The Steerswoman's Road (75 page)

Kammeryn turned and wandered away, returning to his musing.
A mutter of conversation rose from the watchers, and Averryl let out a loud and
delighted “Ha!”

Kree clapped the still-gaping Fletcher on the shoulder. “Let’s
go.”

As Kree led her band away, Fletcher turned to Rowan as he
passed. “Do you believe that?” But he did not wait for her reply. She followed
the band to the edge of camp.

As they were preparing to deploy, all the band members
stopped short, almost simultaneously. “What’s that?” Kree asked. Toward position
six, Rowan saw a thick band of smoke rising from beyond the hills.

Fletcher spoke up. “I saw it when I was out at my prayers. I
figure it’s Ella’s people burning their heroes.” The phrase sounded odd in
conversation, like a line from an Outskirter song.

Bel stepped forward and glowered at the horizon. “No. That’s
not where Ella’s tribe is.” She did not provide the other tribe’s location;
that information represented a trust granted to her.

Kree looked for and found a relay; although the man was within
earshot, she signaled to him. Rowan recognized the gesture meaning “investigation.”

Fletcher spoke up. “Send me.”

“You’ve had no sleep.”

“I’m fine. But I feel responsible. I should have reported it
as soon as I saw it.”

She studied him, then smiled wryly. “Very well—since our
seyoh puts so much store in your intelligence.” The compliment embarrassed him,
and she laughed. “Take Averryl with you.”

Two mertutials had been approaching across the pasture; arriving,
they proved to be pulling a loaded train between them. An Outskirter cloak was
draped across the load, concealing it from view.

As Kree’s band departed, Averryl turned, indicated the train
with a lift of his chin, and addressed the mertutials. “More dead?” he called.

The reply came back: “Maud.”

The report was received before noon. Owing to the terseness of
Outskirter signals, the news was equivocal, both reassuring and disturbing:
Enemy discovered, no danger, position secured. Unsurprisingly, the report was
followed by a request to debrief. Rowan was not present during the debriefing,
but shortly thereafter word of the findings began to circulate through the
camp.

Fletcher and Averryl had discovered what had once been the
camp of the Face People tribe. It had been destroyed by fire in what must have
been a surprise attack just before dawn. There were a great many burned corpses
among the ruins, and a number of dead goblins who had been attracted by the
fire; but no living Face People were found.

The opinions of Kammeryn’s tribespeople, when they received
the news, were mixed. No one was sorry to see the Face People destroyed; but
the method of extermination was not considered quite honorable. Nevertheless,
it seemed that Ella’s people had completed their revenge.

Rowan herself was neither pleased nor distressed, but simply
thought: More dead.

By late afternoon, there were few people about in the camp: the
fire tenders; three cook’s assistants; people carrying supplies to Mander, who
was still at work; a few mertutials engaged in only the most necessary chores.
All others were either on duty on the circles, out among the flocks, or
participating in the events taking place around the edges of camp.

It occurred to Rowan that it might be useful for her to
observe the casting rite, and that she might even be useful herself. She decided
to assist. She wondered that she did not feel more disturbed at the prospect,
or even pleased at the fact that she was not disturbed. She felt nothing at
all. Even this did not disturb her.

And yet, some minutes later, she was still sitting where she
had been, just inside the entrance to Kree’s tent.

She sat in gloom. A shaft of sunlight slanted in through the
entrance, carving from the shadows a single canted block of illumination,
lying across the bright-patterned carpet. Colors glowed, brilliant: sharp
planes, intricate cross-lines. There seemed to be two carpets: a shadowy one
covering the entire tent-floor, and another, smaller one lying before her,
constructed purely of colored light.

The carpet’s pattern consisted of huge red squares,
decorated within by borders of white. Thin lines ran between, dark blue on a
light blue background. The steerswoman sat unmoving, gazing. When the colors
began to pulse, she realized that she was forgetting to blink, and did so.

She decided then that she ought to be up and about her business.
She remained where she was.

