The Steerswoman's Road (66 page)

“Variety,” he said. “It’s goat meat for breakfast, goat meat
for lunch, and goat meat for dinner. You get your variety however you can.”

After the meal, as the darkness began to gather, Fletcher and
Kree took themselves to Mander’s tent, to check on the exhausted Averryl.
Around the encampment, mertutials cleared away crockery, and people began to
bed down for the night.

A pair of children wove their way from their tent through
the sitting and lying Outskirters, to arrive at Rowan’s side: Sithy, and a little
boy so young as to still be unsteady on his feet. “Chess says,” Sithy began;
she paused as if regretting her bravery, then continued, “Chess says give this
to you.” It was the longest speech Rowan had ever heard her make.

“What is it?” Rowan took the tattered object. It felt
faintly greasy in her fingers, without leaving residue, rather like the gum
soles of her own boots. She peered at it in the deepening twilight.

“Chess says—” And Sithy paused so long that Rowan wondered
if she forgot the question. “Says you like ... things,” the girl finished. The
little boy beside her watched both faces in turn, with wide blue eyes too
fascinated to blink.

“I do like things,” the steerswoman reassured them. “I like
to find out about them. Do you know what it is?”

“No ...” The girl’s voice was barely audible.

“Where did you find it?”

“Bodo found it.” Sithy gave her companion a shove, which
sent him reeling. He recovered, and tottered back to her side.

The object, colored a pale brown, was shaped like an empty
sack, about the size of Bodo’s head. The inner surface was slick; the outer had
a rough texture. Rowan took a closer look and tested the material with the edge
of a fingernail. Particles came off, too small to see in the gloom. She rolled
them between her fingers: sand, or something very like it.

“Bodo,” Rowan said, “where did you find this?” The child
looked at her with the same silent astonishment he might have afforded a
talking dog.

“In the grass ...” Sithy supplied.

“I found it in the grass!” Bodo suddenly announced, with perfect
articulation and much volume. Either the memory or the act of declaration
itself amused him beyond control. He emitted a series of gleeful squeals interspersed
with precise ho-ho-hos.

Rowan placed her left hand in the sack and attempted to
restore it to its original shape: oval. “Bel,” she called.

Bel excused herself from a discussion with Merryk and Jann
and approached. “What?”

“Is this a goblin egg?”

Sithy’s jaw dropped at the concept, and she shook Bodo silent.

Bel took the sack and immediately shook her head. “No. Goblin
eggs are white. And thinner.” She attempted to examine it, but the light had
diminished past usefulness. She handed it back to Rowan. “You’d better wait
until morning to study it.”

“I suppose you’re right.” Rowan considered, then brought the
object close to her face. A faint scent wafted out of its interior—musty,
cloying, like the gland scent of some unidentifiable animal; but over this, a
sharp tang she recognized immediately: the sea.

She addressed the children. “Thank you. I do like things,
and I’m very glad to have this.” She waited until the pair had departed, then
said to Bel, “I think it’s a demon egg.”

Bel thought for a moment, then nodded. “Let’s tell Kammeryn.”

Kammeryn sent warnings to the scouts, then informed the
chiefs, who carefully instructed their war bands: Watch, listen, report any
signs of demons instantly. But the night passed with no news.

In the morning, Mander, the healer, searched Rowan out and found
her reexamining the tattered object by daylight. The steerswoman gained no new
information, other than confirmation of the object’s color.

Mander spoke without preamble. “How do your hands feel?”

Rowan looked up. “My hands?” She flexed the fingers and
found them slightly stiff from dryness, which she had attributed to exposure to
the cold wind the previous day.

Mander took her left wrist and studied the hand with a
proprietary air. “Bodo’s hands are itching, fingers and palms. I think it’s
from that thing he found.”

Recalling Bel’s description of a demon spraying corrosive fluid,
Rowan became concerned. “How bad is he?” Her own palms began to itch—a purely
emotional reaction.

“Not bad.” The healer subjected Rowan’s right hand to the
same scrutiny. “Have you washed them yet? Wash them again. I’ll give you some
strong soap. Don’t let anyone use the same water after. If it gets worse, I
have some salve. And you’d better throw that thing away.”

