The Steerswoman's Road

by Rosemary Kirstein

  “Hurrying, then holding, Chess halted.

  Eden must attack alone,

  And deliver death; but Eden was daunted,

  Faltering, failing, filled with fear ...”

  Chess stepped forward and dispatched the enemy, rescuing her partner. Then from the grass around the girls three more warriors appeared, intent on destroying their comrade’s killer. Eden struck down one of them quickly, with a blow born more of panic than intent. Chess injured another, then assisted Eden against a woman who called out a name as she fought: the name of her beloved, dead by Eden’s sword. When that foe fell, Chess returned to the man she had injured. She gave him the freedom to escape; he did not take it, but turned to face her, and was brought down by a fighter all of fourteen years old.

  “Then Eden,” Rowan said when the poem ended, “Eden failed the test. She didn’t become a warrior.” She was as breathless as if she had fought by the side of the children.

  “Not that time.” Chess refilled both cups. “She had to go again two years later, with Kester.” She looked up in sudden surprise at the memory. “And she rescued him!”

  Rowan clapped her hands together. “Good for her!” She found herself serious. “But walkabout, walkabout is dangerous.” She drank again, thoughtfully: a toast to the bravery of children.

  Chess nodded and took a contemplative draft. “You need good warriors. You need people who can face danger. If someone thinks he can’t ever be a warrior, well, he can go straight to mertutial, and the tribe will thank him for his sense. Like Deely. Deely was born on the far side of the line—that’s how we say it.”

  Rowan was following the tracks of some idea; she couldn’t quite recall what idea it was, but the tracks seemed very clear. “People die sometimes.” That wasn’t quite it. “Children. When they go out on the veldt.”

  “Oh, yes.” Chess was saddened. “Sometimes.”

  “When Fletcher went on his walkabout,” Rowan began, then decided she didn’t like the grammatical structure of her sentence: how did the Outskirters say it? “When he went walkabout,” she corrected, “his partner—” She paused to recover the thrust of her statement. “Did his partner die?” The thought of the death of a child abruptly forced a false sobriety upon her. The wavering tent walls became suddenly stable, although the air remained murky. Rowan felt it was very important to pay respectful attention.

  “Ah!” Chess nodded, slowly, with heavy deliberation. “Mai,” she said. “Mai, Jannsdotter, Alace.”

  That was the idea Rowan had been pursuing: Jann’s daughter, as she had suspected. “And Jann blames Fletcher.”

  “Jann and Jaffry do, yes. You see,” Chess said, raising one finger, “he should have come straight hack. He shouldn’t have vanished, stayed away, then come trailing in months later. It looked bad, like he had run.” She looked into her cup as if it held an answer. “Like he had run,” she repeated.

  Rowan considered long before asking the next question. “Did he?”

  Chess weaved as she thought, a motion similar to Bel’s characteristic movement. “Who’s to say? I’m sure there was more to the story than he told.” She took another sip.

  Rowan forced herself to do the same, attempting to cling to her clarity of thought. “He didn’t want to come back,” she said, remembering Fletcher’s comment in Kammeryn’s tent.

  “He was hurt,” Chess said.

  “Injured? How badly?”

  Chess shook her head. She thumped her chest. “No, inside. In his heart. Because of what happened. I think he wanted to die.”

  “What did happen?”

  Chess sighed, shifted, and uncrossed her legs, stretching them out straight; for its age, her gnarled body seemed remarkably flexible. “Now, I have this from my boy, who got it from Averryl, who filled in the spots where Fletcher didn’t say much, which was most of it, except my boy had a few things from Fletcher himself, so he figured out the rest and it makes sense in the end.”

  Rowan was extremely confused by the sentence and became angry: at the state of her mind, at Chess for causing it, and at Outskirter custom for enforcing it. She tried to remember who Chess’s “boy” might he. Then it came to her: Mander. The necessary physical intimacy of healers with their patients often inspired commensurate emotional confidences under other circumstances. Between Mander’s information and that of Fletcher’s closest friend, the story that would follow was likely the most accurate version available.

