The Steerswoman's Road

by Rosemary Kirstein

  They paused for three days just before turning south. Bel had suffered from an attack of the stinging swarmers; she was mildly feverish, too dizzy to walk, and her sight was reduced to a deep red haze. Uncharacteristically, she dithered in frustration at the delay, behavior that Rowan attributed to the illness.

  Rowan, stung only a few times, ignored the sparkling flashes at the edges of her own vision and arranged the rain fly in the most comfortable configuration possible, with redgrass reeds below and tangle-brush roots for uprights. By day she kept a fire burning, and by night buried the coals and shifted the rain fly over the spot, so that the women slept through the chill nights on heated ground.

  The third night, the wind slowly picked up, rising at last to a monotonic, deep-voiced howl. Rowan began to worry about the sturdiness of her arrangements.

  “It looks like a tempest coming up,” Rowan shouted close to Bel’s ear. “I think I need to batten down.”

  “I’ll help.” In the darkness, Bel’s handicap was irrelevant. “No. You stay dry.”

  By touch and memory she found the stakes and guys and tautened them. The wind pressed her cloak tight against her back, rattled its edges violently about her knees, and rain pushed down on her shoulders, suddenly hard, like hands urging her to sit. By shuddering lightning she saw the camp, in a series of colorless sketches: the fly white with reflecting water; the redgrass lying down, combed to the north and battered horizontal; the rain-dark stone where Rowan had sat in the gray afternoon, tending the fire.

  Then blackness returned. The wind paused, veered slightly, backed again, paused again; and an instant before it violently veered once more, Rowan, with a sailor’s instinct, turned and made a wild clutch at the open side of the fly.

  The wind filled the shelter, belling the cloth like a sail; guys snapped, the uprights upended, one of them flying up to graze Rowan’s face. She threw herself to the ground on top of the fly’s free edge, trying to pin it down.

  Bel sat up, began struggling against the cloth. “Stay put!” Rowan shouted. “I’ve got it!” The raindrops grew heavier, fell with more force.

  Another flicker of lightning helped her find the broken, whipping guy lines. She grabbed at one and caught it as the thunder broke; the wind caught her cloak and whipped it over her head, where it streamed before her, booming about her ears. The raindrops were hard on her hack, then harder, then became stinging, sizzling hail.

  She ducked into the shelter, dragging the cloak in a tangle about her; Bel’s hands found and removed the cloak. Rowan held down the tarp corner, forcing it to the ground with difficulty against the wind, as hail rattled on her head through the cloth. She finally solved the problem of securing the corner by pulling it under her and sitting on it.

  She took a moment to catch her breath. The tarp was pressed down, propped only by the women’s heads. The heat from the ground beat upward; Rowan felt as if she was breathing steam.

  Bel spoke; her voice was buried in tumbling rolls of thunder. The cloak was between the women. Rowan groped at it, to arrange it. Its fur was soaking wet, crusted with tiny pellets that melted between her fingers. “Hail,” she told Bel inanely. The Outskirter shifted, and a puff of cool air told Rowan that Bel had made an opening at the fly edge for ventilation.

  Bel found Rowan’s hand and deposited something in it, smooth, round, and so cold they were dry: three hailstones, each half an inch in diameter.

  Rowan rattled them in her hand as their fellows rattled down on her head, only mildly cushioned by the tarp. She shouted over the racket of ice and thunder. “Rendezvous weather?”

  Bel had doubled the cloak and was pulling it over their heads for more protection. It muffled the sound as well, and she replied into the relative quiet, “Nothing but.”

  The violence of the tempest had drawn the damp from the air completely, as often happened. Scudding clouds decorated the morning, and the sun rose yellowly before tucking itself behind a retreating cloud bank.

  Rowan and Bel had spent the night wet: with no props for the rain fly but their bodies, condensation had soaked them wherever they had been in contact with the cloth. Their spare clothing was still damp from previous days; they spread everything in the sun to dry, and spent the morning huddled together under Rowan’s cloak, the last heat of the buried coals rising against their bodies.

  “How is your vision? Can you see?”

