Steerswoman - 01 & 02 The Steerswoman's Road

by Rosemary Kirstein

  They built a fire shelter out of brush, and Rowan eventually started a damp, smoky fire with some of the birch bark she had wisely saved from the forest, now far behind. The flame needed constant attending, due to the smallness of the bramble branches with which they fed it.

  They cooked; they ate; they calculated.

  “We have enough food,” Bel said, “to get back to the Inner Lands from here. We should think about it.”

  Rowan had already been doing so. She sighed. “How long do you think we can extend what we have?” She had traveled on short rations before, and knew her own limits. She did not know Bel’s.

  “Let’s check your maps.”

  They abandoned their meal to stand head-to-head; Bel held the sides of their cloaks together to provide shelter for the chart. Rowan traced with one finger the intermittent tracks to the east of Grey-river. “There’s something here ... a few houses, not really a village. Farms.”

  “Is your Steerswomen’s privilege always dependable?”

  Rowan winced. “No. But nearly always, yes. And it’s harvest by now; most people will be more generous. Can you tell if there’s likely to be a tribe nearby?”

  “There’s likely to be one, anywhere east of here. But I haven’t seen the signs yet.”

  “What signs do you look for?”

  “Goat muck, cessfields, and redgrass eaten to the roots. Bits of corpses, if there’s been trouble.”

  Rowan replaced her map and they returned to their dinner. “How likely are we to end up in bits ourselves?”

  “If we approach them right, they’ll wait to talk first. We’ll only end up in bits if they don’t like our answers.” Bel took another bite of food, appreciatively. “The smoke doesn’t help the frogs,” she observed, “but it’s good for the snake.”

  It was late afternoon, and the travelers considered themselves in place for the night. Rowan wiped the grease from her fingers and rose to set up the rain fly, musing on Bel’s several plans for gaining the acceptance of a tribe. “How is it that I never knew that you had three names?” she wondered as she worked.

  “I never told you any of my names at all,” Bel pointed out, and Rowan recollected with surprise that this was true. When first they met, Rowan had overheard Bel’s first name being used by an Outskirter tribe that was peacefully patronizing the inn at Five Corners; the steerswoman had simply addressed the Outskirter by the name she had heard, as a matter of course.

  “Bel, Margasdotter, Chanly,” Rowan repeated to herself, reminding herself of the elements: given name, matronym, line name. “Perhaps,” she mused aloud, “I should choose two more names for myself. Anya was my mother, which makes me Anyasdotter; and for a line name—” She stopped, catching Bel’s expression.

  The Outskirter sat stiffly, her face all glower. “That’s not a good idea.”

  Rowan recovered. “I’m sorry.” Then: “But why isn’t it?”

  Bel wavered, then returned to eating. “If you name yourself as an Outskirter,” she said, her words barely comprehensible around a mouthful of snake, “you’re saying that you are an Outskirter. People will expect you to act like one, and they won’t forgive you any mistakes you make in proper behavior.” She paused, then continued reluctantly, and more clearly. “And making up a line name out of the air would be saying that our lines mean nothing. It’s an insult.”

  The steerswoman was contrite. “I didn’t intend it that way.”

  “I know. But they won’t. Don’t try it.”

  The greengrass vanished.

  It was as subtle a process as Bel had first described to the Prime: first one noticed occasional patches of redgrass, then more, and eventually one realized that for some indeterminate length of time no greengrass had been seen at all. Certain other green plants remained, however: thistle, with autumn-brown stems, and purple blossoms faded to white; milkweed, sending up drifting silk into the air on mornings of less rain; and dandelion, heads ghostly gray, rain-beaten to damp drab blots. All of them, Rowan noted, plants with airborne seeds.

  The redgrass surprised her by growing taller than ever it had in the Inner Lands, where it was routinely pulled as soon as it appeared. Here, it became knee-high, then waist-high, stiff tall reeds with abrasive blades growing in a three-ranked pattern, and fat beardless seed heads. At first Rowan thought it a different plant altogether; rain seemed to dull its colors, soaking and darkening the bright red faces of the blades to dull brownish brick. They waded through it, its blades clutching and tugging at their clothing.

