As Tara said, they just hoped this one stayed wherever it had gone. Weather came howling down, and that, the village hoped, finished that. In all senses.
Even the Goss brothers’ mourning was short.
Chapter 23
Water dripped off the icicles that rimmed the barracks roof—which often happened on sunny days even in deep winter, but when it went on all day and, after a cold snap, started up again for several days running, then it was relatively certain the thaw had begun.
Likely there was already green in the fields around Shamesey. Danny began thinking of that, and thinking about going back again, maybe this year, maybe not, for a visit.
But with, as Guil put it, water beginning to run downhill again, the village was crazed with packing, the lure of mining and to some extent the solid pay of logging forgotten in a different kind of gold rush. The only way supplies were going to get downhill until trucks got up the mountain was in hand-carts, and while riders might help get fools down the mountain to Tarmin to stake claims, they weren’t going to risk their necks or their horses’ necks shepherding anybody who was overloaded.
So carts were being built and axles and wheels reinforced. Wood was at a premium. Van Mackey had had more work all winter than he wanted to get around to, and had to do it alone: Rick Mackey had been at The Evergreen that night, and Carlo never had gotten the chance to sort grievances out with him. There was a cave in the mountain that served to keep the dead, and Rick Mackey and twelve others were there, besides Serge Lasierre and Darcy Schaffer. Except Earnest Riggs, whose body they never had identified for certain.
The village was without a doctor, but the pharmacists, husband and wife, served as they’d begun to do during Darcy Schaffer’s year of retirement, and their daughter, Azlea Sumner, had settled down to the notion shemight apprentice to the doctor over in Mornay— the doctor there, in the second and third times the two villages had met for skating outings on the pond, had talked about resettling to Evergreen, as a far bigger establishment. The doctor had a son, and Azlea Sumner was very interested.
Van Mackey and Mary Hardesty had set their sights on hiring Randy Goss, Carlo having clearly left the trade, and the work and the potential prosperity piling up the way it was. But with carts wanting wheels and fittings and all of Tarmin and that shop lying down there unclaimed and apt to fall to the Mornay smith—Randy Goss had no interest these days in anything but Shimmer’s imminent foal, which had begun to image, and which was (Ridley and Callie had begun to call it fate) another colt.
In all of it, Randy just played games with Jennie, and Tara taught them the elements of marksmanship, while Guil Stuart told all the junior riders and the potential junior the kinds of things they might need in the open country.
Juniors who had their wits about them (and they all had) paid strictest attention. Jennie, for as young as she was, had acquired a certain sober knowledge that night, and so had Rain. She knew about the dangers on the mountain, and Jennie was in no rush to go out the gate quite yet, even with spring in the air and the wild things coming out of burrows and birthings and silliness imminent.
Wild things coming out of burrows was the part that made them all nervous. And on a certain day Danny, out hunting with Carlo, was troubled to see Carlo and Spook just standing still and staring off down the road to the south, all with a very strange feeling in the ambient.
“Sometimes I wonder if she’s dead,” Carlo said, when Danny rode up beside him. “Sometimes I hope she is. Sometimes I wonder—if that thing’s like Spook, if you could halfway talk to it—or if she could.”
Danny personally didn’t consider talking to it a good idea, inside the ambient or out loud. They still hadn’t heard a thing from it since that night, none of the shelters between there and the south road had been opened that they could detect, when he and Tara and Carlo and Ridley had gone out to check them and to hunt the thing.
So his own opinion was that it wasdead. He damned sure didn’t want to find thatbreed coming across the mountain ridge, laying siege to village walls, and calling village kids out for company. Horses had become addicted to human minds. Horses had never been predators on humans—just curious, just vastly and immediately curious when ships came to the worlds and landed in the horses’ range down near Shamesey. This thing was a far different matter. And he’d shoot one if he saw it, without a second thought about its intentions.
“I sure don’t want to find another one,” he said. “And the ambient’s back, normal as can be.”
“Yeah,” Carlo said.
They were going down the mountain, too, as their plans were. Guil had confessed to all the seniors and to him and Carlo that there was gold in that truck that had gone off, and that a shipper down in Anveney wanted it back.
But meanwhile there wasn’t any way to move it, and by that fact, in lieu of retrieving the truck cargo, he and Carlo had acquired a long-riding job, to go down and north to Anveney and to talk to a man named Cassivey, a shipper. They had to say to him that if he wanted his gold he had to get some trucks andsome oxcarts arranged with supplies.
And then they were going to tell him that if he wanted a share in the property that was to be had at Tarmin, Randy and Carlo Goss had title to a deal of it they were willing to sell, and on which Carlo could provide a deed. The village lawyers and the judge had helped work those papers out, and in not many days more, by their intentions, they were going to head down the trail Guil and Tara had taken up the mountain.
Guil and Tara were going to have what they called an interestingjob, getting band after band of overexcited and heavily armed miners with handcarts and overwrought anticipations down the grades of the truck road, as many as could tent-up around midway: that was the limiting factor on the size of the groups, and the lottery for position was set for the morning. Guil and Tara didn’t need two more riders to house in that very small shelter.
It might, Danny thought, be a good time for them to set out for the lowlands, before that craziness got started.
Meanwhile Cloud and Spook were enjoying the open air and they hadn’t shot a thing yet, nor really been inclined to. They called it hunting.
Mostly they didn’t do the hunters’ work for them. Being riders, they didn’t carry cargo. And having the ambitions they did, to ride the borders, they only hunted for theirneeds, and carried the gear theyneeded, nobody else’s.
The little light that filtered through the evergreen boughs and the deep blue shadows along the road said that camp soon was a good idea. The thought came to him that a warm fireside in a barracks this crowded with good friends was a scarce thing in the world, and that they should enjoy as much of it as they could before they rode apart for the year, maybe to come back again, maybe not. There were no certainties.
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About the author
C. J. Cherryh is a winner of the prestigious Hugo Award for the year’s best science fiction novel. With critical acclaim, many prizes and a string of internationally bestselling novels to her credit, she holds a position as one of the most important science fiction writers of our day, an author who always proves what SF canbe: thrilling, knife-edged human adventure, set in a complex, cohesive and constantly evolving future.
C. J. Cherryh lives in Oklahoma City, USA.