The Outskirter's Secret (56 page)

He was a moment answering. "They're saying
that Fletcher caused all this." The forced march; the deaths while
traveling; hours of digging into the ground; close quarters;
discomfort. Fletcher was resented, perhaps hated; and Averryl, his
closest friend, was conveniently at hand.

Rowan became angry. "All this," she said, "is
intended to save our lives. And if we do survive, then yes,
Fletcher will have caused that." He nodded silently.

She scanned the horizon. Nothing appeared
unusual; it was simply a late-autumn morning in the Outskirts. "If
you've been watching, have you seen anything odd?"

He was gazing westward, and nodded again.
"Just before first light. The stars along the horizon—" He
stretched out one hand and trembled it as demonstration. "—they
twinkled, harder than I've ever seen before. And some of them
seemed to move."

She was appalled. "Move?"

"Up and down, back and forth. But only right
on the horizon, in a space just the width of two fingers. If we
didn't have a clear horizon, I wouldn't have seen it." There was a
clear horizon due west, and southwest; north, a ridge blocked the
view.

"Heat," she explained. In the Inner Lands,
she had often watched stars writhing through the heat rising from a
campfire.

Heat properly should rise; heat should not
come down invisibly from the sky. Nevertheless, it was doing so,
even as she and Averryl stood together in the cool morning, waiting
for the sun to appear.

Averryl looked straight up. "What's
that?"

Above, a faint gray haze. "I don't know."
Unconsciously, she took two steps forward, as if by walking she
could move closer to the sky itself. The haze was thickening.
"Fog?" And high beams of the still-unrisen sun cleared the eastern
horizon, washing the gray to pure, pale, breathtaking gold.

It was high vapors coalescing, creating
themselves as Rowan and Averryl watched, evolving into a faint line
of cloud that stretched up from the southwestern horizon, crossed
the sky above, and vanished behind the ridge to the north. Sunlight
glowed upon the cloud, and it stood strange and glorious, spun gold
against the lightening blue dome of the sky.

"It's beautiful," Averryl said, in a voice of
wonder. Rowan thought it impossible, and horrible.

Jaffry emerged from the shelter at her feet
and caught sight of her and Averryl. "Chess says—" He began. He
stopped, stared above. "Oh . . ."

"What does Chess say?" Rowan asked him. The
cloud-sweep was growing deeper, more defined.

"Is that the heat? It's running the wrong way
. . ."

"No, it's not the heat. Whatever this is,
it's parallel to the area that the heat is striking. What does
Chess say?" The cloud was thickening visibly, beginning to look
uncomfortably like a squall line coming into existence from
nothing, directly above their heads.

The young man pulled his attention from the
sky and addressed Averryl. "That no one should worry about the
goats outside. I'm supposed to tell each tent."

Averryl nodded. "I'll tell the people in
mine."

"Is Bel in with you?"

Averryl had been about to leave; he stopped,
and hesitated before replying. "Bel isn't here."

"What?" Jaffry's face was suddenly blank with
shock.

Rowan was puzzled by the intensity of his
reaction. "She was serving as point scout, and sighted signs of
another tribe to the east. She went to warn them."

He spun on her. "When?"

"Yesterday morning. She hadn't made it back
by nightfall, and she couldn't travel in the dark. But if she went
to the first scouts of the other tribe, told them, and turned
straight around, she must have been near here by sunset. It's light
now; she'll arrive soon."

"Jaffry," Averryl said, and the young warrior
turned to him. "There's nothing that you can do."

Jaffry stood staring at him for a long
moment, then abruptly turned and hurried away toward the next tent,
on his errand for Chess.

Rowan framed a puzzled question to Averryl;
but before she could utter it, it answered itself:

The courting gifts left for Bel had appeared
the first morning she and Rowan were in camp, a very short span of
time for the appearance of romantic feeling. Only two men of the
tribe had been acquainted with Bel for longer than a day: Averryl,
who was too ill to make and leave gifts; and Jaffry. Rowan wondered
why she had not seen this before.

Rain began to fall. Rowan looked up. The line
of cloud was heavier. A cusp of sun appeared on the eastern
horizon, and Rowan instinctively turned her back to it to look for
a rainbow. She found one in the western sky: bright, high, complete
across its entire length, and triple in form.

