The Steerswoman's Road

by Rosemary Kirstein

  Amazed, Rowan shook her head. “I hardly know how to thank you,” she told Kammeryn.

  His eyes were thoughtful. “Don’t,” he said. “When you return, our tribe will see you first, and hear first what you found.”

  “But—” It was Fletcher, his confusion overcoming his etiquette. With a nod, Kammeryn gave permission for his question, and Fletcher fairly burst out, “But why are they going? What’s there?”

  Kammeryn leaned back, considering, and Kree’s sidelong expression told Rowan that Fletcher would receive no answer. But the seyoh surprised her. “We are finished here,” he said. “Ask that question of the steerswoman when you leave.”

  Rowan gathered her materials, and Bel and Fletcher rose to go; but Kree stopped them and turned back to Kammeryn, small bright eyes intent. “That’s not a good idea.”

  He made a show of surprise. “How so?”

  She was hesitant to explain in front of the strangers; but the seyoh waited. “You’ve circumvented the council’s choice,” Kree finally said, “and they won’t like it if you throw your own decision in their faces. It’s better the tribe doesn’t know. They don’t need to be told why you choose to send us where you do.”

  “I don’t see how we can prevent it. The steerswoman is sworn to tell the truth, if she’s asked.”

  Kree knit her brows. “She should do as you tell her.”

  Rowan remained half-risen, one knee on the ground, pen and ink stone in one hand, charts in the other. “I can’t. If he tells me to be silent, or to lie, I can’t do it.”

  Kree addressed the steerswoman. “Understand, I’m in favor of your being here. Mine was one of the voices that spoke for you in the council. But it’s important that the council show unity to the tribe. If you go about telling everything, it will come out that some of the council did not want to accept you.”

  “I can’t help that. And if it’s true, how can it hurt for it to be known?”

  “The tribe doesn’t want to see its leaders divided.”

  “It’s better to see what is, rather than what one wishes were so.” Rowan became very aware that one side of the tent was completely open, that any passing person could overhear everything that Kree wished to keep secret. She was also aware that no person had passed by since the meeting began. Apparently, custom or law prevented eavesdropping. Fletcher himself seemed both appalled to be privy to such dissension, and avidly interested.

  Kammeryn raised one hand. “I cannot force the steerswoman to be silent; and I will not try to. The tribe has one leader: the seyoh. I am not divided. You may leave.”

  22

  Fletcher and Rowan were seated on a rugbefore Kree’s tent. Bel had decided to walk the area between the camp and the inner circle of defenders; she was composing a poem, she explained, and walking helped her to think.

  The morning had passed, and the noon meal. Rowan and Fletcher’s food, however, still sat before them: Rowan’s because she could not speak and eat at the same time, Fletcher’s because partway through the tale he had forgotten that it was there.

  He shook his head slowly, blinking as he gazed about, as if Rowan’s story had transported him to the far lands where the events had occurred, then abruptly dropped him back into the Outskirts. “Falling Guidestars, and intrigue, murder, and wizards ...”

  “Yes. It’s hard to believe.” Told in words, the events seemed hardly credible.

  But Fletcher was deeply disturbed. He turned to her. “Do you really think this wizard, this Slado, has some interest in the Outskirts?”

  “I don’t know.” She picked up the bowl of stew that sat before her; it was long cold. “Perhaps he hasn’t, yet. But everything Bel said makes a great deal of sense to me. If he keeps expanding his power in the Inner Lands, then yes, he’ll turn this way someday.”

  “I don’t know ... The wizards, they don’t only do bad things, do they? They help, too. I’ve heard that the people in The Crags live very high, thanks to their wizard. And that woman wizard, does something with the crops ...”

  “Isara, in the upper Wulf valley. And Jannik in Donner keeps the dragons under control. Or doesn’t, if he takes a disliking to you.” She used a piece of sour flatbread to scoop the thick stew. “And they have their little wars; not so little if you find yourself conscripted into one. I think you’d find all this likelier if you knew wizards as I do.” She studied him a moment. “There’s no wizard in Alemeth,” she observed.

