The Steerswoman's Road (17 page)

“Truth,” Rowan said to herself, then turned to Bel. The Outskirter
was watching her with concern. She had not intruded on Rowan’s thoughts, but
was carefully waiting, with true warrior’s patience. She knew that Rowan had to
follow her own path to her own answers, and that the answers, once found, would
be shared.

“If you’re traveling down a road, and you ask for
directions, and someone lies about them, what happens?” Rowan asked.

“You get lost.”

“If you want to know when to plant your fields, and someone
lies, what happens?”

“You go hungry.”

“If there’s a troop of bandits coming, and no one tells you?”

“You die.”

“People
need
truth! They need it to be happy, to know
what to do, to
live!”
Rowan rose. A single step took her to the water,
and she stood with her gray boots mere inches away from the tiny lapping waves
as she gazed out at the line of trees on the opposite shore.

“What you say is too simple,” Bel said. “Some things are
less important than others.”

Rowan looked up at the clouding sky, where the motionless
hawk still hung. She saw with the whole of her vision equally, and her hearing
brought her what her eyes could not see, the shape of space behind her. Lightly
moving wind brushed her arms, and damp air floated up from the river before
her, against her face and body. She sensed the crushed weeds that lay under the
soles of her boots, and the solid earth beneath. She felt the weight of her own
body, muscle and bone, connecting her to that earth, the limits of her skin
defining the space she occupied. Simultaneous, interlocking, all senses added
up in her being to a single perception, a single clear instant. The whole of her
surroundings came to her in one perfect moment, all of it real, and all of it
true.

“They’re going to take it all away,” she said.

Bel said nothing.

Some wizard was changing the nature of Rowan’s existence.
She could either accept an arbitrary limit to her mind’s reach, and so be less
than a steerswoman, or deceive, and so be no steerswoman at all.

She loved it too much. Less was better than none.

Abruptly, inconsistency caught at her mind: the hawk—it had
not moved.

Rowan began to analyze what her senses had brought her. The
breeze was from the southwest. Would it be different higher up? There should be
a downdraft of cooler air over the river; a hawk would have to beat and circle
to maintain the same perspective. The forest was alive with small game; a hawk
would have found prey by then.

“Get back,” she told Bel, and quickly moved away from the
river’s edge.

They stopped among the trees, Rowan trying to see the speck
through the new green leaves above. Bel had no sword, but a wicked knife had
appeared in her hand. “What is it?”

Rowan spotted it. “We’re being watched. Or the Archives are.”

“By a wizard?”

“Who else can fly?”

Bel peered up. “Will he attack?”

“I don’t know. It hasn’t moved. Perhaps we weren’t seen, or
weren’t recognized.”

Bel nodded. “Then it’s watching the Archives. We should tell
them.”

“Yes. Let’s keep off the path.” Rowan led the way through
the forest, accurately cutting around the twists of the dirt track, first
walking, then running.

They entered by way of the stables, breathless from the
climb. Inside, Josef was currying Artos’s horse, Berry seated on a barrel
nearby.

Rowan stopped, trying to calm her breathing. “Berry,” she
said. “Berry, I’m sorry, I’m going to do it.”

Berry and Josef exchanged a glance; then he silently went
back to his work. Berry rose. “What made you change your mind?”

“The Archives are being watched. By something that flies.”

“It’s not just me, anymore,” Rowan told the resident steerswomen.
They were assembled in the chart room, eight women and two men, some in chairs,
some seated casually on the edges of the sturdy copying tables, one standing
by the window, occasionally scanning the sky. To one side of the room, Josef
and Bel stood watching the proceedings.

“I was thinking about my own life,” Rowan continued. “I love
the steerswoman’s life, and I wasn’t willing to change it. But first this restriction,
and now this ... spying ..” She was standing before the three steps that led to
the master chart. She spread her hands in a broad gesture. “How long before we become
so changed that none of us are steerswomen anymore? The whole way of life is
threatened, for every one of us. I ...” She paused, shaping her thoughts. “I
can’t stand for it. I have to try to stop it, whatever it may take. Or at the
very least, I have to know why.”

