The Steerswoman's Road

by Rosemary Kirstein

  The old Outskirter turned her attention to the steerswoman standing at the edge of the camp, half in shadow, ill-at-ease. “That one of them?” The question was addressed to Bel.

  Rowan had been warned to expect Outskirters sometimes to dismiss her. She answered for herself. “No,” she began, intending to continue.

  “Good. Have to kill her, otherwise.” The woman returned to her task, breaking branches into kindling, grunting under her breath at each snap. “Well, if you’re not going to attack me, what is it you want?”

  Bel gestured Rowan over, and the steerswoman approached, her expression held carefully impassive. She lacked Bel’s ease of dissemblance; no steerswoman could lie in words, and Rowan’s training and own natural inclinations rendered her unskilled at lying by behavior. She had only two choices: to permit her face to be the natural mirror of her thoughts, or permit it to show nothing at all. There was no easy middle ground. Rowan chose the latter extreme.

  Joining Bel by the fire, she doffed her pack and sat down on it. There was a loud creak, and the old woman looked up with a sharp glare intended to freeze; she was met by a flat, blank gaze, impassive, impenetrable. Rowan had learned that the effect was often daunting; it did not fail her now, and the woman wavered. “At the moment,” Rowan said, in a voice so mild and carefully modulated that it communicated only the content of the words, “we want nothing from you.” This was perfectly true. Bel spared Rowan a grin of wolfish pleasure.

  Bel’s plan to gain acceptance into the raiders’ tribe depended on timing and knowledge of tradition and unbreakable custom. The time was not yet. The travelers waited.

  During the long pause that followed, Rowan’s Inner Lands etiquette began to require that introductions be made. She quashed it.

  There was kindling enough, but the old woman continued her job, unnecessarily: a delaying tactic. Unknown to her, it worked more to Rowan and Bel’s benefit than her own. “It takes more than an ambush of dirt-diggers to stop warriors,” she said derisively. “You should have joined them. Plenty of booty.”

  Bel tilted her head, dark eyes amused. “We didn’t like the odds.”

  “You’re afraid,” the old woman said scornfully.

  Bel took no offense. “Of some things. Such as fighting against bad odds beside strangers whose skills I don’t know, who don’t know mine, and who use strange signals to direct the battle.”

  During the speech, the old woman’s interest in Bel began to alter, and by the end, she had abandoned pretense of work. She squinted her sighted eye at Bel, and Rowan read there clearly, for the first time, curiosity. “Where are you from?” she asked slowly. Rowan could not see what in Bel’s words had prompted the question.

  “East.”

  The ancient Outskirter grunted once and sat considering, as if the single word spoke volumes to her. Eventually she indicated Rowan. “Her?”

  “West,” Rowan supplied. Then, because it was against her nature to give so incomplete an answer, she added, “I’m a steerswoman.”

  This won her an astonished look. “Ha!” It was a word, not a laugh, but laughter followed. “One of them. A walker and talker.” And to Rowan’s surprise, she dropped into a parody of graciousness. “Tell me, lady,” she said, following the form used by some common folk, “what’s a good village to raid, hereabouts?”

  Rowan answered truthfully. “The area is new to me, and I’ve been avoiding towns on this journey. The only town I can advise you on is the one I just left, and about them I can tell you this: Your warriors have walked into an ambush. Any survivors should be returning very soon.” She heard a rustle far behind her, and voices in the distance. “I believe that’s them now.”

  “You have sharp ears,” Bel commented, pleased. One voice rose above the others, in an anguished wail; Bel cocked her head, then addressed the woman. “If your tribe is very far from here, you’ll need our help, I think.”

  “You should have helped before,” the woman spat.

  “We’re here now,” Rowan said calmly.

  “We don’t need you, and we don’t want you.”

  The noise grew closer: several people, traveling quickly and with difficulty, abandoning silence for speed.

  “I wonder if the others will agree,” Bel said.

  The voice that had cried out cried again, inarticulate, and the old woman startled. Someone shouted: an urgent hail. The woman responded “This way!” and lumbered to her feet as quickly as old bones would permit.

