The Steerswoman's Road
Page 73
The mertutials whom Chess had called over stood by, weaving, bleary-eyed. Chess’s face lost all expression. “The people can’t stand digging like that,” she told Rowan. “They’ve been walking for three days. They’re at the end of their strength.”
“I know.”
Chess chewed her lip. “I’ll divide the tribe, and assign each group to the tent it’ll be using. They’ll dig at the best pace they can manage, for as long as they can. Erect the roofs at sunset.”
“That sounds like the best we can do.”
Chess jerked her head at those waiting. “Come on.”
Rowan watched them depart, then scanned the skies above, blinking blurred eyes. The sky was decorated with small clouds slowly shifting east. The blue between them was as cool and pure as a jewel.
She turned back to Fletcher. “Other than wind, what else?”
He had been watching intently; now he moved his hands in a vague gesture. “Rain, hail; maybe even snow, I don’t know.”
She knit her brows, thinking; her mind seemed not slow but vacant, airy and empty. Information entered it, to be used and then to vanish into some underground chamber. Ideas appeared seemingly from nowhere. “Hot air expands,” she said. Sealed, heated bottles burst. “Why would the wind move toward the heated area?”
“Don’t know.” And he looked up at her, plaintive, helpless.
Directly behind him, silent throughout the whole conversation, sat Jann.
The tents were down, with groups of people gathered about each of the previous locations. At each site, a handful of people were digging, with knives, swords, their hands. Others watched. More slept.
She found Chess sitting beside a group of diggers. Kammeryn was nearby, asleep or unconscious, Rowan could not tell. His aide dozed close by. “Assign me to the same tent you put Fletcher in,” the steers-woman said to Chess.
The old woman pointed to the ground. “Right here. And we’re in with you.” She spotted movement off at the edge of the camp. “Ha. The inner circles are coming in.”
An old man digging stopped, gaping up at her. “The inner circles left position ?”
“At my order. You don’t like it? Do you want to take over? Do you think anyone will listen to you?”
“But—”
Chess heaved herself to her feet. “The inner circles are coming in,” she announced, and people stopped to listen. “And the outer, and the scouts. Everybody’s coming in. When this wind hits, any tribe nearby will be too busy to think about attacking us.” And she sat down.
When the people returned to their work, she spoke to Rowan quietly. “There’s another tribe spotted, just southeast of us. Your friend Bel went to warn them.”
Bel’s last reported position was some eighteen miles away. “But she doesn’t know what to warn them of.”
“Rendezvous weather. We knew that. Just didn’t know how bad it would be.”
48
Rattling, tapping, hissing—and Rowan thought: The rain has started.
She tried to turn over and rise; something seemed to press down on her, heavily. She struggled, and gasped at the pain of movement. “Hush, girl.” It was Chess, nearby.
“What?” The weight holding her down was the weight of her own body; the pain was of muscles pushed past their limits of strength by days of walking, now locked into knots by the hours of exhausted, motionless sleep.
Rowan was curled on her left side. She tried to straighten, slowly. “What’s the hour?”
“Must be near dawn.”
Rowan managed to roll up to a sitting position. The tent roof was close above her head; a bare earth wall behind her sent waves of coolness against her back. “I need to move a bit.” She opened and closed her hands; even they were stiff, from digging.
“Not in here.” There was no room. Nineteen people were sleeping side by side; and at one end of the tent, six more warriors were sitting upright, in an inward-facing circle. Along one wall of the shelter, and complaining intermittently, ten goats lay on their sides with their legs trussed. The light was barely enough for the steers-woman to see.
“Where’s the door?” There was one, she knew; she had suggested its location herself. Now she could not recall where it was, or where in the tent she was.
Chess reached out a dim hand, and Rowan used it to get herself into motion. She crawled over the two sleepers between herself and the mertutial. “Over there,” Chess said, and pointed her on.
A triangle of gray light above, just this side of the goats. Rowan made her way painfully across to it. None of the sleepers she clambered over were disturbed by her passage.
At the entrance, she pulled herself erect, hissing in annoyance at her body’s complaint. Standing, she had not the flexibility to climb out.
It was not raining; the sound had been only redgrass. Above, the sky was too light for most stars, but still a deep blue too dark for day. It seemed ominous, as if purposely emptied of all but the twin Guidestars, and waiting.
The Eastern Guidestar looked no different from the Western. Rowan considered its angle. The magic heat, if it came from the Eastern Guidestar, must certainly pass above the camp to reach the area west. And if there were heat crossing the sky above, surely the area immediately below must also become warm.
And yet it was cold outside, quite cold.
All around, lying close to each other within pockets of crushed grass, were scores of goats. Some began to stir and stand, shaking their flop-eared heads, the weight of their horns lending a ludicrous drunkenness to the motion. Among them, only slightly taller than the red-grass, were the low peaks of the other shelters.
And one standing figure. She waved it over. “Help me out, please.”
“Is that Rowan?” It was Averryl. He gave her a hand, then two, pulling her from the ground purely by his own effort.
“How long have you been up here?”
“Hours. Since just after midnight. I slept some, then I couldn’t any longer. I wanted to see. And ... and it’s not comfortable in there ...” He nodded toward one of the shelters, presumably his own.
