The Steerswoman's Road (96 page)

Averryl looked straight up. “What’s that?”

Above, a faint gray haze. “I don’t know.” Unconsciously, she
took two steps forward, as if by walking she could move closer to the sky itself.
The haze was thickening. “Fog?” And high beams of the stillunrisen sun cleared
the eastern horizon, washing the gray to pure, pale, breathtaking gold.

It was high vapors coalescing, creating themselves as Rowan
and Averryl watched, evolving into a faint line of cloud that stretched up from
the southwestern horizon, crossed the sky above, and vanished behind the ridge
to the north. Sunlight glowed upon the cloud, and it stood strange and
glorious, spun gold against the lightening blue dome of the sky.

“It’s beautiful,” Averryl said, in a voice of wonder. Rowan
thought it impossible, and horrible.

Jaffry emerged from the shelter at her feet and caught sight
of her and Averryl. “Chess says—” He began. He stopped, stared above.

_“Oh

“What does Chess say?” Rowan asked him. The cloud-sweep was
growing deeper, more defined.

“Is that the heat? It’s running the wrong way ...”

“No, it’s not the heat. Whatever this is, it’s parallel to
the area that the heat is striking. What does Chess say?” The cloud was
thickening visibly, beginning to look uncomfortably like a squall line coming
into existence from nothing, directly above their heads.

The young man pulled his attention from the sky and
addressed Averryl. “That no one should worry about the goats outside. I’m supposed
to tell each tent.”

Averryl nodded. “I’ll tell the people in mine.”

“Is Bel in with you?”

Averryl had been about to leave; he stopped, and hesitated before
replying. “Bel isn’t here.”

“What?” Jaffry’s face was suddenly blank with shock.

Rowan was puzzled by the intensity of his reaction. “She was
serving as point scout, and sighted signs of another tribe to the east. She
went to warn them.”

He spun on her. “When?”

“Yesterday morning. She hadn’t made it back by nightfall,
and she couldn’t travel in the dark. But if she went to the first scouts of the
other tribe, told them, and turned straight around, she must have been near
here by sunset. It’s light now; she’ll arrive soon.”

“Jaffry,” Averryl said, and the young warrior turned to him.
“There’s nothing that you can do.”

Jaffry stood staring at him for a long moment, then abruptly
turned and hurried away toward the next tent, on his errand for Chess.

Rowan framed a puzzled question to Averryl; but before she
could utter it, it answered itself:

The courting gifts left for Bel had appeared the first
morning she and Rowan were in camp, a very short span of time for the appearance
of romantic feeling. Only two men of the tribe had been acquainted with Bel
for longer than a day: Averryl, who was too ill to make and leave gifts; and
Jaffry. Rowan wondered why she had not seen this before.

Rain began to fall. Rowan looked up. The line of cloud was
heavier. A cusp of sun appeared on the eastern horizon, and Rowan instinctively
turned her back to it to look for a rainbow. She found one in the western sky:
bright, high, complete across its entire length, and triple in form.

The cloud was now pure white in the sunlight, and roiling
with abnormal speed. Averryl watched it with jaw dropped. “We should go inside,”
he said presently.

“Not yet.” The light breeze that had been stirring the grass
tops hesitated, then ceased. The redgrass silenced. Rowan and Averryl stood
waiting.

Far to the west, under the arc of the rainbow, the shadowed
land seemed to shimmer. Movement of some sort—then Rowan understood. The
redgrass at the horizon was flattening under the force of a distant wind. The
area’s nearer limit visibility approached, swiftly. The steerswoman braced
herself.

But the air nearby, all around her, already calm, now semed
somehow to still even further, to grow almost thinner. Rowan felt a sudden,
sharp pain in her ears

Then all the air was in motion, the edge of flattened grass
arrived and swept past, and Rowan stumbled forward at the force of the wind at
her back—a wind not from the west, but the east. She turned into it, and
recovered her balance.

It was strong, storm force; had Rowan been on a ship, she
would have been hurrying to shorten sail. But there was no danger to this wind;
the tents would easily hold.

