Rider at the Gate

And by what he knew, they equally feared the uncertainties of a rider’s life—meaning hunting for their supper. Anveney folk might haveno supper. But they seemed reassured that they were surethey would have no supper.

They suffered no surprises. The poison above the town did make spectacular sunsets… that was all you could say for it; but Guil doubted they appreciated the colors above their gray, sooted walls. He’d touched enough Anveney minds for a lifetime, among those drivers who regularly came back to this town when they had other choices. He’d tried to penetrate their sullen, argumentative insistence on certainties. They afflicted him the same way dire illness did.

He’d felt an irrational fear ever since he’d passed the guarded town gates, first that the walls were closing in and then that the successive concentric rows of buildings were shifting and entrapping him. Even when the buildings became wider spaced that anxiety persisted, on the broadening way down which, if it were Shamesey, the convoys would come, assembled in the town square with excitement and honking of horns and cheers of passers-by.

In Anveney, depend on it as one depended there were rich townsmen at the heart of everything, there wasa town square, but to his borrowed memory it was all official buildings and rich houses with sealed windows, while convoys assembled and onloaded and offloaded at warehouses outside the town wall, out by the tailings-heaps.

The buildings came in better repair as the road inclined uphill, the pavings mostly clear of muck. Here a shop stood open-doored, with moderate traffic of buyers, and there, the smell of bread from a bakery wafted out locally stronger than the general stink of the valley air. The bakery stood next a house with bright red doorposts and a red and blue door, a level porch with the rail intact and iron bars on the windows. Touches of color became riot further down the street; red beams with blue trim at the corners of neat yellow and white buildings, a carving of flowers on a wall inset—they all had a dusting of soot, and the flowers were black-edged. But the colors were cheerful.

The folk who walked here (more idle folk than in the lower town) wore townsmen’s long brown coats and broad, flat hats, men and women with woolen trouser hems i

He’d reached town center, where he was sure the bank must be, an open square with all too many silent minds and staring eyes for his liking, a marketplace not like friendly village markets, with their open stalls where riders sometimes came to deal and rub shoulders with townsmen, but shops with most of the goods indoors, requiring the buyer to commit himself and go inside. The nature of the buildings gave him no cue what business they did.

A woman passed near him, hatted and coated into shapelessness. “I’m looking for the bank,” he said to her, and she evaded him and his question with a brisk thumping of thick heels down the walk.

He suffered a flare of anger, and half-smothered it before he remembered that Burn wasn’t there to spread it around the area—but he couldn’t heara damned thing, either, not cues, not intentions, not directions to where money changed hands.

A merchant in thick sweaters was tending his out-front display goods, offering them to passers-by, woolens, as happened—fine knit-work in muted colors; and, offered inside (a sudden realization of the logic of such indoor shops), they’d smell better. He thought if the prices were reasonable, if he had money left after finding a gun, he might come back and buy one of those warm sweaters.

In that case, the man could damned well direct him. “The bank,” Guil said, raising his voice to be sure he couldn’t easily be ignored. “Sir, I’m looking for the bank.”

A scowl, as the man arranged a sweater on a cardboard cutout of a man. A reluctant nod across the square to buildings on the other side. “Bank,” the man said. That was all.

“Thanks,” Guil muttered, jammed his hands deeper into his pockets and walked across the square, past waddling, gauze-masked children and clusters of their glum elders who stopped their gossip to stare. God, he wanted out of this place.

He couldn’t swear to what building the man had indicated. He thought the likeliest candidate for a repository of money was the important-looking building with the bars on the windows: it didn’t look to be selling anything, there being no displays, but there was writing on the windows and the door, and though he couldn’t read, he’d never known anybody to write on windows of a private house.

The door was open, seeming to invite entry. So he walked in, onto a bare board floor, facing a grillwork, an armed guard, and a single young man at an undefended desk out front, while the rest of the employees sat at desks securely behind those formidable bars, which led one to wonder which ranked higher.

“Is this the bank?” he asked the guard.

“Seems so,” the guard said, looking him over. Then the young man at the desk, a thin, nervous fellow, said: “Help you, rider?”

That was the most politeness he’d had in Anveney. He walked over to the desk, folded his arms, said, dubiously, “They say I can draw out money here I put in at Shamesey.”

“Yes, sir. If you’ve the account number and proper identification.”

You could have blown him over with a light breeze. It couldn’t be this easy. “I know the number. I memorized it. My name’s Guil Stuart.”

“You’re supposed to have a card. Do you have one?”

Yes, they’d given him a card. He’d very few places to store such things. He fished in his inside breast pocket, not entirely sure he had it, but he found a little white paper, a little the worse for wear. He hoped they didn’t mind wrinkles.

The desk man looked at it and said: “Seems in order. Would you step through to a desk, sir?”

Sir, yet, from a townsman. Guil received the card back, decided he should keep it out, and as he followed the young man, heard a click that put him in mind of guns. It made his nerves twitch. But the guard had only opened the bars and let him in to the area where the men and women sat at safer desks.

“Help you?” the nearest woman asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and came and offered her the evidently important card. “I’d like to take out some money.”

“Certainly,” the woman said as she looked at the card.

“I put it in at Shamesey,” he said, still unconvinced the bank was going to work, or, more to the point, that it was going to work for a rider.

“That’s fine, sir, the lines are up. No trouble at all.” A waved gesture at the chair beside her desk. “Sit down. I’ll be right back.”

The woman got up, taking the card with her, which he didn’t like, and walked back to a door she closed behind her.

Fancy townswoman. Nice clothes. Flimsy shoes that never saw mud. Behind that door was evidently the place of moneyed secrets and decisions, and Guil told himself that Aby had been right and this banking thing evidently did work. He’d personally had the feeling, putting hard-earned cash into the bank at Shamesey—a place where they took your money at an outside window, and you stood in the street—that he might be throwing it away. He’d never remotely thought that he’d be collecting it and Aby’d be gone.

He sat and he sat, feeling awkward, waiting for the woman to come back, and wondering finally if there was trouble with the phone lines. Wondering if there was some glitch-up, maybe the condition of the card—a few rainstorms had blurred the ink in spots, and he hoped it hadn’t blurred anything important.