The Outskirter's Secret (11 page)

The warrior had been caught with cloak open
and his face up, and was drenched in an instant. He laughed and
shook his hair like a dog, then turned his face up again as if
being battered by the fat, cold drops was the most pleasant
sensation in the world.

"Who knows?" he shouted over the noise. He
dashed water from his eyes with his fingers, wiped his face with
the heels of his hands, then cocked a bright black eye at the
women, amused. When he nodded past Rowan, she turned and discovered
two more warriors, one standing not four feet from her side, the
other posted beside Bel. Their approach had been completely
unnoticed. Raised hoods and closed cloaks rendered them eerily
neutral: genderless, and without personality. They did not
speak.

The first man pulled up his own hood and
leaned closer to the travelers, to be heard above the rain. "We'll
just keep walking until we get there, shall we?"

R
owan awoke to
heavy, musty air, the sour odor of wet fur, and he sound of rain.
Shifting on her bedroll, she found that someone had replaced her
sodden cloak, which she had been using as a blanket, with a heavy
felt cover, thick enough to be a rug. She had been unaware of the
exchange.

"Bel?" Nothing was visible in the sealed air
of the tent; the grayness was just one shade above black, and the
dark seemed less an absence of light than an intrinsic feature of
the smell.

Rowan shoved the cover aside and cast about
with one hand, searching for her pack. Someone, probably Bel, had
laid her sword alongside her bedding. The steerswoman considered,
then stood to strap it on, rising carefully, uncertain of the
available headroom.

She paused and listened. There was no sound
but hers in the tent, no breathing but her own. Outside, amid the
pattering hiss, she heard movement, muffled voices. She groped her
way along the tent wall and suddenly found a flap and threw it
back.

Brilliant sunlight struck her with an almost
physical force, and she drew back, one arm thrown up against the
glare. She had been fooled by the sound: there was no rain, and
every vestige of cloud and mist had vanished. The brightness was
too much for her sleep-bleared eyes. Above and below the shield of
her arm, she caught only glimpses of wild red ground and painful
blue sky.

Someone brushed by, then turned back and
abruptly fingered the loose edge of Rowan's blouse. "This is
filthy. I'll get you another," a female voice said, and then the
woman was gone.

"Thank you," Rowan replied in her general
direction. She wiped at her tearing eyes with her sleeve and tried
to see the world.

Redgrass.

Down the hills and up them, over ridges and
out to the edge of sight, was a single sweeping carpet of redgrass,
rippling in the steady south wind. The grass had already been dried
by the morning sun, and its natural brilliance had returned; colors
trembled across the land as each individual blade twisted and bent,
now showing a brown side, now a bright red. It was difficult to
focus clearly on the shifting and flashing; the earth looked
feverish, as if Rowan were delirious but unable to decide on the
particular hue of her hallucination. Driven by the wind, the hollow
reeds tapped against each other, rough blades rustling, setting up
a rattling hiss that Rowan had mistaken for the sound of rain.

In front and beyond, hills ranged, broken by
two staggered ridges, then falling faintly lower as they reached
out toward the horizon. A far lake sparkled silver in the distance,
edged with looming dark shapes—trees, Rowan assumed, blinking with
the effort of seeing past the grass. Then she corrected herself.
There were no trees in the Outskirts, and this, finally and surely,
was true and pure Outskirts.

The air held a scent, like cinnamon and sour
milk, over the freshness of departed rain. The tent beside Rowan
wafted up a miasma of must and goat. Somewhere someone was roasting
meat.

Rowan could see no green plant life at all.
Clumps and thickets of tanglebrush, gray and black, were
recognizable nearby. A few rocky outcrops showed on one of the
ridges, and far off the land displayed jagged black lines, caused
by what, Rowan had no idea.

And the sky above was empty and blue: blue as
a lake of pure, fresh water.

Someone shifted behind her, and she turned to
face a large male Outskirter, in full gear. He regarded her
silently and warily.

"Hello," Rowan said, hoping he found her as
innocuous as she knew herself to be. "Have you seen my friend
around here?"

"I might have. How would I know him?"

