The Steerswoman's Road (4 page)

As they walked along together, Rowan tried to dispel the feeling
that she had tossed stones into the den of a wildcat, and that the cat had
greeted her with purrs. She might not be forgiven so easily on another
occasion.

Bel settled to the ground by the fire, pulling her piebald cloak
around her. “I think,” she said without preamble, “that they’re part of the
moon.”

Rowan looked up from her writing, saw that a long conversation
was afoot, and carefully put the lid on her ink jar. She had found during the
day’s march that Bel’s times to talk neatly coincided with her own—or possibly
the Outskirter was sensitive to Rowan’s moods and never started a conversation
when she knew Rowan had no interest. “The moon,” Rowan countered, “was white.”

“Sometimes it was blue.”

“Rarely.”

“Yes, but think about it; the moon changed sizes. It was
bigger sometimes, and smaller at other times.”

“That’s known.” Rowan studied Bel across the fire: a small
bundle of various furs, a thatch of dark hair, dark eyes bright with firelight
and starlight. The Outskirter was wearing an odd little smile, as though she
found the workings of her own mind entertaining. “That’s known, as much as
anything about the moon can be said to be known,” Rowan continued.

“What do you mean?”

Rowan poked the fire with her hiking stick. “Only that no
one’s ever seen it. We don’t know for certain that it ever existed.”

Bel was outraged. “Of course it existed! How can you say the
moon never existed? I’ve been hearing of it all my life. The eldest person of
my tribe recalled hearing of it. And he told me of when he was young, and the
eldest then told him about hearing of it. The tales have existed forever.”

“But no tale tells of where it went.”

“Ha! That’s what I’m speaking about.” She leaned back, and
her belt caught the firelight, glinting. “Things look larger when they are
close, and smaller when they’re distant. If the moon changed size, then I think
it must have been near sometimes, and far away at others. Perhaps it came too
close, and fell down.”

The idea surprised Rowan. “It would explain a great deal.”
She considered. “No. The moon’s been gone for a long time, hundreds of years,
perhaps thousands. If it had shattered into jewels, many more would have been
found by now. And the innkeeper’s jewels—if they were imbedded at the time of
their fall, they would have been deeper, in a far older tree. No, they’re
recent.”

After more discussion Bel reluctantly agreed. “My father was
hardly the first person to visit Dust Ridge, only the first for many years. No
one before him found any jewels. He told me they were in plain sight, scattered
across the face of a cliff.”

“Which direction did the cliff face?” Rowan asked.

“I don’t know. Does it matter?”

“Possibly. In every case where the jewels were found on one
side of a thing, it’s always been the northwest face. It’s as if a giant flung
them across the land—and the giant faced southeast.”

“That may be the answer.”

Rowan laughed, amused by the image. “No, it couldn’t be, of
course. He’d have to be far too tall, and far too strong.”

“But why not, if it’s just a question of size? There are
more strange things in the world than you or I have seen.”

Rowan felt a strange chill fall on her. She became aware of
the space around and above her: the distance to the road, the edge of the
forest close at hand. She sensed the area that the first line of trees defined,
heard the wind whistling in the space that curved over their tops. She saw two
women huddled by a fire, in a place that lay equally distant from each horizon,
in the center of a circle. And she knew, with a mapmaker’s eyes, how small that
circle was. The world was a very large place, and might well contain such
things as giants large enough to scatter objects with a single toss, from the Long
North Road to the heart of the Outskirts.

And yet ...

“Well, let’s see.” Rowan shifted back a bit from the fire,
leaving a wide clear area in front of her. She picked up her pen and, using the
blunt end, sketched in the dirt. “We’ll simplify. Instead of thinking of a
scattering of jewels across a whole range with a single throw, let’s consider
two points.” The piece of ground transformed into a rough chart of the terrain
surrounding the jewels. “Assuming that he threw in a southeasterly direction,
the shortest limit would be here—” She marked a point with her pen end. “—and
the farthest here.” She made as if to mark that point also, then saw that her
scale was off. She got up and backed farther away from the fire, finally
guessing at the position of the Dust Ridge in the Outskirts. “And if we make
it as easy for him as possible, we’ll have him stand right on top of the first
point. All he needs to do is drop his jewel, and we’ve established the first
finding.

