The Steerswoman's Road

by Rosemary Kirstein

  Bel looked up at her with nothing more than mild surprise. “Oh, very well. I won’t use what I learn.” She stepped around Rowan and continued down the road, leaving the steerswoman behind again.

  Confused by the barbarian’s nonchalance, Rowan caught up once more. “I don’t know if I made myself clear. I’m going to need some kind of assurance from you. I don’t know anymore if I should trust what you say.”

  Bel studied her face for a long time, great dark eyes unreadable. At last she said with careful casualness, “I’m interested in traveling to different lands and seeing things I haven’t seen before. I suppose that includes local customs. Now, when I say a thing, I mean it. But that may not hold true for others I meet. I suppose I must ... make allowances for differences in customs ... and manners.” She smiled benignly up at Rowan. “So I won’t kill you for that insult.”

  As they walked along together, Rowan tried to dispel the feeling that she had tossed stones into the den of a wildcat, and that the cat had greeted her with purrs. She might not be forgiven so easily on another occasion.

  Bel settled to the ground by the fire, pulling her piebald cloak around her. “I think,” she said without preamble, “that they’re part of the moon.”

  Rowan looked up from her writing, saw that a long conversation was afoot, and carefully put the lid on her ink jar. She had found during the day’s march that Bel’s times to talk neatly coincided with her own—or possibly the Outskirter was sensitive to Rowan’s moods and never started a conversation when she knew Rowan had no interest. “The moon,” Rowan countered, “was white.”

  “Sometimes it was blue.”

  “Rarely.”

  “Yes, but think about it; the moon changed sizes. It was bigger sometimes, and smaller at other times.”

  “That’s known.” Rowan studied Bel across the fire: a small bundle of various furs, a thatch of dark hair, dark eyes bright with firelight and starlight. The Outskirter was wearing an odd little smile, as though she found the workings of her own mind entertaining. “That’s known, as much as anything about the moon can be said to be known,” Rowan continued.

  “What do you mean?”

  Rowan poked the fire with her hiking stick. “Only that no one’s ever seen it. We don’t know for certain that it ever existed.”

  Bel was outraged. “Of course it existed! How can you say the moon never existed? I’ve been hearing of it all my life. The eldest person of my tribe recalled hearing of it. And he told me of when he was young, and the eldest then told him about hearing of it. The tales have existed forever.”

  “But no tale tells of where it went.”

  “Ha! That’s what I’m speaking about.” She leaned back, and her belt caught the firelight, glinting. “Things look larger when they are close, and smaller when they’re distant. If the moon changed size, then I think it must have been near sometimes, and far away at others. Perhaps it came too close, and fell down.”

  The idea surprised Rowan. “It would explain a great deal.” She considered. “No. The moon’s been gone for a long time, hundreds of years, perhaps thousands. If it had shattered into jewels, many more would have been found by now. And the innkeeper’s jewels—if they were imbedded at the time of their fall, they would have been deeper, in a far older tree. No, they’re recent.”

  After more discussion Bel reluctantly agreed. “My father was hardly the first person to visit Dust Ridge, only the first for many years. No one before him found any jewels. He told me they were in plain sight, scattered across the face of a cliff.”

  “Which direction did the cliff face?” Rowan asked.

  “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

  “Possibly. In every case where the jewels were found on one side of a thing, it’s always been the northwest face. It’s as if a giant flung them across the land—and the giant faced southeast.”

  “That may be the answer.”

  Rowan laughed, amused by the image. “No, it couldn’t be, of course. He’d have to be far too tall, and far too strong.”

  “But why not, if it’s just a question of size? There are more strange things in the world than you or I have seen.”

  Rowan felt a strange chill fall on her. She became aware of the space around and above her: the distance to the road, the edge of the forest close at hand. She sensed the area that the first line of trees defined, heard the wind whistling in the space that curved over their tops. She saw two women huddled by a fire, in a place that lay equally distant from each horizon, in the center of a circle. And she knew, with a mapmaker’s eyes, how small that circle was. The world was a very large place, and might well contain such things as giants large enough to scatter objects with a single toss, from the Long North Road to the heart of the Outskirts.

