The Steerswoman's Road (50 page)

They came to a place where a patch of grass had strangely
faded to gray. Bel passed it by, but Rowan lingered, curious. She touched one
pale blade, and it disintegrated, leaving sooty smears on her fingers; she
touched a shaft, and it split, oozing clear fluid that stank with a foul,
greasy odor.

Bel paused and looked back at her. “Don’t bother with that,”
she advised.

“What is it?” Rowan parted the grass to peer into the center
of the patch, despite the stench. There was a clearing within.

“It’s probably a corpse,” Bel said, approaching. “Or part of
one. It looks like someone’s been cast there.”

Rowan drew up short. “Oh,” she said, now disinclined to investigate.
But she had already reached the center, and it held no human remains. “It’s a
fox.”

It was long dead, desiccated skin over delicate bones, fine
fur faded, sprawled under a tangle of rotted reeds. No scavengers had dined on
it; natural corruption had had its way, and the only breaks in the crusted pelt
were the result of the more unpleasant internal stages of decay, long past,
when the body had swelled and burst.

“One of those animals we heard by the raider camp?” Bel
moved closer to study it, tilt-headed. “It’s a strange-looking creature.”

They left the gray patch behind, Rowan brushing her fingers
across the wet grass tops as she walked, to clear off the scent and the fluid. “The
fox is a small predator,” she said, falling into a steerswoman’s explanation. “It’s
shaped like a dog, and graceful as a cat. It’s beautiful when alive, and its
pelt is highly prized. I wonder how it died?” Then she answered herself, body
continuing to walk as her mind stopped short, surprised. “It starved to death.
It must have wandered too far from the Inner Lands, and found nothing to eat ...”

“What does a fox eat?”

“Everything we’d like to, but can’t find.”

Three days later, they found signs of a tribe.

They had crested a rise and stood looking down into a
shallow, rolling field half-obscured by shifting mist. The ground was stubbled,
redgrass cropped to the roots and dying in a patchwork mottle of yellow and
brown; occasional smears of pale gray emitted their particular, distinctive
stench. Fog and curtains of rain hid the far horizons while intimating
replication into the distance, suggesting to shocked eyes that the desolation
continued past the limits of sight, forever.

Rowan stood stunned. “What happened here?”

The scene seemed to please Bel, who regarded her with mild
surprise. “Goats.”

“Goats did all of this?” Rowan reached down to pull at a bit
of longer grass by her feet. It did show the marks of grazing: fibrous blades
stripped and abraded to strings, stiff reeds chewed through at varied heights.

Farther from Rowan’s position, the grass had been cropped
shorter, and farther, shorter still. The field below appeared entirely
lifeless.

Bel had begun to amble down the slope; Rowan hurried to
catch up.

“Watch your step,” Bel said, the instant that Rowan’s left
foot slid violently out from under her. A quick clutch at Bel’s shoulder saved
the steerswoman from landing prone in a puddle of unidentifiable ooze.

Bel helped her to a steady stance. “You have to step
solidly,” she instructed. “You can walk around it now, but later you won’t
always be able to.”

They continued down into the field. “What was that?” Rowan
asked.

“Goat droppings.”

Rowan stopped and turned back to it. “Then the goat was ill.”

“No. It’s always like that.” Bel found herself walking
alone. She stopped, annoyed. “Rowan, you’re not going to study goat muck, are
you?”

Rowan intended to do exactly that. “This was not a healthy
goat.” She found a twig and prodded at the translucent puddle. It was infiltrated
with short wet fibers. “I wonder what it was eating?”

Bel made a gesture that included the entire visible
landscape.

As they descended, Rowan noted that not every plant had been
consumed. Tanglebrush bushes, ranging in a loose, staggered line, seemed
denuded, but closer examination revealed that they had merely rolled their
leaves tightly closed against the rain. She spotted movement among the bushes,
and cautiously called Bel to a halt. “What’s that ?” A bobbing object,
splotched black, brown, and white. Bel looked, then smiled. “That’s dinner.”

The goat seemed pleased to find human company in the barren
wilderness. It greeted them with happy relief—and met its death too quickly to
recognize betrayal. As the travelers cleaned the carcass, Rowan considered the
differences between it and its Inner Lands cousins. There were many.

