The Outskirter's Secret (12 page)

"I'm not accustomed to blatantly drawing
attention to myself." But Rowan found herself liking the Outskirter
approach. It seemed like a game of skill, a small competition of
self-esteem.

Bel passed the soap to Rowan. "You don't have
to. It's not required. But they'll think better of you, if you
do."

"I see." The virtue of the soap, Rowan
discovered, lay largely in its abrasive quality. There was much to
abrade. She set to work. "Will it affect our being accepted?"

"I don't think so." Bel leaned forward and
submerged her head, massaging trail dirt out of her scalp, rose,
and wrung out fistfuls of short hair.

Four of the bathers upstream had gathered in
a knot, waist-deep in water, to discuss something in low tones,
punctuated by girlish laughter, subdued and decidedly
unwarriorlike. Rowan eyed the group, then suddenly tossed the
gritty soap in their direction, a high lob calculated to land in
their center. "Thank you for the soap," she called out as it
fell.

One woman instinctively caught it, her
comrades just as instinctively turning and diving away, to leave
her standing alone, surprised, with the lump in her hand. She
looked Rowan full in the eyes, suppressing laughter that seemed not
derisive but friendly. She thought a moment. "No, thank
you
," she said, then passed the soap
to another and waded out to dry.

Rowan considered the tone of the words. "Was
that an insult?"

"Yes," Bel said, eyes amused. "But a weak
one. Yours was better."

The steerswoman tried to recall under what
conditions a simple "thank you" might constitute an Outskirter
insult. The rules of behavior were not yet fully organized in her
mind, and she shook her head. "This is going to take some
time."

"You're doing well so far."

Rowan laughed. "Purely accidental, I assure
you." She closed her eyes to enjoy the strange scents and the
sunlight.

Her ears immediately told her that it was
raining, hard. She winced involuntarily, blinked her eyes open
again, and found that for an instant, the world consisted of
fragmented blots that only settled into coherence reluctantly. She
forced herself to look around carefully: the brook, the women, the
veldt, the hills, her guard—"Do you have a guard?"

Bel tilted her head at the opposite bank of
the brook. "She's being clever. Either for the practice, or just to
show off."

Rowan looked in the direction indicated, but
saw no one. "Where?" She rose and waded toward the far bank,
curious, then stopped, finding the combination of unsteady vision
and water motion too difficult to manage.

"Think 'goat,' " Bel called.

Rowan found three goats, all difficult to
discern among the red-grass motion. The farthest, she decided, was
the warrior: it seemed to move less often, and less naturally. She
considered that if she decided to climb the bank, the warrior would
reveal herself. An effective configuration: one guard on each side
of the brook.

She returned to Bel's side. "I hope the seyoh
sees us soon. I don't like not clearly knowing what's to happen
next."

Bel had climbed from the water, stepped to
her clothing, carefully reversed the direction of her sword hilt to
face her new position, and sat on the bank. She tilted her face
back, letting the sun and wind dry her. "In a way, I don't like it
either. But it might be best. The longer the wait, the better for
us."

"Why is that?" Rowan rearranged her own sword
and lay down in the sand beside her clothing. She shut her eyes
again and tried to ignore the sound of the redgrass.

Bel changed the subject. "How do you
feel?"

"Fine." Rowan laughed a bit. "But my eyes
don't like the Outskirts. I suppose I'm just not used to it, the
way the colors move. It seems unreal." Her reaction seemed foolish,
and it embarrassed her to reveal it.

Bel made a dubious sound.

Rowan recalled Bel's warning about Outskirter
food and understood her friend's concern. She sat up to speak
reassuringly. "Bel, it's been more than two days—"

The grassy hill, rising to her right, seemed
to lean over like a wave, ready to topple on her. To her left, the
open land jittered and writhed. She froze and screwed her eyes
closed. "Should it affect my vision?"

"No. It should affect your digestion."

"My digestion is fine." It was true. With
eyes closed, she once again felt completely normal: healthy and
fit, with the water cooling delightfully on her skin in the sweet
breeze and the sunlight. She loved the sour spicy scent of the air;
it intrigued her with promises of strangeness, newness. She knew
next to nothing about this land, and beneath the distracting noise
of the redgrass, found a part of herself that was happy as a child
at the prospect of discovery.

