The mare ate the boarding pass while Ruth was arguing about the mare.
There was a little silence at the customs desk. The clerk watched a green corner disappear between yellow teeth. On the glass behind him, the departure clock changed from forty-one minutes to forty.
‘That was your copy,’ Ruth told him.
‘It was the only copy.’
‘Then I suggest you don't feed her the next one.’
The mare had been called Biscuit when Ruth signed the contract. On the first morning she had bitten through a feed sack, eaten an emergency blanket and kicked a dent into the freighter's drinking-water tank. Ruth had privately renamed her Mortgage. They had now travelled together for nineteen days, and Ruth was beginning to think the second name insufficient.
Beyond the customs shelter lay the loading causeway, a strip of black rubber crossing a shallow crater to the freighter. Its stern squatted in vapour. Above the crater the planet's great blue ring stood vertically in the sky, so bright that everybody seemed to be working inside a cracked plate.
Mortgage planted all four feet.
Ruth loosened the lead. She tried walking in a curve, then straight, then alongside the mare's shoulder as though they were going nowhere in particular. Mortgage permitted each proposal up to the causeway's first white stripe. There she stopped. When Ruth produced a carrot, the mare took it, chewed considerately and remained exactly where she was.
‘You can pull harder,’ the clerk suggested.
‘You can come and pull.’
He went indoors.
Ruth ran her hand down the mare's near foreleg. No heat. The shoe was seated cleanly. She checked the other three, the girth of the travel sling, the soft bands around the pasterns. Nothing had shifted. Mortgage smelled of warm hair beneath the sour metal smell of the port, a strong, familiar little weather. Ruth leaned her forehead against the shoulder for a moment.
‘You and me both,’ she said. ‘But we haven't got the money to stay.’
The freight captain came down the causeway carrying a mug. Len was the only captain Ruth knew who looked less authoritative in uniform. His jacket had stretched across the stomach and shortened at the wrists, producing the effect of a schoolboy who had eaten the headmaster.
‘Problem?’
‘She's thinking.’
‘She's had nineteen days to think.’
‘She didn't use them.’
Mortgage turned her head towards the abandoned ore sheds on the crater's north rim.
Len followed her gaze. ‘Nothing over there.’
‘Might be the sun on the sheet metal.’
‘Ruth. Thirty-six minutes. The tug fires, we go. I can't keep the tug.’
She knew. Mortgage was one of six fold-horses being delivered to a survey camp, and the entire point of fold-horses was that you could take them where engines failed. They needed ground under their feet, something elastic about the shape of a gallop, and no more baggage than a willing body could carry. Four hoofbeats opened the fold; the next four closed it. A horse might clear a ravine or a hundred kilometres of ruined country. Nobody could persuade one to do it for a machine.
They were, however, perfectly willing to travel in machines. The five already aboard were eating the ship's expensive hay.
Mortgage made a low noise.
Ruth felt it through her hand before she heard it. Not a whinny. A sound from deep in the chest, nearly swallowed.
From the ore sheds came a faint metallic knock.
Len looked down at his mug.
‘You heard that,’ Ruth said.
‘Cooling roof.’
Mortgage answered with the same low sound. Then she started walking, suddenly and with purpose, dragging Ruth away from the ship.
The lead snapped tight. Ruth went two stumbling steps and let go before the rope burned through her palm. Mortgage trotted uphill, tail lifted, looking altogether pleased with the improvement in arrangements.
‘Get her!’ Len shouted.
Ruth ran after her. ‘What do you think I'm doing?’
The mare reached the first shed and disappeared.
There was no door on that side. A moment before she vanished, her four feet had struck a quick, uneven phrase on the hard ground. Ruth felt the little shove in her ears that accompanied a fold. Dust dropped through the place where a large horse had recently been.
Ruth stopped, bent over, and made several expensive observations about her choice of profession.
The shed's proper entrance stood twenty metres away. Its chain was looped through handles and secured with a padlock. She could hear the mare walking inside. Another knock came from somewhere below her feet.
‘Mortgage!’
Silence. Then, very clearly, the sound of a bucket being kicked.
Len arrived breathing heavily. He handed Ruth his mug and examined the padlock.
‘That's port property.’
‘Well, you've got a port-property horse now.’
He swore, took the mug back and went to find somebody with a key.
