The Steerswoman's Road (49 page)

She did not care to lose her sword. Of all those she had
used or owned, the sword she now carried was the only one with which she felt
something approaching the true unity of fighter and weapon. She had no
intention of permitting anyone to take it from her.

The sword was one that Bel had stolen for her during their escape
from the fortress of the wizards Shammer and Dhree: a standard-issue guardsman’s
sword, stolid, unadorned, seemingly unremarkable. But although there was no
magic power in Rowan’s new sword, she suspected magical processes behind its
construction. It was lighter than its length suggested, and a shade stronger
than its weight would lead one to assume. It held its edge longer, and under
stress it revealed the slightest hint of flex, permitting her to use more
aggressive maneuvers, moves that would risk breakage in a common sword, or
cause its user to be trapped in a disadvantageous stance.

With her knowledge of these differences, the steerswoman now
found during practice that her strategies became incomprehensible to her
opponents, while maintaining to herself an elegant interior logic. She began to
enjoy using the weapon and became, for the first time in her life and to her
great surprise, a superior swordswoman.

“Let’s go.”

The steerswoman looked up. Bel was cleaning her hands with
dirt and leaves. The rabbit carcasses, legs tied together with a strip of skin,
were draped over a low-hanging branch.

“What?”

“Let’s practice.”

“In this weather?”

The Outskirter raised her brows. “You plan never to fight in
the rain?”

Rowan laughed. “Very well, then.” She stood, tossed the Outskirter
weapon hilt-first to Bel, and found her own sword.

They moved into a larger clearing nearby, and as they faced
off, Rowan took a moment wryly to note the oddity of the scene: rain spattering
through the trees all around, a murky humid sky lowering above, tendrils of
ground mist snaking and vanishing, whirling around the legs of two women who
were carefully, intently assuming a battle stance—both damp as otters, and clad
only in their underlinen. Then Bel made her move.

They stepped into the drill as if stepping into a dance,
patterned and familiar, as Rowan studied the action of the Outskirter weapon,
trying to reason out its weaknesses and turn them to her advantage.

Eventually Bel stepped back. “No.”

“What?”

“You’re trying to use your edge against my flat.”

Rowan used the respite to regain her breath. “Your flat is
wood. I thought to be able to chip away at it and weaken the sword.”

“It’ll take you forever.” Bel pushed wet hair from her eyes.
“And I have more weight, and more strength. You’ll exhaust yourself.” She
beckoned, raised her sword. “Try again, with your usual style. But slowly.”

Artificially slow movement was more tiring than swordplay at
normal speed, and Rowan’s muscles trembled as her weapon met Bel’s careful
downstroke. Rowan parried, and as ever, the superior resilience of her sword
began to absorb some of the power behind Bel’s blow, affording Rowan an easy
escape.

She began to take it: a shift of weight, a half step back,
preparing to take advantage of her opponent’s longer recovery time—when Bel
said, “No. Come in.”

Reluctantly, Rowan moved her weight into the stroke, found
her strength overmatched, slid her blade up Bel’s, instinctively shifting to
the strongest section of her own sword

At Bel’s word, they paused: face-to-face, edge-to-edge at
guards. “I don’t like getting this close,” Rowan told Bel.

“I know. Now twist your edge. No,
away
from my guard, and use all the strength you can.” Rowan
complied, to no visible effect whatsoever. “Good.” Bel stepped back and dashed
the water from her eyes with one forearm. Rowan vainly attempted to wipe her
fingers dry on her singlet, to improve her grip. “Now again,” the Outskirter
said when both were finished, “full strength, up to speed. And then halt.”

Rowan tried to repeat the moves: downstroke, clash, flex and
slide, step forward, guard-to-guard, and vicious twist

“That’s right.” They disengaged. “Now look.” Bel held up her
sword for Rowan’s inspection.

Where the blade joined the guard, the metal edging showed
the faintest dent. Rowan put her hand over Bel’s and turned the sword in the
grayish light. On either side of the dent, the metal had lifted slightly from
the wood. Bel indicated it. “That’s the weakest point on an Outskirter sword,”
she said, “where the metal comes up to the hilt guard.”

Rowan considered the implications. “And it’s the strongest
part of my sword.”