Sarah smiled with a teacher’s pride. “Spoken like a steerswoman:
she has to know why.”

There were quiet comments around the room as they consulted
each other briefly. Suddenly weary, Rowan sat down on the lowest step and
watched them, waiting.

Henra stood and addressed the gathering. “This is no small
thing. We all will have a hand in this, I’m afraid, and if someone asks, it
would be best if we could refrain from revealing Rowan’s mission ...” She
trailed off, uncharacteristically hesitant. Rowan recognized on the Prime’s
face the same confused pain Rowan felt at the prospect of living with deceit.
As Arian had said, when it came to the doing of the thing ...

Abruptly, Rowan remembered a simple bit of medical knowledge
learned from Maranne in Wulfshaven: a poisoned limb is amputated.

“No.” Faces turned toward her. “Steerswomen mustn’t lie. I
have to resign the order.”

Shock filled the room, followed by protests. Amid the babble
of voices, Rowan felt suddenly empty, a hollow shape of flesh with no center
and no identity.

Bel and Josef turned perplexed gazes at each other. Speaking
above the noise, Bel asked, “But can’t she join again, when her mission is
finished?”

“It’s never been done,” Arian said.

“Not true,” Hugo put in, and the people quieted to hear him.
“When I was training, there was a steerswoman, named Silva—” Henra nodded. “Yes.”

“She mapped the nearer western mountains,” Keridwen supplied.

“That’s right. But that was later.” Hugo continued. “While
on the road in the east, she fell in love with a farmer there. She left us to
marry and live with him.”

“And he died,” the Prime said.

“Pneumonia. But his love was all that kept her there, and
she became unhappy. She fostered her children to his sister and came back to
us.”

“And did very good work,” Keridwen added, her eyes on the
master chart, where the near edge of the western mountains showed clear and
accurate.

The Prime turned back to Rowan, and she was like a woman released
from some great pain. “Will that suit you?”

Rowan nodded mutely. She felt distant, as if she had already
departed and was on some long unknown road with no guidance.

She looked down at her left hand and saw the silver ring on
her middle finger, the band with that odd half twist that made it a thing both
mysterious and logical: an object of three dimensions, yet possessing only one
face, one edge, folded back into reality by the simple laws of geometry.
Without thinking, she removed it and held it in the palm of her hand. It seemed
weightless.

More quickly, as if by hesitating she would lose her commitment,
she slipped the thin gold chain over her head and let it dangle from her
fingers. She looked at Henra.

“Hold on to them,” the Prime said, “and wear them again when
you can.”

Rowan placed them both in the leather sack on its thong, nestling
beside the uncanny jewel. Tucked under her blouse, the sack felt faintly
heavier, a promise set aside.

Henra sighed, then reorganized herself, efficient. “You’ll
have to choose another name—and remember to answer to it.”

Looking faintly puzzled, Keridwen added, “She should wear a
different cloak, as well. We’re not the only people who use gray felt cloaks,
but each one of us does.”

“That green cloak she arrived in,” Hugo suggested.

“That will do,” Henra agreed. Passing Rowan as she climbed
the stairs, she walked to the master chart. “Now, as to her route: she’ll have
to avoid both Five Corners and Donner—”

“But that’s not enough.” Heads turned to the side of the
room, where Bel stepped forward from her place by the wall. Behind her, Josef
crossed his arms and nodded grimly. The Outskirter continued. “She can’t just
go, and dress differently, and not use her own name. She needs a reason for
going, something that no one would think twice about. She needs something else
to
be.”
She scanned the faces in amazement. “Don’t you people know how
to protect yourselves at all?”

The accusation pushed past Rowan’s weariness of spirit; she
discovered herself angry. “Yes, we do,” she said vehemently, then with
awkwardness corrected her choice of words. “Yes, they do. Steers-women can
protect themselves from bandits and cutpurses on the road. They can protect
themselves from wild beasts. They can protect themselves from those who would
abuse their good natures. We’ve never had to, never wanted to deceive.”

Bel stood before her, solid and sensible. “Time to learn.”

