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)
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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.
Tim Winton, The Riders
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