The Outskirter's Secret (4 page)

Bel gestured Rowan over, and the steerswoman
approached, her expression held carefully impassive. She lacked
Bel's ease of dissemblance; no steerswoman could lie in words, and
Rowan's training and own natural inclinations rendered her
unskilled at lying by behavior. She had only two choices: to permit
her face to be the natural mirror of her thoughts, or permit it to
show nothing at all. There was no easy middle ground. Rowan chose
the latter extreme.

Joining Bel by the fire, she doffed her pack
and sat down on it. There was a loud creak, and the old woman
looked up with a sharp glare intended to freeze; she was met by a
flat, blank gaze, impassive, impenetrable. Rowan had learned that
the effect was often daunting; it did not fail her now, and the
woman wavered. "At the moment," Rowan said, in a voice so mild and
carefully modulated that it communicated only the content of the
words, "we want nothing from you." This was perfectly true. Bel
spared Rowan a grin of wolfish pleasure.

Bel's plan to gain acceptance into the
raiders' tribe depended on timing and knowledge of tradition and
unbreakable custom. The time was not yet. The travelers waited.

During the long pause that followed, Rowan's
Inner Lands etiquette began to require that introductions be made.
She quashed it.

There was kindling enough, but the old woman
continued her job, unnecessarily: a delaying tactic. Unknown to
her, it worked more to Rowan and Bel's benefit than her own. "It
takes more than an ambush of dirt-diggers to stop warriors," she
said derisively. "You should have joined them. Plenty of
booty."

Bel tilted her head, dark eyes amused. "We
didn't like the odds."

"You're afraid," the old woman said
scornfully.

Bel took no offense. "Of some things. Such as
fighting against bad odds beside strangers whose skills I don't
know, who don't know mine, and who use strange signals to direct
the battle."

During the speech, the old woman's interest
in Bel began to alter, and by the end, she had abandoned pretense
of work. She squinted her sighted eye at Bel, and Rowan read there
clearly, for the first time, curiosity. "Where are you from?" she
asked slowly. Rowan could not see what in Bel's words had prompted
the question.

"East."

The ancient Outskirter grunted once and sat
considering, as if the single word spoke volumes to her. Eventually
she indicated Rowan. "Her?"

"West," Rowan supplied. Then, because it was
against her nature to give so incomplete an answer, she added, "I'm
a steerswoman."

This won her an astonished look. "Ha!" It was
a word, not a laugh, but laughter followed. "One of them. A walker
and talker." And to Rowan's surprise, she dropped into a parody of
graciousness. "Tell me, lady," she said, following the form used by
some common folk, "what's a good village to raid, hereabouts?"

Rowan answered truthfully. "The area is new
to me, and I've been avoiding towns on this journey. The only town
I can advise you on is the one I just left, and about them I can
tell you this: Your warriors have walked into an ambush. Any
survivors should be returning very soon." She heard a rustle far
behind her, and voices in the distance. "I believe that's them
now."

"You have sharp ears," Bel commented,
pleased. One voice rose above the others, in an anguished wail; Bel
cocked her head, then addressed the woman. "If your tribe is very
far from here, you'll need our help, I think."

"You should have helped before," the woman
spat.

"We're here now," Rowan said calmly.

"We don't need you, and we don't want
you."

The noise grew closer: several people,
traveling quickly and with difficulty, abandoning silence for
speed.

"I wonder if the others will agree," Bel
said.

The voice that had cried out cried again,
inarticulate, and the old woman startled. Someone shouted: an
urgent hail. The woman responded "This way!" and lumbered to her
feet as quickly as old bones would permit.

The sounds grew rapidly closer, and a male
voice called out, "Dena!"

"Here!" The old woman hurried to follow the
sound.

Bel was on her feet and beside her in an
instant, Rowan close behind. "Quickly," Bel said, "do you want our
help or not?"

Dena stopped to stare at her blankly. "No. Go
away."

"You there! Lend a hand!"

All turned at the voice, and Bel slapped
Rowan's shoulder urgently, once. "Go." The steerswoman hurried
ahead into the brush.

