The Outskirter's Secret (6 page)

"What are you doing?"

Bel was disgruntled. "What no one else is
doing."

Rowan added up the clues of her behavior.
"You're standing guard."

"That's right."

"The others don't seem concerned."

"They're fools."

The steerswoman fell in with her friend's
careful pacing. "How long will you keep this up?"

"Until they put that fire out."

Goblins were attracted by fire at night, Bel
had often told the steerswoman. Rowan looked back at the camp. The
flickering light was blocked from sight by two low canvas tents.
Its faint glow was visible only high above, where it eerily
outlined the branches of the overhanging trees.

Bel had also said that there were no trees in
the Outskirts; they were not, then, beyond the admittedly vague
limits of the Inner Lands. "I don't think goblins are common in
these parts," Rowan said.

"They don't have to be common to be
here."

They continued their slow pacing of the
perimeter. The sounds shifted from those of wind and open meadow to
the night sounds of forest, cool and close. Voices drifted from the
camp: a single person, speaking in declamatory style, others
laughing. "You don't like this tribe," Rowan observed.

Bel's voice was tight. "No."

They were completely alone in the darkness.
"Why not?"

Away from the camp, Bel's answer came
immediately. "They're not good Outskirters. And it'll do no good to
tell them so."

"You're the only Outskirter I know well,"
Rowan observed. Underfoot, the gravel changed to soft pine needles.
"It's hard for me to look at you and know how much is unique, how
much common to all Outskirters. What's wrong with these
people?"

"What's wrong with these people is your
people. The Inner Lands. This tribe has been weakened by them.
Things are too easy here." Bel's posture shifted: a slight drop of
one shoulder, then the other, the brief weaving motion Bel often
made when thinking. "I wouldn't mind if they decided to live
completely like Inner Landers, in farms and towns and such, because
that's a useful way, too, even though it's weak. But what they've
done is taken some Inner Lands ways, and lost some of the true ways
. . ." She turned abruptly and, slapping Rowan's arm once, pointed
back to the camp. "Look. Where is their herd, where are their
handicrafts? Raiding is fair; if you can't defend your goods, you
don't deserve them. But if you only live by preying on the weak,
then you're weaker than your prey. These people would die without
the Inner Lands nearby. They're not good Outskirters, just
bandits."

"I see . . ."

"And Hanlys is a warrior, did you notice?"
Her voice was outraged. "Yes . . ."

"Well, that's wrong. You choose a seyoh from
the mertutials. If your leader knows only how to fight people, and
not how to fight the land, or hunger, or disease . . ." She made a
sound: a harsh breath released through her teeth, a sound of
disgust. "This is what you get. These people are stealing your
goods, while they steal our name. I wish a troop of goblins
would
come down on them."

Rowan sought the right word. "They're . . .
degenerated?"

"They're primitive."

Through gaps in the ring of tents, Rowan
studied the crowd of warriors around the campfire: men and women
clean though unkempt, rough-mannered but friendly and lively. She
thought she could see part of Bel in them, but did not mention
it.

But then she thought of the raiders'
disinterest in the death of Jermyn's wife, of their abandonment of
her remains to scavenging animals, and she began to see that these
Outskirters did lack something that Bel possessed in full: perhaps
a depth of heart, or breadth of understanding.

"Do you want to leave them?" After taking so
much trouble to win their assistance, it seemed unlikely.

"No," Bel confirmed. "But don't expect me to
tell them that I like them."

"I won't." The very idea distressed Rowan.
"The tribe is moving in the morning," she pointed out. "If you
stand guard all night you won't travel well."

"That's true." The Outskirter stopped herself
abruptly, then let out an amused "Ha!" She looked up at the
steerswoman, shadowed eyes glinting starlight. "If we sleep near
the center of the camp, then any goblins that come will get at
these fools first, and we'll have plenty of warning."

Rowan found herself laughing, despite the
possibly grim vision. "There is that," she conceded.

Bel clapped her shoulder. "Let's do it. They
can take their chances."

