The Outskirter's Secret (37 page)

They paused for three days just before
turning south. Bel had suffered from an attack of the stinging
swarmers; she was mildly feverish, too dizzy to walk, and her sight
was reduced to a deep red haze. Uncharacteristically, she dithered
in frustration at the delay, behavior that Rowan attributed to the
illness.

Rowan, stung only a few times, ignored the
sparkling flashes at the edges of her own vision and arranged the
rain fly in the most comfortable configuration possible, with
redgrass reeds below and tanglebrush roots for uprights. By day she
kept a fire burning, and by night buried the coals and shifted the
rain fly over the spot, so that the women slept through the chill
nights on heated ground.

The third night, the wind slowly picked up,
rising at last to a monotonic, deep-voiced howl. Rowan began to
worry about the sturdiness of her arrangements.

"It looks like a tempest coming up," Rowan
shouted close to Bel's ear. "I think I need to batten down."

"I'll help." In the darkness, Bel's handicap
was irrelevant.

"No. You stay dry."

By touch and memory she found the stakes and
guys and tautened them. The wind pressed her cloak tight against
her back, rattled its edges violently about her knees, and rain
pushed down on her shoulders, suddenly hard, like hands urging her
to sit. By shuddering lightning she saw the camp, in a series of
colorless sketches: the fly white with reflecting water; the
redgrass lying down, combed to the north and battered horizontal;
the rain-dark stone where Rowan had sat in the gray afternoon,
tending the fire.

Then blackness returned. The wind paused,
veered slightly, backed again, paused again; and an instant before
it violently veered once more, Rowan, with a sailor's instinct,
turned and made a wild clutch at the open side of the fly.

The wind filled the shelter, belling the
cloth like a sail; guys snapped, the uprights upended, one of them
flying up to graze Rowan's face. She threw herself to the ground on
top of the fly's free edge, trying to pin it down.

Bel sat up, began struggling against the
cloth. "Stay put!" Rowan shouted. "I've got it!" The raindrops grew
heavier, fell with more force.

Another flicker of lightning helped her find
the broken, whipping guy lines. She grabbed at one and caught it as
the thunder broke; the wind caught her cloak and whipped it over
her head, where it streamed before her, booming about her ears. The
raindrops were hard on her back, then harder, then became stinging,
sizzling hail.

She ducked into the shelter, dragging the
cloak in a tangle about her; Bel's hands found and removed the
cloak. Rowan held down the tarp corner, forcing it to the ground
with difficulty against the wind, as hail rattled on her head
through the cloth. She finally solved the problem of securing the
corner by pulling it under her and sitting on it.

She took a moment to catch her breath. The
tarp was pressed down, propped only by the women's heads. The heat
from the ground beat upward; Rowan felt as if she was breathing
steam.

Bel spoke; her voice was buried in tumbling
rolls of thunder. The cloak was between the women. Rowan groped at
it, to arrange it. Its fur was soaking wet, crusted with tiny
pellets that melted between her fingers. "Hail," she told Bel
inanely. The Outskirter shifted, and a puff of cool air told Rowan
that Bel had made an opening at the fly edge for ventilation.

Bel found Rowan's hand and deposited
something in it, smooth, round, and so cold they were dry: three
hailstones, each half an inch in diameter.

Rowan rattled them in her hand as their
fellows rattled down on her head, only mildly cushioned by the
tarp. She shouted over the racket of ice and thunder. "Rendezvous
weather?"

Bel had doubled the cloak and was pulling it
over their heads for more protection. It muffled the sound as well,
and she replied into the relative quiet, "Nothing but."

The violence of the tempest had drawn the
damp from the air completely, as often happened. Scudding clouds
decorated the morning, and the sun rose yellowly before tucking
itself behind a retreating cloud bank.

Rowan and Bel had spent the night wet: with
no props for the rain fly but their bodies, condensation had soaked
them wherever they had been in contact with the cloth. Their spare
clothing was still damp from previous days; they spread everything
in the sun to dry, and spent the morning huddled together under
Rowan's cloak, the last heat of the buried coals rising against
their bodies.

