The Steerswoman's Road

by Rosemary Kirstein

  “I don’t care where you are going. You may not do so with my people.”

  “But we hope,” Rowan continued, and tried to compact her tale, to tell it quickly and compellingly, “we hope to find out why it fell. If one Guidestar can fall—”

  “And I hope you discover your reason. I wish you well. We have cared for you while you were ill because you did us no harm, and approached us honestly, and did not steal from our flocks. But now we are done with you.”

  Rowan made to continue, but Bel gestured the steerswoman to let her take over. She leaned forward. “This means more than you think,” she told the seyoh seriously, and Rowan wondered at the trace of urgency in her voice. “It doesn’t seem so to you, because everything you know has stayed the same—”

  Holding Bel’s gaze, the seyoh lifted her chin fractionally. The movement held some meaning for Bel; instantly, without protest, she ceased to speak, relaxed her posture, and waited.

  The seyoh nodded an acknowledgment. “Take what supplies you need. The knife is a good tool and weapon, and will serve us well.” She settled back, gestured. “Now leave.”

  Bel made to rise, but Rowan wavered, disbelieving they were being dismissed without a full hearing. She wanted to try again; somewhere, she was certain, were the right words to convince this woman to take in the travelers.

  Bel read her intent, forestalled it with a hand on Rowan’s arm. She spoke to the seyoh. “Thank you. The help you gave us is worth more than the food we gained, and the knife we traded.” What followed seemed a formal statement. “My birth-tribe is far east of here. Its seyoh is Serrann, Marsheson, Liev.” It was a gift. Should this tribe encounter Bel’s, possession of the names would constitute an introduction, and might prevent hostilities.

  The seyoh’s eyes warmed with a smile that worked its way past her dignity to reach her mouth. “Thank you,” she said. “Good luck, and travel carefully.”

  11

  Rowan waded waist-deep through dry grass that clutched at her clothing and scratched at her boots. The world was a swirl of red and brown, shifting and shuddering, and the air was awash with sound: an endless hissing and a patternless pattering chatter that filled her ears completely and overflowed, taking up residence in her buzzing skull. The blue overhead seemed unlikely, not to be trusted; she half expected it to curl down and twist in among the reeds, to open chasms of sky beneath her feet

  “Rowan, wait!”

  She came to a stop like a ship at sea and turned into the wind, sails luffing. She rocked against nonexistent swells. Instinct made her plant her feet wide and shift her weight against a wave that was a tussock that refused to move to her expectations. Unbalanced, she fell to a seat among the grass.

  Bel appeared, and hunched down beside her. “Are you all right?”

  The tall reeds defined a little room around the two of them, and the grass sounds were intimate and comprehensible. “Yes,” Rowan said, perplexed.

  “Why did you go ahead like that?”

  “I’m not sure.” She recalled a vague impression that it was possible to outpace the scenery.

  The Outskirter studied her, and Rowan studied herself, both with equal suspicion. “Can you stand?” Bel asked.

  “Yes.” She did not much want to. Instead, she reached out and plucked a shaft of redgrass, turned it over in her hands. The stem was resonantly hollow, the diameter of her smallest finger; the nodes were wide, the sheaths loosely wrapped, and the blades emerged in a three-ranked pattern, instead of the two-ranked that greengrass followed.

  Bel became impatient. “You’ve seen that already.”

  “A moment.” A weed, nothing more; uncommon in the Inner Lands, but not unknown. Leaves brown on one side, red on the other. “All right.” She accepted a hand up, keeping the stalk in her other hand.

  Shuddering colors all around her. Motion, to the limit of the horizon in the north, motion breaking around a solid line of black to the south, motion rising and falling in a series of slopes ahead to the east. The breeze was in her face, speeding wild lines of brown and red directly toward her; it was sinister, threatening. The colors seemed to hover, sourceless, ineffable.

  She looked at the reed in her hand. Leaves brown on one side, red on the other. It was just the wind. “Let’s go.”

  Bel said dubiously, “Stay close, and stay behind.”

