The Steerswoman's Road

by Rosemary Kirstein

  “Are you ready?” Bel had already shouldered her pack.

  Rowan was dismayed. “No breakfast?”

  “Eat as you walk.” She passed the steerswoman some hardbread and cheese. “We’ll take a long rest at noon, with a fire for cooking, if you like. And you can write in your book then.” Rowan was accustomed to recording her day’s observations in her logbook in the evening, by firelight. That would have to change.

  “A moment.” Rowan retrieved her own felt cloak from her bedroll, shook it, folded it, and stowed it in her pack, using its cushioning to prop her tubular map case more securely. Hesitating, she uncapped the case and pulled one chart from its center, the one she and Hanlys had amended. She unrolled it and held it up to compare with the landscape around her. Bel moved closer.

  Rowan mused over the new notations. “If we travel due east, we’ll cross through some forest before we reach the veldt.” This was the name the Outskirters gave for the wide plains of redgrass. Beyond, where blackgrass predominated, was the prairie. “We can reach it in less than three weeks.”

  Bel scanned the landscape. “I don’t know about that. We can travel quickly if we travel alone and don’t meet any trouble. But we ought to try to stay with the next tribe we meet, even though it slows us down. The land isn’t very bad here—it’s mostly Inner Lands and not much Outskirts, but that will change. It’ll be safer, and easier, to travel in a group.”

  Except for the tanglebrush, Rowan had yet to note any evidence of the depredations commonly attributed to the Outskirts. How soon, she wondered, would it alter? How quickly, and how completely?

  She rolled up the map and replaced it. It slid inside its mates and down into the case with a hollow thump, one of the sounds in all the world that Rowan found most satisfying. “Very well, then,” she said,

  “until we do meet a tribe, let’s cover as much ground as quickly as we can, alone.”

  The clouds had moved in sometime after Rowan’s second watch the previous night; now they deepened and darkened. The breeze hesitated, backed, and a light sprinkle of rain swept in, then departed. In the east, the sun disappeared as it rose.

  Rowan gauged the wind expertly, checked its direction against her memory of the previous night’s sighting of the Guidestars. It was blowing from the west, steadily. Weather moved generally from west to east, and despite the gray above, she knew from the wind and sky that there was fairer weather coming. As she recognized this, the rain returned, falling more steadily.

  “This could last into the afternoon,” she told Bel. “I hate to lose the time, but we might do well to move into that bit of forest ahead, set up a rain fly, and wait it out.”

  Bel was disappointed, but agreed. “We can use the time to practice swordsmanship. If you fight against Outskirter weapons, you’ll need to change your technique.”

  “I’m sure you’ll teach me what I need. And if I find the time, I can try to chart this area more carefully.” And they trudged eastward together, through the light drizzle and the shifting air, to the shelter of the woods.

  It rained for twelve days.

  6

  By noon on the first day of rain, a steady downpour had established itself, relenting only occasionally and briefly. The air was hot and heavy, and the weather, slow as treacle, moved up the land from the southeast. Travel was postponed, for that day and for the next. The third day began with a lull and a brief west wind that tried and failed to clear the gloom. Then lightning skirted the eastern horizon, and by noon all was again steamy heat and rain.

  The two women coped as best they could, stripping to their underlinen to endure the humidity. Rowan dropped to a seat on her bedroll under the tarp. “Does this sort of weather happen often?”

  “Sometimes. But usually in the spring. Never this late in the year, not that I can remember.” Bel was seated beside her, crowding close to avoid the water dripping from the edges of the canvas, attempting to dry her hair with one corner of Rowan’s felt cloak.

  Rowan stepped back out of the shelter and set to cleaning a pair of rabbits that had fallen to her snares overnight. Water intermittently drizzled onto her head as branches above bent and sprang under accumulated weight.

  “Well. The weather makes fools of us all, so they say.” The rabbits were two bucks, fat and well fed. She wondered if she would be able to start a cooking fire in the damp; they had dined on cold food for the last three days. Rowan began designing a fire shelter, and mentally tallied the number of birch trees she had noticed in the area. Birch bark burned when wet.

