The Steerswoman's Road (54 page)

There was little conversation, and most was provided by Bel,
commenting on those aspects of Outskirts wildlife that presented themselves: “This
is a slugsnake. It likes to climb things, so don’t stand still.”

“Those tall shapes in the distance are lichen-towers. They
only grow by water.”

“That’s a hawkbug, up there. It won’t bother you, you’re too
big.”

“If this bug lights on you let it bite. It’s harmless, and
it will tell its hive that you don’t taste good. You won’t be bothered again.”

“If this one bites you, kill it as fast as you can. It will
burrow into your flesh and die there, and you’ll have to cut it out with a
knife.” Disturbingly, the two insects seemed indistinguishable. But Rowan
listened, accepting the information, accumulating facts for later and, it was
hoped, more coherent consideration.

The next morning, as she was drawing water from a steep-banked
creek, Rowan attempted to steady herself against a crusty boulder that bulked
from the water’s edge over the bank. As she leaned her hand against it, the
object’s surface gave away, and her left arm sank in, to the elbow. She felt
sharp lines of scratches against her arm.

Overbalanced, she fell, instinctively clenching her fist,
grasping for some purchase. Her fingers squelched in damp pulp, finding thin
stiff things inside, like wires—sharp. They cut; she let go, but her fingers
tangled among them. She stumbled, splashing into the shallows on her knees; her
hand twisted, found more wire, cutting her palm and fingers

Her cries brought Bel, who appeared behind her, steadying
Rowan’s body with her own, one hand bracing the trapped arm. “Don’t move, you’ll
make it worse.”

Rowan hissed between clenched teeth, “I think I’ve hurt myself.”
Where she had squashed it, the pulp was fluid, drenching her cuts, stinging
wildly. She made an involuntary sound and squeezed her eyes shut. “What do I
do?”

“For now, stay still. Do you have your balance?”

Rowan adjusted her knees minutely; the shift in position
caused her hand to move in its trap, and more pain. She hissed again, then
managed to say, “I’m steady.”

“Stay put.” Bel moved away. Wet sounds, crunches, tiny
snaps. A sweet, greasy odor puffed into Rowan’s face, again and again. At last
she felt air on her forearm, and Bel’s hands closed around her wrist. “Now
stand up, but try not to move your hand.”

Using her foot, Bel had flattened the gray surface around Rowan’s
hand down to the dirt of the creek bank. Clear blue fluid puddled and ran into
the water, oozing from white pulp pierced by broken black spines. Around Rowan’s
hand, the substance was untouched; a soggy mass, white above her hand, pink
below, looped throughout with glittering black.

Rowan stood, left elbow awkwardly bent as Bel braced her
hand against movement. Despite this, there was a small shift; the steers-woman
made a choked sound and beat her thigh with her right fist, twice, then froze
and gasped, “Now what?”

Bel eyed her. “Relax your hand, but don’t move.”

She released Rowan, pulled out a knife, reversed it, and
used the handle to carefully push the reddened pulp away from the coil. With
thumbs and forefingers protected by two pieces of leather cut from her
leggings, she snapped the sharp loops, one by one. Rowan watched, body tense
and poorly balanced, breathing shallowly.

She fell to her knees when her hand came free, then cursed
viciously and at length when Bel submerged it in the creek. The water cleaned
but did not soothe. Eventually Rowan said, “Let go.”

Both women were in the shallows, Bel on one knee, Rowan
half-sprawled. There was more red in the water than the steerswoman cared to
see. Her hand was an undifferentiated mass of pain, and when she pulled it from
the creek, blood and water trailed down along her arm, dripping off her elbow.
She breathed carefully, slowly. “Was that thing poisonous?”

“Not much.” Bel was watching her. “Just enough to make it
hurt worse.”

Rowan uncurled her fingers carefully and studied the damage.
“Do you still have one of those bits of leather?” Her voice was tight.

Bel did; and before Rowan could react, Bel used it herself,
reaching over and swiftly extracting one three-inch spine that had entered
Rowan’s hand from the side and extruded from the base of her palm.

The steerswoman had run out of curses. “Thank you,” she said
weakly.

“Are you going to faint?”

Rowan looked around. The light was too bright, the creek surface
too distant. “I don’t think so.” She blinked. “I’ve a needle and thread in my
pack.”

