The Steerswoman's Road (51 page)

Bel was facing the closer enemy; it was fitting. Bel was the
better fighter, Bel was the native. Rowan’s job was to guard their backs, and
she set to her job with a grimmer, more intense concentration.

The far warrior was signaling again, and reinterpreting the
distortion of distance, the steerswoman saw that he had turned around and was
gesturing to someone past him, someone beyond sight. Rowan suddenly surmised a
relay formation, and understood that there might be dozens of warriors nearby,
spread invisibly across the landscape, moving to surround the travelers. Her
stance had shifted, of itself, in unconscious preparation for sudden action.
She now reviewed the path that she and Bel had used to approach this area,
tried to guess if it was still clear, and began planning a retreat.

Bel and the near warrior had been conversing; in retrospect
Rowan understood that he had asked to see what she was offering. Bel said to
the steerswoman, “Stand as you are, I’m shifting.” Rowan felt her friend step
forward; she heard her slip off her pack, and the slap of thongs as it was
opened.

Rowan saw a motion to her left and was about to speak when
Bel’s warrior said, “Warrior at three.”

“I see him,” the steerswoman confirmed to Bel; to her eyes,
it was merely a spot of variegated brown, difficult to focus on, moving with
suspicious purpose.

Bel was fussing with the pack’s contents. “Check nine,” she
said quietly.

“What?”

“Is there anyone to your right?”

Rowan scanned the area. “I don’t think so.”

She heard Bel step forward again, heard the warrior come to
meet her, and realized that Bel had walked past her own sword and was now
face-to-face with the warrior, completely unarmed. Rowan found that she hated
the idea, and strained to keep herself from turning around.

There was silence behind; then the man spoke. “How many
goats did you take?”

“One.”

“This is too much.”

“I know. It’s what we have. It’s yours.”

The man in front of Rowan was signaling again, this time to
Rowan’s right.

“Someone’s coming,” Rowan said. “They’re going to close us
off.” Bel said to the warrior, “We’d like to meet your seyoh.”

“Where’s your tribe?”

“We have no tribe. We’re traveling. Perhaps we can travel
with you.” He made a negative sound, then amended, reluctantly, “It’s not for
me to decide. Let’s have a look at your friend.”

Bel called to her. “Rowan, set down your sword and come
here.”

“Put it down?” She could hardly believe the order.

“Yes. Do it.”

With the greatest reluctance, Rowan set her weapon down onto
the rotted stubble, finding she had to clench her empty hands into fists to
keep them from clutching for it again.

Bel and the stranger were five feet apart, Bel standing with
the blatant ease that told Rowan she was ready for instant action; the man
studied Rowan with a mild-mannered calm that she recognized as his version of
the same preparedness.

“This is Rowan,” Bel said. “She only has one name. And I’m
Bel, Margasdotter, Chanly.”

The names were volunteered, and the warrior was under no obligation
to offer his own. His bright black gaze puzzled over the steers-woman. “You
have no family?” He was holding the handleless knife blade that Bel had offered
him, one of eight that Bel and Rowan carried as trade items.

The steerswoman found herself reluctant to speak more than
was necessary. “I have family.”

“She’s from the Inner Lands,” Bel supplied.

“You’re a long way from your farm.” He turned the blade over
in his hands, enjoying its gleam, its balance.

“I’m not a farmer, I’m a steerswoman.”

He shook his head; the word was meaningless to him. “Warrior,
at nine by you,” he said then.

Rowan spun left and saw an Outskirter, clearly visible,
perfectly recognizable in a bold piebald cloak. The person was signaling. Bel
put a reassuring hand on Rowan’s shoulder. Rowan turned back. “We’re
surrounded.”

“Yes.” Bel spoke to the man. “What’s your answer?”

He studied the women. His hair was shaggy black to his shoulders,
his beard unevenly trimmed, his face a sunburned brown with black chips of
eyes. Rowan saw that his sword was now sheathed.

He slipped the knife blade into his waistband, then abruptly
stepped back and gestured widely to his comrades. Rowan startled at the
suddenness, wondered what he was saying. A finger of sunlight broke through the
clouds, and indicated a gully past the warrior, as if it had tried to find the trio,
and missed. It vanished, and a light rain began.