  “Some people can guess the coming weather, sometimes,” Bel said, muffled under the cloak. “You’re usually good.”

  “Perhaps it works differently in the Outskirts.” The Steerswomen had no more reliable information about weather than did the folk. There were rules, usually dependable, but rules were not principles, and so could not be trusted.

  “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight,” Rowan mused as she slit one buck with her field knife. The rain had broken briefly at sunset the previous evening, and the sky had gifted them with a wild glory of orange and poppy red. And the rain had returned with darkness.

  Bel watched Rowan at work, then rose. “Let me do that.”

  “No, I’d rather. I’m deathly bored.” Study of rabbit anatomy was a small diversion.

  “I know.” The Outskirter reached among her gear and pulled out a sheathed sword, one of two she carried alongside her pack. “Look at this instead, then tell me what you think of it.” Puzzled, Rowan took it from her hand and relinquished her place in the drizzle to Bel.

  The sheath was cured hide, similar to that of Bel’s other sword; small differences in markings told Rowan that this was not the weapon Bel commonly used, but a new acquisition.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “At Five Corners, a week before I met up with you.”

  The hilt was of horn, and the guard. Rowan drew the sword. It was black, edged with dull-colored metal. She felt the flat. “It’s wood.”

  “Except for the edge.”

  Workable metal was at a premium in the Outskirts. “An Outskirter sword?”

  “That’s right.”

  There were no trees in the Outskirts. “Where did the wood come from?” The grain, barely visible black on black, curled wildly in tiny interlocking swirls.

  “It’s a tanglebrush root.” Bell gathered a handful of rabbit entrails and flung them far in a fast sidearm motion. Rowan thought briefly of scavenging raccoons. “Tanglebrush sends down one large root, about so long.” Bel demonstrated with bloody hands; something over four feet. “If you burn off the bush, you can dig up the root. Then you cure it with slow heat.”

  Rowan hefted the weapon. It seemed well balanced, though the width of its cross section made it move through the air more sluggishly than a metal sword of similar length. “You have a steel sword.”

  Bel nodded broadly. “And you won’t find many like it among the tribes. I won it from someone, who won it from someone else—it must have come from the Inner Lands, a long time ago. And that’s why you have to learn how to fight against a tangleroot sword. People will try to win your sword from you.”

  Rowan traced small figures-of-eight in the air; her elbow and the sword’s point were splashed with running drops off the edge of the tarp. “They’ll try to confiscate it?” She wiped the blade and set to admiring the weapon’s design: an interesting solution to problems of scarcity.

  “They won’t sneak up on you and snatch it. That is, no one in any tribe that we travel with will.” Bel severed her rabbit’s neck and held up the head and attached skin, taking pleasure in the neatness of her work. “It’s a formal tradition. If you covet someone’s weapon, you have the right to challenge him to a duel.”

  Rowan disliked the idea. “Not to the death?”

  “No. That’s wasteful.” Bel balled up the head and pelt and tossed it after its viscera. The skin spread in the air as it lofted, like a flying squirrel. “To disarmament, to
a killing blow stopped at the last moment, or to surrender. The winner gets the choice of weapons.”

  The better fighter acquired the superior weapon. Rowan nodded thoughtfully and turned to careful study of the sword, considering weight, length, resilience, and possible advantages and disadvantages in strategy.

  She did not care to lose her sword. Of all those she had used or owned, the sword she now carried was the only one with which she felt something approaching the true unity of fighter and weapon. She had no intention of permitting anyone to take it from her.

  The sword was one that Bel had stolen for her during their escape from the fortress of the wizards Shammer and Dhree: a standard-issue guardsman’s sword, stolid, unadorned, seemingly unremarkable. But although there was no magic power in Rowan’s new sword, she suspected magical processes behind its construction. It was lighter than its length suggested, and a shade stronger than its weight would lead one to assume. It held its edge longer, and under stress it revealed the slightest hint of flex, permitting her to use more aggressive maneuvers, moves that would risk breakage in a common sword, or cause its user to be trapped in a disadvantageous stance.

