The Steerswoman's Road

by Rosemary Kirstein

  He was pale. “What’re you going to do?”

  They altered his bonds, first freeing his left hand, bracing it against the top of Bel’s pack, then securing it in place, palm up. He struggled desperately and quieted only under the influence of a choking hold from Bel, held long enough to bring him to the edge of fainting.

  Rowan took a moment to regather her determination. She pulled out her knife and examined it reluctantly, testing its edge, wondering if she would ever be able to use it to eat again. It came to her that, quite sensibly, she would.

  Shaking his head to clear it, breathing in heavy gasps, the soldier spoke to her. “You, you’re a steerswoman.”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s a bluff, right?” His voice quavered in desperation. “I mean, you lot, you’re not that sort, are you? You steerswomen, you’re supposed to be, supposed to be ...” He ran down.

  “Supposed to be?” Rowan prompted.

  He swallowed. “Well ... good.”

  She digested his words. “Last chance,” she said again, and felt on her own face a mirror of the panicked pleading that she saw in her victim’s. Bel watched her sidelong.

  Rowan looked at the knife, looked at the soldier, looked up at the sky. She drew one shaky breath and stepped forward.

  Bel’s hand was on her shoulder. “Wait.”

  “No.” A mote of anger sparked in her. She dared not interrupt herself, but knew she must act in the momentum of her decision.

  Bel grabbed one shoulder and pulled her around to face the other way. She spoke quietly. “Get out of sight.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because you’re no good!” Bel hissed. Then she continued more calmly. “A torture victim’s mood is just as important as the pain. You’re sorry for him, and he knows it. You don’t want to hurt him.”

  Rowan turned to her blankly. “I don’t.”

  “Well, I do!” Her eyes blazed. “I hate him. I’ll be glad to see him suffer. And he’s going to suffer, not because of you or because of me, but because he made an evil choice, to serve a wizard who means us harm.”

  Rowan attempted to formulate a reply, but Bel pressed on. “When you start cutting him, you’ll want to stop, and he’ll want you to, and you’ll know it, and he’ll know it. It’ll be back and forth between the two of you. You’ll look for any excuse to stop. He’ll use that against you.” She stopped and glanced once at the man. “Let me do it. I’ll take him apart and enjoy it.”

  “It’s my job.”

  “The job belongs to the one who can do it best.” The Outskirter’s gaze challenged her, but as Rowan watched, her friend’s expression changed to reluctant sympathy. “Rowan, cold blood’s not for everyone.” She jerked her head. “Get out of sight.”

  The horses had quieted, and Rowan had no desire to upset them again. She led them down the path, until it curved and the clearing was out of sight, tethered them to a stout fallen tree, and turned away to where the path’s edge sloped down to the ravine below.

  An outcropping of rock stood a few feet down the slope. Rowan climbed down and found a seat, looking north across the darkening landscape. Northwest, a lake caught the failing sunlight, a single silver line in the distance, like a sword.

  From up the path there came an odd sound, like the cry of an unidentifiable small animal. The horses shifted nervously.

  The evening was clear, and to her right the Eastern Guidestar hung like a beacon, twenty-five degrees up from the eastern horizon, forty degrees south of due east. Unseen over her left shoulder, the Western Guidestar stood, higher than its partner and dimmer at present.

  The sounds in the distance became more continuous.

  She felt a strange combination of relief and shame. The responsibility was hers, and she had abdicated it, and deep inside she was glad to do so. It made her feel somehow unfit; it rankled.

  The noises became appalling, inhuman.

  Bel was right; the job was best done by one best suited for it. And yet

  She tried to distract herself. She realized that it would take a problem to lose herself in solving, something useful, confirming her own skills. She sifted, searching, the soldier’s voice a weird music behind her thoughts.

  The jewels—irritating, frustrating, apparently useless, yet still the fulcrum on which all these events pivoted. But the information was too slight and too familiar. More was needed for further thought to be effective.