Through a thumb-sized rust hole Ruth could see the mare's shoulder, a band of light on her coat. Mortgage stood near a square opening in the floor. The opening had once held machinery; its edge was raised, and a broken ladder slanted into it.
A narrow head rose from the square. Ears too large. A wet white star. It sank again.
Ruth put her eye closer until rust cut her eyebrow.
‘Oh, you rotten old girl,’ she whispered, smiling despite herself. ‘You could have mentioned that.’
The key took seven minutes. It belonged to a man who belonged to a subcontractor who no longer existed, but who had continued coming to work because nobody had stopped his wages. He let them in and stayed by the door, vigorously denying responsibility for whatever was inside.
The juvenile stood at the bottom of a service pit, knee-deep in old dust. His ribs showed. There was a water trough under a leaking pipe, and the rim had been bitten bright. A split feed sack lay beside it, trampled almost empty. A fragment of loading net hung from his hind leg.
Mortgage lowered her head into the opening. The juvenile stretched his muzzle upwards. They breathed against each other's nostrils for a long time.
‘One of yours?’ Len asked.
‘Not on my load.’
The port man said the horses had been moved out of these sheds six weeks earlier. A sale. Or a seizure. There had been two lots of vehicles and a fight. He had stayed in his office.
‘How did nobody hear him?’
The man pointed towards the crater. A tug engine was turning over. Ruth could feel its vibration in her teeth.
Len crouched by the edge. ‘Can he jump?’
‘Straight up, with a hind leg caught?’
‘Fold, then.’
‘Needs a run.’
The pit was long enough for three strides, perhaps four if the animal were desperate. The netting was stretched beneath a fallen ladder. Every attempt to move it had tightened the mesh around the fetlock. Ruth could see where the hair had rubbed away.
Her kit was on the ship. She asked Len for a knife. He gave her one with a blade designed to open sealed meals. She looked at it.
‘I was having lunch,’ he said.
There was no safe ladder. Ruth sat on the edge and lowered herself, found a pipe with one boot, missed the next foothold and dropped the final metre. Pain shot through her heel. The juvenile rushed against the far wall, pulling the net taut.
‘Easy.’
She turned sideways. Waited. Above her, Mortgage's broad head obscured half the daylight.
‘You can help,’ Ruth said.
The mare snorted dust into her hair.
It took patience Ruth could not afford. The youngster trembled when she moved and trembled when she stopped. She crouched, spoke about meaningless things, let him smell the back of her hand. He was not a foal, she realised; perhaps two years old, and probably tall enough to have been mistaken for a small adult during the move. His coat was the colour of dirty milk.
Above them Len's wrist alarm began to sound.
‘Twenty minutes,’ he said.
‘Then stop telling me.’
Ruth worked one finger under the net. The flesh was swollen but the mesh had not cut deeply. She sliced one strand, then another. The blunt knife caught and slipped. The youngster kicked, striking the wall beside her elbow. She withdrew, waited again, went back.
With the final strand severed, the net dropped. He lifted the leg clear, held it oddly for a moment, then set it down. Weight passed through it. Ruth let herself breathe.
Len had found a length of cable. He lowered a loop.
‘You first. Then we work out the horse.’
Mortgage pulled her head out of the opening. A moment later Ruth heard the mare's feet, fast and close.
‘Move!’ she shouted.
The mare folded into the pit with a bang that struck Ruth in the chest. Dust filled everything. Ruth pressed herself flat against the wall. A horse's hip slid past her face. Above, Len coughed and swore.
When the dust settled, Mortgage occupied most of the available space. She touched the juvenile's neck, smelled his injured leg and swung her hindquarters towards Ruth.
‘I know,’ Ruth said. ‘I also think I'm an idiot.’
The mare nudged the youngster towards the far end. He limped once, then took two ordinary steps. Mortgage turned awkwardly and placed herself beside him, facing the length of the pit.
Ruth understood what she meant to try. Two horses galloping shoulder to shoulder could share a fold. She had seen a mare take a foal across a dry riverbed, its feet scarcely touching the ground. But they had started on a broad meadow. Here a turn would carry somebody into concrete.
‘Your sling,’ Ruth said.
The travel sling was still buckled around Mortgage's body. Its metal rings could catch the pit wall or the youngster's leg. Ruth unfastened it and dragged it clear. Mortgage shifted impatiently, hoof scraping her boot.
Len's alarm sounded again. He shut it off.
