The Steerswoman's Road (78 page)

“Yes.” Rowan studied the surface with vast distaste. Any person
foolish enough to attempt to cross it would crash through, to be impaled below
on thousands of the vicious internal spines. “We’ll have to go around this. It
can’t be everywhere.” She looked across the gap to the far bluff. It was over a
mile away. “It’s on the other side, as well.” She looked around: standing
boulders behind and around, the lichen-tower and open air before. “We need a
better vantage. We can’t see from here.” Her eyes narrowed. “We have to get
closer to the edge.”

Bel grunted, annoyed. “This is the edge.”

They scouted, tracing the true cliff, searching for a place
where the rocks were not extended by gray growth. For more than an hour they
paced, rounding crags recognized only by logic, disguised by the lichen-towers’
surface. They found no free edge, and always a bluff stood across the wide gap;
first one, then another, facing them, offering them a mirror of their own
bland geography.

Rowan needed to stand at an edge, look down, look out. She
could not see the lay of the land, could not determine where they must go.

They found one place where a sharp, rocky crag rose above
the stone field, higher than the lichen-towers. Rowan shed her cloak, kicked
out of her boots, and prepared to climb it.

Bel said, “Listen.”

Silence.

“If the river were dry, the towers couldn’t live.” There was
no sound of rushing water.

“It can’t be dry, with all the rain we’ve had,” Rowan said. “Perhaps
they overgrew it completely?”

Bel shook her head, uncertain.

Rowan clambered up the rear of the crag, away from the cliff’s
edge and the treacherous surface of the lichen-tower. Bel watched from below,
dubiously.

Presently she called up. “What do you see?”

Rowan pulled her attention from her handholds and looked.

It was a world of smooth gray, pale mist, white sky. Below:
the bulge of the lichen-tower. Left and right: more of the same. Across the
gulf of air: more, shoulder-to-shoulder with one another, crowding.

Up the wavering ravine, the winding, branching course of the
unseen river was marked only by gaps between undulating walls of featureless
gray. Rank after rank, until mist obscured sight, where barely seen shapes
hinted at an endless complexity of mounds, curves, shapes .

There was no change, no end in sight. Rowan crouched, stupidly
gape-mouthed, disbelieving. She pulled herself farther out, nearer the edge of
the crag.

Downstream: the identical view.

“Can you see the river?”

Rowan was beyond speech. She looked straight down.

The pale sunlight lit the misty depths, growing whiter as it
fell deeper. She saw somewhere below a tiny flash of silver and squinted,
blinking, trying to discriminate one faint shade from another. There did seem
to be a thin, wavering line below, barely discernible, but it couldn’t be the
water: to feed so many lichen-towers, and such tall ones, would require a very
great river indeed.

Then she understood. It was a great river—and it was very
far away.

“Gods below,” she breathed. “It’s over two miles straight
down.” Bel could not hear her. “Rowan! Are you all right?”

The steerswoman pulled her gaze from the chasm. Bel was
looking up at her, short hair falling back from her face, dark eyes worried.

Rowan reassured her. “Yes,” she called, and gave a helpless
laugh. “And I can see the river.”

She descended and stood leaning against the base of the
crag, breathless from exertion or from the impossible scene, she could not tell
which. Bel watched her, waiting.

“It’s two miles down, at the least,” Rowan said when she recovered.
“And over a mile to the other side. There are lichen-towers the whole length of
the river, all the way up the cliffs. There’s no way down, and no way up if we
make it to the floor of this—I don’t know what to call it—ravine, chasm.” She
shook her head again.

Bel thought. “None of the cliffs are bare rock?”

“None that I could see. And I could see far ...”

Both were silent.

“We’ll have to go around it,” Bel said.

“Yes.”

“North, or south?”

Rowan called her map to mind, and now she trusted it. “The
river must run to the sea eventually, but I have no idea how far that might be.
It ran to the edge of the wizards’ map. And it may be even deeper farther
south.” Rivers sometimes cut deep beds for themselves as they flowed, over the
years; but there was nothing like this known anywhere in the Inner Lands. “This
must he the oldest river in the world.”

Bel was not impressed. “North, then.”

