Steerswoman - 01 & 02 The Steerswoman's Road

by Rosemary Kirstein

  “You’ve done what you could,” she told him. “Fletcher, you did everything you possibly could, and if we live, it’s entirely due to you.”

  He seemed not to hear her. “I didn’t know,” he repeated. Then, with a visible effort, he regathered himself, speaking more cogently. “Rowan ... I thought I was just collecting information. I didn’t know what it was used for, who needed it. I didn’t know it was for—for this ...” And he looked at the ceiling.

  “You tried to help,” she said. “To help Kammeryn, the tribe, me. You watched when you could, warned when you could, joined the warriors in defense ..” She abruptly recalled what Kammeryn had said: that the tribe of Face People who had attacked Kammeryn’s tribe had later been killed by Fletcher, alone. “And ..” An entire tribe, destroyed. It seemed an act of typical wizardly cruelty; she could not reconcile it with her recovered understanding of Fletcher’s character. “How did you destroy the Face People’s tribe?” she asked.

  Fletcher found the memory distressing. “The link has a weapon in it ...”

  “A destructive spell?”

  “Yes.”

  Rowan had had experience with destructive spells. “Why didn’t we hear it?” In the Inner Lands, the boy Willam’s destructive spell had made a sound like a thousand thunders.

  “It’s silent.” A different sort of magic. “It spreads a sort of fire ...”

  “You burned them to death.”

  “Yes ... I didn’t want to ... But they would have attacked again. They had almost no herd. And they couldn’t leave, they were boxed in, and they didn’t even know it. Ella’s tribe to the east, ours to the south, another northwest ... They would have hurt my people again;

  I couldn’t let that happen.” The roof began to shudder, silently, then snapped and settled into rhythm as the wind began to rise.

  “You saw all that through the Guidestar?” Rowan thought it strange, very strange that she should care at this moment about any such distant thing as a Guidestar.

  “Yes,” Fletcher replied.

  “Why didn’t you see them before the attack?” Just at the threshold of hearing, there came a distant rising tone, joining the sound of the wind.

  “I did.” Thunder rolled briefly, distantly. “That morning, during my report and reconnaissance. But I didn’t know who or what they were then; they just looked like a small tribe. You don’t understand, I can’t—” He amended his words. “With my link, I couldn’t actually see them, not as if I were a bird. I saw ... notations, like on your charts. I could tell that they were people, because they were arranged like a camped tribe, but they weren’t deployed like attackers, not when I looked. That happened later ...”

  Rowan thought long; and as she did, the rising tone became a far-off, approaching scream. “But this magic weapon ... You could have used it to stop the battle.”

  He closed his eyes. “Yes. And given myself away. Anyone who saw would know I had magic. They’d assume I was a wizard. I couldn’t know how they’d react. And in my training ... the rules said to protect my cover, at any cost. If people see you using magic, the simplest thing to do is kill the witnesses.”

  How many people might have been looking in Fletcher’s direction, Rowan could not guess. But she herself had been at Fletcher’s side.

  He would have needed to kill her; and any nearby warrior; and any relays watching; and any person to whom the relays spoke. Kammeryn. Perhaps the entire tribe.

  In that frozen moment, with the Face People bearing down on him, with his link in one hand and his sword in the other, Fletcher had been faced with a choice. And he had abandoned his magic powers, taken up his sword, and thrown himself into a battle that he was certain he could not possibly survive.

  He had been willing to die rather than harm Kammeryn’s people. “That’s why you didn’t use the spell to help your walkabout partner,” she said.

  He turned toward her; but his eyes were blind, his face suddenly, shockingly empty. His mouth moved once. “Mai,” he said, but too quietly for her to hear the sound.

  It was the expression she had seen before—emptiness, a silence of body and mind. But now she understood it. “Fletcher,” she said, and of itself, her hand reached toward his shoulder.

  But he pulled back violently, twisting away from her hand as if he could not at that moment bear a single touch. The mask of emptiness writhed on his face, shattered, and fell away, and for the first time Rowan could see what he had kept hidden behind it: it was horror.

