The Steerswoman's Road (82 page)

The small man still did not approve.

“Now,” Averryl protested, “you wouldn’t deny a warrior a
drink, would you?”

“They are warriors?” The man was dubious.

Bel took a large draft and leaned forward to look him boldly
in the eye. “I killed fourteen of your friends,” she told him. He wavered, and
his gaze flicked to Rowan.

“Perhaps that many, myself,” she admitted. “I was far too occupied
to keep a running tally.”

The Face Person studied her. “Women shouldn’t fight,” he
said. “Yes, yes, we know,” Fletcher said dismissively. “Bad for the child in
the womb.”

The stranger turned to him in surprise and, as if against
his will, emitted one short laugh, like the bark of a dog. Then the wooden face
split, and he laughed long and loud, pounding the ground with one fist.

Rowan exchanged an amused glance with Fletcher; he was, she
decided, a very useful man indeed.

She spoke to the Face Person. “I’m Rowan.” She took another
sip; Bel did the same.

There was still laughter in his eyes. “Efraim. Fearsome women,”
he commented wryly. The humor had humanized him. He was no longer an anonymous
danger, another depredation of the Outskirts; he was a small gnomish man of
wiry strength and taciturn pride, who had survived the most dreadful battle of
Rowan’s life. “You are the steers-woman,” Efraim said to Rowan.

“That’s right.” She and Bel sipped again; the liquor seemed
to Rowan considerably less authoritative than it had been on her first experience.
“Did Fletcher and Averryl tell you what that means?”

“You have questions?”

“Yes. I also answer any question put to me.”

“And you tell the truth.”

“Always.”

Bel spoke up. “I hope you don’t mean to ask anything that
will help you attack our tribe after Rendezvous. If you do, we’ll simply report
it to our seyoh, and be prepared when you come.”

“I have no tribe to tell it to. All are gone. From battle,
from fire.” Remembering the destroyed camp Fletcher and Averryl had found,
Rowan was suddenly sorry for the man. “All of them?”

“Yes.”

Bel took a sip; Rowan did the same. And when Fletcher ostentatiously
caught the Face Person’s eyes, and both drank together, Rowan realized that she
and her companion were now even with the men: from now on, each drinker would
select a single person to match each sip, choosing a different person each
time.

Efraim’s draft was long, and when he finished, he sat
looking into his cup.

“Why did your people come so far west?” Rowan asked him. He
looked up at her. “We were dying.”

She looked at the small sad eyes in the weathered face. “Tell
me about it.”

“The land became cruel. Always the Face is a cruel place to
live; but for many years, each time the tribe changed pastures, things went for
the worse.

“At each moving, the redgrass grew less and less. The herd
had not enough to eat in each pasture, and we had to move soon; but the next
pasture was no better, and often worse. At last the land became like the
prairie told of in legend, where only blackgrass grew. The herd could find no
food, and could give little to the tribe.

“Now all tribes on the Face began to prey upon each other.
But when they defeated each other, they had no one to prey upon. Many people
died in battle, many more of hunger.

“Then strange creatures, and stranger ones, came to attack;
creatures such as had not been seen before, nor told of in lore or song. The
tribes did not know how to fight these creatures. And so the people grew ever
fewer in number.

“At last all the seyohs understood that the land had won the
battle of life, that it had defeated the Face People.

“And so we came west, seeking other people to raid: the
rich, fat tribes west of the Face. But those tribes had good food, and were
healthy and strong; we were poor and weak. The Face People most often failed.

“And then the weather began to say that it was time to Rendezvous.
It had been long since the last Rendezvous, and by the count of years, and the
season, the time was not right. But our law told what to do in time of
Rendezvous, that we must meet and not fight.

“Some of the tribes of Face People listened to the command
of the weather, and found a place to make open camp. But my tribe, my people,
did not do this. Perhaps this is why all my tribe are now dead, why fate turned
against us; it is punishment.

“Our seyoh was foolish. He told us that, because the great
heat did not come, it was not a true Rendezvous.”

The steerswoman leaned forward. “‘Great heat’?”

“Yes,” the Face Person confirmed. “So the tales say: when it
is time to Rendezvous, a great heat comes over the land, causing destruction.”
Rowan looked to her friend. “Bel?”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing. Only Rendezvous weather,”
Bel told her. Averryl also expressed ignorance.

