The Outskirter's Secret (35 page)

And yet, some minutes later, she was still
sitting where she had been, just inside the entrance to Kree's
tent.

She sat in gloom. A shaft of sunlight slanted
in through the entrance, carving from the shadows a single canted
block of illumination, lying across the bright-patterned carpet.
Colors glowed, brilliant: sharp planes, intricate cross-lines.
There seemed to be two carpets: a shadowy one covering the entire
tent-floor, and another, smaller one lying before her, constructed
purely of colored light.

The carpet's pattern consisted of huge red
squares, decorated within by borders of white. Thin lines ran
between, dark blue on a light blue background. The steerswoman sat
unmoving, gazing. When the colors began to pulse, she realized that
she was forgetting to blink, and did so.

She decided then that she ought to be up and
about her business. She remained where she was.

It came to her slowly that the blue lines
defined a second pattern, ranked behind the first: a complexity of
cubes shown in perspective, their true nature obscured by the red
squares. She wondered how Deely had accomplished this design, if he
had woven the cube pattern completely first, then overlaid the red.
She wondered if, should she lift and reverse the carpet, the
background pattern would become foreground; or whether she would
see only the first design, with the cross-pattern revealed as
illusion. She reached into the light and studied her own glowing
hand on a square of glowing red, lines below defining distant,
possibly imaginary, forms of blue.

She rose and found her way to where the
corpses were being prepared, directing herself by the smell of old
blood and intestinal offal.

She arrived at the west edge of camp, where a
group of mertutials were sitting quietly on the ground, around a
recumbent cloak-covered form. Rowan hesitated. She wished to
assist, but she could not tell whether or not the mertutials'
attitudes indicated that solemnities had commenced and ought not to
be interrupted.

Then Chess lifted her head and cocked an eye
at Rowan. "Here to help?"

The steerswoman nodded.

"Got a good knife?"

Rowan's hand found her field knife; she
displayed it. Chess saw, nodded, and beckoned with a jerk of her
head.

Parandys shifted his position in favor of
Rowan. "Here, take the arm, it's easier," he said quietly.

They resettled. Chess was sitting by the
corpse's head. "Well," she said, then heaved a sigh. "Well," she
said again, almost inaudibly, and wiped a sudden flow of tears from
her eyes, using the heels of her hands, like a child.

Then she picked up her own knife; it was the
same one she used to prepare food. With a gesture, she directed the
others to remove the cloak. The form below was Eden. Chess leaned
forward . . .

The steerswoman found herself far away, on
the opposite edge of camp, on her knees in the dirt, coughing and
choking in an uncontrollable fit of vomiting. It continued for a
long time.

Eventually she became aware that someone was
supporting her shoulders. The arm across her back felt like ice
through the cold of her sweat-soaked shirt, but it was steady,
gentle, and patient. Rowan was weakly grateful for the
assistance.

Finally, she could raise her own head and
straighten her back. She turned away and sat shivering, looking
into the camp. Behind her, Fletcher used the edge of one boot to
shove loose dirt over the mess.

"Now, what brought that on?" he asked
cheerfully when he had finished. "After-battle nerves? Chess's
cooking?"

Rowan breathed slowly, deep breaths.
"Casting," she managed to say. It was the first word she had spoken
that day.

Fletcher's brows raised, and he pursed his
lips around a silent whistle. He dropped to a seat beside her.

When she had regained control of herself, she
found him watching her with complete sympathy and comprehension.
She recalled that when Fletcher had found Kammeryn's nephew dying
alone on the veldt, he had executed an entire Outskirter funeral
rite, alone. "How did you do it?"

He understood her unspoken reference. "Wasn't
easy."

She became angry with her weakness. "It's so
foolish! I've seen dead bodies before; I've killed people myself. A
corpse is just a shell, it's just . . . it's just matter."

"Not if it's someone you know." He shifted in
thought. "Our brains think faster than our bodies, Rowan. You can
look at Mare, or Kester, lying on the ground, and know for a fact
that they're not really there at all, that they're gone, and you're
just looking at where they used to be. Doesn't matter. If you watch
them being cut up, you find your stomach has a mind of its own.