  She wanted something more technical and involving, something with information and principles to grasp and work with. That incidental paradox that she had argued with Arian about ...

  An object flung with great force from a high tower, at a certain upward angle: by using straightforward techniques known to any steers-woman, by taking them further than anyone had before, Rowan had seemed to demonstrate that it was possible for the object never to strike the ground.

  It was quite obviously false. Things simply did not happen that way. And yet, why would the techniques work in other circumstances but fail in this one? She reconstructed the details of the problem in her mind, and the events in the distance, the strange sounds, and her own shame faded from her awareness.

  She recognized that there was an interrelationship between the height of the tower and the force of the impetus. The higher the tower, the less force was necessary. At a great enough height, one needed merely to let go of the object, and it would fall away, never quite reaching the ground; slightly lower, and it would reach ground eventually.

  The shorter the tower, the more force was needed, until eventually the object could be flung by someone standing at ground level. But the force required was impossible, immeasurable—and she reminded herself that “impossible” and “immeasurable” were not the same idea. It was patently impossible to construct a tower high enough—she knew too well the restrictions on the variables involved—but the force of the impetus was merely immeasurable.

  She had a feel for the quantity, however; she could imagine it, in principle, but not with precision. She disliked that. It was too vague.

  And it left her with the same glaring contradiction that had so outraged Arian at the Archives: No matter what the numbers said, objects did fall to the earth.

  But did they? Every single time?

  Approach it from another direction. What does not fall?

  Birds flew, by some technique known to themselves. Wizards were said to fly and could make things fly, possibly by the same means. Clouds floated, but they were vapors, like steam, mere fogs risen above ground level. When she had been a child, she had dreamed of tying a rope to a cloud and being lifted into the sky. She imagined herself a child without knowledge, looking at the world as a child did. Would a child be surprised to hear of objects that did not fall?

  Not at all. The sun did not fall, nor the constellations, nor the Guide-stars. Children, and for that matter, most adults, took that as a given.

  But the sun did not fall because it was no object moving across the sky. In fact it was the stable center of the universe, and the world moved about it in a great circle, spinning improbably on its axis. Rowan remembered how amazed she was when she had first learned that. But once known, it was easily confirmed, by any number of methods.

  The stars were far suns, or so tradition said. But this was unprovable. In any event, they were immeasurably distant.

  The Guidestars hovered forever in the sky. They did not fall, but neither did they move. They hung immobile on the celestial equator and seemed to shift only as the traveler below changed position on the world’s surface.

  They were neither far suns, nor immeasurably distant. Their height was easily calculable from their apparent displacement when viewed from different locations on the world. Though they were very high indeed, if they had been suns the world would have been aflame from the heat of their proximity.

  But they did not move.

  She noticed vaguely that there was silence from up the path, had been for some time, and that Willam was seated
beside her. The boy was shaking, rank with sweat. Rowan ignored him and returned to the seduction of the problem.

  Reason and reasonableness were at odds. Something was wrong, either in the calculations, or in the formulation of the problem, or in the principles by which she understood the world.

  And that was the possibility that Arian had overlooked. The error was not necessarily in the calculations, nor in the construction of the problem.

  She checked the numbers over and over, trying to quantify the vaguenesses, to identify and limit the areas of missing knowledge. She kept reaching the same results: It might be true. It might be possible for a falling object never to reach the ground. And more: Under certain conditions, it might actually be impossible for it to do so.

  At some point she realized that Willam was gone, and in retrospect remembered that he had risen, stepped to one side, vomited, and returned up the path.

  The sounds in the distance began again.

  She was briefly taken by nausea at imagining the nature of those proceedings, and in her single-mindedness she found herself annoyed at the interruption. Of their own accord, her thoughts slipped back into the fascination of reason.

  What would actually happen, taking the calculations as valid? Precisely, how would an object flung to that height behave?

  It would move away into the distance, past the horizon. And then?

