The Steerswoman's Road

by Rosemary Kirstein

  “And did it arrive straightaway?” Rowan asked, amused. Bel weaved uncomfortably.

  “Well, no,” Fletcher admitted. “About a week later, really. But I also asked to be the one to find you two.”

  Bel spoke up. “Can your god tell you where you left the tribe?” He laid a hand on his breast. “Just follow your scout.”

  They proceeded, ambling along a grassy ridge; a small brook crossed the land below, lichen-towers crowding its edge. One was so tall that Rowan looked across, instead of down, at it. She found she held it in disdain: she had seen the king of all lichen-towers.

  Presently Fletcher said, “Oh, and one of the tribes at Rendezvous is Ella’s.”

  Bel was delighted. “That’s good!”

  “And another,” he continued, “is Face People.”

  They were four clear, cool, sunlit days traveling to Rendezvous.

  On the night of the second day, Rowan dreamed that Bel stood above her in the darkness, listening to the night. Rowan’s dream-self, aware that she dreamed, wondered if it was a real perception woven into the dream. It reminded her of the last time Bel had stood so, silent in the dark, and the memory struck her awake.

  It was true. Taking up her sword, Rowan rose to stand by her companion’s side and waited. She could see and hear nothing to prompt Bel’s concern.

  Eventually, the Outskirter said, “There’s someone nearby.”

  Rowan moved to where Fletcher was sleeping and nudged his foot with hers. She dimly saw him shift. By Inner Lands reflex, he rolled over and burrowed deeper into his blanket; then Outskirts training assumed command and he was on his feet, his sword glittering starlight.

  Silently, the three moved to stand back-to-back in a triangle.

  Rowan studied her section of the landscape, with all her senses. The redgrass chattered, sending fleeing shadows of dark and greater dark across the view. The only breaks in the dim pattern were placed where Rowan knew, from the previous day’s observations, that natural obstacles stood. No smell of human or animal reached her.

  Presently Fletcher spoke, quiet words falling from his great height. “I think I’ve got him. Bel, you check, you’re better than me.”

  The two traded positions. “At eleven by me,” Bel confirmed.

  “Nothing here,” Fletcher told her from his new position.

  “Nothing,” Rowan added, “but—” She was ashamed to be so distrustful of her own perceptions, but the two warriors were better trained than she.

  Fletcher touched her arm lightly. They traded places. “Nothing,” he confirmed. Then he turned to stand beside Bel; Rowan followed his example. The three stood facing an enemy imperceptible to Rowan; and as they stood so, it came to Rowan how good a thing it was to have these two comrades to stand beside, in the dangerous, hissing darkness.

  They waited long, and nothing changed. “I fight from the left,” Fletcher eventually reminded Bel.

  “Trade with Rowan.”

  They reconfigured. They waited. The wind died, and rose again. They were facing west.

  Rowan risked a quiet question. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes,” and “Yes,” from the warriors.

  She could not help from whispering, “How?”

  “Listen.”

  She listened. The redgrass chattered in dithering waves. She tried to listen to it more closely, tried to hear each and every individual reed as it tapped against its neighbor. And she did hear them, sharper and more clearly than ever she thought she could, each tap like a tiny blow upon her ears. But there was no sound other than that.

  Her heart became a fist, pounding her chest for escape. She waited until the strain of waiting became an agony in her bones. “Listen for what?”

  “For silence.”

  Then she heard it: among the chattering of the grass, one place from which nothing emerged, one small pocket of silence where there should have been sound. She could almost hear, in that absence, the very shape of the person’s body, although that might be illusion; but the shape seemed to her smaller than the average man.

  Fletcher shifted, tense. “No attack?”

  “He knows we’re ready.”

  As Rowan listened, the pocket closed, filling from the edges. “He’s going,” she whispered.

  “He’s gone,” Bel said.

  They slept in shifts. They did not hear the stranger again.

  33

  “Skies above,” the steerswoman said.

  Fletcher beamed with pride. “And there it is,” he confirmed. The three travelers stood with the base of a high ridge to their left, an undulating valley before them, another ridge beyond. Down the valley, up and down the folds in the land and on both sides of a meandering creek, splayed a single mass of gray and brown tents.

