The Steerswoman's Road

by Rosemary Kirstein

  He shook his head in apology. “I do not know. It was before my time, before my father’s.”

  Rowan nodded abstractedly; she was calculating. “And how old are you?”

  “I am twenty-two years old.”

  She broke from her thoughts to stare at him: she had assumed him twice that age. “I see.” And before his father’s time, as well ... “How old was your father when you were born?”

  “He was thirteen years old.”

  Thirty-five years. “And how long ago did the Face People last take part in a Rendezvous?”

  “Long ago. Near to half a hundred years.”

  “Forty-eight years?” The Rendezvous immediately previous to the falling of the secret Guidestar.

  “That long.”

  “It was the wizards doing it,” Bel announced, then made an inarticulate sound: half a laugh, half a curse. “I come back to the Outskirts to rally my people against a coming threat—”

  “—and the threat has been here all along,” the steerswoman finished.

  Averryl looked from one woman to the other, then to his friend

  Fletcher, who sat deep in thought. “The heat on the Face?” Averryl took a moment to consider, a process made difficult by alcohol. “But it stopped. That’s good. The threat is over.”

  Bel struck the carpet with her fist, an action of helpless fury; only Efraim did not jump at the suddenness. “The wizards reached out from the Inner Lands,” Bel declared, “out of their fortresses, and hurt my people. They sent their magic here. They can do it again.”

  “If what you call Rendezvous weather invariably follows the heat on the Face,” Rowan said quietly, “it is being done again.”

  Bel turned a warrior’s gaze to her. “Yes.”

  Efraim was puzzled. “Magic? Wizards?”

  “Yes,” Rowan said.

  “Wizards are stories, they are fantasies. They do not exist.”

  Bel turned to him. “They’re real. They hurt your people, they destroyed your pastures. They did it for centuries.”

  “But how can this be?”

  Rowan shook her head. “I wish I knew.” Only the sun and fire could emit heat to any great distance. “Efraim,” she said, knitting her brows in thought, “was there any strange light visible when the heat arrived?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Light. Heat must have a cause, a source. Did anything glow, like a coal?”

  “You confuse me.”

  “It might be mentioned, in a tale, a legend. Did the sun become brighter?” Could the sun grow brighter in one part of the world only? How immense a magical spell could this one be?

  “No one stayed to see.”

  Of all the Guidestars, it was the Eastern that hung most directly over the Face. “Did the Eastern Guidestar become brighter?”

  “Who can say? It happened long ago.”

  “Rowan,” Bel put in, “if a Guidestar got brighter, everyone would see it. You’d see it in the Inner Lands.”

  “Perhaps ...” Armies sometimes constructed beacons, shielded on all sides, except for the direction of the signal. But such a beam would spread, over enough distance. The Guidestars stood more than twenty thousand miles above the world. The light would be seen.

  “It would be in the songs and legends of my own tribe, as well,” Bel said.

  “True.” Sourceless heat: an impossibility. And the only source of impossible events: magic.

  Rendezvous weather, then, followed the killing heat. The heat was caused by some wizard—or rather, a series of wizards across the centuries—in a twenty-year repeating cycle. A Guidestar fell, and the cycle ceased. The events were connected.

  “The possibilities are two ...” Rowan began, and her thoughts outpaced her words.

  Either the fallen Guidestar’s absence rendered the heat spell inoperable; or the event that caused the Guidestar to fall also caused the cycle to cease.

  But Rendezvous weather had returned, or seemed to have, although out of pattern, so that the spell to cause heat still functioned, and was in use. Thus, it was not the Guidestar’s falling that interrupted the cycle; rather, the falling and the cessation of the cycle had shared the same cause.

  But what cause?

  She had insufficient information. She was left with the same two possibilities she had begun with: either the causative event could not be prevented, or was initiated intentionally. It still came down to Slado. “Either he did it,” she said without preamble, “or he did not stop it.”

  Efraim had been observing her lost in her thoughts, and now leaned forward into a dusty shaft of fading light from one of the sky flaps. “Did you have a vision? Are the gods speaking to you?”

