The Riders (37 page)

Scully hobbled numbly around the mulchy deck, keeping low as he could behind the cabin top. A single duck rose off the water, its wings whiffling like the school cane of memory. On the foredeck he crouched beside an ornamental coil of rope and rotten tackle and he saw the denim leg out there in the spill of corner light. The sharp-toed boot disembodied by mist and the angle. His breath quickened. He was calm but his body was loaded.

He measured the jump to the dock. It was close, furry with mist, but close. He figured four feet. It was twenty, twenty-five yards to the street corner. His calves locked up.

But he waited. Was he visible? It seemed unlikely. He saw a knee now. A fresh draught of recognition. He stayed put. Watched. He counted to twenty, forty, ninety. The creak of a heavy leather coat. What if she just crossed the cobbles to the gangplank, just pushed off that righteous Protestant wall and strode across and called out? What would happen, how would he act?

He heard the toes of his frozen socks slipping fractionally on the gritty slime of the foredeck. He gripped the searing metal rail, ready.

Then the boot turned and showed a Cuban heel, two. There was a worldly groan of leather and a shift on the cobbles. Out into the loop of strangled light blurred the hair and moonflash of
skin as the figure turned unhurriedly up the sidestreet and was gone, leaving a wake of footfalls that set Scully off automatically. He sprang and lost ground, lifted and fell facedown in hemp and mire and leafy crap at the gunwhale's edge. He scrabbled hopelessly for a few seconds and then gave up. It was simple. He just desisted and listened in bitter relief to the sound of those boots ringing upward in the mist, rapping against the high bricks of the Herengracht and the muted night.

It was in him to get up, he had the will, the sheer idiot stubbornness in him to do it, he knew, but he heard the clonk of furniture beneath him and the flicker of light and it was enough to lie there alive in the cold and feel the hawser against his face.

•  •  •

W
HEN HE CAME STIFFLY DOWN
the steps into the tilting cabin, Billie held out the wavering flame of the cigarette lighter whose plastic was foggy and green, and let him see his way to a chair. She had her pack on the table and the phone in her hand. He blinked in the strange light and peeled off his socks. His whiskery chin shook a little, but his eyes were clear.

‘Okay,' he murmured. ‘Okay.'

Billie couldn't tell if this was a question or a command, but she hugged the receiver to her ear and kept dialling anyway. Tiny waves rocked against the furniture. She watched him open cupboards to find some socks. She tilted up her own wrapped feet and shook them at him. At the other end of the phone after the sound of oceans and the land and sky, a man said.

‘This better be fooking good, then. Jaysus Mary and Joseph it better had!'

For when the angel woos the clay

He'll lose his wings

At the dawning of the day . . .

‘Raglan Road'

R
AIN, GREAT UNRAVELLING SHEETMETAL SWATHES
of rain fell as the old Transit slushed through the tunnels of hawthorn, through miry bends, past rows of poplars, of larch and oak. Curtains of mud rose at every turn and the wipers juddered across the glass. Through grey little towns of cold-pressed council houses they went, and onto pebblecast bungalows and mongrel Spanish haciendas with asphalt turnarounds in the strange pure green of land. They passed roadside camps of travellers whose miserable donkeys stood tethered to other people's fences in the rain, and everywhere there were ruins choked with blackberry and ivy, fallen walls, tilted crosses and mounds like buried cysts in the earth. Rain.

No one spoke. The three of them sucked carefully on the mints they'd been sharing since Dublin and rubbed at the misting screen with their mittened knuckles.

Peter Keneally steered carefully. It was like transporting bone china. He winced at every rut in the roads of the Republic and cast sideways glances at the two of them there up beside him. They were hollow-cheeked, you could say. Subdued. The little
one's scars were like silky patches of sunlight. She had a queer notch in the front of her hair, right there at his elbow. The face of a saint, by God. Now and then the bush of her hair rested on his arm and he felt like singing. Scully had cut himself shaving, which was no surprise the way his hands shook. His eyes were bloodshot, raw as meatballs, and his clothes were clearly not his own. He looked like he'd seen the Devil, but he had a wan sort of smile on his face when they came into familiar country.

In the flat-bottomed valley before the long rise to the Leap, even before the road widened for the scarecrow of a tree that stood as a hindrance to traffic, Scully was pulling off his seatbelt and leaning over to touch his arm. Peter geared down.

Billie watched him get down into the hard icy rain where the van stopped, right there beside the funny tree with the bits of stuff in it. His hair flattened, his shoulders ran with water, but he didn't seem to hurry. The wipers slushed across in front of her and she watched him reach out for something in the boughs.

‘Aw, now,' said the man beside her.

She saw the rag in her father's hands, watched it fall limp to the mud at his feet. She sucked her mint.

Out in the rain Scully held onto the tree wondering how it could happen, how it was that you stop asking yourself, asking friends, asking God the question.

I
T WAS THE FIRST NIGHT
of the year. Scully woke suddenly, kept his eyes closed and listened to the startling silence of the house. The quiet was so complete that he heard his own heartbeat, his breath loud as a factory. He opened his eyes involuntarily and saw, upon the boards of the floor, a curious light. It ran up the wall as well, like muted moonlight. Then he saw the empty impressed pillow beside him and swung out of bed completely, his naked skin shrinking against the cold.

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.

•  •  •

B
AREFOOT 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.

Other books by Tim Winton

NOVELS

An Open Swimmer

Shallows

That Eye, the Sky

In the Winter Dark

Cloudstreet

Din Music

STORIES

Scission

Minimum of Two

FOR YOUNGER READERS

Jesse

Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo

The Bugalugs Bum Thief

Lockie Leonard, Scumbuster

Lockie Leonard, Legend

Blueback

The Deep

NON-FICTION

Land's Edge

Down to Earth
(with Richard Woldendorp)

SCRIBNER

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1994 by Tim Winton

Originally published in Australia by Pan Macmillan Publishers Australia.

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

First Scribner trade paperback edition 2003

SCRIBNER
and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Winton, Tim.

The riders / Tim Winton.—1st Scribner ed.

p. cm.

I. Title.

PR9619.3.W585R5  1995

823—dc20  94-45375

CIP

ISBN-13: 978-0-684-80296-1

ISBN-10: 0-684-80296-1

ISBN-13: 978-0-684-82277-8 (PBK)

ISBN-10: 0-684-82277-6 (PBK)

ISBN: 978-1-4767-9734-2 (eBook)

“Tom Traubert's Blues” by Tom Waits © Fifth Floor Music reprinted by permission of Rondor Music Australia Pty Ltd.

“Comin' into Los Angeles” by Arlo Guthrie reproduced by permission of Essex Music of Australia. Unauthorized copying is illegal.

The lines from “On Raglan Road” by Patrick Kavanagh are reprinted by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of the late Katherine B. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency.

This book has had many patrons. Earliest work was done with the aid of the Literature Board of the Australia Council and the Martin Bequest. My heartfelt thanks to Joe Sullivan and the sound of his boots on the gravel every morning a long time ago, and also to Denise Winton and Howard Willis for their patience, their expertise and their very real help.