The Steerswoman's Road (48 page)

Rowan drew up short. “Not that rattle we’re moving toward?”

“No. That’s tanglebrush.”

The Outskirter was disinclined to converse. Rowan left her
friend to silence, and the two continued together into the quiet night.

Informed that Bel was depending on hearing, Rowan did the
same, and at once began feeling more and more at ease. This was not yet the dangerous,
unknown Outskirts; it was hill and grass and forest such as she had walked on
and through all her adult life. Her night-traveling skills reasserted
themselves, and she began listening for movement, not of goblins, but of
animals large and small, of the echoless loom of unseen bushes, and of
stealthily approaching strangers. She heard the call of a nightjar, the
rustling of field mice, and once, in a lull of the breeze, sensed the sudden
breathless hush of owl’s wings above. The rattling tanglebrush was a tantalizing
oddity, and she struggled internally, resisting the impulse to approach one
and kindle a small fire by which to examine it.

A chorus of yelps rose in the distance, and Bel startled. “What
was that?”

“Foxes.” Rowan discovered that without noticing, the women
had exchanged positions: Rowan was again leading, comfortably. “They like this
sort of land.” In Bel’s months of traveling the Inner Lands alone, she could
easily have missed that particular sound. “They’ll stay away. They don’t like
humans.”

Bel made no reply. They walked on, as the land began to
slope.

Rowan wished to find something to say, some way to remove
from Bel the dishonor of the raider tribe’s treatment. It seemed impossible.

She searched and considered—and soon found herself mired in
speculations based on incomplete knowledge of Outskirter traditions and codes.
She tried to form an analogy by reference to Inner Lands groups who claimed to
hold honor highly: certain cadres of soldiers, highly placed aristocrats,
priests of some sects. Nothing seemed applicable.

Then she tried again on a simpler level, and realized
suddenly that Bel, through no fault of her own, had been made to look a fool in
front of a friend. “I don’t think much of those raiders’ manners,” Rowan said,
spontaneously. To herself, the comment seemed inane.

But Bel relaxed somewhat. “And that,” she said aggrievedly, “is
what you Inner Lands think Outskirters are.” The matter was closed. She turned
to practical concerns. “Do you have enough water, or should we try to find a
brook to camp by?”

Rowan began to feel better. She elbowed her shoulder-slung
water bag, and it emitted a jolly little gurgle. “I have enough.”

“Then let’s stop here. I only wanted to put some distance between
us and that mob. They might change their minds and turn on us.”

It seemed unlikely. “All right.” Rowan paused, and tried to
scan the area. The ground had flattened again, and was clear enough for their
purposes. Only a few low bushes sprouted in the darkness, one of them a
tanglebrush clattering with a quiet, brittle noise in the now-light breeze. The
women unslung their packs and set to flattening a section of the knee-deep
greengrass.

As they arranged their camp, another Inner Lands danger came
to mind. “The villagers mentioned occasional wolves,” Rowan said. “And a fire
would keep them away. Rowan, I won’t have a fire here.”

“You’d rather meet a wolf than a goblin?”

“Of course.” There was a grin in the Outskirter’s voice, and
she once again became completely herself. “I’ve never met a wolf.” She settled
her gear with a thump of her pack at the head of her bedroll. “But just in
case, we’ll sleep in shifts. You first.”

The Outskirts had no border.

Despite the knowledge, Rowan had more than half expected to
be awakened to a wild endless sweep of redgrass rolling to the limits of the
horizon, cheerfully spotted with white goats—and likely to suddenly sprout an
infestation of bizarre creatures, or a shouting horde of sword-waving
barbarians.

But the pale gray light of the cloudy morning showed terrain
no different from that of the Inner Lands. The dewless meadow was greenly
carpeted with clover and one of the various sorts of green-grass called “panic”
by common folk. The land remained flat to the east, grew hillier to the south.
North, the forest sent a long arm eastward, and shielding her eyes against the
sun as it rose into the clouds, Rowan discerned the woods curving south again
in the distance.

But close beside Rowan’s resting place stood the intriguing
tangle-brush. She pulled herself from her cloak and bedding to examine it.