“North. We’ll have to retrace our steps until we clear this.”
So much travel, wasted.

Bel leaned against a boulder, crossed her arms, and gave a
wry half-smile. “Kammeryn’s tribe will have gone east since we left them.”

“Yes.” In the midst of the eerie wilderness, Rowan felt amazement
at the idea: that there were dear friends somewhere nearby, familiarity, a
place to go. “If we travel due north, we can meet them again.” And she wanted
to, very much. “We’ll stay with them until they’ve passed by”—she came back to
her surroundings again and gestured—“all this. Then we can go south.”

“It might have been worse. We might have had no one to meet,
no way to find more supplies. And no one looking for us.” Bel’s smile became
genuine. “It’ll feel like going home.” She straightened, clapped Rowan’s
shoulder. “Come on.”

Eight notes of a jolly tune: an Inner Lands drinking song,
whistled melodiously above the rattle of the redgrass. Rowan stopped short and
turned around.

Fletcher stood behind, bouncing on his toes. “Wondered when
you were going to notice me.”

Rowan laughed out loud. “Skies above, it’s good to see you!”
Spontaneously, she threw her arms around his waist and gave him a bear hug,
its momentum considerably augmented by the weight of her pack. Taken aback, he
stumbled a bit.

Bel watched sidelong. “He’s been walking behind us for an
hour.” Fletcher disengaged himself and sent Bel a look of disappointment. “And
here I thought my shiftiness was so improved.”

“Oh, it is. I didn’t notice you until you were as near as a
kilometer.”

“Well, that’s better. Time was, you’d have known I was here
the day before I arrived.” He assumed an air of careful dignity and gave Bel a
comradely clap on the shoulder, as formal greeting.

She responded with a poke in the ribs, which he attempted to
dodge. “Where’s the tribe?”

“Oof. Not where you’d think, which is why I’m here. Kammeryn’s
been sending scouts to the places we would have been. We keep moving, so there’ll
always be someone where you’d expect.”

“You’re a scout now?” Bel was frankly dubious.

“And thank you for your confidence. No, not really. But we’re
short, what with Maud gone, and Zo getting headaches. We’re filling in with
volunteers. That’s me: volunteer, and I hope you appreciate it.”

“We do,” Rowan assured him. “Why did the tribe change route?”
She considered possible reasons: land too wet to support redgrass; land too dry
to provide enough drinking water; troops of goblins; demons; enemies.

“For the most pleasant of reasons.” He spread his arms. “Ladies,
to everyone’s delight and amazement, it’s Rendezvous.”

Both women looked at the sky; it was clear, blue, and had
been for days.

He held up his hands. “I know. Don’t ask me. We came across
an open camp in the midst of a tempest. The seyohs consulted, and decided that
it was time. Another tribe joined us. Then another. Then it started to hail.
The next day the weather cleared, and it’s been like this since.” He looked
abashed. “Perhaps it’s my fault. I prayed for a little sunshine.”

“And did it arrive straightaway?” Rowan asked, amused. Bel
weaved uncomfortably.

“Well, no,” Fletcher admitted. “About a week later, really.
But I also asked to be the one to find you two.”

Bel spoke up. “Can your god tell you where you left the
tribe?” He laid a hand on his breast. “Just follow your scout.”

They proceeded, ambling along a grassy ridge; a small brook
crossed the land below, lichen-towers crowding its edge. One was so tall that
Rowan looked across, instead of down, at it. She found she held it in disdain:
she had seen the king of all lichen-towers.

Presently Fletcher said, “Oh, and one of the tribes at
Rendezvous is Ella’s.”

Bel was delighted. “That’s good!”

“And another,” he continued, “is Face People.”

They were four clear, cool, sunlit days traveling to Rendezvous.

On the night of the second day, Rowan dreamed that Bel stood
above her in the darkness, listening to the night. Rowan’s dream-self, aware
that she dreamed, wondered if it was a real perception woven into the dream. It
reminded her of the last time Bel had stood so, silent in the dark, and the
memory struck her awake.

It was true. Taking up her sword, Rowan rose to stand by her
companion’s side and waited. She could see and hear nothing to prompt Bel’s
concern.

