The Outskirter's Secret (47 page)

But eventually, interest in the topic waned.
It was an unlikely occurrence. Steerswomen meeting bandits were
usually simply attacked, as would be any other of the common folk.
They responded by fleeing or defending their lives by sword. In
situations of smaller harm, such as personal intrigue, the
steerswoman first told the questioner that all parties concerned
would be informed of the entire conversation, and the question was
usually withdrawn.

Rowan's own experiences had been more
extreme, and she had responded to the wizards' threat to her life
by resigning the Steerswomen, leaving her free to assume a false
identity and deceive as necessary. But she had suffered during that
period. While a steerswoman, she was a living embodiment of the
principle she held highest; while not a steerswoman, the lack of
that principle left a wound in her spirit, as sharp as physical
pain.

She said to the seyoh, "If you asked for the
names, I would first ask if you planned to use them to cause harm."
A person intending harm would not be likely to admit to it; and she
would catch him in an obvious lie, place him under the
Steerswomen's ban, and be free to deny him the information.

He avoided the trap. "And if I did, and said
so?"

She became angry. "Then," she said fiercely,
"this is what I would do: I would answer your question, but I would
delay my reply for the space of time it took for me to challenge
you to a blood duel, and either win or die."

He raised his eyes and regarded her calmly.
"A dead woman cannot answer. A dead man needs no reply. This is
clever, but dangerous. You would do this to protect your
friends?"

"No." She felt that she was thinking as an
Outskirter, and that it was absolutely correct to do so. "I would
do it as revenge against you personally, for daring to try and
force me to betray my own honor."

And to her utter amazement, he smiled. "Ha,"
he said, and pounded the carpet with his fist, twice. He seemed to
enjoy the action; possibly it served him in place of laughter.

Then he rose, crossed the tent, and returned
carrying a box of stiff, woven fabric, somewhat larger than was
usual. He placed it before her, opened it, and removed an object
from within. He said to her, and it was a strange phrase to hear
stated in such a prosaic tone, "Here is a wondrous thing." He
closed the box, placed the object on the lid, and leaned back.

The steerswoman sat stunned. "Skies above,"
she breathed.

A squat cone on a short base, standing a foot
and a half tall and perhaps two feet in diameter, made of
tarnished, dented metal. Its surface was studded with smaller
objects, some attached directly to the face of the cone, some
placed on the ends of rods.

She forgot the Face Person, the tent, the
fact that she was sitting in the middle of a possibly hostile camp.
The object stood before her, startlingly incongruous, impossibly
present.

Fascinated, Rowan moved closer, rising to her
knees to do so. The seyoh spoke. "You may touch it; it is
harmless."

She did so, hesitantly, then probingly. The
rods and objects were attached securely, but four of the six rods
were bent at an angle. She tested and could not straighten them.
The objects on the rods' tips were damaged; one had glass shards
where there must once have been a small glass boss.

She tilted the cone to see the base. The
metal was cool on her palm, but it was not iron or steel, or brass;
the entire thing shifted too easily, was too light to be
constructed of those materials.

From the base hung a number of thick, stiff
strings; and these she had seen before. When she and Bel had
infiltrated the fortress of the wizards Shammer and Dhree, Rowan
had managed by stealth to examine the contents of one of a number
of wooden boxes being unloaded from a delivery cart: rolls of
semirigid strands of a brightly colored, unidentifiable substance,
with copper cores within, like magically coated jeweler's wire.
These were the same. "This is wizard-made," she said.

"Wizards are legends, so I had always
believed," the seyoh said. "I thought this merely made by men with
strange knowledge."

She could not take her eyes from the thing in
her hands. "We're both right," she replied distantly. "Wizards are
men, with very strange knowledge indeed."

The connection between cone and base was
crushed and flattened to one side. She peered up at the joining. It
seemed designed to rotate. The base itself was hollow to a shallow
depth, stopped by a flat surface etched with lines of copper. Not
the pattern itself, but the intricacy nudged at her memory; it was
vaguely reminiscent of the sort of decorations found on clothing
made by the Kundekin, a reclusive craftspeople dwelling in the
Inner Land. But more importantly, the spell that controlled the
magical gate guarding the wizards' fortress had been activated by a
wooden disk and a ceramic recess, both of which had lines not much
different from these.