  The sounds grew rapidly closer, and a male voice called out, “Dena!”

  “Here!” The old woman hurried to follow the sound.

  Bel was on her feet and beside her in an instant, Rowan close behind. “Quickly,” Bel said, “do you want our help or not?”

  Dena stopped to stare at her blankly. “No. Go away.”

  “You there! Lend a hand!”

  All turned at the voice, and Bel slapped Rowan’s shoulder urgently, once. “Go.” The steerswoman hurried ahead into the brush.

  There were four of them: one man with a bloody face supporting another staggering with three arrow shafts in his thigh, and behind, a third man half-dragging a woman who was clutching the front of her vest over her abdomen with both fists, sobbing helplessly at each movement.

  Rowan rushed to her side and slung one arm across the woman’s back to the man’s shoulder. “Here.” She gestured, urging him to link hands behind the woman’s knees to carry her.

  He was panting, his face pale with shock, and he looked at Rowan in confusion, seeing her clearly, for the first time, as a stranger. “Who are you?” he gasped.

  “My name is Rowan.” She gestured again, hurriedly. “Here, like this—”

  There was a hand on her arm: Bel, holding her back. Rowan protested, “What—”

  Bel spoke to the man. “That’s her only name.”

  Concern for the plan to gain acceptance vanished in Rowan’s desire to help. “Skies above, Bel, let me go—” Bel’s fingers became like iron bands. Rowan caught the man’s expression.

  Panic and desperation were struggling in his face with something else, another force, equally compelling. His gaze flicked between Bel’s face and Rowan’s. His mouth worked twice, as if there were something he needed to say, but did not want to.

  Between them, the wounded woman writhed once and emitted a clench-toothed wail as an appalling amount of blood worked its way between her fingers.

  The question resolved itself. Custom and tradition combined with need.

  He turned to Rowan. “I’m Jermyn, Mirason, Dian.” Bel vanished, gone to help the other wounded, and Jermyn locked his right hand on Rowan’s shoulder and quickly swung the woman off the ground as they linked hands behind her legs. “Help me get my wife to camp. I think she’s dying.”

  It was the help they rendered that gained the two travelers the right to ask for assistance of their own. But it was the exchange of names that guaranteed it would be granted.

  They began the short trip to the tribe’s main encampment slowly: three wounded people supported and aided by four whole, carrying as much of the cached equipment as they could manage. Soon, they were moving more quickly, with only two wounded members.

  Rowan paused, looking back to where the body of Jermyn’s wife lay in the trackless brush, abandoned. “Aren’t they going to bury her?”

  The others were already far ahead. Bel had dropped back, waiting for Rowan. “Customs differ. Even among the Outskirters.” She winced. “My people wouldn’t leave her like this. But we wouldn’t bury her, either.”

  At the last, Jermyn had sat long beside his wife, holding her hand, while his comrades shifted impatiently, waiting for her to die so that they might continue. Their only interest seemed to be the length of delay.

  The steerswoman turned away and joined her friend, disturbed. She remembered a poem Bel had once recited, that included a death rite. “You’d burn her body?” It made her think much better of Outskirters, to know not all were so callous.
/>   Bel adjusted the load she carried: two packs, her own and one belonging to the man whose leg she had helped steady while the old woman painfully extracted three arrows. “No. That’s only for heroes.” One pack was on her back; the other she shifted from hand to hand by its straps.

  “What, then?” Rowan took the extra pack from her.

  “First,” Bel informed her as they resumed following the Outskirters, “we’d divide her.”

  “‘Divide’?” Rowan was puzzled.

  Bel gestured. “Cut her up. Into pieces, at the joints.”

  The spare pack dropped to the ground as the steerswoman stopped short, stunned and sickened. “What?”

  “With the torso in two pieces.” Bel had paused ahead and was looking back at her, matter-of-factly.

  Rowan swallowed her distaste. Customs differed, as Bel had said. “And then?” Her voice sounded thin to her own ears.

  “We’d cast her.”

  “You’re using that word in a way I don’t know.”