Efraim was not surprised. “It happened only on the Face.
This is how our seyoh was foolish. We were already far from the Face; he could
not tell if the heat had come there. But he did not want to Rendezvous, and so
pretended more wisdom than he possessed.”

“This heat,” Rowan pressed him, “what was it like? What do
you mean when you say it caused destruction?”

Efraim took a sip of the erby, requiring Rowan to match him.
“All this happened long ago. I know only what I have been told, and what the
tales say. It grew warm. People became ill. Then they fled the Face, knowing
the heat would grow greater still, and that the land itself would die.”

“The land, die?” Rowan grew appalled. “I don’t understand.”

“After Rendezvous, when the tribes returned to the Face, all
plants were dead, all insects and animals.” He drank again, Averryl with him. “It
was a bad thing. No one was sorry when it stopped, when Rendezvous stopped, so
many years ago.”

Fletcher’s face was a great wince of thought. “Everything
was dead?” Belief was impossible.

But Bel said slowly, “I don’t like this.” Her dark eyes,
growing darker, were focused on some far distance.

“Neither do I.” Rowan was doing the same as Bel, and ignored
her next drinking prompt. “Efraim, how do you mean this: dead in what way? From
drought?” But Rendezvous weather brought rain. “By fire?” She imagined the
grass and plants on the Face aflame, eventually quenched by rain ...

He shook his head in apology. “I do not know. It was before
my time, before my father’s.”

Rowan nodded abstractedly; she was calculating. “And how old
are you?”

“I am twenty-two years old.”

She broke from her thoughts to stare at him: she had assumed
him twice that age. “I see.” And before his father’s time, as well ... “How old
was your father when you were born?”

“He was thirteen years old.”

Thirty-five years. “And how long ago did the Face People
last take part in a Rendezvous?”

“Long ago. Near to half a hundred years.”

“Forty-eight years?” The Rendezvous immediately previous to
the falling of the secret Guidestar.

“That long.”

“It was the wizards doing it,” Bel announced, then made an inarticulate
sound: half a laugh, half a curse. “I come back to the Outskirts to rally my
people against a coming threat—”

“—and the threat has been here all along,” the steerswoman finished.

Averryl looked from one woman to the other, then to his
friend

Fletcher, who sat deep in thought. “The heat on the Face?”
Averryl took a moment to consider, a process made difficult by alcohol. “But it
stopped. That’s good. The threat is over.”

Bel struck the carpet with her fist, an action of helpless
fury; only Efraim did not jump at the suddenness. “The wizards reached out from
the Inner Lands,” Bel declared, “out of their fortresses, and hurt my people.
They sent their magic here. They can do it again.”

“If what you call Rendezvous weather invariably follows the
heat on the Face,” Rowan said quietly, “it is being done again.”

Bel turned a warrior’s gaze to her. “Yes.”

Efraim was puzzled. “Magic? Wizards?”

“Yes,” Rowan said.

“Wizards are stories, they are fantasies. They do not exist.”

Bel turned to him. “They’re real. They hurt your people,
they destroyed your pastures. They did it for centuries.”

“But how can this be?”

Rowan shook her head. “I wish I knew.” Only the sun and fire
could emit heat to any great distance. “Efraim,” she said, knitting her brows
in thought, “was there any strange light visible when the heat arrived?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Light. Heat must have a cause, a source. Did anything glow,
like a coal?”

“You confuse me.”

“It might be mentioned, in a tale, a legend. Did the sun
become brighter?” Could the sun grow brighter in one part of the world only?
How immense a magical spell could this one be?

“No one stayed to see.”

Of all the Guidestars, it was the Eastern that hung most
directly over the Face. “Did the Eastern Guidestar become brighter?”

“Who can say? It happened long ago.”

“Rowan,” Bel put in, “if a Guidestar got brighter, everyone
would see it. You’d see it in the Inner Lands.”

“Perhaps ...” Armies sometimes constructed beacons, shielded
on all sides, except for the direction of the signal. But such a beam would
spread, over enough distance. The Guidestars stood more than twenty thousand
miles above the world. The light would be seen.

“It would be in the songs and legends of my own tribe, as
well,” Bel said.

