The Rider, the Ride, the Rich Man's Wife, page 1
Premee Mohamed
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
The Rider, The Ride, The Rich Man’s Wife
I am grateful to my editor Marie O'Regan for ushering this novella into the world, and our cover artist Carly Allen-Fletcher for capturing the spirit of the story.
Introduction
Premee Mohamed is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. She is the author of the “Beneath the Rising” series of novels, which have been finalists for the Crawford Award, British Fantasy Award, Locus Award, and Aurora Award. Her three novellas have been finalists for the Nebula Award, Aurora Award, British Fantasy Award, Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction, and Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize. In 2022 she won the Nebula Award and World Fantasy Award for her novella And What Can We Offer You Tonight and the Aurora Award for her novella The Annual Migration of Clouds. She has been a finalist for the Hugo, Ignyte, British Fantasy, and Crawford awards.
Her short fiction has appeared in print and audio venues including Analog, Augur, Nightmare Magazine, Slate, Fireside Fiction, and PodCastle. In 2017 she was nominated for the Pushcart Prize for her story 'Willing' (Third Flatiron Press). Her short story “Never Was Born His Equal” was published in the anthology The Other Side of Never in May 2023, edited by myself and my husband, Paul Kane.
All of which is to say, Premee Mohamed is an extremely talented—not to mention prolific—writer, and well-versed in the novella form. With The Rider, The Ride, The Rich Man’s Wife, Premee blends Fairy Tale and Western in a post-apocalyptic setting to great effect. Every seven years, the hunt comes to Wrathford, and the unlucky chosen one must evade the pursuit by The Rider and his Wife until nightfall to survive. No one can remember anyone surviving the Hunt. Or almost no one. When Lucas’ brother Kit is chosen, he can’t let his brother die alone. He’s all Lucas has left. The two brothers set out to survive, and thus the scene is set for an epic chase through an apocalyptic landscape, with the brothers meeting peril after peril and discovering the truth behind the Hunt along the way.
Enjoy.
—Marie O’Regan
Derbyshire, 2024
When they come for your head you must run for your life
The rider, the ride, the rich man’s wife
—Skipping song, origin unknown
The new well was salt.
“Just our luck,” said someone, but it wasn’t luck. It was the odds of geological formations round here, that was all. Always about fifty-fifty, salt or sweet. I could tell people didn’t believe it, crowding around Rowse to study the steel bowl full of water—glass-clear, not a single speck of anything, no chalk or dirt or slime or grit, beautiful to see.
The old man wasn’t having it. “Looks don’t tell you nothing.” He thrust it out in defiance, and someone took it and drank, and spat of course, cursing. Then I wanted to try it too, see how bad it was, because Rowse was right and yet folks always find it difficult to feel something in their gut, to know instinctively something is true, and to hear that it’s false—the heart rebels against it. The water looked fine to me.
“Lucas, don’t. It’ll make you sick.” Kit, my twin brother, the voice like mine, the thoughts even like mine in my head. He touched my elbow, tentative, not quite pulling me back, hoping just the touch would serve to stop me.
“I have to know,” I whispered to him. “Mr. Rowse? May I?”
“Damnfool kid,” he said, but handed it over anyway. And it wasn’t just regular salt but something awful, bitter, drying out my mouth and biting into it not like a sip of liniment but poison, a smell and taste like the lye-water you used on white clothes. I spat too, gagged, felt the world reel around me. Rowse tossed the rest of the water onto the rucked-up dirt around the hole.
“Let no man say I lie,” he said, and that got a few laughs.
When I was done coughing they set me and Kit on the treadmill to winch up the two chaps who had been down there digging, because we were the smallest and lightest of the men—and proud to be called men, though we were just seventeen—and the wood of the big wheel was getting too worn out to be worked by mules or ponies. Then I just had to watch Kit’s boots moving careful and slow on the slats, and time my steps to his, while I listened to the others talk.
“Salt as the sea,” Rowse said, shaking his head.
“When have you ever tasted the sea?” said Mrs. Edwards.
A few more tired chuckles. “It’s not the end of the world,” said someone.
No, but the well had taken months of work to hit water, all our wells did. And every time, the salt ate away at the heart, it never came back; you could see it in people’s eyes, bitten away by the white crystals like teeth. Old man Rowse, who organized and planned the whole thing, who pulled the whole town together, look at him there—it was the end of something for him, slumped and skinny under his ancient leather hat, the silver moustaches (salt as the sea!) drooping, new grooves in his cheeks.
Mrs. Edwards said, “He’s right. Level’s good. We can get the kids running buckets of the stuff to the sunstill. It won’t be like having a good well, but it’ll be better than not having done it, what with the state the old one’s in.”
Rumbles of agreement. Kit hissed, “Pay attention!” even though we were still moving at a snail’s pace on the wheel.
“I don’t need to,” I said. “I’ve got you.”
He rolled his eyes. Town motto pretty much. Start telling it to us when we’re kiddies. We may not have much, but we have each other. This you’re supposed to be proud of—supposed to carry it with you like a flask, take a nip whenever times get tough (you’ll know when the time comes) (so they say).