  The grass growth hid the shape of the land beneath, and some of Rowan’s steps jarred against sudden rises, or dropped sickeningly into dips. Bel was having no such problem. “How can you tell how to step?”

  “Watch the grass tops.”

  The idea was not attractive. Rowan recalled a similar situation, when she had been trying to teach Bel to overcome seasickness.

  “Watch the waves,” she had told Bel, advising her to act exactly opposite to instinct’s inclination.

  Rowan wished it would rain; wished the colors to gray, the grass to dampen and silence. She watched the grass tops dizzily and stumbled along behind the Outskirter.

  They had been traveling for one day and the greater part of a second. The tribe was out of sight; the tents, people, goats—familiar visual anchors—were gone. There was only the rolling veldt: unpredictable color shimmering across her eyes, fragmenting her vision. Rowan had walked that day as though blind, had slept that night as though still walking, dreaming incomprehensible patterns of flailing light and dark, and roaring voices. She awoke exhausted.

  There was little conversation, and most was provided by Bel, commenting on those aspects of Outskirts wildlife that presented themselves: “This is a slugsnake. It likes to climb things, so don’t stand still.”

  “Those tall shapes in the distance are lichen-towers. They only grow by water.”

  “That’s a hawkbug, up there. It won’t bother you, you’re too big.”

  “If this bug lights on you let it bite. It’s harmless, and it will tell its hive that you don’t taste good. You won’t be bothered again.”

  “If this one bites you, kill it as fast as you can. It will burrow into your flesh and die there, and you’ll have to cut it out with a knife.” Disturbingly, the two insects seemed indistinguishable. But Rowan listened, accepting the information, accumulating facts for later and, it was hoped, more coherent consideration.

  The next morning, as she was drawing water from a steep-banked creek, Rowan attempted to steady herself against a crusty boulder that bulked from the water’s edge over the bank. As she leaned her hand against it, the object’s surface gave away, and her left arm sank in, to the elbow. She felt sharp lines of scratches against her arm.

  Overbalanced, she fell, instinctively clenching her fist, grasping for some purchase. Her fingers squelched in damp pulp, finding thin stiff things inside, like wires—sharp. They cut; she let go, but her fingers tangled among them. She stumbled, splashing into the shallows on her knees; her hand twisted, found more wire, cutting her palm and fingers

  Her cries brought Bel, who appeared behind her, steadying Rowan’s body with her own, one hand bracing the trapped arm. “Don’t move, you’ll make it worse.”

  Rowan hissed between clenched teeth, “I think I’ve hurt myself.” Where she had squashed it, the pulp was fluid, drenching her cuts, stinging wildly. She made an involuntary sound and squeezed her eyes shut. “What do I do?”

  “For now, stay still. Do you have your balance?”

  Rowan adjusted her knees minutely; the shift in position caused her hand to move in its trap, and more pain. She hissed again, then managed to say, “I’m steady.”

  “Stay put.” Bel moved away. Wet sounds, crunches, tiny snaps. A sweet, greasy odor puffed into Rowan’s face, again and again. At last she felt air on her forearm, and Bel’s hands closed around her wrist. “Now stand up, but try not to move your hand.”

  Using her foot, Bel had flattened the gray surface around Rowan’s hand down to the dirt of the creek bank. Clear blue fluid puddled and ran into the water, oozing from white pulp pierced by broken black spines. Around R
owan’s hand, the substance was untouched; a soggy mass, white above her hand, pink below, looped throughout with glittering black.

  Rowan stood, left elbow awkwardly bent as Bel braced her hand against movement. Despite this, there was a small shift; the steers-woman made a choked sound and beat her thigh with her right fist, twice, then froze and gasped, “Now what?”

  Bel eyed her. “Relax your hand, but don’t move.”

  She released Rowan, pulled out a knife, reversed it, and used the handle to carefully push the reddened pulp away from the coil. With thumbs and forefingers protected by two pieces of leather cut from her leggings, she snapped the sharp loops, one by one. Rowan watched, body tense and poorly balanced, breathing shallowly.

