The Steerswoman's Road (95 page)

Rowan looked at her mental chart, triangulating from known
landmarks, comparing distances.

“Seyoh,” the aide repeated, trying to get his attention.
Rowan stooped down beside them and cautiously permitted herself to be aware of
Kammeryn’s face.

The seyoh saw and recognized her, and Mander bending over
him, then looked past the healer’s shoulder. “Chess,” he said.

The cook grunted in surprise. “Right.” She heaved herself
erect and looked about in the dim starlight. “You!” she called, and pointed.

“What’s on that train? Never mind, clear it off! Mander,
Jenna, get him over there.” They hurried to obey, raising the seyoh between
them. He spoke weakly; Rowan could not hear his words.

Chess did, then turned to the steerswoman. “He says you know
where we are.”

Rowan checked her figures, checked the time by the stars. “Where
do we go now?”

She looked at the route ahead and became briefly confused;
she thought there was one number that she had neglected to take into account ...

“Rowan!”

The map glowed in her mind, as if lit by a fire behind it.
And then a second chart overlaid itself: Fletcher’s information, longitude,
latitude, area. The features of both charts merged, matched.

They vanished. Rowan stood shivering with cold, shuddering
in exhaustion, redgrass chattering around her, with Chess’s gnarled face before
her, dim in starlight.

The steerswoman swallowed. “No farther. We make camp here.”

“Chess, I need to speak to Fletcher.”

It was now full light. The tribe had slept, struggled back
to wakefulness, and set to work.

The old woman pulled her attention from the rising tents and
eyed Rowan. “Sounds like a good idea to me.” They passed together through the
standing and sitting tribe members.

Fletcher was seated on the ground, looking down, weaving in
place. Half of Orranyn’s band was seated in a circle around him, watching him
with eyes feverish from exhaustion; the other half sat leaning against their
comrades’ backs, asleep. One of them was Orranyn.

Chess kicked his foot. “Wake up. We’re going to talk to him.”
Orranyn came awake with a violent start. “Kammeryn said—”

“Kammeryn’s asleep. He put me in charge. Stand up when you
talk to me, boy.”

“Chess—”

“If I can stand, you can stand, and I’m standing, so stand!”
He stood.

“We’ve got a captive wizard here,” Chess said, “and we want
to know some things. Move aside.” And she led Rowan into the circle, which
shifted at their chief’s gesture to make more room within.

Fletcher looked up at the two women. One side of his mouth
twitched. “Shall I stand?” He looked too weak to do so.

“We’ll sit.” They did. Chess jerked her chin at Rowan. “You
ask. I don’t know what to ask.”

“Rowan—” Fletcher said.

She put up her hand. “Fletcher, just don’t ask me anything.
Answer.” He nodded, jerkily.

“Girl, your laws are stupid,” Chess said.

“Yes,” Rowan said without thinking, “sometimes.” And if the
survival of these people she loved, and her own life, had depended upon
breaking those laws at this moment, she would have done so, on the instant. But
that was not necessary.

She said to Fletcher, “Rendezvous weather.”

He nodded. “We’re safe from the heat, but we’ll catch the
weather that follows it.”

“How soon will it come, and how bad will it be?”

“I’m not sure.” He rubbed his face. “Before, when I was looking
back at the twenty-year cycle of routine bioform clearance, the weather started
reacting about two weeks after the start of the heat. But looked at another
way, it came one day after peak.”

She shook her head in annoyance; she was too weary to puzzle
through his language. “Peak being a high point? The moment of greatest heat?”

“Yes. And there’s no buildup this time. It’s coming all at
once. We might have as little as twelve hours from the moment the heat starts.”

“At nightfall, today?”

“Yes.”

Chess leaned back and shook Jaffry awake. “You. Go to Steffannis.”
One of the cook’s assistants. “Tell him to start a fire, slaughter twenty
goats, and start cooking them now. And to set a crew to making bread.”

The young man made to protest in confusion, but Orranyn sent
him off with a gesture.

Chess turned back to Fletcher. “How long will it last?”

He spread his hands. “The heat? Twenty-four hours. The
weather, I don’t know; weeks, months, perhaps, altogether. But it will be worst
for a much shorter time. Days, perhaps.”