“Now to throw, from there, all the way to the Outskirts ...”
She squinted a bit, thinking. “He’s throwing well past the horizon. I wonder
how he aims, or if he aims? And his jewel has to move very fast, to cover that
much ground before it falls.” She stepped to one side, and stooped down,
quickly drawing a complex of interlocking lines.

Rowan discovered that Bel was beside her; lost in her calculations,
she had not noticed when the Outskirter had left her seat across the fire. “What
is that?”

“A graph,” Rowan began. She prepared to elaborate, but her
thoughts ran ahead, leaving her explanation somewhat abbreviated. “It charts
the time it takes an object to fall. The horizontal distance traveled isn’t a
factor. We look at distance traveled here—” And she sketched a second figure
beside the first. “Moving objects fall in a curve.

The harder the object is thrown, the faster it moves, and
the farther it can travel before falling. And, of course, it helps to start
from high up.”

She looked up and saw that Bel was not looking at the
sketches at all, but was studying Rowan’s face. The steerswoman realized she
had left her friend behind. Bel could understand maps of a terrain, but she
obviously had no means to interpret a map of an event.

“Here.” Rowan picked up a white pebble and tossed it into
the road. “You saw that it fell in a curve?”

“Of course. How do you think I hit that rabbit?”

Rowan found another, tossed harder.

“Another curve,” Bel said.

“A flatter curve,” Rowan pointed out.

“Yes.”

Rowan turned back to her graph. “Think of this as a chart of
the route traveled by the pebble. This line could be the ground, and here’s
where we start to throw it. This line shows how the pebble travels along,
curving back down to the ground ...”

Bel nodded. “But the ground isn’t flat.”

“True, but for now we’ll pretend there are no hills or valleys—”

“No, I understand that. But your line doesn’t show that the
ground curves, too. The earth is round.”

Rowan stopped short. Bel continued. “You don’t need to think
about it, normally, but if you’re pretending the giant is throwing past the
horizon, it seems to me that it would make a difference.”

“True.” Rowan felt faintly embarrassed for having underestimated
the level of Bel’s knowledge. She knew aristocrats in Wulfshaven who doubted
that the earth was round.

She tried to adjust her explanation to a more sophisticated
level, then realized that was a mistake, also. There was simply no way to guess
how much knowledge Bel possessed, and of what kind. Instead, Rowan resigned
herself to being constantly surprised by the barbarian.

“True, it would make a difference,” she repeated. “You have
the curve of the earth’s surface—” She drew a long arched line. “And the curve
of the jewel’s path.” She drew a second, wildly out of scale, intersecting the
first. “And of course, the harder he threw, the more the arc flattens.” She
drew a flatter path, reaching farther past the curved “horizon.”

She looked at the three lines for a long time. “That’s odd.”

“What?”

She reached out and added one more line to the out-of-scale
sketch. Abruptly, she started laughing. Bel watched her in perplexity.

“I’m sorry,” Rowan said at last. “Call it a steerswoman’s
joke. Charts like this can fool you sometimes.”

“What do you mean?”

Rowan pointed. “According to this, if he threw something
hard enough, it would never come down.” Bel looked at the sketches, tilting
her head.

“It’s ridiculous, of course,” Rowan continued. “There’s no
way to throw that hard, not even with a catapult. But if you could, then the
path of the object would curve less than the curve of the earth. When the
object fell, it would—” She laughed again. “It would miss the earth.”

“And then?” Bel asked easily.

“And then nothing.” Using her foot, Rowan rubbed out the
drawings. “It doesn’t happen that way, of course. It only seems so, because I
haven’t drawn accurately, I haven’t used real distances. Nothing can throw that
hard, and nothing thrown can move that fast. It’s amusing, but nothing can be
learned from it.” She sat down again and reached for her map case.

Bel dragged another dead branch toward the fire and began
breaking it, standing on the center of the limb and pulling up on the thinner
end. It cracked noisily, and she repeated the process. “No giants?”

“Not in this case.” Rowan pulled out the smaller map of the
jewels’ distribution and began measuring with her calipers.

