The Steerswoman's Road (45 page)

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.”

“Three 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?”

“That’s right.” She could see Bel speaking earnestly to a warrior
seated next to her; his reply consisted of a head shake, a scornful twist of
the mouth, and a dismissive hand gesture.

“Strange company for a steerswoman.”

“She’s very good company indeed. And the best I could ask
for, if I’m to get to where I’m going, and find what I’m looking for.”

“Going and finding?” He made a show of surprise; Rowan began
to find annoying his faint air of condescension. “I thought the way of
steerswomen was to walk wherever the wind took them, and ask too many questions
along the way.”

Rowan necessarily conceded the substance of his remark. “Generally,
something like that is the case. Although we move less randomly than you might
think.” She took a moment to miss her past life: roaming through the green
wildlands, wandering into welcoming villages, charting, noticing, questioning
and answering, making endless discoveries, large and small. Now she sat in a
barbarian encampment on the edge of the dangerous Outskirts, on a journey to
find the source of magical jewels. It seemed a very unlikely situation.

She shook her head. Her old life now seemed distant,
poignant, carefree. “Lately,” she told the seyoh, “I seem always to be searching
for something in particular.”

His smile was indulgent. “And what do you search for, steers-woman?”

Rowan said wryly, aware of how odd it would sound, “A Guidestar.”
A warrior seated nearby, who had been following the conversation, interjected a
comment. “Ha. Look up.”

Involuntarily, she did so. The sky was near fully dark, with
only one Guidestar, the Eastern, visible, hanging eternally motionless against
the sky over the shadowy meadow. Its twin, the Western Guidestar, was hidden by
the overhanging branches of the forest. Stable, immobile, unchanging, these
two points of light were the markers by which humankind located itself on the
surface of the world, counting the passage of time as each night the slow
constellations marched across the sky behind them.

Rowan prepared a reply to the warrior. “I’m not looking for
the ones you can see,” she began.

“If you can’t see them, you can’t find them.” One of his cohorts
gave him a friendly shove in appreciation of the joke.

“I’m looking,” Rowan replied patiently, “for one that has
never been seen—from here.”

This was greeted with silent thought. “They can both be
seen, everywhere,” another person ventured.

“No.” Looking around, she discovered herself to be a center
of attention. Despite the unlikely setting, the situation was one she understood,
and she easily stepped into her role.

She shifted position back a bit and, leaning forward, drew a
circle in the dirt between herself and the seyoh. “Look. Here’s the world, as
if we’re looking down at the pole. And here are the Eastern and Western
Guidestars.” Two dots. “Can you see? If you travel far enough in either
direction, one or the other will be left behind, around the curve of the world.”
She added two more dots. “And you’ll see a new Guidestar, in the opposite
direction.”

They puzzled over the diagram. One man leaned over to trace
the circle with his finger, eyes squinted with the unaccustomed effort of
abstraction. “That’s the world?” He seemed unconvinced.

Another, more quick, ventured, “We’ve traveled a fair bit.
Why has no one never seen that happen?”

From over Rowan’s shoulder, a creaking voice spoke. “It’s
too far.”

Rowan turned and found the old healer leaning above her. Abandoning
dignity, he eased himself to his knees, scuffled over to the drawing, and
pointed, as pleased as a child. “Look at that. You’d have to go ...” He
thought, his watery eyes flickering. “.. near a quarter the whole way around
the world to see the next Guidestar.” He settled himself more comfortably,
cradling his pouch of medicines in his lap, and looked up at Rowan with a
bright gaze, curious and expectant. Someone tapped him, then rudely gestured
him to leave. He stubbornly ignored the request.

“That’s close,” Rowan replied. The others present appeared
skeptical. “But,” she added, holding up one finger, “if in fact you traveled that
far, you might not see one, after all.” She reached down and smoothed the dust
over one of the secret Guidestars. “One has fallen.”

More faces, pale in firelight, turned toward Rowan, then
turned among themselves in puzzlement, and some argument.

“They can’t fall,” one warrior woman loudly replied to the
man beside her. “They can’t fall—they’re
stars.”

“But if they
did,”
he protested, appalled by the
idea.

“They’re not stars, they’re objects.” Rowan had to raise her
voice. “They’re things. Stars move across the sky at night. The Guidestars seem
not to move, unless you move yourself beneath them. They are different.”

“They are stars.” The arguing woman turned toward her. She
had a narrow face, sharp as a hatchet. “They’re special stars, there’s only
two, and they haven’t fallen. They can’t.”

The healer was watching Rowan in fascination. She was
tempted to speak directly to him, to offer her information only to that old,
quick mind behind the sunburned wrinkles; but her duties were not just to one
person.

She changed her method. Speaking to the woman, she said, “Why
only two?”

“Two is all we need.”

“Need for what?”

“Direction. To tell where we’re going.”

“To say that they’re for something is to say that they exist
for your benefit.”

“Why else?”

“And that they were put there.”

“Yes .. :,

“By whom?”

“By gods.”

Rowan leaned back. “They
were
put there. By wizards, and for their use.” A certain category of
simple spells, Corvus had told her, required the presence of at least one
Guidestar. Certain larger spells, he had speculated, probably required the
presence of all of them.

“By wizards? Wizard things, up in the sky?” The idea was
beyond credibility. “No. There’s no wizards out here.”

“Olin’s not far,” Hanlys pointed out, jerking his head to
indicate direction: west. The limits of Olin’s holding, always vague, might
come as near as the western bank of Greyriver.

“We’re Outskirters,” the woman stressed. “Wizards leave the
Outskirts alone. We’re not their goats, like Inner Lands folk.”

A part of Rowan resented the metaphor; but as a steerswoman,
she conceded its truth. “You’re fortunate in that.” She considered the diagram
in the dirt, then wiped it clean with a sweep of her hand. “And without meaning
any insult, it doesn’t much matter if you believe me or not. I know where the
Guidestar has fallen, and that’s where I’m going.”

The healer studied the blank space as if the marks were
still there. “Long trip, just to look at something,” he commented.

She smiled at him. “Long trips are the best kind.”

Across the fire, Rowan noticed Bel standing among her own
small audience, speaking to a female warrior while four men listened with
expressions respectively dubious, bored, scornful, and annoyed. Some comment of
Bel’s made the young woman look at her in sudden surprise, then laugh and—to
Rowan’s astonishment—pat Bel’s shoulder as if comforting a child. Bel
stiffened, eyes cold.