D is for Dragon

D is for Dragon
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Welcome to the Hearthside

The Hearthside is a blog for the writings of Nathaniel Hart. Check out the sample stories to the right. Check Below for updates on appearances, readings, and current work.

Sample Story: Old Horses


Old Horses

As I pull into the LZ for Min Culner’s farm the whine of my engines overpowers the sound of the horses. Culner raises them well, the best of anyone really, but they still panic when my Trans comes close. This is not any fault of his exactly, it's just because I'm the only one who still visits him, and even I only do it to take him to his checkups. Min Culner lives in a listing type-2 that should have been decommissioned years ago. He’s out in the Interior, about as far as you can be, and much of his equipment is just as disheveled as his home. As for the type-2, it was never more than a two story box meant to temporarily house four people. Culner has used it for outside of fifty years and it leans noticeably to the left. The roof and walls are beveled from age, sagging outwards like a steri-can left out empty in the desert sun. He hasn’t painted it in years and though the pigments on those old prefabs are supposed to last a lifetime, the desert winds have stripped them bare around the corners. As I said before, Culner raises horses out here. He is one of a few people left on the planet to do so. Sometimes I wonder why.
When I get out of my Trans, its intakes spinning to a stop, Culner is already out of his house, rifle in hand. When he sees that it's me he sets the gun on the porch and comes to give me a firm handshake. It usually turns into a hug. Not today. He's in a bad mood today.
“Positer's busted,” he murmurs.
He takes me inside the Type-2 to what would have been the logistics room of the old military prefab. He has made it his kitchen and as the coffee and canned beef cook he tells me that one of the mares threw a shoe yesterday. He hopes she is going to be ok, and honestly I do too. Culner hates to put them down; he has had to do it too often these days. There are few buyers anymore, just enough to keep him in business. He would rather send them off even if it pains him to watch them go, because keeping them around until he has to put them down is worse.
Back around Severance horses were in common use. By the time I was born, when Culner was around thirty, you would still see them around. In the early days after we cut from the Cardinal Stars everything was in short supply and the teraforming was still taking. Emissions were harshly regulated and the cost of fuel was through the roof. A horse was often cheaper than a Trans, even a personal, and for the simple journeys across the rugged terrain of Caldevera horses were in demand. Culner talks about those days all the time, and it’s the first thing he chews my ear about over coffee.
“Back then a palfrey would go for about two sixty. You know, I bet we liked them for the same reason we liked storytellers.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, knowing full well the answer. Culner is not senile, but he does tend to repeat himself.
“Well, you know before Severance it was all about the Cardinal Stars. It was all we had to look forward to. You were born on some rock like Caldevera, or Yures, or Polente and you planed on getting it good and moving out to the Cardinals. There wasn’t any pride in being from Caldevera, we didn’t look to the beauty of the night migration of the Olslen Sparrows or the savage purity of a Scellis crab brooding, or the awe of the dust storms gathering on the Lusten plain, have you ever seen it? The clouds rising six miles into the sky dropping only when the ozone gets too thin and they fall like when you drop milk into coffee. I could watch it all day. God I wish I could live out there.”
“You could move out there Min” I say, and he replies:
“Yup. But then who would take care of the herd?”
He always says that. After coffee he starts to get himself together. Going to the Hub is always a production even if we don’t do anything beyond his checkup. He seems to move around without much purpose listlessly moving from one corner of the Type-2 to the next. When at last it’s time, we head out to the Trans and he shouts a goodbye to the herd. They watch indifferently. They are as passive as the glare in a window, as silent as a tree in the dead of noonday heat. As we are on route, the shriek of the engines dulled by the roar of wind across the fore, Culner starts up the conversation again and for once goes back to a point rather than starting the cycle over again.
“Did I ever tell you why we liked horses?” he asks staring as passively out the window as his horses do at him.
“You know I don’t think you ever have, Min, why is it?” I reply, for the stories he tells are always worth waiting through the same introduction a few times.
“It’s like I was saying, we had no pride in ourselves, no pride in our world. But when we chose to break from the Cardinal Stars it was like we suddenly awoke to all the beauty here. You can’t capture that in an image or a text, no matter how you try you can’t get it all. You need a person to talk to you face to face to really express it. We learned the power of a storyteller, of someone who knows the weight of words; of someone who thinks with a depth that would drown most men; of someone who can show me with words a thing more beautiful than I shall ever see with my eyes.”
Culner fancies himself a poet. I am inclined to think he is.
“Anyway,” he continues, “we suddenly had to live on our own, and when that happened we got a sort of pride in our simplicity. People didn’t want to see a feature; they wanted to hear a story. They didn’t want to use a Trans to get their evening meal; they wanted to walk to it. We took a step backwards because we saw it as comin' home. Horses were like that. Nobody had a need to ride a horse for thousands of years. Then suddenly, by some trick, we were riding them again on Caldevera and it seemed an entirely Caldeveran thing to do.”
“I remember that when I was a kid,” I chime in, “even though they were on the outs, all the kids still wanted a horse.”
“It’s not just the horses,” Culner replies, “I mean, that’s the most obvious one. But why do you think we started wearing non-synthetic threads again? They’re worse in every way. It’s a principle of sorts. There is no reason that sheep wool should feel better than Silktext. But it does anyway! It’s the principle that makes it so.”
“I think I get it.” I say
“You don’t,” he replies as quick as a whip, “but it’s ok. I’m glad you want to get it. But I think that only people like Midja and I can get it. Only us old timers.”
This is the first time this trip that he mentioned Midja, and I count it as a good thing. I worry though that he is thinking about her more and more. They have been apart for nearly twenty years. That much longing must change a man.