The magical gate had opened of its own
accord; and Rowan knew that this was one use of magic, to animate
the inanimate. Likely this object, as part of a Guidestar, did
something, undertook some action; and as she had suspected, the
Guidestars themselves somehow acted.

"I'm tempted," she said, "to try to take it
apart."

"I have tried, myself, often. It does not
admit my prying."

Rowan noted scratches and scorings on the
surface. "Did you use a metal knife?" He had done. He showed it to
her, and its edge was chipped.

The inner surface around the open base was of
a substance something like very hard ceramic, bearing innumerable
dark lines where the knife had been drawn across the material. She
cautiously inserted her hand into the base; it was smooth on the
sides, and the back of her hand was scratched by the copper-etched
face, which seemed to have short bits of wire thrust through from
the opposite side.

She removed her hand and looked inside again.
The copper lines served to connect the short bits of wire to each
other. The positioning of the wire ends suggested the placement of
objects on the opposite side, tantalizingly; there were obvious
sets of pairs, the outlines of rectangles and parallelograms. Using
her fingers, she tried to feel the edges of the copper-etched face.
The seyoh watched, then wordlessly passed his chipped knife to her.
She inserted the blade and ran it around the sides, finding no
purchase. "Have you tried to break it open?" A sledgehammer and
anvil might have been useful.

"Yes. I failed."

The steerswoman stood the object back on its
base, atop the Outskirter box. She drew away her hands and sat
regarding it.

A piece of the fallen Guidestar. This thing
had once dwelt in the sky, forever falling around the world,
forever missing the ground, forever seeming to hang at one point on
the celestial equator. And it now sat before her. "How did you get
it?"

"I found it myself, as a young boy. There was
more: a great hole in the ground where it had struck, and some more
metal in the earth. I was tending the flock and discovered it, and
ran to tell my seyoh.

"I thought straightaway that it was a piece
of the light of omen, that it had fallen from the sky. My seyoh
agreed, and saved this part of it. We carried it with us always."
He made a small, disparaging sound. "He revered it, and said we
were to do the same. I am no such fool. It is a only a thing.
Wondrous, but still a thing."

"But you still keep it."

He nodded. "It is strange. It inspires
strange thoughts."

She pulled her gaze from the object and
turned to study the seyoh, speculatively. "You seem to regard that
as good."

He smiled, slightly. "I thought long on it,
as a child and as a warrior. I thought in a strange fashion. It is
useful, to think strangely. You see the world in a different way,
become hard to fool. It enabled me to rise among my people and
become seyoh."

"I see." Inspiration from the sky;
originality. "Why did you not mention this at Rendezvous?"

He grunted. "All Outskirters are my enemies.
On the Face, to live is to cause someone else to die; by the sword,
by hunger. And this is true elsewhere in the Outskirts; but it
happens more slowly and is harder to see. I wish that among those
living people shall be all the members of my tribe.

"Bel, Margasdotter, Chanly says to me that we
must work together, and fight with all tribes side by side. To hear
it, it sounds like a good thing.

"But if battle comes, or magical attack,
perhaps Bel will see that three tribes will live if she sends one
into danger, knowing it may die." His head jerked in anger, and he
spoke vehemently. "That tribe will not be mine!"

"I see." Stated so, it made sense; but only
from the one tribe's perspective. "But don't you understand," she
went on, "that if the wizards, or Slado himself, come to the
Outskirts themselves, that your tribe's help may make a difference
to the outcome? And that if the other Outskirters' resistance
fails, you and your tribe will suffer?"

He grunted. "So Bel has said. But she is an
Outskirter. She will protect her own and let others suffer. I do
not trust her. I promise nothing to her. But you—" Rowan found
herself held in a gaze like deep, black water. "You are
different."