  They came to a place where a patch of grass had strangely faded to gray. Bel passed it by, but Rowan lingered, curious. She touched one pale blade, and it disintegrated, leaving sooty smears on her fingers; she touched a shaft, and it split, oozing clear fluid that stank with a foul, greasy odor.

  Bel paused and looked back at her. “Don’t bother with that,” she advised.

  “What is it?” Rowan parted the grass to peer into the center of the patch, despite the stench. There was a clearing within.

  “It’s probably a corpse,” Bel said, approaching. “Or part of one. It looks like someone’s been cast there.”

  Rowan drew up short. “Oh,” she said, now disinclined to investigate. But she had already reached the center, and it held no human remains. “It’s a fox.”

  It was long dead, desiccated skin over delicate bones, fine fur faded, sprawled under a tangle of rotted reeds. No scavengers had dined on it; natural corruption had had its way, and the only breaks in the crusted pelt were the result of the more unpleasant internal stages of decay, long past, when the body had swelled and burst.

  “One of those animals we heard by the raider camp?” Bel moved closer to study it, tilt-headed. “It’s a strange-looking creature.”

  They left the gray patch behind, Rowan brushing her fingers across the wet grass tops as she walked, to clear off the scent and the fluid. “The fox is a small predator,” she said, falling into a steerswoman’s explanation. “It’s shaped like a dog, and graceful as a cat. It’s beautiful when alive, and its pelt is highly prized. I wonder how it died?” Then she answered herself, body continuing to walk as her mind stopped short, surprised. “It starved to death. It must have wandered too far from the Inner Lands, and found nothing to eat ...”

  “What does a fox eat?”

  “Everything we’d like to, but can’t find.”

  Three days later, they found signs of a tribe.

  They had crested a rise and stood looking down into a shallow, rolling field half-obscured by shifting mist. The ground was stubbled, redgrass cropped to the roots and dying in a patchwork mottle of yellow and brown; occasional smears of pale gray emitted their particular, distinctive stench. Fog and curtains of rain hid the far horizons while intimating replication into the distance, suggesting to shocked eyes that the desolation continued past the limits of sight, forever.

  Rowan stood stunned. “What happened here?”

  The scene seemed to please Bel, who regarded her with mild surprise. “Goats.”

  “Goats did all of this?” Rowan reached down to pull at a bit of longer grass by her feet. It did show the marks of grazing: fibrous blades stripped and abraded to strings, stiff reeds chewed through at varied heights.

  Farther from Rowan’s position, the grass had been cropped shorter, and farther, shorter still. The field below appeared entirely lifeless.

  Bel had begun to amble down the slope; Rowan hurried to catch up.

  “Watch your step,” Bel said, the instant that Rowan’s left foot slid violently out from under her. A quick clutch at Bel’s shoulder saved the steerswoman from landing prone in a puddle of unidentifiable ooze.

  Bel helped her to a steady stance. “You have to step solidly,” she instructed. “You can walk around it now, but later you won’t always be able to.”

  They continued down into the field. “What was that?” Rowan asked.

  “Goat droppings.”

  Rowan stopped and turned back to it. “The
n the goat was ill.”

  “No. It’s always like that.” Bel found herself walking alone. She stopped, annoyed. “Rowan, you’re not going to study goat muck, are you?”

  Rowan intended to do exactly that. “This was not a healthy goat.” She found a twig and prodded at the translucent puddle. It was infiltrated with short wet fibers. “I wonder what it was eating?”

  Bel made a gesture that included the entire visible landscape.

  As they descended, Rowan noted that not every plant had been consumed. Tanglebrush bushes, ranging in a loose, staggered line, seemed denuded, but closer examination revealed that they had merely rolled their leaves tightly closed against the rain. She spotted movement among the bushes, and cautiously called Bel to a halt. “What’s that ?” A bobbing object, splotched black, brown, and white. Bel looked, then smiled. “That’s dinner.”

