The Outskirter's Secret (39 page)

"You wouldn't . . ." He caught sight of
Averryl, seated by Berrion's tent. "Aha! Just the man we were
looking for!"

The warrior was repairing a break in his
sword strap, braiding bits of leather between his fingers. "I see
Fletcher found you. I thought he might. When you want something
found, call for Fletcher. It's a genuine talent he has."

Rowan dropped to the ground, pulling her
cloak under her. "Actually," she said, "Kammeryn is the man we're
looking for, but it seems he's occupied at present."

Leaning forward, Fletcher spoke
conspiratorially. "And when did that happen?" He tilted his head in
the direction of the seyoh's tent.

"While you were gone. Not so surprising, when
you think of all the time they've been spending together."

Rowan could restrain her curiosity no longer.
"Who?"

Averryl exuded pride on his seyoh's behalf.
"Ella."

Both women were taken aback. "The same Ella?"
Bel asked.

"None other. Everyone knew she was being
courted by someone. It turned out to be Kammeryn."

Rowan pointed out, "He could be her
grandfather."

Averryl shrugged with the urbane air of one
long accustomed to an unusual fact. He pretended to give careful
attention to his work. "Actually," he said, "I believe he's some
kind of cousin about fifty times removed. They're both of Gena
line."

Bel had been considering; she reached her
conclusion, tilted her head. "It makes sense to me. If Kammeryn
courted me, I might think twice, but I wouldn't take very long to
do it."

"There's no problem with her being of another
tribe?"

Averryl shook his head. "We'll be at
Rendezvous for another two weeks or so. It's enough time for a
small romance."

"Then courting, and a romance, aren't
necessarily a prelude to a more permanent arrangement?"

"No," Bel told her. "The rites are different
for marriage. You have to be very certain and very serious. It's
forever."

Rowan spent the next two hours plying the
Outskirters with questions on the traditions and formal rites
surrounding marriage and child rearing. Halfway through, Chess
wandered by, listened a moment, commented, "Hmph. I see we've got
our steerswoman back," and wandered off again.

"
W
e had four
days of tempest," Kammeryn told Rowan and Bel after they had
described their journey and explained their return. "When the rain
slackened, one of our scouts came back in, with an odd report.

"He had found another tribe of Face People,
but pitched in open camp. I sent people to watch it, for two days;
then I permitted one of our scouts to be spotted. The Face People
responded with a request to meet."

He shook his head in thought. "It was the
wrong season," he continued, "and twelve years too soon to
Rendezvous. But I thought it might be a good thing, to gather now."
He addressed Bel. "Under normal circumstances, it might take you
eight months to deliver your message to four more tribes. But we
have six tribes here, right now."

"They were all ready to Rendezvous? No one
attacked?"

"I sent scouts to look for Ella's tribe,
thinking that their seyoh, having heard your story, would feel as I
did. They joined us. With three tribes together, no one would
attack. And when scouts of other tribes sighted us, they could see
that we were a genuine Rendezvous. They reported to their
seyohs"—he gave a small smile—"and everyone was curious."

Rowan smiled to herself; curiosity, she knew,
was a powerful force. "What did you tell them, when they came?"

"That, by the end of Rendezvous, two people
would arrive who had seen a fallen Guidestar. And that all the
seyohs must hear what they have to say."

"I can speak to them all at once," Bel
observed.

"Yes. When would you like that to be?"

Bel thought. "Two days from now. In the
afternoon. Tonight, we'll rest. Tomorrow, after dinner, when
everyone will be telling poems and tales, I'll give my poem. The
seyohs will have a night and the next day to think about it."

With a full day of waiting before Bel was to
tell her startling tale to the massed tribes, Rowan found an
afternoon's distraction for herself: she sat beside the fire pit,
carving a bit of tanglebrush root with her field knife. Bel leaned
against a cushion beside her, eyes closed, apparently half dozing.
Rowan had attempted to converse with her, to be sternly told that
Bel was adding new stanzas to the poem of her and Rowan's
adventures in the Inner Lands, and that quiet was required. So the
two sat silently, companionably, engaged in their separate
occupations.