“Comfortable?” she echoed. His voice had lent the word a meaning beyond the merely physical.
He was a moment answering. “They’re saying that Fletcher caused all this.” The forced march; the deaths while traveling; hours of digging into the ground; close quarters; discomfort. Fletcher was resented, perhaps hated; and Averryl, his closest friend, was conveniently at hand.
Rowan became angry. “All this,” she said, “is intended to save our lives. And if we do survive, then yes, Fletcher will have caused that.” He nodded silently.
She scanned the horizon. Nothing appeared unusual; it was simply a late-autumn morning in the Outskirts. “If you’ve been watching, have you seen anything odd?”
He was gazing westward, and nodded again. “Just before first light. The stars along the horizon—” He stretched out one hand and trembled it as demonstration. “—they twinkled, harder than I’ve ever seen before. And some of them seemed to move.”
She was appalled. “Move?”
“Up and down, back and forth. But only right on the horizon, in a space just the width of two fingers. If we didn’t have a clear horizon, I wouldn’t have seen it.” There was a clear horizon due west, and southwest; north, a ridge blocked the view.
“Heat,” she explained. In the Inner Lands, she had often watched stars writhing through the heat rising from a campfire.
Heat properly should rise; heat should not come down invisibly from the sky. Nevertheless, it was doing so, even as she and Averryl stood together in the cool morning, waiting for the sun to appear.
Averryl looked straight up. “What’s that?”
Above, a faint gray haze. “I don’t know.” Unconsciously, she took two steps forward, as if by walking she could move closer to the sky itself. The haze was thickening. “Fog?” And high beams of the stillunrisen sun cleared the eastern horizon, washing the gray to pure, pale, breathtaking gold.
“It’s beautiful,” Averryl said, in a voice of wonder. Rowan thought it impossible, and horrible.
Jaffry emerged from the shelter at her feet and caught sight of her and Averryl. “Chess says—” He began. He stopped, stared above.
“Oh
“What does Chess say?” Rowan asked him. The cloud-sweep was growing deeper, more defined.
“Is that the heat? It’s running the wrong way ...”
“No, it’s not the heat. Whatever this is, it’s parallel to the area that the heat is striking. What does Chess say?” The cloud was thickening visibly, beginning to look uncomfortably like a squall line coming into existence from nothing, directly above their heads.
The young man pulled his attention from the sky and addressed Averryl. “That no one should worry about the goats outside. I’m supposed to tell each tent.”
Averryl nodded. “I’ll tell the people in mine.”
“Is Bel in with you?”
Averryl had been about to leave; he stopped, and hesitated before replying. “Bel isn’t here.”
“What?” Jaffry’s face was suddenly blank with shock.
Rowan was puzzled by the intensity of his reaction. “She was serving as point scout, and sighted signs of another tribe to the east. She went to warn them.”
He spun on her. “When?”
“Yesterday morning. She hadn’t made it back by nightfall, and she couldn’t travel in the dark. But if she went to the first scouts of the other tribe, told them, and turned straight around, she must have been near here by sunset. It’s light now; she’ll arrive soon.”
“Jaffry,” Averryl said, and the young warrior turned to him. “There’s nothing that you can do.”
Jaffry stood staring at him for a long moment, then abruptly turned and hurried away toward the next tent, on his errand for Chess.
Rowan framed a puzzled question to Averryl; but before she could utter it, it answered itself:
The courting gifts left for Bel had appeared the first morning she and Rowan were in camp, a very short span of time for the appearance of romantic feeling. Only two men of the tribe had been acquainted with Bel for longer than a day: Averryl, who was too ill to make and leave gifts; and Jaffry. Rowan wondered why she had not seen this before.
Rain began to fall. Rowan looked up. The line of cloud was heavier. A cusp of sun appeared on the eastern horizon, and Rowan instinctively turned her back to it to look for a rainbow. She found one in the western sky: bright, high, complete across its entire length, and triple in form.
The cloud was now pure white in the sunlight, and roiling with abnormal speed. Averryl watched it with jaw dropped. “We should go inside,” he said presently.
“Not yet.” The light breeze that had been stirring the grass tops hesitated, then ceased. The redgrass silenced. Rowan and Averryl stood waiting.
Far to the west, under the arc of the rainbow, the shadowed land seemed to shimmer. Movement of some sort—then Rowan understood. The redgrass at the horizon was flattening under the force of a distant wind. The area’s nearer limit visibility approached, swiftly. The steerswoman braced herself.
But the air nearby, all around her, already calm, now semed somehow to still even further, to grow almost thinner. Rowan felt a sudden, sharp pain in her ears
Then all the air was in motion, the edge of flattened grass arrived and swept past, and Rowan stumbled forward at the force of the wind at her back—a wind not from the west, but the east. She turned into it, and recovered her balance.
It was strong, storm force; had Rowan been on a ship, she would have been hurrying to shorten sail. But there was no danger to this wind; the tents would easily hold.