“Get your weapons. It’s a long walk to camp.”

Bel slapped Rowan’s shoulder with a delighted “Ha!” They retrieved
the swords, and when she held her weapon again the steers-woman felt a shade
more proper, more fit. They were still surrounded.

“Are we accepted?” Rowan asked. She wiped the blade on her
sleeve, made to sheathe it, but discovered that her hand and arm did not want
her to do so.

“Not yet. But we have a chance to explain our case. If we
can convince them we’re not enemies, they might take us in.”

“We don’t know that they’re going in our direction.”

“Yes, we do.” Bel shouldered her pack. “There isn’t any
grass left to the west. They’ve been there. They have to go east, or at least
easterly.” She turned to the man, who had approached again and was waiting
for them. “Can we make camp by nightfall?”

He scanned the flat, sprinkling sky, calculating. Sudden as
buckets, the downpour recommenced, and the distances closed in and vanished
into rattling, roaring gray. Rowan hastily sheathed her sword and drew up her
hood.

The warrior had been caught with cloak open and his face up,
and was drenched in an instant. He laughed and shook his hair like a dog, then
turned his face up again as if being battered by the fat, cold drops was the
most pleasant sensation in the world.

“Who knows?” he shouted over the noise. He dashed water from
his eyes with his fingers, wiped his face with the heels of his hands, then
cocked a bright black eye at the women, amused. When he nodded past Rowan, she
turned and discovered two more warriors, one standing not four feet from her
side, the other posted beside Bel. Their approach had been completely
unnoticed. Raised hoods and closed cloaks rendered them eerily neutral: genderless,
and without personality. They did not speak.

The first man pulled up his own hood and leaned closer to
the travelers, to be heard above the rain. “We’ll just keep walking until we
get there, shall we?”

Rowan awoke to heavy, musty air, the sour odor of wet fur,
and the sound of rain. Shifting on her bedroll, she found that someone had
replaced her sodden cloak, which she had been using as a blanket, with a heavy
felt cover, thick enough to be a rug. She had been unaware of the exchange.

“Bel?” Nothing was visible in the sealed air of the tent;
the grayness was just one shade above black, and the dark seemed less an absence
of light than an intrinsic feature of the smell.

Rowan shoved the cover aside and cast about with one hand,
searching for her pack. Someone, probably Bel, had laid her sword alongside her
bedding. The steerswoman considered, then stood to strap it on, rising
carefully, uncertain of the available headroom.

She paused and listened. There was no sound but hers in the
tent, no breathing but her own. Outside, amid the pattering hiss, she heard
movement, muffled voices. She groped her way along the tent wall and suddenly
found a flap and threw it back.

Brilliant sunlight struck her with an almost physical force,
and she drew back, one arm thrown up against the glare. She had been fooled by
the sound: there was no rain, and every vestige of cloud and mist had vanished.
The brightness was too much for her sleep-bleared eyes. Above and below the
shield of her arm, she caught only glimpses of wild red ground and painful blue
sky.

Someone brushed by, then turned back and abruptly fingered
the loose edge of Rowan’s blouse. “This is filthy. I’ll get you another,” a female
voice said, and then the woman was gone.

“Thank you,” Rowan replied in her general direction. She
wiped at her tearing eyes with her sleeve and tried to see the world. Redgrass.

Down the hills and up them, over ridges and out to the edge
of sight, was a single sweeping carpet of redgrass, rippling in the steady
south wind. The grass had already been dried by the morning sun, and its natural
brilliance had returned; colors trembled across the land as each individual
blade twisted and bent, now showing a brown side, now a bright red. It was
difficult to focus clearly on the shifting and flashing; the earth looked
feverish, as if Rowan were delirious but unable to decide on the particular
hue of her hallucination. Driven by the wind, the hollow reeds tapped against
each other, rough blades rustling, setting up a rattling hiss that Rowan had
mistaken for the sound of rain.

In front and beyond, hills ranged, broken by two staggered
ridges, then falling faintly lower as they reached out toward the horizon. A
far lake sparkled silver in the distance, edged with looming dark shapes—trees,
Rowan assumed, blinking with the effort of seeing past the grass. Then she
corrected herself. There were no trees in the Outskirts, and this, finally and
surely, was true and pure Outskirts.