  With her knowledge of these differences, the steerswoman now found during practice that her strategies became incomprehensible to her opponents, while maintaining to herself an elegant interior logic. She began to enjoy using the weapon and became, for the first time in her life and to her great surprise, a superior swordswoman.

  “Let’s go.”

  The steerswoman looked up. Bel was cleaning her hands with dirt and leaves. The rabbit carcasses, legs tied together with a strip of skin, were draped over a low-hanging branch.

  “What?”

  “Let’s practice.”

  “In this weather?”

  The Outskirter raised her brows. “You plan never to fight in the rain?”

  Rowan laughed. “Very well, then.” She stood, tossed the Outskirter weapon hilt-first to Bel, and found her own sword.

  They moved into a larger clearing nearby, and as they faced off, Rowan took a moment wryly to note the oddity of the scene: rain spattering through the trees all around, a murky humid sky lowering above, tendrils of ground mist snaking and vanishing, whirling around the legs of two women who were carefully, intently assuming a battle stance—both damp as otters, and clad only in their underlinen. Then Bel made her move.

  They stepped into the drill as if stepping into a dance, patterned and familiar, as Rowan studied the action of the Outskirter weapon, trying to reason out its weaknesses and turn them to her advantage.

  Eventually Bel stepped back. “No.”

  “What?”

  “You’re trying to use your edge against my flat.”

  Rowan used the respite to regain her breath. “Your flat is wood. I thought to be able to chip away at it and weaken the sword.”

  “It’ll take you forever.” Bel pushed wet hair from her eyes. “And I have more weight, and more strength. You’ll exhaust yourself.” She beckoned, raised her sword. “Try again, with your usual style. But slowly.”

  Artificially slow movement was more tiring than swordplay at normal speed, and Rowan’s muscles trembled as her weapon met Bel’s careful downstroke. Rowan parried, and as ever, the superior resilience of her sword began to absorb some of the power behind Bel’s blow, affording Rowan an easy escape.

  She began to take it: a shift of weight, a half step back, preparing to take advantage of her opponent’s longer recovery time—when Bel said, “No. Come in.”

  Reluctantly, Rowan moved her weight into the stroke, found her strength overmatched, slid her blade up Bel’s, instinctively shifting to the strongest section of her own sword

  At Bel’s word, they paused: face-to-face, edge-to-edge at guards. “I don’t like getting this close,” Rowan told Bel.

  “I know. Now twist your edge. No, away from my guard, and use all the strength you can.” Rowan complied, to no visible effect whatsoever. “Good.” Bel stepped back and dashed the water from her eyes with one forearm. Rowan vainly attempted to wipe her fingers dry on her singlet, to improve her grip. “Now again,” the Outskirter said when both were finished, “full strength, up to speed. And then halt.”

  Rowan tried to repeat the moves: downstroke, clash, flex and slide, step forward, guard-to-guard, and vicious twist

  “That’s right.” They disengaged. “Now look.” Bel held up her sword for Rowan’s inspection.

  Where the blade joined the guard, the metal edging showed the faintest dent. Rowan put her hand over Bel’s and turned the sword in the grayish light. On either side of the dent, the metal had lifted slightly from the wood. Bel indicated it. “That’s the weakest point on an Outskirter sword,” she said, “where the metal comes up to the hilt guard.”

  Rowan considered the implications. “And it’s the strongest part of my sword.”

  “That’s right. You’ll never see two Outskirters with wood-andmetal swords using this technique, because it sets weakness against weakness. But for you, it’s your strength against their weakness.” She took up her position. “Again.”

  A long drill, and they did not stop this time. Applying the new technique, Rowan found that she shifted stance more often, more completely, and more abruptly than was her former habit. She struggled to adapt; then she caught the feverish rhythm, moved with it, felt her effectiveness grow, and a strange wild joy rose in her. She began to love it.