  “Alemeth?” Fletcher came back to his surroundings quickly and shot her a bright, amused glance. “Now, what made you say Alemeth?”

  She smiled. “Your accent.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  “Never. And I’ve never heard an accent quite like yours, either.” Fletcher’s consonants were slurred and soft, his intonation light and mobile, far different from the clearer rhythms and flatter tones of the Outskirters. “I tried to place it, and I couldn’t. I thought it might be The Crags, because of the lilt; but the pattern is too different. That left only accents I’ve never heard at all, and that left the western mountains, or southeast, around Alemeth; Alemeth seemed likelier. And now,” she said, settling back with her bowl and bread, “now I want your story. What’s a silk-weaver doing in the Outskirts?” Alemeth was famous across the Inner Lands for the quality of its fabrics.

  “Weaver? Ha! as we Outskirters say. Never touched a bobbin in my life.” He adopted a haughty demeanor and held it just long enough to impress it upon her. “We were bakers. My family, that is.”

  She coughed stew. “Bakers?” She could hardly imagine a more unlikely profession for a man become a wild barbarian.

  He shook a finger at her. “I can make a custard tart you wouldn’t believe.”

  She laughed, long and freely. “Do you know, I could use a custard tart just now.” After long traveling through strange, grim lands, she found Fletcher’s foolishness refreshing.

  “Ah, well, there you are, you see. No likely chance of that out here.” And he glanced about disparagingly; but the glance turned into a long gaze of pleasure, at the tents, the veldt, the windy white sky. He seemed to forget her and sat looking at his world with deep satisfaction.

  “You like it,” Rowan observed.

  “No place I’d rather be.” Fletcher took a deep breath, blew it out, then gave an embarrassed wince. “I guess you’d have to blame youth,” he said, “or adventurousness, or a sense of romance ... I don’t know. But my grandfather was an Outskirter, and from the time I had enough words to ask him to tell me, he’d tell me. The most astonishing tales—do you know, half the town thought he was a born liar, made it up as he went along. But I knew, because I listened all the time, put it all together, until I felt like I could pick out of a crowd all those people I’d never seen”—he indicated spaces in the empty air—“his family, his war band, tribemates, all those fierce women he loved ...

  “It was so much bigger than the way I lived. Nobody’s life depended on what my family did. If we didn’t bake, well, someone else would—not so well, perhaps, but no one would starve. But you see, everything he did mattered. Life and death. I wanted—” He looked sheepish. “I wanted to do something big.”

  “Why did your grandfather leave here?”

  He shrugged. “Hard times drove his tribe inward, they raided a village and lost, he lost a leg, a village girl nursed him, one thing led to another.”

  Rowan noted again the object he wore on a thong around his neck: a cross, some four inches tall, made of Inner Lands wood. “Are Christers so forgiving that they’ll help a man who attacked their town?”

  He gave her a mock-pious look. “It’s true. My grandmother was a Christer, and once my grandfather was hurt, he was helpless. We don’t kill a helpless man.”

  Rowan was both interested and dubious. “Can you be a Christer and an Outskirter at the same time? Isn’t there some conflict?”

  “Not so far.” He pursed his lips. “We’ve nothing against defending ourselves; I can manage to do my duty to
the tribe. All I ask is privacy to say my prayers, and a chance to render a little kindness now and again.” He laughed. “You watch, I’ll have all these barbarians converted, eventually.” He assumed a sudden expression of panic, glanced about as if expecting attack, and showed relief at finding none. “Well, perhaps not,” he conceded.

  “Anyway,” he went on, gesturing with one hand, to paint the picture, “so there I am, young weed of a boy, head full of tales. I try the family business, and it’s, let’s say, less than fascinating. And the little boy grows into a very bored man, head still full of dreams.

  “So eventually I figure out that I can damn well do as I please, and what I please is to become an Outskirter. Told the parents and the uncles and the aunts, and you can believe I didn’t hear the end of it until I’d walked off out of earshot, and over the horizon.” His hand made an arrow to that direction.

  “And what did your grandfather think?”