₪₪₪
Midja and Culner met in Potlem Hub, the same place I take him for checkups now. They were both in their teens, she a little older than he, he a little bolder. When Severance came they both put on green arm bands. Interior kids like them were good for sabotage. Together, along with a few others, they would set charges on the Cardies’ bridges or at repeater stations. They got hit bad just before the Cardies pulled out, their group got strafed by a drop ship. Midja and he were the only survivors, them and their horses. It was traumatic, but it brought them together after the war. Culner knew how to ranch. Midja’s family was killed in the war and so it seemed only natural for them to ranch together.
For years they lived in that Type-2 abandoned by the Cardies when they fled the planet. They became part of the community and for a few years the two even organized a ride and race out in the interior. They never had a lack of customers. Everyone wanted a horse and if you wanted quality, you went to the Interior folk who had been ranching before severance was even a whispered dream. Though they lived rural, they lived well. Culner speaks of it with the wistful joy of a historian and the longing of a landlocked sailor. Those fine days are so far lost to him that it is as if they happened to someone else.
Midja was beautiful, witty, and indomitable in all things. She had a way with the horses that Culner could never manage. He could calm a wild horse if he needed to, she couldn’t do that. But Midja could look at a herd and know the horses like no one else. Horses are finicky, they have no fear in running headlong across the range, yet a seasoned steed will look funny at a hanging plastic tarp and go no nearer regardless of the rider’s urgings. It’s not that they are stupid, or even that they are animals. I have heard Culner talk of it enough that I know there is some trick, some magic to them. Midja knew that magic. She didn’t need to calm a steed, she just choose to ride one that was calm to start with. She could do the same thing with people because in a lot of ways they have the same sort of trickiness to them. Maybe that’s why she chose to leave Culner.

