The Steerswoman's Road

by Rosemary Kirstein

There were furious ambushes among the tents, sudden encounters; a force of six enemies made a stand by the fire pit and were coldly and systematically eliminated; wild-eyed mertutials, past warriors all, defended the children’s tent, destroying would-be assassins before any younger fighters had time to assist; and at last the camp was secured.

  Kammeryn took stock. “Who’s still fighting?”

  “Most of Kree’s band is at twelve,” he was told. “They have assistance. Last signal said they can hold.”

  “Good.”

  Another relay spoke. “There are single raiders spotted at four, about five of them. They made off with ten goats. Last report, maybe ten minutes ago.”

  “None since?”

  “No.”

  “And Kester?”

  “No report.”

  Kammeryn was pacing the edge of the cold fire pit. He stopped and scanned faces.

  “Quinnan.”

  “Seyoh?”

  “Go to four.”

  The warrior left, at a run. Kammeryn resumed his pacing, his tall, straight figure striding like an old soldier on guard, his eyes distant as he mentally assembled information. Across the pit, standing quietly by Mander’s tent, Rowan did the same. What’s happening at six? she wondered; and a moment later Kammeryn voiced that question.

  “The band you sent is out of sight, no relay between.”

  “Fletcher.”

  “Seyoh?” Fletcher had been standing in an exhausted slouch, dazed. He came upright instantly, feverishly alert, breathing through his teeth.

  “Go toward six. If they’re near enough, relay. If not, find them, come back with a report. Don’t join the fight, I want information.” Fletcher nodded, one quick jerk. “I’m off.”

  He was not: Jann stepped in front of him.

  “Seyoh, I’d like to do that,” she called, her eyes narrowly watching Fletcher’s face. She did not trust him, or credit the trust her seyoh placed in him. Fletcher stared down at her as if he could not quite recall who she was.

  The matter was trivial; Kammeryn gestured with annoyance. “Go.” Jann departed. The seyoh turned away. “Nine?”

  One warrior had just returned from there. “Secured. Half our people, half strangers.”

  The seyoh nodded to himself, then took a moment to meet the eyes of one of the warriors who had returned with Rowan: the small, muscular man. Kammeryn acknowledged his presence, and the help of his tribe, with another small nod. The man replied in the same fashion.

  A girl, the one child near walkabout age, dashed into camp; she had been pressed into relay duty. “Twelve,” she said. “Twelve is secure. Some of them are coming in.”

  “Have them move to ten.”

  “I can’t, they don’t know the signals.”

  Kammeryn glanced at the stranger again. “Go back to your post,” he told the girl. “When they reach you, send them to me.”

  Kammeryn and Rowan each contemplated their respective images of the tribe’s present defense: the circle was half secure, half uncertain.

  The camp was silent. Kammeryn paced. Presently he asked, “New reports ?”

  There were none. “The children?”

  “Safe,” Chess called.

  “Mertutials ?”

  “We lost some. Most of the rest are helping Mander.”

  “Wounded?”

  Chess grunted. “Plenty. Warriors, mertutials, strangers.”

  The man at Rowan’s side turned at Chess’s words, then caught the seyoh’s eye. He received a gesture of permission, and Chess conducted him to the tent where Mander was tending the wounded.

  In the distance: voices, approaching from position twelve. Their sound was rhythmic.

  “Who knows about the flock on nine-side?”

  Rowan spoke up. “They ran from our fight, toward seven, or maybe six. Except for about twenty, who broke toward nine.”

  He mused. “No one has mentioned them. That’s where the first strike was. We’ll assume that twenty lost.” He paused and looked again at the nearby faces: waiting mertutials and warriors, two relays. His eyes glittered. “Prisoners?” No one answered. “I’ll assume none. If one shows up, tell me instantly.”

  The voices reached the edge of camp. They were singing. Kammeryn turned.

  The song had no words, only a tune, simple, and a rhythm, repetitive: a song to march by.

  Seven warriors entered camp, their swords sheathed. Three led. At left: a blond man, narrow-bodied, with a thin, foxy face. At right: a strong woman of startling height, her hair a short wild cloud of curls, her eyes black and laughing.

