The Steerswoman's Road

by Rosemary Kirstein

  Minutes passed, and eventually Rowan attempted to move one leg to a more comfortable position; she received a look, a widening of Bel’s eyes more communicative than words.

  The Outskirter was afraid. It took Rowan a long, stunned moment to believe it.

  Bel was her guide, Bel was the native, Bel was the warrior, wise in the ways of her land. Never before in the Outskirts had Rowan ever seen her truly afraid. It came to Rowan shockingly that if Bel was frightened, then her own survival depended upon following instructions instantly, completely.

  Bel wanted silence and stillness. Heart pounding, muscles yearning for action, Rowan complied.

  More time passed. Rowan listened to the inhuman humming, watching Bel for more unspoken signs. Their two shadows slowly lengthened.

  The noise grew again, and Rowan found that she could locate its direction: south by southeast, behind her, to Bel’s left, distance unknown. Bel visually gauged the distance between her own hand and her sword hilt, a mere foot away within easy reach. Rowan carefully did the same.

  The sound faded slightly, stopped, then abruptly returned, much quieter. Rowan thought of the low hills that lay behind her; the source of the humming had passed behind one and emerged again, farther away.

  At long last it diminished to near-inaudibility, regaining a directionless quality. Bel relaxed, then caught Rowan’s eye with a questioning expression, pointing to one ear. Realizing that her hearing was sharper than the Outskirter’s, Rowan moved only her fingers in a cautioning gesture.

  At last the noise disappeared, and she spread her hands to communicate the fact, not presuming to decide for herself whether the danger was over.

  Bel drew and expelled a deep breath. “Close, but not too close.” She rose, somewhat stiffly, her eyes still wide, her gaze flicking about the landscape.

  “What was it?” Rowan found that her jaw ached. She had been sitting with teeth clenched for over two hours.

  “A demon,” Bel said. She turned slowly in a complete circle, making a careful study of the surroundings, listening and looking. Rowan attempted to rise, stumbled as a cramp took her left leg. “They’re rare,” Bel continued. “They make that noise, constantly. We’re lucky that your hearing is so sharp. I might not have noticed in time.”

  Rowan massaged her left calf awkwardly with her right hand and followed Bel’s example in searching the horizon for she knew not what. The land was empty, the grass near-silent in the stillness. “What would have happened?” There were legends of demons in one part of the Inner Lands, but legends only.

  “It would have come for us, and killed us.” Bel looked at the direction where the sound had vanished, and began to relax. “They’re attracted by sound.”

  “All sound? Do they chase goblins, tumblebugs? Tanglebrush?”

  “I don’t know. But if one hears you, it comes. They’ve destroyed entire tribes.” She began gathering their equipment, urgently. “Let’s leave. Now.”

  Rowan packed her pens, her ink stone, her book, her bedroll. “Is there no way to defend against them?”

  “If you stand in front of one and wave your sword, it sprays you with a fluid that melts your flesh from the bones.”

  Rowan grimaced. “And if you don’t wave your sword?”

  “It does the same.”

  “What do they look like?”

  “No one I know has seen one.” Bel rolled her cloak, tied it to her pack. “I know some tales, and one song where a demon appears. They’re said to stand as tall as a man, colored silver or gray, and have arms like slugsnakes. They have no head, and no face.”

  Rowan attempted to envision it. “How do they see?”

  “No one knows.”

  Their camp dismantled, the women moved off quickly, in a direction opposite from the demon’s last known position. The new route headed more to the north than had been planned. Rowan made no complaint. She walked behind her silent friend, listening to the Outskirts.

  12

  They did not hear the demon again, but began to sleep in shifts, for fear of missing its approach. With less rest, they traveled harder in the mornings, when they were freshest, paused more briefly for noon meal, and stopped earlier in the evening. Soon, Bel was again searching for tribe signs; Rowan dizzied herself by trying to do the same, scanning horizons that daily became more obscured as the travelers approached and entered an area with many small, high hills.