They returned to the center of the camp and
found entertainment in progress. A huge red-haired warrior was
pacing by the fire, singing a humorous song in a booming voice.
Rowan and Bel took seats beside the offending fire.

The song told of an Outskirter scout who
seduced a farmer's daughter, inspiring her to steal her father's
possessions, one by one, as gifts to her lover; a clever, saucy
tale—and one that Rowan had heard a dozen times in the Inner Lands,
with a tinker in the role of the Outskirter.

The hatchet-faced woman rose next, to recite
a heavy-rhythmed poem which included many lovingly depicted gory
battles, whose points or purposes remained obscure. The warriors
listened intently, but the steerswoman noted one face not watching
the recitation. It was Jermyn. During the previous song, he had
showed ostentatious hilarity; now he sat, expression blank, eyes on
the ground. One of his dicing companions nudged him to direct his
attention. He did not respond.

Bel and Rowan were seated across the fire
from him; Bel was following Rowan's gaze. "He should sing a song
for his wife. Or tell a story, or a poem; something to mark her
passing."

"I don't believe that he wants to," Rowan
observed. Jermyn's companions continued to display no sympathy for
his loss, and he seemed to wish to pay it no attention himself;
finally mastering his emotions, he fabricated an expression of
interest and turned up his face toward the performer, to display
it.

Had Bel not spoken the next words, Rowan
would have: "It's wrong."

"Yes."

The woman's recitation came to a thudding
end, and in the space that followed, someone seated far back from
the fire underwent a degree of cajoling, as friends called for an
amusing story. The person reluctantly began to rise to his feet, a
lopsided grin on his face.

Bel stood. "I'll do it." She stepped
forward.

Her appearance was a surprise, exciting quiet
comments from the warriors, some of dubious tone. Bel ignored them
and took up her position by the fire, to the right, where the
fewest people sat behind her. Rowan saw her in profile, face
flickering pale in firelight, starlit darkness behind.

The tune was slow and gentle, filled with the
rich, long notes that Bel's voice carried best. The lyrics followed
no standard form that Rowan recognized; they wandered, with no
clear rhymes, only suggestions of assonance, falling at unexpected
points in the melody, line endings now lagging, now running ahead
of the natural symmetry of the tune.

"Who has seen her, following the wind,

From end to end, long hills

Winding, black and midnight when her voice

Comes shadowing down the sky?

I know her eyes from ages past, and this

A year ago, a day,

Still too wise for the touch . . ."

Melodic cadence and lyric resolution seemed
to wrap around each other. Rowan began to catch the sense behind
the structure: an endless, forward-moving spiral, as each element
strove to complete itself, found itself out of step with its
partner, and so was impelled to continue.

". . . Her eyes now light in light on dark,

Her voice a silent, known and humming

In my heart only: wider, call and empty.

Her fingers pulse the edges of the sky . . ."

The style of grammar was peculiar, the choice
of metaphor hardly comprehensible: the song seemed to use words in
a fashion very different from the usual. The steerswoman struggled
briefly, then understood that a hundred unheard implications echoed
unperceived behind each phrase. She began to listen more with her
heart than her ears, grasping at the emotions that trailed behind
the words. First they seemed like moving shadows; then like pastel
banners of silk; then she understood how to hear the song, and its
images opened to her.

It was a love song, but the strangest she had
ever heard. The woman who was its subject seemed absent, though
bound to return; but from the manner in which the composer
attempted to convey her nature, it was clear that she was
perceptible only to him, like a spirit, or a ghost, coming to him
alone, mysteriously.

". . . 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 . . ."

Although the form was new to her, Rowan
sensed that the song was ancient, passed from voice to voice,
altered subtly across the years. The composer was as gone as his
lover, as mysterious as she, known only to the listener for the
space of time that his words and music were lifted into the night
air by Bel. Defining his lover, he defined himself; showing what he
loved, he showed the most secret part of his soul, showed it easily
and willingly.