  Between them, with one arm around each of their waists, their arms linked behind her shoulders, and half her face gory from a scalp wound: Bel.

  She brought the troop to Kammeryn, where they halted. Bel stood a moment looking up at the seyoh. She grinned. “I think we can count the Face People as out.” She unlinked from her friends and stepped aside. “This is Ella.”

  The tall woman turned to Kammeryn. “Seyoh,” she said, dignity fighting triumph in her eyes.

  “Kammeryn,” he supplied, cautiously. First names only.

  “My people tell me that they found ten goats in the company of some men who definitely didn’t own them. The goats are on their way back. Please let your people know, so they won’t kill mine before they can say Bel’s names.”

  Kammeryn gestured; the relays went to pass the word.

  Ella drew a breath. “What’s your orientation?”

  “You came from twelve.”

  “Right.” She looked about, setting the configuration in her mind, then gestured. “We deployed two bands at your six. No report, but we know there was only one band of Face People there. I’d be damned surprised if it weren’t secure by now. How many did you send there?”

  He was watching her face, speculatively, with great interest. “One band,” he said. “With yours, six is secure.”

  She raised her brows. “Might be some heavy losses. The Face People are a nasty crowd.”

  “I have a runner returning shortly.”

  “Good. We began with two bands at your six, one at eight, one at nine, and one at twelve. One more scattered along your three-side.”

  He became concerned on her tribe’s behalf. “That’s a lot of people to send out.”

  Her face darkened. “We had a grudge. We met that crowd before, and they did us damage. We wanted them dead.”

  Jann arrived, breathing heavily. “Six is secure,” she reported. “The wounded are on their way in. Three of ours, and—” She caught sight of Ella and addressed her. “—and four of yours. And you’ve lost five of yours, I’m sorry to tell you.”

  “And ours?” Kammeryn prompted.

  “None from six.”

  Kammeryn and Ella regarded each other. Kammeryn spoke. “When you return to your tribe,” he said, “tell your seyoh that I am Kammeryn, Murson, Gena.”

  She studied his face. “Thank you.”

  * * *

  Kammeryn took Ella and two of her people to his tent for more discussion. The rest of those who had arrived with her sighted their comrades by Rowan and Fletcher and went to greet them happily.

  Bel approached and paused five feet away from Rowan. The two stood considering each other. Rowan’s relief was too large for laughter, or embraces. She felt she needed something to lean back against.

  Bel tilted her head. “How much of that blood is yours?”

  Rowan looked down at herself. “I have no idea. And yourself?”

  Bel fingered her scalp tentatively. “I should get this stitched. How many did you take down?”

  “I forgot to count.”

  “Good. You should never count. It’ll only make you conceited.” She paused, then grinned. “I took fourteen.”

  And then Rowan could laugh.

  Rowan’s only injuries were a huge bruise on her right forearm, a smaller one on her left, and a number of badly strained muscles arranged in an annoyingly random configuration about her body. Sh
e stood by while Parandys, whose normal occupation was combing wool, spinning, and dyeing, trimmed Bel’s hair with a knife and carefully sewed the wound with fine thread and a thin bone needle. After watching the procedure, Rowan went to Kree’s tent and retrieved from her own gear the little packet of five silver needles. These she bestowed upon Mander, indicating that they were his forever. They were instantly put to use.

  The steerswoman and her companion were set to work, carrying cloths and water, passing implements to Mander and his assistants, and doling out large and small drafts of erby, which served to rapidly numb the senses. Fletcher and Averryl were in and out, supporting or carrying wounded warriors; when the number of arrivals slackened, Rowan looked again and found Averryl working alone, Fletcher absent.

  After a lull, more wounded arrived from position six: Ella’s people.

  One of their number had a thong tied around one forearm, twisted tight with a knife handle. Below the tourniquet, her arm was a chaos of bone and loose muscle, the hand a crushed ruin.