"How is your vision? Can you see?"

Bel peered about. "Well enough. No, it's
getting darker."

"The sun went behind a cloud again."

"Then I'm all right."

There was a silence, which Rowan spent
calculating. "The weather has been strange for over a month. Does
that really indicate Rendezvous?"

Bel shrugged. "According to the songs and
poems, yes." She sang a verse of a song describing a courting
during Rendezvous; in the space of twelve lines, the weather was
cold, warm, clear, stormy, hailing.

"That sounds like what we've been
having."

"But now the weather is out of sequence with
the years. It's odd."

Rowan shook her head in confusion. "Not to
me. I don't see why it should be in sequence to begin with. What
can be special about twenty years?"

"I don't know." Bel made a sound of feral
amusement. "It will be interesting if some people think it's time
to Rendezvous, and some don't. One tribe will set up an open camp,
and another will attack it. The first will think that truce has
been violated, and go for vengeance." Her amusement vanished. "It
will make my job harder."

With Bel recovered, they left the lowlands
behind, and the country began, almost imperceptibly, to climb.
Clouds returned by night and remained, and a heavy fog appeared and
disappeared intermittently, but the rain did not return.

The fifth night after the tempest, Rowan rose
from sleep and stood in the darkness, with shifting clouds above
opening and closing, concealing and revealing small starry
sweeps.

Bel stirred on her bedroll. "What's the
matter?"

"Wait." Rowan followed a particular gap as it
ghosted across the sky: high above, the Swan. Then the opening sank
east, to show the Hero, with one bright untwinkling star at his
side, and Rowan took mental bearings from the Eastern Guidestar,
her first sighting of it in many days.

"We've made very good time, considering the
weather," she mused. "But where's the river?"

"The river?" Rowan heard Bel sit up.

The steerswoman nodded, then remembered that
her friend could not see the motion in the darkness. "Yes. We
should be only a few miles from it. We should be able to see its
lichen-towers by now."

"Perhaps it doesn't have any."

Rowan nodded again, not in assent, but in
thought. Above, the Guidestar vanished as the clouds closed in and
opened elsewhere, more southerly. "The land isn't used to this much
rain; it's normally dry. If there were a river anywhere near, the
lichen-towers would be hungry for the water."

Bel was beside Rowan, scanning the sky as if
she could read it as well as the steerswoman. "Then your map is
wrong? The part you copied from the wizards? Or the river has
shifted since they made the map?"

Rowan watched the skies with gaze narrowed in
thought. "One of those reasons, perhaps . . ."

The women returned to their beds, and Rowan
spent the night without sleeping; she brooded, and reluctantly
began to recalculate, assuming a greater and greater eastern shift
in the location of her final destination.

There was water, but transient water, little
runoffs and rivulets caused by the overabundance of rain.
Blackgrass thrived in standing pools, redgrass drooping and
drowning around it. The women sloshed and slipped up the land
toward a bare rocky field ahead.

They clambered among head-high boulders for
more than an hour, then took a moment to rest among them. Rowan
suppressed a desire to pull out her map and consult it yet again;
it would serve no purpose. She sat in silence and internally
berated herself at length: for having so untrustworthy a memory of
the wizards' original map; for having waited so long before
attempting to reconstruct it; and for what must certainly be a
general and inexcusable slackness in her application of
Steerswomen's techniques.

She called her complaint to a halt. She was
neither slack nor forgetful. Circumstances had been beyond her
control. Self-derision was a useless exercise.

She sighed and began to address Bel; but the
Outskirter's expression stopped her.

Bel was gazing into the distance between the
boulders in mild puzzlement. Then her face suddenly cleared, and
she emitted a delighted "Ha!" and sprang to her feet.

"What?"

Bel slipped out of her pack and clambered
atop an uneven boulder, motioning to Rowan. "I've found your
river!"

Up beside Bel, Rowan looked out where the
Outskirter indicated. "Where is it?" The jumble of boulders ended
unevenly some thirty feet from where the women stood. Beyond was a
rounded, featureless stretch of bare gray rock perhaps a hundred
and fifty feet wide, which stopped abruptly, ending with nothing
but air.