  Bel paused on one crest, again signaling Rowan to a stop beside her. The morning was windy, the grass raucous, roaring, and the contrasts of color across its surface flaring, bright and alive, like fire. The sky above was blue and white, motionless, frozen. Rowan felt trapped between the land and sky, had a wild impression that she might suddenly fall up, away from the j ittering, burning hills into the icy heights. The Outskirter gazed eastward, and Rowan waited; with the slackening of her wearied concentration, the landscape collapsed into visual chaos.

  Eventually she realized that Bel was not examining the land to the east, but only facing in that direction; her attention was elsewhere. Rowan studied her: a clear and familiar shape against the writhing background. Bel stood with a lazy nonchalance that to Rowan’s eyes communicated total alertness. Rowan spoke, quietly and cautiously. “What?” Her thoughts immediately went to the demon; above the grass noise, she could not hear any hum.

  Bel gestured at the landscape: a motion so elaborately communicative that the steerswoman instantly recognized it as false, designed to deceive. “We’re being followed. Look confused.”

  Rowan gazed at the distance, slowing, forcing the view into some semblance of true land, hills, rocks. She shook her head as if perplexed. “Is it a person?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. If it is a person, he’s very good. It might be a wounded goblin, going along the ground, or a small goat.”

  “Can you tell where it is?”

  “Not exactly. Behind us. West.”

  Rowan startled at a noise. “What was that?” A brief rattle, not behind, but ahead.

  “Slugsnake in a tanglebrush,” Bel said indifferently. Slugsnakes were harmless.

  Bel threw up her arms as if the lay of the terrain had defeated her, and slipped out of her pack. “Pull out your maps, and settle down as if you’re checking our route. I’ll go ahead, like I’m scouting, and try to double back and catch him.”

  Rowan began to comply, vainly trying to sense the follower without looking in his direction, attempting to use a combination of hearing, peripheral vision, even smell. Her skin tingled, as if, with her other senses useless, she might manage to locate him by some extension of touch.

  She understood Bel’s strategy. “I’m bait,” she muttered, uncapping her map case.

  “You have to be. It’s too late to hide, and you can’t move without being seen. I can. If he tries to come near you, I may spot his motion. Keep your sword handy.”

  Bel wandered off to the east, and Rowan seated herself on the Outskirter’s pack, holding the map before her. The slugsnake rattled its tanglebrush.

  The wind faltered, faded to silence, then rose again, slowly. At first quietly, then more loudly, the grass began again its tapping, hissing, until it became a sound so constant as to hold no meaning whatsoever.

  A person who followed in hiding could mean no good; there was danger, and Rowan was alone.

  And suddenly, under the impetus of that danger, Rowan accepted the sound of the Outskirts, without conscious thought; she accepted it and dismissed it. It was expected, it was background. It held no information; with her eyes on her charts, she waited for other sounds, for something unexpected.

  Unexpectedly, the tanglebrush had not rattled in the wind. Under the guise of comparing chart to landscape, Rowan rose and looked in that direction. Bel was there, crouched to the ground, her body blocking the tanglebrush from view. Rowan looked away. But Bel’s body could not have blocked the sound.

  Rowan looked again. Bel was not there, but her cloak was—draped over the brush in perfect sem
blance of a cloaked Outskirter crouched among the redgrass.

  As if absently, the steerswoman moved closer to her pack and sword. Turning in a slow circle, she alternated outward glances with longer gazes at her map. The chart covered territory left far behind, days ago; she did not truly see it, but tried to study the images she gained from each outward glance, tried to absorb them, to hold them clearly in her mind.

  To the east: hills, slowly ranging lower in the twisting distance, and the decoy cloak in the foreground. South: small hills of writhing red-grass, then longer hills, rising to a false horizon.

  West, where the follower was hidden: lower land, flatter, with occasional stands of tanglebrush, merging eventually into hazy distance. In the wild sweeps of motion, no recognizable sign of a person, nor of an animal. North: a peppering of single conical hills that rose above the grass and at the limit of sight, where red and brown merged to a dull brick red, a gray meandering line of what she guessed to be lichen-towers.