Rowan followed Mander’s directions carefully, carrying a water
sack to the cessfield and pouring the water over her hands instead of immersing
them in the carrier; it would be used again, and she did not want any possible
contamination to occur. She emptied the remaining water, slung the loose sack
over her shoulder, and turned back to camp; but as she was crossing the border
of dying grass at the edge of the cessfield, she stopped abruptly, then looked
around.

She had noticed at the old encampment that redgrass suffered
from the presence of human waste: grass nearby bleached, then rotted, exactly
as it had done in the place where, so many weeks earlier, Rowan and Bel had
found the dead fox. Ghost-grass, it was called, and it had ringed the tribe’s
cessfield in an area some eight feet wide.

But here, after only one night of camping, the ring of decay
was already three feet wide, affecting not only the redgrass, but tanglebrush,
blackgrass, and a low, bulbous blue plant she had learned to call moss-wort.
Rowan attempted to imagine the extent of destruction that would be caused by a
tribe remaining stationary for two weeks or more, as was usual in good
pastures—and became disturbed.

As she walked back to camp, she considered that it must be
more efficient to dig a pit for waste and confine its ill effect, rather than
set aside a flat area—and so wide a one, at that. The Outskirters could not
have caused more destruction with their waste if they had actually planned to
do so. And she immediately began to wonder if that was the case.

A question to Chess provided the answer. “The land is our
enemy,” the mertutial told her as she stowed the water carrier onto a nearly
loaded train.

“But you can’t mean to harm it!”

“Why not?” Chess secured the straps on the load. “It means
to harm us. It tries to kill us every day. We harm it back.”

“But that doesn’t make sense.”

Chess’s only reply was to deliver a sidelong look of
derision. The steerswoman continued, “If you destroy the grass, how will you
feed your herd?”

“By moving on.”

Rowan took further questions to Bel, who was occupied with
organizing her own equipment and Rowan’s. Bel paused to consider, head tilted,
then nodded. “It’s true. The land is our enemy. Most things in the Outskirts
are our enemies. We kill the goblins, we tear down the lichen-towers, we burn
out tanglebrush.”

“When you need to, or simply as a matter of course?”

“As a matter of course.” She passed Rowan her pack. “We kill
a goblin whether it’s attacked us or not. If we find their eggs, we destroy
them. If we camp near lichen-towers, we’ll pull them down. It’s the right thing
to do.”

“But you’re also harming the redgrass; the goats need the redgrass!”
Then Rowan stopped in realization. “And they destroy it, themselves,” she
added, surprised. The goats grazed the reeds close to the roots; the stubs then
died. She found another question. “How long does it take the redgrass to
recover?”

Bel shrugged into her pack. “Who can say? We never stay long
enough to find out.”

Nearby, Kree was counting heads. She came up short. “Where’s
Fletcher?”

“Went off to do his prayers,” someone replied, disgruntled,
then pointed. “Coming back just now.”

Rowan looked, and saw Fletcher approaching at a cheerful
lope, clearly visible across the open landscape.

Kree watched a moment, then made an indulgent gesture. “Well,
if his god protects him, more power to it, and to him, too.”

Another voice spoke, in a barely audible grumble. “Fletcher
finds enough trouble to need a god all to himself.”

Kree’s response was a single glance that rendered the
speaker silent. “It’s true Fletcher finds trouble.” She pitched her voice for
all her warriors to hear. “And I’m glad of it. Fletcher has a talent for finding
trouble before it finds someone else, and for dealing with it. Whether it’s his
prayers that protect him, or his wits, I don’t care. The result is the same. He’s
one of the strengths of this band.”

Fletcher had approached near enough to hear the comments. “And
if you want an example of the usefulness of prayer,” he called out, “here’s
one.”

Rowan saw what he had. “Be careful how you handle it,” she
called, and drew nearer. “It irritates the skin.”

Fletcher eyed the object with wild suspicion. “Mine, or its?”
Unlike Bodo’s find, Fletcher’s was unbroken. It bulked round and full,
wobbling faintly between Fletcher’s bony hands, from the motion of internal
fluid.

“Where did you find it?”