Its hair was not white and short, but long, as much as eight
inches in length, splotched randomly. Farm goats had short black horns; their
counterparts of the Outskirts veldt carried heavy weaponry, two inches thick at
the base, growing almost straight back, and only curving outward at the tips.
Rowan recognized the source of the wooden sword’s hilt.

She became distracted from her study by a glance at Bel’s expression.
The Outskirter seemed worried. “What’s wrong?”

“This is a good goat. It shouldn’t have been lost.”

“We’re fortunate that it was.” Of itself, Rowan’s mind
entered into a series of calculations that brought a very pleasing revision in
the number of miles the two women could safely travel before food would again
become a concern.

Bel shook her head as she severed one of the legs at the
knee. “We look after our herd very carefully. If the flockmaster finds even one
goat missing, scouts are sent out.”

Rowan paused. “Should we be expecting scouts?”

The Outskirter rose and gave the misty, drizzling meadow careful
consideration. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “I think these people left
very quickly.”

Rowan imitated her, gaining no additional information whatsoever.
“How can you tell?”

Bel shrugged and returned to their work. “Only by the goat.”

There was no brush for a fire shelter, no wood to burn; Bel
declared that it was time to use Outskirter methods. In future days Rowan came
to designate, somewhat arbitrarily, the frogs and snake as the journey’s last
meal in the Inner Lands, the goat as the first meal in the Outskirts.

Bel instructed Rowan to dig a pit, then occupied herself
with cutting squares in the cropped turf with her knife. She lifted the small
blocks, brushed off the dirt in the dead roots of the upper layer, and demonstrated
them to be a type of peat. The women built their fire in the pit and covered it
with the tarp, one end propped up with the now-useless wood sword, and so
prepared their first fresh meal in four days.

“I should warn you,” Bel said as they settled to dinner, “that
you’re going to be sick.”

Rowan stopped with the first bite partway to her mouth. “You
told me that the goat wasn’t ill.”

“It wasn’t.” Bel continued slicing cooked segments from the
carcass, wrapping them in oiled cloth for packing. “It’s nothing to do with
that. If someone from the Inner Lands eats Outskirter food, she’ll be ill, for
a while. It always happens.”

In most cases, Rowan knew, it was water that carried
diseases, in the crowded sections of cities, or in villages where unsanitary conditions
prevailed. She and Bel had been drinking local water throughout their journey
thus far, to no ill effect; certainly, Rowan reasoned, the problem Bel referred
to must result only from food prepared in a tribal camp, under possibly
primitive standards of cleanliness. She considered that it might not be polite
to point this out to Bel.

She shrugged, and began to eat. “How ill, and for how long?”

“Perhaps a day. Then you’ll be fine, and you won’t have any
problems with the food again. It will affect me, too. Outskirters who leave
the Outskirts for any length of time have the same problem.” She considered
the chunk of fresh roasted meat in her left hand with open longing, then shook
her head. “I should wait a day. Then we won’t be sick at the same time, and can
take care of each other.” She left her work and brought some dried beef strips
and hardbread from her pack.

“What’s it like, this disease?” Rowan asked.

The Outskirter gave a short laugh. “Many trips to the cessfield.”

It was unlikely that Rowan would be able single-handedly to
alter the established cooking habits of an entire Outskirter tribe; at some
point it would be necessary for her to pass through what seemed from Bel’s
description to be a transient adaptive malady. She sighed. “Charming. I shall
look forward to it.” She continued to eat. “How long after eating Outskirter
food does one begin to feel ill?”

Bel was tearing with her teeth at the tough strip. “About
two days,” she said, chewing stolidly. “Although that’s usual for returning Outskirters.
Perhaps you’ll take less time.”

“Perhaps it won’t affect me at all.”

The reply was muffled. “Ha.”

“How do we do this?”

It was two days later; two days of trudging through gloom
and showers across the endlessness of dead and rotting redgrass stubble that
marked the tribe’s trail. Bel scanned the barren land and the scattered tanglebrush,
then looked up at the lone figure on the hill. “We walk directly to him, always
choosing an open path. He mustn’t think we have friends waiting in ambush.”