  If it never reached the ground, it would simply continue, completely around the world. Eventually, it would come back into view from the opposite horizon, crossing the point where it had started.

  No, not quite—because the world would have turned a bit in the interval.

  This made the computations more complicated. Annoyed, she altered the orientation of the object’s path, from north-south to west-east, on the equator, to minimize the effect of the world’s rotation. It helped.

  Abruptly, in a leap of reason, she flung it higher, far above the minimum height necessary for an unfailing object

  She came to her feet and spun to seek the Western Guidestar hanging motionless above her

  And was face-to-face with Bel. The Outskirter had spoken. Rowan shook her head in momentary confusion. “What?”

  Bel repeated, her face showing vast dissatisfaction. “It’s no use,” she said. “I think he’s under a spell.”

  “He won’t say anything?” She vaguely recalled a wild, weeping voice in the distance, and that it had spoken at length.

  “It isn’t that. He talks. He’s even eager to. But he just doesn’t make any sense. You’d better hear it yourself.”

  As Rowan approached, she looked once at the state of the man’s hand and arm, then kept her eyes to his face. Unfortunately, her observation and memory were too good. The sight stayed with her, against her will; and then she chose to remember it, and recognize and accept the results of her actions.

  Bel dropped one hand on the trembling man’s right shoulder, in a gesture that seemed almost friendly. His head snapped up, and he looked at her, wild-eyed. “No! That’s all there is, I swear it, I don’t know any more!” His skin was white, slick with sweat.

  “Of course,” Bel reassured him. “But just repeat it for the steers-woman, there’s a good fellow.”

  He looked at Rowan and began to speak, urgently, desperately. As she listened, Rowan felt her scalp prickle.

  What she heard was not the incoherent gibberings a man might make in delirium. The sounds were organized, inflected like speech, and the look on the soldier’s face reflected the meaning he believed them to carry. The pattern of inflection teased the ear, mimicking reason—but not one of the utterances matched any single true word. The effect was uncanny.

  At the end, his communication slipped into comprehensibility with a plaintive “That’s all, please, I’d tell more, but that’s all they told me.”

  Rowan stood helpless, sick with horror. Somehow, this was the most appalling result of magic she had yet witnessed—worse than the casual death of Reeder’s boy, crueler than the orchestrated slaughter of innocent people by a swarm of dragons, stranger than Willam’s eerie traveling fire. This man’s very will and sacred reason had been twisted by some wizard, twisted for a purpose incidental to his own life.

  Rowan crouched down beside him, studying his face. He avoided her gaze, his breath hissing behind clenched teeth.

  “Listen,” she said carefully, trying to sound kind and reasonable. “I’m sorry, but there’s a problem here. We believe you’re under some kind of spell.” He screwed his eyes shut, ignoring her. “I know you think you’ve told us something,” she went on, “but you haven’t really. It’s an illusion.”

  He looked up at her, and a small sound escaped from the back of his throat. Realization grew on his face, and with it the terror that the evening’s events were not finished, that there was more to come.

  “Perhaps there’s some way you can get around it?” Rowan said. “Can you approach it from some other direction?”

  A strangled cry escaped him, and then he was speaking again, in a high pleading voice—all sounds with no sense.

  “No, wait,” Rowan told him. “It’s no good. Try to calm down ... start with something simple.”

  Beyond hearing her, he cried his desperate monologue.

  “Try to tell us your name,” she suggested, and touched his shoulder, attempting, irrationally, to comfort him.

  He tried to writhe away from her hand, twisting at the ropes. His left arm slipped slickly in its bonds, raw flesh and bone tangling against rope. He uttered a gurgling cry and fainted.

  Bel let out a gust of air. “Well.”

  Rowan sat back on her heels and was silent for a long time. Finally, she nodded.

  “What happens now?” Willam asked. He was as pale as the soldier.

  Bel made to answer, but Rowan stopped her with a gesture. She spoke to Willam. “Get me some cloth. The spare linen shirt from my pack should do.” He hurried to do it.