Wet, tanned arms sprouting over the edge of the stone casing, grappling for thin air. A couple of men went to get them, the diggers. Their voices loud now that the wheel was stilled: Salt, salt as the Devil’s own piss. Salter than that, maybe: their hair and eyebrows were frosted white with the stuff. We had honest to goodness struck brine, not brack.
“Off you go,” Rowse said, and Kit and I climbed down, already a little disoriented from treading the spinning thing.
“The fence—” Kit began to say to me, because we had been aiming to repair the fence in the south pasture today. But he cut off his words and stared, and held his hands out to either side of him as if he were standing in a rowboat.
I felt it a second later—not exactly the ground moving but felt what he had felt, as we both often did. The slight vertigo of stepping from moving to still ground, then this new thing, this tremble under our feet.
No one spoke. Not to say Did you feel that too or What was that or Jesus Christ! We trembled together, all in a circle like at mass, with that same sense of dutiful grimness. Kit was thinking (I knew he was) that we had hit something we shouldn’t have with this well, as sometimes happened—a pocket of oil or poison gas or superhot steam or something. There goes the town, there goes everything.
But the movement subsided and I shuddered as it went because it felt somehow wet, serpentine. Like standing in mud with airfish moving all around your ankles, rubbing on you.
This was not about the well. If only.
The sky lost its light, turning from its whitewash blue to the dark sapphire of deep water and then past that, a dim, looming green. We stood and watched it go as if we had dropped something into the river, sinking without a trace. Against the flat darkness thunderheads began to build on the horizon, effortlessly shouldering each other out of the way, muscular and uncaring, piling up and up on one another in sunset hues of amber and rose. And still no one spoke. No Tornado! Get inside! or What’s wrong with them rainclouds?
Instead we waited. These were the signs that came before the sign. That they were different every seven years meant we had to wait. And there it was: slicing through the heavy, lit-up clouds, something small and silvery, like a falling star.
I had thought it really was a falling star but as it vanished behind us there came a tremendous clatter and then a spang of metal, a noise of impact without intent, and Kit and I ran for the center of town, following the rising cloud of dust to where the church had once stood.
Mostly still did, except that the thing, whatever it was, had struck the main tower, shearing right through the stone and sending the entire thing to the street below along with its bell. And that was something, because I’d never seen the bell up close and of course from street level it looks about as big as a thimble. Now it splayed like a dead steer, split from the fall and half-buried in stones and dirt and mortar. The broken edge of the bronze was so clean it reflected my astonished face like a mirror. Of the thing that had fallen there was no sign. Perhaps it had only been light after all, light of a killing kind. The sign.
“We’ll discuss the well tomorrow,” Rowse said behind me, and I jumped. The others began to wander off, heading for home, some quicker than others. Kit and I watched them go. No one looked back.
I thought As if anything they do makes a difference and he nodded as if I had spoken.
“Why can’t the ghosts pick on some other town?” Kit muttered under his breath. “There’s places with more folks.”
Rowse shrugged, and ran his thumb gingerly along the broken edge of the bell. “Reckon we’ll never get a new one,” he said, as if to himself. “That’s that, I suppose. Well, I don’t know, Kit. Them of the Silver and
I tried to imagine what they might look like, our particular afflictions, and found that I could not. Despite the rain that would attend their coming I still pictured them approaching through the dust that normally blanketed Wrathford: two trembling silhouettes in the amber light, and their hounds roiling around their feet like a mudslide, the filth filled with freshly-polished bones. Two monsters that should have been a blessing, bringing rain, but instead coming with death. A tale like it, Rowse told us once, was also part of the history of a wet green land—but he didn’t know which one. A place where the rain fell often enough, anyway, to wash the crows clean so that they were black instead of ochre.
Right on cue the rain began, sparse drops as big as coins plocking into the rock-hard dirt of the street. I thought about the seeds that might grow from this soaking, seeds that had lain quiet since the last hunt, waiting, infinitely more patient than us. How sometimes people would find a sack of barley or whatnot hid by their great-grandma or something and plant it and up it would come. In a good year. Like this: a hard rain once every seven years.
We looked up and down the street at the closed doors and shuttered windows. How damp and awful it would be inside, with no air coming in. Everyone had their water collectors out, and folks were already darting around on the outskirts no doubt, setting up the piping and the filters to get water into the cisterns.
And some folks were done that part and were putting offerings out on their front porches if they had any, windowsills if they didn’t. Some just out on the street: a trembling hand shooting out, spilling a little, then slamming the door and locking it, the sound of the turning bolt as loud as a gunshot. A tin mug here and there, most with a crumbled piece of cornbread or a spoon of field peas. Richer stuff for a few: honeycomb, white bread, jerky on a good china plate.
Kit said, “We didn’t set aside anything to leave out for ‘em.”
“It doesn’t make a difference,” I said. “Everyone says that. If you offer something or don’t offer something, you could still get picked.”
“Then why do they do it?”