  “As Fletcher tells it,” Chess continued, “they were coming up on a swamp, with a kilometer between them, Mai ahead, at about two by Fletcher. He didn’t see her go down, but he heard her shout, and he started to go to her. And then she was screaming. And then she wasn’t.

  “He killed the creature—he called it a mud-lion”—Rowan nodded, remembering Fletcher’s descriptions of the swamp creatures—

  “after a bad fight, but too late for Mai. She wasn’t dead, but she couldn’t speak. And she didn’t know who Fletcher was. She couldn’t think anymore, my boy says, from shock. She should have died right away, but she didn’t.”

  They drank again.

  “Now, you know that I’ve seen plenty of blood, in my time. But my boy, he didn’t like to tell it to me, how Mai died. Something about the way the beast’s jaws worked—they don’t tear, they squeeze and cut at the same time, sealing the wounds. The girl was in pieces, and there were plenty of pieces.” She blinked at the image she created for herself, then dropped her head a bit and spoke more quietly, looking up at Rowan from under her grizzled brows. “She was cut through the middle, as well, still alive. So there she was, just a piece of a girl, most of the top half, in the mud, looking around, dying ...” The old woman’s eyes fell, her voice faded away, and she sat, looking blindly at the cup resting in her lap. It came to Rowan that the girl in the story had been a real, living person, known to Chess since her birth.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Chess announced. She sat up, recovering a degree of animation. “We’re supposed to be celebrating, and here I am telling sad stories.” She ostentatiously took a long swallow.

  Rowan pointedly did not do the same. “I want,” she said, “the rest of this story. I like Fletcher. When I see him sad, I worry.” A small, hazy corner of her mind was surprised at how true this statement was.

  “I like him, too,” Chess said. “He’s peculiar, but I like that. When you get to be my age, you learn that peculiar is good. Young people don’t understand that.”

  Rowan refused the digression. “The story,” she prompted.

  Chess shook her head. “That’s all. Mai died, and Fletcher just put his face east and started walking.”

  “Planning never to return?”

  “Planning nothing, I suppose. You’ve seen how he looks when he remembers it.” Her voice became heavy. “Planning nothing, not even thinking. Just walking away.”

  Rowan tried to imagine it. It seemed like death. “But he came back.”

  “He came back.” Chess paused. “Fletcher is a good warrior. Now, that is. I had my own doubts before. Since coming back ... it’s like he put more of his heart into being a warrior. He takes it seriously. We lost Mai, but we got a better Fletcher than we had before.” She puzzled a moment, made to drink, then recalled that Rowan had not matched her. She waited, puzzling some more. “Fletcher’s good now, but ... but in a strange way.”

  “How so?” Rowan, conceding, drank; a smaller sip than perhaps was polite.

  Chess gave further thought to the question; it rated yet another sip. “He doesn’t look good,” she said at last. “When you watch him walking, you think he’s going to fall over his own feet. I’ve seen him practice, and he just barely holds his own, though he does seem to have a lot of stamina. But the thing is—” She leaned forward, tapping the rug for emphasis. “The thing is, and I have this from Eden who had it from her girl”—Kree, Rowan remembered—“that if you put him out on the circle, that position is damned well secure. If he pulls duty as temporary scout, he’ll
come back with good report, clear, full of things he wasn’t asked to find out. He makes a lot of jokes, but don’t let him fool you. He’s got good eyes, and a sharp mind, and sometimes he just sees things, things other people miss—like your demon egg. He figures out exactly where to go, and what to do, to get results. If he’s all alone and something happens, he can deal with it.” She stopped, blinked. “Mind you, he’ll just barely scrape by. But, see, that’s it, that’s it.” She became excited by her discovery of the fact. “Any other warrior would be good straight off, or fail and die straight off, but Fletcher scrapes by—all the time. It’s like you can always depend on him scraping by, all the time.” She peered up at Rowan, at an angle. “That’s useful. Do you see how useful that is? That’s useful.” She had begun to list to starboard.