From one of the avenues of another tribe,
Rowan noticed Dane, the eldest child in Kammeryn's tribe, emerge in
the company of a strange boy. Dane caught sight of Rowan, waved,
and approached; to forestall any interruptions to Bel's creativity,
Rowan rose and went to meet the two young people.

"This is Leonie," Dane introduced the boy. He
was dark, and broad of build, some four inches shorter than gangly
Dane. He nodded greeting to the steerswoman. "When we leave
Rendezvous," Dane continued, "he'll be coming with us."

"You're joining the tribe?"

"No," the boy replied. "I'll stay till after
walkabout."

"There's no one in his tribe near his age,"
Dane explained. "And I'd have to wait three years for Hari. That's
too long."

"I see." Rowan found appalling the prospect
of these two children wandering the wildlands alone.

Dane's eyes were bright in anticipation.
"We're working out signals. Because he can't tell me his tribe's,
and I can't tell him ours. So we're making up our own."

Rowan searched for something to say. "Make
the signals good ones," she told the children, "and learn them
well."

By evening, Rowan was restless; but Bel
declined to observe the evening's entertainment and remained in
Kree's tent, contemplating her own presentation for the following
evening. Rowan brought her dinner. "Why do you need to change your
poem?"

When creating, Bel habitually wore an
expression of utter serenity. Her face altered not at all as she
replied, "To make it better."

"I don't see how that's possible," Rowan
admitted honestly.

Bel began to eat, completely absorbed in her
thoughts. Presently she said, mildly, "Go away. Find something to
do."

The steerswoman smiled to herself and
accepted the dismissal. She sought out Fletcher.

"Aren't you bored with my company by
now?"

"Not at all," she assured him.

He offered his arm in exaggerated Inner Lands
courtliness. "Then permit me to be your escort for the evening. Ho,
Averryl!" he called to his friend, "I'm squiring the steerswoman
tonight."

The warrior handed his empty bowl to a
waiting mertutial. "What's 'squiring'?"

"Making sure she enjoys herself."

Rising, Averryl wiped his mouth on the back
of his hand, and his hand on a cloth. "Get into another insult
duel. That should be fun." He passed the cloth to the
mertutial.

Fletcher acquired a fantastic glower. "I lost
the last one. Miserably."

"Exactly."

The tribes were camped on a slope. Rowan,
Fletcher, and Averryl walked down among the paths of Kammeryn's
camp. They ended finally at the tribe's fire pit, skewed from its
usual position. Not far to the right lay another fire, apparently
belonging to another tribe, and to the left lay four more, all
arranged to form a short arc. There were open-sided cook tents near
each fire, each tribe ranging out behind its cook tent in a
widening wedge. Rowan instinctively surmised a completion of the
arrangement: a single central open area ringed around by fires,
with the avenues between tribes radiating like the spokes of a
wheel. The steerswoman calculated that it would take twelve tribes
to complete the circle.

Averryl shook his head when Rowan commented.
"No, that never happens. There are never twelve tribes near enough
to each other to Rendezvous. The most I've ever heard of gathered
is eight."

There was food at each fire pit, and all were
apparently welcome to sample. Past the fires was a large flat area,
where activities were in progress: dances with spinning sticks
flung into the air, and impromptu groups of musicians with bone
flutes, wooden clappers of various tones, banjos, and mandolins,
the last amazingly constructed from the skulls of goblins.

They paused to watch a wrestling match, where
a pair of muscular women contested, first one pinned to stillness,
then both suddenly writhing and twisting, and the other now pinned
to stillness. When the match was won, Averryl gave Rowan and
Fletcher a sidelong glance, then wandered over to speak to the
winner, saying something to her that immediately caused her to
laugh out loud with delight.

Fletcher nudged Rowan; she nudged him back.
Linking arms again, they left Averryl behind.