  “Halt!” Bel called out, and pulled away. Rowan found she was exhausted without having been aware of it. She leaned forward, hands on knees, and drew long deep breaths. Bel came forward and displayed her weapon.

  At the guard, one side of the edging had completely lifted from the wooden blade, in a short battered curve. “When you reach this point, try to get your edge under the loose end, and work it up.”

  Rowan wiped her forehead against her shoulder. “111 pull away, I’ll leave myself open.”

  “Don’t pull out—get under the edging, and then slide your blade alongside your opponent’s.” Bel took both swords and demonstrated the configuration and movement: a scissoring action. Rowan could see that in battle the force would peel away the metal from the wood.

  She was impressed. “I can completely destroy the other fighter’s weapon.”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s quite an advantage.” Something occurred to her. “When you won your metal sword, were you using a wooden?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you ever manage to win?”

  The Outskirter grinned and stepped back. “Like this.”

  They set to again, the same drill, and Rowan found her moment: parry, flex and slide, forward, hilt-to-hilt—

  Bel shifted, spun, vanished.

  Battered metal lay lightly across the back of Rowan’s neck. Bel’s voice came from behind. “You’ll have to watch out for that one.”

  7

  They resigned themselves to traveling in the rain.

  Every second day, they stopped early to dry their clothing by damp, smoky fires, which they extinguished at dark. They practiced swordplay until Rowan had successfully destroyed the tanglewood sword; Rowan updated her logbook, its pages limp with dampness in the shelter of the tarp; and Bel found occupation for idle hours in trying to learn to read and write, clumsily scratching letters in the muddy earth with a stick.

  They counted miles.

  “This can’t continue,” Rowan stated. The older forest was slowly being left behind, tall spruce and birches grudgingly abdicating to scrub pine, briar, blackberry.

  Bel made no reply, disentangling herself from a net of brambles. “It’s going to take forever.” They were making less than fifteen miles a day.

  “Isn’t Hanlys’s information of any use?” Bel asked.

  Rowan made a wordless comment of disgruntlement. The raider tribe’s seyoh had proved to have a very vague understanding of mileage. “The brushland should break—at some point,” Rowan said. “Then some wide gr
eengrass meadowlands with occasional young copses. It’s going to take longer than we thought.”

  Bel did not reply; Rowan knew that the Outskirter’s thoughts, like Rowan’s own, were on their food supply.

  From the start, Bel had maintained that the Outskirts had no game, and that only association with a tribe, with its attendant herd, could insure survival. Rowan, accustomed to occasionally living off small game and wild plants during the more isolated segments of her routes, had accepted the statement only half-seriously.

  But when she noted the appearance of the stiff, rough-edged red-grass, which the deer never touched, and its slow intermingling with the green of panic grass and timothy, she also began to note the disappearance of smaller animals. The rabbits, the mice, and even certain birds, were gone.

  “Grouse,” she enumerated to herself, as she struggled through the briar. “Quail, titmice. Finches.”

  “What?”

  Rowan had not realized that she had spoken aloud. “Where are the birds?” To give the lie to her observation, an egret lifted in the distance, rising above unseen water, white wavering wingstrokes dim against the mist-laden gray of the sky.

  “You won’t see many, deeper in the Outskirts,” Bel replied. “If a tribe moves close to the Inner Lands, flocks of birds will follow it, but only for a while.”

  Rowan paused to wipe sweat and condensation from her face. “Perhaps we should head for that water. There may be ducks.”

  “Can you catch a duck?”

  Rowan made a vague gesture. “Probably. I know the theory, but I’ve never tried it.”

  The water was an east-running brook, slow and shallow, and there were no ducks; two more egrets fled to the sky at the travelers’ approach, and three smaller birds, possibly herons. In autumn, with no nestlings, they had no reason to return. Rowan caught frogs, and one snake, while Bel watched from the banks with immense amusement.