Suddenly, without derision, Josef laughed. “Look at you, a
bunch of steerswomen,” he said. “You know so much, but the one thing you don’t
know about is lying.” He held up his index finger, like an instructor. “Well,
I can tell Rowan how to fool people. The best way to lie is to tell the truth.”

The steerswomen looked at each other in perplexity. Bel expanded
on Josef’s statement. “That’s right, you say true things—except, you leave some
things out. That way, the person takes what you’ve said and makes his own
conclusions—the wrong ones, because of what’s missing.”

Josef gave her an affirming nod. “And that’s your lie. And
the second best way is to tell the truth—something obvious, something the
other person knows down to his bones—and add your lie onto it, so long as it
fits in.”

“The person knows that the part he can check is true, and if
the rest makes sense, he’ll believe it,” Bel said.

“And the last good way to lie is to say nothing. Let the
other person guess as much as he likes, and when he’s dead wrong,” he said with
a smile, “you tell him how clever he is.”

The group relaxed. The alien concept of deception had been
reduced to principles. One thing every steerswoman understood was the
application of principles.

More confident, Henra said, “Very well. Without compromising
ourselves, we can help Rowan by seeing for her what’s unsaid.” She gestured. “Rowan,
stand up please.” Rowan rose and stood before them, the great master chart
looming at her back. “Now, everyone, imagine you’ve never seen her. Try to
remove that information from your mind. What can you tell, just by looking at
her? What is this woman?”

Rowan waited under their discerning gazes. What was she? Ignoring
her present pain, she thought back to her childhood, before she had met
Keridwen, when no one around her shared that most basic part of her nature.
What had she been then?

Nothing. She felt a return of that emptiness, that blank
solitude and unnamed yearning that had characterized her life before. She felt,
again, like the child who saw too much, thought too quickly, and had no one who
could understand her.

“She travels, constantly, outdoors,” Sarah noted. “See how
dark her skin is, how streaked her hair. And she travels on foot; look at her
stance, and the development of her legs.”

“The upper part of her body is not developed,” Arian said. “She’s
not a laborer; she doesn’t live by the use of her muscles.”

“Her fingers are ink-stained,” Henra said. “It’s the sort of
staining that lives in the cracks of one’s hands and can’t be removed. She uses
a pen, every single day.”

“She might be a scribe,” Keridwen suggested.

“A scribe who travels?” Arian said. “Not likely.”

“Notice how composed she is,” Hugo put in, tilting his head
in study. “This is a woman who knows she can handle whatever she gets into. And
see how she watches us? She’s thinking, and she’s used to thinking. She’s used
to figuring out for herself what to do.”

“That spells steerswoman to me,” the dark-haired woman noted.

“Try to put that out of your mind,” Henra said.

Rowan listened to the information, considering the clues as
if they applied to some stranger, grateful for a problem to occupy her loneliness.
A scribe would not travel, not often. Would a clerk? A student?

Berry addressed Rowan. “Say something.”

“Say something?”

“Anything, just speak. Describe the weather.”

Rowan looked out the window. “It’s a beautiful, cloudless
day. It’s comfortably cool, but the sunlight coming in heats the stone floor. I
can feel a draft from the warm air rising.” She realized that she had noticed
more than the average person would, and had supplied the information casually.
She would have to stop that.

Hugo made a wry face. “Well, by that voice, she’s educated.”

“No,” Berry said. “Or, not necessarily. In the north, they
have that careful manner of speech, even among the uneducated. And the crispness
of her consonants, and the rhythm, that confirms it. She’s from the north, past
the western curve of the Long North Road. Far north, I’d say, from the sound of
her vowels. I think she’s from one of the farthest settlements, by the Red
Desert. I’d place the town nearest as Umber.”

Bel looked at Rowan in amazement. “Is that all true?”

Rowan winced. “Exactly.”

Henra was disturbed. “That’s far too precise. She advertises
her origins.”

“But Berry’s using a steerswoman’s ear,” Arian said. “Would
the average person notice this?”

Everyone turned to Josef. “Average person, eh?” he said
wryly. “All right, well, she sounds a little ... foreign, but not so much. I
wouldn’t think twice. Say it again?” Rowan repeated the sentences. Josef nodded.
“Maybe educated. Sort of ... stiff.”