Eventually, the Outskirter said, “There’s someone nearby.”

Rowan moved to where Fletcher was sleeping and nudged his
foot with hers. She dimly saw him shift. By Inner Lands reflex, he rolled over
and burrowed deeper into his blanket; then Outskirts training assumed command
and he was on his feet, his sword glittering starlight.

Silently, the three moved to stand back-to-back in a
triangle.

Rowan studied her section of the landscape, with all her
senses. The redgrass chattered, sending fleeing shadows of dark and greater
dark across the view. The only breaks in the dim pattern were placed where
Rowan knew, from the previous day’s observations, that natural obstacles stood.
No smell of human or animal reached her.

Presently Fletcher spoke, quiet words falling from his great
height. “I think I’ve got him. Bel, you check, you’re better than me.”

The two traded positions. “At eleven by me,” Bel confirmed.

“Nothing here,” Fletcher told her from his new position.

“Nothing,” Rowan added, “but—” She was ashamed to be so distrustful
of her own perceptions, but the two warriors were better trained than she.

Fletcher touched her arm lightly. They traded places. “Nothing,”
he confirmed. Then he turned to stand beside Bel; Rowan followed his example.
The three stood facing an enemy imperceptible to Rowan; and as they stood so,
it came to Rowan how good a thing it was to have these two comrades to stand
beside, in the dangerous, hissing darkness.

They waited long, and nothing changed. “I fight from the
left,” Fletcher eventually reminded Bel.

“Trade with Rowan.”

They reconfigured. They waited. The wind died, and rose
again. They were facing west.

Rowan risked a quiet question. “You’re sure?”

“Yes,” and “Yes,” from the warriors.

She could not help from whispering, “How?”

“Listen.”

She listened. The redgrass chattered in dithering waves. She
tried to listen to it more closely, tried to hear each and every individual
reed as it tapped against its neighbor. And she did hear them, sharper and more
clearly than ever she thought she could, each tap like a tiny blow upon her ears.
But there was no sound other than that.

Her heart became a fist, pounding her chest for escape. She
waited until the strain of waiting became an agony in her bones. “Listen for
what?”

“For silence.”

Then she heard it: among the chattering of the grass, one
place from which nothing emerged, one small pocket of silence where there
should have been sound. She could almost hear, in that absence, the very shape
of the person’s body, although that might be illusion; but the shape seemed to
her smaller than the average man.

Fletcher shifted, tense. “No attack?”

“He knows we’re ready.”

As Rowan listened, the pocket closed, filling from the
edges. “He’s going,” she whispered.

“He’s gone,” Bel said.

They slept in shifts. They did not hear the stranger again.

“Skies above,” the steerswoman said.

Fletcher beamed with pride. “And there it is,” he confirmed.
The three travelers stood with the base of a high ridge to their left, an
undulating valley before them, another ridge beyond. Down the valley, up and
down the folds in the land and on both sides of a meandering creek, splayed a
single mass of gray and brown tents.

“How many tribes at Rendezvous?”

“Six,” Fletcher replied. He had told her before;
nevertheless, intellectual calculation and immediate perception were two quite
different experiences. There were well over a thousand people camped in the
valley below. Rowan had never before seen one thousand people gathered
together in one place.

The travelers descended, and as they approached the first
outlying tents, Bel reminded Rowan, “You don’t walk through another tribe’s
area unless you’ve been invited, or there’s an emergency. There are paths
between each tribe.”

They found one: a broad straight avenue running from the
edge of the encampment, sloping downward with the lay of the land. To the
right, a scene both familiar and strange to Rowan: everyday camp life, with
warriors lounging, conversing, practicing, mertutials bustling and drudging,
children at play—but none of them people whom Rowan had ever seen before. She
smiled at a pair of twin boys who had stopped a make-believe sword challenge to
watch the newcomers pass; when she waved to them, she received a hearty wave
from the bolder of the two, a shy one from his brother.

But along the left side of the wide path stood tents smaller
than usual, and more crudely constructed. They were crowded close together
with no access between, creating, in effect, a shabby wall guarding the
residents from the eyes of passersby. The only sound from that direction was a
muffled conversation, two voices speaking quietly in the distance.