  She fell to her knees when her hand came free, then cursed viciously and at length when Bel submerged it in the creek. The water cleaned but did not soothe. Eventually Rowan said, “Let go.”

  Both women were in the shallows, Bel on one knee, Rowan half-sprawled. There was more red in the water than the steerswoman cared to see. Her hand was an undifferentiated mass of pain, and when she pulled it from the creek, blood and water trailed down along her arm, dripping off her elbow. She breathed carefully, slowly. “Was that thing poisonous?”

  “Not much.” Bel was watching her. “Just enough to make it hurt worse.”

  Rowan uncurled her fingers carefully and studied the damage. “Do you still have one of those bits of leather?” Her voice was tight.

  Bel did; and before Rowan could react, Bel used it herself, reaching over and swiftly extracting one three-inch spine that had entered Rowan’s hand from the side and extruded from the base of her palm.

  The steerswoman had run out of curses. “Thank you,” she said weakly.

  “Are you going to faint?”

  Rowan looked around. The light was too bright, the creek surface too distant. “I don’t think so.” She blinked. “I’ve a needle and thread in my pack.”

  Rowan discovered, in the most unpleasant way possible, that Bel was not adept at small work. The Outskirter’s hands were trained for strength, not nimbleness. Strength was what she used, pinning Rowan’s arm against a rock as she worked, forcing it abruptly under water to clear the blood. And Rowan used her own: spending all her energy in clutching one arm around her drawn-up knees, trying to direct all tension away from her brutalized left hand.

  Bel substituted patience for skill, and repair was a long process. “Yell if you like,” she said cheerfully. “It won’t bother me.”

  “I don’t care to,” Rowan replied, or tried to reply; the sounds emerged from behind her clenched teeth as a rasping hiss, oddly intonated.

  Bel found it perfectly comprehensible. “Suit yourself.” But Rowan did yell, at another unexpected dousing, when the icy water found a way to wash in directly against one finger bone. It was like being struck by a hammer.

  The sound left her too exhausted to struggle, and she sat limp, unable to raise her head. Her face ached where she had pressed it against her leg. “What was that thing?” Her own voice sounded distant.

  Bel spared a glance from her work—and to Rowan’s utter astonishment, she replied with an outrageous imitation of the steers-woman’s own style of speech, complete with the throaty vowels and crisp consonants of Rowan’s northern accent. “An Outskirts plant, called a lichen-tower. It grows along watercourses, and possesses—” She paused to find a suitably pedantic phrase. “—a stiff spiraled internal structure, permitting it to grow to extreme heights—”

  She did not finish her explication, as Rowan became weakly hilarious. Bel paused to watch her. When the gasping laughter ran down she gave, for the first time, what Rowan considered fair warning. “Again.” She pulled Rowan’s hand into the water, pulled it out, treating the limb as if it were not a part of Rowan’s body, but only attached to it. She resumed her repairs, this time on the palm side.

  Rowan eventually found her voice again. “It should be tall,” she said, of the lichen-tower; Bel had mentioned such plants before.

  “It was a young one.”

  They did not travel the rest of that day, and in the afternoon, as Rowan watched blearily, Bel systematically destroyed eight immature lichen-towers growing on the creek’s bank, all of which Rowan had assumed to be boulders. Whether the destruction represented revenge, custom, or had some useful purpose, the steerswoman was too tired to ask.

  * * *

  Rowan learned to fear the Outskirts, and remembered that she ought to have done so from the outset.

  She was accustomed to fearing specific dangers in the Inner Lands: wolves, bandits, lightning, storms at sea, and, eventually, the enmity of wizards. But the world was background to those things, and they inhabited it. Bel had told her of specific Outskirts’ dangers, and Rowan now knew many by name and habit; but they seemed discrete, separate, existing within no comprehensible framework, so that the next day, when Bel stopped her with a gesture and the merest touch on her arm, Rowan froze instantly, scanning for danger. “What is it?”

  Bel replied only by pointing. Rowan followed her finger to the horizon, but saw only the chaos of moving colors. There was no way to discern anything unexpected against such a view.

  She looked at her friend. Bel’s expression was not one of caution, but amusement. “You don’t see it?”