  Bel peered about. “Well enough. No, it’s getting darker.”

  “The sun went behind a cloud again.”

  “Then I’m all right.”

  There was a silence, which Rowan spent calculating. “The weather has been strange for over a month. Does that really indicate Rendezvous?”

  Bel shrugged. “According to the songs and poems, yes.” She sang a verse of a song describing a courting during Rendezvous; in the space of twelve lines, the weather was cold, warm, clear, stormy, hailing.

  “That sounds like what we’ve been having.”

  “But now the weather is out of sequence with the years. It’s odd.”

  Rowan shook her head in confusion. “Not to me. I don’t see why it should be in sequence to begin with. What can be special about twenty years?”

  “I don’t know.” Bel made a sound of feral amusement. “It will be interesting if some people think it’s time to Rendezvous, and some don’t. One tribe will set up an open camp, and another will attack it. The first will think that truce has been violated, and go for vengeance.” Her amusement vanished. “It will make my job harder.”

  With Bel recovered, they left the lowlands behind, and the country began, almost imperceptibly, to climb. Clouds returned by night and remained, and a heavy fog appeared and disappeared intermittently, but the rain did not return.

  The fifth night after the tempest, Rowan rose from sleep and stood in the darkness, with shifting clouds above opening and closing, concealing and revealing small starry sweeps.

  Bel stirred on her bedroll. “What’s the matter?”

  “Wait.” Rowan followed a particular gap as it ghosted across the sky: high above, the Swan. Then the opening sank east, to show the Hero, with one bright untwinkling star at his side, and Rowan took mental bearings from the Eastern Guidestar, her first sighting of it in many days.

  “We’ve made very good time, considering the weather,” she mused. “But where’s the river?”

  “The river?” Rowan heard Bel sit up.

  The steerswoman nodded, then remembered that her friend could not see the motion in the darkness. “Yes. We should be only a few miles from it. We should be able to see its lichen-towers by now.”

  “Perhaps it doesn’t have any.”

  Rowan nodded again, not in assent, but in thought. Above, the Guidestar vanished as the clouds closed in and opened elsewhere, more southerly. “The land isn’t used to this much rain; it’s normally dry. If there were a river anywhere near, the lichen-towers would be hungry for the water.”

  Bel was beside Rowan, scanning the sky as if she could read it as well as the steerswoman. “Then your map is wrong? The part you copied from the wizards? Or the river has shifted since they made the map?”

  Rowan watched the skies with gaze narrowed in thought. “One of those reasons, perhaps ...”

  The women returned to their beds, and Rowan spent the night without sleeping; she brooded, and reluctantly began to recalculate, assuming a greater and greater eastern shift in the location of her final destination.

  There was water, but transient water, little runoffs and rivulets caused by the overabundance of rain. Blackgrass thrived in standing pools, redgrass drooping and drowning around it. The women sloshed and slipped up the land toward a bare rocky field ahead.

  They clambered among head-high boulders for more than an hour, then took a moment to rest among them. Rowan suppressed a desire to pull out her map and consult it yet again; it would serve no purpose. She sat in silence and internally berated herself at length: for having so untrustworthy a memory of the wizards’
original map; for having waited so long before attempting to reconstruct it; and for what must certainly be a general and inexcusable slackness in her application of Steerswomen’s techniques.

  She called her complaint to a halt. She was neither slack nor forgetful. Circumstances had been beyond her control. Self-derision was a useless exercise.

  She sighed and began to address Bel; but the Outskirter’s expression stopped her.

  Bel was gazing into the distance between the boulders in mild puzzlement. Then her face suddenly cleared, and she emitted a delighted “Ha!” and sprang to her feet.

  “What?”

  Bel slipped out of her pack and clambered atop an uneven boulder, motioning to Rowan. “I’ve found your river!”

  Up beside Bel, Rowan looked out where the Outskirter indicated. “Where is it?” The jumble of boulders ended unevenly some thirty feet from where the women stood. Beyond was a rounded, featureless stretch of bare gray rock perhaps a hundred and fifty feet wide, which stopped abruptly, ending with nothing but air.

