Cloud's Rider

“I heard—” Carlo began, “—about last night.”

“We went out today,” Da

“I dreamedabout the horse,” Randy said. “I heard it. I keep saying, if you’d just let me go—”

“No,” Carlo said. “He’s still got a notion about being a rider.”

Da

“I hearit.”

“Him. If you heardhim you’d know it’s him. He’s confused, he’s lost. And if you were goingto be a rider—you wouldn’t want that horse. Believe me.”

“I’m telling you—”

“Listen to him,” Carlo said.

“I don’t wantto listen. I want somebody to listen to me.”

“Randy,” Da

“You can’t!”

“I’ve been trying not to. So’s Ridley. But there’s a limit to what he’ll let go on near this village. We can’t put this village in danger.”

Randy was shaking. Literally shaking. He looked as if he’d cry. He had a gulp of beer instead.

Da

“You said you can’t hear a horse over ten meters,” Carlo said. “That sure wasn’t the case on the road.”

“Yeah, well. Most times. This is the exception.”

“This horse? Or this time?”

“Don’t want to talk here,” Da

“Yeah,” Carlo agreed. Randy had taken down too much of the beer and too little supper. “Eat, kid. Remember when you went hungry.”

Randy began to pick at his food.

“Eat it while you’ve got it,” Da

“I want to live in the rider camp,” Randy said.

“Randy,” Carlo said. He never called his brother by his given name. It got the kid’s attention. “Twelve. Hear me?”

“Shit.”

Carlo got up, went to the bar and got another round of beers. Brought them back and set them down.

Da

Carlo tried to hold himself back, because tonight he’d rather the beer than the stew, himself.

“Buy you supper?” Carlo asked.

“I’m having supper in the camp,” Da

“Sure. But the beers are on the Mackeys.”

“Thank ’em for me,” Da

“Sure,” Carlo said. He spooned down his stew and the part of Randy’s Randy didn’t eat. Had two pieces of bread. And by that time Randy was sotted.

“You ought to beat Rick up,” Randy said, out of nowhere.

“Yeah. Sure. Someday. Don’tpush it. You’re not cute when you’re drunk and you’re getting there real fast.”

“Am not.”

“Yeah.” Carlo watched, and finished his beer, and had the notion with Da

And in not too long Carlo shoved back his chair, gathered up Randy by an arm and had Da

There might be a village rule against drunk kids. Nobody said anything and they walked Randy out into the chill air.

Randy didn’t come around to sobriety. They walked him down the steps and across the intervening yard toward the junk pile and the tree.

There Carlo stopped. “Let the kid sit,” he said, and he and Da

“So what couldn’t you say inside?” Carlo asked.

Da

“Damn!”

“I think,” Da

“I can find out,” Carlo said. He didn’t wantto know. He was supposed to go there tomorrow. After church. And he didn’t want to. Not after finding out the riders knew. He didn’t know if he could keep himself calm around her. “What’s he going to do about it?”

“I don’t know yet. I think he understands we were out of choices. —Carlo, I—had to tell him the rest of it. About where you were. And why.”

Supper went to ice on his stomach.

“He won’t tell the marshal,” Da

“Yeah,” Carlo said bitterly.

“No one will know.”

“The rider camp is no one? I don’t believe it. I’ve got a brother—”

“Nothing will happen to him.”

“Dammit. Dammit. I trusted you!”

Da

“You don’t think. Da

“Or I’ll get you outof here. I promise you. I promiseyou.”

He couldn’t organize his thoughts. He didn’t know what he thought, and two beers didn’t help. He wanted to sit down where he was. He wanted not to think about it.

“Yeah,” he said. He’d learned—adults didn’t take things for granted. Adults didn’t trust blindly. Adults didn’t expect other adults to keep extravagant promises.

Da

Carlo gathered Randy up by an arm and got him moving. Maybe Randy’d heard enough of it for a thought or two to penetrate his brain. Maybe he hadn’t.

He didn’t know himself what he’d just heard. He was mad. But he wished he had the sense not to be walking away from Da

But when he looked back, from the door to the forge, with Randy’s weight on his arm, Da

Chapter 14

There were evergreen boughs on the altar, there were lamps burning with sweet-smelling oil, and after the social a

Carlo liked the smells and the sights, and the church murals weren’t so fine as those in Tarmin, but they were amazing to his eyes—portraying creatures of the New World, which wouldn’t have pleased preacher Wales down in Tarmin, not by a long way.

And the preacher really got to him when he started talking about the kids down in Tarmin. He had a lump in his throat and noted people in the seats down the row were using handkerchiefs. The preacher proceeded to the old business of how nobody ever knew the hour or the day they’d die, which was predictably grim, and then segued into an exhortation to enjoy the world—which was so sharp a left turn from the expected path of doom and gloom that Carlo tried to reconstruct in his mind exactly how the preacher had gotten where he had from the point where preacher Wales had always concluded the world was the source of evil.