The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series) (10 page)

His anguish was too close to the surface. The strain of masking it was too great. His control was too fragile, and his emotions, when they broke through, too helpless. It was unhealthy; it was dangerous. Something must be done.

“Janus,” she said gently, “think of it. You’d live right here, in Alemeth, among people you already know well. You’ll have respect, a home, and good work that actually uses your skills, instead of wasting your training on odd jobs. And you’d be host to any steerswoman passing by, and you could talk to her, question her, learn all her adventures as you pour another cup of tea right by your own f1reside— ”

“Write the Prime.” He turned away, carefully placed his hands on the railing, spoke with his back to her. “You write her first. If she agrees to your plan, then I’ll see if I can stand to bare my soul a second time.”

She felt a rush of gratitude, as if hope were being offered to her instead of him. “Good. Thank you. I wish I’d known this sooner; I could have sent the letter on the
Beria
. . . Have you any idea when the next ship might be coming by?”

“No.” He turned back. “Rowan, I’ll be going away for a while.”

This took her aback. “Away? Why?”

“Sometimes I need to. Once in a while, I become too jumpy, too emotional . . . I reach a point where I can’t bear to be around people for a while. When that happens, I go away until I need people again. I always come back.”

Good and useful work was what he needed, she told herself. That, more than anything else, would heal his spirit. But it would take time, and he must deal with himself as he saw fit in the interim.

Still, she could not help feeling that her presence, and her insistent questions, were causing his departure. He seemed to guess her thoughts. “It has nothing to do with you,” he reassured her. “I’ve been working up to it for some time now; everyone in town has noticed. I’ve spent all my money on supplies, the ship is loaded— ”

“Ship? This ship? This is yours?”

“Yes, and please don’t mock her; she’s the best I can do in my reduced circumstances.” He stepped past the steerswoman, back to his work. “I’d been planning to go as soon as I fix the deck. I don’t care to break my leg the first time I jibe.” He stooped, sorted through the waiting new planks.

Surprise rendered her question blunt. “Aren’t you afraid of the sea?”

“Of course I am.” His voice was weirdly cheerful. “I’m also afraid of falling downstairs every morning. But when it gets this bad, I don’t care anymore. If you want to get away from people, it’s the sea that’s best. There are few things in the world as inhuman as the sea.”

She stood looking down at his back as he worked. Something was missing. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“How it feels,” he said immediately, his tone unchanged. “How it feels to need to do this.” He found the new plank he wanted, maneuvered it in place, and banged its side to set the tongue and groove.

She felt she must do something to change the mood. “I think you’re just leaving me to deal with the gossips all by myself.”

He laughed. “Aha. My strategy has been revealed by the wily steerswoman. By the time I come back the whole matter will have blown over entirely. They’ll be nattering about catching Gwen and Steffie in the hayloft, or counting how much money Leonard’s spent on the boys and girls at Maysie’s house.”

“She uses children?”

“No, no; they’re just always referred to as boys and girls. I believe, because it lends an air of playfulness.”

“That’s the solution, then; while you’re gone, I’ll try to encourage interest in Leonard’s debaucheries.”

“Just don’t ask Maysie to help. She tends to regard her knowledge as a sacred trust. Which is why she never got on with Mira.” He returned to extracting nails from the old boards.

Rowan sat on the railing. “Would you consider waiting until I’ve finished the letter, and putting in at Donner to send it from there?” Donner was a busy port; the letter would move far more quickly than from Alemeth.

“No. There are too many people in Donner. Ow.” He had banged a finger. He went to put it in his mouth, and was again foiled by the glove. And again, and oddly, he did not remove it but sat with his teeth gritted, waiting for the pain to pass.

“Is there something wrong with your hands?”

“Mm. Skin condition of some sort. Picked it up in the wildlands.” He blew out a breath, shook the hand, and returned to work. “It gets better and worse, but it never quite goes away.”

“Perhaps you should let me see.”

“The local healer is dealing with it.”

“Can you handle a ship with it?”

“I usually wait until it improves. But it’s always worse by the time I can come back. And I do believe I’ll change the subject now; there’s something needs discussion.”

She nodded. “Exactly what would you prefer not generally known among the citizens of Alemeth?”

He paused to think. “This whole business about getting the ban lifted. It still might turn out not to be possible.”

“I think you’re safe. The matter is hardly likely to arise of itself.”

“And they don’t know I’m under ban at all. And they don’t know I was ever a steersman.”

“I should be able to maneuver around that one. But if someone manages a wild guess, I won’t be able to deny it.”

“Well, I suppose I can live with that. And I’d rather they didn’t know I was a coward.”

“I’m still not convinced that you are.”

“Very well, if you insist: I’d rather they not be told that the reason I resigned was that I am convinced that I am unable to fulfill my role, due to what I believe is a lack of simple courage.”

“I’ll merely say that you discovered that the life did not suit you.”

“They’ll press for details.”

“I’ll distract them with all sorts of ancillary information about the life of a steerswoman and the various reasons any one of us might choose to resign.”

“That might work for a while. But they’ll come back to it.”

Rowan thought, then smiled broadly. “I could always use the vindictive approach.”

He was a moment remembering to what she referred; then his jaw dropped. “Now, that,” he said slowly, “I would like to see. Rowan being nasty: unimaginable!” He caught her expression. “That’s a very odd look you’ve got on your face . . .”

“Actually,” she said uncomfortably, “it just occurred to me to try to count the number of people I’ve killed. I keep losing track somewhere in the middle twenties.”

