“The bell’s loose, papa,” Jennie said.
“Noticed that,” he said.
“Is it going to ring all night?”
“I wouldn’t doubt. But I’m not going to climb up after it. Are you?”
“No.” Jennie was eight and still played. Even runaway bells skittered out of her usually skittery thoughts. She sat on the braided rug and arranged her carved horses and her carved toy trucks. She had the trucks carry blocks for crates around the patterns of the braided rags and under the table legs and back again, until they could arrive at the wood-box, where she had laid an ambush of willy-wisps. That was the knot of horse fur she’d gotten from the sheddings bag and tucked beside the box.
“So is Serge going to get it?” Thoughts had skittered back to the bell.
“I don’t think so,” Ridley said to his offspring. “Serge doesn’t want to go climb the ladder, either, does he?”
Supper was cooking. They had a winter deal, he and his partner Callie, the mother of the Offspring: meals cooked versus trips out to break the ice on the den’s water barrel—plus cleanup of said meal. He’d done the ice-breaking twice today, once at dawn before the blow had started, once before they tucked in for the evening, and Jennie had helped him with a hammer. So Callie cooked and he sat with his feet propped up.
Jennie ran her convoy into ambush and turned a truck over. “They had a door come open,” Jennie announced happily. “Here’s the willy-wisps. There’s hundreds of ’em. Yum.”
Gruesome child. Ridley kept putting the whipstitch border on what was going to be a jacket in another three weeks of spare-time work. Winter evenings were good for that, and a fancy jacket traded to a trucker come snowmelt was going to be worth, oh, maybe a tenth what that trucker was going to sell it for down in Anveney or Shamesey, and by the time it got to Carlisle, twice that. But, then, that increase in cost was the life the trucker risked going there, and the lives the riders risked getting him there in one piece, and they were all in the same business. He’d get store money for it: the village supplied their riders with very generous basics, but shirting and such, and shoes for Jennie’s growing feet—they all cost. Leather from the tanner—that, he had a deal on.
“They’re going to use the radio,” Jennie announced. Her riders and her truckers had been shooting steadily for a noisy minute or two.
“That’s really stupid,” Ridley said sympathetically. “Are the riders going to tell them that’s stupid?‘
“No, this guy is sneaking and doing it.”
“He must be new on the job.”
“Here comes a spook-bear!” Jennie said. “He’s going straight for that radio! Grrr.”
There were snarls and pow-pow-pows.
“The bear got him,” Jennie said sadly.
“Too bad,” Callie said. “But they’re going to have to wait. Dinner’s on.”
“The bear’s having dinner, too.”
“Oh, what a nice thought,” Ridley said. “Wash.”
“I’m not—”
“If there’s water available, you wash, youngster. Feet go in the den. Feet go on this floor. Hands go on this floor. Hands get washed.” The bell had assumed a steady cadence. A strong gust of wind caught the flashing and made it sing.
“Nasty wind,” Callie said, setting down bowls.
“ We’renot in it,” Ridley said, and got up and helped with the ladling-out. It was stew, good, thick bear-meat stew. They had a fair bit in the smoke-shed. They had the hides at the tannery, and that was cash, too, come spring.
There wasn’t a thing wrong with the world this evening.
“I washed!” Jennie announced.
He snatched Jennie up. Hugged her tight. Growled, “I’m the bear.”
Jennie shrieked and kicked with abandon.
“Supper,” Callie said, unimpressed. “The bear better get the spoons.”
“If I let you go,” Ridley said, with his arms full of daughter, “will you get the spoons?”
“All right,” Jennie said, and he let her down. She was growing. She’d landed a couple of solid kicks. The bear thought he’d have bruises.
Jennie got the spoons. The bear held the bowls while mama ladled out the stew.
Sleet had given way to snow, drifting puffs on a gentler, darker wind as light faded in what Danny knew now was storm-glow, no longer daylight. The grades where they climbed were a lot gentler. There began to be trees: that gave them encouragement that they might find the shelter. But they’d spent and struggled and spent the strength they had—and now Randy had all but run out of endurance—the kid was still walking, but from Randy now came a muddled lot of <fireside at home> and <biscuits baking> and a disturbed recollection of <mama at the table. Brionne in a red coat, coming out the door.> The kid was drifting into dreams.
Or nightmares—as he slumped down onto his knees and then onto his face: <Brionne standing on the road, still in the red coat, with no awareness in her eyes.>
They reached him. Carlo knelt down and turned the kid and held him.
“Back on the travois,” Danny said.
“Can’t,” Carlo said. There was panic in his voice. “He’ll go to sleep. He’s too tired. He’s got to get up, that’s all. Come on, kid. Dammit, on your feet! Hear me?”
Randy wouldn’t wake up. Not even when Carlo hit him.
“He’s cold,” Carlo said. <Fear> was thick in the ambient. “He’s gotten cold. —Can’t Cloud carry him? Can’t you get him to?”
“He can’t,” Danny said. “He can’t. He’s worked as hard as we have. Let the kid rest. Calm down. Loosen the ties, we’ll bundle him in again.”
“He’ll die!”
“He’ll die if you scare hell out of him—the kid’s doing all he can.” He jerked ties undone and opened the furs, in which Brionne was still warm, to let Carlo lift Randy, half-aware as he was, onto the travois.
Carlo wasn’t saying anything now about being tired. There was just fear. Randy didn’t want the cords tied down. “No!” he said— scared, Danny didn’t need the ambient to understand, that the thing could finally get away from them.
“We won’t let you go,” he said. “It’s almost flat here.” He tied a couple of rumbling knots, securing the kid in the only real warmth there was, and got up.
<Blood on the snow> still came to them, a flash of white, daylight vision. It hadn’tstopped for their supplies.
“Best we can do,” Danny said as calmly as he could. “Keep going. Got to be a shelter—a door we can shut.”
“I don’t think it’ll hurt us,” Randy said from beneath muffling furs. “I could talk to it. It’s lonely. I could try—”
“Forget it! We don’t need a horsefight on top of everything else!” He was growing short-fused himself. And scared. Randy wanted a horse, Randy, like his sister, wanteda horse to such a degree that Cloud didn’t like to be in closed spaces with him, and that lost horse out there wasn’t in any sense one for any green villager kid to take on. When creatures in the Wild started doing the unusual they were usually sick—and for a horse to follow them up a mountain through the wintry hell they’d been through? Damn sure it wasn’t behaving like a normal horse.
“It wouldn’t fight Cloud,” Randy said. “I know. If you could just bring it in— Icould talk to it. That’s what it wants, doesn’t it?”
“It’s not sane, if it tracked us up here, and it willfight Cloud.”
“It won’t.” Fourteen-year-old logic. “If it thought I was its rider it’d come for me, wouldn’t it? I can do it—”
“Shut up and listen to the rider, you hear me?” Carlo’s voice cracked and broke as he stood up. “We’re in trouble, we’re in real serious trouble, here, kid. Don’t beg trouble. Keep quiet. Think at it and I’ll hit you. I mean it!”
“Let’s move,” Danny said, and got up. Cloud had come back and wanted <Danny walking,> ignoring the existence of boys or travois.
Worse, Cloud had his mind on the road behind them, and kept looking that way, ready for a horsefight, sending out the impression of <male horse> and <wanting mating> all over the mountainside.