Rider at the Gate

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 feelit; 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 Da

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) nobodyknew 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 ski

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 di

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 di

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 hewas 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’dnever had that in his lessons.