  “Yes,” she said, “and no.” She looked at him: strange, eager, simple. How much he understood, she did not know.

  She attempted a smile of reassurance, forced herself to speak more lightly, and prompted him to join her in a drink. “A vision of a sort,” she said. “Myself, simply trying to imagine how these events came about. As for the gods ...” She attempted to trade a wry glance with Fletcher, who was looking aside and blinking over and over, as if trying to marshal alcoholic thoughts into some semblance of order. “As for the gods, I believe I’ll leave them to people like Fletcher.”

  Efraim took her statement literally and turned to Fletcher in amazement. “The gods speak to you? Are you a seer?”

  Fletcher abandoned attempts at cognition. “Seer, ha!” he said, catching Bel’s eye, then draining his cup with a tipsy flourish even looser of elbow than was his habit. “I see things, that’s for sure. As for my god speaking, well, mostly I speak to him. I often wonder how interested he really is.” He took a moment to be puzzled by the question, during which pause Bel took her matching sip; then Averryl and Rowan drank, and the cups became empty. Averryl refilled them from the dregs of the jugs, moving with the careful overprecision of the deeply inebriated.

  “The gods speak back,” Efraim asserted. His voice had acquired a muzzy slur. “You must know how to listen. What do you listen to, when you listen?”

  Fletcher seemed to have no good answer. “The air,” he said vaguely.

  Efraim took a deep breath, as if to steady uncertain internal processes. “The air is good to listen to. You must listen to the ground, as well. And the grass.” Unanimously, everyone present paused, listening.

  The wind across the sky flaps hummed two deep tones, rising and falling in tandem. Outside, the redgrass rattled, tapped, hissed. In her months in the Outskirts, Rowan had forgotten that the redgrass sounded like rain. Now it became rain again: the Outskirts themselves, daring to tell a lie to a steerswoman. False information, covering secrets.

  Rowan shivered. “Do you believe that you know what your gods are saying?” The voice of the veldt grew perceptibly louder. Bel’s eyes narrowed. “They’re saying ‘Watch out.’”

  Averryl listened with tilted head. “They’re saying, ‘We will destroy you.’” His drunken motions had steadied, and he sat balanced, intent, as if attending to the sounds of distant battle.

  Efraim said, “‘Intruders. We hate you. You will never defeat us.’” He spoke quietly, heavily, as though in a trance, or half-asleep.

  Rowan found her gaze locked with Fletcher’s. “All in all,” he told her sincerely, “I prefer my way of looking at it.” They drank; the others did the same; the cups were empty once more. Fletcher leaned forward carefully and tapped one jug with a fingernail. It clinked hollowly. “Gone,” he said. “Who wants more?” He blinked. “Please, nobody say, ‘Me.’”

  No one did. Averryl leaned back and stretched out his legs, preparatory to rising, then paused, perhaps thinking better of it. Bel sat brooding; then her glance fell on the Face Person. She sighed once, rose easily, and walked over to him.

  Efraim had not moved, his lids drooping over unfocused eyes. Bel prodded his shoulder, and he brought his attention to her as if it were a weighty object, requiring great effort to raise. “Where are you sleep
ing tonight?” she asked him.

  “On the veldt.”

  Bel’s mouth twisted. “You can’t sleep on the veldt in this state.”

  “I am very happy,” he confirmed. But to contradict his words, a single tear rolled down from his left eye, to pause and remain unnoticed at the edge of his mouth. He was happy, because the erby and the company had permitted him to forget his solitude; but within, he remained aware that he was alone, tribeless, without family or comrades, and with his gods against him.

  “A flesh termite will bite you as soon as the sun comes up,” Bel said. “A harvester will drag you away in the night.” This impossible scenario caused Efraim abruptly to bark his dog’s laugh again. “Come on,” Bel told him. “Let’s find Kammeryn. I think he’ll permit you to stay with our tribe tonight.”

  “Perhaps Mander has room in his tent,” Rowan suggested.

  Bel helped the Face Person to his feet. “That’s a good idea. This fellow is going to feel bad in the morning. It’ll be nice for him to have a healer right there.”