  Bel came closer, suspicious. “What are you going to do?”

  Rowan found Bel’s knife. “To start, I’m going to bandage this arm.” She cut the ropes that held it, carefully disentangling them from the muscle and tendon.

  “You’re not going to let him go?”

  “That is exactly what I am going to do.” She took the shirt that Willam handed her and began tearing strips.

  The Outskirter rounded on her. “Are you insane? Don’t you know what will happen?”

  “I think I have a good idea.” She gestured Will to bring a waterskin.

  “But he didn’t betray his wizard, and now he knows it. There’s no reason for him not to return to whoever sent him and say that we hadn’t been stopped.”

  “Very probably that’s what he’ll do.” Seeing that the soldier was regaining his senses, Rowan instructed Will, “Give him some water. No, don’t untie him. I’m sorry, friend. I’m helping you, but it will still hurt.”

  “They’ll know where we are!” Bel leaned close to Rowan’s face. “They’ll know where we were, they’ll know where we’re going, and they’ll find us in an instant!”

  “They’ll have the information to do so.” Rowan took the skin from Willam and poured water over the hand and arm. The man shrieked and fainted again.

  “Rowan.” The Outskirter spoke seriously. “You’ve always seemed a sensible person, if inexperienced—”

  “Thank you.” She did not have needle and thread to stitch back muscle and skin, but she noticed that Bel’s work had been very clean and efficient. The hand would be useless, but the man’s life was in no immediate danger.

  “But this is pure madness. It’s nothing less than suicide.” The soldier groggily came to again and startled at seeing Bel’s face so close. She stepped back, annoyed. “Rowan,” she repeated, and waited until the steerswoman looked up. “I don’t care to die.”

  “Good. Neither do I.” Rowan turned back and continued the work, noticing that she was learning more about the anatomy of the human arm than she had previously
known.

  Bel said nothing more.

  Rowan finished the bandaging, untied the man, helped him to his feet, gave him a bit of food and water to take, and led him to the head of the trail. He stood, swaying and trembling, looking about in disbelief. Rowan gestured with her chin. “Go on.”

  Behind her, Bel made a wordless sound of rage, and the soldier stumbled, turned, and left down the trail at a staggering run.

  Bel set loose a flurry of curses. She stormed back to her pack, flung off the ropes, and dragged it aside as Will watched in amazement. “It’s impossible, it’s insane, and I’m having no part of it.” Her movements were jerky with agitation. She pointed hack up the rising path. “I am going that way. I’ll probably get lost, and I don’t care, because I’d have a better chance of survival. I’m not following you to suicide.”

  Rowan stepped over to one of the bodies of the slaughtered soldiers and examined its trappings. Without looking up she asked Will, “What do you think?”

  He glanced from one to the other, confused. “I—I don’t know. I’m glad we didn’t kill that man; it’s not his fault he’s under a spell, but ... Lady, I think we should have. It would have been safer ...”

  “I didn’t think you could be so stupid!”

  Ignoring Bel, Rowan pulled the helmet from the corpse’s head and studied it, thinking.

  “I can still catch him,” the Outskirter said through her teeth. “No.”

  “Rowan—”

  “Here.” She tossed the helmet to Bel, who reflexively caught it. “Does it fit?”

  “Fit?”

  Rowan turned to the boy. “Will, are you any good at tracking? I know how to do it, but it’s mostly theory with me. I expect you’ve tracked game before ...”

  “Yes.”

  Bel turned the helmet over in her hands, watching Rowan with suspicion.

  The steerswoman stood. “I’m sick of running, and I don’t care to dodge any more attacks. I want to find out who’s responsible.” Her mouth twisted. “And since our poor friend couldn’t tell where he came from, he will kindly lead us there.”

  Bel stood, stunned. Then slowly, she began to laugh. She tossed the helmet into the air, caught it, and pulled it down on her head. It fit.