In all Rowan's short life of only casual
love, she found herself for the first time wishing to know someone
who would speak of her in words like these.

"Until my own hands meet once,

And fleeting, learn her place among

The empty spaces I will arrange myself

Among the changes of the dark. I will

Find myself in waiting, forget I wait,

And what is known, unknown. When she is gone,

I am sole and only . . ."

The flickering fire, the harsh, still faces
vanished; but Rowan remained aware of the forest, of the cool quiet
atmosphere smelling of greenness and water, of the sky where, amid
the glittering stars of the Fisherman, the Eastern Guidestar shone,
a stark needle-point of light.

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

Of stars, the sweet of light, the secret tang 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 elements of structure approached each
other, met: the song ended.

There was a long silence, and Rowan rode on
the silence as if it were still song; it seemed endless, holding
within it all the time needed for the mind to reach across the wide
world, across time and history. She felt empty, but not diminished,
as if all that lay in her heart had left her body to become water,
sky, the air itself.

She was a hollow reed, and the wind had blown
through her, the wind that circled the world, that had been
everywhere and touched everything and was still touching it. That
wind had blown one pure tone through her soul and departed, and she
waited, disbelieving that it could be gone.

A motion brought her mind back to camp,
leaving a piece of her heart in the wilderness. Bel shifted from
one foot to the other in a fashion characteristic to her at the
completion of a performance, smiled her small smile, and crossed
over to seat herself by Rowan's knee.

The steerswoman studied her friend: a small,
compact shape of bone and muscle, fur and leather, poetry and
violence. Beneath a shock of short brown hair, the familiar dark
eyes glowed in pleasure. Rowan shook her head, amazed.

There was a scattering of ground-pounding
Outskirter applause, and Rowan looked across the fire for Jermyn's
reaction. He was gone. "What happened to Jermyn?"

A man beside her replied. "Ran off." And he
reached behind her to give Bel's shoulder a friendly shove.
"There's a new way to do battle: turn a man to an infant with a
song, and send him crying."

The steerswoman looked at him in shock. He
had not been listening; or, listening, had not understood. It did
not seem possible.

"Better than swords," one woman added with a
laugh, lounging back to lean on her elbows. "Easy victory, no blood
to either side."

Rowan found it difficult to control her
distaste. "I don't believe that was the intention."

Bel's eyes flared. "That was 'The Ghost
Lover,' " she informed the woman stiffly. "Someone ought to have
sung it, or something like it, so I did."

Hanlys joined the conversation. "It worked on
Jermyn. Looked like a ghost himself."

Bel had altered the way she was sitting,
becoming more upright, more balanced. "It's one of Einar's songs,"
she said coldly.

The woman who had spoken earlier indicated
deprecating comprehension. "I suppose they still sing those old
songs," she said, and made a vague gesture intended to refer to the
east, actually indicating south by southwest.

Rowan recognized danger in Bel and tried to
redirect the conversation. "Who's Einar?" she asked.

"The first seyoh, from the oldest times we
know. He made our laws. And he was a poet, and a singer."

"A legendary figure," Hanlys put in, for the
steerswoman's edification.

"Not only legend! He was a real person!"

The woman disagreed. "If he lived, why does
no one have his name in their line?"

"Because he loved a ghost! You can't get
children on a ghost."

The male warrior spoke under his breath.
"Loved a ghost, ha. Goat, more like, out there," he said, and then
events moved too quickly for Rowan to forestall.

From her cross-legged position, Bel was on
her feet in a single fluid movement. Her sheathed sword had been on
the ground beside her; now the naked blade was in her hand.
"Enough!" Light flickered on the weapon as it moved: then,
abruptly, it was standing alone, vertical, its point buried in the
earth by the fire, while its owner pointed an accusing finger that
moved slowly around the circle of faces, indicating each and every
person singly. "This is a challenge!" Fury filled Bel's voice, a
fury Rowan recognized: the fury of battle. Bel's dark eyes
glittered, cold stars in a shadowed face. "Come forward!"