  Fletcher stirred himself. “When you wake up,” he told Efraim, “please remember that we need Mander. So don’t kill him, out of reflex.” He blinked. “No matter how hungry you are.”

  “We’ll see you get breakfast,” Averryl added.

  When the two had left, Rowan took a deep breath and climbed to her feet. She found to her surprise that she felt merely dizzy; the erby had had a considerably milder effect on her this time. She wondered if she had become acclimatized, then looked at her friends.

  Fletcher seemed about to fall asleep where he sat. Averryl was studying his bedroll across the tent, fixedly, as if contriving a mathematical solution to the problem of getting himself from his seat to his bed. Neither moved.

  “Come on, you two. The sun’s gone down. Time to sleep.” She took Fletcher’s hand, attempted to pull him to his feet. In this she was frustrated: he offered neither resistance nor cooperation, but permitted her to pull his arm loosely into the air over his head, providing her no leverage.

  Ignoring her completely, he addressed Averryl. “I feel sorry for that fellow.”

  Averryl abandoned his deliberations and turned his head slowly, speaking definitely. “He should join our tribe.”

  Rowan dropped Fletcher’s arm. “Ours?”

  Averryl brought his gaze up to hers. “Yes.” He knit his brows. “He must be a good fighter, to have survived to now. We lost a lot of people. We don’t have enough children to replace them.”

  “We lost a lot of people to his people,” Rowan said. “Very likely he killed some himself. Mare,” she said, Averryl’s own comrade in Kree’s band; “Kester,” who had been mildly, harmlessly tending his flock; “or Maud.” The unknown scout had come to symbolize to Rowan all Outskirters fallen in battle.

  Averryl’s expression did not change as he nodded. “In the service of his tribe,” he confirmed. “If our tribe was his, we’d have that service from him.”

  “He’d have to change his diet,” Fletcher pronounced blearily.

  Averryl shifted attention back to him. “Then he’ll change. If a man changes, I don’t hold against him the things he did before the change.”

  Weaving a bit, Fletcher laid one hand against his own breast, over the Christer cross that lay there. “And they say we’re kind.”

  Averryl eventually solved the problem of reaching his bedroll by approaching it on hands and knees. Once he had arrived, reflex and habit took over, and he undressed himself easily, although he closed his eyes to do it.

  Fletcher presented greater difficulty. Rowan managed to half hoist him to his feet, where he was in immediate danger of falling. They stood so, unsteady, she behind with her arms around his waist. He looked about, unable to figure where she had gone, and found her by raising one arm and spying her beneath it. “You,” she told him, “are very drunk.”

  “And you’re not.”

  “No.” She shifted her grip. “Take a step.”

  He straightened, then shifted one leg heavily. “And you’re not,” he repeated.

  “That’s right,” she confirmed; then she stopped, and introspected.

  She was slightly dizzy; her arms and legs felt heavy; there was a faint blue haze around the dimming sky flaps; and that was all. “Why aren’t I drunk?”

  Fletcher spoke with difficulty. “The second pair of jugs,” he said, and thought, and continued, “and the third, had”—he winked; the expression, unfortunately, remained on his face as if frozen—“a lot of water in them.”

  She stared at him a moment. “Bel and I missed the first jugs entirely.”

  “Right.” He nodded, and his features released themselves.

  It became too difficult to hold him up. She pushed from behind, and he managed a pair of long staggering steps that brought him near enough to his bedroll for her to turn him about and permit him to fall to a seat. He rocked in place.

  She brought her face close to his, to gain his attention. “Why was the erby watered?”

  He spoke seriously. “Efraim ... told you things. Maybe he wouldn’t have, sober. Got him drunk. You were hearing things. Needed your brain. Couldn’t be drunk.”

  With the first jugs at full strength, the Face Person had become comfortable and relatively talkative; after that, the reduced amount of liquor in the following pairs was sufficient to send him into inebriation. But Rowan and Bel, drinking only the weakened liquor, had been able to keep their wits about them. Fletcher had planned this.