Rowan discovered, in the most unpleasant way possible, that Bel
was not adept at small work. The Outskirter’s hands were trained for strength,
not nimbleness. Strength was what she used, pinning Rowan’s arm against a rock
as she worked, forcing it abruptly under water to clear the blood. And Rowan
used her own: spending all her energy in clutching one arm around her drawn-up
knees, trying to direct all tension away from her brutalized left hand.

Bel substituted patience for skill, and repair was a long
process. “Yell if you like,” she said cheerfully. “It won’t bother me.”

“I don’t care to,” Rowan replied, or tried to reply; the
sounds emerged from behind her clenched teeth as a rasping hiss, oddly intonated.

Bel found it perfectly comprehensible. “Suit yourself.” But
Rowan did yell, at another unexpected dousing, when the icy water found a way
to wash in directly against one finger bone. It was like being struck by a
hammer.

The sound left her too exhausted to struggle, and she sat
limp, unable to raise her head. Her face ached where she had pressed it
against her leg. “What was that thing?” Her own voice sounded distant.

Bel spared a glance from her work—and to Rowan’s utter astonishment,
she replied with an outrageous imitation of the steers-woman’s own style of
speech, complete with the throaty vowels and crisp consonants of Rowan’s
northern accent. “An Outskirts plant, called a lichen-tower. It grows along
watercourses, and possesses—” She paused to find a suitably pedantic phrase. “—a
stiff spiraled internal structure, permitting it to grow to extreme heights—”

She did not finish her explication, as Rowan became weakly hilarious.
Bel paused to watch her. When the gasping laughter ran down she gave, for the
first time, what Rowan considered fair warning. “Again.” She pulled Rowan’s
hand into the water, pulled it out, treating the limb as if it were not a part
of Rowan’s body, but only attached to it. She resumed her repairs, this time on
the palm side.

Rowan eventually found her voice again. “It should be tall,”
she said, of the lichen-tower; Bel had mentioned such plants before.

“It was a young one.”

They did not travel the rest of that day, and in the
afternoon, as Rowan watched blearily, Bel systematically destroyed eight immature
lichen-towers growing on the creek’s bank, all of which Rowan had assumed to
be boulders. Whether the destruction represented revenge, custom, or had some
useful purpose, the steerswoman was too tired to ask.

* * *

Rowan learned to fear the Outskirts, and remembered that she
ought to have done so from the outset.

She was accustomed to fearing specific dangers in the Inner
Lands: wolves, bandits, lightning, storms at sea, and, eventually, the enmity
of wizards. But the world was background to those things, and they inhabited
it. Bel had told her of specific Outskirts’ dangers, and Rowan now knew many by
name and habit; but they seemed discrete, separate, existing within no
comprehensible framework, so that the next day, when Bel stopped her with a gesture
and the merest touch on her arm, Rowan froze instantly, scanning for danger. “What
is it?”

Bel replied only by pointing. Rowan followed her finger to
the horizon, but saw only the chaos of moving colors. There was no way to
discern anything unexpected against such a view.

She looked at her friend. Bel’s expression was not one of caution,
but amusement. “You don’t see it?”

Rowan relaxed somewhat, spreading her hands. “Where?”

Bel continued to point, but walked forward, circling to the
left. When she came around to face Rowan again, her finger indicated the space
between them.

Rowan squinted. “Insects?” She realized that there was a
cloud of insects at just head height, some circling, some hovering. Bel
gestured Rowan forward, and the steerswoman circled as Bel had, keeping her
eyes on the insects, puzzled. They seemed unable to move beyond some defined
boundary; some of those hovering appeared to hover with motionless wings

When she reached Bel’s side, the angle of sunlight caught
slim silver traces around the insect cloud. “Is that a spiderweb?” The cloud
was in midair; there was nothing nearby from which to hang a web. Bel’s finger
moved carefully, outlining a shape.

The flying and suspended insects were contained within a
canted oval dome of gossamer, its long axis pointed downward. Below the axis
Rowan saw a bit of redgrass blade, less than an inch long, apparently floating
at knee height, then saw the line that attached it ...

Bel’s finger traced again, along a ghostly line that slanted
down from the open side of the dome. The line came to ground, upwind, and the
configuration came together in Rowan’s eyes—but she shook her head in
disbelief. “A kite?”