The air held a scent, like cinnamon and sour milk, over the freshness
of departed rain. The tent beside Rowan wafted up a miasma of must and goat.
Somewhere someone was roasting meat.

Rowan could see no green plant life at all. Clumps and
thickets of tanglebrush, gray and black, were recognizable nearby. A few rocky
outcrops showed on one of the ridges, and far off the land displayed jagged
black lines, caused by what, Rowan had no idea.

And the sky above was empty and blue: blue as a lake of
pure, fresh water.

Someone shifted behind her, and she turned to face a large
male

Outskirter, in full gear. He regarded her silently and
warily.

“Hello,” Rowan said, hoping he found her as innocuous as she
knew herself to be. “Have you seen my friend around here?”

“I might have. How would I know him?”

They had come in at night, in rain, and had gone directly to
sleep. Possibly news of their arrival had not been passed on to all the tribe
members. “A woman,” Rowan told him, “smaller than I am.” She held out a hand to
demonstrate the height. “Dark brown hair, brown eyes. Her cloak is not as fine
as yours.” The man’s cloak was not Bel’s random patchwork, but a striking gray
and black diagonal design. “An Outskirter, like yourself.”

“Ha. There’s only one like me.”

“Well, yes.” He was nearly twice Bel’s size, and blond. “And
there’s only one like her, as well, more’s the pity. We were brought in last night,
by a warrior, one of the men guarding the flock to the west. I don’t know his
name.”

The warrior nodded, as if this confirmed information he already
possessed, and it came to Rowan that if she had presented any tale but the
truth, matters would have turned to the worse. This man was assigned as her
guard.

As they stood regarding each other, Rowan’s Inner Lands habits
began to demand that an introduction be made. She tried to remember the rules
Bel had laid out, but found nothing that covered interaction with a person
assigned to watch her. She followed her instinct. “I’m Rowan, a steerswoman,
from the Inner Lands. I only have the one name.” Replying with his own full
name would imply an acceptance he had no authority to render, but she hazarded
to ask, “And you are ... ,” knowing that mere first names were sometimes
bestowed more freely, and wishing to have some means of addressing him.

The Outskirter delivered a narrow glare and rubbed the back
of his neck uncomfortably, his sword strap creaking. “Hm. That fellow who
brought you in has gone back to his band.” His dislike seemed more formal than
personal. “Well, I don’t suppose you’ve killed anyone yet. Have you?”

She was not sure this was a joke. “Not so far.”

“Here.”

Rowan turned at the new voice and caught a tossed wool
shirt. “Wash at the creek, or no one will want to associate with you.” The
woman vanished again, leaving Rowan only with impressions of height, long dark
hair, and a bundle balanced on one shoulder.

Rowan looked at the shirt in her hand, then held it up for
the man to see. She waved it slightly. “How do I find the creek?”

He made a satisfied sound, then motioned with a nod. “On the
far side of the camp.” He paused. “You can’t go through. I’ll lead you around.”

“Thank you.”

His reply was a grunt.

The tent she had slept in was one of a cluster of four
crowded together, back-to-back. Some of skin, some of felt, all in shades of
gray and brown, they might have been cloud shadows against the wild color of
the surrounding redgrass.

As she followed the Outskirter around the body of the camp,
Rowan saw that all the tents were in groups of four, back-to-back like cornered
soldiers. Between the groups she caught intriguing glimpses of the life within.
Spaces between the clusters seemed to define avenues, annexes, even
courtyards; it was like passing by a village of cloth and leather houses.
People walked along those paths she could see, most of them moving quickly, as
if on some errand; they glanced at her once, then studiously ignored her.

As they rounded the south side of the camp, they passed a
group of five children, playing at battle—using real weapons, Rowan realized.
One made boldly to challenge her presence, but her guard stopped him with a
hand on his shoulder and an admonishing finger in his face, and with gestures
directed the children’s attention away from the steerswoman. But he paused
among them long enough to correct one fierce young girl’s sword grip; the others
watched the instruction intently, then picked up their adventure where it had
been interrupted.