  And yet ...

  “Well, let’s see.” Rowan shifted back a bit from the fire, leaving a wide clear area in front of her. She picked up her pen and, using the blunt end, sketched in the dirt. “We’ll simplify. Instead of thinking of a scattering of jewels across a whole range with a single throw, let’s consider two points.” The piece of ground transformed into a rough chart of the terrain surrounding the jewels. “Assuming that he threw in a southeasterly direction, the shortest limit would be here—” She marked a point with her pen end. “—and the farthest here.” She made as if to mark that point also, then saw that her scale was off. She got up and backed farther away from the fire, finally guessing at the position of the Dust Ridge in the Outskirts. “And if we make it as easy for him as possible, we’ll have him stand right on top of the first point. All he needs to do is drop his jewel, and we’ve established the first finding.

  “Now to throw, from there, all the way to the Outskirts ...” She squinted a bit, thinking. “He’s throwing well past the horizon. I wonder how he aims, or if he aims? And his jewel has to move very fast, to cover that much ground before it falls.” She stepped to one side, and stooped down, quickly drawing a complex of interlocking lines.

  Rowan discovered that Bel was beside her; lost in her calculations, she had not noticed when the Outskirter had left her seat across the fire. “What is that?”

  “A graph,” Rowan began. She prepared to elaborate, but her thoughts ran ahead, leaving her explanation somewhat abbreviated. “It charts the time it takes an object to fall. The horizontal distance traveled isn’t a factor. We look at distance traveled here—” And she sketched a second figure beside the first. “Moving objects fall in a curve.

  The harder the object is thrown, the faster it moves, and the farther it can travel before falling. And, of course, it helps to start from high up.”

  She looked up and saw that Bel was not looking at the sketches at all, but was studying Rowan’s face. The steerswoman realized she had left her friend behind. Bel could understand maps of a terrain, but she obviously had no means to interpret a map of an event.

  “Here.” Rowan picked up a white pebble and tossed it into the road. “You saw that it fell in a curve?”

  “Of course. How do you think I hit that rabbit?”

  Rowan found another, tossed harder.

  “Another curve,” Bel said.

  “A flatter curve,” Rowan pointed out.

  “Yes.”

  Rowan turned back to her graph. “Think of this as a chart of the route traveled by the pebble. This line could be the ground, and here’s where we start to throw it. This line shows how the pebble travels along, curving back down to the ground ...”

  Bel nodded. “But the ground isn’t flat.”

  “True, but for now we’ll pretend there are no hills or valleys—”

  “No, I understand that. But your line doesn’t show that the ground curves, too. The earth is round.”

  Rowan stopped short. Bel continued. “You don’t need to think about it, normally, but if you’re pretending the giant is throwing past the horizon, it seems to me that it would make a difference.”

  “True.” Rowan felt faintly embarrassed for having underestim
ated the level of Bel’s knowledge. She knew aristocrats in Wulfshaven who doubted that the earth was round.

  She tried to adjust her explanation to a more sophisticated level, then realized that was a mistake, also. There was simply no way to guess how much knowledge Bel possessed, and of what kind. Instead, Rowan resigned herself to being constantly surprised by the barbarian.

  “True, it would make a difference,” she repeated. “You have the curve of the earth’s surface—” She drew a long arched line. “And the curve of the jewel’s path.” She drew a second, wildly out of scale, intersecting the first. “And of course, the harder he threw, the more the arc flattens.” She drew a flatter path, reaching farther past the curved “horizon.”

  She looked at the three lines for a long time. “That’s odd.”

  “What?”

  She reached out and added one more line to the out-of-scale sketch. Abruptly, she started laughing. Bel watched her in perplexity.

  “I’m sorry,” Rowan said at last. “Call it a steerswoman’s joke. Charts like this can fool you sometimes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Rowan pointed. “According to this, if he threw something hard enough, it would never come down.” Bel looked at the sketches, tilting her head.