  “Well, he was gone by then. But he’d helped me before, learning swordplay and such. I guess I must’ve had the idea before I knew I had it. It was already somewhere in my head that I’d see the Outskirts someday.

  “And, do you know, it’s exactly like I thought it would be—and not.”

  “How so?”

  He thought long, several varieties of puzzlement crossing his face. “Well ... I expected it to be exciting, and it is. And I expected there to be monsters, and enemies, and comrades, and there are. And I expected to love all that, and I do ..” He struggled to find an explanation, his brows knit so tightly that his entire face became a single squint of concentration.

  Then the answer came to him. Abruptly, he grabbed a fistful of the patterned carpet and held it up to show her. “I didn’t expect to love this.”

  She was bemused. “You love the rug?”

  “Yes! Look at it, someone made it; Deely made it! And that!” He pointed to the neighboring tent. “See that patch, on the left? Last winter, it was so cold, and the coals were left too high under the tent floor; that whole corner got singed. That’s Orranyn’s tent. And that.” A train. “The wheel sticks on that one, you have to give it a solid kick before you pull first time, then it’s fine all day. And look at this.” He picked up the rough pottery bowl that held the remains of his stew. “The clay; I found that, in the banks of a stream we passed six months ago. I had to tear out the lichen-towers over it. Now it’s a bowl.” He put it down slowly, puzzling over it, puzzling over himself. “It’s strange. I do love these things: little things, daily life ..” He looked up and pointed. “See how the sun comes over the tent?” They were sitting in its dim, peaked shadow. “And there’s a hawkbug.” Above. “And Chess!” The mertutial was stumping along between the tents, gathering empty bowls. Fletcher flung himself to his feet, throwing his arms out dramatically. “Chess,” he declared, “I love you!”

  The old woman grunted. “Ha. It’s all talk. Come to my tent at sundown. Bring a present.” Taking the remains of their meal, she wandered off.

  Fletcher watched her, with a smile of affection and something like pride. He looked down at Rowan from his gangling height. “Am I a lunatic?”

  “No ...” She gazed around, at the world he had come to see and had learned to care for more than he expected. “I feel that way sometimes, as well. It’s the large things in life that drive us, that we measure ourselves by; but it’s the small things, the daily things that—that become precious to us.”

  “That’s it.” He dropped to sit beside her, quieter now. “That’s the very word; they’re precious.” He cupped his hands, a tiny, cherishing gesture. “I want to hold on to them, somehow. I want them safe. I want them to be this way forever.” He shook his head, amazed at himself, and opened his hands to free their contents. “And it wasn’t for the small things that I came to the Outskirts.”

  “Was it the small things that brought you back to this tribe?” Rowan asked him. He turned to her, suddenly blank. “In Kammeryn’s tent,” Rowan went on, “you said that you weren’t sure you wanted to come back from walkabout.”

  The expression remained, identical to the one he had worn while helping with her charts; a wordless emptiness lying immediately behind his eyes.

  She instantly, deeply regretted broaching the subject. She found it hurt her to see Fletcher so, to see someone so alive and lively driven to sudden stillness. Fletcher did not speak, but nodded infinitesimally.

  “I’m sorry,” Rowan said sincerely, “I can see that’s a bad memory. If it’s nothing I need to know, I won’t ask of it again.”

  He sat motionless, expressionless. Eventually words found their way back to him. “Thank you,” he said.

  After evening meal, as the falling sun faded the western sky to pale pink, faint green, clear blue, Bel recited her poem to the tribe.

  It was a tale of wizards and magic in the distant Inner Lands, of small people standing against mighty ones; of a woman who held to truth against the lies of the powerful; of another who set cunning and violent skill against cruel force; of a boy with a secret talent and a need for justice—all three brought together by glittering chips of blue that had fallen from the sky ...

  Rowan listened, fascinated, hardly recognizing herself in the tale. Bel depicted the steerswoman as different than she felt herself to be: more innocent, more intransigent, purer, perhaps, and certainly wiser. Young Willam seemed darker than he had been, suffused with fate, choosing danger for the sake of honor. And Bel, as the speaker of the tale, was never described, and so only seen by her actions: she became an elemental force, a wind from the wildlands driving its way to its goal.

