The Steerswoman's Road (77 page)

But as the group walked back to camp, with Fletcher trailing
behind, cheerfully dragging the train and playing hilarious rhyming games with
the children, it occurred to Rowan that as much as she might miss Bel, if she
traveled with Fletcher she would be given, every day, reason for laughter. And
she found that she liked that idea very much.

The dangers of the Outskirts did not merely inhabit the Outskirts
^.
;
they constituted it. Blackgrass grew in puddles beneath the redgrass: wiry
tangles to trap the feet and send the traveler sprawling. Flesh termites
scouted the tops of the grass, hunting the heat of breathing. Solitary goblin
jills, exhausted and at the end of their lives after laying their last eggs,
lay prone and half-hidden, to rise up suddenly in a last instinctive attack.

Even the damp redgrass itself snagged and sliced at the passerby.
The surface of Rowan’s gum-soled steerswoman’s boots had become scarred to a
fine network of white on gray and were now covered, thanks to the help of an
inventive mertutial, with a pair of thong-tied gaiters of shaggy goatskin. Her
trousers, torn with innumerable small cuts, were covered by rough leather leggings,
and her gray felt cloak, its leading edges worn to the underbinding, had been
left in the dubious care of Hari, who fancied it as a blanket. Rowan’s new
cloak, piebald in patches of brown and gray, was one discarded by Chess in
favor of the appropriated courting gift.

As a result, the casual eye spying on the travelers would
see not a warrior leading an Inner Lander, but two Outskirters, wading down the
hills through rain-soaked redgrass toward the misty lowlands.

There were no casual eyes. There were only a convoy of harvesters,
trooping along below the grass cover; a fleet of shoots sweeping the sky for
gnats, bobbing behind slowly pacing trawlers; and a slugsnake, which had
insinuated itself between Rowan’s boot and gaiter, there to travel unnoticed
for hours, comfortably coiled about her ankle.

There were also, somewhere in the nearby swamp, one or more
mud-lions—and, quite possibly, demons.

“Fletcher never saw demons here,” Bel replied to Rowan’s
speculation.

“I know. But Shammer said that demons need salt water.” Rowan
crumbled dirt onto her boot, covering the slime left by the evicted slugsnake. “And
that the Inland Sea was the wrong sort of salt.” She replaced the gaiters,
knotting the thongs behind heel, ankle, and calf. “I was near the salt bog in
the Inner Lands years ago, just after Academy. I’d like to taste the water
here to see if it’s the same.”

Bel looked down at her sidelong. “You’d like to, but you won’t.”

Rowan sighed and straightened. “No. It wouldn’t be wise.”
She had a sudden, vivid vision of the girl Mai being clutched by rough-scaled
arms and torn by needle-studded jaws. In Rowan’s mind, Mai was a younger,
female version of her brother, so that it was calm Jaffry’s familiar face that
Rowan saw twisting in pain and terror.

“Good.”

They skirted the marshier ground, keeping a course due east
before swinging southeast past the swamp. Rowan found Fletcher’s observations
and landmarks invaluable. The weather had become uniformly gray and drizzling,
the sun’s direction difficult to discern even in full day, and the Guidestars
remained invisible for long damp nights. Without Fletcher’s information, Rowan
would have had little idea of her true direction. She found reason, again and
again, to bless Fletcher for his sharp observations; and a few moments, to her
surprise, to miss him.

They paused for three days just before turning south. Bel had suffered
from an attack of the stinging swarmers; she was mildly feverish, too dizzy to
walk, and her sight was reduced to a deep red haze. Uncharacteristically, she
dithered in frustration at the delay, behavior that Rowan attributed to the
illness.

Rowan, stung only a few times, ignored the sparkling flashes
at the edges of her own vision and arranged the rain fly in the most comfortable
configuration possible, with redgrass reeds below and tangle-brush roots for
uprights. By day she kept a fire burning, and by night buried the coals and
shifted the rain fly over the spot, so that the women slept through the chill
nights on heated ground.

The third night, the wind slowly picked up, rising at last
to a monotonic, deep-voiced howl. Rowan began to worry about the sturdiness
of her arrangements.

“It looks like a tempest coming up,” Rowan shouted close to
Bel’s ear. “I think I need to batten down.”