‘I have to leave,’ he said.
Ruth looked up. Her bag was in her berth, with her wages card and the little boots she had bought for her sister's baby. Her contract paid on delivery. Five horses counted as a failed load, and there was no clause for rescue, or for a mare with opinions about freight.
‘Put my bag ashore.’
Len did not argue. That was almost worse.
‘I'll have the port man bring it.’
He disappeared from the opening. Ruth heard him running.
Mortgage backed a pace. The juvenile copied her, clumsily. Their bodies pressed together. Ruth hauled herself onto the pipe and climbed high enough to make room, fingers sliding on the gritty wall. Her heel throbbed. She could not tell whether the youngster had enough strength, or whether Mortgage could reach the missing beat for both of them.
‘Go on,’ Ruth said.
The mare struck off.
It was scarcely a gallop. A stamp, a scramble, the pale youngster trying to run inside the movement of the older body. At the end of the pit Mortgage gathered herself. Ruth braced for the impact.
Space pinched shut. For an instant there were two sets of feet above the floor and no bodies between them. Then the pit was empty.
Outside, somebody screamed.
Ruth shut her eyes.
‘Not a person,’ she said to the wall. ‘Please, not a person.’
The port man's voice followed, furious. His bicycle had been leaning against the shed. A horse had appeared upon it.
By the time he lowered a proper ladder, Mortgage was standing over the flattened machine and the youngster was eating the dry stalks growing through the yard. He allowed Ruth to inspect the leg. It would need washing, rest and somebody with more than a meal knife. He was very hungry. She gave him the last carrot and wished there were ten.
The tug's engines rose. Across the crater, the causeway withdrew from Len's ship. Ruth watched her employment lifting on a cushion of dust.
Mortgage called.
From inside the freighter came five replies.
‘No,’ Ruth said.
The loading hatch was still open. Len stood in it beside her bag, having apparently run out of people to give it to. Behind him a horse shouldered through the flexible stall divider.
‘Len!’
Too late. The horse took three strides across the cargo bay. Another followed. Then the air between the ship and the ground bent and a chestnut gelding appeared in the yard, landing so close that Ruth felt his breath.
The remaining four arrived in quick succession. One brought a mouthful of hay. The last, an immense grey, paused to finish chewing before he stepped out of the fold.
Ruth sat on the ruined bicycle.
In the loading hatch Len raised both hands. She could not hear him over the engines. She knew perfectly well what he was saying.
The port man began to laugh. Ruth looked at him until he stopped.
Seven horses stood together, six rounded and well fed, one angular stranger pressed between them. Mortgage smelled the gelding's stolen hay and took half of it. The youngster edged closer. Ruth made herself stand.
‘Right. We need water.’
They had water in the shed. There was hay in the customs storeroom, according to the port man, because the previous shipment had left some behind. A veterinary station stood twelve kilometres south, on the old survey road. He knew a woman with a truck.
Ruth considered the truck. Then she looked at the horses, their solid feet, the attentive ears pointing in seven different directions. The youngster had begun to lean against Mortgage. His eyelids drooped, though he kept chewing.
‘Tomorrow,’ she said. ‘We'll walk tomorrow.’
The port man brought a shallow plastic basin. Ruth filled it at the leaking pipe, then poured water slowly over the youngster's leg. The first stream made him shy against Mortgage; the second he endured. Dust ran down his hoof in brown ropes. There was no blood underneath, only the swollen band where the mesh had held him. She wanted the veterinary woman here tonight. The port man said he would call, and Ruth asked him to do it before fetching the hay.
He looked as though he might argue, but went.
Ruth eased her own boot off. Her heel was already darkening. Mortgage reached round and sniffed her bare foot, then drew away, upper lip raised.
‘Nobody invited your opinion.’
The youngster nosed the empty basin. She gave him fresh water, a little at a time, and sat beside him while he drank. Without his net and the depth of the pit between them, he seemed much younger.
Len's ship rose above the ring's bright edge. Something small dropped from the loading hatch, trailing an orange emergency streamer. Her bag. It landed halfway down the crater slope.
Ruth pulled her boot back on and fetched it herself. Behind her, the horses began nosing into the shed, arranging their large bodies around the trough, complaining about the accommodation. Mortgage went in last. At the doorway she turned and waited, one ear pricked towards Ruth and the other listening to her herd.
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