Cloud’s Rider

C. J. Cherryh

Chapter 1

The sleet arrived on the wind that howled out of the Firgeberg, gray particles that abraded skin, stung eyes. Solid crystals sucked by a chance breath over the edge of the woolen scarf went down a throat already raw with altitude and exertion.

Heart hammered.

Knees ached.

To sweat into clothing that would hold moisture was to freeze. To sweat into what carried it away too efficiently was to give up vital moisture to the air—and one layered the clothing and gave up nothing, because a human in the High Wild couldn’t afford to give up any resource, not the warmth in his face, not the moisture in his breath, not the day’s ration of food he kept next his body, and not the nighthorse moving ahead of them on this upward road, breaking through the shallow drifts.

Especially not the horse.

You didn’t rely on anything in this world of ice and sudden slips but what you carried on your own person. That was what an experienced high-country rider had told him, and it was advice Danny Fisher now believed as an article of faith. What he’d learned and what he’d heard in a fast outpouring of detail from a senior rider in a rider shelter at the bottom of this road was going to bring him through this. It was going to get his horse through this. It was going to get the three kids behind him through this—

Or at least two of them. The hundred kilos of ironwood travois and supplies the boys were pulling up this icy road (his horse had better sense) was definitely not all resource. He personally didn’t give a cold damn for the thirteen-year-old girl constituting most of that weight, lying bundled and unconscious among their supplies: but he was fighting like hell for her brothers.

And what he knew to do to get them all to safety now was to climb at a steady pace, trying to track passing time and changing conditions on this winding road hung on the edge of the sky, in a reasoned, planned progress from the shelter they’d left this morning to the shelter they’d reach sometime before dark.

But with the wind getting up and the sleet continuing to come down, when the reasoned, calculated world slowly disappeared in a veil of sleet and when the posts that told truck drivers that used this road where the edge was were only lumps of white in a boil of sleet and old snow, he relied solely on that snow-veiled darkness, that living sense of shape, life, and <cold nighthorse belly> that was moving ahead of all of them, to know where to set his feet. The most valuable asset he ordinarily had from Cloud was that inner sense of the mountain’s shape—the land-sense that a nighthorse rider gained from his horse at any distance under three meters.

But all the shape he could perceive right now was the location of himself relative to Cloud and the two boys, and that stretch of sleeted rubble between him and his horse and slightly ahead of them. The wildlife from which Cloud drew his location-sense was all hidden away in burrows, as anything of common sense was dug in and asleep for the duration of the storm. It took human beings to chooseto trek up here.

Then in the blindness of a sudden gust his horse doubted for an instant where the road was. Cloud imaged, giddily, <white> and <falling> as he shied back from what was or was not the edge.

It was enough to make a snow-blinded human who valued that horse above all human company want to sit down, grab onto the rocks and not budge for an hour.

But he was still standing. And it wasn’t white emptiness beneath Cloud’s three-toed hoof—but solid, sleeted rock. Danny’s heart was pounding, and that might be Cloud’s heart or his own or the boys’, but it was Cloud’s four feet that began walking first, driven by <cold belly> and impatience to be out of this cold. The boys with the travois hadn’t kept their footing through the scare: they had to pick themselves up off the ground to get moving, shaken, not wanting to be where they were any longer, that was for very damn certain.

But they couldn’t stop short of that shelter, not in this wind. Don’t try to camp on the high end of the Climb: more advice he took on faith from the rider who’d told him the route. It was autumn. The temperatures, bitter as they were in this gale-force wind, hadn’t fallen enough to create a dry cold—and if you ever let damp form around you in the day, if you sat down where you could pick it up from the ground or the rocks, or just dressed in such a way that dampness built up, the windchill would kill you, without argument or excuse.

Tonight’s stopping place, the shelter they were aiming for, could sustain them all winter if there weren’t the recourse of villages and civilization in front of them, a string of five such tucked against the mountain’s east face. But there was nothing in reach behind them but a small shelter that definitely couldn’t sustain them, not reliably so beyond a few days, and he’d felt compelled this morning to make a calculated bet on the weather—taking them on a climb that on a good summer day and with no wind he understood from that same rider as a couple of hours’ ride.

It hadn’t been just a couple of hours. He was sure of that—and it was a long, weary hike. Cloud wouldn’t—couldn’t—carry him up this steep grade in this kind of weather. The boys had the travois to pull, and from them he felt numbness and cold right now, along with a lingering flutter of fear. Cloud’s near-disaster had called up a rush of adrenaline, and the boys were using too much of their strength pulling the travois to endure many surprises like that.

Bloody hell— hewas scared and shaky. He hadn’t fallen down because he was used to horse-images in all degrees of urgency and most times reflexively walled the confusion out. The boys weren’t used to a horse’s sending being that close to them, and they couldn’tsort it out or keep their feet under them in the crisis.

Or stop themselves from reliving the slip again and again. Cloud’s four-footed gait had confused their balance and they wouldn’t let the moment go: they’d confuse Cloud’s balance if they kept it up.

“Quiet,” he had to tell them out loud and in no uncertain terms. After a week together they knew he didn’t mean any audible noise.

They tried to be quiet and calm down after that—as quiet as two boys could be who’d thought they were falling off a mountain.

The road they were on, by what he knew of it, followed the folds and bends of the mountain upward supposedly a kilometer and a half vertical distance from their initial start on the east face of Rogers Peak—but he’d come to appreciate how a kilometer and a half vertical translated to walking distance on a mountain. He’dthought it a pretty straightforward climb. They’d come from the first-stage shelter across a portion of the south face to reach the midway shelter last night, and now they were east and up toward the settlements high on the forested slopes.

But it didn’t do it by logic of what would get there fastest. It did it, he’d discovered, by the logic of where the builders could hang a road and make it stay and not slide. It was a road built solely to get the logging trucks and oxcarts up and down, and the road builders had patched in rubble fill and timber shorings wherever its precarious thread crossed a gap narrow enough for them to bridge overa split in the mountain instead of following the contour all the way back into a recess. Places like that were wind zones. And where the builders hadn’t found a bridgeable gap—he and his small party had to walk all the in and out contour of the mountain, sometimes a considerable distance, until the builders had found a place to make the road turn back the direction they actually wanted to go.

A couple of hours on a good day—hell. From the midway shelter they’d left at dawn this morning they could make solid walls again before they slept—that was what he intended: rest there a couple of days, and beyond that—