  “It’s ridiculous, of course,” Rowan continued. “There’s no way to throw that hard, not even with a catapult. But if you could, then the path of the object would curve less than the curve of the earth. When the object fell, it would—” She laughed again. “It would miss the earth.”

  “And then?” Bel asked easily.

  “And then nothing.” Using her foot, Rowan rubbed out the drawings. “It doesn’t happen that way, of course. It only seems so, because I haven’t drawn accurately, I haven’t used real distances. Nothing can throw that hard, and nothing thrown can move that fast. It’s amusing, but nothing can be learned from it.” She sat down again and reached for her map case.

  Bel dragged another dead branch toward the fire and began breaking it, standing on the center of the limb and pulling up on the thinner end. It cracked noisily, and she repeated the process. “No giants?”

  “Not in this case.” Rowan pulled out the smaller map of the jewels’ distribution and began measuring with her calipers.

  “That’s too bad. What about magic?”

  “It’s beginning to look like that’s the answer. Which means no answer at all.”

  Bel tossed the wood onto the fire. The flames diminished, damped. Picking up Rowan’s abandoned hiking stick, she pushed the new pieces into better positions. “Why don’t you ask a wizard?”

  “A steerswoman ask a wizard? Not likely. Or rather, not very useful. They don’t answer.”

  “I thought everyone had to answer a steerswoman.”

  “Nobody has to answer anyone; people answer because they want answers in turn. If you deny any steerswoman’s questions, no steers-woman will ever answer yours again.”

  Smiling, Bel sat down next to Rowan. “And wizards don’t care.”

  “Exactly.”

  Bel’s eyes glittered. “There’s more than one way to ask a question. And more than one way to find answers.” She made a stretching reach and dragged her small pack closer to the fire. “Here’s a way I understand.” She pulled out a square cloth-wrapped object somewhat larger than her hand. The cloth was silk, Rowan saw, and she wondered briefly how the Outskirter had acquired it. Bel unfolded it, revealing a varnished-paper box, and inside the box

  Rowan laughed. “Cards!”

  “Do you know the cards?” Bel began to sift through them, tilting their faded faces to the firelight.

  “Well enough, I suppose. But I don’t believe in their accuracy.”

  The barbarian gave her a sad look of reproach but said nothing. She found the Fool and placed it on the ground before her. After a moment’s hesitation, Rowan pulled the jewel from its leather pouch and laid it atop the card.

  “Shall I shuffle, or will you?” the barbarian asked.

  “I don’t see that it matters. The jewel can hardly shuffle for itself. You go ahead.”

  The cards were of the traditional size, large and awkward in anyone’s hand, especially unwieldy for Bel. She shuffled them thoroughly, though clumsily, cut them three times with her left hand, re-formed the pack, and pulled the first card.

  It was the two of rods, reversed. Bel moved the blue gem to one side and placed the card on top of the Fool. “The situation,” Bel began, “is controlled by others, a domination that causes suffering.”

  “Well, the jewel certainly suffered. See? It’s shattered.” Bel glowered. “Are you going to take this seriously?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  The second card was the Priest, and Bel placed it across the first two. “The way to counter this is by conforming to expected behavior.”

  “The jewel doesn’t do that at all.”

  “Perhaps if it had, it wouldn’t have shattered,” Bel retorted. “Now, be quiet, please.” She placed the next card in position above the first two. “Fortune, reversed. A bad turn of luck.” She threw Rowan a warning glance, and the steerswoman held her peace, reminding herself that it was impolite to mock another’s religion, and simply bad tactics to anger an Outskirter.

  The next card was the nine of cups, reversed. “At the root of the matter, an imperfection in plans.” The Hanged Man. “Suspension. There has been a period of waiting, of suspended decision, but this is now ending.” Rowan found herself thinking of an object hurled into the sky and not falling down; suspended, somehow, but that period of suspension over. Suspended like—like what?