  The goat seemed pleased to find human company in the barren wilderness. It greeted them with happy relief—and met its death too quickly to recognize betrayal. As the travelers cleaned the carcass, Rowan considered the differences between it and its Inner Lands cousins. There were many.

  Its hair was not white and short, but long, as much as eight inches in length, splotched randomly. Farm goats had short black horns; their counterparts of the Outskirts veldt carried heavy weaponry, two inches thick at the base, growing almost straight back, and only curving outward at the tips. Rowan recognized the source of the wooden sword’s hilt.

  She became distracted from her study by a glance at Bel’s expression. The Outskirter seemed worried. “What’s wrong?”

  “This is a good goat. It shouldn’t have been lost.”

  “We’re fortunate that it was.” Of itself, Rowan’s mind entered into a series of calculations that brought a very pleasing revision in the number of miles the two women could safely travel before food would again become a concern.

  Bel shook her head as she severed one of the legs at the knee. “We look after our herd very carefully. If the flockmaster finds even one goat missing, scouts are sent out.”

  Rowan paused. “Should we be expecting scouts?”

  The Outskirter rose and gave the misty, drizzling meadow careful consideration. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “I think these people left very quickly.”

  Rowan imitated her, gaining no additional information whatsoever. “How can you tell?”

  Bel shrugged and returned to their work. “Only by the goat.”

  There was no brush for a fire shelter, no wood to burn; Bel declared that it was time to use Outskirter methods. In future days Rowan came to designate, somewhat arbitrarily, the frogs and snake as the journey’s last meal in the Inner Lands, the goat as the first meal in the Outskirts.

  Bel instructed Rowan to dig a pit, then occupied herself with cutting squares in the cropped turf with her knife. She lifted the small blocks, brushed off the dirt in the dead roots of the upper layer, and demonstrated them to be a type of peat. The women built their fire in the pit and covered it with the tarp, one end propped up with the now-useless wood sword, and so prepared their first fresh meal in four days.

  “I should warn you,” Bel said as they settled to dinner, “that you’re going to be sick.”

  Rowan stopped with the first bite partway to her mouth. “You told me that the goat wasn’t ill.”

  “It wasn’t.” Bel continued slicing cooked segments from the carcass, wrapping them in oiled cloth for packing. “It’s nothing to do with that. If someone from the Inner Lands eats Outskirter food, she’ll be ill, for a while. It always happens.”

  In most cases, Rowan knew, it was water that carried diseases, in the crowded sections of cities, or in villages where unsanitary conditions prevailed. She and Bel had been drinking local water throughout their journey thus far, to no ill effect; certainly, Rowan reasoned, the problem Bel referred to must result only from food prepared in a tribal camp, under possibly primitive standards of cleanliness. She considered that it might not be polite to point this out to Bel.

  She shrugged, and began to eat. “How ill, and for how long?”

  “Perhaps a day. Then you’ll be fine, and you won’t have any problems with the food again. It will affect me, too. Outskirters who leave the Outskirts for any length of time have the same problem.” She considered the chunk of fresh roasted meat in her left hand with open longing, then shook her head. “I should wait a day. Then we won’t be sick at the same time, and can take care of each other.” She left her work and brought some dried beef strips and hardbread from her pack.

  “What’s it like, this disease?” Rowan asked.

  The Outskirter gave a short laugh. “Many trips to the cessfield.”

  It was unlikely that Rowan would be able single-handedly to alter the established cooking habits of an entire Outskirter tribe; at some point it would be necessary for her to pass through what seemed from Bel’s description to be a transient adaptive malady. She sighed. “Charming. I shall look forward to it.” She continued to eat. “How long after eating Outskirter food does one begin to feel ill?”

  Bel was tearing with her teeth at the tough strip. “About two days,” she said, chewing stolidly. “Although that’s usual for returning Outskirters. Perhaps you’ll take less time.”

  “Perhaps it won’t affect me at all.”

  The reply was muffled. “Ha.”

  8

  “How do we do this?”