  “Dear god, Rowan,” he said. “It happened so fast.” The terror on his face was so great that it drained all emotion from his voice, his body, so that he was sitting perfectly still, speaking almost inaudibly, and rapidly, without will or control. “I heard her shout,” he said in that quiet voice, with that face of horror, “and I ran to her, and then—”

  “Fletcher, don’t ...” She reached toward him again, but slowly. “That’s past, you couldn’t help it.”

  He did not hear her. “And then she was screaming, and when I cut down that thing—” His voice came alive again with the saying of the word, with the force of the memory, and his body twisted, as if trying to escape the very words he spoke

  Rowan froze.

  “And then,” he went on, his voice becoming wild, “and then it was thrashing on the ground, burning, between us, and she was standing there, blood all down one arm, looking at me, and the look on her face, and she was saying, over and over, ‘What are you?’” He jerked once, as if from a sword thrust, and wrapped his arms about himself. “She was shouting at me, ‘What are you?’”

  He quieted, slowly, shuddering. Rowan tried to speak his name, failed; she could make no sound.

  “And I,” he continued, in the empty voice again; and she wished that he would stop, stop now—“and I didn’t know what to do ... I just, I couldn’t think, and it happened so damned fast ...

  “And then, after ... when I saw ... I wanted to die. And I thought, I’ll just go away, I’ll just walk away and die ...”

  Rowan spoke at last; but now it was against her will. “You killed her.”

  He looked up at her, into her eyes, and he seemed puzzled. “And I walked. I think I walked forever. I didn’t die. And then, somehow, I was walking back.” He reached out and clutched her wrist, held it tight. “Mai was gone. But if I died—Rowan, don’t you see that if I died, it would be like losing them all ...”

  “Fletcher.” But it was not Rowan who spoke. Fletcher was slow in comprehending, slow in turning to the speaker.

  Jann was a shadow, a quiet voice. “Fletcher,” she said, “your life is mine.”

  And it was done quickly.

  49

  The tornadoes in the west did not strike the tribe but slowly worked their way northeastward and dissipated.

  The tribe lasted through two tornadoes that writhed toward them from the east, through hail, debris, and through three full days of trailing high winds at mere hurricane force.

  The weather never ceased; but there came a time at last when it slacked, when the boiling clouds above emitted no lightning. And hesitantly, cautiously, small groups of people emerged from the shelters to make their reports to Kammeryn. Chess stayed at his side, urging him to eat when he forgot to, to sleep when necessary.

  The tribe had lost one shelter. Rowan herself went out to view it. It had become a hole in the ground, with a ten-foot length of lichen-tower core wedged inside. The tent skin, the poles, the internal and external bracing wires, and all the people who had been in the shelter were gone. Rowan stood gazing at it, wondering stupidly how Outskirters would handle funerals in which the corpses had already been cast across the land by the wind itself.

  There were other dead. A warrior had been killed when a stave was pulled by its line out of the earth behind her, striking and crushing her skull. A mertutial had died at the height of the first tornado, apparently from terror. One young boy succumbed to exhaustion and pneumonia, contracted after one side of the children’s shelt
er tore, letting the driving rain soak all the inhabitants.

  And there was Dane.

  Zo and Quinnan had returned two days after the last tornado; they had been sheltering among the rocks in the ridge to the north. They were wet, half-starved, and at the end of their strength, and they were carrying the girl between them.

  Dane was unable to walk, could not control her own body. She trembled and spasmed constantly; she recognized no one.

  Zo and Quinnan, going against Kammeryn’s command, had dared to enter the near edge of the zone of heat. But the air was not hot, not even warm. Instead, they began to feel ill, first Zo, then Quinnan; nausea, fits of trembling, blinding pains in the head. They struggled onward and found Dane, crawling toward them; of Leonie there was no sign.

  Dane’s hands and knees were raw and blistered. When Zo and Quinnan bent to raise her, they found that it was the ground itself that was warm, some of the stones hot, and that the grass was almost brittle, as if drying from within, in a slow, flameless heat.