  Encouraged by Rowan’s serious expression, Bel continued. “The queen of swords, reversed. Narrow-mindedness, intolerance ... these are the influences now coming into effect.”

  Rowan broke off her chain of thought and leaned closer, interested. “I learned that card differently. Don’t you read a face card as representing the influence of a person?”

  “Not at all. The person on the card stands for the attributes.” Rowan wondered which interpretation was the original, what aspects of life led the more primitive society to take a more symbolic point of view. One would expect the reverse, but it seemed the cultured Inner Lands had either clung to or developed the literal interpretation. It was an interesting observation.

  The cards now formed a cross on the ground, and Bel placed the next one to the left of the figure. The five of cups, reversed. Bel squinted at it, thinking. “A new alliance, or a meeting with an old friend, bringing hope.”

  “But which?”

  “Perhaps both. And at this point—” Bel placed the next card above the previous. “Four of swords, that’s a period of rest, or recuperation, a withdrawal.” Bel looked dissatisfied, then brightened. “Of course! You’re going back to the Archives, where you’ll rest, see old friends, then gather your forces again.”

  “Is this reading about the jewel, or is it about me?”

  “Your fate is interwoven with its,” Bel said confidently. She turned up the next card and put it in position. She looked at it for some moments, puzzled.

  “Poor workmanship,” Rowan prompted. “Pettiness, mediocrity.”

  “Yes, but it’s in the Spirit position ... How can the spirit of the jewel be pettiness, or poor workmanship? Poor planning, perhaps? It’s very mysterious.”

  And very vague, Rowan thought. But if the jewel was magical, or part of a magic spell, perhaps it had been poorly made? So that in use, it would fail, resulting in that period of inactivity Bel found in the cards?

  Here was the very nature of the cards’ appeal, she reminded herself. Presenting symbols, emotionally powerful archetypes open to wide interpretation, they were immensely seductive to any pattern-seeking mind. And above all else, steerswomen were adept in the skill of detecting patterns amid seeming chaos.

  In any chaos of symbols, patterns, if none existed, could be easily created. Rowan took a moment to admire the pattern her mind found, to enjoy it
in a purely aesthetic fashion—then, with no regret, discarded it. It was fantasy, disguised as information. Nothing could be learned from it.

  Much could be learned, however, about Bel and the attitudes of the Outskirters, and Rowan shifted her interest to her new friend and the culture that shaped her. “What’s the last card?”

  Bel turned it up: the Emperor, reversed. “Dependence,” Bel said. “And danger. Either physical danger, or a threat to possessions.” Bel thought carefully for a while, obviously casting about for connections, that same search for patterns that Rowan had briefly followed. “I don’t see how the jewel itself can be in danger, so it must be that it carries danger. I think we should be very careful.”

  Rowan picked it up and returned it to its sack. “I’m surprised you don’t tell me to simply discard it.” That would have been the advice of a true believer in the cards.

  “Oh, no,” the Outskirter replied, and she smiled as she gathered her cards. “This is more interesting.”

  Much later, Rowan was still poring over her charts. At last she rose, and not wishing to disturb the sleeping Outskirter, she crossed to the opposite side of the fire. Using her hiking stick, she began again to draw the same graphs, but carefully, accurately. All sense of her surroundings faded. She was like a swimmer, exploring by touch alone the bottom of some rocky pool, trying to create a chart for something that could not be seen, a chart not for the eyes, but for the touch of the mind.

  3

  “Never just duck,” Rowan’s old swordmaster had instructed her. “Bad idea! If the enemy comes up behind, how can you tell what his move is? An overhand blow, and you die on the ground instead of standing. Duck and move! Gamble! He’s probably right-handed. If he’s not striking straight down, he’s sweeping from left to right. That’s his strongest stroke. Move to the right, fast! Roll! Face him as soon as you can, so you can see what he’s doing. Instinct will say roll to the left, keep your own right arm free. Fight it! You’ll be rolling into his blow.”