“That’s right. You’ll never see two Outskirters with
wood-andmetal swords using this technique, because it sets weakness against
weakness. But for you, it’s your strength against their weakness.” She took up
her position. “Again.”

A long drill, and they did not stop this time. Applying the
new technique, Rowan found that she shifted stance more often, more completely,
and more abruptly than was her former habit. She struggled to adapt; then she
caught the feverish rhythm, moved with it, felt her effectiveness grow, and a
strange wild joy rose in her. She began to love it.

“Halt!” Bel called out, and pulled away. Rowan found she was
exhausted without having been aware of it. She leaned forward, hands on knees,
and drew long deep breaths. Bel came forward and displayed her weapon.

At the guard, one side of the edging had completely lifted
from the wooden blade, in a short battered curve. “When you reach this point,
try to get your edge under the loose end, and work it up.”

Rowan wiped her forehead against her shoulder. “111 pull
away, I’ll leave myself open.”

“Don’t pull out—get under the edging, and then slide your
blade alongside your opponent’s.” Bel took both swords and demonstrated the
configuration and movement: a scissoring action. Rowan could see that in battle
the force would peel away the metal from the wood.

She was impressed. “I can completely destroy the other fighter’s
weapon.”

“That’s right.”

“That’s quite an advantage.” Something occurred to her. “When
you won your metal sword, were you using a wooden?”

“Yes.”

“How did you ever manage to win?”

The Outskirter grinned and stepped back. “Like this.”

They set to again, the same drill, and Rowan found her moment:
parry, flex and slide, forward, hilt-to-hilt—

Bel shifted, spun, vanished.

Battered metal lay lightly across the back of Rowan’s neck.
Bel’s voice came from behind. “You’ll have to watch out for that one.”

They resigned themselves to traveling in the rain.

Every second day, they stopped early to dry their clothing
by damp, smoky fires, which they extinguished at dark. They practiced swordplay
until Rowan had successfully destroyed the tanglewood sword; Rowan updated her
logbook, its pages limp with dampness in the shelter of the tarp; and Bel found
occupation for idle hours in trying to learn to read and write, clumsily
scratching letters in the muddy earth with a stick.

They counted miles.

“This can’t continue,” Rowan stated. The older forest was
slowly being left behind, tall spruce and birches grudgingly abdicating to
scrub pine, briar, blackberry.

Bel made no reply, disentangling herself from a net of brambles.
“It’s going to take forever.” They were making less than fifteen miles a day.

“Isn’t Hanlys’s information of any use?” Bel asked.

Rowan made a wordless comment of disgruntlement. The raider
tribe’s seyoh had proved to have a very vague understanding of mileage. “The
brushland should break—at some point,” Rowan said. “Then some wide greengrass
meadowlands with occasional young copses. It’s going to take longer than we
thought.”

Bel did not reply; Rowan knew that the Outskirter’s
thoughts, like Rowan’s own, were on their food supply.

From the start, Bel had maintained that the Outskirts had no
game, and that only association with a tribe, with its attendant herd, could
insure survival. Rowan, accustomed to occasionally living off small game and
wild plants during the more isolated segments of her routes, had accepted the
statement only half-seriously.

But when she noted the appearance of the stiff, rough-edged
red-grass, which the deer never touched, and its slow intermingling with the
green of panic grass and timothy, she also began to note the disappearance of
smaller animals. The rabbits, the mice, and even certain birds, were gone.

“Grouse,” she enumerated to herself, as she struggled
through the briar. “Quail, titmice. Finches.”

“What?”

Rowan had not realized that she had spoken aloud. “Where are
the birds?” To give the lie to her observation, an egret lifted in the distance,
rising above unseen water, white wavering wingstrokes dim against the
mist-laden gray of the sky.

“You won’t see many, deeper in the Outskirts,” Bel replied. “If
a tribe moves close to the Inner Lands, flocks of birds will follow it, but
only for a while.”

Rowan paused to wipe sweat and condensation from her face. “Perhaps
we should head for that water. There may be ducks.”

“Can you catch a duck?”

Rowan made a vague gesture. “Probably. I know the theory,
but I’ve never tried it.”

The water was an east-running brook, slow and shallow, and
there were no ducks; two more egrets fled to the sky at the travelers’ approach,
and three smaller birds, possibly herons. In autumn, with no nestlings, they
had no reason to return. Rowan caught frogs, and one snake, while Bel watched
from the banks with immense amusement.