Rowan laughed. "It's a cliff! We're on top of
it!" The river was near, but it was
down
. She saw another cliff facing her across the
open, misty distance, a smooth gray-faced bluff. "It's two cliffs."
Then, she said dubiously, "It's a ravine . . ."

Bel's pleasure had faded to suspicion.
"That's a wide ravine."

"Let's have a look." They slid off their
perch and threaded their way among the boulders toward the flat
area beyond.

An instant before their feet touched it, both
women stopped and stepped back, almost simultaneously. They
exchanged puzzled glances, and Bel stooped to reach out and test
the surface ahead. She ran her hand across it, then suddenly
muttered a curse, drew her sword, and struck down.

There was a crunch, a crackling, and a faint,
sweet odor, as the sword broke through, leaving a deep and narrow
slash. Inside: white pulp, black spines. Bel stood, her sword
dripping a faintly bluish fluid.

Rowan's mouth twisted. "And there's our
lichen-tower."

Bel nodded, disgruntled, and pointed to where
the gray ended and the air began. "That's not the cliff." She
pointed at the jumbled rocks around their feet. "This is the cliff.
This lichen-tower has grown up along its side, all the way to the
top."

"Yes." Rowan studied the surface with vast
distaste. Any person foolish enough to attempt to cross it would
crash through, to be impaled below on thousands of the vicious
internal spines. "We'll have to go around this. It can't be
everywhere." She looked across the gap to the far bluff. It was
over a mile away. "It's on the other side, as well." She looked
around: standing boulders behind and around, the lichen-tower and
open air before. "We need a better vantage. We can't see from
here." Her eyes narrowed. "We have to get closer to the edge."

Bel grunted, annoyed. "This is the edge."

They scouted, tracing the true cliff,
searching for a place where the rocks were not extended by gray
growth. For more than an hour they paced, rounding crags recognized
only by logic, disguised by the lichen-towers' surface. They found
no free edge, and always a bluff stood across the wide gap; first
one, then another, facing them, offering them a mirror of their own
bland geography.

Rowan needed to stand at an edge, look down,
look out. She could not see the lay of the land, could not
determine where they must go.

They found one place where a sharp, rocky
crag rose above the stone field, higher than the lichen-towers.
Rowan shed her cloak, kicked out of her boots, and prepared to
climb it.

Bel said, "Listen."

Silence.

"If the river were dry, the towers couldn't
live." There was no sound of rushing water.

"It can't be dry, with all the rain we've
had," Rowan said. "Perhaps they overgrew it completely?"

Bel shook her head, uncertain.

Rowan clambered up the rear of the crag, away
from the cliff's edge and the treacherous surface of the
lichen-tower. Bel watched from below, dubiously.

Presently she called up. "What do you
see?"

Rowan pulled her attention from her handholds
and looked.

It was a world of smooth gray, pale mist,
white sky. Below: the bulge of the lichen-tower. Left and right:
more of the same. Across the gulf of air: more,
shoulder-to-shoulder with one another, crowding.

Up the wavering ravine, the winding,
branching course of the unseen river was marked only by gaps
between undulating walls of featureless gray. Rank after rank,
until mist obscured sight, where barely seen shapes hinted at an
endless complexity of mounds, curves, shapes . . .

There was no change, no end in sight. Rowan
crouched, stupidly gape-mouthed, disbelieving. She pulled herself
farther out, nearer the edge of the crag.

Downstream: the identical view.

"Can you see the river?"

Rowan was beyond speech. She looked straight
down.

The pale sunlight lit the misty depths,
growing whiter as it fell deeper. She saw somewhere below a tiny
flash of silver and squinted, blinking, trying to discriminate one
faint shade from another. There did seem to be a thin, wavering
line below, barely discernible, but it couldn't be the water: to
feed so many lichen-towers, and such tall ones, would require a
very great river indeed.

Then she understood. It was a great river—and
it was very far away.

"Gods below," she breathed. "It's over two
miles straight down."