The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series) (46 page)

They would need it when they reached Janus’s anchorage, to row to shore. “Can you swim?” The chart did not note snails in those waters.

“Yes.”

“Zenna?” She had been able to, before.

“Well enough.”

“Then yes.”

Rowan and Steffie manhandled it to the starboard rail and sent it into the sea, where it immediately became a hazard; with the ship making no headway, the skiff remained in the water at its side, and the waves attempted to dash it against the weakened hull. Cursing, they hauled it back in with the boat hook, reduced it to kindling, discarded the pieces.

Rowan checked the waterline again. “Just a bit more.” She rapidly ran down a mental inventory of the ship’s stores and fittings, reached a bleak conclusion. “There’s nothing more to lose.”

“Yes, there is,” Steffie said. He adjusted the bloody rag around his left palm, spat on his right palm, hefted the axe, and swung it into the side of the low cabin housing.

Rowan nodded slowly. “I think that should be just about enough.”

29

A
bove the copper strips, the hull showed snail damage in a band nearly five inches wide toward the stern, over six inches at the bow. There were five places where individual snails had gouged through completely; fortunately, the holes were less than half an inch wide and widely spaced. Other spots had been nearly chewed through, mostly concentrated toward the bow.

The travelers sacrificed a floor plank from the cabin, and Rowan and Steffie whittled twenty-four tapered plugs to be driven into the holes and near holes from the outside by a person hung over the side on a rope harness. After some experimentation, it was evident that Zenna was best at the job, and for most of one day she swung above the water in a harness, nimbly propelling herself along the side with her one foot, Rowan and Steffie tending her safety lines. Periodically she climbed aboard so that the stores in the hull could be shifted to counterbalance the weight of three people all standing on one side of the ship.

Repairs completed, they immediately reset the rudder, secured the sheets, and cautiously left the snail-infested waters behind.

They restored the rest of the ship to as much order as could be managed. The aft cabin was rearranged with pallets on the floor, loose gear secured in bundles with ropes. Among Rowan’s traveling equipment was an oiled canvas tarp, which she generally used to contrive tents and rain flys; it was now pressed into service as a cover for the absent cabin housing. In this duty it was less than ideal, as its unsupported middle tended to dip, collecting pooled dew in the morning, and later bucket-worths of rainwater. It was laced across with cords, to prevent it catching and rising in the wind.

The chaos in the hold was a larger problem. The remaining floor planks were reset. The water barrels, the heaviest single objects on the boat, were redistributed for best balance. Smaller crates of stores were lashed to the floor’s bare crossbeams.

Most loose stores had ended up in the bilge. One of the two bags of wheat flour had burst, and a bag of maize flour was soaked through. The wheat was unusable; the maize had to be chipped into chunks and crushed to be used. The pickled pork was rescued from the bilge, and the travelers, of necessity, dined on it for days; out of its barrel, it would soon spoil.

The preserved fish had gone overboard, and once repairs and rearrangements were effected, the travelers tried to replenish supplies by fishing.

On days of smooth and steady wind, there was little else to occupy them. They took turns at the tiller. Zenna charted their progress. Both women amended Janus’s charts with what new information they could find and updated their own logbooks. They coached Steffie on the finer points of seamanship, in which he took serious interest, remembering everything and applying it with more and more confidence. And they fished.

Rowan found an hour’s distraction studying a particularly peculiar little creature that had snagged itself on her hook. It bristled with wild spines, which she carefully did not touch, and was striped like the breasts of some sparrows. She brought up her logbook and pens, and began entering descriptions and sketches.

Outskirts, she found herself musing, Inner Lands. The boundaries of the two categories were becoming more and more clear to her. Although it seemed odd to label a sea creature so, the spiny fish she studied obviously belonged to the “Inner Lands” category. It lacked the “four-ness” one found so consistently in Outskirts life.

Beside her, Steffie had found a bit of charcoal and was idly drawing the fish himself on the wood of the deck. Rowan smiled a bit but did not intrude.

She needed better terms for the categories, she thought, as the fish on her page grew more and more like the one gulping air before her. But she could find no satisfactory words to pin down so vague a concept as “more like us” and “less like us.” The fish was in no way like a human, but she sensed very clearly that it was closer to humans than were the four-spined, four-finned little snails; the four-legged moths in Alemeth; or the demons . . .

Beside her, Steffie had grown still. Puzzled, she glanced at him.

He was glowering down at his sketch, which, unfortunately, resembled nothing living. Moreover, the spines were too large, so that only three fit on the hump intended to be its back; the stripes ran in entirely the wrong direction; and the circle positioned as the eye seemed to have a white, like a human’s.

