Cloud's Rider

It was altitude causing that. He’d felt it a little down at the cabin with the senior riders, and Guil had warned him it could get debilitating—which he couldn’t afford right now. Mouth was dry. They hadn’t eaten all day. He didn’t think he could swallow the thawed food he carried; eating snow relieved the dryness but chilled the bones, so he just took a little mouthful, after which he shut his eyes—partly to ease the headache and partly just to warm them from the wind.

But even with his eyes shut, he saw them all <sitting in snow> from Cloud’s senses, a moving sort of vision as Cloud came trudging back. <Tired horse, ice lumps in his tail, banging against his hocks.>

He had so much rather have nursed his headache and caught his breath undisturbed, but he couldn’t let that a

So he put his glove back on and broke the ice lumps out of Cloud’s tail—three big sharp ones—by bashing them against his knee with his gloved fist and the hilt of his boot-knife. The way the weather was going they’d form again off the melt that Cloud’s own body heat made, and dealing with Cloud was getting him damp, when that was what he was most trying to avoid.

Cloud paid him when he was done with a warm rough tongue across the cheek and a whuff of hot nighthorse breath in his face where his scarf had slipped. <Cloud and Da

Cloud loved ham with all his omnivorous heart. It was so vivid he could taste it.

But so was Cloud’s own case of altitude-generated dry mouth, and when Da

No words between Da

Couldn’t do anything about the cold knees except the extra cloth they’d wrapped around—Tara had told them that trick: lots of air space and extra woolen padding. But Randy’s wraps kept coming loose and gathering around his calves. Da

Then Cloud decided it was time to walk and they lost their windbreak.

“Kid can’t do it anymore. ” Carlo’s voice was all but gone as they got up. “I need help, Da

“You and me,” Da

So Carlo took the left-hand pole of the travois and Da

But the next stretch was a hellish steep that began on the inside curve for a downhill-bound truck, the kind of place where the builders had tended to do their worst: this turned out to be the worst grade yet, up to yet another wandering road and into the teeth of an icy damp wind.

(“The mountain can surprise you. ” Tara Chang had even said it in words, plain as she could make it. “Don’t commit to that road unless you’re sure you’ve got several days ru

Well, he’d seen no ring around the moon when they’d left the first-stage shelter. He’d seen clouds just past them in the east.

This morning when they’d left—hell’s bells, he hadn’t been able to seethe moon, in a sleet-storm that his other source of advice, Carlo and Randy, who had spent their lives on the mountain, said could be the leading edge of a real blizzard coming down.

He’d listened most to Tara telling him how to move when the choice was move—and not enough, he realized now, to both Guil and Tara telling him he should wait for a clear, established trough between major storms— thatwas what Guil had meant, not any stupid counting. He’d known all his life that there tended to be a four-day gap between storms that reached Shamesey.

But down there you saw them coming. He’d not imagined that up here you didn’t seethe weather. They were almost onthe continental divide—and the consequence of being on the east of the mountain ridge meant the weather came up hidden by the mountain until it broke right over your head.

The direct consequence was that a storm which hadn’t even been a cloud-line on the horizon yesterday morning at first-stage had set in hard during the night of their stay at midway. They’d seen it first boiling above the distant peaks of the central massif when, coming up from that first-stage shelter at dusk last night, they’d rounded that last curve. The midway shelter had been there in front of them and, a fact with which he reproached himself now, he’d never thoughtto turn around and go back right then, when, yes, they were tired, and they’d walked all day; and, yes, there was a horse down below they didn’t want to deal with—but it might have been better than this.

Last night the wind had howled about the midway cabin, literally shaking the walls of a structure poised on the edge of nothing at all. Their fire had refused to stay lit against the draft coming down the chimney. His information from Tara as well as Carlo and Randy said the road above midway and below was subject to deep, impassable drifting once winter set in. After the small stack of wood ran out in that barren, treeless steep the snow might block them from leaving, and they could freeze to death in a cabin that even with the intermittent fire last night had been colder than hell’s attic.

Even knowing thathe’d not seriously thought of turning them around and leading them back to first-stage—because he’d been unwilling to face that damned stray horse.

He’d had too much sympathy for it—since it was itself a refugee from the Tarmin disaster, lost, bereaved, more desperate than they were. Riders had died down on the lower reaches of the mountain, and horses had survived—meaning hurt horses, horses missing riders—and the one haunting the vicinity of the first-stage cabin when they’d arrived hadn’t been too sane to start with, if it was the horse he most feared—a good chance it was that horse, considering where it was hanging out, where a rider had died who was, no question, crazy.