The Steerswoman's Road (83 page)

Efraim had not moved, his lids drooping over unfocused eyes.
Bel prodded his shoulder, and he brought his attention to her as if it were a
weighty object, requiring great effort to raise. “Where are you sleeping
tonight?” she asked him.

“On the veldt.”

Bel’s mouth twisted. “You can’t sleep on the veldt in this
state.”

“I am very happy,” he confirmed. But to contradict his
words, a single tear rolled down from his left eye, to pause and remain unnoticed
at the edge of his mouth. He was happy, because the erby and the company had
permitted him to forget his solitude; but within, he remained aware that he
was alone, tribeless, without family or comrades, and with his gods against
him.

“A flesh termite will bite you as soon as the sun comes up,”
Bel said. “A harvester will drag you away in the night.” This impossible
scenario caused Efraim abruptly to bark his dog’s laugh again. “Come on,” Bel
told him. “Let’s find Kammeryn. I think he’ll permit you to stay with our tribe
tonight.”

“Perhaps Mander has room in his tent,” Rowan suggested.

Bel helped the Face Person to his feet. “That’s a good idea.
This fellow is going to feel bad in the morning. It’ll be nice for him to have
a healer right there.”

Fletcher stirred himself. “When you wake up,” he told
Efraim, “please remember that we need Mander. So don’t kill him, out of reflex.”
He blinked. “No matter how hungry you are.”

“We’ll see you get breakfast,” Averryl added.

When the two had left, Rowan took a deep breath and climbed
to her feet. She found to her surprise that she felt merely dizzy; the erby had
had a considerably milder effect on her this time. She wondered if she had
become acclimatized, then looked at her friends.

Fletcher seemed about to fall asleep where he sat. Averryl
was studying his bedroll across the tent, fixedly, as if contriving a mathematical
solution to the problem of getting himself from his seat to his bed. Neither
moved.

“Come on, you two. The sun’s gone down. Time to sleep.” She
took Fletcher’s hand, attempted to pull him to his feet. In this she was frustrated:
he offered neither resistance nor cooperation, but permitted her to pull his
arm loosely into the air over his head, providing her no leverage.

Ignoring her completely, he addressed Averryl. “I feel sorry
for that fellow.”

Averryl abandoned his deliberations and turned his head slowly,
speaking definitely. “He should join our tribe.”

Rowan dropped Fletcher’s arm. “Ours?”

Averryl brought his gaze up to hers. “Yes.” He knit his
brows. “He must be a good fighter, to have survived to now. We lost a lot of
people. We don’t have enough children to replace them.”

“We lost a lot of people to
his
people,” Rowan said. “Very
likely he killed some himself. Mare,” she said, Averryl’s own comrade in Kree’s
band; “Kester,” who had been mildly, harmlessly tending his flock; “or Maud.”
The unknown scout had come to symbolize to Rowan all Outskirters fallen in
battle.

Averryl’s expression did not change as he nodded. “In the service
of his tribe,” he confirmed. “If our tribe was his, we’d have that service
from him.”

“He’d have to change his diet,” Fletcher pronounced
blearily.

Averryl shifted attention back to him. “Then he’ll change.
If a man changes, I don’t hold against him the things he did before the change.”

Weaving a bit, Fletcher laid one hand against his own
breast, over the Christer cross that lay there. “And they say
we’re
kind.”

Averryl eventually solved the problem of reaching his bedroll by
approaching it on hands and knees. Once he had arrived, reflex and habit took
over, and he undressed himself easily, although he closed his eyes to do it.

Fletcher presented greater difficulty. Rowan managed to half
hoist him to his feet, where he was in immediate danger of falling. They stood
so, unsteady, she behind with her arms around his waist. He looked about,
unable to figure where she had gone, and found her by raising one arm and
spying her beneath it. “You,” she told him, “are very drunk.”

“And you’re not.”

“No.” She shifted her grip. “Take a step.”

He straightened, then shifted one leg heavily. “And you’re
not,” he repeated.

“That’s right,” she confirmed; then she stopped, and introspected.

She was slightly dizzy; her arms and legs felt heavy; there
was a faint blue haze around the dimming sky flaps; and that was all. “Why aren’t
I drunk?”

