The Outskirter's Secret (43 page)

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."

"
B
efore 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 bad weather."

The third female seyoh spoke. "Bad weather
and Rendezvous don't always come together."

"But didn't they, before the Guidestar fell?"
Rowan countered. She and Bel had discussed this with Kammeryn
before the meeting. "If you search your memory, and your songs,
you'll find that it's so. Likely your tribe didn't formally
recognize the fact, as part of its tradition; but Bel's tribe,
living farther east, did. I believe that the closer one was to the
Face itself, the more severe the weather. The connection would be
much more evident to Bel's people."

The man with the braided beard spoke true to
form. "My people do not live on the Face. This heat is no concern
of ours."

It was Bel who replied. "But the doings of
wizards, that is. There's more." She addressed the Face Person.
"The Face People have never come this far west before. Why are you
here now?"

He turned his flat gaze on her and did not
answer, and Rowan felt her friend began to seethe at his refusal.
But when the steerswoman cautiously prompted him again, he did
reply. His expression did not change, nor did he raise his voice,
but his words and tone were so suddenly vehement that all present
startled.
"I feed my people!"