“That’s too bad. What about magic?”

“It’s beginning to look like that’s the answer. Which means
no answer at all.”

Bel tossed the wood onto the fire. The flames diminished,
damped. Picking up Rowan’s abandoned hiking stick, she pushed the new pieces
into better positions. “Why don’t you ask a wizard?”

“A steerswoman ask a wizard? Not likely. Or rather, not very
useful. They don’t answer.”

“I thought everyone had to answer a steerswoman.”

“Nobody has to answer anyone; people answer because they
want answers in turn. If you deny any steerswoman’s questions, no steers-woman
will ever answer yours again.”

Smiling, Bel sat down next to Rowan. “And wizards don’t
care.”

“Exactly.”

Bel’s eyes glittered. “There’s more than one way to ask a
question. And more than one way to find answers.” She made a stretching reach
and dragged her small pack closer to the fire. “Here’s a way I understand.”
She pulled out a square cloth-wrapped object somewhat larger than her hand. The
cloth was silk, Rowan saw, and she wondered briefly how the Outskirter had
acquired it. Bel unfolded it, revealing a varnished-paper box, and inside the
box

Rowan laughed. “Cards!”

“Do you know the cards?” Bel began to sift through them, tilting
their faded faces to the firelight.

“Well enough, I suppose. But I don’t believe in their accuracy.”

The barbarian gave her a sad look of reproach but said
nothing. She found the Fool and placed it on the ground before her. After a
moment’s hesitation, Rowan pulled the jewel from its leather pouch and laid it
atop the card.

“Shall I shuffle, or will you?” the barbarian asked.

“I don’t see that it matters. The jewel can hardly shuffle
for itself. You go ahead.”

The cards were of the traditional size, large and awkward in
anyone’s hand, especially unwieldy for Bel. She shuffled them thoroughly,
though clumsily, cut them three times with her left hand, re-formed the pack,
and pulled the first card.

It was the two of rods, reversed. Bel moved the blue gem to
one side and placed the card on top of the Fool. “The situation,” Bel began, “is
controlled by others, a domination that causes suffering.”

“Well, the jewel certainly suffered. See? It’s shattered.”
Bel glowered. “Are you going to take this seriously?”

“I’m afraid not.”

The second card was the Priest, and Bel placed it across the
first two. “The way to counter this is by conforming to expected behavior.”

“The jewel doesn’t do that at all.”

“Perhaps if it had, it wouldn’t have shattered,” Bel
retorted. “Now, be quiet, please.” She placed the next card in position above
the first two. “Fortune, reversed. A bad turn of luck.” She threw Rowan a
warning glance, and the steerswoman held her peace, reminding herself that it
was impolite to mock another’s religion, and simply bad tactics to anger an
Outskirter.

The next card was the nine of cups, reversed. “At the root
of the matter, an imperfection in plans.” The Hanged Man. “Suspension. There
has been a period of waiting, of suspended decision, but this is now ending.”
Rowan found herself thinking of an object hurled into the sky and not falling
down; suspended, somehow, but that period of suspension over. Suspended
like—like what?

Encouraged by Rowan’s serious expression, Bel continued. “The
queen of swords, reversed. Narrow-mindedness, intolerance ... these are the
influences now coming into effect.”

Rowan broke off her chain of thought and leaned closer,
interested. “I learned that card differently. Don’t you read a face card as
representing the influence of a person?”

“Not at all. The person on the card stands for the
attributes.” Rowan wondered which interpretation was the original, what aspects
of life led the more primitive society to take a more symbolic point of view.
One would expect the reverse, but it seemed the cultured Inner Lands had either
clung to or developed the literal interpretation. It was an interesting
observation.

The cards now formed a cross on the ground, and Bel placed
the next one to the left of the figure. The five of cups, reversed. Bel
squinted at it, thinking. “A new alliance, or a meeting with an old friend,
bringing hope.”

“But which?”

“Perhaps both. And at this point—” Bel placed the next card
above the previous. “Four of swords, that’s a period of rest, or recuperation,
a withdrawal.” Bel looked dissatisfied, then brightened. “Of course! You’re
going back to the Archives, where you’ll rest, see old friends, then gather
your forces again.”