It came to her slowly that the blue lines defined a second
pattern, ranked behind the first: a complexity of cubes shown in perspective, their
true nature obscured by the red squares. She wondered how Deely had
accomplished this design, if he had woven the cube pattern completely first,
then overlaid the red. She wondered if, should she lift and reverse the carpet,
the background pattern would become foreground; or whether she would see only
the first design, with the cross-pattern revealed as illusion. She reached into
the light and studied her own glowing hand on a square of glowing red, lines
below defining distant, possibly imaginary, forms of blue.

She rose and found her way to where the corpses were being
prepared, directing herself by the smell of old blood and intestinal offal.

She arrived at the west edge of camp, where a group of mertutials
were sitting quietly on the ground, around a recumbent cloak-covered form.
Rowan hesitated. She wished to assist, but she could not tell whether or not
the mertutials’ attitudes indicated that solemnities had commenced and ought
not to be interrupted.

Then Chess lifted her head and cocked an eye at Rowan. “Here
to help?”

The steerswoman nodded.

“Got a good knife?”

Rowan’s hand found her field knife; she displayed it. Chess
saw, nodded, and beckoned with a jerk of her head.

Parandys shifted his position in favor of Rowan. “Here, take
the arm, it’s easier,” he said quietly.

They resettled. Chess was sitting by the corpse’s head. “Well,”
she said, then heaved a sigh. “Well,” she said again, almost inaudibly, and
wiped a sudden flow of tears from her eyes, using the heels of her hands, like
a child.

Then she picked up her own knife; it was the same one she
used to prepare food. With a gesture, she directed the others to remove the
cloak. The form below was Eden. Chess leaned forward ...

The steerswoman found herself far away, on the opposite edge of
camp, on her knees in the dirt, coughing and choking in an uncontrollable fit
of vomiting. It continued for a long time.

Eventually she became aware that someone was supporting her
shoulders. The arm across her back felt like ice through the cold of her
sweat-soaked shirt, but it was steady, gentle, and patient. Rowan was weakly
grateful for the assistance.

Finally, she could raise her own head and straighten her
back. She turned away and sat shivering, looking into the camp. Behind her,
Fletcher used the edge of one boot to shove loose dirt over the mess.

“Now, what brought that on?” he asked cheerfully when he had
finished. “After-battle nerves? Chess’s cooking?”

Rowan breathed slowly, deep breaths. “Casting,” she managed
to say. It was the first word she had spoken that day.

Fletcher’s brows raised, and he pursed his lips around a
silent whistle. He dropped to a seat beside her.

When she had regained control of herself, she found him
watching her with complete sympathy and comprehension. She recalled that when
Fletcher had found Kammeryn’s nephew dying alone on the veldt, he had executed
an entire Outskirter funeral rite, alone. “How did you do it?”

He understood her unspoken reference. “Wasn’t easy.”

She became angry with her weakness. “It’s so foolish! I’ve
seen dead bodies before; I’ve killed people myself. A corpse is just a shell,
it’s just ... it’s just matter.”

“Not if it’s someone you know.” He shifted in thought. “Our
brains think faster than our bodies, Rowan. You can look at Mare, or Kester,
lying on the ground, and know for a fact that they’re not really there at all,
that they’re gone, and you’re just looking at where they used to be. Doesn’t
matter. If you watch them being cut up, you find your stomach has a mind of its
own.

“I remember when I first came to the Outskirts, it took me
forever just to
see
the land, clearly. My brain knew it all had to make
sense, but my eyes figured differently.”

Rowan nodded, remembering her own similar experience.

“Well,” Fletcher continued, “you can figure out how things
are, and tell yourself that’s the way it is. But you can’t always act the way
you think you should, not right away. Sometimes you just have to live with it
awhile first.”

She shivered. The air was bright and empty. “Why casting?”
she asked him. “Why do it
that
way?”

He thought long. “Casting ... casting is the last victory.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Outskirters fight,” he began. “And there’s plenty to fight
against—but not only other people.” He gestured at the quiet camp, referring to
its present state, the result of specific enemies. “There’s more to it, more
than this.”

“Goblins,” Rowan suggested.

“And other animals, and insects. But, see, they’re all part
of the land, part of the Outskirts themselves.

