Rider at the Gate

The three riders who had spoken with Stuart held their horses still, and Da

< 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.

<Blue eyes, pale face, a thread of blood down from the nostril. Autumn hair on sunset stone. >

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.

<Burn,> 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, ru

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 Da

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.

Da

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 begi

<Dead horse,> Cloud was imaging. <Blood everywhere. Dead rider. > 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 Da

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 ru

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 allthat 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 orderedCloud to go away, and Cloud surged against his push in a fit of jealous anger.

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

<Dark,> Cloud sent back. <Lightning. Thunder. Cold rain.>

“Behave yourself!” Nighthorses understood some words, more than a few words, when they wanted to; Da

<Lightning.>

“Denis.” <Boy at table in house. Boy following him through Shamesey streets, past trucks, crying, upset. Angry people in the house. > —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. Da

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.

Da

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.