  Rowan laughed. “It’s a cliff! We’re on top of it!” The river was near, but it was down. She saw another cliff facing her across the open, misty distance, a smooth gray-faced bluff. “It’s two cliffs.” Then, she said dubiously, “It’s a ravine ...”

  Bel’s pleasure had faded to suspicion. “That’s a wide ravine.”

  “Let’s have a look.” They slid off their perch and threaded their way among the boulders toward the flat area beyond.

  An instant before their feet touched it, both women stopped and stepped back, almost simultaneously. They exchanged puzzled glances, and Bel stooped to reach out and test the surface ahead. She ran her hand across it, then suddenly muttered a curse, drew her sword, and struck down.

  There was a crunch, a crackling, and a faint, sweet odor, as the sword broke through, leaving a deep and narrow slash. Inside: white pulp, black spines. Bel stood, her sword dripping a faintly bluish fluid.

  Rowan’s mouth twisted. “And there’s our lichen-tower.”

  Bel nodded, disgruntled, and pointed to where the gray ended and the air began. “That’s not the cliff.” She pointed at the jumbled rocks around their feet. “This is the cliff. This lichen-tower has grown up along its side, all the way to the top.”

  “Yes.” Rowan studied the surface with vast distaste. Any person foolish enough to attempt to cross it would crash through, to be impaled below on thousands of the vicious internal spines. “We’ll have to go around this. It can’t be everywhere.” She looked across the gap to the far bluff. It was over a mile away. “It’s on the other side, as well.” She looked around: standing boulders behind and around, the lichen-tower and open air before. “We need a better vantage. We can’t see from here.” Her eyes narrowed. “We have to get closer to the edge.”

  Bel grunted, annoyed. “This is the edge.”

  They scouted, tracing the true cliff, searching for a place where the rocks were not extended by gray growth. For more than an hour they paced, rounding crags recognized only by logic, disguised by the lichen-towers’ surface. They found no free edge, and always a bluff stood across the wide gap; first one, then another, facing them, offering them a mirror of their own bland geography.

  Rowan needed to stand at an edge, look down, look out. She could not see the lay of the land, could not determine where they must go.

  They found one place where a sharp, rocky crag rose above the stone field, higher than the lichen-towers. Rowan shed her cloak, kicked out of her boots, and prepared to climb it.

  Bel said, “Listen.”

  Silence.

  “If the river were dry, the towers couldn’t live.” There was no sound of rushing water.

  “It can’t be dry, with all the rain we’ve had,” Rowan said. “Perhaps they overgrew it completely?”

  Bel shook her head, uncertain.

  Rowan clambered up the rear of the crag, away from the cliff’s edge and the treacherous surface of the lichen-tower. Bel watched from below, dubiously.

  Presently she called up. “What do you see?”

  Rowan pulled her attention from her handholds and looked.

  It was a world of smooth gray, pale mist, white sky. Below: the bulge of the lichen-tower. Left and right: more of the same. Across the gulf of air: more, shoulder-to-shoulder with one another, crowding.

  Up the wavering ravine, the winding, branching course of the unseen river was marked only by gaps between undulating walls of featureless gray. Rank after rank, until mist obscured sight, where barely seen shapes hinted at an endless complexity of mounds, curves, shapes .

  There was no change, no end in sight. Rowan crouched, stupidly gape-mouthed, disbelieving. She pulled herself farther out, nearer the edge of the crag.

  Downstream: the identical view.

  “Can you see the river?”

  Rowan was beyond speech. She looked straight down.

  The pale sunlight lit the misty depths, growing whiter as it fell deeper. She saw somewhere below a tiny flash of silver and squinted, blinking, trying to discriminate one faint shade from another. There did seem to be a thin, wavering line below, barely discernible, but it couldn’t be the water: to feed so many lichen-towers, and such tall ones, would require a very great river indeed.

  Then she understood. It was a great river—and it was very far away.

  “Gods below,” she breathed. “It’s over two miles straight down.” Bel could not hear her. “Rowan! Are you all right?”

  The steerswoman pulled her gaze from the chasm. Bel was looking up at her, short hair falling back from her face, dark eyes worried.