“And the plants—we burn down tanglebrush, tear down lichen-towers
...”

“Destroy the redgrass, with your herd and your waste.”

“Right. We’re fighting the land, in our way. The land wants
to kill us. The whole of the Outskirts, with enemies, animals, plants, hunger,
disease, even the shape of the land, with cliffs and ravines and too much water
or not enough—it’s all of it, all the time, trying to defeat us.”

“And it wins in the end. Because, eventually, you die. Everyone
has to die.”

“But that’s just it. You die ... but then your comrades cast
you ...” He made a motion with his hands: out and around, spreading. “And there
you lie. But the land, it can’t stand to have you there. And it can’t get rid
of you.”

Ghost-grass, Rowan thought. “Where you’re cast, the land—it
dies?”

“That’s it, then; you’ve won. It’s your last act, the last
thing you can do—and you always win.”

“But why cut up the corpse?” she asked, then answered
herself. “To spread the effect.”

“Right. The more you destroy, the greater the victory.”

“But why does it kill the plants? In the Inner Lands,
decaying matter helps things grow.” In her home village, the funeral groves
were constructed far from the farms; years later, when farmland expanded, the
people found green growth already in place, a fertile core about which the new
farms could grow.

Fletcher shrugged. “Don’t know.”

Rowan considered the destruction each Outskirter tribe laid behind
it, as it traveled eastward, always away from the Inner Lands. There should
have been a huge lifeless swath across the land, from north to south, a dead
barrier between Inner Lands and Outskirts. But she had crossed only occasional
areas of such desolation, and recalled her journey so far as an almost-smooth
progression: from old green forests to thinner green forests, to brushland, to
green fields with an ever-greater proportion of redgrass, to the redgrass
veldt. “Apparently, the damage isn’t permanent ...”

His mouth twisted. “Don’t say that to a born Outskirter.
Their belief is that it is. Casting conquers the land. They say it gives the
land a human soul.”

Victory even beyond death. She found she admired the idea. “I
wish I could do something,” she said. “Honor them, somehow, show the living the
respect that I have for their dead ... but I can’t, not in the way they would
wish.”

He puzzled; then his face cleared. “Yes, you can. There’s
more than one way to do it.” He rose and offered her a hand up. “Come with me.”

He led her out of the camp, toward position twelve, where all
day two lines of smoke had been visible on the veldt: funeral pyres, now extinguished.

At one of the sites, only two people were present, sifting
ashes into goatskin bags: Quinnan and Gregaryn, scouts.

Rowan felt a rush of relief, and gratitude toward Fletcher.
She could assist. She would need to handle no dismembered limbs, no segments
of persons she had known in life; only clean ashes.

But Quinnan was reluctant: scouts considered themselves a
group apart. “She’s not one of us,” he replied to Fletcher’s suggestion.

“Well, she’s no Outskirter,” Fletcher replied easily. “So,
yes, she’s not one of us. But I think she’s one of you.”

The scout was puzzled. “How so?”

Fletcher spread his hands. “What do scouts do? Well, scouts
live to find things out. Isn’t that what a steerswoman does?

“Scouts travel alone. So do steerswomen. Scouts go and see
what’s out there, so that other people can know—just like a steerswoman. Scouts
look at things from the outside. They try to figure out what’s happening. That’s
what Rowan does, all the time.

“No good scout would ever give false information. No
steers-woman ever, ever tells a lie.

“She isn’t an Outskirter,” Fletcher concluded, “but as far
as I can see, she’s as good as any scout.”

Quinnan studied the steerswoman a long moment; then he took
up one of the bags and told her what to do. Rowan listened closely to the instructions;
but when she turned to Fletcher, to find some Outskirter way to express her
thanks, she found he had gone.

Rowan stood alone on the windy veldt, waist-deep in redgrass a
mile due north of the camp. Some twenty goats were browsing nearby, making
their first pass at the grass. Later they would return again, to graze more
closely, then again to crop the reeds to stubble. Rowan thought it a shame to
spread the ashes where the animals would be eating and defecating. But she had
been told to go no farther.