A flash of lightning blazed through his headache, blinding him, making white edges on the rocks; immediately the thunder crashed around him, total environment, deafening, pain ricocheting inside his temples and behind his eyes.
Then the rain hit in earnest, a deluge so thick it made a vapor on the blowing wind. Rain pooled in the brim of his hat and made an intermittent waterfall off the edge. He kept moving, tightening his scarf about his neck to keep the water from going down his collar. His knees were soaked below the slicker. His feet were beginning to be soaked through despite the oil coating he maintained on his boots, and the last feeling in them was going—no help at all to his balance.
Then <wet horse> flashed across his vision, <mad, wet horse on one hill, Guil in flappy brown slicker.>
The whole universe opened up, a sense of location, a map of relationship to the whole landscape, and he looked uphill through the veil of rain and twilight. A dark shape was trotting toward him, brisk, angry, shaking itself as it came.
He didn’t sit down. He wanted to collapse right there in the road, his legs were so weak—but he’d only have to get up again, and be all over mud.
<Bacon,> he promised Burn, but even that didn’t prevent Burn from detecting the pain and the exhaustion, and didn’t prevent Burn’s growing agitation as Burn came slogging up in the mud, dripping wet and imaging <dark, fire, kick men. Guil on back.>
Burn stopped alongside him. He leaned against Burn’s rain-slick shoulder, feeling its fever-warmth against his face, with the cold rain coming down on them—stood there, Burn smelling him over and snorting in disgust, finding <bad smell and smokeweed> despite the rain.
Burn was warm. Burn was a windbreak. Burn was solid. Most of all, his sense of the whole world was back. Burn didn’t ask how he’d hit his head. Burn wasn’t curious about done-things, just possibly-to-do things, and if Burn’s rider was hurting, Burn was mad at the hurt and wanted it to go away. Burn wanted <kicking men,> if men were responsible, but <no,> Guil sent. <Man giving bacon. Three slabs of bacon. Man giving rifle and gear. Man in room. Guil in room. Nice man. With bacon.>
<Guil’s face cut,> Burn insisted. <Blood-smell, bad-smell, Guil-smell. Kick and bite.>
He was too sick to argue. He just wanted up on Burn’s safe back and the two of them away from here and under shelter of some kind, and he didn’t think he could make the jump up—knew he couldn’t, with the two-pack. He slung the weight over Burn’s withers, wishing Burn not to object and still figuring to have an argument, with Burn in that negative mood, figuring possibly to be left in the roadway in the rain, <Burn shaking off the pack.>
Burn didn’t sulk at all about the pack. Burn even dropped a leg to make it easier for a wobbly rider… but Burn’s rider couldn’t make it that way. He wanted Burn square on his feet again, and (the arm with the rifle all the way over Burn’s withers and probably jabbing him in God-knew-what places) he couldn’t do more than jump for it and land belly-down like a kid. He slithered a leg over with no grace at all, trying not to hit Burn again with the rifle barrel or knock the pack off Burn’s shoulders—he caught it, squared it, pinned it with a knee and shakily tucked the slicker about him, wet knees and all, Burn standing still as a rock the while, for which he was very grateful.
Burn slowly started moving, testing his rider’s balance. Burn’s heat reached the insides of his legs, traveling upward under the slicker, wonderful, wonderful warmth. He could hug the slicker around him and hope for the warmth below to meet the lesser warmth he’d saved in his upper body, if he could stay upright so long.
He shivered, waiting for that to happen. His legs jerking in spasm bothered Burn, whose thoughts on the matter weren’t coherent, something like <Guil falling,> and <this way> and <that way,> because the twitches were signaling Burn directions he didn’t mean and didn’t want.
Burn figured it out, though, worried about it, and got mad, imaging <fire, and dark> and <kill.> But Guil imaged <log shelter,> and < rider-stone, > and Burn began to pick up his pace, imaging <grassy hills in twilight,> and <fire> and <fish.>
< Rider-stone, > Guil insisted, because there was a shelter where this road joined the boundary road. Intersections were places you could always look for shelter, and where there was shelter of any kind, riders set up a marker, be it wood or stone, in this otherwise desolate land, to carve or scratch over with messages to riders who came on the same road.
Burn agreed, finally, while the rain spattered about them and gullied down the hills. Burn had been waiting for him in that shelter, in a < barren, bad place, > and had only come after him when the weather turned… he already saw the refuge Burn was taking him to, <lean-to made of logs, next the stone. Barren land. Bad-tasting grass.>
Didn’t have to say things out loud for Burn. Damn lot smarter than townsmen, Guil thought muzzily. Friendlier than bank-women.
<Handsome horse,> Burn agreed, splashing along the barren, puddled road, pace, pace, pace, pace, never missing a beat, strong and confident. All around them, water sluiced unchecked down the hills, remaking the gullies and washing at the roots of the feeble grass.
But at least the ground cover that held out grew more frequent.
Chapter xiii
THERE WAS DAMP IN THE AIR, DAMP WHICH IN THIS UNEASY SEASON could be melting snow—or could herald another storm. The clouds which had in midafternoon wreathed the summit of Rogers Peak had moved on; and the departing sun, long slipped behind the mountains, had left a pink glow over the snowy rooftops and blued shadows along the snow-banked walls. Cookfires spread an upward smudge on the snow-blanketed evening, and the direction of that smoke said quiet winds, change pending.
“Early winter,” Tara said, on the porch of the rider quarters where, the light being better and the wind being still, she’d pulled the table outside, and she and Vadim diced potatoes for their common supper. She hashed one to bits and lost three pieces overside onto the porch. “Damn.” It wasn’t a good score she was keeping.
“I can finish,” Vadim said. “Take it easy, Tara. Go sit down.”
“I’m fine.”
“I know you’re fine. You need your fingers.”
It made her mad. It shouldn’t. She knew it shouldn’t. She chopped away, hacking at the job, trying for self-control. The horses were out of range, collectively, in the den. Flicker was ‘taking it easy.’ Flicker was sore as hell, and had earned her rest and care, having saved both their necks.
The knife slipped. She swore, sucked at a nicked finger.
“Tara, for God’s sake—”
She evaded Vadim’s attempt to see it, or to hold her, kept sucking at it. The taste of blood somehow satisfied the gnawing unease. It was real harm. You could taste it, smell it, feel it, you didn’t have to imagine it. She stood there as Vadim, with misgivings evident on his face, set back to work. For a moment, inside, the world was white. White was everywhere and her heart was pounding.
“Trust you with knives,” Vadim muttered. “I told you—”
She snapped, “I thought Barry and Llew would have started back. They ought to have started back.”
Vadim didn’t look up. A single peeling spiraled down from a potato in Vadim’s strong, capable hands. Finally Vadim said, “They’re big boys. They’ll manage the same as you did. If there’s something out there, they have as good a chance as you did. More. There’s two of them.”
“Bunch of skittery townsmen on their hands,” she said in a low voice. “Oxen. God knows what they’d do. The townsmen damn sure don’t know. There’s that wrecked truck out there. The damn convoy could have told us. Aby could have toldus.”