The cloud was now pure white in the sunlight,
and roiling with abnormal speed. Averryl watched it with jaw
dropped. "We should go inside," he said presently.

"Not yet." The light breeze that had been
stirring the grass tops hesitated, then ceased. The redgrass
silenced. Rowan and Averryl stood waiting.

Far to the west, under the arc of the
rainbow, the shadowed land seemed to shimmer. Movement of some
sort—then Rowan understood. The redgrass at the horizon was
flattening under the force of a distant wind. The area's nearer
limit visibly approached, swiftly. The steerswoman braced
herself.

But the air nearby, all around her, already
calm, now seemed somehow to still even further, to grow almost
thinner. Rowan felt a sudden, sharp pain in her ears—

Then all the air was in motion, the edge of
flattened grass arrived and swept past, and Rowan stumbled forward
at the force of the wind at her back—a wind not from the west, but
the east. She turned into it, and recovered her balance.

It was strong, storm force; had Rowan been on
a ship, she would have been hurrying to shorten sail. But there was
no danger to this wind; the tents would easily hold.

The wind did not gust, nor swirl. It ran,
steadily east to west, seeming almost perfectly horizontal and
coming from no storm, but the sweet sun-glared horizon. Leaning
harder into it, she considered that the tent slopes might have
aligned better; but Fletcher had said that the wind would later
shift.

She stepped back to Averryl and leaned
close.

"Let's get inside," he said over the rushing
noise.

She shook her head. "You go on. This isn't
bad. I want to wait for Bel." A dead tanglebrush rolled up the
slope and caught against a goat, which started bawling, dancing
away from it. Other goats bawled response, and those standing shied
about, then made their way to the lee of the low tent peaks. The
tanglebrush, now free of its obstacle, spun in place crazily,
upside down on its mazy dome.

"You're being stupid!" The words were not
angry, merely louder to carry over the wind.

Rowan laughed. "Do you know," she said, close
to his ear, "I'd hate to have to count the number of times an
Outskirter has said that to me."

The wind increased; soon, it was better to
sit on the ground, back to the wind. Averryl gave her one edge of
his cloak, and she wrapped herself close to him. They steadied each
other as the force against their backs grew.

The wind should have dispersed the line of
cloud. No such event occurred. The cloud had ceased to spread, but
it stayed in place, and its face was roiling faster. The cloud
built higher, lower, and its western edge was now shadowed from the
sun, black and threatening. The top, along its entire visible
length, was forming into the familiar anvil of a thunderhead, made
weird by infinite extension north and south.

At the first sign of lightning, they would
have to take shelter. Rowan thought of Bel, alone on the
wind-driven veldt. She looked over one shoulder.

The shimmering redgrass had vanished. In its
place: a single featureless expanse of dull brick red. The grass
was lying completely horizontal, driven by the solid, sourceless
gale. Rowan swept water from her eyes as she tried to see if she
could discern a single, approaching figure. None was visible. Rowan
imagined the gale wind catching Bel's cloak and lifting her, to
send her spinning away into the sky like a lost sail. But Bel,
although short, was in no way a light person. Rowan found the
vision amusing; and then, quite suddenly, appalling.

Movement above caught her eye, and she
twisted about again, looking up. The top of the squall line was
sending out wild streamers, swirling out without diminishing the
whole, speeding away east.

The ground wind blew east to west. The wind
above was west to east. Rowan could not explain it.

It was now full morning, with white sunlight
casting her and Averryl's shadows before them, rain falling at a
sharp, windy slant from above, and the triple rainbow, a trifle
lower in the sky, even brighter than before. But behind the
rainbow, below and past the squall line, over the presumed area of
the magical heat, the western sky was as clear and blue as the
eastern.

From one of the shelters, a figure
half-emerged, looking about, short red hair wild in the wind: Kree.
Rowan nudged Averryl. "Go on, she's looking for you," she told him;
she had to repeat it, louder.

"Are you going in?" he shouted back.

"Soon!"

His expression was stubborn. "I'll wait!"

