He replied; Zenna caught Rowan’s eye and motioned her over, relinquished the tiller to her. “I was fifteen,” Zenna replied to another unheard question. She joined Steffie by the rail but called back to Rowan. “You were, what, eighteen?”
Rowan was lost. “At what point?”
“When you entered the Academy.”
The meaning of Steffie’s complaint became clear. “Yes,” Rowan said, then overcame her astonishment. “But, Steffie, there were others who were older. Age is not considered a factor.”
“Helen was twenty-two,” Zenna volunteered.
“But I’m that come winter,” Steffie said. Rowan had thought him somewhat younger. He turned back to lean glumly against the rail. “And this training, this Academy, where’s it? Wulfshaven? Take a while to get there.”
“It won’t be in Wulfshaven,” Zenna said. “It’s in a different place each time. I don’t know where it will be held next.”
“Three years from now,” Rowan added.
“There, see? I’ll be nearly twenty-five. Most likely, I’ll be married, with tykes climbing all up me when I come home from work, the wife complaining at me about something or other …”
In the silence that followed, Zenna shrugged. “Then don’t marry. Use the time to prepare. I’ll be there to help. You can learn to read better, and chart and diagram. I can get you started on higher maths.”
“Of course!” Rowan said. “With Zenna’s help, you can learn a great many things in three years. And then, when the time comes— ”
“But that’s not good enough, is it?” He looked from one steerswoman to the other. “There’s more to being a steerswoman than just knowing things. Anyone can know things. I could work as hard as you want, and memorize all sorts of things, but … but I’d be just collecting them. Like pretty rocks, or butterflies … that’s it. Pinning them down in your head, and then your head all full of beautiful things, but none of them alive anymore.” He held his hands as if there were something between them, something that moved, and then was still.
Rowan recalled that among the steerswomen candidates who had failed training, the commonest reason was the very thing Steffie was trying to express; those women, in attempting to acquire knowledge, had instead merely collected facts. “It does take a special sort of person,” she admitted.
“But how can I tell I’m that?” Steffie turned his gaze on Rowan: dark, clear eyes under the wild tangle of brown hair. “How can I know I’m not just wishing for things, fooling myself? With me so old already, I don’t want to … I don’t want to waste my heart on something impossible. Can you tell?” His gaze now included them both. “Can you two tell if I’m the right sort for it?”
“No,” Zenna said honestly, “I can’t tell, one way or the other. I’ve only known you a few weeks. But nothing I’ve seen tells me you’re definitely wrong for it.”
“It’s much easier to tell who is wrong for it than who is right,” Rowan admitted. “And even people who seem perfect for the work can fail training, for any number of reasons. Forget what we think, Steffie— what do you think?”
“Me? How am I supposed to tell?”
Zenna made to reply; but Rowan held up a silencing hand, thought a moment, then motioned her to take over the tiller. “Hold on a moment,” she said to Steffie, then went below.
She returned, and Zenna caught sight of what Rowan was carrying. “Oh, perfect!”
Rowan handed it to Steffie. “Let’s try something. Tell me what that is.”
He fingered it suspiciously. “Well, it’s a bit of paper …” A glance at Rowan’s face told him she wanted more. “A strip of paper,” he went on. “Got its ends glued, so it’s a loop with a twist in.” He noticed something that pleased him. “Look, it’s like your rings! Bigger, though.”
“That’s right,” Rowan said. “And the twist is not a whole twist, it’s a half twist. That’s important. Look closer, and think about what you see.”
Steffie did so: his puzzlement grew glum, and then he shook his head. “It’s a Steerswomen’s test, isn’t it? And I’m missing it.”
“I wouldn’t call it a test,” Zenna said, “not exactly.”
“Not in the usual sense of the term. Just go ahead and tell us everything you can about that loop.”