  “How many tribes at Rendezvous?”

  “Six,” Fletcher replied. He had told her before; nevertheless, intellectual calculation and immediate perception were two quite different experiences. There were well over a thousand people camped in the valley below. Rowan had never before seen one thousand people gathered together in one place.

  The travelers descended, and as they approached the first outlying tents, Bel reminded Rowan, “You don’t walk through another tribe’s area unless you’ve been invited, or there’s an emergency. There are paths between each tribe.”

  They found one: a broad straight avenue running from the edge of the encampment, sloping downward with the lay of the land. To the right, a scene both familiar and strange to Rowan: everyday camp life, with warriors lounging, conversing, practicing, mertutials bustling and drudging, children at play—but none of them people whom Rowan had ever seen before. She smiled at a pair of twin boys who had stopped a make-believe sword challenge to watch the newcomers pass; when she waved to them, she received a hearty wave from the bolder of the two, a shy one from his brother.

  But along the left side of the wide path stood tents smaller than usual, and more crudely constructed. They were crowded close together with no access between, creating, in effect, a shabby wall guarding the residents from the eyes of passersby. The only sound from that direction was a muffled conversation, two voices speaking quietly in the distance.

  Even the smell was strange. Over the right-hand camp, a familiar miasma composed of goat must, food smells, garbage, and human sweat hung in an almost visible cloud: strong, friendly, welcoming. The quiet camp on the left smelled only of the veldt: a faint scent like sour milk, cinnamon, and dust. The absence of the usual odors disturbed Rowan. It seemed to imply not cleanliness, but a lack of the normal and healthy adjuncts of human existence. It was a smell of poverty.

  She turned to ask a question of Fletcher, but Bel asked it first and provided the answer simultaneously. “Face People?”

  Fletcher nodded, then lifted one finger to covertly indicate the path ahead of them. On the ground, in the center of the avenue, sat a man.

  He was small, with short dark hair. Cloakless, he wore a shabby goatskin tunic, a single garment with a hole for the head, belted around the waist, its hem ending well above the high tops of his boots. His sword was slung on his back, and his arms were wrapped around his drawn-up knees. The arrangement of his limbs left his genitals partially exposed; he was as indifferent to the fact as would be a dog. He simply sat, with his back to the lively camp and his face to the mottled walls of the quiet one, staring, neither blankly nor with hostility, but with infinite patience.

  When the travelers parted to pass around him, he ignored them, gazing ahead stolidly. Rowan and Bel exchanged a disturbed glance over his head. Fletcher, however, remained irrepressible. “Morning,” he called out cheerfully to the fellow in passing.

  The man looked up, his expression unaltered; but a moment before Fletcher’s glance turned away, he nodded, once, in acknowledgment. Then he returned to his study.

  Out of earshot, Rowan asked, “Is he an outcast?”

  Fletcher winced. “You’ll have to ask him yourself; no one else wants to. He showed up abo
ut a week into Rendezvous; sits there for a few hours every day, then vanishes, no one knows where.”

  “Not into the Face People’s camp?” Bel asked.

  “Don’t know.”

  They found Kree’s tent, left their equipment within, and then proceeded to Kammeryn’s tent to inform him of their return. But as they approached, Rowan noticed something lying across the threshold: two cloaks, one of them Kammeryn’s, identifiable by the pattern on its bright woven trim.

  The three stopped short, paused long. “Oops,” Fletcher said eventually. Bel emitted a pleased “Ha!” Rowan blinked twice, then began perusing a mental list of the tribe’s less decrepit female mertutials. Fletcher took charge of the situation and gazing at the sky with ostentatious nonchalance, led the women away. “Lovely weather,” he commented.

  “I didn’t recognize the other cloak,” Bel said quietly. She was suppressing a grin.

  “You wouldn’t ...” He caught sight of Averryl, seated by Berrion’s tent. “Aha! Just the man we were looking for!”