"How so?"

He sat long in thought; and it came to Rowan
that he would attempt to express a very abstract idea, and that the
small words with which he was most familiar would prove
insufficient tools.

"In the morning," he said hesitantly, "the
sun comes up. This is good to know, for you must rise, and do
things. But if you sleep in your tent, someone must come and tell
you: The sun has come up."

"Yes . . ."

He became more sure. "To sleep or to rise, to
do the work of your day or to wait—to decide this, you must first
know one thing: that the sun is up. In life, this is always true.
In order to do, you must know."

The steerswoman understood. "True." In order
to choose between alternatives of action, or inaction, one must
first possess the relevant information.

"But you do not always know what is needed
for you to know. You must learn far more than you need to
know."

"True." Once the choice of action was made,
most facts acquired were revealed as superfluous to it, and
unrelated to the subject; but one must first acquire those facts,
in order to recognize that.

"You, steerswoman," the seyoh said, "you know
a great deal."

"Yes . . ."

He looked down, then around, as if the walls
of the tent had vanished and he could clearly see his tribe about
him. "My people suffer. I wondered why. I did not have enough
knowledge to say." He turned back to her, intent. "And then, at the
meeting of the seyohs, you tell me. You know more than I."

"About this one subject, yes, I do . . ."

"Who is to say to you what is needed, or not
needed, for you to know? And so you ask, always. Only foolish
persons would not answer; because it is your way that once you
understand, you give understanding to all who ask it of you."

"I'm a steerswoman," she confirmed.

"And you showed to me that you would rather
die than serve as a tool for others to cause harm." His earlier
questions had been a test.

He indicated the Guidestar fragment. "And so
I show you this, and tell you what I know. Perhaps it will help
you, and me, and my tribe. Perhaps not. Who can say? Only you, who
know the most, can discover. And when you discover, you will tell
all."

She left the camp in high spirits.

She was accompanied to the camp's limits by
one escort, and to a distance of a mile out by a second: grim,
small men, virtually indistinguishable from each other. Rowan found
herself admiring them, for the sake of their seyoh.

When she was left to continue alone, she knew
that there were other watchers hidden, somewhere in the nearby
grass. The fact did not at all disturb her. And when a figure rose
from the grass directly ahead, she expected no trouble
whatsoever.

It fact, it was Fletcher. She regarded him,
amused. "Have you been out there all along?" she asked.

"Hiding like a fool-you bug, up till now." He
looked very nervous indeed. "Let's get out of here."

She smiled reassuringly. "It's all right.
They don't plan any harm."

"So you say." He led the way back. "If they
don't mean harm, why are they watching us so damn hard?"

Bel said, "Natural caution." Where Bel had
appeared from, Rowan had no idea; but there she was, walking
alongside. "If my tribe was so close to another, I'd have a full
war band scattered in hiding, as well."

"Or two," Fletcher said, all attention
fiercely on the surroundings.

Bel glowered. "I counted eleven; so I guessed
twelve."

"I counted eighteen. I guess two dozen."

"Not that many." Bel was disparaging. "Your
imagination is running away with you."

He spoke between his teeth. "I could hear the
buggers breathing."

Rowan could not help but laugh; she could not
ask for two more dedicated guardians. "Really, both of you,
everything is fine. And I've heard and seen the most amazing
things." She prepared to relate the entire experience, too excited
to wait until they reached camp.

But Fletcher had come to a dead halt ahead of
her and stood jittering. "Damn," he said under his breath.

Bel scanned the veldt. "What?"

He ignored her. "Look, you," he said to the
redgrass ahead, "I understand. I sympathize with your, your natural
caution. But if you think we're going to walk within two meters of
you, you're damn well mistaken!" He made a wild gesture of
dismissal.
"Clear off!"

There was a pause, then a louder clatter
among the chattering of the redgrass, and a line of motion,
departing. Rowan and her companions continued on their way. Twenty
feet later, Bel looked back, and Rowan did the same: the Face
Person was now standing, looking after them with a bemused
expression.