Fletcher spoke with difficulty. “The second pair of jugs,”
he said, and thought, and continued, “and the third, had”—he winked; the
expression, unfortunately, remained on his face as if frozen—“a lot of water in
them.”

She stared at him a moment. “Bel and I missed the first jugs
entirely.”

“Right.” He nodded, and his features released themselves.

It became too difficult to hold him up. She pushed from behind,
and he managed a pair of long staggering steps that brought him near enough to
his bedroll for her to turn him about and permit him to fall to a seat. He
rocked in place.

She brought her face close to his, to gain his attention. “Why
was the erby watered?”

He spoke seriously. “Efraim ... told you things. Maybe he
wouldn’t have, sober. Got him drunk. You were hearing things. Needed your
brain. Couldn’t be drunk.”

With the first jugs at full strength, the Face Person had
become comfortable and relatively talkative; after that, the reduced amount of
liquor in the following pairs was sufficient to send him into inebriation. But
Rowan and Bel, drinking only the weakened liquor, had been able to keep their
wits about them. Fletcher had planned this.

She shook her head in reluctant admiration. “I would never
have thought of such a thing.”

“Of course not.” He assumed a sloppily serious expression. “You’re
not devious. You’re honest. I like that.” Then he beamed with pride. “I’m
devious.”

Rowan began her preparations for sleep; but halfway through,
she noticed that Fletcher was still sitting, weaving in place, brows knit over
some deep thought that absorbed him completely.

“Do you need some help?” she asked him, and received no reply.
She went to him and sat on her knees beside him.

He took a moment to notice her. His puzzled expression
cleared, and he spoke as if pleased by his own reasoning. “I think,” he said
with careful clarity, “that he did it. On purpose.”

“Who did what?”

“Slado. The Guidestar. Knocked it down.”

One of her possibilities; and if wizards had once had the
power to set the Guidestars in place originally, then Slado certainly had the
power to bring it down. “What makes you so certain?”

“Hiding it. Not just from the folk. From the wizards.”

“He might hide the fact for any number of reasons.” She steadied
his weaving form by one shoulder and began untying his vest. “He’s the master
wizard. If he’s losing his power, he might not want it known.”

“Maybe. But—” He paused to watch her hands working as if it
were an action entirely new to him, and interesting. “But,” he continued, “if
something was making it, the Guidestar, fall down, and he wanted it to stay up ...”
It was too long a sentence for his inebriated mind. “Can’t think.” He put his
hands on either side of his head, long fingers spread like spider legs. “Grinding
like a mill in there. A few stones in the works. Noisy.”

“Don’t try to think,” she advised him, and moved behind to
pull off his vest. “Think in the morning.” She pulled him down on his bedroll;
he fell back in a spread-armed flop.

“Help,” he said to the ceiling.

She had begun on his bootlaces, and now stopped. “What?”

“Slado. He’d ask for help.”

She returned to her work. “Not necessarily.” But it would
have been the wisest course: if the loss of a Guidestar had far-reaching,
negative results, as Corvus himself had speculated, then, for the good of all,
Slado would ask the other wizards’ assistance to prevent that event.

But Slado, she knew, was not concerned with the good of all.
And so he kept his secrets.

The steerswoman had new facts, but facts only. She could not
find, in that weave of facts, the one thread that would lead her to the reason
why. Nevertheless, she tried, as the blue erby-hazed shadows faded toward
darkness.

She came back to her surroundings to find herself sitting on
her heels, Fletcher’s boot still in her hand. She set it down and turned her
attention to the other.

She had assumed him asleep; at the tug on his foot, he
revived. He pointed one arm straight up and declared solemnly, “No fun tonight,
Rowan!”

She dropped the foot to laugh. “I should hope not! We have
company!”

Fletcher looked to his right and sighted Averryl, his arms crossed,
composed for sleep. “Still here?”

“Still here,” Averryl said.

“Lewd, s’what you are. Well, stay. Nothing’s going to happen.”

“Except you two talking all night. Shut up, or I’ll beat you
senseless. In the morning.” He turned over.

“Can’t talk,” Fletcher complained as Rowan pulled up his
blanket, “and can’t cuddle. Rowan, I’m good for nothing.”