  Rowan reassured her. “Yes,” she called, and gave a helpless laugh. “And I can see the river.”

  She descended and stood leaning against the base of the crag, breathless from exertion or from the impossible scene, she could not tell which. Bel watched her, waiting.

  “It’s two miles down, at the least,” Rowan said when she recovered. “And over a mile to the other side. There are lichen-towers the whole length of the river, all the way up the cliffs. There’s no way down, and no way up if we make it to the floor of this—I don’t know what to call it—ravine, chasm.” She shook her head again.

  Bel thought. “None of the cliffs are bare rock?”

  “None that I could see. And I could see far ...”

  Both were silent.

  “We’ll have to go around it,” Bel said.

  “Yes.”

  “North, or south?”

  Rowan called her map to mind, and now she trusted it. “The river must run to the sea eventually, but I have no idea how far that might be. It ran to the edge of the wizards’ map. And it may be even deeper farther south.” Rivers sometimes cut deep beds for themselves as they flowed, over the years; but there was nothing like this known anywhere in the Inner Lands. “This must he the oldest river in the world.”

  Bel was not impressed. “North, then.”

  “North. We’ll have to retrace our steps until we clear this.” So much travel, wasted.

  Bel leaned against a boulder, crossed her arms, and gave a wry half-smile. “Kammeryn’s tribe will have gone east since we left them.”

  “Yes.” In the midst of the eerie wilderness, Rowan felt amazement at the idea: that there were dear friends somewhere nearby, familiarity, a place to go. “If we travel due north, we can meet them again.” And she wanted to, very much. “We’ll stay with them until they’ve passed by”—she came back to her surroundings again and gestured—“all this. Then we can go south.”

  “It might have been worse. We might have had no one to meet, no way to find more supplies. And no one looking for us.” Bel’s smile became genuine. “It’ll feel like going home.” She straightened, clapped Rowan’s shoulder. “Come on.”

  32

  Eight notes of a jolly tune: an Inner Lands drinking song, whistled melodiously above the rattle of the redgrass. Rowan stopped short and turned around.

  Fletcher stood be
hind, bouncing on his toes. “Wondered when you were going to notice me.”

  Rowan laughed out loud. “Skies above, it’s good to see you!” Spontaneously, she threw her arms around his waist and gave him a bear hug, its momentum considerably augmented by the weight of her pack. Taken aback, he stumbled a bit.

  Bel watched sidelong. “He’s been walking behind us for an hour.” Fletcher disengaged himself and sent Bel a look of disappointment. “And here I thought my shiftiness was so improved.”

  “Oh, it is. I didn’t notice you until you were as near as a kilometer.”

  “Well, that’s better. Time was, you’d have known I was here the day before I arrived.” He assumed an air of careful dignity and gave Bel a comradely clap on the shoulder, as formal greeting.

  She responded with a poke in the ribs, which he attempted to dodge. “Where’s the tribe?”

  “Oof. Not where you’d think, which is why I’m here. Kammeryn’s been sending scouts to the places we would have been. We keep moving, so there’ll always be someone where you’d expect.”

  “You’re a scout now?” Bel was frankly dubious.

  “And thank you for your confidence. No, not really. But we’re short, what with Maud gone, and Zo getting headaches. We’re filling in with volunteers. That’s me: volunteer, and I hope you appreciate it.”

  “We do,” Rowan assured him. “Why did the tribe change route?” She considered possible reasons: land too wet to support redgrass; land too dry to provide enough drinking water; troops of goblins; demons; enemies.

  “For the most pleasant of reasons.” He spread his arms. “Ladies, to everyone’s delight and amazement, it’s Rendezvous.”

  Both women looked at the sky; it was clear, blue, and had been for days.

  He held up his hands. “I know. Don’t ask me. We came across an open camp in the midst of a tempest. The seyohs consulted, and decided that it was time. Another tribe joined us. Then another. Then it started to hail. The next day the weather cleared, and it’s been like this since.” He looked abashed. “Perhaps it’s my fault. I prayed for a little sunshine.”