The Outskirter's Secret (19 page)

"He's in there?" he asked, then hurried
forward and was under the shelter before Rowan could challenge
him.

She stood bemused. Another scout, she
hypothesized, then found her pack and soaked her spare blouse from
the waterskin while rain drizzled down her neck.

The stranger was sitting on his haunches,
studying Averryl silently. Rowan gave him one cautious glance, then
set to bathing Averryl's back with the wet cloth. The man watched a
moment, then without a word took the shirt from her and continued
the job.

She sat back. "I'm Rowan," she said, then
added, as she had learned to, "Only the one name."

"Garvin, Edenson, Mourah." He gestured. "Help
me turn him."

The sick man, who had revived under the cool
water, protested peevishly, but when the newcomer reassured him, he
recognized the voice and struggled to become alert. "Garvin?"

"None other."

"Where were you?"

Rowan handed Garvin the waterskin, and he
resoaked the cloth. "I never saw your fire. Met a troop and ran
like a tumblebug. I know when I'm in over my head." He wiped the
cloth down Averryl's chest. "Looks like you don't."

"I was surrounded."

"Mm. Well." Garvin examined, but did not
touch, the injured arm. The wound itself was wrapped in linen torn
from Bel's spare blouse, secured with thongs. Below this, the
forearm showed a single raised ridge along the inside to the wrist,
and the middle two fingers of the hand were visibly swollen. The
other fingers and the thumb seemed normal, which followed no logic
Rowan could discern.

Averryl relaxed under his comrade's
ministrations, and presently Garvin caught Rowan's eye and jerked
his head in suggestion that they speak outside.

The drizzle had stopped, and the air had
begun to move, a light west wind. Garvin peered at the sky, then
shook his head in incomprehension of the weather's pattern. "Do you
think he'll lose the arm?" Rowan asked.

The warrior was surprised. "No. No . . ." His
eyes were deep-sea blue in his tanned face, and an old scar arced
from his left temple to the side of his nose. He studied the
steerswoman speculatively from under bristling yellow brows, then,
by way of explanation, held out his own thick forearm and with one
finger traced a line that followed the ridge on Averryl's arm.
"Goblin spit. Runs down the nerve, here." The finger ran down to
his palm, which he tapped thoughtfully. "He'll lose the use of
those fingers, for certain. He'll be able to use the arm itself,
but he might not want to. It'll pain him forever."

Rowan nodded. She knew that damage to a nerve
often resulted in paralysis of a part of the body farther from the
backbone. "What about the fever?"

"Well, that's the thing. If he gets past
that, he'll do well enough." With that he descended into internal
musing, eyes automatically scanning the horizon as his expression
faintly mirrored his thoughts.

Abruptly, the wind swept from west to north,
and the clouds above began to roil. Garvin stared up, slack-jawed.
"Look at that."

With uncanny speed, the cloud cover churned
and seemed to tumble gray masses down toward them, which bled into
streamers of mist that trailed off to the southeast before they
reached ground. Breaks showed in the layers above, revealing a blue
first faint, then brighter. Around the little camp, spots of yellow
sunlight illuminated the decimated redgrass. To the north, a
clearly demarcated line of clear weather appeared, sped toward
them, swept in, arced overhead, and flew south, bringing a coldness
that descended so suddenly that Rowan's ears popped.

She and Garvin traded looks of amazement.
"Rendezvous weather?" the steerswoman hazarded. Garvin gave no
reply.

A voice hailed, and, squinting against the
brightness in the distance, Rowan recognized Bel, waving. The
Outskirter paused to stoop to the ground, then approached at a jog
trot, dragging something behind.

Leaving Garvin to tend Averryl, Rowan went
forward and met her friend. "What do you have there?"

"A tent for Averryl. Did Garvin arrive?"

"Yes. But I meant, what are you carrying the
tent on?"

"This is a train. No, don't examine it; pull
it. I have to go back and help. The tribe is moving."

Rowan positioned herself between two poles
whose grips were worn shiny from countless hands. "Where is the
tribe going?" She took a moment to wonder where such lengths of
wood had come from, in the treeless Outskirts.