  She shook her head in reluctant admiration. “I would never have thought of such a thing.”

  “Of course not.” He assumed a sloppily serious expression. “You’re not devious. You’re honest. I like that.” Then he beamed with pride. “I’m devious.”

  Rowan began her preparations for sleep; but halfway through, she noticed that Fletcher was still sitting, weaving in place, brows knit over some deep thought that absorbed him completely.

  “Do you need some help?” she asked him, and received no reply. She went to him and sat on her knees beside him.

  He took a moment to notice her. His puzzled expression cleared, and he spoke as if pleased by his own reasoning. “I think,” he said with careful clarity, “that he did it. On purpose.”

  “Who did what?”

  “Slado. The Guidestar. Knocked it down.”

  One of her possibilities; and if wizards had once had the power to set the Guidestars in place originally, then Slado certainly had the power to bring it down. “What makes you so certain?”

  “Hiding it. Not just from the folk. From the wizards.”

  “He might hide the fact for any number of reasons.” She steadied his weaving form by one shoulder and began untying his vest. “He’s the master wizard. If he’s losing his power, he might not want it known.”

  “Maybe. But—” He paused to watch her hands working as if it were an action entirely new to him, and interesting. “But,” he continued, “if something was making it, the Guidestar, fall down, and he wanted it to stay up ...” It was too long a sentence for his inebriated mind. “Can’t think.” He put his hands on either side of his head, long fingers spread like spider legs. “Grinding like a mill in there. A few stones in the works. Noisy.”

  “Don’t try to think,” she advised him, and moved behind to pull off his vest. “Think in the morning.” She pulled him down on his bedroll; he fell back in a spread-armed flop.

  “Help,” he said to the ceiling.

  She had begun on his bootlaces, and now stopped. “What?”

  “Slado. He’d ask for help.”

  She returned to her work. “Not necessarily.” But it would have been the wisest course: if the loss of a Guidestar had far-reaching, negative results, as Corvus himself had speculated, then, for the good of all, Slado would ask the other wizards’ assistance to prevent that event.

  But Slado, she knew, was not concerned with the good of all. And so he kept his secrets.

  The steerswoman had new fac
ts, but facts only. She could not find, in that weave of facts, the one thread that would lead her to the reason why. Nevertheless, she tried, as the blue erby-hazed shadows faded toward darkness.

  She came back to her surroundings to find herself sitting on her heels, Fletcher’s boot still in her hand. She set it down and turned her attention to the other.

  She had assumed him asleep; at the tug on his foot, he revived. He pointed one arm straight up and declared solemnly, “No fun tonight, Rowan!”

  She dropped the foot to laugh. “I should hope not! We have company!”

  Fletcher looked to his right and sighted Averryl, his arms crossed, composed for sleep. “Still here?”

  “Still here,” Averryl said.

  “Lewd, s’what you are. Well, stay. Nothing’s going to happen.”

  “Except you two talking all night. Shut up, or I’ll beat you senseless. In the morning.” He turned over.

  “Can’t talk,” Fletcher complained as Rowan pulled up his blanket, “and can’t cuddle. Rowan, I’m good for nothing.”

  “You are,” she said, and kissed the end of his pointed nose, “good for more than you know.”

  39

  “Before you speak,” the steerswoman announced to the assembled seyohs, “before you give your decisions, we have new information for you to consider.”

  The moderator’s unfocused eyes flickered in her face. “Tell us.”

  “Before I tell, I need to ask.” She addressed the seyoh of the Face People. “Tell me,” she said; then she remembered that the chairperson could not see to whom Rowan spoke. “I ask the Face Person, tell me about the heat that used to come before Rendezvous.”

  He had been toying with his braid. He stopped and gazed at Rowan, stone eyes in a wooden face. “How do you know of this?”

  She took the most literal interpretation of his words possible. “By asking, and by being answered.” She did not know if the Face People’s habitual secrecy forbade Efraim to speak as freely with her as he had done. If asked directly, she must provide his name; but she would need to be asked directly. “In past times, when you left the Face and