“I’ll help.” In the darkness, Bel’s handicap was irrelevant.
“No. You stay dry.”

By touch and memory she found the stakes and guys and tautened
them. The wind pressed her cloak tight against her back, rattled its edges
violently about her knees, and rain pushed down on her shoulders, suddenly
hard, like hands urging her to sit. By shuddering lightning she saw the camp,
in a series of colorless sketches: the fly white with reflecting water; the redgrass
lying down, combed to the north and battered horizontal; the rain-dark stone
where Rowan had sat in the gray afternoon, tending the fire.

Then blackness returned. The wind paused, veered slightly,
backed again, paused again; and an instant before it violently veered once
more, Rowan, with a sailor’s instinct, turned and made a wild clutch at the
open side of the fly.

The wind filled the shelter, belling the cloth like a sail;
guys snapped, the uprights upended, one of them flying up to graze Rowan’s face.
She threw herself to the ground on top of the fly’s free edge, trying to pin
it down.

Bel sat up, began struggling against the cloth. “Stay put!”
Rowan shouted. “I’ve got it!” The raindrops grew heavier, fell with more force.

Another flicker of lightning helped her find the broken, whipping
guy lines. She grabbed at one and caught it as the thunder broke; the wind
caught her cloak and whipped it over her head, where it streamed before her,
booming about her ears. The raindrops were hard on her hack, then harder, then
became stinging, sizzling hail.

She ducked into the shelter, dragging the cloak in a tangle
about her; Bel’s hands found and removed the cloak. Rowan held down the tarp
corner, forcing it to the ground with difficulty against the wind, as hail
rattled on her head through the cloth. She finally solved the problem of
securing the corner by pulling it under her and sitting on it.

She took a moment to catch her breath. The tarp was pressed
down, propped only by the women’s heads. The heat from the ground beat upward;
Rowan felt as if she was breathing steam.

Bel spoke; her voice was buried in tumbling rolls of
thunder. The cloak was between the women. Rowan groped at it, to arrange it.
Its fur was soaking wet, crusted with tiny pellets that melted between her
fingers. “Hail,” she told Bel inanely. The Outskirter shifted, and a puff of
cool air told Rowan that Bel had made an opening at the fly edge for
ventilation.

Bel found Rowan’s hand and deposited something in it,
smooth, round, and so cold they were dry: three hailstones, each half an inch
in diameter.

Rowan rattled them in her hand as their fellows rattled down
on her head, only mildly cushioned by the tarp. She shouted over the racket of
ice and thunder. “Rendezvous weather?”

Bel had doubled the cloak and was pulling it over their
heads for more protection. It muffled the sound as well, and she replied into
the relative quiet, “Nothing but.”

The violence of the tempest had drawn the damp from the air completely,
as often happened. Scudding clouds decorated the morning, and the sun rose
yellowly before tucking itself behind a retreating cloud bank.

Rowan and Bel had spent the night wet: with no props for the
rain fly but their bodies, condensation had soaked them wherever they had been
in contact with the cloth. Their spare clothing was still damp from previous
days; they spread everything in the sun to dry, and spent the morning huddled
together under Rowan’s cloak, the last heat of the buried coals rising against
their bodies.

“How is your vision? Can you see?”

Bel peered about. “Well enough. No, it’s getting darker.”

“The sun went behind a cloud again.”

“Then I’m all right.”

There was a silence, which Rowan spent calculating. “The
weather has been strange for over a month. Does that really indicate Rendezvous?”

Bel shrugged. “According to the songs and poems, yes.” She
sang a verse of a song describing a courting during Rendezvous; in the space of
twelve lines, the weather was cold, warm, clear, stormy, hailing.

“That sounds like what we’ve been having.”

“But now the weather is out of sequence with the years. It’s
odd.”

Rowan shook her head in confusion. “Not to me. I don’t see
why it should be in sequence to begin with. What can be special about twenty
years?”

“I don’t know.” Bel made a sound of feral amusement. “It
will be interesting if some people think it’s time to Rendezvous, and some don’t.
One tribe will set up an open camp, and another will attack it. The first will
think that truce has been violated, and go for vengeance.” Her amusement
vanished. “It will make my job harder.”

With Bel recovered, they left the lowlands behind, and the
country began, almost imperceptibly, to climb. Clouds returned by night and
remained, and a heavy fog appeared and disappeared intermittently, but the rain
did not return.