They had come in at night, in rain, and had
gone directly to sleep. Possibly news of their arrival had not been
passed on to all the tribe members. "A woman," Rowan told him,
"smaller than I am." She held out a hand to demonstrate the height.
"Dark brown hair, brown eyes. Her cloak is not as fine as yours."
The man's cloak was not Bel's random patchwork, but a striking gray
and black diagonal design. "An Outskirter, like yourself."

"Ha. There's only one like me."

"Well, yes." He was nearly twice Bel's size,
and blond. "And there's only one like her, as well, more's the
pity. We were brought in last night, by a warrior, one of the men
guarding the flock to the west. I don't know his name."

The warrior nodded, as if this confirmed
information he already possessed, and it came to Rowan that if she
had presented any tale but the truth, matters would have turned to
the worse. This man was assigned as her guard.

As they stood regarding each other, Rowan's
Inner Lands habits began to demand that an introduction be made.
She tried to remember the rules Bel had laid out, but found nothing
that covered interaction with a person assigned to watch her. She
followed her instinct. "I'm Rowan, a steerswoman, from the Inner
Lands. I only have the one name." Replying with his own full name
would imply an acceptance he had, no authority to render, but she
hazarded to ask, "And you are . . . ," knowing that mere first
names were sometimes bestowed more freely, and wishing to have some
means of addressing him.

The Outskirter delivered a narrow glare and
rubbed the back of his neck uncomfortably, his sword strap
creaking. "Hm. That fellow who brought you in has gone back to his
band." His dislike seemed more formal than personal. "Well, I don't
suppose you've killed anyone yet. Have you?"

She was not sure this was a joke. "Not so
far."

"Here."

Rowan turned at the new voice and caught a
tossed wool shirt. "Wash at the creek, or no one will want to
associate with you." The woman vanished again, leaving Rowan only
with impressions of height, long dark hair, and a bundle balanced
on one shoulder.

Rowan looked at the shirt in her hand, then
held it up for the man to see. She waved it slightly. "How do I
find the creek?"

He made a satisfied sound, then motioned with
a nod. "On the far side of the camp." He paused. "You can't go
through. I'll lead you around."

"Thank you."

His reply was a grunt.

The tent she had slept in was one of a
cluster of four crowded together, back-to-back. Some of skin, some
of felt, all in shades of gray and brown, they might have been
cloud shadows against the wild color of the surrounding
redgrass.

As she followed the Outskirter around the
body of the camp, Rowan saw that all the tents were in groups of
four, back-to-back like cornered soldiers. Between the groups she
caught intriguing glimpses of the life within. Spaces between the
clusters seemed to define avenues, annexes, even courtyards; it was
like passing by a village of cloth and leather houses. People
walked along those paths she could see, most of them moving
quickly, as if on some errand; they glanced at her once, then
studiously ignored her.

As they rounded the south side of the camp,
they passed a group of five children, playing at battle—using real
weapons, Rowan realized. One made boldly to challenge her presence,
but her guard stopped him with a hand on his shoulder and an
admonishing finger in his face, and with gestures directed the
children's attention away from the steerswoman. But he paused among
them long enough to correct one fierce young girl's sword grip; the
others watched the instruction intently, then picked up their
adventure where it had been interrupted.

The groupings of the tents fell into some
larger pattern: a star, it seemed, though Rowan could not from her
vantage count the points. The wind brought the smell of cooking
again, and she surmised a central open area, with a fire pit.

When they passed another of the tent city's
points, Rowan found herself at the crest of a little dale, looking
east. Below, the creek reflected the blue of the sky, stable and
peculiar amid the noisy, shimmering red and brown. The motion of
the colors rendered the scene freakish, unreal, the sloping
perspective seemed about to shift without ever quite doing so, and
the tapping of the reeds never ceased, but rose and fell like rain
on the ocean. Rowan gazed down dizzily and felt as if her ears were
tired inside, from the noise.

Over the sound, half-audible voices came up
from the creek: cheerful, comradely shouts, playful squeals. Her
guard nodded down at the creek. "There you go, Rowan," he said, and
she wondered if the use of her name signified anything. "Don't be
too long, or you'll miss breakfast." And he sat, apparently with
every intention of watching her as she bathed.