  Rowan took her delayed obligatory sip. “That’s useful,” she agreed. With the story ended, her self-enforced concentration began to slip. She felt pleased. She liked Fletcher. Fletcher was useful. “It’s good to be useful.” She decided that this was a deep observation; then decided that it was a statement inane to a positively puerile degree; and then, because it could hardly do more harm, drank again.

  Chess did the same. “I like the boy,” she said. It took a moment for Rowan to realize that she meant not her son, but Fletcher. “He makes me laugh.”

  Rowan sat amazed at the comment. She had absolutely never heard Chess laugh. The idea was worthy of examination. She paused to examine it at length, or at least seemed to: she was certainly doing something with her mind, although she could not quite identify what.

  At some point she heard a sound and decided that neither she nor Chess had made it. She turned her head to look at its source, discovering that the action was very unwise indeed.

  She acquired a tilted, unstable view of Bel, who was lying on her side on her bedroll, watching wryly. She had cleared her throat to gain Rowan’s attention, and now indicated Chess with a lift of her chin.

  Rowan turned back dizzily to find the mertutial fast asleep, head dropped on her chest. “Sleeping sitting up,” Rowan observed. “A true Outskirter to the end.” She blinked. “What do I do with her?”

  “She’ll have to sleep it off.” Bel rose. “Let’s put her in my place. I’ll sleep in her tent.”

  Sometime in the night, Rowan was awakened by the sounds of Kree’s band returning to their beds. “What is that racket?” Kree demanded. Rowan became aware of the sound: a raucous, buzzing rattle. Chess was snoring.

  “Dragon, by the sound of it,” Fletcher said.

  “It’s Chess,” Rowan informed them, or tried to: she discovered that her face was muffled in her blanket. She cleared it and repeated the statement. It came out slurred, which annoyed her.

  “If that’s Chess,” Averryl said, “where’s Bel?” Rowan heard him undress and climb into his bedroll on Chess’s far side.

  She attempted to control her speech more precisely. “She’s sleeping in Chess’s tent. Because Chess is sleeping here tonight.”

  “No Bel?” someone asked, seeming amused by the concept. Four voices from various parts of the tent commented simultaneously: two “Ah”s, one “Oho,” and one half-audible “Ha.”

  Rowan intended to ask what was meant by the comments, but fell asleep before the words reached her mouth.

  She was shocked awake by swooping whoops, cracking cackles, a number of pounding stomps

  Rowan opened her eyes to dimness, her body heavy from the motionless sleep of the drunk. The tent was sweetly warm, her rough blanket comforting. She had no desire to move, and would be satisfied to stay in place all day—if only that impossible din would cease!

  The sounds were joined by laughter and indecipherable comments pitched at a humorous level. Rowan rolled over and rose with difficulty; she felt that her brain consisted of viscous fluid possessed of a slow, independent momentum. She discovered that she was still completely dressed, and, resigned to action, she plodded out into the painful sunshine.

  Outside: a crowd of laughing people, and more watching from nearby tents. Among them, a figure draped in a swirling cloak, turning and flapping with delight. “Oho,” a voice declared, “someone loves me, and loves me true, that’s for sure!” Rowan came closer.

  It was Chess, lively and nimble despite the previous night’s debauch. The cloak she wore was a delight to see, its patches, black and white, worked into a bold diagonal design, flashing before the eyes as she alternately spread and swirled it. It was clearly designed for camp-wear, and not for a warrior while on duty; it was eye-catching, immediately identifiable, from its clear pattern to its ties of bright blue braided wool.

  Rowan found Fletcher nearby. “What’s happening?” Looking up at his height caused her eyeballs to throb.

  He grinned down at her. “Looks like Chess found a courting gift.”

  “But—” It certainly was not intended for Chess. “Can she do that?”

  Fletcher assumed a wide-eyed, innocent expression. “I didn’t see anyone else claim it.” He laughed.

  Chess’s uncharacteristic sociability was explained. She had known, or suspected, that the next gift would be very fine indeed, and that it, too, would be refused. By spending the night in Kree’s tent, she was technically as eligible as the gift’s intended recipient. Rowan grinned wryly at the old woman’s cleverness: Chess had acquired a lovely possession, prevented its likely destruction, and quite probably put an end to the clearly unwelcome petitions of the giver.