The wind did not gust, nor swirl. It ran, steadily east to
west, seeming almost perfectly horizontal and coming from no storm, but the
sweet sun-glared horizon. Leaning harder into it, she considered that the tent
slopes might have aligned better; but Fletcher had said that the wind would
later shift.

She stepped back to Averryl and leaned close.

“Let’s get inside,” he said over the rushing noise.

She shook her head. “You go on. This isn’t bad. I want to
wait for Bel.” A dead tanglebrush rolled up the slope and caught against a
goat, which started bawling, dancing away from it. Other goats bawled response,
and those standing shied about, then made their way to the lee of the low tent
peaks. The tanglebrush, now free of its obstacle, spun in place crazily, upside
down on its mazy dome.

“You’re being stupid!” The words were not angry, merely
louder to carry over the wind.

Rowan laughed. “Do you know,” she said, close to his ear, “I’d
hate to have to count the number of times an Outskirter has said that to me.”

The wind increased; soon, it was better to sit on the
ground, back to the wind. Averryl gave her one edge of his cloak, and she
wrapped herself close to him. They steadied each other as the force against
their backs grew.

The wind should have dispersed the line of cloud. No such
event occurred. The cloud had ceased to spread, but it stayed in place, and its
face was roiling faster. The cloud built higher, lower, and its western edge
was now shadowed from the sun, black and threatening. The top, along its entire
visible length, was forming into the familiar anvil of a thunderhead, made
weird by infinite extension north and south.

At the first sign of lightning, they would have to take
shelter. Rowan thought of Bel, alone on the wind-driven veldt. She looked over
one shoulder.

The shimmering redgrass had vanished. In its place: a single
featureless expanse of dull brick red. The grass was lying completely horizontal,
driven by the solid, sourceless gale. Rowan swept water from her eyes as she
tried to see if she could discern a single, approaching figure. None was
visible. Rowan imagined the gale wind catching Bel’s cloak and lifting her, to
send her spinning away into the sky like a lost sail. But Bel, although short,
was in no way a tight person. Rowan found the vision amusing; and then, quite
suddenly, appalling.

Movement above caught her eye, and she twisted about again,
looking up. The top of the squall line was sending out wild streamers, swirling
out without diminishing the whole, speeding away east.

The ground wind blew east to west. The wind above was west
to east. Rowan could not explain it.

It was now full morning, with white sunlight casting her and
Averryl’s shadows before them, rain falling at a sharp, windy slant from
above, and the triple rainbow, a trifle lower in the sky, even brighter than
before. But behind the rainbow, below and past the squall line, over the
presumed area of the magical heat, the western sky was as clear and blue as the
eastern.

From one of the shelters, a figure half-emerged, looking
about, short red hair wild in the wind: Kree. Rowan nudged Averryl. “Go on, she’s
looking for you,” she told him; she had to repeat it, louder.

“Are you going in?” he shouted back.

“Soon!”

His expression was stubborn. “I’ll wait!”

There came a thump on Rowan’s shoulder; she turned into the
wind.

Bel: glaring, leaning down to shout her words an inch from
Rowan’s nose. “What are you doing out here?”

Rowan grinned. “Waiting for you!”

“You’re a lunatic!”

“Yes!” the steerswoman replied with enthusiasm. And Averryl
instantly made off, with obvious relief.

Rowan and Bel helped each other to the shelter’s entrance,
struggling against the wind, bracing their arms on each other’s shoulders. “Where’s
your cloak?” Rowan asked when they were inside. “I lost it.”

Bel slept, promising to relate her experiences after her rest.
The report was delayed further: three hours later, the wind noise even in the
shelter became an unchanging roar, too loud, too steady, for conversation.

There was thunder, intermittent, and then almost constant.
Lightning became a continuous flicker, outlining the shelter roof, the crack
in the door; someone hurried to secure it tighter. The rain was heavier,
seeming to fall like stones. The air shook, constantly, as if the shelter were
a drum continuously ruffled, with the humans trapped within. It was not far
from the truth.

