father demanded.

His mother said, “Da

But he couldn’t sit down. The feeling was dreadful, as if his mind were going every direction at once, and he had to wonder, didn’t his family feel anything?

His youngest brother, Denis, shook at his arm, saying, “Da

His mother was upset now, and his father was angry, ordering him to take his seat with the rest of the family and act like a sane human being.

But he had to get to the camp. He had to find Cloud. He headed for the door.

His father shoved his chair back, too, yelling at him to come back and do as he was told. His father crossed the room in two strides and grabbed his arm hard enough to bruise it. Then his mother was on her feet, and grabbed his father’s arm.

“Let him alone!” his mother yelled.

“The boy can act like he’s sane! The boy can sit down and finish his supper!”

“We have neighbors!”

“Fine, we have neighbors! They all know our son’s crazy! It’s no news to them!”

“Don’t you yell at me! Sit down! Everybody sit down and eat your di

Da

His father’s hand cracked across his face. His father started yelling at him, something about God and religion, devils and hell.

But devils and hell weren’t here. Something else was, something as frightening and far more imminent.

Da

Da

“You don’t have to come back, you!” his father yelled. “You’re damned to hell, dealing with that beast, you know that? You’re going straight to hell!”

“Shut up!” his mother yelled. “You don’t mean that! —Da

“Yes, I mean it!” his father shouted, and the fight was in full cry when Da

He was halfway to the bottom, two steps at a time, before Denis overtook him. Denis got a grip on his coat, screaming at him to stop, he didn’t want him to go, papa didn’t mean it, he couldn’t go out there, the devil would get him and drag him and that horse down to hell if he went back there.

Da

It was meaningless noise to him. He ran the stairs, rushed out the door and down the street, breathless.

People everywhere were stopped, gathered along the walks, looking toward the wooden walls of the camp. He’d never felt anything the like: it was bad, it promised the town worse dreams, and people shied away from him in the streets, seeing not a kid who’d grown up in their neighborhood, but a rider’s fringed leather, a rider’s clear purpose in the midst of the stifling storm-feeling.

Trucks jammed Gate Street, which led down to the bell-arch, trucks crowding one another, engines growling in their uphill climb toward the market and the warehouses buried deep beneath the town center: protection for the material wealth—and the vital food supplies that were life to everyone, merchant and slum dweller alike.

Only the riders could survive without. Riders could survive without the town; the town could never survive without the riders.

Tanker trucks lumbered in the midst of the canvas-covered cargo trucks, huge, long rigs the drivers ordinarily chose to park outside the walls. Tonight they were in the line, seeking shelter from the coming dark.

Da

“Don’t listen!” a street preacher was shouting. “Heed not the beasts! Death and damnation to the followers of the beasts! Pray! Shut your hearts against the creatures of this world and pray to God for deliverance!”

The feeling on Gate Street was overwhelming. Maybe part of it was the exhaust from the trucks: fumes welled up in the narrow street, under a dilapidated overhang of buildings so old and so close that at the gentle imprecisions of the uphill road the tankers ran their tires up over the low curbs and threatened the eaves and people on the sidewalks.

Da

Terrible thump. Some driver rear-ended the truck in front. Second collision, then, as somebody else stopped too short. Panic was contagious. The truckers felt it.

“Pray for your children, that they follow not the beasts!”

He was strangling in it.

Fear raced through the camp, provoking a general surveillance over the main street from the doors of rider hostels and nighthorse dens alike. The camp-boss and the several riders who had first come out to meet the arrivals had set up their own watch over the situation from the vantage of the Gate Tavern porch. Nighthorses who had drifted into their vicinity had shied off into the twilight, spreading the message that the camp-boss was not pleased.

The tide of disturbance had rolled all the way through the camp and back again. Consistently now it imaged a thin, smallish man with fair hair, recognizable to some, not to others; it imaged strangers at the gate, and horror in their company.

That image stirred hate in some quarters, and that hate roused other angers waiting to explode, tempers set off by nothing more than the darkness of the feeling. Fights broke out that had nothing remotely to do with Guil Stuart.

But it was hate for Guil Stuart that had sent Ancel Harper in particular searching after his cousins; and anger and fear flowed through their meeting at Hami’s Tavern, a bar mostly claimed by the riders of Hallanslake district. Nighthorses wandered through the open portico of the tavern, and the feeling in that precinct was not good.

Hallanslakers, Harper included, knew Stuart.

And unlike most of the riders in Shamesey camp, Ancel Harper recognized the threat lurking about the edges of the message. He, unlike most riders, had felt it before and never wanted to feel it again.