  “You look awful.” It was Bel, studying her with amused sympathy. “Thank you so much,” Rowan replied. “Far be it from a steers-woman to deny the truth. I feel exactly as bad as I look.”

  “She needs food,” Fletcher told Bel.

  “And fresh air,” Bel replied to him. “Perhaps a little easy exercise.”

  “They’re looking for people to hunt goblin eggs in the pasture.”

  “That’s perfect.”

  “Actually,” Rowan put in, “I thought of spending the day in bed.” They ignored her. “She slept straight through dinner last night,” Bel said.

  “So she did. I’ll fetch her some breakfast. You walk her around a bit.”

  “To the cessfield and back should do it.”

  “Right.” He loped off. Bel nudged Rowan’s arm and led her away. Rowan, with a wry grin, permitted herself to be ushered.

  As they walked, the steerswoman recalled something. “Bel, that cloak was meant for you.”

  The Outskirter stopped short, her brows went up, her wide eyes grew wider, and she weaved from side to side in thought; a total effect comical enough to make Rowan laugh out loud.

  “How do you know?” Bel asked.

  “By some odd comments in the tent last night, from Kree’s people.”

  “Do you know who left it?”

  Rowan smiled. “I have no idea at all. Have you?”

  “None.” Bel became satisfied; they resumed walking. “It’s just as well that Chess took it, then. I hope it serves her well.”

  27

  “Ask me why I’m following you around,” Fletcher said.

  Four days had passed, and Rowan had already become restless. But the tribe would be in place for at least two weeks, and the steerswoman had no choice but to remain until they moved again.

  On this day, she dealt with her restlessness by wandering among the flock in Fletcher’s company, wading through the still-deep grass between the camp and the inner circle. The late-morning sky was bright, a cool clear crystal above the shifting, rippling red—a phenomenon still rare enough in Rowan’s experience of the Outskirts that she intended to make the most of it.

  She sauntered along in the sunlight, Fletcher beside her, or perhaps she beside him; the lengths of their strides did not match. Sometimes she was ahead, sometimes he.

  She decided to humor him. “Why are you following me around?”

  He paused a moment to apply his knee to the ribs of a browsing goat, which was disinclined to give way. “Well, actually, I’m en
joying it. But the fact is, I’ve been told to.” He grinned down at her and shook a finger. “Call yourself a steerswoman; you’re supposed to notice things. Haven’t you noticed that you’ve had someone beside you every minute today?”

  “No, I haven’t,” she replied, bemused.

  “Now ask me where Bel is.”

  Rowan stopped in her tracks. “Where’s Bel?” Her companion had risen before her. Rowan had not seen her yet that day.

  Fletcher pointed north. “Last night one of the scouts found signs of another tribe. Bel’s gone to talk to them.”

  Rowan looked in the direction indicated: forty goats scattered among the sweeping redgrass, some seen only by the disturbance they made in the rolling pattern. In the distance, a single warrior at position ten.

  Rowan resumed walking, annoyed. “I’d like to have gone with her.”

  Fletcher’s eyes and mouth apologized. “Letting strangers stay among us is one thing. Letting them wander off to talk to a tribe that might be hostile, whenever they want to—that’s dangerous.”

  “But Kammeryn let Bel go.”

  He raised a finger, amused. “But you’re still here.”

  She stopped again, and her jaw dropped. “I’m a hostage?” It seemed impossible, considering the friendship she had begun to share with these people. Then she viewed it again, from the brutal perspective of the Outskirts, and saw that it was entirely sensible.

  “Let’s just say,” Fletcher told her, “that we’re going to take very good care of you, until your friend returns.” He began walking again. Rowan took half again as many steps as his, to catch up.

  “I suppose it’s to reassure the people who are bothered by Kammeryn endlessly extending your stay,” he continued. “But if you really want to talk to the next tribe yourself, you could probably reverse things, next time. Bel could stay here.”