They built a fire shelter out of brush, and Rowan eventually
started a damp, smoky fire with some of the birch bark she had wisely saved
from the forest, now far behind. The flame needed constant attending, due to
the smallness of the bramble branches with which they fed it.

They cooked; they ate; they calculated.

“We have enough food,” Bel said, “to get back to the Inner
Lands from here. We should think about it.”

Rowan had already been doing so. She sighed. “How long do
you think we can extend what we have?” She had traveled on short rations
before, and knew her own limits. She did not know Bel’s.

“Let’s check your maps.”

They abandoned their meal to stand head-to-head; Bel held
the sides of their cloaks together to provide shelter for the chart. Rowan
traced with one finger the intermittent tracks to the east of Grey-river. “There’s
something here ... a few houses, not really a village. Farms.”

“Is your Steerswomen’s privilege always dependable?”

Rowan winced. “No. But nearly always, yes. And it’s harvest
by now; most people will be more generous. Can you tell if there’s likely to be
a tribe nearby?”

“There’s
likely
to be one, anywhere east of here. But
I haven’t seen the signs yet.”

“What signs do you look for?”

“Goat muck, cessfields, and redgrass eaten to the roots.
Bits of corpses, if there’s been trouble.”

Rowan replaced her map and they returned to their dinner. “How
likely are we to end up in bits ourselves?”

“If we approach them right, they’ll wait to talk first. We’ll
only end up in bits if they don’t like our answers.” Bel took another bite of
food, appreciatively. “The smoke doesn’t help the frogs,” she observed, “but it’s
good for the snake.”

It was late afternoon, and the travelers considered
themselves in place for the night. Rowan wiped the grease from her fingers and
rose to set up the rain fly, musing on Bel’s several plans for gaining the acceptance
of a tribe. “How is it that I never knew that you had three names?” she
wondered as she worked.

“I never told you any of my names at all,” Bel pointed out,
and Rowan recollected with surprise that this was true. When first they met,
Rowan had overheard Bel’s first name being used by an Outskirter tribe that
was peacefully patronizing the inn at Five Corners; the steerswoman had simply
addressed the Outskirter by the name she had heard, as a matter of course.

“Bel, Margasdotter, Chanly,” Rowan repeated to herself, reminding
herself of the elements: given name, matronym, line name. “Perhaps,” she mused
aloud, “I should choose two more names for myself. Anya was my mother, which makes
me Anyasdotter; and for a line name—” She stopped, catching Bel’s expression.

The Outskirter sat stiffly, her face all glower. “That’s not
a good idea.”

Rowan recovered. “I’m sorry.” Then: “But why isn’t it?”

Bel wavered, then returned to eating. “If you name yourself
as an Outskirter,” she said, her words barely comprehensible around a mouthful
of snake, “you’re saying that you are an Outskirter. People will expect you to
act like one, and they won’t forgive you any mistakes you make in proper behavior.”
She paused, then continued reluctantly, and more clearly. “And making up a
line name out of the air would be saying that our lines mean nothing. It’s an insult.”

The steerswoman was contrite. “I didn’t intend it that way.”

“I know. But they won’t. Don’t try it.”

The greengrass vanished.

It was as subtle a process as Bel had first described to the
Prime: first one noticed occasional patches of redgrass, then more, and eventually
one realized that for some indeterminate length of time no greengrass had been
seen at all. Certain other green plants remained, however: thistle, with
autumn-brown stems, and purple blossoms faded to white; milkweed, sending up
drifting silk into the air on mornings of less rain; and dandelion, heads
ghostly gray, rain-beaten to damp drab blots. All of them, Rowan noted, plants
with airborne seeds.

The redgrass surprised her by growing taller than ever it
had in the Inner Lands, where it was routinely pulled as soon as it appeared.
Here, it became knee-high, then waist-high, stiff tall reeds with abrasive
blades growing in a three-ranked pattern, and fat beardless seed heads. At
first Rowan thought it a different plant altogether; rain seemed to dull its
colors, soaking and darkening the bright red faces of the blades to dull brownish
brick. They waded through it, its blades clutching and tugging at their
clothing.