“About a kilometer from the edge of camp, toward position
seven.” Fletcher gingerly placed the object on the ground, where its shape
flattened somewhat. “There I was,” he said, “settling down for a friendly chat
with the Almighty Lord, and I practically put my knee down on this thing.
Wouldn’t have noticed it otherwise. I like to think I was guided.” He acquired
a piously smug expression, then dropped it with a laugh. “Well, maybe not. At
the best, I was prevented from landing square on top of it.”

Rowan suppressed the urge to cut the object open
immediately; the contents might be corrosive. This was Kammeryn’s tribe, and
any possibly dangerous action ought first to be cleared with him. Bel went to
fetch the seyoh. “Did you hear anything?” Rowan asked Fletcher as she stooped
down to peer at the presumed demon egg.

He raised his brows. “Such as?”

“Humming. A single tone, sustained. It’s the sound demons
make.”

“Nothing. I hummed myself, a bit. But nothing else.”

Bel arrived, with Kammeryn in tow. The seyoh examined the
demon egg without touching it, conversed briefly with Rowan and Bel, then made
the suggestion that Rowan had hoped for.

She took over. “We should clear this area,” she said. “If
the surface irritates, the contents might do so as well, and to a greater
extent. There’s liquid inside; it’ll spread.”

Clearing the area consisted simply of continuing
preparations for the day’s travel, then directing people to step back from the
object. Bel acquired a wool rag from a mertutial, then covered the egg and
steadied it with her hands, leaving an opening in the covering on the far side.
Reaching across, the steerswoman sliced into the exposed surface with her
field knife, turning away her face to avoid any splashes.

The opening tore; the object collapsed. Inside: only a clear
fluid that spilled and sank into the ground immediately, exactly as would
water.

Rowan was disappointed. “Nothing more?” She had hoped to
find a demon embryo. But Bel removed the cloth, and it was true: there were no
other contents. Rowan leaned forward cautiously and sniffed the ground. The
scent was of seawater, with an additional sour tang that she had smelled only
once before; but the overlying musky trace was entirely unfamiliar.

Rowan sat up. “Fletcher?” He approached.

She did not like to upset him; but she needed to know. “Does
this smell like your swamp?”

He tested it. “Yes.”

* * *

Rowan and Bel walked that morning with Kammeryn.

“According to the wizards Shammer and Dhree,” Rowan said, “demons
need salt water, and a salt water different from that found in the Inland Sea.
North in the Inner Lands, there is an area called the salt bog; I’ve been
there, and the water smelled a bit like that egg. There are legends that demons
once existed in the salt bog, but no one in living memory has ever seen one.”

“If they need special water,” Bel added, “that would explain
why they’re so rare. And why we see signs of them now that we’re moving closer
to Fletcher’s swamp.”

“Perhaps the Face People have some experience of them.” Kammeryn
mused. “Face People, demons, wizards. You bring strange things, steerswoman.”

Rowan was taken aback. “I bring nothing,” she told him, “but
information.”

During the morning, messages were regularly relayed from the
scouts. No sign was found of demons. The most skillful scout, a woman named
Maud, was sent much farther ahead than was usual, specifically to search for
the creatures. Garvin was pulled from his band to serve temporarily as her
contact, at which Jann commented: “Now we’re short. What a bother: I suppose it’s
Fletcher’s talent for trouble, again.” Orranyn’s band had been moved up within
the formation and was now dragging train. With Garvin absent, burly Merryk was
both dragging train and carrying a pack.

Rowan was unable to tell whether Jann’s observation was by
way of complaint. “Surely it’s better to find out about things before they
cause problems.”

The warrior sighed aggrievedly. “Of course it is. But the
thing is,” she said, glowering, “Fletcher’s not a good warrior.” Merryk shot
her a cautioning glance; the bald statement was of the sort that caused Outskirters
to take quick offense. Fletcher, however, was well out of earshot.

Jann continued. “You’d think that it would be the skillful
warrior who finds danger first; we’re trained that way all our lives. If there
are strangers, or monsters, we ought to spot them. But we don’t; a gangling
fool like Fletcher does. It’s like an insult.”

“Perhaps,” Rowan ventured, “it’s because he has less ability
with the usual Outskirter skills that he’s developed—” She sought the word. “—more
observativeness, perhaps. The ability to notice the incongruous.”