Rising as high as her waist, its black branches, randomly
right-angled, doubled back and forth on themselves, creating a seemingly
impenetrable mazy dome. The outermost twigs bore flat, narrow leaves as long as
her hand, gray on one side, blue-black on the other. Each leaf stiffly
presented its dark face to the rising sun. Beneath the edge of the dome, as if
in its shelter, grew a patch of the vermin weed redgrass.

“Do the leaves move as the sun moves?” The leaves of some
plants in the Inner Lands did so.

Bel’s mood had repaired itself in the night. Now she was occupied
with rolling her piebald cloak and securing it to the outside of her pack; the
day was already warm. “Yes. Don’t put your hand in there. There are thorns, and
the sap is poisonous.”

Rowan had been about to do exactly that, and drew back sharply.
She would have to learn to investigate more cautiously than was her usual
habit. They were going into Bel’s country, and anything unfamiliar should be
checked against Bel’s knowledge.

“Are you ready?” Bel had already shouldered her pack.

Rowan was dismayed. “No breakfast?”

“Eat as you walk.” She passed the steerswoman some hardbread
and cheese. “We’ll take a long rest at noon, with a fire for cooking, if you
like. And you can write in your book then.” Rowan was accustomed to recording
her day’s observations in her logbook in the evening, by firelight. That would
have to change.

“A moment.” Rowan retrieved her own felt cloak from her bedroll,
shook it, folded it, and stowed it in her pack, using its cushioning to prop
her tubular map case more securely. Hesitating, she uncapped the case and
pulled one chart from its center, the one she and Hanlys had amended. She
unrolled it and held it up to compare with the landscape around her. Bel moved
closer.

Rowan mused over the new notations. “If we travel due east,
we’ll cross through some forest before we reach the veldt.” This was the name
the Outskirters gave for the wide plains of redgrass. Beyond, where blackgrass
predominated, was the prairie. “We can reach it in less than three weeks.”

Bel scanned the landscape. “I don’t know about that. We can
travel quickly if we travel alone and don’t meet any trouble. But we ought to
try to stay with the next tribe we meet, even though it slows us down. The land
isn’t very bad here—it’s mostly Inner Lands and not much Outskirts, but that
will change. It’ll be safer, and easier, to travel in a group.”

Except for the tanglebrush, Rowan had yet to note any evidence
of the depredations commonly attributed to the Outskirts. How soon, she wondered,
would it alter? How quickly, and how completely?

She rolled up the map and replaced it. It slid inside its
mates and down into the case with a hollow thump, one of the sounds in all the
world that Rowan found most satisfying. “Very well, then,” she said,

“until we do meet a tribe, let’s cover as much ground as
quickly as we can, alone.”

The clouds had moved in sometime after Rowan’s second watch
the previous night; now they deepened and darkened. The breeze hesitated,
backed, and a light sprinkle of rain swept in, then departed. In the east, the
sun disappeared as it rose.

Rowan gauged the wind expertly, checked its direction
against her memory of the previous night’s sighting of the Guidestars. It was
blowing from the west, steadily. Weather moved generally from west to east,
and despite the gray above, she knew from the wind and sky that there was
fairer weather coming. As she recognized this, the rain returned, falling more
steadily.

“This could last into the afternoon,” she told Bel. “I hate
to lose the time, but we might do well to move into that bit of forest ahead,
set up a rain fly, and wait it out.”

Bel was disappointed, but agreed. “We can use the time to
practice swordsmanship. If you fight against Outskirter weapons, you’ll need to
change your technique.”

“I’m sure you’ll teach me what I need. And if I find the
time, I can try to chart this area more carefully.” And they trudged eastward
together, through the light drizzle and the shifting air, to the shelter of
the woods.

It rained for twelve days.

By noon on the first day of rain, a steady downpour had established
itself, relenting only occasionally and briefly. The air was hot and heavy, and
the weather, slow as treacle, moved up the land from the southeast. Travel was
postponed, for that day and for the next. The third day began with a lull and a
brief west wind that tried and failed to clear the gloom. Then lightning
skirted the eastern horizon, and by noon all was again steamy heat and rain.

The two women coped as best they could, stripping to their
underlinen to endure the humidity. Rowan dropped to a seat on her bedroll
under the tarp. “Does this sort of weather happen often?”