He winced, shrugged, then returned to the question with dogged determination. “Right. Well, it’s made out of paper and glue. And it’s about an inch wide. And a foot long, I mean the paper it’s made from was a foot long, before it was turned into a loop. But now it’s a loop, so it doesn’t have any ‘long’ to it anymore, it’s just got an ‘around.’ ” He blinked. “Two ‘arounds.’ Around the inside and around the outside.” A pause. “With a twist. I mean a half twist.” Another pause. His brows knit. “Where the sides … switch …”
Rowan was attempting to keep her face impassive; Zenna did not bother, but sat half turned at the tiller, watching with a broad catlike smile.
Steffie seemed to derive equal encouragement from both their expressions. “The sides switch,” he said more definitely. “So the outside goes inside, and the inside goes outside. Right there.” The twist. “But …” More thought. “If that half of a twist was there all along, then the outside that’s switching to inside was the inside already.”
He had ceased addressing his comments to the steerswomen. “Where d’they switch back?” He was asking only himself. “ ’Cause, I don’t see it happening.” He stopped turning it and merely regarded it, rapt. And Rowan found it extremely interesting that he did not do as she had, when first she saw such an object: trace the loop with one finger, moving along it until, impossibly, the finger ended its trip precisely where it had begun with no break, no jump, no switching of sides.
Instead, all such action was taking place in Steffie’s mind only; and he reached his conclusion alone. “It’s … the same side, on the inside and outside. Always. That’s only one side the thing has.” His voice was quiet with wonder. “This is a thing with just one side.” He became more excited. “And look here, see?— the twist, that’s what makes it be. Because you can’t just have a side all by itself, can you, hanging on to nothing. Everything else has got two sides— a this side and a that side, leaning right up against each other, sort of, and making the thing be. But this one side, all by itself …” He grinned suddenly. “Right! That half a twist flips the side over, and lets it lean right up against itself. So that’s how come … that’s how come it’s not just an idea you can think about, it’s a real thing that you can hold in your hand.” He laughed. “Now, that’s about the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen, barring demons. No, forget that; this is weirder even than demons— ” He looked up to find the two women regarding him, and seemed a bit surprised to find them there. He recovered. “So … did I get it right? I know I did, I’m sure of it. I passed the test?”
“Solving the loop is not a test,” Rowan told him. “It’s a demonstration.”
“Demonstration of what?”
“Of everything you just did,” Zenna said.
“But what’s the point?”
“The point,” Rowan said, “was to make you do it. Tell me: was it hard or easy?” Steffie became wary, but Rowan assured him: “It doesn’t matter whether it was hard or easy. But just tell us: Which was it?”
“Well …” The loop, hanging from his hand, fluttered in the breeze; he held it more tightly. “Some of it was hard, and some of it was easy. And doing one hard part made some of the other hard parts easy. I wasn’t thinking about it being hard or easy. I guess I was too busy.” He regarded it again, shrugged. “Mostly, it was just different. Something different to think about. A different way to think about things. Do you have any more?” he asked suddenly.
“More?”
He held it up. “More things like this that make you think different.”
“Why?” Rowan asked.
He was taken aback. “Well, because, if you do, I’d like a crack at them.”
“Why?” Zenna r
epeated.
“Why?” He looked back and forth between the women. “I liked it. I want to do it again.”
“And again after that?” Zenna asked.
“Well … sure.”
“For the rest of your life?” Rowan asked.
“Yes.” The answer came immediately, and almost inaudibly, as if the word had spoken itself before Steffie could think to take a breath to speak it. He himself seemed surprised to hear it and, with his gaze turned inward, more amazed still by all that lay behind the word inside him.
Then he did take a breath, a deep one as if to shout, but he spoke in a normal tone of voice. “Yes,” he said.
Rowan felt a grin on her face and was surprised by the amount of pride in him she felt. “Now, what did you just learn?”
“That I want to know. I want to find out.” No hesitation. No uncertainty.
“Then, join us.”
“Well,” he began, but took a moment to wipe his eyes with the heels of his hands, “I think I’ll do exactly that.”