  Two of her uninjured comrades posted themselves at her sides, as Mander waited for his implements to be cleaned and recleaned in boiled water. Rowan, feeling useless and helpless, urged the woman to drink from the cup of erby, which she refilled as soon as it was emptied.

  Mander sat on the ground beside his patient, amiable. “What’s your skill?”

  The warrior replied through pain-clenched teeth. “Killing my enemies.”

  Mander shook his head. “Other than that.” From this moment, she was a mertutial. Mander was asking what her new work would consist of.

  The woman did not reply, so one of her comrades prompted her solicitously. “Goats ..”

  “Herding?”

  “Diseases,” the woman said, and Rowan administered another draft. “Diseases of the goat.”

  Mander was interested. “Ah. Well, now, diseases of the goat have much in common with diseases of humans, did you know that?”

  “I could hardly care less.” She spoke a shade more easily, and her muscles became looser: the alcohol’s effect.

  Mander directed her friends to position the arm on the ground away from her body, and the woman stiffened in anticipation. “Would you like to know how I chose my job?” Mander asked.

  Her eyes were squeezed tight. “I would like you to do your job, and then leave me alone.”

  The healer continued. “It was like this—” He recounted, with great detail, an immense battle the tribe had faced some ten years before, and his own role in it. The tale was well delivered, and Mander depicted himself as a properly valiant warrior. The wounded woman began to relax, showing a certain amount of grudging interest in the drama of the fight. At the culmination of the story, Mander received a wound much like the one he now saw before him.

  “The healer,” he said, handing Rowan one of the silver needles to thread for him, “botched the job. A rot set in, and she had to remove more of the arm two days later. She botched it again, and had to take more. It was an outrage!” He adjusted his position, nimbly using his bare feet to brace the wounded arm, and applied pressure. “You can believe that I cursed her! I cursed her up one side and down the other, down the river and back again. I wish I could remember all the curses I used; I’m sure I’d go down in legend as a true poet.

  “Eventually she shouted back at me, ‘If you think you can do better, do it yourself next time!’” He nodded briefly as Bel arrived with the tools on a cloth and set them down. “I said: ‘Ha! I could do a better job with my teeth!’”

  The warrior threw her head back and laughed out loud, helpless, her body completely slack; the laugh became a sudden scream, which silenced as she fainted.

  Mander completed the rest of the job quickly and efficiently, then spoke quietly to the woman’s friends as he rinsed his hand and dried it on the towel that Bel held for him. “She won’t lose any more of that arm,” he told the warriors. “I stole that old healer’s job, and I’ll keep it until the day I die.” He clapped one of their shoulders in parting. “Because I’m the best.”

  It was full night when Rowan emerged from the infirmary tent. Bel had left sometime before; Rowan had not seen her depart. Rowan had remained at Mander’s side, serving, as others did, as his extra hands, until someone had tapped her on the shoulder and curtly ordered her to get some rest. It was not until she stepped into the night air that she realized that the person who had dismissed her was Kree; that Kree had spoken exactly as she would have spoken to one of her own war band; and that Rowan had accepted the order as completely and instinctively as Kree’s own warriors did.

  The steerswoman wended her way among the tents by memory, only half-aware that she was guiding herself by a clear mental map of the camp, hovering in her exhausted mind. The map led her to Kree’s tent; but her bleary perceptions did not notice the person who was standing outside its entrance, until he spoke. “Rowan?”

  She paused. “Fletcher.” She rubbed tired eyes, as if clearing them would dispel the night-dark itself. Aware that he was present, she now sensed him by hearing: his breathing, the creak of leather, small rustles of fur and cloth, all arranged and configured to the particular height and shape of his long body. He stood by, quietly occupying the air.

  Before she could ask her question, he asked it himself, of her. “Are you all right?”

  She enumerated her small injuries. “And you?”

  He shifted. “A little slice down one side; that’s minor. One of those weasels whacked me on the back. Maybe he cracked a rib; Mander wasn’t sure. Someone stabbed me in the shin, but not deep.” He spoke without gestures, and quietly. “A lot of people are dead.”

  Rowan nodded. “I suppose we won’t know who, until the morning.”