“True.” Sourceless heat: an impossibility. And the only
source of impossible events: magic.

Rendezvous weather, then, followed the killing heat. The
heat was caused by some wizard—or rather, a series of wizards across the centuries—in
a twenty-year repeating cycle. A Guidestar fell, and the cycle ceased. The
events were connected.

“The possibilities are two ...” Rowan began, and her
thoughts outpaced her words.

Either the fallen Guidestar’s absence rendered the heat
spell inoperable; or the event that caused the Guidestar to fall also caused
the cycle to cease.

But Rendezvous weather had returned, or seemed to have, although
out of pattern, so that the spell to cause heat still functioned, and was in
use. Thus, it was not the Guidestar’s falling that interrupted the cycle;
rather, the falling and the cessation of the cycle had shared the same cause.

But what cause?

She had insufficient information. She was left with the same
two possibilities she had begun with: either the causative event could not be
prevented, or was initiated intentionally. It still came down to Slado. “Either
he did it,” she said without preamble, “or he did not stop it.”

Efraim had been observing her lost in her thoughts, and now
leaned forward into a dusty shaft of fading light from one of the sky flaps. “Did
you have a vision? Are the gods speaking to you?”

“Yes,” she said, “and no.” She looked at him: strange,
eager, simple. How much he understood, she did not know.

She attempted a smile of reassurance, forced herself to
speak more lightly, and prompted him to join her in a drink. “A vision of a
sort,” she said. “Myself, simply trying to imagine how these events came about.
As for the gods ...” She attempted to trade a wry glance with Fletcher, who was
looking aside and blinking over and over, as if trying to marshal alcoholic
thoughts into some semblance of order. “As for the gods, I believe I’ll leave
them to people like Fletcher.”

Efraim took her statement literally and turned to Fletcher
in amazement. “The gods speak to you? Are you a seer?”

Fletcher abandoned attempts at cognition. “Seer, ha!” he
said, catching Bel’s eye, then draining his cup with a tipsy flourish even looser
of elbow than was his habit. “I see things, that’s for sure. As for my god
speaking, well, mostly I speak to him. I often wonder how interested he really
is.” He took a moment to be puzzled by the question, during which pause Bel
took her matching sip; then Averryl and Rowan drank, and the cups became empty.
Averryl refilled them from the dregs of the jugs, moving with the careful
overprecision of the deeply inebriated.

“The gods speak back,” Efraim asserted. His voice had acquired
a muzzy slur. “You must know how to listen. What do you listen to, when you listen?”

Fletcher seemed to have no good answer. “The air,” he said
vaguely.

Efraim took a deep breath, as if to steady uncertain
internal processes. “The air is good to listen to. You must listen to the
ground, as well. And the grass.” Unanimously, everyone present paused, listening.

The wind across the sky flaps hummed two deep tones, rising
and falling in tandem. Outside, the redgrass rattled, tapped, hissed. In her
months in the Outskirts, Rowan had forgotten that the redgrass sounded like
rain. Now it became rain again: the Outskirts themselves, daring to tell a lie
to a steerswoman. False information, covering secrets.

Rowan shivered. “Do you believe that you know what your gods
are saying?” The voice of the veldt grew perceptibly louder. Bel’s eyes narrowed.
“They’re saying ‘Watch out.’”

Averryl listened with tilted head. “They’re saying, ‘We will
destroy you.’” His drunken motions had steadied, and he sat balanced, intent,
as if attending to the sounds of distant battle.

Efraim said, “‘Intruders. We hate you. You will never defeat
us.’” He spoke quietly, heavily, as though in a trance, or half-asleep.

Rowan found her gaze locked with Fletcher’s. “All in all,”
he told her sincerely, “I prefer my way of looking at it.” They drank; the others
did the same; the cups were empty once more. Fletcher leaned forward carefully
and tapped one jug with a fingernail. It clinked hollowly. “Gone,” he said. “Who
wants more?” He blinked. “Please, nobody say, ‘Me.’”

No one did. Averryl leaned back and stretched out his legs,
preparatory to rising, then paused, perhaps thinking better of it. Bel sat
brooding; then her glance fell on the Face Person. She sighed once, rose
easily, and walked over to him.