The warrior began to move, angling away to the left. “When
he sees how we approach, he’ll know we want to meet. If he keeps moving away
from us, we must stop, and make it clear that we won’t follow, or he’ll think
we’re hostile.” She led the way down the slope, and the figure paused again,
watching.

After long days traveling alone with Bel, the addition of
another human being was oddly disturbing. The sudden presence of the distant
figure seemed inexplicable, its upright stance incongruous, its motion peculiar,
and its possession of an intelligent mind unlikely. Rowan found herself
regarding it as a strange animal, unpredictable and possibly dangerous. But
when they came within fifteen yards, it proved to be only a man in Outskirter
garb, shaggy-haired, bearded, watching them with shadowed eyes.

As they approached, Bel spoke quietly to Rowan. “Something’s
wrong.”

Rowan studied the figure. She could see nothing that might
have prompted Bel’s comment, but took the fact as given. “He’s from the tribe
that lost the goat?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps he thinks we stole it.”

“We did steal it. Until we strike a trade for it, it’s
considered stolen. But that’s not it.”

They continued to approach the man. “You said the tribe left
quickly.”

“Yes.” Bel’s gait became more easy and natural, a danger signal
to Rowan.

The steerswoman considered. “The tribe encountered some trouble.
He thinks we might be involved.”

“Yes.”

Possibly the trouble had taken the form of an attack by a
hostile tribe; perhaps the man was overcautious after a lost battle. “How can
we reassure him?”

“We can’t. And it’s too late for us to back off. We’ll just
have to be exactly what we are, and hope he sees it soon enough.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Fight. Or run. Whichever we can manage.”

At a distance of fifteen feet, Bel stopped, Rowan pausing beside
her, and they stood facing the man quietly for some moments. There was no
gesture from him, no word and no signal. He held himself completely still, and
Rowan was abruptly certain that there were other warriors near, whose existence
and location this man was trying not to betray by unconscious behavior.

She glanced about: no one else was visible.

At the moment Rowan decided that he was never going to move
at all, he did, slowly. Reaching over his shoulder, he pulled a black,
metal-edged sword from its sheath and stood with its hilt in his right hand,
the flat of its blade resting across a bare left forearm. A motion of his
shoulders threw back the damp patchwork cloak, leaving both arms clear and in
sight, showing a black, shaggy vest thong-tied over a wide expanse of chest.

Bel drew her own sword, and the man’s eyes widened at the
gleam of bright metal. She laid it on the ground before her, hilt to the right,
then stepped back a pace. Rowan made to imitate her, but was quietly told, “No.
Keep your sword in hand, and stand with your back to me. I’m unarmed; you watch
behind. Don’t look over your shoulder at him, he’ll take it as a threat.”

Rowan complied; and, not knowing what to look for, she
looked at nothing, carefully, intently: the wide, empty land, the bare
undulating hills, the textureless gray skies. She listened in a widening
circle, hearing Bel’s gear creak behind her, a crunch in the wet stubble as
the man adjusted his stance.

As Bel was about to speak, Rowan noticed something. “There’s
movement in front of me, at an angle to my left, just past the second rise.”
The motion stopped, then began again, crested the low hill, and revealed
itself. Rowan relaxed. “Goats, two of them.”

Bel spoke up to the man. “Two goats, at ten by you,” she announced.
Rowan wondered at the turn of phrase.

She heard the stranger reply. “And a warrior, at five by
you.” In the far, windless distance something moved, colorless against the dead
ground, visible only by its motion. It traced a slow arc to Rowan’s right, then
paused, as if watching.

Rowan stared at it, deeply disturbed. It was a person, she
knew, but had she not been alerted to its presence, she would never have seen
it, could barely see it even now. It came to her that the world around her was
alive with information, none of it recognizable or comprehensible to her. Her
trusted senses, her dependable intellect were inadequate here, and the fact
made her feel more helplessly unarmed than if she were naked and without a
sword.

“We took a goat yesterday,” Bel told her man. “If it’s
yours, trade is due you.”

There was a long silence. The distant, half-seen object apallingly
sprouted recognizable human arms, made broad gestures: signals, certainly, to
the man behind Rowan, possibly replies to similar silent signals from him.
Rowan wished she could face the nearer stranger. He was close by, he was
undisguised, but she could not read his face, she could not interpret his
reactions, she could not
see
what
he was doing.