There were four of them: one man with a
bloody face supporting another staggering with three arrow shafts
in his thigh, and behind, a third man half-dragging a woman who was
clutching the front of her vest over her abdomen with both fists,
sobbing helplessly at each movement.

Rowan rushed to her side and slung one arm
across the woman's back to the man's shoulder. "Here." She
gestured, urging him to link hands behind the woman's knees to
carry her.

He was panting, his face pale with shock, and
he looked at Rowan in confusion, seeing her clearly, for the first
time, as a stranger. "Who are you?" he gasped.

"My name is Rowan." She gestured again,
hurriedly. "Here, like this—"

There was a hand on her arm: Bel, holding her
back. Rowan protested, "What—"

Bel spoke to the man. "That's her only
name."

Concern for the plan to gain acceptance
vanished in Rowan's desire to help. "Skies above, Bel, let me go—"
Bel's fingers became like iron bands. Rowan caught the man's
expression.

Panic and desperation were struggling in his
face with something else, another force, equally compelling. His
gaze flicked between Bel's face and Rowan's. His mouth worked
twice, as if there were something he needed to say, but did not
want to.

Between them, the wounded woman writhed once
and emitted a clench-toothed wail as an appalling amount of blood
worked its way between her fingers.

The question resolved itself. Custom and
tradition combined with need.

He turned to Rowan. "I'm Jermyn, Mirason,
Dian." Bel vanished, gone to help the other wounded, and Jermyn
locked his right hand on Rowan's shoulder and quickly swung the
woman off the ground as they linked hands behind her legs. "Help me
get my wife to camp. I think she's dying."

It was the help they rendered that gained the
two travelers the right to ask for assistance of their own. But it
was the exchange of names that guaranteed it would be granted.

They began the short trip to the tribe's main
encampment slowly: three wounded people supported and aided by four
whole, carrying as much of the cached equipment as they could
manage. Soon, they were moving more quickly, with only two wounded
members.

Rowan paused, looking back to where the body
of Jermyn's wife lay in the trackless brush, abandoned. "Aren't
they going to bury her?"

The others were already far ahead. Bel had
dropped back, waiting for Rowan. "Customs differ. Even among the
Outskirters." She winced. "My people wouldn't leave her like this.
But we wouldn't bury her, either."

At the last, Jermyn had sat long beside his
wife, holding her hand, while his comrades shifted impatiently,
waiting for her to die so that they might continue. Their only
interest seemed to be the length of delay.

The steerswoman turned away and joined her
friend, disturbed. She remembered a poem Bel had once recited, that
included a death rite. "You'd burn her body?" It made her think
much better of Outskirters, to know not all were so callous.

Bel adjusted the load she carried: two packs,
her own and one belonging to the man whose leg she had helped
steady while the old woman painfully extracted three arrows. "No.
That's only for heroes." One pack was on her back; the other she
shifted from hand to hand by its straps.

"What, then?" Rowan took the extra pack from
her.

"First," Bel informed her as they resumed
following the Outskirters, "we'd divide her."

" 'Divide'?" Rowan was puzzled.

Bel gestured. "Cut her up. Into pieces, at
the joints."

The spare pack dropped to the ground as the
steerswoman stopped short, stunned and sickened. "What?"

"With the torso in two pieces." Bel had
paused ahead and was looking back at her, matter-of-factly.

Rowan swallowed her distaste. Customs
differed, as Bel had said. "And then?" Her voice sounded thin to
her own ears.

"We'd cast her."

"You're using that word in a way I don't
know."

The Outskirter gestured with both hands: in
front of her, then out and around. "Spread the pieces, as far as
possible. Distribute them across the land."

"Whatever for?"

"For the sake of the land's soul."

Religion. Rowan took a breath and released
it, then regathered the spare pack. Even in the Inner Lands
religion was the one thing most varied, and most inexplicable.

Religion, she thought again, with a touch of
amused derision, then remembered: the farm of her childhood, the
desert so frighteningly near, grim and red but for the distant holy
green of the funeral groves—and the nearer groves, huge and old,
one sheltering the farmhouse itself. And more: small phrases spoken
to ward off evil, daily beliefs unfounded but cherished by her
family, the great solemn Midsummer Festival of joy and sacrifice .
. .