“What do you mean by the worst? What exactly happens?”

He moved his shoulders. “Winds, to start. On the Face, they
reached over a hundred miles an hour.”

This was incomprehensible; she had expected him to say “very
high winds,” or “gales” or “hurricane,” if he knew such terms. But miles an
hour was a measurement applied to the movement of objects. The wind was no
object. Rowan tried to imagine an object caught in such a wind; but its speed
of motion would depend not only upon the wind force, but on the size, shape,
and construction of the object. Perhaps the greatest danger would come from
loose objects, such as bushes, or bits of lichen-tower, flying at high speed.
She thought of ships’ sails, when a sheet gave way from stress. The loose end
moved suddenly free, and powerful, like a great thrashing hand, smashing
everything before it

Sails. She stood up suddenly. “This is wrong.”

“What?” Chess asked.

Rowan looked around the camp, at the tents now almost all erected:
vertical walls of skin, with no great masts, no yards to brace them. The lines
and poles would never hold. “We have to dig in.” Chess had stood up beside her.
“Wind’ll knock all this down?”

“Yes.”

Chess called out. “Stop everything! You, you, and you, over
here!”

Rowan looked down at Fletcher. “Where will the wind come
from?”

“At first, east to west, toward where the heat was. A few
hours later, northeast to southwest. Sometime later, southwest to northeast.”

Rowan spoke to Chess. “We dig into the ground, wide holes,
and erect the tents’ skins as roofs over them, with a low peak, running
northeast to southwest. Cross-lines for bracing, inside and out.”

The mertutials whom Chess had called over stood by, weaving,
bleary-eyed. Chess’s face lost all expression. “The people can’t stand digging
like that,” she told Rowan. “They’ve been walking for three days. They’re at
the end of their strength.”

“I know.”

Chess chewed her lip. “I’ll divide the tribe, and assign
each group to the tent it’ll be using. They’ll dig at the best pace they can
manage, for as long as they can. Erect the roofs at sunset.”

“That sounds like the best we can do.”

Chess jerked her head at those waiting. “Come on.”

Rowan watched them depart, then scanned the skies above,
blinking blurred eyes. The sky was decorated with small clouds slowly shifting
east. The blue between them was as cool and pure as a jewel.

She turned back to Fletcher. “Other than wind, what else?”

He had been watching intently; now he moved his hands in a
vague gesture. “Rain, hail; maybe even snow, I don’t know.”

She knit her brows, thinking; her mind seemed not slow but
vacant, airy and empty. Information entered it, to be used and then to vanish
into some underground chamber. Ideas appeared seemingly from nowhere. “Hot air
expands,” she said. Sealed, heated bottles burst. “Why would the wind move
toward
the heated area?”

“Don’t know.” And he looked up at her, plaintive, helpless.

Directly behind him, silent throughout the whole
conversation, sat Jann.

The tents were down, with groups of people gathered about each
of the previous locations. At each site, a handful of people were digging, with
knives, swords, their hands. Others watched. More slept.

She found Chess sitting beside a group of diggers. Kammeryn
was nearby, asleep or unconscious, Rowan could not tell. His aide dozed close
by. “Assign me to the same tent you put Fletcher in,” the steers-woman said to
Chess.

The old woman pointed to the ground. “Right here. And we’re
in with you.” She spotted movement off at the edge of the camp. “Ha. The inner
circles are coming in.”

An old man digging stopped, gaping up at her. “The inner circles
left position ?”

“At my order. You don’t like it? Do you want to take over?
Do you think anyone will listen to you?”

“But—”

Chess heaved herself to her feet. “The inner circles are
coming in,” she announced, and people stopped to listen. “And the outer, and the
scouts. Everybody’s coming in. When this wind hits, any tribe nearby will be
too busy to think about attacking us.” And she sat down.

When the people returned to their work, she spoke to Rowan
quietly. “There’s another tribe spotted, just southeast of us. Your friend Bel
went to warn them.”

Bel’s last reported position was some eighteen miles away. “But
she doesn’t know what to warn them of.”

“Rendezvous weather. We knew that. Just didn’t know how bad
it would be.”