  Dane lasted one day in the camp; Mander could do nothing for her. Zo’s headaches did not abate, and she sat huddled in pain, Quinnan caring for her, never leaving her side.

  And with the weather slackened, the people had time to deal with their dead.

  Rowan and Bel stood out on the slope, gazing across the land. The wind was stiff and steady, southwest and northeast. “Fletcher said it would change,” Rowan said. The weather was following the course he had predicted. It felt strange to her, as if his remembered words somehow controlled instead of reflected events, as if he were perhaps still present, waiting to tell her more, his long form standing just behind her, just past the edge of her sight.

  “He’s gone,” Bel said.

  “Yes ..”

  Bel took three aimless steps, looking down, looking at the sky. “We need him and now he’s gone.” Her voice was expressionless.

  Rowan understood that Bel’s distress had a different source from her own. She roused herself from her thoughts. “He helped us, yes. If he were here, he would keep helping us ...”

  “He knew magic. We need magic.”

  “Perhaps not ..”

  “We’re useless without it.” Bel suddenly took five strong paces forward, spun back to the steerswoman, and stretched her arms out to indicate the entire visible world. She stood so, with the rolling roof of clouds above her; with the earth torn in freakish lines from horizon to horizon, where tornadoes had riven it; with fragments of lichen-towers, fragments of goats, splintered bushes, redgrass crushed flat, all about her, a hole that had once contained human beings at her feet. “Look at it, Rowan!” she shouted. “Look!”

  Rowan looked—at all of it. Bel dropped her arms as if she had not the strength to hold them up, sat as if she could no longer stand. Rowan went to her side.

  “If Slado sends soldiers,” Bel said quietly, “we can fight them, face-to-face. And if he sends too many soldiers to face, then we can fight them from behind: hiding, sneaking.

  “If Slado sends wizards, we’ll face them until we learn the limits of their magic; and then we’ll vanish into the landscape, strike when they’re not looking, or bait them until they fall into some trap.”

  She raised her hands, made them into fists, and drew them down as if forcibly, to rest on her knees. “If they build fortresses,” she said, “we’ll break them down. If we can’t, then we’ll infiltrate. If they take up residence, we’ll become their servants and their lovers and murder them in their sleep ...” The rain returned, spattering, hissing. Bel ignored it.

  “Rowan,” she said, water trailing down her face, “I can fight people; any people that he sends here, I can find some way to fight. Any wizard who comes here, despite magic, despite guards—if they come, I can strike them. Anything that I can touch, I can fight ...”

  And she gathered her strength and shouted, as if it were the last shout of her life: “Rowan, I cannot fight the sky!”

  And the warrior sat silent on the torn earth. She dropped her head and closed her eyes.

  The steerswoman gazed down at her. “I can.”

  Bel looked up.

  “One person has caused this, Bel,” Rowan continued. “One single man: Slado. And I can fight him.

  “I’ll find out what this is all for, what it’s meant to accomplish. I’ll find out how it’s done—and put a stop to it.” She dropped to her knees beside her friend. “I need to know more. I need to learn, to learn everything I can. And when I know enough, then will come the time to act.”

  Bel gazed at her. “Can you learn where Slado is?”

  The steerswoman nodded. “Eventually. Yes.”

  “We’ll find him, and kill him.”

  “If that’s what it takes.”

  “If it’s not what it takes, it’s still what we’ll do. I’ll slit his throat myself. He’s a murderer, Rowan. Murderers die.” And the steers-woman could not argue.

  A voice spoke from behind. “Rowan?” She turned.

  Averryl was there; and behind him, Kree, and the rest of the band. There was something in their midst. Averryl said, “We’re going to cast Fletcher.”

  Rowan looked at the shrouded form lying among the warriors; not standing invisibly behind her, not waiting to speak, not one moment away from touching her shoulder.

  “Cast him?” she said uncomprehending. An Outskirter rite of honor for a wizard’s minion, a man who had been sent for Slado’s purposes, to aid in a plan which had caused only horror and death?