"I remember when I first came to the
Outskirts, it took me forever just to see the land, clearly. My
brain knew it all had to make sense, but my eyes figured
differently."

Rowan nodded, remembering her own similar
experience.

"Well," Fletcher continued, "you can figure
out how things are, and tell yourself that's the way it is. But you
can't always act the way you think you should, not right away.
Sometimes you just have to live with it awhile first."

She shivered. The air was bright and empty.
"Why casting?" she asked him. "Why do it
that
way?"

He thought long. "Casting . . . casting is
the last victory."

"I don't understand."

"Outskirters fight," he began. "And there's
plenty to fight against—but not only other people." He gestured at
the quiet camp, referring to its present state, the result of
specific enemies. "There's more to it, more than this."

"Goblins," Rowan suggested.

"And other animals, and insects. But, see,
they're all part of the land, part of the Outskirts themselves.

"And the plants—we burn down tanglebrush,
tear down lichen- towers . . ."

"Destroy the redgrass, with your herd and
your waste."

"Right. We're fighting the land, in our way.
The land wants to kill us. The whole of the Outskirts, with
enemies, animals, plants, hunger, disease, even the shape of the
land, with cliffs and ravines and too much water or not enough—it's
all of it, all the time, trying to defeat us."

"And it wins in the end. Because, eventually,
you die. Everyone has to die."

"But that's just it. You die . . . but then
your comrades cast you . . ." He made a motion with his hands: out
and around, spreading. "And there you lie. But the land, it can't
stand to have you there. And it can't get rid of you."

Ghost-grass, Rowan thought. "Where you're
cast, the land—it dies?"

"That's it, then; you've won. It's your last
act, the last thing you can do—and you always win."

"But why cut up the corpse?" she asked, then
answered herself. "To spread the effect."

"Right. The more you destroy, the greater the
victory."

"But why does it kill the plants? In the
Inner Lands, decaying matter helps things grow." In her home
village, the funeral groves were constructed far from the farms;
years later, when farmland expanded, the people found green growth
already in place, a fertile core about which the new farms could
grow.

Fletcher shrugged. "Don't know."

Rowan considered the destruction each
Outskirter tribe laid behind it, as it traveled eastward, always
away from the Inner Lands. There should have been a huge lifeless
swath across the land, from north to south, a dead barrier between
Inner Lands and Outskirts. But she had crossed only occasional
areas of such desolation, and recalled her journey so far as an
almost-smooth progression: from old green forests to thinner green
forests, to brushland, to green fields with an ever-greater
proportion of redgrass, to the redgrass veldt. "Apparently, the
damage isn't permanent . . ."

His mouth twisted. "Don't say that to a born
Outskirter. Their belief is that it is. Casting conquers the land.
They say it gives the land a human soul."

Victory even beyond death. She found she
admired the idea. "I wish I could do something," she said. "Honor
them, somehow, show the living the respect that I have for their
dead . . . but I can't, not in the way they would wish."

He puzzled; then his face cleared. "Yes, you
can. There's more than one way to do it." He rose and offered her a
hand up. "Come with me."

He led her out of the camp, toward position
twelve, where all day two lines of smoke had been visible on the
veldt: funeral pyres, now extinguished.

At one of the sites, only two people were
present, sifting ashes into goatskin bags: Quinnan and Gregaryn,
scouts.

Rowan felt a rush of relief, and gratitude
toward Fletcher. She could assist. She would need to handle no
dismembered limbs, no segments of persons she had known in life;
only clean ashes.

But Quinnan was reluctant: scouts considered
themselves a group apart. "She's not one of us," he replied to
Fletcher's suggestion.

"Well, she's no Outskirter," Fletcher replied
easily. "So, yes, she's not one of us. But I think she's one of
you."

The scout was puzzled. "How so?"

Fletcher spread his hands. "What do scouts
do? Well, scouts live to find things out. Isn't that what a
steerswoman does?

"Scouts travel alone. So do steerswomen.
Scouts go and see what's out there, so that other people can
know—just like a steerswoman. Scouts look at things from the
outside. They try to figure out what's happening. That's what Rowan
does, all the time.

"No good scout would ever give false
information. No steerswoman ever, ever tells a lie.

