The Outskirter's Secret

by Rosemary Kirstein

  On the fringes of the group, all alone, was Bel.

  “Ha,” Rowan’s companion said. “You took your time.”

  “I didn’t know the hour,” Rowan replied. She slipped her sword strap over her head and kicked out of her boots. Each person’s clothing, whether neatly or haphazardly arranged, had its owner’s weapon lying on top, hilt carefully pointing to the water—handy for quick recovery in case of danger. Rowan followed their example, wondering to herself if the precaution was necessary.

  She waded into the cool water, feeling small stones beneath her feet. “I think I insulted my guard, by asking his name,” she told Bel, then dipped beneath the surface to rinse the first layer of dirt from her body. Below, sound closed in with a familiar closeness, and her sight was limited to shafts of sweet white light, brown creek bed, and a number of blurred naked human bodies. She had an odd desire to remain there.

  She resurfaced to the incessant hiss and tap of the redgrass, the rattle of nearby tanglebrush, the shifting red and brown. On the far side of the creek, some Outskirts plant had put out a patch of magenta blossoms. The effect was faintly nauseating.

  “No one will tell you their names, not until we’ve been accepted,” Bel reminded her, studying a raw spot on her own stomach, an abrasion from wearing wet clothing for days. Bel scooped water onto it, then rubbed off a patch of dead skin.

  “Should I tell them mine?”

  “Yes. Every chance you get.” Bel raised her voice to the bathing women. “This is the friend I mentioned, the steerswoman, Rowan. She only has one name.”

  “Ha,” someone said, and the women went back to their business.

  “Will that knife blade buy our way in?”

  “Nothing will buy our way in, and you shouldn’t say it like that. The knife blade was for the goat we took. And the fact that we bothered to trade for it instead of stealing it shows them that we mean well.”

  Rowan became confused. “Wouldn’t they respect us more if we did steal it?”

  “In a way. But if we want this tribe to become our tribe, even temporarily, we can’t do anything that’s against its interests.” Bel moved to the shallower bank and sat down in the water, leaning back a bit, water slapping against her breasts. Her short, muscular legs extended before her, half floating.

  “When do we meet the seyoh?”

  Bel kicked up a few splashes with childlike pleasure. “I expect they’re discussing us right now, and they’ll plan to hear our story sometime this afternoon.”

  “That’s good. I’d like to get things settled. I feel a bit odd being half ignored.” Rowan imitated her friend and found the contrast between the cool water and the oddly scented air refreshing. Because it was natural for her to do so, she gazed at the longest perspective, out to the horizon. The scene stubbornly refused to integrate; it became weirder, wavering, and the magenta flowers jabbed at her vision like a nail in her eye.

  She focused on the creek bank and concentrated on the conversation. “The people act as if I’m supposed to be invisible, but don’t have the manners to be so correctly.”

  Bel laughed. “That’s well said. And it’s true. But the fact is, you are doing it correctly. You’re supposed to act as if you don’t have the manners to be invisible. You should force people to notice you.” Bel raised her voice again. “Who has soap?” There was no reply from the bathers. “Well, I’m used to my own smell. But it will be a hard time on anyone who has to stand near me …” Something landed with a splash between the two women. “Ha.” Bel retrieved the grayish lump and began vigorously scrubbing her hair with it, to little visible effect.

  “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 redgrass 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, concerne
d 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.”

  The healer had learned something of the ways of steerswomen during Rowan’s illness. “Your ban won’t serve you here. If you know I can’t answer, don’t ask the question. You’ll speak to the seyoh tomorrow afternoon.”

  Rowan found that the scene around her was rapidly becoming more precise, though maintaining a translucent, airy quality. Without changing, the breeze was suddenly very cool and refreshing.

  “That’s good,” Rowan said. “We have a lot to say.” Somewhere at the back of her mind, a part of herself was independently reviewing the information she planned to present. She watched it at work, with a detached pride.

  The healer departed, and the food arrived: broth and bread. It was delicious.

  As she drank and ate, she began to notice the sounds of the camp. The hiss and rattle of the veldt was unending, but from the center of the camp wafted voices, music, and intriguing clatters that she finally recognized as two fighters training with metal-edged tanglewood swords.