Cloud's Rider

He asked Ridley what he thought of the weather-chances for the next while and Ridley said, Oh, should clear for at least two days. When he asked how Ridley knew that, Ridley looked puzzled and didn’t answer at once.

Ridley just knew, that was the real answer. It was complicated, the system Ridley had for knowing, or at least rendering good guesses. And no flatlander was going to be sure of it on a single telling.

Assuredly, though, it was a day too good and too su

The village as a whole was one street, no more, and the buildings were of unpainted boards, with incredibly steep roofs, a village made quaint and beautiful with a deep, deep coating of snow, and snow-coated trees, of all things, trees right in town, the evergreens that gave the village its name, thick-coated with white where they stood out of the range of children. He was delighted by the trees. And by the fact the snow-piles were white, not brown with mud.

And maybe the village wouldn’t look so pretty when the rains came and the mud took over, but under its coating of pristine snow it was the prettiest human-built place he’d ever seen, including Shamesey’s middle square where rich folk lived.

They went toward the mountain—up the street—and Da

“Meeting in the church,” Ridley said, as they walked. “Right down there.”

“In the church,” He was mildly surprised. And alarmed. They let us in there? he almost asked. But that might be rude.

“Middle building, there. Church is the biggest place in town. Except the tavern down at the other end. So the village council meets here, the court does, any what they call sobermeeting. We were over in the left-hand row, endmost, yesterday.”

The church he’d have definitely taken for offices. In Shamesey they wouldn’t for any reason be asking a couple of riders under the hallowed roof. Practicality of using the space made a logical sense that wouldn’t have mattered to the hellfire and brimstone religious down in the flatlands.

But he figured level ground in a village tucked tight against a mountain had to be too valuable to leave sitting idle.

It was an impressive building when they came up on its wide-roofed porch, and they went in through a foyer with religious pictures over a painted blackboard with a notice that the Wagstaffs had had a girl and that they needed volunteers to patch a leak in the church roof.

He took off his hat. Ridley did, and they walked on through.

The inside of the church was painted bright blue, with a huge mural, not too badly rendered, of God letting down the Landing Ship in His hands, and of green and gold fields, and white villages all over. And mountains with villages above the encircling clouds.

It was certainly a lot more cheerful then the murals in his parents’ church, where an angry God sent lightning down and black beasts slunk along the edges with fangs and claws and glowing red eyes that gave sinful children a lot of bad dreams.

In Evergreen, God had a smile on His face, and nighthorses stood on the edge of the green land, looking curiously up at the vision of God with an attitude real horses took.

He let go a sigh without thinking about it, and wasn’t so scared of this church and this preacher, who maybe wasn’t going to threaten him with Hell; he found the courage to go and meet the cluster of villagers who were enjoying the tea and cookies at the rear of the hall. Ridley walked in the lead, in search of cookies, Da

“There’s the ones that came with me,” he said, constrained, if somebody was about to hand out benefits and good will, to remember those that needed it worse and far more permanently than he did. “I’m fine. The Goss boys lost pretty well everything.” He didn’t see them in the meeting. He thought he should at least speak for them.

“Lord bless,” the woman said, and introduced him to the district judge, Wilima Mason-Hodges, a gray-haired woman who couldn’t shake his hand: hers were full of teacup and cookies, but she nodded in a friendly way and introduced him to a Mr. William Hodges Dawson, attorney and proprietor of something about or near the tavern.

At that moment the marshal and his deputy wanted the mayor and Wilima Hodges, and Da

He said what he knew. If the blacksmith Carlo was staying with was part of this meeting, nobody mentioned the fact to him—and he didn’t think that by the less-than-good things he’d heard about the Mackeys that anybody had bothered to invite them—though he would think the blacksmith ought to be a fairly substantial businessman.

Meanwhile Ridley was discussing Je

Dawson the lawyer asked about his co

Then the marshal called out that everybody should take their seats, and Da

The proper thing seemed to be to stand there, and the assembly turned out to fill the front four rows of the seats. Reverend Quarles got up and offered a quiet, thankfully brief prayer respecting the dead down in Tarmin and the survivors that had gotten up to Evergreen.

After that the mayor got up and straightway said, “Rider Fisher, if you’d come and tell us what you witnessed down in Tarmin.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, and walked up to the front of the meeting, hat in hand, to stand and talk while others sat down, but he’d talked in meeting in the riders’ camp down in Shamesey, so it wasn’t his first time to talk to so many people—and these weren’t drunk, crazy, or armed.

And he figured he should at least cover all the details he had given the marshal in his office, how the Wild had gotten over the walls one night down at Tarmin, that only one Tarmin rider had survived from the camp, and that the Goss kids had lived till he rescued them.