“You are,” she said, and kissed the end of his pointed nose,
“good for more than you know.”

“Before you speak,” the steerswoman announced to the assembled
seyohs, “before you give your decisions, we have new information for you to
consider.”

The moderator’s unfocused eyes flickered in her face. “Tell
us.”

“Before I tell, I need to ask.” She addressed the seyoh of
the Face People. “Tell me,” she said; then she remembered that the chairperson
could not see to whom Rowan spoke. “I ask the Face Person, tell me about the
heat that used to come before Rendezvous.”

He had been toying with his braid. He stopped and gazed at
Rowan, stone eyes in a wooden face. “How do you know of this?”

She took the most literal interpretation of his words
possible. “By asking, and by being answered.” She did not know if the Face People’s
habitual secrecy forbade Efraim to speak as freely with her as he had done. If
asked directly, she must provide his name; but she would need to be asked
directly. “In past times, when you left the Face and

Rendezvoused, you did it not only because your laws directed
you to, but because if you stayed you would die.”

He dropped his braid into his lap. “It is true.” And there
was a puzzled stir among the listeners.

“The heat,” Rowan said, “and the weather that followed it
both ceased when the Guidestar fell.”

“The Face People last Rendezvoused forty-eight years ago.”
He carefully picked up his braid again and threaded it through his fingers; but
now it was clearly a mannerism. “The Guidestar fell twelve years later, so you
tell.”

“And what was the heat like? Where did it come from?” She expected
the questions to be refused; she did not care. Refusal, she believed, would
only serve to convince the others of her conclusions.

But he did not refuse. “No one stayed to see. At the first
sign of the coming of the heat, all tribes would flee the Face.”

“What was the first sign?”

“It would grow warm. This was as it should be, when winter
turns to spring. But it was a different heat, because although it was not
strong, the people became ill, and the goats.”

“Ill in what way ?” The tent walls rippled in the wind,
stilled.

“Pains in the head, and dizziness. The goats would vomit,
and some weak people. If the tribe did not move soon enough, the ground became
hot, and the air.”

“And when you returned after Rendezvous, what did you find?”
He paused, a pause intended to seem merely contemplative. “We found all living
things dead.”

There was silence within the tent. Outside, a group of
children shouted in laughter, passed by, and were gone.

Kammeryn spoke. “Dead by fire?” His voice was mild, his
black eyes intent and unblinking.

The Face Person did not reply until Rowan repeated the question.
“No,” he told her. “No flame, no smoke.” At this Kammeryn leaned back, and his
gaze narrowed in thought.

“Dead with no marks on them?” Bel asked. He ignored her,
studying the idle weaving motions of his hands. And it was a pose, Rowan
understood; he was deeply disturbed and did not know how to conduct himself in
this situation.

The chairperson spoke disbelievingly. “This is impossible.
Can you truly mean
all
living things?”

The Face Person’s only reply was a flat stare, which she
could not perceive.

“Did nothing survive?” Rowan asked him.

“Nothing,” he replied. “No plants. No insects. No animals.”
Someone spoke in outrage. “How would your tribe support itself?” The tone
implied that the speaker knew the answer.

The Face Person gazed at the man with an expression of indifference
so complete that it constituted derision. But Rowan pressed: she wanted the
facts, in words. “By raiding?”

“Yes. At first. Later, the land became alive again.”

Rowan was confused. “The grass came back to life? And the
animals?”

“No. New grass. Redgrass is strong, grows quickly. And new
animals: the Face People themselves, and their goats, returning with the
grass.”

“I see. Then: every twenty years, an inexplicable,
destructive heat; every twenty years, strange and violent weather; every twenty
years, Rendezvous.”

“Yes. This is what I was told. I saw none of it myself. It
was before my time.”

He looked Kammeryn’s age; but Rowan was not surprised by his
statement and merely asked, “And how old are you?”

“I am forty-one years old.”

Bel stepped in smoothly. “Then you can’t remember, as the
other seyohs can, that the Rendezvous forty-eight years ago had had weather.”

The third female seyoh spoke. “Bad weather and Rendezvous
don’t always come together.”