  East, and she had finished her circle: the decoy, and no sign of Bel. Rowan was alone.

  Her heart beating hard, she stared blindly at the chart in her hands; and suddenly, of itself, her mind added the quartered images together, completing the circle of her sight. The world came to her, entire and whole, all senses simultaneous, shockingly clear:

  She stood on the rocky crest of a conical hill, part of a series that swept from the north, joining into wild ridges in the south, with flatland to one side, hills and dales to the other; grass covered the earth, a deep carpet, waist-high everywhere but the stony hilltops. The sky was a blue dome, arcing, perfect, clouds crowding in from the south; she felt the shape of those clouds as surely as if she were touching them.

  To the eyes, sky and horizon met, but she knew that sky and land continued beyond sight: skies she had seen, land she had crossed herself, and farther lands beyond those. All touched each other: a continuum sweeping from the mountains west of Wulfshaven, across two great rivers, through green forest to red veldt to the place where she stood, and past her to the east, and the north, and the south.

  She stood with stone beneath one foot, bare earth beneath the other; redgrass began below her position.

  —Alone, on top of a bare hill. She made a perfect target.

  She sat. Outskirters carried no bows. (Why not? No wood but tangleroot—too stiff? Too short?) A knife could be thrown. A tangleroot knife would be too thick to fly well, too dull to do damage at distance. She noted the distance of a thrown metal knife, mentally marking a safe circle around herself.

  Wind shifted from east to north, and the tone of the chattering grass altered. To her mind, the sound was no sound, it was identical to silence; she ignored it. True sound in this world was patterned sound: a man walking, an insect hunting. She heard nothing.

  Colored waves of turning and twisting redgrass—movement caused by wind, by its force and direction. The motion had a source and a reason; she did not try to hold the colors, or to watch them, but let them sweep unimpeded across her sight. And it came to her that she could use that motion, that what she sought was motion at odds with that patterned sweep, and that, if it were there, it would show clearly.

  And then it came, suddenly and quickly, in the corner of her eye, a flicker of contrast so sharp that it seemed to burn: color out of pattern, diagonal movement against parallel—and sound: three crunches, as feet abandoned stealth. She found her sword and spun.

  A thump, a wild rattle. Bel’s cloak was on the ground. Grass hissing, leaves twisting, bright color showing the departing motion, as clear as a shout, as clear as a finger indicating: There!

  The attacker was fleeing, crouched beneath the grass tops, the disturbance of his motion drawing a contrasting line within the sweeping colors. He had discovered Bel’s ruse, had seen Rowan spin, sword in her hand, had lost his advantage.

  Rowan heard Bel approach from behind, recognizing her steps as easily as if she walked among silence. “He fooled me. He went for me instead of you.”

  The angle of the motion changed abruptly and vanished; the person was moving south, artfully using the grass’s motion as cover for his own. But he could only move at the same pace as the windy patterns; if he tried to move faster, then

  Brown where there should have been red, red instead of brown. “There!” She found that she had shouted it.

  “He’s very good,” Bel commented.

  The statement made no sense—Rowan could see him! “Can we catch him?” She wanted to, desperately, furiously.

  “Too late.”

  He vanished again; he was far enough away that the wind’s pace was safe. Rowan did not know his position.

  No, she did: she knew his speed and his direction. She calculated, her eyes tracing the only possible invisible path. “Which way around that hill, do you think?” He could not climb it without being seen.

  “It depends. He might be running to someplace in particular.”

  The hill would make eddies of the patterns, like water around a rock, hard to predict. If he passed on the near side, he would give himself away. “The far side,” Rowan said.

  “If he hasn’t lost his head.”

  A brief splash of brown against red, an instant before it disappeared behind the hill. “There.” And he was gone. The women were alone under the windy sky, above the chattering grass.

  “He might have been a scout,” Bel ventured.

  “Would a scout attack as a matter of course?” Rowan asked, turning to Bel—

  —and clarity of perception vanished as suddenly as a snapped twig. Its loss broke the steerswoman’s heart. “Oh, no ..”