  The Outskirter gestured with both hands: in front of her, then out and around. “Spread the pieces, as far as possible. Distribute them across the land.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “For the sake of the land’s soul.”

  Religion. Rowan took a breath and released it, then regathered the spare pack. Even in the Inner Lands religion was the one thing most varied, and most inexplicable.

  Religion, she thought again, with a touch of amused derision, then remembered: the farm of her childhood, the desert so frighteningly near, grim and red but for the distant holy green of the funeral groves—and the nearer groves, huge and old, one sheltering the farmhouse itself. And more: small phrases spoken to ward off evil, daily beliefs unfounded but cherished by her family, the great solemn Midsummer Festival of joy and sacrifice ...

  In the absence of thought, one fell back on habits of emotion. In the world of her childhood, to cut the body of a dead person was sacrilege.

  But she was not a child, she was an adult, and a steerswoman. There was no reason to believe that the disposition of a corpse had any effect on its departed inhabitant.

  She tucked the pack awkwardly under one arm and rejoined Bel, and they continued after their guides through the brush. Presently she spoke again, with a nervous half-laugh of relief. “Do you know,” she said, pushing aside a low branch to aid their passage, “for a moment, I was afraid you were going to tell me that your people eat their dead.”

  “No,” Bel replied. “You’d have to go much farther east than my tribe, for that.”

  4

  “Three left? Three from two dozen?” The dark, angular man leaned close to the wounded warrior’s face. “And how could that happen?”

  The single war chief who had survived the raid twisted his leg involuntarily under the ministrations of an elderly healer. “Outnumbered. Outmaneuvered. Ambushed.”

  “And how many did you take down?”

  A wince, either of pain or dismay. “Hard to see. Maybe five.”

  “Five!”

  Seated nearby, Rowan wondered which five of the brave villagers had fallen, and found in herself small sympathy for these Outskirters.

  The camp was pitched against the edge of the forest, one side nestled beneath overhanging evergreens, the other open to a green, rolling meadow, where the tent shadows now stretched away from the vanishing sun, long fingers indicating the east. The tents themselves were of varied construction and materials: tall pavilions of billowing cloth, battered with age and usage; long low structures of stitched hide; canvas shelters in military style. Looted, Rowan guessed, from various sources, over a period of years.

  The tribe’s leader was dark-haired, his face a complexity of sharp angles and weathered lines, and he wore his patchwork cloak with the rakish flair of an actor, over canvas trousers and an Inner Lands cotton shirt. He mused, small eyes glittering. “They must have had warning.” Rowan did not volunteer explanation, but despite herself glanced at her companion.

  Bel sat across the fire from her, halfway back amid a group of lounging and seated warriors. A thin, bedraggled woman of middle age was moving among the people, passing out slices of venison from a wooden platter. She reached Bel, and Rowan saw but did not hear Bel’s “Thank you.” The serving woman paused momentarily in surprise, then continued on without reply.

  “Well.” The leader sat back on his haunches and blew out his cheeks expressively. “Well, it happens.” He dismissed the mystery with blunt pragmatism. “Fall almost on us, winter coming,” he reflected. “We’ll have to move further out, take on one of the goat-tribes.” He scanned the encampment, counting heads. “And we’ll have to be clever about it.” He addressed the assemblage in general. “Think about it. Any ideas, talk to me.” He caught Rowan watching him, nodded a greeting, and moved over to join her.

  “And you’re an odd one, Rowan steerswoman,” he said, as someone shifted to make room for him to sit, “wandering out in the wilderness.”

  “I’m often wandering out in the wilderness,” she replied. “In fact, I enjoy it.”

  “But never through such dangerous lands as these.” He tilted his head at her humorously, firelight and fading sunlight combining to highlight high cheekbones. “Hanlys, Denason, Rossan,” he introduced himself, then added, “seyoh.” Rowan recognized the Outskirter term for a tribe’s leader.

  “You and your people are the most dangerous things we’ve yet found on our trip, Hanlys,” she commented, knowing this would be taken as a compliment. “And if I understand correctly, you won’t harm us.”

  “True enough. We’re obligated. Unless you decide to harm us now, that is.”