In the absence of thought, one fell back on
habits of emotion. In the world of her childhood, to cut the body
of a dead person was sacrilege.

But she was not a child, she was an adult,
and a steerswoman. There was no reason to believe that the
disposition of a corpse had any effect on its departed
inhabitant.

She tucked the pack awkwardly under one arm
and rejoined Bel, and they continued after their guides through the
brush. Presently she spoke again, with a nervous half-laugh of
relief. "Do you know," she said, pushing aside a low branch to aid
their passage, "for a moment, I was afraid you were going to tell
me that your people eat their dead."

"No," Bel replied. "You'd have to go much
farther east than my tribe, for that."

"
T
hree left?
Three from two dozen?" The dark, angular man leaned close to the
wounded warrior's face. "And how could that happen?"

The single war chief who had survived the
raid twisted his leg involuntarily under the ministrations of an
elderly healer. "Outnumbered. Outmaneuvered. Ambushed."

"And how many did you take down?"

A wince, either of pain or dismay. "Hard to
see. Maybe five."

"Five!"

Seated nearby, Rowan wondered which five of
the brave villagers had fallen, and found in herself small sympathy
for these Outskirters.

The camp was pitched against the edge of the
forest, one side nestled beneath overhanging evergreens, the other
open to a green, rolling meadow, where the tent shadows now
stretched away from the vanishing sun, long fingers indicating the
east. The tents themselves were of varied construction and
materials: tall pavilions of billowing cloth, battered with age and
usage; long low structures of stitched hide; canvas shelters in
military style. Looted, Rowan guessed, from various sources, over a
period of years.

The tribe's leader was dark-haired, his face
a complexity of sharp angles and weathered lines, and he wore his
patchwork cloak with the rakish flair of an actor, over canvas
trousers and an Inner Lands cotton shirt. He mused, small eyes
glittering. "They must have had warning." Rowan did not volunteer
explanation, but despite herself glanced at her companion.

Bel sat across the fire from her, halfway
back amid a group of lounging and seated warriors. A thin,
bedraggled woman of middle age was moving among the people, passing
out slices of venison from a wooden platter. She reached Bel, and
Rowan saw but did not hear Bel's "Thank you." The serving woman
paused momentarily in surprise, then continued on without
reply.

"Well." The leader sat back on his haunches
and blew out his cheeks expressively. "Well, it happens." He
dismissed the mystery with blunt pragmatism. "Fall almost on us,
winter coming," he reflected. "We'll have to move further out, take
on one of the goat-tribes." He scanned the encampment, counting
heads. "And we'll have to be clever about it." He addressed the
assemblage in general. "Think about it. Any ideas, talk to me." He
caught Rowan watching him, nodded a greeting, and moved over to
join her.

"And you're an odd one, Rowan steerswoman,"
he said, as someone shifted to make room for him to sit, "wandering
out in the wilderness."

"I'm often wandering out in the wilderness,"
she replied. "In fact, I enjoy it."

"But never through such dangerous lands as
these." He tilted his head at her humorously, firelight and fading
sunlight combining to highlight high cheekbones. "Hanlys, Denason,
Rossan," he introduced himself, then added, "seyoh." Rowan
recognized the Outskirter term for a tribe's leader.

"You and your people are the most dangerous
things we've yet found on our trip, Hanlys," she commented, knowing
this would be taken as a compliment. "And if I understand
correctly, you won't harm us."

"True enough. We're obligated. Unless you
decide to harm us now, that is."

"It isn't likely. I believe Bel and I are
going to need all the friends we can get." The serving woman had
reached them, and brusquely handed the seyoh and Rowan their food.
"Thank you," Rowan said, offhand, and the woman turned away
abruptly, changing her course to distribute in another section of
camp. Unfed persons to Rowan's right voiced rude protests, which
the server ignored.

Rowan looked after her. "Did I say something
wrong?"

Hanlys snorted. "Shocked her, more like.
We're not soft on our servants, like some." He tilted his head
infinitesimally in Bel's direction. "She's from east?"