  There was nothing in the story that was not true. Rowan could match each event to memory. But Rowan had not seen herself like this at the time; had not, she realized, seen herself at all. She had seen only the things she needed to do, and how to do them; the things she needed to know, and what kept them hidden; and, in the end, a small piece of the truth.

  When Bel spoke of the Guidestars, the tribe looked up, although the sky was too light to see them. When she spoke of the steers-woman, faces turned toward Rowan, speculative, then nodding. Through the art of her words, Bel caused Outskirters to understand a steerswoman.

  And when Bel told of the deceit and cruelty of the wizards, some brows were knit in thought, and some eyes were wide in astonishment; but by the end of the poem, Rowan found in the faces of many of the warriors a mirror of her own anger and resolve.

  “I was wrong.”

  Rowan turned around. Kree was sitting behind her, with young Hari asleep across her lap, his arms and legs sprawled with a child’s disregard of comfort.

  “If those evil people are going to come here,” Kree told Rowan, “everyone needs to know. We’ll need to act together.”

  “Can different tribes learn to act together?”

  Kree was definite. “Yes. They’ll follow their seyohs, and stupid people don’t become seyohs. They know a threat when they see it. When something threatens a tribe, the warriors fight. If something came to threaten all tribes, we’d all fight. We attack. We protect.” She ran one callused hand down her son’s back, and he stirred in his dreams, shifting into a position even less likely. “Kammeryn is very wise,” Kree said.

  There was another sleeping face among the people: Averryl’s. He had emerged, shakily, from Mander’s tent just after the meal. Sometime during Bel’s poem, exhaustion had overtaken him, and he had leaned back briefly to support himself against Fletcher, there to fall asleep against Fletcher’s chest. Fletcher had moved only once, locking his long arms in front of his friend’s body, to prevent him from falling, and had remained in that uncomfortable, protective position for the rest of the long evening.

  When darkness approached, the fire tenders hurried to bury the flames. People began to disperse, several pausing at the far side of the fire pit to exchange a few words with Bel, whose every reply seemed to include a definite, affirming nod. Yes, Rowan imagined her saying, everything I said was true.

  R
owan pulled Bel aside as they were entering Kree’s tent for the night. “What is it?” Bel asked.

  Rowan waited a moment, permitting the members of the war band to finish entering, before she spoke. “I have a question.”

  Bel glanced once at the disappearing warriors. “Yes?” They stepped farther from the entrance.

  “If you’re on walkabout and your partner gets in trouble, it’s your duty to rescue him, correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  Stars were appearing above. The breeze whispered. “If you fail, are you held responsible for his death?”

  Bel raised her brows, an action barely visible in the gloom. “It happens fairly often. If people suspect you failed through incompetence, yes. You might face a blood duel when you return. Or if you refuse to help through cowardice, then that’s the same as murder, and you can be executed. But those things are hard to prove; it’s just the two of you, out there alone. Usually, no one’s held to blame.” Bel shifted uncomfortably, and Rowan suspected that she would not like what she heard next. “Remember, the candidates are children.”

  “Children?”

  “Around thirteen years of age is usual. Some go earlier, some later.” Rowan found the idea appalling. “But Fletcher went last year, and he wasn’t a child.”

  “No, he was.” Bel shook her head broadly. “It’s a passage: if you’re an Outskirter, then you’re a child until you go walkabout, and a warrior after. Formally, as far as the tribe was concerned, Fletcher was a child.”

  “And his partner was some thirteen years old.”

  “Yes. It’s sad.”

  Rowan was thinking of Fletcher’s expression when, against his will, his thoughts were forced to dwell upon his journey. And she remembered another face that carried a look that was as quiet, as dark, as deep. “Is Jaffry the only child Jann has?”

  Bel looked up at her with interest. “I don’t know.”

  In the morning, Rowan was again the last in Kree’s tent to rise. As she stepped into the cool sunlight, something crackled under her foot. She looked, and then stooped down to examine it.