"It's not going, it's coming. They're pulling
everything up and moving here." She gave Rowan a dray-beast's slap.
"Go."

By the time she reached the little camp,
Rowan had acquired companions: six goats had come up from behind,
passed, then doubled back to pace alongside her. They jittered,
shaking flop-eared heads in disapproval of the barren ground.

Their voices drew Garvin from the shelter,
and when Rowan dropped the train grips, he immediately fell to
dismantling the conveyance, standing on one side and directing
Rowan to imitate his actions on the other.

The frame of the train was made from two
poles, some twelve feet long, and a four-foot spreader. Behind the
grips, the gap narrowed away from the puller, as in a travois, but
with a single small black wheel at the point. Between the grips and
the wheel stretched a hide platform, apparently part of the tent
itself. Garvin released the wheel on his side and twisted his pole,
and it slid back, collapsing the structure. Rowan did the same on
her side.

Hot damp breath blew down her neck, and
something nibbled at her hair. Garvin reached across and shoved the
goat away from Rowan; it protested, then clambered forward, over
the train and past the rain fly. Two more goats joined it,
appearing from the right, and when Rowan paused to look about, she
counted a full dozen nervously wandering animals.

"Hey-oh, Rowan!" someone called from behind.
Rowan turned, and the person waved at her from a distant rise, then
angled away to the south. It was no one she knew.

Garvin was taking the poles themselves apart:
they were constructed of four-foot lengths of tangleroot wood, the
mated ends revealing curious twisting joints, reinforced by wood
strips and leather straps. Rowan imitated Garvin's actions.

She spotted another warrior far off, moving
from her right to her left, and understood that this was the
direction the approaching tribe followed. More goats appeared,
reluctantly trailing after the figure.

The steerswoman made to continue
disassembling, but Garvin stopped her. "No. We want one long pole,
one short each." That was what they had. He chased away a kid goat
that was perched atop the folded mass of the tent, and began to
untie lashings. The kid complained, skipped aside, and made a dash
to regain its position.

It was swept from its feet by a tall woman,
and draped across her shoulders as she strode into the camp and
strode out again without pausing. There was another person beyond
her, and yet another beyond, pacing her at measured distance, all
warriors in gear, but without packs.

"Who chose this spot? It's terrible!" Two
train-draggers had appeared, and dropped their loads. One fell to
work, and the other fell to complaining, pointing here and there at
inadequacies of the terrain. Three walkers with outsized packs came
up to the cold remains of yesterday's fire, and examined it,
shaking their heads, then scuffed dirt to cover it. They found a
better location ten feet away, dropped their packs, withdrew
implements, and set to digging a shallow hole. More goats straggled
through.

Rowan and Garvin did not bother to take down
the rain fly where Averryl sheltered; they drove stakes, looped
thongs, and prepared to draw the stitched hide up and directly over
the tarp itself. Four more draggers appeared, found positions, and
began to disassemble their trains.

"There, there, there!" a high voice squealed,
admonished by a quieter deep voice. A flock of children flurried
forward, parting around Garvin and Rowan like a burbling tide
around rocks as they passed. One little girl froze and stared at
Rowan, giggling in hysterical shyness at seeing a stranger, and was
drawn off by a bent-backed old man. "Hush and stay away, now,
Averryl's sick." A serious-faced blond boy paused and stooped to
peer in at Averryl, then stationed himself protectively nearby as a
crowd of over a hundred goats of every size, age, and combination
of colors swept in, through, and out again, exactly as the children
had done. An elderly woman dropped her train by the new fire pit
and began unloading blocks of peat.

Bel appeared, pulling a train, locked in
conversation with a gray-haired man who spoke with much
gesticulation and walked with a limp. She spared Rowan a wave. The
man took an item from the train's platform, stumped over to Rowan,
and handed it to her: a foot-square box of stiffened wool fabric,
patterned in maroon and violet. Not knowing what else to do with
it, she tucked it under the rising tent as she and Garvin lifted
the lower end of its short uprights. The guardian boy left his post
to help, pulling the tent's side into shape.