"She isn't an Outskirter," Fletcher
concluded, "but as far as I can see, she's as good as any
scout."

Quinnan studied the steerswoman a long
moment; then he took up one of the bags and told her what to do.
Rowan listened closely to the instructions; but when she turned to
Fletcher, to find some Outskirter way to express her thanks, she
found he had gone.

Rowan stood alone on the windy veldt,
waist-deep in redgrass a mile due north of the camp. Some twenty
goats were browsing nearby, making their first pass at the grass.
Later they would return again, to graze more closely, then again to
crop the reeds to stubble. Rowan thought it a shame to spread the
ashes where the animals would be eating and defecating. But she had
been told to go no farther.

Halfway to the horizon, she saw a lone guard
manning the inner circle. The warrior did not watch or acknowledge
her, but attended to his or her own assignment.

Rowan opened the little bag cautiously. It
contained small objects among the ashes: bones, she assumed, likely
finger bones that had not had time or enough heat to incinerate.
Through the bag's sides the ashes were cool, the bones slightly
warm.

The steerswoman held the bag in both hands
with the opening away from her, and put her back to the wind.

She passed the bag across the air; a fine
white mist blew from it, caught by the breeze, vanishing instantly.
"Maud . . ." she began, and tried to remember who Maud had been.
Rowan had never met the scout, had only glimpsed her once, in the
distance. She had no face, no form in Rowan's mind. A stranger.

Rowan moved her hands again. "Brinsdotter . .
." She looked among remembered faces for a woman, a mertutial or
older warrior, named Brin. She found none. There was no living
mother to weep for this warrior child.

A third time: "Haviva . . ." It was necessary
to upend the bag to empty it completely. The small bones fell from
the opening, disappearing among the chattering grass at Rowan's
feet. Rowan knew of no other person in Kammeryn's tribe who carried
the line name Haviva.

The steerswoman felt cold, empty. She looked
about the endless wilderness: at the shimmering blades, at the
cloud-crowded evening sky, and at the camp itself, lost on the
veldt among its own shadows. The only sound was the voice of the
grass.

Then she heard words. "Who is Maud?" She had
spoken the words herself.

And she answered herself: Maud was no one;
Maud was no face, no voice, no person; Maud was a road stopped
before its destination. Maud, Brinsdotter, Haviva was three names,
white mist, bones on the ground.

The steerswoman was tired by death. She did
not know how to mourn enough for all the dead. But here was only
one dead, one person gone, sent into the wind by Rowan's own
hands.

Rowan felt she could mourn for one person;
but she could not mourn for Maud.

She dropped the woolen bag, stepped over it,
and walked back to camp.

She could not rest that night.

Eventually she rose and threaded her way in
darkness through the sleeping warriors: past Bel, Averryl,
Fletcher, who stirred uneasily in his sleep; past Chai, Cassander,
Ria, and at last Kree in her position by the entrance. The chief
sat up, instantly awake, asking softly, "Is that Rowan?"

How Kree had identified her in the dark Rowan
had no idea. "Yes," the steerswoman said. "I can't sleep. I need to
walk."

"The circles are undermanned. There may be
more Face People out there."

"I'll stay in camp."

Outside, the night was cool and clear. Rowan
walked down the alley between Kree's tent and Orranyn's toward the
center of camp. The tents were faint shapes, difficult to discern;
their black star-shadows seemed to hold more substance than they
themselves did. Rowan passed in and out of those shadows, half
expecting to feel their edges on her skin, like the touch of the
water's surface on a rising swimmer's face.

The fire pit was cold, with the ancient,
deserted smell of dead ashes. In the open center of the camp, Rowan
looked up. Above were scores of bright stars; but she did not link
them into their patterns, or give them their names. She left them
solitary, each alone in the cold air. Among them, nearer to the
zenith than ever she had seen it, stood the Eastern Guidestar. A
wizards' thing, hung in the sky, she thought, and tried to be angry
for the fact. She failed. Timekeeper, traveler's friend, she tried
again; the terms had no meaning. Her beacon, urging her eastward
forever, toward the place where its own fallen mate lay dead in the
wilderness; the matter now seemed abstract, illusory.