The Steerswoman's Road (52 page)

The groupings of the tents fell into some larger pattern: a
star, it seemed, though Rowan could not from her vantage count the points. The
wind brought the smell of cooking again, and she surmised a central open area,
with a fire pit.

When they passed another of the tent city’s points, Rowan
found herself at the crest of a little dale, looking east. Below, the creek reflected
the blue of the sky, stable and peculiar amid the noisy, shimmering red and
brown. The motion of the colors rendered the scene freakish, unreal, the
sloping perspective seemed about to shift without ever quite doing so, and the
tapping of the reeds never ceased, but rose and fell like rain on the ocean.
Rowan gazed down dizzily and felt as if her ears were tired inside, from the
noise.

Over the sound, half-audible voices came up from the creek:
cheerful, comradely shouts, playful squeals. Her guard nodded down at the
creek. “There you go, Rowan,” he said, and she wondered if the use of her name
signified anything. “Don’t be too long, or you’ll miss breakfast.” And he sat,
apparently with every intention of watching her as she bathed.

As she descended, slightly unsteady, Rowan fought an urge to
turn back, to lose herself among the tents and people. Her eyes, and her mind,
remained uncomfortable with the sweep of shuddering colors, the cruel, immobile
black, and her body was uneasy, unable to find its proper balance as she moved
down the slope to the waterside.

But at the creek, to her surprise, she found green life: a
crowd of scrub pines, and an incongruous patch of gray-headed thistle. Her eyes
rested there as if they were the only real things in the world.

The bathers were all women, standing hip-deep or sitting
neck-deep in the cool water. One of them was annoying the others by skimming
her palm across the surface to send up sheets of spray. Her cohorts soon dealt
with the prank by mobbing her and forcing her head below the surface until she
indicated surrender.

On the fringes of the group, all alone, was Bel.

“Ha,” Rowan’s companion said. “You took your time.”

“I didn’t know the hour,” Rowan replied. She slipped her
sword strap over her head and kicked out of her boots. Each person’s clothing,
whether neatly or haphazardly arranged, had its owner’s weapon lying on top,
hilt carefully pointing to the water—handy for quick recovery in case of
danger. Rowan followed their example, wondering to herself if the precaution
was necessary.

She waded into the cool water, feeling small stones beneath
her feet. “I think I insulted my guard, by asking his name,” she told Bel, then
dipped beneath the surface to rinse the first layer of dirt from her body.
Below, sound closed in with a familiar closeness, and her sight was limited to
shafts of sweet white light, brown creek bed, and a number of blurred naked
human bodies. She had an odd desire to remain there.

She resurfaced to the incessant hiss and tap of the
redgrass, the rattle of nearby tanglebrush, the shifting red and brown. On the
far side of the creek, some Outskirts plant had put out a patch of magenta
blossoms. The effect was faintly nauseating.

“No one will tell you their names, not until we’ve been accepted,”
Bel reminded her, studying a raw spot on her own stomach, an abrasion from
wearing wet clothing for days. Bel scooped water onto it, then rubbed off a
patch of dead skin.

“Should I tell them mine?”

“Yes. Every chance you get.” Bel raised her voice to the bathing
women. “This is the friend I mentioned, the steerswoman, Rowan. She only has
one name.”

“Ha,” someone said, and the women went back to their business.

“Will that knife blade buy our way in?”

“Nothing will buy our way in, and you shouldn’t say it like
that. The knife blade was for the goat we took. And the fact that we bothered
to trade for it instead of stealing it shows them that we mean well.”

Rowan became confused. “Wouldn’t they respect us more if we
did steal it?”

“In a way. But if we want this tribe to become our tribe, even
temporarily, we can’t do anything that’s against its interests.” Bel moved to
the shallower bank and sat down in the water, leaning back a bit, water
slapping against her breasts. Her short, muscular legs extended before her,
half floating.

“When do we meet the seyoh?”

Bel kicked up a few splashes with childlike pleasure. “I
expect they’re discussing us right now, and they’ll plan to hear our story
sometime this afternoon.”

