Tim Winton - The Riders

Scully rushed to Billie’s room and slapped on the light. The little bed was open and unmade. Her boots and papers lay spread on the floor, her toys lined up neatly. Down the stairs he felt his knees popping against the strain and he stumbled into the kitchen and the living room to find them empty and their fireplaces dead. He stormed upstairs again to check his bed once more and that’s when he passed the uncurtained gable window and saw the world transformed beyond it. He rubbed it clear. A small dark figure trailed down through the bright miracle of the snow, and beyond the wood, beyond his own breath misting up the glass, he saw the lights coming from across the valley and the mountains that stood spectral and white in the cold distance.

• • •

BAREFOOT HE WENT with nothing but a bathrobe about him. The snow was soft and clean and cold enough to stop the pain in his feet after a while. He broke through to stones and gnarled sticks that snagged up in the ash wood, but he felt nothing. The sky was a mere soup bowl above him, his breath a pillar of smoke that led him on in Billie’s footprints.

He found her by the old pumphouse in the castle grounds. Its ruined walls were rebuilt with snow, and snow joined it to hedges that looked solid as stone, a new settlement overnight. She was fully dressed and still, her black Wellingtons gleaming in the light of the riders’ torches as they stood bleakly before the keep. She turned and saw him, smiled uncertainly.

Billie looked at his bare feet, his shivering body as he pushed forward down the slope to the men and their tired horses. Their little fires crackled on the end of their sticks, and steam jetted from the horses’ nostrils and you could see their streaming sides and tarry maps of blood. Some of the men were only boys, and there were women too, here and there, their round dirty faces shining in the firelight, upturned eyes big as money. Scully went down among them, putting his hands up against the horses and talking, saying things she couldn’t hear. Questions, it sounded like.

Billie saw axes and spears and bandaged limbs but she was not afraid. The riders’ hair was white with snow, and it stood like cake frosting on their shoulders and down the manes of their horses. Their shields and leggings were spattered with mud and snow and the shiver of bridles and bits rattled across her like the chittering of her teeth.

He looked like one of them, she saw it now — it was like swallowing a stone to realise it. With his wild hair and arms, his big eyes streaming in the firelight turned up like theirs to the empty windows of the castle, he was almost one of them. Waiting, battered, disappointed. Except for his pink scrubbed living skin. That and the terry-cloth robe.

Scully smelled them, the riders and their horses. He recognized the blood and shit and sweat and fear of them, and he looked with them into the dead heart of the castle keep whose wings were bound east and west with snow-ghosted ash trees and ivy, whose rooks did not stir, whose light did not show and whose answer did not come. He knew them now and he saw that they would be here every night seen and unseen, patient, dogged faithful in all weathers and all worlds, waiting for something promised, something that was plainly their due, but he knew that as surely as he felt Billie tugging on him, curling her fingers in his and pulling him easily away, that he would not be among them and must never be, in life or death.

It was only when they were high on the hill, two figures black against the snow, in the shadow of their house, that Scully’s feet began to hurt.