She opened her eyes cautiously, concentrating
on Bel's familiar face. The hill remained a hill, and this time the
land to the left seemed solid of itself, though vaguely
threatening, with horizon foreshortened. But now, by contrast, the
water of the creek looked strange: solid, like a gleaming band of
metal. The remaining bathers seemed only to exist from the waist
up: macabre half persons moving normally, casually, unaware of
their horrible condition.

"It's that everything is so very different,"
Rowan asserted, forcing herself to continue looking. "I'll adjust.
If Outskirters can get used to it, I can, as well."

"We're born to it."

"I suppose that's the case." Stubbornly, she
continued to study her own reactions.

Bel rose to recover her clothes, and Rowan
followed, directing her own actions cautiously. "But at one time,"
the steerswoman continued, "your people must have needed to adjust,
like me, when they first came to the Outskirts." She began to
dress.

Bel pulled on her own blouse. "No," she said
when her head emerged. "We've always been in the Outskirts."

The tribe members were beginning to gather by
the fire pit at the center of the camp for the morning meal. It was
a casual process: people congregated in disorganized groups, or sat
alone, or appeared and took their food to other parts of the camp.
Those who sat and stayed, conversing or musing, were handed rough
pottery cups of broth and round biscuits by three elderly
mertutials, assisted by a pair of children.

Bel and Rowan were cautiously conducted by
their guards to one side of the area and instructed by gesture to
go in no farther. Bel took the limitation with evident good humor,
and ostentatiously joined a group of six warriors seated on a light
woven rug outside a nearby tent. She introduced herself and her
companion politely; the group fell silent, then shifted their
seating to define a circle that definitely excluded the two
strangers and their watchers. They returned to their interrupted
conversation, which concerned an epidemic of lameness in that part
of the flock pasturing in a location referred to as
"nine-side."

Bel explained the system used. "You think of
a circle, and put numbers around it. Twelve is always straight
ahead, in the direction the tribe is moving, or has been moving, or
intends to move, if that's decided yet. Then you count around the
circle to the right, starting with one."

"Why isn't one straight ahead? It makes more
sense."

"I don't know. That's how we do it." Bel
beckoned a passing mertutial, who was inclined to ignore them.
"Twelve is straight ahead," she continued, "six is straight behind,
three to the right and nine to the left."

Perhaps perplexed by the necessity of the
instruction, Rowan's guard attempted to exchange a curious glance
with his partner. She ignored him, maintaining a studied air of
disinterest in their charges, fooling no one.

"It's an odd system; it'll need getting used
to," Rowan said, then immediately realized that it need not; as a
mapmaker, she was accustomed to 360 degrees in a circle. Twelve
divided into it neatly, giving exactly thirty degrees to each
Outskirter point, a felicity she found peculiar. "Why twelve?" she
wondered aloud, then answered herself: to divide neatly into 360.
"Why three hundred and sixty?" To divide easily by twelve. Her
half-voiced musing prompted Bel to require explanation.

They were finally provided breakfast—the
mertutial, an elderly man, bald but possessing a waist-length beard
that was pridefully well groomed, handed them steaming cups; he
moved with a dignity markedly different from the mertutials of the
raider tribe. He was clean and healthy. His hands, though aged,
were steady, and his back was straight.

Looking up at him, Rowan recalled some of
Bel's instruction on proper Outskirter society: Mertutials were
persons whom age or injury had rendered unable to serve as
warriors. Nearly all mertutials had once been warriors. This man
had survived hard life in the wilderness to serve the tribe in a
second role, and possessed the same degree of honor as he had had
in the first—quite a different situation from the way of the
degenerated raider tribe.

"Thank you," Rowan said to him, taking her
cup; and looking up at him, she paused, wondering suddenly what
strange dangers, what solitudes, what wild and furious battles he
had passed through in his long years to live to this day, when
sustenance itself rested in his hands, passing from his to the
outstretched hands of younger comrades.