“That’s good. I’d like to get things settled. I feel a bit
odd being half ignored.” Rowan imitated her friend and found the contrast
between the cool water and the oddly scented air refreshing. Because it was
natural for her to do so, she gazed at the longest perspective, out to the
horizon. The scene stubbornly refused to integrate; it became weirder,
wavering, and the magenta flowers jabbed at her vision like a nail in her eye.

She focused on the creek bank and concentrated on the conversation.
“The people act as if I’m supposed to be invisible, but don’t have the manners
to be so correctly.”

Bel laughed. “That’s well said. And it’s true. But the fact
is, you are doing it correctly. You’re supposed to act as if you don’t have the
manners to be invisible. You should force people to notice you.” Bel raised
her voice again. “Who has soap?” There was no reply from the bathers. “Well, I’m
used to my own smell. But it will be a hard time on anyone who has to stand
near me ...” Something landed with a splash between the two women. “Ha.” Bel retrieved
the grayish lump and began vigorously scrubbing her hair with it, to little
visible effect.

“I’m not accustomed to blatantly drawing attention to
myself.” But Rowan found herself liking the Outskirter approach. It seemed like
a game of skill, a small competition of self-esteem.

Bel passed the soap to Rowan. “You don’t have to. It’s not required.
But they’ll think better of you, if you do.”

“I see.” The virtue of the soap, Rowan discovered, lay
largely in its abrasive quality. There was much to abrade. She set to work. “Will
it affect our being accepted?”

“I don’t think so.” Bel leaned forward and submerged her
head, massaging trail dirt out of her scalp, rose, and wrung out fistfuls of
short hair.

Four of the bathers upstream had gathered in a knot,
waist-deep in water, to discuss something in low tones, punctuated by girlish
laughter, subdued and decidedly unwarriorlike. Rowan eyed the group, then
suddenly tossed the gritty soap in their direction, a high lob calculated to
land in their center. “Thank you for the soap,” she called out as it fell.

One woman instinctively caught it, her comrades just as instinctively
turning and diving away, to leave her standing alone, surprised, with the lump
in her hand. She looked Rowan full in the eyes, suppressing laughter that
seemed not derisive but friendly. She thought a moment. “No, thank you,” she
said, then passed the soap to another and waded out to dry.

Rowan considered the tone of the words. “Was that an insult?”

“Yes,” Bel said, eyes amused. “But a weak one. Yours was better.”

The steerswoman tried to recall under what conditions a
simple “thank you” might constitute an Outskirter insult. The rules of behavior
were not yet fully organized in her mind, and she shook her head. “This is
going to take some time.”

“You’re doing well so far.”

Rowan laughed. “Purely accidental, I assure you.” She closed
her eyes to enjoy the strange scents and the sunlight.

Her ears immediately told her that it was raining, hard. She
winced involuntarily, blinked her eyes open again, and found that for an
instant, the world consisted of fragmented blots that only settled into
coherence reluctantly. She forced herself to look around carefully: the brook,
the women, the veldt, the hills, her guard—“Do you have a guard?”

Bel tilted her head at the opposite bank of the brook. “She’s
being clever. Either for the practice, or just to show off.”

Rowan looked in the direction indicated, but saw no one. “Where?”
She rose and waded toward the far bank, curious, then stopped, finding the
combination of unsteady vision and water motion too difficult to manage.

“Think ‘goat,’” Bel called.

Rowan found three goats, all difficult to discern among the
red-grass motion. The farthest, she decided, was the warrior: it seemed to move
less often, and less naturally. She considered that if she decided to climb the
bank, the warrior would reveal herself. An effective configuration: one guard
on each side of the brook.

She returned to Bel’s side. “I hope the seyoh sees us soon.
I don’t like not clearly knowing what’s to happen next.”

Bel had climbed from the water, stepped to her clothing, carefully
reversed the direction of her sword hilt to face her new position, and sat on
the bank. She tilted her face back, letting the sun and wind dry her. “In a
way, I don’t like it either. But it might be best. The longer the wait, the
better for us.”

“Why is that?” Rowan rearranged her own sword and lay down
in the sand beside her clothing. She shut her eyes again and tried to ignore
the sound of the redgrass.

Bel changed the subject. “How do you feel?”

“Fine.” Rowan laughed a bit. “But my eyes don’t like the Outskirts.
I suppose I’m just not used to it, the way the colors move. It seems unreal.”
Her reaction seemed foolish, and it embarrassed her to reveal it.