“Sometimes. But usually in the spring. Never this late in
the year, not that I can remember.” Bel was seated beside her, crowding close
to avoid the water dripping from the edges of the canvas, attempting to dry her
hair with one corner of Rowan’s felt cloak.

Rowan stepped back out of the shelter and set to cleaning a
pair of rabbits that had fallen to her snares overnight. Water intermittently
drizzled onto her head as branches above bent and sprang under accumulated
weight.

“Well. The weather makes fools of us all, so they say.” The
rabbits were two bucks, fat and well fed. She wondered if she would be able to
start a cooking fire in the damp; they had dined on cold food for the last
three days. Rowan began designing a fire shelter, and mentally tallied the
number of birch trees she had noticed in the area. Birch bark burned when wet.

“Some people can guess the coming weather, sometimes,” Bel
said, muffled under the cloak. “You’re usually good.”

“Perhaps it works differently in the Outskirts.” The Steerswomen
had no more reliable information about weather than did the folk. There were
rules, usually dependable, but rules were not principles, and so could not be
trusted.

“Red sky at night, sailor’s delight,” Rowan mused as she
slit one buck with her field knife. The rain had broken briefly at sunset the
previous evening, and the sky had gifted them with a wild glory of orange and
poppy red. And the rain had returned with darkness.

Bel watched Rowan at work, then rose. “Let me do that.”

“No, I’d rather. I’m deathly bored.” Study of rabbit anatomy
was a small diversion.

“I know.” The Outskirter reached among her gear and pulled
out a sheathed sword, one of two she carried alongside her pack. “Look at this
instead, then tell me what you think of it.” Puzzled, Rowan took it from her
hand and relinquished her place in the drizzle to Bel.

The sheath was cured hide, similar to that of Bel’s other
sword; small differences in markings told Rowan that this was not the weapon
Bel commonly used, but a new acquisition.

“Where did you get it?”

“At Five Corners, a week before I met up with you.”

The hilt was of horn, and the guard. Rowan drew the sword.
It was black, edged with dull-colored metal. She felt the flat. “It’s wood.”

“Except for the edge.”

Workable metal was at a premium in the Outskirts. “An Outskirter
sword?”

“That’s right.”

There were no trees in the Outskirts. “Where did the wood
come from?” The grain, barely visible black on black, curled wildly in tiny
interlocking swirls.

“It’s a tanglebrush root.” Bell gathered a handful of rabbit
entrails and flung them far in a fast sidearm motion. Rowan thought briefly of
scavenging raccoons. “Tanglebrush sends down one large root, about so long.”
Bel demonstrated with bloody hands; something over four feet. “If you burn off
the bush, you can dig up the root. Then you cure it with slow heat.”

Rowan hefted the weapon. It seemed well balanced, though the
width of its cross section made it move through the air more sluggishly than a
metal sword of similar length. “You have a steel sword.”

Bel nodded broadly. “And you won’t find many like it among
the tribes. I won it from someone, who won it from someone else—it must have
come from the Inner Lands, a long time ago. And that’s why you have to learn
how to fight against a tangleroot sword. People will try to win your sword from
you.”

Rowan traced small figures-of-eight in the air; her elbow
and the sword’s point were splashed with running drops off the edge of the
tarp. “They’ll try to confiscate it?” She wiped the blade and set to admiring
the weapon’s design: an interesting solution to problems of scarcity.

“They won’t sneak up on you and snatch it. That is, no one
in any tribe that we travel with will.” Bel severed her rabbit’s neck and held
up the head and attached skin, taking pleasure in the neatness of her work. “It’s
a formal tradition. If you covet someone’s weapon, you have the right to
challenge him to a duel.”

Rowan disliked the idea. “Not to the death?”

“No. That’s wasteful.” Bel balled up the head and pelt and
tossed it after its viscera. The skin spread in the air as it lofted, like a
flying squirrel. “To disarmament, to a killing blow stopped at the last moment,
or to surrender. The winner gets the choice of weapons.”

The better fighter acquired the superior weapon. Rowan nodded
thoughtfully and turned to careful study of the sword, considering weight,
length, resilience, and possible advantages and disadvantages in strategy.