The wind did not gust, nor swirl. It ran, steadily east to west, seeming almost perfectly horizontal and coming from no storm, but the sweet sun-glared horizon. Leaning harder into it, she considered that the tent slopes might have aligned better; but Fletcher had said that the wind would later shift.
She stepped back to Averryl and leaned close.
“Let’s get inside,” he said over the rushing noise.
She shook her head. “You go on. This isn’t bad. I want to wait for Bel.” A dead tanglebrush rolled up the slope and caught against a goat, which started bawling, dancing away from it. Other goats bawled response, and those standing shied about, then made their way to the lee of the low tent peaks. The tanglebrush, now free of its obstacle, spun in place crazily, upside down on its mazy dome.
“You’re being stupid!” The words were not angry, merely louder to carry over the wind.
Rowan laughed. “Do you know,” she said, close to his ear, “I’d hate to have to count the number of times an Outskirter has said that to me.”
The wind increased; soon, it was better to sit on the ground, back to the wind. Averryl gave her one edge of his cloak, and she wrapped herself close to him. They steadied each other as the force against their backs grew.
The wind should have dispersed the line of cloud. No such event occurred. The cloud had ceased to spread, but it stayed in place, and its face was roiling faster. The cloud built higher, lower, and its western edge was now shadowed from the sun, black and threatening. The top, along its entire visible length, was forming into the familiar anvil of a thunderhead, made weird by infinite extension north and south.
At the first sign of lightning, they would have to take shelter. Rowan thought of Bel, alone on the wind-driven veldt. She looked over one shoulder.
The shimmering redgrass had vanished. In its place: a single featureless expanse of dull brick red. The grass was lying completely horizontal, driven by the solid, sourceless gale. Rowan swept water from her eyes as she tried to see if she could discern a single, approaching figure. None was visible. Rowan imagined the gale wind catching Bel’s cloak and lifting her, to send her spinning away into the sky like a lost sail. But Bel, although short, was in no way a tight person. Rowan found the vision amusing; and then, quite suddenly, appalling.
Movement above caught her eye, and she twisted about again, looking up. The top of the squall line was sending out wild streamers, swirling out without diminishing the whole, speeding away east.
The ground wind blew east to west. The wind above was west to east. Rowan could not explain it.
It was now full morning, with white sunlight casting her and Averryl’s shadows before them, rain falling at a sharp, windy slant from above, and the triple rainbow, a trifle lower in the sky, even brighter than before. But behind the rainbow, below and past the squall line, over the presumed area of the magical heat, the western sky was as clear and blue as the eastern.
From one of the shelters, a figure half-emerged, looking about, short red hair wild in the wind: Kree. Rowan nudged Averryl. “Go on, she’s looking for you,” she told him; she had to repeat it, louder.
“Are you going in?” he shouted back.
“Soon!”
His expression was stubborn. “I’ll wait!”
There came a thump on Rowan’s shoulder; she turned into the wind.
Bel: glaring, leaning down to shout her words an inch from Rowan’s nose. “What are you doing out here?”
Rowan grinned. “Waiting for you!”
“You’re a lunatic!”
“Yes!” the steerswoman replied with enthusiasm. And Averryl instantly made off, with obvious relief.
Rowan and Bel helped each other to the shelter’s entrance, struggling against the wind, bracing their arms on each other’s shoulders. “Where’s your cloak?” Rowan asked when they were inside. “I lost it.”
Bel slept, promising to relate her experiences after her rest. The report was delayed further:
three hours later, the wind noise even in the shelter became an unchanging roar, too loud, too steady, for conversation.
There was thunder, intermittent, and then almost constant. Lightning became a continuous flicker, outlining the shelter roof, the crack in the door; someone hurried to secure it tighter. The rain was heavier, seeming to fall like stones. The air shook, constantly, as if the shelter were a drum continuously ruffled, with the humans trapped within. It was not far from the truth.
Outside, heard only in the short gaps between thunder peals, the goats cried out in their weirdly human voices, seeming quiet and distant against the roaring wind. The animals tried to hide behind the tent peak, crowding, shoving each other onto the tent itself. The ceiling sagged, writhed, and threatened to collapse. Rowan and three others quickly stood to push up from below, spilling the animals off; and they did the same again moments later, and again; more helpers joined the work. At last there were nine people standing with bent backs, supporting the laden roof against their shoulders.
One of Garris’s warriors, at his own initiative, tied a safety line about his waist, handed its end to his comrades, and exited the shelter. There was a tense half hour of waiting; then, one by one, the weight of each goat on the roof vanished. When he returned, exhausted and rain-drenched, the word made its way slowly across the shelter, from shouting mouth to noise-numbed ear: “He killed them.”
Rowan wanted to know what else he had seen; whether the inhabitants of the other shelters had done the same as he; whether the other shelters were still intact.
Such detailed communication was impossible. Rowan returned to a seat beside Bel, who was now awake, looking about with a sharp gaze, thinking, waiting for an opportunity for useful action.
There was nothing to do but wait. More people slept than Rowan thought possible amid the noise: they were still too spent to do otherwise. Others sat, huddled, as if the sound of wind and rain were itself wind and rain, as if it were necessary to brace and protect oneself from the mere noise. With painful slowness, the hours passed.