Shock silenced him. Then, “Twenties? Skies above, Rowan, how— He stopped.

They sat, he on the deck, she on the port railing, the air full of creaks and laps and rattles, with the question and all the unanswered others lying on the deck between them, like a single, mute stone.

At last Rowan stood, made a show of brushing her trouser legs. “I do believe,” she said, “that I’ll go see to that letter right now.”

7

B
ooks, and books. You’d think there was nothing more important in the world.

The steerswoman was at it every morning, right after her walk and her breakfast. And if Steffie passed by the Annex at night, he could see she was still at it then, too, because there was a light downstairs. And more than once he or Gwen had caught her in the morning with books all spread around, and sometimes maps she’d drawn, too, and you could tell she hadn’t slept. On those days she walked after breakfast instead of before, and she did it down by the harbor instead of up by the groves.

She walked by the harbor more and more as the weeks went by. Sometimes she went down of an evening, too, when everyone else was off to Brewer’s or the Mizzen, or to their families.

“Looking for her sweetheart,” was Gwen’s guess. But Rowan had said that Janus wasn’t her sweetheart. And she kept on saying it, because people kept on asking it, most every day for a while, when they dropped by of an afternoon. Which they started to do less and less. Not that Steffie blamed them; it just wasn’t the same without Mira.

Sometimes Steffie wondered why he kept hanging about himself, and Gwen, too. But after all this time, he sort of felt it was their right. Sooner or later, the real new keeper of the Annex would show up, and maybe things would sort out.

So, Rowan kept to herself, for the most part. After the night she’d run into Janus, the only time Steffie had seen her go to Brewer’s was one evening when she’d been up all the night before and all day, and had not stopped at all.

She hadn’t been just reading, but writing and drawing, too, and measuring something and covering some pages with numbers. Not numbers in rows, like adding them up, but numbers and letters together in long lines, like they were sentences, like numbers were a language you could talk and say things with. Funny way to think of it.

But, suddenly, in the middle of it, she’d stood up, picked up the page she’d been working on, and stood staring at it. Then she tore it up.

Then she tore up the rest, and the drawings, too. She put them all in the fireplace, strapped on her sword, took money from the jar, and told Steffie that she was going to buy him a drink.

He wanted to ask her what it was all about, but he didn’t, because as soon as she sat down in Brewer’s, she started talking.

She talked about living in the Outskirts, with all those barbarians, traveling along and fighting with each other; and how funny the goats were; and how noisy the grass was, like rain on the roof, she said, when the wind blew it. She talked about how the air smelled in the morning, sour and spicy; and how Outskirters could talk to each other far away by waving their arms; and how their food was so boring that sometimes they made it taste bad on purpose, just to be different.

She told about a festival, Rendezvous, she called it, when the tribes didn’t fight but told stories and had contests. She told two of the stories, one about a dead warrior who wanted his funeral done over right and another one, a funny one, about a girl who took a fancy to the old man who led the tribe.

Pretty soon, people in the tavern started quieting, like a circle spreading out from around her. Rowan looked like she didn’t even notice, like it was the Outskirts she was seeing instead.

There were songs, too, Rowan said, and she sang one. She had no voice to speak of, sort of plain and thin; but the song was the strangest one that Steffie had ever heard, with a twisty melody and words that only made sense if you didn’t try to understand them.

By then she had everyone in Brewer’s gathered around, none of them speaking at all, not even when the song made Maysie cry. It was Brewer took Maysie’s hand and gave her his towel; but the steerswoman jus went on.

She told about rescuing a man from a whole troop of goblins, her and this friend of hers, fighting a long time, all in the night by a great bright fire; then straightaway told how she saw, at that Rendezvous, a mandolin made out of a dead goblin’s head. And a duel she fought with an Outskirter, and how the other person shook her hand after, each of them saying how good the other fought.

She didn’t talk like she was talking to a lot of people, not checking how they took things, seeing if they were bored, changing direction to suit the crowd— not the way old Mira used to. Rowan talked like she was talking to herself, or as if it was her own thoughts, the things inside her, that were doing the speaking, and she was just listening to what they said.

She told about things tall as trees that weren’t trees but had deadly sharp spines running all through them, and how little Outskirter children would cut them down and laugh when they fell crashing. And how it got so cold last winter they brought all the goats in the tents at night, and she woke up to find a fat doe cuddled up right under her blanket.

And a river, the oldest river in the world, so far below a cliff that the water was just a tiny ribbon, and way off east, up where all the green-colored grass ran out and all the red-colored grass was almost gone, other people living there, who were such barbarians that the
barbarians
called them barbarians.

And when the time came for the tribe to move, they’d just pack up and walk, homes and goats and all, all off across the landscape together, far away . . .

It made Steffie think of what it would be like to be an Outskirter, always moving, always defending, and how it wasn’t so barbaric at all but brave, really, hard and brave and good.

Steffie thought about it for a long time before he noticed that Rowan had stopped talking; and it was because she’d fallen asleep right in her chair, her beer, which she hadn’t touched once, still on the table beside her.

It was Steffie and Gwen who packed her up, got her home, and helped her unstrap her sword and fall into bed. She wasn’t up until noon the next day.

She didn’t talk all during lunch, and neither did Steffie. Because if he said anything, it would be about what she’d said last night, and somehow he didn’t want to do that. It had been like he’d gone to a strange land without quite knowing how he’d done it; like it was special, maybe magical, and touching it with new words would make it all go away.

Gwen didn’t speak either, except for “Pass the sauce.” She was thinking, too, but whatever she was thinking made her look at Rowan sideways.