₪₪₪

Every time we come into Potlem Hub Culner gets this kind of spooked look in his eyes. It’s like he doesn’t quite trust the buildings not to fall, or the lines of Trans not to veer into him, or the calcicrete to stay solid below his boots. The lines of running lights rushing through the air silence him, the models leering from holographic displays disarm him, and the hum of city noise fuddles him. He is as helpless here as I would be in the Interior plain. I walk close to him, almost touching his side, so that he knows I am there, and that seems to comfort him. Together we head into the Medi-Center and he noticeably calms down. He knows the way from here and there is less threat from the soft glow of the waiting room than there is from the ominous canyons of the Hub outside. Here he can relax a little, but just a little. As we wait for his check-up he starts reminiscing again.
“You don’t remember Soprone when it was raging, do you?”
I shake my head “No. I was too young.”
“It was a monster. Killed, what? Sixty percent of the population in West Quad? We were hit so bad by it. I had this friend Tomos. He caught it and mustn’t have lasted even three days. He was an Interior man out working on solar clusters so we only saw him every couple of days. Never even found his body, horse must have bucked it off somewhere in the desert. Lot of people just disappeared like that. Us Interior folk that lived alone, we died alone.”
“Guess you’re the lucky one, Min, to have made it through.” I say.
“Yeah. Lucky enough to have a good horse.” I look confused a second and then ask:
“I thought Midja took you in when you caught it.”
“Naw,” he replies, “She was out north helping a dusky mare give birth. Happened all sudden like and bad, but she turned that sidelong birth around. That little foal was Artina. Didn’t I ever tell you that before?” I shake my head. He hadn’t.
Just like that birth, Soprone comes on sudden and badly too. It attacks the lungs, swelling them shut, then moves throughout the circulatory system. If you can get help, and if they have the drugs on hand, and if you are not too far gone for the re-breather, and if the blood thinners take, and if you are lucky, then you will survive it. It’s quick moving, airborne, and with a long and subtle incubation period. If you survive it, it changes you. Your lungs warp from the scarring and wearing, it makes a fundamental change in the way you absorb oxygen at the molecular level. Even as recently as the ‘20s it still killed people, I lost a good friend to it. Now days we have targeted drugs that kill it off fast. If we catch it, and we usually do, then we can stop it every time. Back during the outbreaks, when Culner caught it, there was nothing like that. Min made it through, somehow, but he still lives with the consequences: daily medication and constant checkups.
His name rolls around at the med station and I take him in for his checkup. At the diagnostic station in back the tech asks him the usual questions. She is a new girl who has never met him before and around her Culner brightens a little. He is, in the way of an old man, flirty, and to see that brings a smile to my lips. The attitude drops when she asks him if he still rides. It’s not that the question makes him sad it’s more like the smile of a waking dreamer slowly fading to a day-to-day stoicism. Like a sunny dawn rising into the waiting clouds, not dark ones, but not the glory of the blue sky either.
“No miss, I don’t ride anymore,” Culner replies.
I know that he hasn’t ridden since Artina.

₪₪₪

After he caught Soprone Culner changed. He was laid up for nearly a year and after that he had to hire hands to help at his ranch, had to check in at the Hub every two weeks, and couldn’t ride for more than a few hours. Midja was, in every way, understanding, caring, and careful. Something had changed her though, as much as it had changed him. They started fighting about nothing and made up, but only in words. They were both approaching middle age now and secure enough to have children but the conversation never happened. After a long fight that was left to simmer, she rode off to her friend’s house and it was over.
A year passed. The ranch started to decline. As Caldevera rebuilt in the wake of Soprone, it did so differently. We started refining Ioti gas and Trans took over for horses in the Hubs. With the Trans becoming popular the culture started to slowly change. I remember when I was a kid my parents would take me to the storyteller every weekend and all the kids wanted to learn to ride. When I was in my teens everyone wanted a Trans. It was a kind of freedom to go from one place to the next. Around the same time night shows started popping up in the Hubs. We had gotten ahead of the curve of simple survival and we exulted in it. We had finally achieved that which all the stories had told the kernel of: independence. When I was in academy the skyline was lit by construction cranes. We built new buildings, taller than any the Cardinal Stars had built for us, and they were Caldeveran buildings with central balconies and courtyards to encourage our gatherings and togetherness. Some of them even had stables along with the garages and hangers. Now you can see the Hubs from space. Most people don’t go to storytellers much anymore, but it’s not because they aren’t important. Most people just don’t have the time and besides we can see them on the vid screens every night telling by the cast of firelight with music to accent their words.
While all this was happening Culner was still running the ranch with the help of a few hands. Midja would visit from time to time, and when she did they were like old lovers, but she was seeing someone else now. She was kind to him, but kind as one would be to child, a sympathetic kindness. Sometimes it set him off. Once, they had gone for a ride and stopped on a mesa top behind the ranch. As they talked the gold of sunset faded to twilight’s blue shroud, and then finally to the dark of night speckled with the thousand candle lights of the galaxy. Something about her manner, petting his head as he lay and mumbling “I know hon, I know…” insulted him. She treated him like a mother would a child and while he was grateful for the affection there was a hierarchy in that he couldn’t tolerate. He said something stupid and they were fighting in moments. Finally she got up to leave.
“There you are. Riding off again.” He shouted. He was trying to hurt her with his words.
“I never rode off anywhere.” She replied, her voice honest enough to scar.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean Midja? You left me, woman.”
She dropped out of the saddle with a heavy sigh and came to his side. She put a hand on his arm tightly, feeling the tenseness in it.
“Yes I did Min. You changed hon. After Soprone, you changed.”
“Of course I did. Do you think I liked it?”
“No you didn’t I reckon, but hon, you changed all the same. When you got out of the medi you didn’t want to do much of anything. You know what I liked best about you Min? You were a rancher because you couldn’t keep a steady job. We used to go for rides just for the hell of it. How long has it been since you went to Lusten Plain, or saw the migrations, or even to the Hub when you didn’t have to?”
“I can’t ride that far anymore.” He replied, crestfallen.
“You could take a Trans.”
“Who would take care of the herd?”
“The hands Min, same as they did in the past whenever you got a wild hair to move you took on a few extra folks for a fortnight.”
“Yeah, but you know Artina's weak. I wouldn’t want the little mare to falter.”
She sighed that same resigned sigh and kissed him as if it was their last time.
“Sometimes a good horse stumbles Min, and sometimes when you get sick you don’t get better.”
They didn’t speak again for ten years.