Bel made a dubious sound.

Rowan recalled Bel’s warning about Outskirter food and understood
her friend’s concern. She sat up to speak reassuringly. “Bel, it’s been more
than two days—”

The grassy hill, rising to her right, seemed to lean over
like a wave, ready to topple on her. To her left, the open land jittered and
writhed. She froze and screwed her eyes closed. “Should it affect my vision?”

“No. It should affect your digestion.”

“My digestion is fine.” It was true. With eyes closed, she
once again felt completely normal: healthy and fit, with the water cooling delightfully
on her skin in the sweet breeze and the sunlight. She loved the sour spicy
scent of the air; it intrigued her with promises of strangeness, newness. She
knew next to nothing about this land, and beneath the distracting noise of the
redgrass, found a part of herself that was happy as a child at the prospect of
discovery.

She opened her eyes cautiously, concentrating on Bel’s familiar
face. The hill remained a hill, and this time the land to the left seemed solid
of itself, though vaguely threatening, with horizon foreshortened. But now, by
contrast, the water of the creek looked strange: solid, like a gleaming band of
metal. The remaining bathers seemed only to exist from the waist up: macabre
half persons moving normally, casually, unaware of their horrible condition.

“It’s that everything is so very different,” Rowan asserted,
forcing herself to continue looking. “I’ll adjust. If Outskirters can get used
to it, I can, as well.”

“We’re born to it.”

“I suppose that’s the case.” Stubbornly, she continued to
study her own reactions.

Bel rose to recover her clothes, and Rowan followed,
directing her own actions cautiously. “But at one time,” the steerswoman continued,
“your people must have needed to adjust, like me, when they first came to the
Outskirts.” She began to dress.

Bel pulled on her own blouse. “No,” she said when her head
emerged. “We’ve always been in the Outskirts.”

The tribe members were beginning to gather by the fire pit at
the center of the camp for the morning meal. It was a casual process: people
congregated in disorganized groups, or sat alone, or appeared and took their
food to other parts of the camp. Those who sat and stayed, conversing or
musing, were handed rough pottery cups of broth and round biscuits by three
elderly mertutials, assisted by a pair of children.

Bel and Rowan were cautiously conducted by their guards to
one side of the area and instructed by gesture to go in no farther. Bel took
the limitation with evident good humor, and ostentatiously joined a group of
six warriors seated on a light woven rug outside a nearby tent. She introduced
herself and her companion politely; the group fell silent, then shifted their
seating to define a circle that definitely excluded the two strangers and
their watchers. They returned to their interrupted conversation, which
concerned an epidemic of lameness in that part of the flock pasturing in a location
referred to as “nine-side.”

Bel explained the system used. “You think of a circle, and
put numbers around it. Twelve is always straight ahead, in the direction the
tribe is moving, or has been moving, or intends to move, if that’s decided yet.
Then you count around the circle to the right, starting with one.”

“Why isn’t one straight ahead? It makes more sense.”

“I don’t know. That’s how we do it.” Bel beckoned a passing
mertutial, who was inclined to ignore them. “Twelve is straight ahead,” she
continued, “six is straight behind, three to the right and nine to the left.”

Perhaps perplexed by the necessity of the instruction, Rowan’s
guard attempted to exchange a curious glance with his partner. She ignored
him, maintaining a studied air of disinterest in their charges, fooling no one.

“It’s an odd system; it’ll need getting used to,” Rowan
said, then immediately realized that it need not; as a mapmaker, she was
accustomed to 360 degrees in a circle. Twelve divided into it neatly, giving
exactly thirty degrees to each Outskirter point, a felicity she found peculiar.
“Why twelve?” she wondered aloud, then answered herself: to divide neatly into
360. “Why three hundred and sixty?” To divide easily by twelve. Her half-voiced
musing prompted Bel to require explanation.

They were finally provided breakfast—the mertutial, an
elderly man, bald but possessing a waist-length beard that was pridefully well
groomed, handed them steaming cups; he moved with a dignity markedly different
from the mertutials of the raider tribe. He was clean and healthy. His hands,
though aged, were steady, and his back was straight.