After dinner, a more formal gathering took
place. People arranged themselves about the open area, on all
sides, taking advantage of the natural slope. And one by one, each
tribe was called upon for a song, or a poem, or a tale.

Rowan heard of a fierce battle for pasture;
of a young warrior who presumed to court her own tribe's seyoh; of
a haunting, where the spirit of an uncast man killed his tribe's
goats, one by one, until his body was found and given proper
rites.

But when the Face People were called upon,
they did not respond. There was an uncomfortable pause, and then
Kammeryn's tribe was called on, and Averryl delivered the tale of
his rescue by Rowan and Bel.

When he finished, someone spoke out of turn.
"I will tell," the voice called out. A small man approached from
the back of the crowd and made his way down the slope to the
center, walking stolidly, almost defiantly, as if to battle.

There came a slow rising, murmur of surprise,
and within it isolated pockets of sharp comment, clearly
disapproving.

"What's wrong?" Rowan asked, but when the man
reached his position, she saw him clearly for the first time.
"That's a Face Person."

He stood boldly in place, staring down each
individual complaining group.

"Will they try to stop him?" Rowan asked.

"Don't know." Fletcher was squinting at the
man. "That's our friend from the alleyway." The man they had seen,
sitting alone, facing the Face People's camp.

When quiet came at last, the man announced,
"This is for the one I love: Randa, Chensdotter, Luz."

"Should he say her names?"

"She must be dead."

The man drew a long breath, as if to shout;
instead, he sang: "Who has seen her," he began in a harsh
voice,

"—Following the wind

From end to end, long hills

Winding, black and midnight, when her voice

Comes shadowing down the sky? . . ."

"That's Einar's song," Rowan said quietly. "
'The Ghost Lover.' "

"One of Einar's songs," Fletcher corrected.
"He wrote about a thousand."

The singer did not have a singer's voice: it
was rough-edged and unmelodic, needing to be forced from note to
note. But the song itself, somehow, did not suffer. It acquired a
color far different from that which Bel had given it. It was no
longer a song of sweet, eerie longing; it was a hopeless plea, a
cry of pain.

"From where she stands to where I stand

Is but a hand, a link, and a lock,

But there are doors, mine poor for being

Always wide—"

Rowan thought it odd to hear of a door and a
lock in a song sung by a tent-dwelling Outskirter. Tent entrances
were sometimes loosely referred to as doors—but they had no
locks.

All known Outskirter history began with the
days of Einar, the first to use poem and song, easily passed on to
later generations. She wondered what events lay lost before Einar's
time.

"I lose my days in days of days.

I know my time by nights of yes or no,

In going, stepping into dark,

And standing, marking yes or no—"

Bel's home tribe believed that Einar, for the
love of the ghost, never made love to a human woman, and thus left
no descendants. Kammeryn's tribe believed that Einar did take part
in normal romantic intercourse, but that his unnatural relations
with the spirit-woman drained the power of life from his seed.
Rowan found both versions credible: Einar's devotion to his
mysterious love was utter, complete. Such an intensity could not
exist without effect upon Einar himself, either emotional or
physical. But Einar seemed not to care about the state of his soul,
or, by implication, of his body. He only loved, totally; and
hundreds of years later, the wiry, rough man now present held up
that love for all to see, as the mirror of his own.

" . . . And she will tell me, when she speaks again:
the cry

Of stars, the sweet of light, the secret tongue of
numbers.

When last I sang she smiled, and I will sing
again

While all the world and winter rain complete,

Until fleeing has no home but her words,

Last known, last awaited, last spoken, last
heard."

The song ended. There was silence. With no
further ceremony, the small man immediately left the center, walked
to the edge of the crowd, and vanished.

Rowan and Fletcher walked slowly back to camp
together. Without looking, she was sharply aware of him as a long
angular form of bone and muscle moving quietly at her side. She had
instinctively lengthened her stride; he had shortened his. Their
steps matched.

"He must have been a very strange man,
Einar," Rowan said at last, thinking aloud.

"How's that?"