The Outskirter's Secret (42 page)

"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."

"
T
he 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.

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."