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Shamesey, lying southeast, had protested and demanded that Anveney shut down its furnaces on those days when the wind was blowing toward Shamesey and its farmlands—but Anveney consistently refused, first on the grounds that it wasn’t possible, the furnaces couldn’t shut down entirely on a given day; and then demanding that Shamesey pay exorbitantly in grain and fuel for any days the refineries were out of operation.
So the two regions quarreled and counterclaimed—it was news the rider camps cared about, since the fools held trade and rider pay and villages’ winter supply hostage to their ongoing dispute. Anveney didn’t need riders to guard their town at all, Anveney said, because their walls and their guards defended them, even out in the remote mining pits.
The stink and the poison defended Anveney, that was the truth all riders knew, and even townsmen in Shamesey had an inkling. The plain fact was that no creature in its right mind would come near Anveney, first for the stink that clung to everything, in that zone where the smoke spilled its most odoriferous content to earth—and second, for the more alarming effects: a stranger to Anveney felt he had contamination on his skin. He’d been here once, himself, and his skin had itched until he’d bathed in clean water, which argued to him and surely to any creature with a brain that it couldn’t be good. It was why he wouldn’t allow Burn close enough to eat the grass on the edge of this place.
But humans somehow survived here. Humans mined and refined the metals, and when Anveney shipped its ingots and sheet metal outside the envelope of its poison, it still needed riders to guard the shipments.
Anveney both needed what its poisoned soil wouldn’t grow or graze, and held its own goods back if it didn’t get the price it wanted. Other towns wanted copper to make the wires for the phone system, which never worked when you needed it—but at least it didn’t draw predators like the radio did; townsmen wanted the phones enough to keep paying riders to fix the lines and guard the crews that put up poles that fell down in the ice storms all winter.
Lately Anveney and its little network of high-country mining camps with their copper and such had all made one union, and wouldn’t sell except at their prices. This was the next escalation of the smoke wars.
So now Shamesey, latest he’d heard, was trying to arrange some kind of terms with Malvey, since Anveney was as desperate for food as Shamesey was for electrics and copper sheet for rich families’ roofs. Shamesey reasoned that if Anveney got hungry enough it might shut down its smoke when the winds blew southerly. Shamesey had made alliance not only with Malvey and itsunion, but with other, smaller towns in the grain belt, which dealt with Shamesey markets, and began to hold back grain and to create stockpiles of copper against Anveney’s price-fixing and smoke-dumping, saying that Shamesey could do without copper longer than Anveney could do without bread.
It was a damned stupid situation. Guil had heard both sides of the argument all his life, at varying degrees of immediacy, and didn’t comment, as riders didn’t generally voice opinions on town politics to their employers or to the truck drivers, whose trade was gossip as well as cargo. Talk like which side was right confused the horses and worried riders, when towns got to quarreling—nobody needed more ill feeling near the horses than they naturally had coming at them, but when the smoke wars heated up, things generally grew uncomfortable; and the smell of Anveney, both the stench and the town-wide atmosphere of fear and grievance, made it hard for a rider not to have opinions. Bad enough the refinery jobs at Malvey, including the chance of blowing sky-high in a truck accident.
But… Aby had argued, in her dealings with Anveney, the pay’s good and I can camp out till they arrange the papers and get the trucks to the gate. I don’t have to go into town but once a trip.
Well for her, he supposed, wondering once, in Aby’s near company, how good in the blankets this Anveney shipper might be.
Gotten his ear boxed, he had—deserved it, he was sure; Aby’d been only half joking when she immediately after pushed him into the blankets and never did answer the question.
Come with me, she’d urged him again, last spring. Talk Burn into it. You’ve got to see the country up there.
I do see it, he’d said. She’d imaged him her route again and again.
And she’d said, pleading with him: With your own eyes, Guil. You’ve got to feel it. You’ve got to be there.
But he’d refused. He’d made his commitment to Malvey; he’d elected to run his risks with the fuel tankers up to Darwin. He had his hard-won customers down south that he didn’t want to let into the hands of anybody else, for fear they might call on that somebody else next time.
And truth be told—he’d grown a little tired of her evasions.
So now he was walking to Anveney town alone, his eyes feeling the sting of the smoke when the wind gusted a fickle current down-valley.
Anveney’s Garden, riders called the place, the area all around and northeast of Anveney, where the soil lay completely bare and prone to erosion, gullies leading to gullies leading to a wash that ran down to a river that ran through barren banks a long, long way before the inpouring of other streams began to put more life into Limitation River than death could take out. Even that far, neither riders or horses would eat the freshwater fish, which grew strange lumps on their bodies.
No riders wintered over in the district, that he knew of, either. During the summer if you looked over from the Tarmin main road, you could generally find a plume of smoke in the hills, a handful of riders resting up for a day or two, waiting for some convoy to organize; they’d wait in that still-green zone, always outside the dead fields.
Only a few weeks ago, Aby had been among them.
Chapter xi
BRIONNE’S FEET WERE COLD, HER FINGERS WERE COLD. SHE TUCKED her hands in her pockets and kept walking, brushed by evergreens which dumped the burden of their boughs and spattered wet snow onto the melting crust.
It was a beautiful morning. It wasn’t golden anymore. She’d walked through that angle of the sun. But it was a shining morning, still. Glistening white, the sun gleamed in snow-melt off tall branches. It was the kind of morning that would lead to glossy melt by afternoon, and a freezing icy crust again by night, in Brio
And when the kids of Tarmin village gained permission to go outside the walls it had always been with riders all about, but Tarmin wasn’t afraid of goblin cats. Tarmin folk and riders both went out to skate on the mountain lake, and Tarmin children, when the riders were near, went out to build snow forts and sometimes, especially if you were lovey with boys, just to walk to the Rim and see the valley, with rider pairs to watch them.
It was scary being out on her own. But she wasn’t truly afraid. Her horse surely knew she was looking for it, her horse was only testing her in making her walk so far from the walls, and if there should be a goblin cat, her horse would never let it come close to her. If there was a nest of willy-wisps, her horse would hear her call and come to her rescue, if she couldn’t, as a rider could, drive them away simply by imaging as loudly as she could.
I’m here, she called to her horse, not with her voice, but the way the riders spoke, the pictures you made in your mind.
And there came… oh, so suddenly you’d never know it had happened… the view of a girl in a red coat, with a blue scarf—of course that was herself. Of course it was. And sometimes, the riders said, you could get that kind of image from willy-wisps, but it didn’t feel scary like willy-wisps, it felt…