As she descended, slightly unsteady, Rowan
fought an urge to turn back, to lose herself among the tents and
people. Her eyes, and her mind, remained uncomfortable with the
sweep of shuddering colors, the cruel, immobile black, and her body
was uneasy, unable to find its proper balance as she moved down the
slope to the waterside.

But at the creek, to her surprise, she found
green life: a crowd of scrub pines, and an incongruous patch of
gray-headed thistle. Her eyes rested there as if they were the only
real things in the world.

The bathers were all women, standing hip-deep
or sitting neck-deep in the cool water. One of them was annoying
the others by skimming her palm across the surface to send up
sheets of spray. Her cohorts soon dealt with the prank by mobbing
her and forcing her head below the surface until she indicated
surrender.

On the fringes of the group, all alone, was
Bel.

"Ha," Rowan's companion said. "You took your
time."

"I didn't know the hour," Rowan replied. She
slipped her sword strap over her head and kicked out of her boots.
Each person's clothing, whether neatly or haphazardly arranged, had
its owner's weapon lying on top, hilt carefully pointing to the
water—handy for quick recovery in case of danger. Rowan followed
their example, wondering to herself if the precaution was
necessary.

She waded into the cool water, feeling small
stones beneath her feet. "I think I insulted my guard, by asking
his name," she told Bel, then dipped beneath the surface to rinse
the first layer of dirt from her body. Below, sound closed in with
a familiar closeness, and her sight was limited to shafts of sweet
white light, brown creek bed, and a number of blurred naked human
bodies. She had an odd desire to remain there.

She resurfaced to the incessant hiss and tap
of the redgrass, the rattle of nearby tanglebrush, the shifting red
and brown. On the far side of the creek, some Outskirts plant had
put out a patch of magenta blossoms. The effect was faintly
nauseating.

"No one will tell you their names, not until
we've been accepted," Bel reminded her, studying a raw spot on her
own stomach, an abrasion from wearing wet clothing for days. Bel
scooped water onto it, then rubbed off a patch of dead skin.

"Should I tell them mine?"

"Yes. Every chance you get." Bel raised her
voice to the bathing women. "This is the friend I mentioned, the
steerswoman, Rowan. She only has one name."

"Ha," someone said, and the women went back
to their business.

"Will that knife blade buy our way in?"

"Nothing will buy our way in, and you
shouldn't say it like that. The knife blade was for the goat we
took. And the fact that we bothered to trade for it instead of
stealing it shows them that we mean well."

Rowan became confused. "Wouldn't they respect
us more if we did steal it?"

"In a way. But if we want this tribe to
become our tribe, even temporarily, we can't do anything that's
against its interests." Bel moved to the shallower bank and sat
down in the water, leaning back a bit, water slapping against her
breasts. Her short, muscular legs extended before her, half
floating.

"When do we meet the seyoh?"

Bel kicked up a few splashes with childlike
pleasure. "I expect they're discussing us right now, and they'll
plan to hear our story sometime this afternoon."

"That's good. I'd like to get things settled.
I feel a bit odd being half ignored." Rowan imitated her friend and
found the contrast between the cool water and the oddly scented air
refreshing. Because it was natural for her to do so, she gazed at
the longest perspective, out to the horizon. The scene stubbornly
refused to integrate; it became weirder, wavering, and the magenta
flowers jabbed at her vision like a nail in her eye.

She focused on the creek bank and
concentrated on the conversation. "The people act as if I'm
supposed to be invisible, but don't have the manners to be so
correctly."

Bel laughed. "That's well said. And it's
true. But the fact is, you are doing it correctly. You're supposed
to act as if you don't have the manners to be invisible. You should
force people to notice you." Bel raised her voice again. "Who has
soap?" There was no reply from the bathers. "Well, I'm used to my
own smell. But it will be a hard time on anyone who has to stand
near me . . ." Something landed with a splash between the two
women. "Ha." Bel retrieved the grayish lump and began vigorously
scrubbing her hair with it, to little visible effect.