There came a thump on Rowan's shoulder; she
turned into the wind.

Bel: glaring, leaning down to shout her words
an inch from Rowan's nose. "What are you doing out here?"

Rowan grinned. "Waiting for you!"

"You're a lunatic!"

"Yes!" the steerswoman replied with
enthusiasm. And Averryl instantly made off, with obvious
relief.

Rowan and Bel helped each other to the
shelter's entrance, struggling against the wind, bracing their arms
on each other's shoulders. "Where's your cloak?" Rowan asked when
they were inside.

"I lost it."

Bel slept, promising to relate her
experiences after her rest. The report was delayed further: three
hours later, the wind noise even in the shelter became an
unchanging roar, too loud, too steady, for conversation.

There was thunder, intermittent, and then
almost constant. Lightning became a continuous flicker, outlining
the shelter roof, the crack in the door; someone hurried to secure
it tighter. The rain was heavier, seeming to fall like stones. The
air shook, constantly, as if the shelter were a drum continuously
ruffled, with the humans trapped within. It was not far from the
truth.

Outside, heard only in the short gaps between
thunder peals, the goats cried out in their weirdly human voices,
seeming quiet and distant against the roaring wind. The animals
tried to hide behind the tent peak, crowding, shoving each other
onto the tent itself. The ceiling sagged, writhed, and threatened
to collapse. Rowan and three others quickly stood to push up from
below, spilling the animals off; and they did the same again
moments later, and again; more helpers joined the work. At last
there were nine people standing with bent backs, supporting the
laden roof against their shoulders.

One of Garris's warriors, at his own
initiative, tied a safety line about his waist, handed its end to
his comrades, and exited the shelter. There was a tense half hour
of waiting; then, one by one, the weight of each goat on the roof
vanished. When he returned, exhausted and rain-drenched, the word
made its way slowly across the shelter, from shouting mouth to
noise-numbed ear: "He killed them."

Rowan wanted to know what else he had seen;
whether the inhabitants of the other shelters had done the same as
he; whether the other shelters were still intact.

Such detailed communication was impossible.
Rowan returned to a seat beside Bel, who was now awake, looking
about with a sharp gaze, thinking, waiting for an opportunity for
useful action.

There was nothing to do but wait. More people
slept than Rowan thought possible amid the noise: they were still
too spent to do otherwise. Others sat, huddled, as if the sound of
wind and rain were itself wind and rain, as if it were necessary to
brace and protect oneself from the mere noise. With painful
slowness, the hours passed.

Kammeryn had awakened briefly. In the
near-blackness of the shelter, it was impossible for Rowan to
evaluate his condition. He attempted to sit up; Chess did not
permit him to do so. He acquiesced so quickly that Rowan was
concerned.

Chess tried to fill him in on the situation,
shouting each sentence near his ear. Eventually the seyoh was made
to understand that all persons within the shelter were currently
safe; that the condition of others was undetermined and
indeterminable. He nodded at the information—weakly, it seemed to
Rowan—and gripped Chess's shoulder once in response. Then he closed
his eyes and lay quiet, possibly asleep; and Rowan assumed that
Chess was still in command.

Rowan's own weariness began again to overtake
her. She did not want to sleep. She wanted to observe, to notice
every detail of experience—but not for the sake of a steerswoman's
endless search for information.

It was not her being a steerswoman that made
her want to know; she had become a steerswoman because of her own
need, the need to know and understand. And at this moment, she
merely wished, for herself, to be aware, and could not bear the
thought of being otherwise.

Hoping to husband her strength, she braced
her back against the bare earth wall. The contrast between the
shuddering air around her and the utter stability of the earth
against her back confused her senses; she was immediately, horribly
nauseous. She leaned forward, away from the wall. The conflict
vanished, and she was instantly more at home, in the midst of every
sailor's proper element: motion. She sensed it on her skin and
behind her eyes; it gently trembled her bones. She reached back and
groped along the earth face, finding one of the internal guy lines
where it dove into the dirt. She wrapped her fingers about it, and
it was like a living tendon in her hand. The taut tent skin above
spoke to her through the line, through her fingers, and she
listened with her body to the tale of wind, force, and power
driving across the land above.