  “There will he more in the morning than there are now.”

  Rowan thought of some under Mander’s care who might not last the night. “Yes. But we gave better than we got, Fletcher.” She remembered him in his blind warrior’s fury, felling an uncountable number of Face People. Then another memory came unbidden: that frozen moment before the onslaught, when Rowan had not known if Fletcher would fight at all. It came to her that it was not fear of death that had held him in that instant, because when he did fight, it was with the wild and utter abandon of a man who knew he would not survive. What thoughts were in his mind as he watched the inescapable assault approaching, Rowan did not know; but at that moment, Fletcher had been faced with two options. He had chosen death as the preferable one.

  But Fletcher always scraped by, Chess had told her. He had scraped by again, this time saving not only his own life, but the lives of many in his tribe. And it was his tribe, his own. He was no mere adopted Inner Lander. He was a warrior.

  Rowan felt pride on his behalf. “You fought well,” she told him. She said no more than that, but the tone of her voice said what her words did not.

  When he replied, it was with a voice of quiet amazement. “After we cleared out that bunch by the fire pit,” he said, “and everything got still, there I was, standing around in a daze. And Averryl, he steps up to me, looks me in the eye and says, ‘You did good,’ and wanders off again.” There was no parody, no humor in his voice. “That’s all. Just: ‘You did good.’”

  Rowan smiled. “Bel is much the same.”

  Fletcher stirred. “Well,” he said, half to himself, “let’s see what else I can do good.” And he strode off through the quiet camp without another word.

  29

  Late the previous night, Bel had been awakened with the word that one of the scouts had discovered signs of another tribe. Before dawn, she had been escorted to the limit of Kammeryn’s defended pastures, then left to continue alone.

  In speaking with the new tribe’s council, her discourse on the wizards, the fallen Guidestar, and her mission were considerably aided by the poem she had composed. Their seyoh was impressed, and although she accepted Bel’s information only as hypothesis, she guaranteed cooperation should the wizards’ threat ever materialize. Th
ey parted on friendly terms.

  But when Bel attempted to return to Kammeryn’s tribe, she found herself approaching the rear of what was obviously an attack formation.

  “I couldn’t see a way to get around them to warn Kammeryn, not in time for it to make much difference,” Bel told Rowan, as they lay on their bedrolls in the darkness. Despite her exhaustion, Rowan was unable to sleep; the battle continued to reenact itself behind her eyes.

  Bel continued. “I went back to the other tribe. I was going to point out that these attackers probably would give them trouble after defeating Kammeryn’s people, and it might be in their best interest to help us out now. But as it turned out, they’d met them before, and suffered fairly badly. They were ready to join forces with us, to get rid of them.”

  “We’re lucky you arrived when you did.”

  “No, you’re not.” Bel turned over onto her stomach and rested her chin on cupped hands. “We could have arrived sooner. But the Face People would have seen us and run. We didn’t want to chase them away, we wanted to kill them. We deployed so that they would be trapped between us and you. And waited until they attacked, so they were in the open, and off-balance.”

  Rowan sighed. “I would have preferred them chased away, if it saved lives.” At last report, there were at least ten dead from Ella’s tribe, and perhaps twenty from Kammeryn’s. Many on both sides were wounded. Others were still missing, status unknown.

  “Chasing them wouldn’t have saved lives. They’d have come back later, when we weren’t prepared. This way was best.”

  Rowan ran the strategy in her mind. “Of course. You’re right.”

  Somewhat later, when her internal reenactment had progressed to the scenes in the infirmary tent, Rowan spoke aloud. “How often does this sort of thing happen?”

  She received no reply; Bel was asleep.

  The tribe lost seventeen people. Among those whom Rowan knew well: Kester, surprised among his flock on nine-side; Mare, of Kree’s band, fallen in the furious battle at position twelve; Elleryn and Bae, of Berrion’s band, which had been covering the outer circle on nine-side; Cherrasso, of Orranyn’s band, who had been positioned at inner ten; and Dee, a mertutial relay who had maintained her post as the Face People struck the camp itself.