₪₪₪

We gather the things we need in Potlen Hub and load them into the Trans. The hands get most of Culner’s essentials for him, but there is always something he finds need of. With the Positer blown out this week half the ranch is without power. I don’t get in Culner’s way as he goes through the supplier from end to end looking for the right part, but when he turns for a question I am quick to help him get set up. I think I should let him do things himself, but more and more he needs help, or at least, he asks for it. Once the Trans is loaded we take off and head back to the ranch. As we pass between the buildings Culner looks down on the people gathered in sky-ways and balconies. Its full dark now, and they are gathered for drinking and music, like we Caldeverans do around the campfire. The music is canned and the fires are hub lights but the principle is the same. He looks at it all like a horse on the edge of spooking.
“It’s my birthday today.” He mentions off hand. Damn. I knew that I was forgetting something. That, I figure, is the reason he has been so reminiscent and open today. Before I can say anything though, Culner chimes in again.
“Don’t want to do nothing though. No point, so don’t worry about it.”
I hit the signer to circle back around and find a place to take him for dinner, a plan made in haste when he leans over and turns off my signal. Culner does things only one way. Begrudgingly I head back towards his land in the Interior. We fly in silence a while and once the city is almost out of sight he says:
“You know, it was harder in the old days. Positers were a lot less efficient, no cells to speak of, and of course no Trans.”
“Yeah, but you got along alright then, right?”
“We had to. Seems like a nightmare when I think about it now. I remember having to ride three hours to get water. Doctor was a five hour wait, if you could raise him by radio that is. I don’t know what I’m saying… It’s just. Well when something broke, you couldn’t fix it. You just had to learn to live without it.”
“Must have been a pain,” I reply, but Culner is already gone. His eyes are cast to the dusky horizon and his mind must be further still. Midja leaving him broke something in Culner. Then again maybe it was already broke and Midja being around had kept it from being obvious. The ranch began to falter as the economy changed. Culner was never a salesman, it was just that in the past the demand had come to him. As Caldevera got to its feet power became widely available in the Hubs, people started to cluster in the wake of the Soprone pandemic, and emissions standards were rolled back. Suddenly the idea of flying place to place seemed more attractive. The idea of the horse was that same freedom; a Trans only amped that up. Slowly, over the course a decade we began to understand that how we got where we were going was not as important as where we went. It might seem a subtle thing, to go from exalting a process to desiring a product. I mean, it’s not like we all became materialists in the past ten years. I’m not one of the radicals who will say something like that. It’s just that once we understood that Caldeveran meant something, then that idea of what was Caldeveran could be altered.
Culner is not a product of this, but perhaps an example. When we needed horses we thought of ranchers as useful people. When we looked back on years of that it seemed like horses defined something that was “us”. But as the situation changes there are other things that make up “us”. The older things don’t disappear. They become overwritten. It’s like the scent of old paint lingering in a room long after it’s been covered over, a hint of some other time, some other “us”. For the people left behind, like Culner, it’s like everyone moved away. One day they look back, and though they can’t put their finger on when, they realize that they fell from the pack. It’s something you can’t fix, you have to learn to live without it.
Culner didn’t see Midja for ten years. Then out of the blue she calls him. They talk by line for an hour or so. She tells him she’s married, has twins, and has moved to Moden Hub. He says very little. His silences are constant and after a while she can find no more words to fill them.
“I realized I had your pistol from the war. I wanted to give it back to you. I don’t want it in the house with the kids.”
Silence.
“Can I see you?” she asks.
“Ok.”