  “It isn’t likely. I believe Bel and I are going to need all the friends we can get.” The serving woman had reached them, and brusquely handed the seyoh and Rowan their food. “Thank you,” Rowan said, offhand, and the woman turned away abruptly, changing her course to distribute in another section of camp. Unfed persons to Rowan’s right voiced rude protests, which the server ignored.

  Rowan looked after her. “Did I say something wrong?”

  Hanlys snorted. “Shocked her, more like. We’re not soft on our servants, like some.” He tilted his head infinitesimally in Bel’s direction. “She’s from east?”

  “That’s right.” She could see Bel speaking earnestly to a warrior seated next to her; his reply consisted of a head shake, a scornful twist of the mouth, and a dismissive hand gesture.

  “Strange company for a steerswoman.”

  “She’s very good company indeed. And the best I could ask for, if I’m to get to where I’m going, and find what I’m looking for.”

  “Going and finding?” He made a show of surprise; Rowan began to find annoying his faint air of condescension. “I thought the way of steerswomen was to walk wherever the wind took them, and ask too many questions along the way.”

  Rowan necessarily conceded the substance of his remark. “Generally, something like that is the case. Although we move less randomly than you might think.” She took a moment to miss her past life: roaming through the green wildlands, wandering into welcoming villages, charting, noticing, questioning and answering, making endless discoveries, large and small. Now she sat in a barbarian encampment on the edge of the dangerous Outskirts, on a journey to find the source of magical jewels. It seemed a very unlikely situation.

  She shook her head. Her old life now seemed distant, poignant, carefree. “Lately,” she told the seyoh, “I seem always to be searching for something in particular.”

  His smile was indulgent. “And what do you search for, steers-woman?”

  Rowan said wryly, aware of how odd it would sound, “A Guidestar.” A warrior seated nearby, who had been following the conversation, interjected a comment. “Ha. Look up.”

  Involuntarily, she did so. The sky was near fully dark, with only one Guidestar, the Eastern, visible, hanging eternally motionless against the sky over the shadowy meadow. Its twin, the Western Guidestar, was hid
den by the overhanging branches of the forest. Stable, immobile, unchanging, these two points of light were the markers by which humankind located itself on the surface of the world, counting the passage of time as each night the slow constellations marched across the sky behind them.

  Rowan prepared a reply to the warrior. “I’m not looking for the ones you can see,” she began.

  “If you can’t see them, you can’t find them.” One of his cohorts gave him a friendly shove in appreciation of the joke.

  “I’m looking,” Rowan replied patiently, “for one that has never been seen—from here.”

  This was greeted with silent thought. “They can both be seen, everywhere,” another person ventured.

  “No.” Looking around, she discovered herself to be a center of attention. Despite the unlikely setting, the situation was one she understood, and she easily stepped into her role.

  She shifted position back a bit and, leaning forward, drew a circle in the dirt between herself and the seyoh. “Look. Here’s the world, as if we’re looking down at the pole. And here are the Eastern and Western Guidestars.” Two dots. “Can you see? If you travel far enough in either direction, one or the other will be left behind, around the curve of the world.” She added two more dots. “And you’ll see a new Guidestar, in the opposite direction.”

  They puzzled over the diagram. One man leaned over to trace the circle with his finger, eyes squinted with the unaccustomed effort of abstraction. “That’s the world?” He seemed unconvinced.

  Another, more quick, ventured, “We’ve traveled a fair bit. Why has no one never seen that happen?”

  From over Rowan’s shoulder, a creaking voice spoke. “It’s too far.”

  Rowan turned and found the old healer leaning above her. Abandoning dignity, he eased himself to his knees, scuffled over to the drawing, and pointed, as pleased as a child. “Look at that. You’d have to go ...” He thought, his watery eyes flickering. “.. near a quarter the whole way around the world to see the next Guidestar.” He settled himself more comfortably, cradling his pouch of medicines in his lap, and looked up at Rowan with a bright gaze, curious and expectant. Someone tapped him, then rudely gestured him to leave. He stubbornly ignored the request.