Rattling, tapping, hissing—and Rowan thought: The rain has
started.

She tried to turn over and rise; something seemed to press
down on her, heavily. She struggled, and gasped at the pain of movement. “Hush,
girl.” It was Chess, nearby.

“What?” The weight holding her down was the weight of her
own body; the pain was of muscles pushed past their limits of strength by days
of walking, now locked into knots by the hours of exhausted, motionless sleep.

Rowan was curled on her left side. She tried to straighten,
slowly. “What’s the hour?”

“Must be near dawn.”

Rowan managed to roll up to a sitting position. The tent
roof was close above her head; a bare earth wall behind her sent waves of
coolness against her back. “I need to move a bit.” She opened and closed her
hands; even they were stiff, from digging.

“Not in here.” There was no room. Nineteen people were sleeping
side by side; and at one end of the tent, six more warriors were sitting
upright, in an inward-facing circle. Along one wall of the shelter, and
complaining intermittently, ten goats lay on their sides with their legs
trussed. The light was barely enough for the steers-woman to see.

“Where’s the door?” There was one, she knew; she had suggested
its location herself. Now she could not recall where it was, or where in the
tent she was.

Chess reached out a dim hand, and Rowan used it to get
herself into motion. She crawled over the two sleepers between herself and the
mertutial. “Over there,” Chess said, and pointed her on.

A triangle of gray light above, just this side of the goats.
Rowan made her way painfully across to it. None of the sleepers she clambered
over were disturbed by her passage.

At the entrance, she pulled herself erect, hissing in
annoyance at her body’s complaint. Standing, she had not the flexibility to
climb out.

It was not raining; the sound had been only redgrass. Above,
the sky was too light for most stars, but still a deep blue too dark for day.
It seemed ominous, as if purposely emptied of all but the twin Guidestars, and
waiting.

The Eastern Guidestar looked no different from the Western.
Rowan considered its angle. The magic heat, if it came from the Eastern
Guidestar, must certainly pass above the camp to reach the area west. And if
there were heat crossing the sky above, surely the area immediately below must
also become warm.

And yet it was cold outside, quite cold.

All around, lying close to each other within pockets of
crushed grass, were scores of goats. Some began to stir and stand, shaking
their flop-eared heads, the weight of their horns lending a ludicrous drunkenness
to the motion. Among them, only slightly taller than the red-grass, were the
low peaks of the other shelters.

And one standing figure. She waved it over. “Help me out,
please.”

“Is that Rowan?” It was Averryl. He gave her a hand, then
two, pulling her from the ground purely by his own effort.

“How long have you been up here?”

“Hours. Since just after midnight. I slept some, then I
couldn’t any longer. I wanted to see. And ... and it’s not comfortable in there
...” He nodded toward one of the shelters, presumably his own.

“Comfortable?” she echoed. His voice had lent the word a
meaning beyond the merely physical.

He was a moment answering. “They’re saying that Fletcher
caused all this.” The forced march; the deaths while traveling; hours of
digging into the ground; close quarters; discomfort. Fletcher was resented,
perhaps hated; and Averryl, his closest friend, was conveniently at hand.

Rowan became angry. “All this,” she said, “is intended to
save our lives. And if we do survive, then yes, Fletcher will have caused that.”
He nodded silently.

She scanned the horizon. Nothing appeared unusual; it was
simply a late-autumn morning in the Outskirts. “If you’ve been watching, have
you seen anything odd?”

He was gazing westward, and nodded again. “Just before first
light. The stars along the horizon—” He stretched out one hand and trembled it
as demonstration. “—they twinkled, harder than I’ve ever seen before. And some
of them seemed to move.”

She was appalled. “Move?”

“Up and down, back and forth. But only right on the horizon,
in a space just the width of two fingers. If we didn’t have a clear horizon, I
wouldn’t have seen it.” There was a clear horizon due west, and southwest;
north, a ridge blocked the view.

“Heat,” she explained. In the Inner Lands, she had often
watched stars writhing through the heat rising from a campfire.

Heat properly should rise; heat should not come down
invisibly from the sky. Nevertheless, it was doing so, even as she and Averryl
stood together in the cool morning, waiting for the sun to appear.