"You're welcome," he replied, and she saw in
his eyes that despite her strange clothing, he took her to be a
warrior: that to him, hers was now the defense, the strength, and
the violence, all for the sake of her tribe.

A warrior never thanked a warrior, nor a
mertutial a mertutial; but across the line that demarcated their
roles, gratitude was always recognized, and rendered.

Then the old man was gone, leaving Rowan with
a cup in one hand and a meat-filled biscuit in the other. She spoke
to her companion. "Bel," she said, "I like your people very
much."

On further consideration, Rowan declined to
partake of the breakfast; she had yet to experience the illness Bel
had predicted, and she still hypothesized that she might delay its
onset by delaying the ingestion of tribe-cooked food.

Seeing the steerswoman place cup and biscuit
on the carpet, Bel asked for explanation, and was annoyed when she
received it. "It won't work. You ate that goat we took. You've been
eating it for two days."

"Nevertheless."

Bel shook her head at Rowan's stubbornness,
then ate the steerswoman's breakfast as well as her own.

It was dysentery, Rowan discovered one hour
later; and it did not last one day, but three.

By evening she was unable to reach the
cessfield unassisted, to the discomfiture of her guard. Other
provisions were made, which duty Bel handled, until she was struck
with the illness herself the following morning. Rowan recalled very
little of that day, except the constant presence of a silent child,
of indeterminate gender, who urged her by gesture to drink as much
water as she could hold.

On the third morning, Rowan found herself
alone, vaguely aware that she had slept uninterrupted through the
night. She shakily dressed and made her way out of the hot,
goat-smelling tent, compelled by a bleary desire to sit out in the
breeze. The view briefly confounded her: incomprehensible colors,
sky too bright, earth shuddering and roiling in waves of red and
brown. She dealt with the problem instinctively by taking four
staggering steps away from the tent's entrance and dropping to a
seat on the ground, facing the tents instead of the open veldt.

Bel approached, in the company of a
mertutial, an old woman whose hair, a complexity of tiny plaits
interwoven into a single fat braid, reached nearly to her knees.
Her face, with its squat, broken nose and tiny blue eyes, was
weirdly compelling; Rowan vaguely felt that she should know it.

They settled beside her, the woman displaying
a distinctly proprietary air. "You're right," she said to Bel,
"She's up at last."

Rowan attempted to concentrate. She seemed to
recognize the woman without actually remembering her. It was an
interesting phenomenon.

The woman reached for Rowan's wrist, and
Rowan found that she accepted this action without question; it was
familiar.

"How do you feel?" Bel asked. Rowan had
forgotten that she was there.

The steerswoman considered long, during which
period she briefly lost the question, then recovered it. "Tired,"
she replied at last. "And very stupid."

The old woman laid a hand on Rowan's face,
directing her gaze into her own. "Well. Not surprising." She peered
at Rowan's eyes.

And Rowan remembered: the woman had visited
her before. She was the tribal healer. Rowan recalled the
intelligent, concerned gaze, and with sudden embarrassment recalled
her own behavior. She had become possessed of the idea that the
woman harbored secrets, and had responded to her constant inability
to answer questions with the patient argument "I'm a steerswoman,
you know."

"I'm sorry," Rowan said.

The healer understood perfectly. "No need,"
she replied, patting Rowan's cheek in a motherly fashion. Rowan
wondered how many people this woman had killed when she was a
warrior.

The healer turned to Bel. "She'll be fine.
I've never seen it strike anyone this hard before, but she's past
it now. Make sure she keeps getting plenty of water."

Bel nodded. "Good. We're sorry to be so much
trouble. I know people have been waiting to speak to us."

The healer gestured another mertutial over
and instructed him to bring a light meal. "You'll feel better
tomorrow," she told Rowan. Then to Bel: "You'll need to travel
carefully for a few days, not too hard, but I think you'll
manage."

"Is the tribe going to be moving?" Rowan
managed to ask. The woman refused the question with an apologetic
glance, and Rowan suppressed an urge to add, "I'm a steerswoman,
you know."