  It was two days later; two days of trudging through gloom and showers across the endlessness of dead and rotting redgrass stubble that marked the tribe’s trail. Bel scanned the barren land and the scattered tanglebrush, then looked up at the lone figure on the hill. “We walk directly to him, always choosing an open path. He mustn’t think we have friends waiting in ambush.”

  The warrior began to move, angling away to the left. “When he sees how we approach, he’ll know we want to meet. If he keeps moving away from us, we must stop, and make it clear that we won’t follow, or he’ll think we’re hostile.” She led the way down the slope, and the figure paused again, watching.

  After long days traveling alone with Bel, the addition of another human being was oddly disturbing. The sudden presence of the distant figure seemed inexplicable, its upright stance incongruous, its motion peculiar, and its possession of an intelligent mind unlikely. Rowan found herself regarding it as a strange animal, unpredictable and possibly dangerous. But when they came within fifteen yards, it proved to be only a man in Outskirter garb, shaggy-haired, bearded, watching them with shadowed eyes.

  As they approached, Bel spoke quietly to Rowan. “Something’s wrong.”

  Rowan studied the figure. She could see nothing that might have prompted Bel’s comment, but took the fact as given. “He’s from the tribe that lost the goat?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps he thinks we stole it.”

  “We did steal it. Until we strike a trade for it, it’s considered stolen. But that’s not it.”

  They continued to approach the man. “You said the tribe left quickly.”

  “Yes.” Bel’s gait became more easy and natural, a danger signal to Rowan.

  The steerswoman considered. “The tribe encountered some trouble. He thinks we might be involved.”

  “Yes.”

  Possibly the trouble had taken the form of an attack by a hostile tribe; perhaps the man was overcautious after a lost battle. “How can we reassure him?”

  “We can’t. And it’s too late for us to back off. We’ll just have to be exactly what we are, and hope he sees it soon enough.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  “Fight. Or run. Whichever we can manage.”

  At a distance of fifteen feet, Bel stopped, Rowan pausing beside her, and they stood facing the man quietly for some moments. There was no gesture from him, no word and no signal. He held himself completely still, and Rowan was abruptly certain that there were other warriors near, whose existence and location this man was trying not to betray by un
conscious behavior.

  She glanced about: no one else was visible.

  At the moment Rowan decided that he was never going to move at all, he did, slowly. Reaching over his shoulder, he pulled a black, metal-edged sword from its sheath and stood with its hilt in his right hand, the flat of its blade resting across a bare left forearm. A motion of his shoulders threw back the damp patchwork cloak, leaving both arms clear and in sight, showing a black, shaggy vest thong-tied over a wide expanse of chest.

  Bel drew her own sword, and the man’s eyes widened at the gleam of bright metal. She laid it on the ground before her, hilt to the right, then stepped back a pace. Rowan made to imitate her, but was quietly told, “No. Keep your sword in hand, and stand with your back to me. I’m unarmed; you watch behind. Don’t look over your shoulder at him, he’ll take it as a threat.”

  Rowan complied; and, not knowing what to look for, she looked at nothing, carefully, intently: the wide, empty land, the bare undulating hills, the textureless gray skies. She listened in a widening circle, hearing Bel’s gear creak behind her, a crunch in the wet stubble as the man adjusted his stance.

  As Bel was about to speak, Rowan noticed something. “There’s movement in front of me, at an angle to my left, just past the second rise.” The motion stopped, then began again, crested the low hill, and revealed itself. Rowan relaxed. “Goats, two of them.”

  Bel spoke up to the man. “Two goats, at ten by you,” she announced. Rowan wondered at the turn of phrase.

  She heard the stranger reply. “And a warrior, at five by you.” In the far, windless distance something moved, colorless against the dead ground, visible only by its motion. It traced a slow arc to Rowan’s right, then paused, as if watching.

  Rowan stared at it, deeply disturbed. It was a person, she knew, but had she not been alerted to its presence, she would never have seen it, could barely see it even now. It came to her that the world around her was alive with information, none of it recognizable or comprehensible to her. Her trusted senses, her dependable intellect were inadequate here, and the fact made her feel more helplessly unarmed than if she were naked and without a sword.