Somehow they can’t find a time when they can meet for more than a month. Midja works and has the twins, she is busy these days. Culner is not. He lies or exaggerates his way out of meeting her. Privately he hopes she will forget about it. After a month she stops calling. Winter comes and with it the off season. Buyers are infrequent when the dust kicks up in the stormy months. Culner likes the dust, but he and Artina both need respirators. After her difficult birth Artina was weak growing up. Culner showed her every kindness and trained her as a palfrey rather than for hard rides. For all their apparent grace, horses are strange, panicky creatures. A horse trained for hunting that won’t spook at the crack of a rifle will look sideways at a line of paint on the road and go no further. Simple things set them off, a coat caught in the wind, the puttering of a Positer, the feel of a calcicrete slab underfoot – any of these things can make them jump, freeze, or buck. It takes a good rider to make a good horse. There was no better pair than Artina and Culner. When he rode her she would walk right past a roaring harvester, under a hovering Trans, through a bustling market it didn’t matter. She was calm in all things when they were together and he loved that marriage of horse and rider more than anything else in the world.
Culner would ride around the property with her every day, and it was when they were riding along the mesa top out behind the Type-2 that Midja found them. The wind was up, and the winter dust stained the horizons red. Midja was wrapped up in a duster and her face was obscured by a filter mask but Culner knew her immediately by her stance. The domed lenses of her goggles colored her face sepia, like an old photo. She had his sidearm wrapped up in a cloth tied with twine. Culner couldn’t bring himself to come closer. The wind howled around them, too loud for words, but they didn’t need any. Midja was not a woman who waited for things to happen. She walked firmly across the space between them, steadying herself against the wind, and reached the pistol up to him holding it dangling by the twine. It was not a motion which allowed for a reply. Culner took a hand of the reins and leaned over to take it and Midja stepped just an inch closer.
Artina started. She jumped back, her hind quarters spun round. Even over the wind you could hear the crack when she stumbled and fell to the ground.
Here I need to pause a moment...
I can’t say what went through Culner’s mind in those minutes. I can only tell you what he told me. It was coming back from a check up about a year ago that I heard the details with Artina for the first time.
He got quiet when he reached this part of the story. The Trans was dark except for the running lights. Against the night sky I could see only his silhouette and the sparkle of my gauges reflected as a pinpoint of light in his eyes.
“Well there wasn’t much you could say without shouting. Guess we didn’t need to. Midja and I knelt down by her. I… She had caught her foot in between these two cobbles of basalt, each one about as big as my chest. The bone was out of place. We can do so much these days with medicine, but there isn’t really anything you can do for a break like that so far out in the Interior. I knew that even if we got her fixed up she wouldn’t run anymore. And like a poem that comes upon you all at once I could look out and see the life before her. I could see her limping, then trotting in pain, but nothing more than that. I could see her looking out of the stable, her head poked out at the pasture. I could see a glint in her eye, the spark of the setting sun, burning like a candle set in a high window. I could see this all perfectly in my mind.”
He went silent here. He never told me what he did but I knew. Midja had left the sidearm just as she had found it, and Culner was not the type to leave it unloaded.
As I said before, I cannot speak for what thoughts went through Culner’s head. But that was the last time he saw Midja and he never rode again. I think I know why. I remember when he first taught me to ride Culner told me something. I remember it so well I can recite it by heart.
“You know,” he said “the best horse in the world, you can take her through a field of knives and she will carry you with a high head and a gentle canter. But if that horse knows you’re scared for one second all the skill in the world wont keep you on her. You keep your head when you are in the saddle, you hear? Because when a horse stumbles, well, what I mean to say is sometimes it’s the horse that did it. Sometimes it’s the rider.”