The air threatened rain for days, but never made good on its threat. White haze crept up the sky from the southwest, and sunlight beat down on the ship, damp and hot, like a solid, sweltering blanket. Each morning and evening, Rowan impatiently tapped the blown— glass flute of the barometer, in a vain attempt to encourage the fluid level to change. The level stubbornly continued to indicate low pressure.
The Guidestars remained invisible throughout the nights, and in daytime the sun became more and more blurred behind the mist overhead. The steerswomen could not tell direction other than vague east in the mornings and vague, red west in the evenings. The ship crept across the water, with a sluggish breeze three points aft of starboard.
On the fourth day, the horizons began to close in.
Rowan and Zenna stood in the bow, grimly watching the fog move in.
“We can’t afford to wait this out.”
“No.”
The women stood regarding the weather. “There’s no way to tell where we are.”
Rowan sighed. “Let’s take soundings. As long as we have deep water, there’s a chance we’re moving in generally the correct direction.” Janus’s charts showed the shallower water closer to the north shore of the channel and even had some indications in place on the southern shore. The center of the channel had been too deep to sound.
They set Steffie in the bow with the sounding line, laboriously tossing out the bolt that had replaced its original weight and reeling it in; but his call was always, “No bottom!”
In the afternoon, the breeze lifted, backed, and they permitted the ship to run before it, now not wishing to move more quickly, for fear of running into shallow water too soon to react. Steffie’s voice became a comforting rhythm.
Then the wind stiffened, and the fog began to pocket, opening and closing about them. “At last,” Rowan muttered, relieved to see clear water in the passing breaks.
Both women startled at silence, when Steffie did not call on cue. “Steffie?” Zenna shouted.
He cried out, wordlessly.
Rowan ran forward; but he was already scrambling aft. “It ends!”
“What?”
“The water, it ends, I saw it in a break— ”
“Land?” Rowan was stunned. They must be far, far off course.
“How far ahead?” Zenna asked.
“No, not land! The water just ends, in a straight line, straight ahead!”
“That can’t be right,” Rowan said, “the sea can’t simply end— ”
He clutched her shoulders, shouted at her, terrified. “Straight across, nothing past it, dead ahead!”
“Jibe!” Zenna yelled. “Get the boom, I’m jibing to port, now.”
Rowan ran to the mainsail sheet, pulled the knot loose just as Zenna shoved the tiller hard about. Rowan and Steffie grabbed the boom, forced it into the wind, past it. The boom tore from their hands, swinging wide and fast, as the sail caught. They stumbled, clutched the flailing rope, lashed it. The jibe snapped the line taut, the sail filled with a clap like thunder, and the little ship shook and shuddered from the blow.
Zenna fought to hold the tiller, bracing her foot on the cockpit side, then found her balance and the ship’s simultaneously. They were heeled wildly over to starboard; but the clumsy vessel suddenly loved the angle and, almost as if surprised, gave itself to a sweep of glad speed.
Rowan found herself braced with her feet in the ropes tying down the tarp, her back against the port side rail, her right fist clutching the back of Steffie’s shirt, fingers slipping in old silk. Steffie was scrabbling with his hands, kicking, trying to avoid tumbling into the tarp-covered hole.
Looking out, but feeling from the angle as if she were looking up, Rowan saw that the fog had lifted off the starboard side.
The sea ended.
Perhaps three miles distant: a geometrically perfect line, a false horizon beyond which the gray sky seemed too close. It’s fog, the steerswoman thought, a line of fog; but a line a fog so perfectly straight was no less impossible.
Steffie had quieted beside her, found a grip on the railing above him, and turned himself around. The two stayed so, staring, quiet, trembling.
Eventually Steffie said in a small voice, “Met an old Christer once who said the world was flat.”
“The world is not flat,” the steerswoman said immediately.
“Right.”
Between the ship and the end of the sea, gray shapes humped and sank between the waves: one, three, then half a dozen, a dozen. “Big fish,” Steffie noted inanely. One broke the water, arced down again.