She followed the tether to its root, and met the kite-flier:
a skinny four-limbed bug, some six inches tall, standing knock-kneed among the
redgrass. One sticky arm clutched a redgrass reed of extremely dubious
stability; the other held a ball of spittle from which the fine line extruded,
ascending to the aerial web.

Moving quietly, Rowan lowered herself to the ground beside
it, cradling her injured hand in her lap. “What is it?” She grinned at the bug,
enchanted.

Bel tilted her head. “I thought you’d like it. It’s a
trawler.”

“‘Trawler,’ as in a fishing boat?” Rowan laughed out loud. “It’s
trawling the air!”

“I don’t know about fishing boats, but ‘trawler’ is its
name. When it’s caught enough flying bugs, it will pull its shoot to the ground
and have lunch.”

“The shoot is its net?” Rowan leaned closer to the bug and
sighted up along the tether. The bit of redgrass hanging from the shoot provided
stabilizing weight. The trawler, outraged by the steerswoman’s proximity,
voiced two sharp clicks. Rowan startled, and the creature took the opportunity
to transfer the spittle-ball onto a grass stem, then clambered quickly away
through the redgrass, all knees and elbows.

“That’s right. If a hawkbug catches a trawler, sometimes it
will save the shoot, and drag it through the air itself. The shoot can last for
days.”

That afternoon, as they rested before dinner, Rowan drew out her
logbook, clumsily, with one hand and one elbow, and settled down to update
the entries. She had had no inclination to write since leaving the last tribe,
and no mental effort to spare; but it occurred to her that an attempt to notate
her observations might aid in her comprehending them more completely, and
provide a distraction from the pain of her hand.

Bel had her own occupation: smoothing a patch of ground near
her bedroll, she painstakingly began drawing letters in the dirt with a stiff
redgrass reed, practicing writing. Rowan had found that the Outskirter had a
sharp memory for the shapes and sounds, but unused as she was to small work,
her letters tended to look very peculiar, starting large and growing larger as
she tired.

As she worked, Rowan became aware of a faint humming sound,
like the passing phantom noises one’s own ears might manufacture. In
retrospect, she realized that it had been continuing for some time. Experimentally,
she blocked her ears, and the noise vanished. Bel looked up from her laborious
writing. “What’s the matter?”

“An odd sound,” Rowan replied, trying to pinpoint its direction.
It was impossible; the dim sound lay at the threshold of hearing and was
intermittently masked by the sound of redgrass.

Dropping her reed, Bel stood and scanned the land, then
closed her eyes, listening. “I don’t hear it.”

“It’s very faint.”

“What does it sound like?” But at that moment the breeze
died, the grass quietened, and Bel caught the noise. She froze, then smoothly
and soundlessly dropped into a sitting position on the ground. She said
nothing, but held Rowan’s gaze with an expression of warning.

“What—” Rowan began, but a minute motion of Bel’s hand silenced
her, and she froze. The noise became somewhat louder.

Minutes passed, and eventually Rowan attempted to move one
leg to a more comfortable position; she received a look, a widening of Bel’s
eyes more communicative than words.

The Outskirter was afraid. It took Rowan a long, stunned moment
to believe it.

Bel was her guide, Bel was the native, Bel was the warrior,
wise in the ways of her land. Never before in the Outskirts had Rowan ever seen
her truly afraid. It came to Rowan shockingly that if Bel was frightened, then
her own survival depended upon following instructions instantly, completely.

Bel wanted silence and stillness. Heart pounding, muscles
yearning for action, Rowan complied.

More time passed. Rowan listened to the inhuman humming,
watching Bel for more unspoken signs. Their two shadows slowly lengthened.

The noise grew again, and Rowan found that she could locate
its direction: south by southeast, behind her, to Bel’s left, distance unknown.
Bel visually gauged the distance between her own hand and her sword hilt, a
mere foot away within easy reach. Rowan carefully did the same.

The sound faded slightly, stopped, then abruptly returned,
much quieter. Rowan thought of the low hills that lay behind her; the source
of the humming had passed behind one and emerged again, farther away.

At long last it diminished to near-inaudibility, regaining a
directionless quality. Bel relaxed, then caught Rowan’s eye with a questioning
expression, pointing to one ear. Realizing that her hearing was sharper than
the Outskirter’s, Rowan moved only her fingers in a cautioning gesture.