₪₪₪

We set down outside of the Type-2 and I help a very old man unload his goods and get inside his house. He reminds me that I have to get going. I have work in the morning and the partner to think about back at home. I know it but I don't want to just up and leave. There is a whiny somewhere in the barn, the sort of long lax one that I think means “I want attention.” Culner knows better and ignores it. We embrace, like old friends and I head for the door.
“Same time next fortnight?” he asks.
“Of course. Unless you need me by sooner.”
“I think I’ll manage alone.” He replies. I hesitate at the door.
“Look,” I say, “it’s your birthday and I think I still got some brandy in my flask, can I come in? We can have that drink, or just get some coffee and talk? Or we can go somewhere. You don’t have to stay here tonight Min.”
“Nah, no need for all that.” Min says. I can see in his face that he wants to say something else but he doesn’t. He won’t let me any closer than this, no matter how I try to help him.
Outside you can hear the dust rattling against the side of the building. It’s late summer and the autumn is always short in coming. Finally Culner just waves me off and starts inside.
“G’night.”
“Alright, Min. Good night, and happy birthday.”
The ranch is quiet and dark. I wait a minute in my Trans. In the growing wind I can hear that Type-2 rattling like it’s going to fall apart. I don’t know how anyone can sleep in that racket. The hands have all gone back to their homes in the Hub for the night. There, it is still early. There will be people laughing drinking all night in some parts of the Hubs, their faces bathed in the glow of the screens as they gather around to hear the music. Out here it is already as silent as it will get. The silence is not an audible one, but a mental one. In this silence I think back to those words Midja said to Culner, words he has repeated exactly the same every time he has told me that story.
“Sometimes a good horse stumbles Min, and sometimes when you get sick you don’t get better.”
As I heat up the engines the sound of the intakes overpowers the sound of the winds buffeting against the Type-2. I pull up into the night air, free and unencumbered. Down below I can see the ranch dark and empty, a decaying relic of a very different past. The lights of the Hub are already visible on the horizon. They burn brighter than the stars, the spire of buildings like burning trees, the flitting firefly lights of Trans lines, the glitter of a thousand celebrations and a thousand thousand achievements. These two things so different, can yet be held in my single vision for this one moment in history. I burn my engines and the dichotomy is gone.
And that could be the end. But I don’t make it home that night. Min Culner’s aged face appears on my com screen not ten minutes after I leave.
“Hey kid, I was just... Well talking to you made me think... Look, can I ask you a favor?”
₪₪₪
My partner is going to kill me when I get home, but hell, it’s Min’s birthday after all.
By dawn Min and I are on the Lusten plains sitting in my Trans and watching the dust storms build. As the heat of morning meets the clouds of free flying dust they rise high into the sky, elegant, formless pillars like the smoke of volcanic vents in the deepest ocean trenches. Then at once, as if by command of some inconceivable power, the dust drops all around the sides of that great pillar and a wall of shrieking sand roars across the vast expanses. It is a hiss in the distance but as it overtakes our Trans plunging the whole world into a thick darkness the sound around us is like a thousand galloping hooves.
I can’t see Min in the darkness of this moment. It is like we have been buried alive. I am terrified. I can’t see Min, but I know he is smiling a real smile. And that knowledge is a greater thing of beauty than I shall ever see with my eyes alone.