“Dolphins,” Rowan breathed.
Zenna called out, her voice tight from her straining muscles, but her words cheery. “Well, my loyal crew, I believe we’ve come a bit further than we suspected.” And past the clean straight line of water, the fog receded further, lifting, and revealing more sea beyond— but more distant than it ought to be, and seeming further down, as if they were looking past a ledge down some great height.
“The Dolphin Stair!” Steffie cried out, now glad. “It’s got to be!”
“That’s my guess,” Zenna said. “And if we don’t want to roll over the top”— and the tiller creaked— “someone better help me with this.”
Steffie clambered across the tilted deck to lend his back to Zenna’s work. But Rowan remained wedged, staring out across the stretch of water, to the far horizon beyond, thinking: Can stairs be made of water?
30
They could.
The travelers stood with their backs against the foot of the great cliffs on the northern shore of the channel. The narrow strip of ground at their feet was covered in small, loose shards, fallen through the years from the rocks above.
The straight edge, the end of the Inland Sea, was a mere two hundred feet away; they dared not try to get closer.
The lip ran south by southwest, stretching off to become invisible in the hazy distance. On the far horizon: a tiny, dim, gray shape— another cliff. The eye could not doubt that the sun-silvered line ended at that place.
Seawater poured over the edge, seeming almost static in its smoothness. But the power of the moving water was revealed by the sound: a continual, rushing roar, so loud it seemed more matter than sound. It was as if the noise itself possessed mass, weighting the three people in place under its pressure.
Past the edge of the lip, and down: another expanse of water, spreading eastward, ending in another lip. Past that lip: another, further down. And again, and more as, in a series of unnatural waterfalls, the Dolphin Stair guided the water of the Inland Sea down to join the distant Ocean.
Zenna’s grip on Rowan’s arm tightened, and when Rowan turned to look, the other steerswoman indicated with a lift of her chin.
Dolphins had been pacing them offshore, possibly the same group sighted three days before. Now they began a series of leaps and dives, then as a group turned toward the edge and raced at it. First one, and then a crowd of dolphins: l
eaping just as they reached the water’s end, each gray, muscular body arcing up and out into the bright blue air. In mid-flight, each dipped its nose downward, and vanished past the edge.
And that, Rowan saw, was how the dolphins used their stair, leaping over edge after edge, eventually to reach the open ocean.
They had found Janus’s anchorage that morning, after three days of sailing north, keeping well back of the top of the stair. The anchorage lay between a barren island and a little rocky cove. Rowan had been prepared to dive overboard to search the cove’s floor for a boulder large enough to replace the lost anchor, but this proved unnecessary: Janus had sunk a mooring line. The line was marked by a sphere of murky yellow glass, the float from a fishing net.
Alone, Rowan swam ashore, and discovered Janus’s camp.
Above the tide line there was a small but solid hut constructed of Inner Lands wood, nestled against a rock wall. Inside: a pallet made of old blankets, a battered chair, a lath crate beside the bed, and a lamp with a tin of oil— conditions hardly different from Janus’s room above the cooper’s. The steerswoman immediately checked inside the crate and was disappointed to find that it held no papers or charts, only some pots and a boning knife. A small store of firewood, much of it driftwood, lay stacked at the foot of the bed, safe from the elements.
Outside, water barrels crowded against the hut, some holding rainwater, some upended and empty, some in various stages of being reduced to firewood. These last gave Rowan an eerie feeling; there remained here a feeling of work interrupted. Rowan caught herself looking around warily, half expecting someone to suddenly return.
After a moment spent thinking how she herself would arrange such a camp, she immediately found a storage hole, with sacks of vegetables, a crate of salt fish, and a barrel holding sacks of wheat flour tucked inside.
Returning to the water’s edge, Rowan waved to her friends and then used an exaggerated version of the wood gnomes’ language of gestures to communicate to Zenna that she had found the camp, that there was no danger, and that there was food here.
The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series) Page 34