I shrugged. Why do people pray? Nothing answers their prayers. Why did even we, who were not godly men, mutter Help me Jesus when bone was showing or a wall fell in? In a land where Rowse said folks had once watched gods walk around same as coyotes, just as skittish and wild, and the faith with the cross showed up as a late-coming imposter? No, folks just say things, do things, because we’ve always done them. Not because they make sense.
Same with the rhymes and songs some people said would keep them safe today. We could hear the notes rising over the dull thud of the rain, a dozen different tunes. I had always thought of our townsfolk as a rigorously rational bunch, occasionally superstitious, because not a farmer existed anywhere that wasn’t, or a blacksmith for that matter; but there was never belief, only habit. Prayers weren’t made to be answered, only to be a comforting thing like a lullaby sung to the kiddies at night. You didn’t expect to get something out of them. People listened to the elders tell their stories about them of the Silver and the Dust, but stories was all they were. It was a world where you put a seed in the ground and it caught or didn’t catch and it was nothing to do with imps or fairies or spirits or demons; where you measured a piece of timber and it was twenty-eight inches and it stayed twenty-eight inches whether you marked it with a piece of chalk or a piece of charcoal. But this, this felt different. I had never seen the like.
“It don’t make a difference, right?” Kit said. “Mr. Rowse?”
“Not as far as I know. And even if there was rules to the choosing, I expect they’d break them without losing sleep over it.”
At my side it was like I could hear Kit thinking, transmitted each time his elbow bumped mine. Like a spider tapping out messages on her web. Everything he wanted to say, everything he wanted to ask. The way, like me, he knew that Rowse had just said And supposing you are picked I do not need to tell you to keep the rules of the hunt. Do I. I am sure I do not. Now that you’re almost grown.
“That’s not fair,” Kit said. “If they’re allowed to break the rules and we aren’t.”
Rowse said, “The problem with kids is you think you all invented the moon and the stars in the sky. You all think nothing was there in the world before you and you came up with everything for the first time. Listen, it was years ago we all saw what happened when someone tried to cheat.”
“Who was it?”
“Don’t interrupt,” he said, even though I had been pretty sure he was at the end of a sentence. “And it don’t matter anyway. They was about your age. A little older—maybe eighteen, nineteen. A fool of a girl and a worse fool of a boy. She got picked, and he tried to interfere, and just before sunset we found their heads in the square. The rest they keep. Is that how you want to die? Breaking their laws instead of the laws of men?”
“Nossir,” Kit said automatically.
The rain was getting heavier, and I was shivering. With our shadows gone we seemed to move through a land without depth; our boots were getting wet and our soaked clothes shrank to our backs. “Let’s go home,” I said.
Rowse waved to us as we went, still tense, unsatisfied—everything in his taut skinny body said it, everything but his mouth. I wondered what else he wanted to say, but he’d tell us tomorrow, no doubt, when we were talking about the well, because that was surely going to be a long talk. We’d have to plan the location of the next well right quick if we wanted to get any depth before the ground froze up.
Kit and I trudged back through the mud as if it were something we did every day but in truth I could not clearly remember the last time I had walked on soaked earth. I felt queasy, unsteady. Seven years ago was when our own folks had died—not taken by the ghosts but by whip-fever, both in a matter of weeks. My memory of the time was a locked room, windowless and dark, only the skittering of mice and birds within it.
“We could leave town,” I said, as I often did.
“We could,” Kit replied, as he often did.
We wouldn’t leave. Everyone we knew was here; everyone everyone knew was here. It was dry and hot and grim and boring and desperately precarious, some years more so, some less, and you never became inured to any of it—the heat or the drought or the dullness—so every day it struck you anew and you wondered dimly whether folks here had always lived like this or if it had been different at some point, remembered by nothing but your bones.
But at least here was the river Rett (formerly the Ratt, formerly the Rath, depending on which survey map you looked at), which meant folks could farm here; and there was community, and traders came by now and then, ahorse or by water, and the Wife and the Rider only came every seven years, and one person, just one person, didn’t seem so bad when you thought about it, which we didn’t. We knew damn well there were towns out there worse than Wrathford, bigger or smaller, where folks got killed in various ways way more than one person every seven years. Simple fact.
And all right. Sometimes they did take more than one person. But not for the hunt—just retaliation for breaking the rules. For interfering, which indicated a lack of respect. For malingering or desertion, for trying to hide people or leave town. Unerringly folks would get sniffed out, dug out. Cellars, attics, bunkers, caves near the river. Then instead of one death there might be dozens, as payback instead of payment, or so Rowse told us. He was the only one we’d ever heard talk about it, and he had to be nagged, coerced, bullied, and bribed to do it. No one else brought it up. Even among the kids there were plenty who wouldn’t sing the skipping song about the Rider and the Wife, their fear as pure and real as that of a tornado or a cottonmouth.
Today was the day no one could hide. Only wait in dignified and stoic silence like seeds to be chosen. You never knew what day in the seventh year the sign would come, just as the seeds never knew when the rain would come. All you could be was ready on the day.