The fifth night after the tempest, Rowan rose from sleep and
stood in the darkness, with shifting clouds above opening and closing, concealing
and revealing small starry sweeps.

Bel stirred on her bedroll. “What’s the matter?”

“Wait.” Rowan followed a particular gap as it ghosted across
the sky: high above, the Swan. Then the opening sank east, to show the Hero,
with one bright untwinkling star at his side, and Rowan took mental bearings
from the Eastern Guidestar, her first sighting of it in many days.

“We’ve made very good time, considering the weather,” she
mused. “But where’s the river?”

“The river?” Rowan heard Bel sit up.

The steerswoman nodded, then remembered that her friend
could not see the motion in the darkness. “Yes. We should be only a few miles
from it. We should be able to see its lichen-towers by now.”

“Perhaps it doesn’t have any.”

Rowan nodded again, not in assent, but in thought. Above,
the Guidestar vanished as the clouds closed in and opened elsewhere, more
southerly. “The land isn’t used to this much rain; it’s normally dry. If there
were a river anywhere near, the lichen-towers would be hungry for the water.”

Bel was beside Rowan, scanning the sky as if she could read
it as well as the steerswoman. “Then your map is wrong? The part you copied
from the wizards? Or the river has shifted since they made the map?”

Rowan watched the skies with gaze narrowed in thought. “One
of those reasons, perhaps ...”

The women returned to their beds, and Rowan spent the night
without sleeping; she brooded, and reluctantly began to recalculate, assuming a
greater and greater eastern shift in the location of her final destination.

There was water, but transient water, little runoffs and
rivulets caused by the overabundance of rain. Blackgrass thrived in standing
pools, redgrass drooping and drowning around it. The women sloshed and slipped
up the land toward a bare rocky field ahead.

They clambered among head-high boulders for more than an
hour, then took a moment to rest among them. Rowan suppressed a desire to pull
out her map and consult it yet again; it would serve no purpose. She sat in
silence and internally berated herself at length: for having so untrustworthy a
memory of the wizards’ original map; for having waited so long before attempting
to reconstruct it; and for what must certainly be a general and inexcusable
slackness in her application of Steerswomen’s techniques.

She called her complaint to a halt. She was neither slack
nor forgetful. Circumstances had been beyond her control. Self-derision was a
useless exercise.

She sighed and began to address Bel; but the Outskirter’s expression
stopped her.

Bel was gazing into the distance between the boulders in
mild puzzlement. Then her face suddenly cleared, and she emitted a delighted “Ha!”
and sprang to her feet.

“What?”

Bel slipped out of her pack and clambered atop an uneven
boulder, motioning to Rowan. “I’ve found your river!”

Up beside Bel, Rowan looked out where the Outskirter indicated.
“Where is it?” The jumble of boulders ended unevenly some thirty feet from
where the women stood. Beyond was a rounded, featureless stretch of bare gray
rock perhaps a hundred and fifty feet wide, which stopped abruptly, ending with
nothing but air.

Rowan laughed. “It’s a cliff! We’re on top of it!” The river
was near, but it was
down.
She saw another cliff facing her across the
open, misty distance, a smooth gray-faced bluff. “It’s two cliffs.” Then, she
said dubiously, “It’s a ravine ...”

Bel’s pleasure had faded to suspicion. “That’s a wide
ravine.”

“Let’s have a look.” They slid off their perch and threaded
their way among the boulders toward the flat area beyond.

An instant before their feet touched it, both women stopped
and stepped back, almost simultaneously. They exchanged puzzled glances, and
Bel stooped to reach out and test the surface ahead. She ran her hand across
it, then suddenly muttered a curse, drew her sword, and struck down.

There was a crunch, a crackling, and a faint, sweet odor, as
the sword broke through, leaving a deep and narrow slash. Inside: white pulp,
black spines. Bel stood, her sword dripping a faintly bluish fluid.

Rowan’s mouth twisted. “And there’s our lichen-tower.”

Bel nodded, disgruntled, and pointed to where the gray ended
and the air began. “That’s not the cliff.” She pointed at the jumbled rocks
around their feet. “This is the cliff. This lichen-tower has grown up along its
side, all the way to the top.”