A shadow fell over Rowan's shoulder; she
looked up and found three other tents, erected back-to-back in a
square with her own. As she secured the last guy lines, a woman
nearby said, "Like this, Rowan," and showed her the best way to
cross the lines of the adjacent tent.

"Thank you."

A man approached, wearing two shoulder-slung
pouches, straps crossing on his chest. He was of warrior age, but
he carried no sword; the steerswoman noticed that he lacked a left
arm. "Rowan!" he greeted her, and then said, "Which one?"
indicating the tents with his only hand. Before she could reply,
Garvin, now inside the tent, held open the entrance flap and waved
the man inside. The flap closed, to be reopened an instant later as
the rain fly and its two gnarled poles were thrust into Rowan's
arms. Atop the tent, an overlap slapped open from below and was
tied into place by hands that vanished a moment later.

"Rowan?"

She turned to see an Outskirter standing
behind her; he slid a pack from his shoulders and brushed a strand
of white hair from his face. A thick white braid trailed down his
broad chest, and his eyes were black in nests of weather-beaten
wrinkles.

"Kammeryn, Murson, Gena," he introduced
himself, and added with a gentle smile, "Seyoh. Welcome to our
camp."

The steerswoman stood bemused, arms full of
canvas and tangleroot, and looked around. She was in the middle of
a town.

Her newly erected tent faced the central
square, where the fire pit was already being put to use by two
squabbling mertutials. Other tents circled the areas, entrance
flaps and occasionally entire sides rolled open and secured above,
to show inner chambers carpeted with patterned cloth.
Outskirters—warriors and mertutials both—strode, wandered, or
bustled according to their individual duties. Half a dozen warriors
arranged a carpet before one of the open tents, dropped packs, and
settled to relax and converse.

"Thank you," Rowan said to Kammeryn, "but I
feel a bit odd being welcomed to a place when I haven't moved ten
feet from where I originally stood. Perhaps I should say to you,
'Welcome to my former bivouac.' "

"
W
e have been
told that you are a steerswoman. Now you must tell us what that
means."

The adjoining walls of four adjacent tents
had been rolled up to the ceiling and tied in place, creating a
single large chamber, its remaining walls rippling like water from
the chill wind gusting outside. Above, vent flaps were turned up,
affording sixteen identical views of crystalline blue sky. Their
configuration against the flow of wind occasionally set them
humming faintly, disharmoniously.

Rowan and Bel sat in the center of a thin
carpet angularly patterned in blue and white, surrounded by a
circle of eighteen seated Outskirters. Kammeryn sat directly before
his guests, an armed cushion of the same design behind him. Rowan
took a moment to scan the faces. There was no clear demarcation
between warrior and mertutial; but she noted that the woman on
Kammeryn's right was of his own age, and certainly a mertutial, and
that the man to his left was younger than Rowan, and surely a
warrior. There seemed to be a general trend toward maturity,
progressing around the circle to end at the seyoh's seat. Rowan
wondered if, should Kammeryn die, the circle would simply shift,
adding one young face at the beginning.

"I said a great deal to Jann, about myself
and my purposes. She didn't pass the information on to you?"

"Jann spoke to me only, briefly, and returned
to her position on the outer circle. What you have to say, we need
to hear from you."

Rowan nodded, and gathered her information
into a coherent explanation. "That I am a steerswoman means that I
am a constant student. I try to understand everything I encounter.
I study what I see, and if there are people who can inform me, I
ask questions of them.

"The simplest thing I study, and most
constantly, is the land itself. I chart the country I cross, as
accurately as possible. That skill of steerswomen is the one of the
greatest uses to people in the Inner Lands, and it's what we are
best known for. But we are also interested in the people of the
lands we chart, their ideas, actions, and traditions. And many more
things: why plants grow where they do, the nature of objects, of
natural events, how to use mathematics to navigate and to measure
and describe . . ." She paused, discovering a more concise and
inclusive statement, and its simplicity surprised her. "The
Steerswomen are actually trying to answer only three questions:
what, how, and why."

"To the Steerswomen," Bel put in, "knowledge
is life."