  “What?” Bel stood before her, solid and familiar—under a sky too wide, too blue, above a roiling meaningless mass of brown and red ... The Outskirter turned to see if something behind her had prompted Rowan’s reaction.

  The steerswoman looked around: rising and falling slopes of color, spots of black, the horizon too near, nearer than she knew it to be. She sank to a seat on Bel’s pack, hand limp around her sword hilt, and cursed, weakly and repetitively.

  “What’s the matter?”

  I’m on a hill, Rowan told herself, and the rocky hilltop did become real; but it seemed to exist alone, as if floating unmoored on an ocean of red-and-brown waves. “I could see ...”

  “See what?”

  See as a steerswoman saw: completely. No frantic, piecemeal stitching-together of sight and sound and scent; see entirely, feel herself in the world, reason what she could not perceive, and know it all as true.

  “See everything,” she said.

  Closing her eyes, she sensed the hill below her as suddenly as if it had just risen up from the ground. She matched its shape with her memory, pictured the pattern of terrain it had inhabited so sensibly, considered the wise redgrass that had told her so much, so easily, and tried to add all those ideas to her inner vision of the world.

  Experimentally, she opened her eyes again. Bel was crouched close in front of her, brows knit. Behind her were the hills that Rowan expected: but too flat, like ranked landscape cutouts in a traveling pantomime theater.

  It did not matter. She told Bel, and she told herself, “I can do it. I did it, and I can do it again.”

  Bel said nothing.

  Rowan spoke bitterly, a fury directed only at herself. “I knew what the grass was saying to me. If that man had come at me, I would have seen him, I could have taken him!”

  Another realization struck her abruptly, and her anger vanished, replaced by shame. “Bel,” she said, “you can’t forever fight for two, guard two, feed two.” She gave a weak laugh. “I can hardly believe it; that you’ve done this much, this long, for me ..”

  “I’m doing it for myself.”

  “Perhaps. But ...” Briefly, patterns and pieces fell together in her mind, then fragmented. There was reason and sense behind the Outskirts; it was a place, as surely as was the Inner Lands, with elements interlocking: wind, grass, water, life ..

  “I don’t
care to be a burden to you,” she told her friend. “Starting now, I will ... I will cease to be some package, that you have to deliver.”

  Bel considered, studying Rowan’s face; and then she nodded satisfaction. “Good. It’s about time.”

  13

  Rowan dreamed of the sea. he water was gray and sunlit silver, alive with small waves moving clean and regular as mathematics. Above, the sky was a perfect clear dome of blue, where stars were faintly visible, although it was full daylight. High overhead the Harp stood, Vega gentled to dim comradeship with the coolly brilliant sun.

  She stood on a deck, the wind two points aft of starboard, her ship running fast on a close reach. The vessel was shaped like a cargo ship, but small, no more than fifteen feet abeam. Perfectly fitted, it was of simple design, without ornamentation, but constructed of the richest of woods, dark-stained and gleaming, showing everywhere the handiwork of master craftsmen.

  Facing aft, she saw that the poop was deserted. Without looking elsewhere, she knew that there was no one else aboard.

  She controlled her ship by thought alone.

  She was in no way surprised by this. It seemed to her that it was proper, but it was immensely difficult. Mere wishing was not sufficient; every detail of control must be held consciously, simultaneously. The angle of the rudder, the set of the sails, the particular tension on each sheet—she was aware of each, as aware as if by touch, and each must be maintained, or moved, in perfect respect to the currents of wind and water, by force of will and wisdom.

  Constant, interlocking, interdependent, the details filled her mind completely, but other than these, her thoughts were few. Within this work, there was no room for such things as personality, identity. In command of all, she was herself diminished. Time passed in her dream, and as slow as stones, a feeling began to grow in her that she had another task at hand. Eventually she understood that it was that she must also chart her course. Taking navigational sightings, the subtle interplay of numbers—all seemed beyond her now. Yet it must be done.