  The warrior was repairing a break in his sword strap, braiding bits of leather between his fingers. “I see Fletcher found you. I thought he might. When you want something found, call for Fletcher. It’s a genuine talent he has.”

  Rowan dropped to the ground, pulling her cloak under her. “Actually,” she said, “Kammeryn is the man we’re looking for, but it seems he’s occupied at present.”

  Leaning forward, Fletcher spoke conspiratorially. “And when did that happen?” He tilted his head in the direction of the seyoh’s tent.

  “While you were gone. Not so surprising, when you think of all the time they’ve been spending together.”

  Rowan could restrain her curiosity no longer. “Who?”

  Averryl exuded pride on his seyoh’s behalf. “Ella.”

  Both women were taken aback. “The same Ella?” Bel asked. “None other. Everyone knew she was being courted by someone. It turned out to be Kammeryn.”

  Rowan pointed out, “He could be her grandfather.”

  Averryl shrugged with the urbane air of one long accustomed to an unusual fact. He pretended to give careful attention to his work. “Actually,” he said, “I believe he’s some kind of cousin about fifty times removed. They’re both of Gena line.”

  Bel had been considering; she reached her conclusion, tilted her head. “It makes sense to me. If Kammeryn courted me, I might think twice, but I wouldn’t take very long to do it.”

  “There’s no problem with her being of another tribe?”

  Averryl shook his head. “We’ll be at Rendezvous for another two weeks or so. It’s enough time for a small romance.”

  “Then courting, and a romance, aren’t necessarily a prelude to a more permanent arrangement?”

  “No,” Bel told her. “The rites are different for marriage. You have to be very certain and very serious. It’s forever.”

  Rowan spent the next two hours plying the Outskirters with questions on the traditions and formal rites surrounding marriage and child rearing. Halfway through, Chess wandered by, listened a moment, commented, “Hmph. I see we’ve got our steerswoman back,” and wandered off again.

  34

  “We had four days of tempest,” Kammeryn told Rowan and Bel after they had described their journey and explained their return. “When the rain slackened, one of our scouts came back in, with an odd report.

  “He had found another tribe of Face People, but pitched in open camp. I sent people to watch it, for two days; then I permitted one of our scouts to be spotted. The Face People responded with a request to meet.”

  He shook his head in thought. “It was the wrong season,” he continued, “and twelve years too soon to Rendezvous. But I thought it might be a good thing, to gather now.” He addressed Bel. “Under normal circumstances, it might take you eight months to deliver your message to four more tribes. But we have six tribes here, right now.”

  “They were all ready to Rendezvous? No one attacked?”

  “I sent scouts to look for Ella’s tribe, thinking that their seyoh, having heard your story, would feel as I did. They joined us. With three tribes together, no one would attack. And when scouts of other tribes sighted us, they could see that we were a genuine Rendezvous. They reported to their seyohs”—he gave a small smile—“and everyone was curious.”

  Rowan smiled to herself; curiosity, she knew, was a powerful force. “What did you tell them, when they came?”

  “That, by the end of Rendezvous, two people would arrive who had seen a fallen Guidestar. And that all the seyohs must hear what they have to say.”

  “I can speak to them all at once,” Bel observed.

  “Yes. When would you like that to be?”

  Bel thought. “Two days from now. In the afternoon. Tonight, we’ll rest. Tomorrow, after dinner, when everyone will be telling poems and tales, I’ll give my poem. The seyohs will have a night and the next day to think about it.”

  With a full day of waiting before Bel was to tell her startling tale to the massed tribes, Rowan found an afternoon’s distraction for herself: she sat beside the fire pit, carving a bit of tanglebrush root with her field knife. Bel leaned against a cushion beside her, eyes closed, apparently half dozing. Rowan had attempted to converse with her, to be sternly told that Bel was adding new stanzas to the poem of her and Rowan’s adventures in the Inner Lands, and that quiet was required. So the two sat silently, companionably, engaged in their separate occupations.

  From one of the avenues of another tribe, Rowan noticed Dane, the eldest child in Kammeryn’s tribe, emerge in the company of a strange boy. Dane caught sight of Rowan, waved, and approached; to forestall any interruptions to Bel’s creativity, Rowan rose and went to meet the two young people.