  A man who had taken up Outskirter ways, Outskirter life; who had come to love the world he lived in, and each person who had stood beside him, for their beauty, for their strength, for their honor. A man whose every word was a lie, but whose every chosen action was driven by only truth, the truth that was his love of the life; who had declared, with laughter, with joy, his love of a tribe’s old cook, of a hand-woven rug, of a rough pottery bowl, of a steers-woman. A man who had discarded unimaginable powers and accepted the simple sword, striking at the enemies of those he loved, knowing he could die in the attempt and believing it worth his death.

  A man who had stood by his tribe, by his seyoh, by his chief. A warrior of Kree’s band. Fletcher.

  Outskirter rites for an Outskirter. Rowan stood, rain on her clothing, her hands, her face. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course. I’m coming.”

  50

  Dust Ridge was appropriately named.

  They saw it first as a smoky line on the horizon. Rowan took it to be a low cloud; but it did not follow the rest of the weather. It grew larger as they approached, and at last they could see that it was a long cliff, with winds from above spilling dust from drier land beyond, over the edge. Rowan worried about climbing up into that dust, but it was only with the wind from the east that the phenomenon occurred. When the wind faded, or changed, Dust Ridge stood bare and calm.

  They had traveled with Kammeryn’s people for two months as the tribe slowly recovered. The Outskirters had survived by replenishing their flock with goats strayed from tribes that did not survive the tempests and tornadoes. But when they reached land too grim to support the tribe, they paused to wait, and Rowan and Bel went on alone.

  Dust Ridge should have been out on the blackgrass prairie; the report of Bel’s father had placed it so. It was not. It was on the Face.

  Rowan wondered at her own surprise. The Outskirts moved, she knew, shifting forever eastward. The Face moved as well, she now saw, staying always ahead of the Outskirts themselves. When Bel’s father had been here, it had been prairie; now it was the Face.

  Rowan had before given little thought to the fact that Bel’s father had been to Dust Ridge; the steerswoman had not before fully comprehended the nature of life in the Outskirts, on the Face, on the prairie. Now she wondered at his interest in a land so inhospitable. But Bel could provide no good answer: it had been her father’s way to always travel, she told Rowan, often alone, and often to places that did not much interest other people. Bel found it not at
all surprising that he should have seen fit to take himself out onto the blackgrass prairie, for no other reason than that it existed.

  But there was no blackgrass at Dust Ridge now, nor were there goblins. The heat had come to the Face for the first time in decades, earlier that year, and had destroyed all life then present, leaving the tanglebrush bare and brittle, the lichen-towers weirdly desiccated, their internal spiraled spines bare and dead against the sky.

  But there was new life: redgrass, spreading in from the Outskirts, meeting no natural competitors at all. Rowan and Bel walked across dried mulch composed of dead and rotted plant and insect life, merged and mixed by the intervening rains. Here and there were small and larger stands of redgrass, rattling sweetly, promising pastures to come.

  Rowan’s calculations of the location of the fallen Guidestar had a limit to their accuracy: she could not narrow the possible area to anything less than twenty miles. But Rowan had no plan to scour the face of the ridge for the Guidestar.

  Instead, she and Bel made their camp on the plain below the cliffs and waited.

  At sunset, Rowan stood facing the ridge; and as the sun fell behind her, illuminating the cliffs with gold and rose, she saw a streak, a smear of white glints on the raw face of the ridge, glowing brighter as the light changed, then fading when it disappeared. She marked the place in her mind, and sat staring at it long after dark.

  They found a path up to it, certainly the same path Bel’s father had used; there was no other. It was rough, and switched back and forth. They left their equipment below, taking only Rowan’s logbook, pens, ink, and a waterskin, in an otherwise empty pack.

  Rowan and Bel stood at last at a place where a thousand glittering blue jewels lay at their feet, in the shadow of a huge, shattered shape that thrust out from the cliff itself.

  It was as large as a large house, and had once been larger; they could see that one side was torn, and open. Inside, there might once have been a chamber; but the body of the Guidestar was itself crushed, and that possible chamber was collapsed, extruding trusses, beams of metal, blackened with the heat of its burning fall.