  Rowan relaxed somewhat, spreading her hands. “Where?”

  Bel continued to point, but walked forward, circling to the left. When she came around to face Rowan again, her finger indicated the space between them.

  Rowan squinted. “Insects?” She realized that there was a cloud of insects at just head height, some circling, some hovering. Bel gestured Rowan forward, and the steerswoman circled as Bel had, keeping her eyes on the insects, puzzled. They seemed unable to move beyond some defined boundary; some of those hovering appeared to hover with motionless wings

  When she reached Bel’s side, the angle of sunlight caught slim silver traces around the insect cloud. “Is that a spiderweb?” The cloud was in midair; there was nothing nearby from which to hang a web. Bel’s finger moved carefully, outlining a shape.

  The flying and suspended insects were contained within a canted oval dome of gossamer, its long axis pointed downward. Below the axis Rowan saw a bit of redgrass blade, less than an inch long, apparently floating at knee height, then saw the line that attached it ...

  Bel’s finger traced again, along a ghostly line that slanted down from the open side of the dome. The line came to ground, upwind, and the configuration came together in Rowan’s eyes—but she shook her head in disbelief. “A kite?”

  She followed the tether to its root, and met the kite-flier: a skinny four-limbed bug, some six inches tall, standing knock-kneed among the redgrass. One sticky arm clutched a redgrass reed of extremely dubious stability; the other held a ball of spittle from which the fine line extruded, ascending to the aerial web.

  Moving quietly, Rowan lowered herself to the ground beside it, cradling her injured hand in her lap. “What is it?” She grinned at the bug, enchanted.

  Bel tilted her head. “I thought you’d like it. It’s a trawler.”

  “‘Trawler,’ as in a fishing boat?” Rowan laughed out loud. “It’s trawling the air!”

  “I don’t know about fishing boats, but ‘trawler’ is its name. When it’s caught enough flying bugs, it will pull its shoot to the ground and have lunch.”

  “The shoot is its net?” Rowan leaned closer to the bug and sighted up along the tether. The bit of redgrass hanging from the shoot provided stabilizing weight. The trawler, outraged by the steerswoman’s proximity, voiced two sharp clicks. Rowan startled, and the creature took the opportunity to transfer the spittle-ball onto a grass stem, then clambered quickly away through the redgrass, all knees and elbows.

  “That’s right. If a hawkbug catches a trawler, sometimes it will save the shoot, and drag it through the air itself. The shoot can last for days.”

  That afternoon, as they rested befo
re dinner, Rowan drew out her logbook, clumsily, with one hand and one elbow, and settled down to update the entries. She had had no inclination to write since leaving the last tribe, and no mental effort to spare; but it occurred to her that an attempt to notate her observations might aid in her comprehending them more completely, and provide a distraction from the pain of her hand.

  Bel had her own occupation: smoothing a patch of ground near her bedroll, she painstakingly began drawing letters in the dirt with a stiff redgrass reed, practicing writing. Rowan had found that the Outskirter had a sharp memory for the shapes and sounds, but unused as she was to small work, her letters tended to look very peculiar, starting large and growing larger as she tired.

  As she worked, Rowan became aware of a faint humming sound, like the passing phantom noises one’s own ears might manufacture. In retrospect, she realized that it had been continuing for some time. Experimentally, she blocked her ears, and the noise vanished. Bel looked up from her laborious writing. “What’s the matter?”

  “An odd sound,” Rowan replied, trying to pinpoint its direction. It was impossible; the dim sound lay at the threshold of hearing and was intermittently masked by the sound of redgrass.

  Dropping her reed, Bel stood and scanned the land, then closed her eyes, listening. “I don’t hear it.”

  “It’s very faint.”

  “What does it sound like?” But at that moment the breeze died, the grass quietened, and Bel caught the noise. She froze, then smoothly and soundlessly dropped into a sitting position on the ground. She said nothing, but held Rowan’s gaze with an expression of warning.

  “What—” Rowan began, but a minute motion of Bel’s hand silenced her, and she froze. The noise became somewhat louder.