Outside, heard only in the short gaps between thunder peals,
the goats cried out in their weirdly human voices, seeming quiet and distant
against the roaring wind. The animals tried to hide behind the tent peak,
crowding, shoving each other onto the tent itself. The ceiling sagged,
writhed, and threatened to collapse. Rowan and three others quickly stood to
push up from below, spilling the animals off; and they did the same again
moments later, and again; more helpers joined the work. At last there were nine
people standing with bent backs, supporting the laden roof against their
shoulders.

One of Garris’s warriors, at his own initiative, tied a
safety line about his waist, handed its end to his comrades, and exited the
shelter. There was a tense half hour of waiting; then, one by one, the weight
of each goat on the roof vanished. When he returned, exhausted and
rain-drenched, the word made its way slowly across the shelter, from shouting
mouth to noise-numbed ear: “He killed them.”

Rowan wanted to know what else he had seen; whether the inhabitants
of the other shelters had done the same as he; whether the other shelters were
still intact.

Such detailed communication was impossible. Rowan returned
to a seat beside Bel, who was now awake, looking about with a sharp gaze,
thinking, waiting for an opportunity for useful action.

There was nothing to do but wait. More people slept than Rowan
thought possible amid the noise: they were still too spent to do otherwise.
Others sat, huddled, as if the sound of wind and rain were itself wind and
rain, as if it were necessary to brace and protect oneself from the mere noise.
With painful slowness, the hours passed.

Kammeryn had awakened briefly. In the near-blackness of the
shelter, it was impossible for Rowan to evaluate his condition. He attempted
to sit up; Chess did not permit him to do so. He acquiesced so quickly that
Rowan was concerned.

Chess tried to fill him in on the situation, shouting each
sentence near his ear. Eventually the seyoh was made to understand that all
persons within the shelter were currently safe; that the condition of others
was undetermined and indeterminable. He nodded at the information—weakly, it
seemed to Rowan—and gripped Chess’s shoulder once in response. Then he closed
his eyes and lay quiet, possibly asleep; and Rowan assumed that Chess was still
in command.

Rowan’s own weariness began again to overtake her. She did
not want to sleep. She wanted to observe, to notice every detail of experience—but
not for the sake of a steerswoman’s endless search for information.

It was not her being a steerswoman that made her want to
know; she had become a steerswoman because of her own need, the need to know
and understand. And at this moment, she merely wished, for herself, to be
aware, and could not bear the thought of being otherwise.

Hoping to husband her strength, she braced her back against
the bare earth wall. The contrast between the shuddering air around her and the
utter stability of the earth against her back confused her senses; she was
immediately, horribly nauseous. She leaned forward, away from the wall. The
conflict vanished, and she was instantly more at home, in the midst of every
sailor’s proper element: motion. She sensed it on her skin and behind her eyes;
it gently trembled her bones. She reached back and groped along the earth face,
finding one of the internal guy lines where it dove into the dirt. She wrapped
her fingers about it, and it was like a living tendon in her hand. The taut
tent skin above spoke to her through the line, through her fingers, and she
listened with her body to the tale of wind, force, and power driving across
the land above.

She felt the wind slowly shift, slowly veer to the
northeast, then felt it start to slack, even before its roaring voice began to
fade.

She tapped Bel’s knee to gain her attention and alerted
Chess. In the growing quiet, amid the cries of relief from the huddled people,
the three women made their way across the shelter.

They entered the circle of Fletcher’s guard and settled
beside him. He was fast asleep. Rowan gently shook him awake.

He came to awareness slowly, swinging his head about in the
gloom, confused. Rowan spoke his name, her voice small in her noise-deadened
ears.

He became alert, peering about in the gloom as if amazed to
be alive. “Is it ending?”

“You tell us,” Bel said.

“How long was I asleep?”

“All morning. It’s past noon, now, at a guess,” Chess
supplied.

The hope on his face vanished. “Then it’s just begun.” As if
to put the lie to his words, the rain ceased drumming overhead. On one side of
the shelter, someone was keening, continuously, and possibly had been doing so
unheard all morning.

“How do you know?” the steerswoman asked him.

He flung an arm out in frustration, nearly striking one of
his guards. “I don’t know. The track from forty-eight years ago showed high
winds and storm, on both sides of the print. I don’t know how long it will last
this time, but—more than one morning. There’s more coming.”