  “This is Leonie,” Dane introduced the boy. He was dark, and broad of build, some four inches shorter than gangly Dane. He nodded greeting to the steerswoman. “When we leave Rendezvous,” Dane continued, “he’ll be coming with us.”

  “You’re joining the tribe?”

  “No,” the boy replied. “I’ll stay till after walkabout.”

  “There’s no one in his tribe near his age,” Dane explained. “And I’d have to wait three years for Hari. That’s too long.”

  “I see.” Rowan found appalling the prospect of these two children wandering the wildlands alone.

  Dane’s eyes were bright in anticipation. “We’re working out signals. Because he can’t tell me his tribe’s, and I can’t tell him ours. So we’re making up our own.”

  Rowan searched for something to say. “Make the signals good ones,” she told the children, “and learn them well.”

  By evening, Rowan was restless; but Bel declined to observe the evening’s entertainment and remained in Kree’s tent, contemplating her own presentation for the following evening. Rowan brought her dinner. “Why do you need to change your poem?”

  When creating, Bel habitually wore an expression of utter serenity. Her face altered not at all as she replied, “To make it better.”

  “I don’t see how that’s possible,” Rowan admitted honestly.

  Bel began to eat, completely absorbed in her thoughts. Presently she said, mildly, “Go away. Find something to do.”

  The steerswoman smiled to herself and accepted the dismissal. She sought out Fletcher.

  “Aren’t you bored with my company by now?”

  “Not at all,” she assured him.

  He offered his arm in exaggerated Inner Lands courtliness. “Then permit me to be your escort for the evening. Ho, Averryl!” he called to his friend, “I’m squiring the steerswoman tonight.”

  The warrior handed his empty bowl to a waiting mertutial. “What’s ‘squiring’?”

  “Making sure she enjoys herself.”

  Rising, Averryl wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and his hand on a cloth. “Get into another insult duel. That should be fun.” He passed the cloth to the mertutial.

  Fletcher acquired a fan
tastic glower. “I lost the last one. Miserably.”

  “Exactly.”

  The tribes were camped on a slope. Rowan, Fletcher, and Averryl walked down among the paths of Kammeryn’s camp. They ended finally at the tribe’s fire pit, skewed from its usual position. Not far to the right lay another fire, apparently belonging to another tribe, and to the left lay four more, all arranged to form a short arc. There were open-sided cook tents near each fire, each tribe ranging out behind its cook tent in a widening wedge. Rowan instinctively surmised a completion of the arrangement: a single central open area ringed around by fires, with the avenues between tribes radiating like the spokes of a wheel. The steerswoman calculated that it would take twelve tribes to complete the circle.

  Averryl shook his head when Rowan commented. “No, that never happens. There are never twelve tribes near enough to each other to Rendezvous. The most I’ve ever heard of gathered is eight.”

  There was food at each fire pit, and all were apparently welcome to sample. Past the fires was a large flat area, where activities were in progress: dances with spinning sticks flung into the air, and impromptu groups of musicians with bone flutes, wooden clappers of various tones, banjos, and mandolins, the last amazingly constructed from the skulls of goblins.

  They paused to watch a wrestling match, where a pair of muscular women contested, first one pinned to stillness, then both suddenly writhing and twisting, and the other now pinned to stillness. When the match was won, Averryl gave Rowan and Fletcher a sidelong glance, then wandered over to speak to the winner, saying something to her that immediately caused her to laugh out loud with delight.

  Fletcher nudged Rowan; she nudged him back. Linking arms again, they left Averryl behind.

  After dinner, a more formal gathering took place. People arranged themselves about the open area, on all sides, taking advantage of the natural slope. And one by one, each tribe was called upon for a song, or a poem, or a tale.

  Rowan heard of a fierce battle for pasture; of a young warrior who presumed to court her own tribe’s seyoh; of a haunting, where the spirit of an uncast man killed his tribe’s goats, one by one, until his body was found and given proper rites.