Hoping that Steffie would not ask for a comment, Rowan tried to look away before he noticed her attention; but she was too late. He glanced up and met her gaze, then abruptly and roughly wiped his foot across the drawing, leaving it a smear of gray. He scrambled to his feet and strode off to the starboard bow.

Rowan hesitated, then returned to her work.

Some time later, he was still there. She set aside her logbook and went to him.

He was systematically destroying the bit of charcoal in his hands, scraping off shards, letting them flutter off in the wind.

“Don’t be discouraged,” she told him. “It isn’t an easy thing to do. I have had some training.”

Steffie flung the charcoal away abruptly. “Never mind. It’s too late, isn’t it?”

Rowan puzzled. “ ‘Too late?’ ”

“You have to start young, don’t you?” He glowered down at the black speck as it swept alongside and was left behind. “I’m too old.”

“Not at all,” she assured him. She felt she was missing something. “If you want to learn to draw well, I’m sure you— ” But he had turned away and strode angrily past the helm, to stand brooding over the aft railing. Zenna shot him a puzzled glance, spoke a question that Rowan did not hear.

He replied; Zenna caught Rowan’s eye and motioned her over, relinquished the tiller to her. “I was fifteen,” Zenna replied to another unheard question. She joined Steffie by the rail but called back to Rowan. “You were, what, eighteen?”

Rowan was lost. “At what point?”

“When you entered the Academy.”

The meaning of Steffie’s complaint became clear. “Yes,” Rowan said, then overcame her astonishment. “But, Steffie, there were others who were older. Age is not considered a factor.”

“Helen was twenty-two,” Zenna volunteered.

“But I’m that come winter,” Steffie said. Rowan had thought him somewhat younger. He turned back to lean glumly against the rail. “And this training, this Academy, where’s it? Wulfshaven? Take a while to get there.”

“It won’t be in Wulfshaven,” Zenna said. “It’s in a different place each time. I don’t know where it will be held next.”

“Three years from now,” Rowan added.

“There, see? I’ll be nearly twenty-five. Most likely, I’ll be married, with tykes climbing all up me when I come home from work, the wife complaining at me about something or other . . .”

In the silence that followed, Zenna shrugged. “Then don’t marry. Use the time to prepare. I’ll be there to help. You can learn to read better, and chart and diagram. I can get you started on higher maths.”

“Of course!” Rowan said. “With Zenna’s help, you can learn a great many things in three years. And then, when the time comes— ”

“But that’s not good enough, is it?” He looked from one steerswoman to the other. “There’s more to being a steerswoman than just knowing things. Anyone can know things. I could work as hard as you want, and memorize all sorts of things, but . . . but I’d be just collecting them. Like pretty rocks, or butterflies . . . that’s it. Pinning them down in your head, and then your head all full of beautiful things, but none of them alive anymore.” He held his hands as if there were something between them, something that moved, and then was still.

Rowan recalled that among the steerswomen candidates who had failed training, the commonest reason was the very thing Steffie was trying to express; those women, in attempting to acquire knowledge, had instead merely collected facts. “It does take a special sort of person,” she admitted.

“But how can I tell I’m that?” Steffie turned his gaze on Rowan: dark, clear eyes under the wild tangle of brown hair. “How can I know I’m not just wishing for things, fooling myself? With me so old already, I don’t want to . . . I don’t want to waste my heart on something impossible. Can
you
tell?” His gaze now included them both. “Can you two tell if I’m the right sort for it?”

“No,” Zenna said honestly, “I can’t tell, one way or the other. I’ve only known you a few weeks. But nothing I’ve seen tells me you’re definitely wrong for it.”

“It’s much easier to tell who is wrong for it than who is right,” Rowan admitted. “And even people who seem perfect for the work can fail training, for any number of reasons. Forget what we think, Steffie— what do
you
think?”

“Me? How am
I
supposed to tell?”

Zenna made to reply; but Rowan held up a silencing hand, thought a moment, then motioned her to take over the tiller. “Hold on a moment,” she said to Steffie, then went below.

She returned, and Zenna caught sight of what Rowan was carrying. “Oh, perfect!”

Rowan handed it to Steffie. “Let’s try something. Tell me what that is.”

He fingered it suspiciously. “Well, it’s a bit of paper . . .” A glance at Rowan’s face told him she wanted more. “A strip of paper,” he went on. “Got its ends glued, so it’s a loop with a twist in.” He noticed something that pleased him. “Look, it’s like your rings! Bigger, though.”

“That’s right,” Rowan said. “And the twist is not a whole twist, it’s a half twist. That’s important. Look closer, and think about what you see.”

Steffie did so: his puzzlement grew glum, and then he shook his head. “It’s a Steerswomen’s test, isn’t it? And I’m missing it.”

“I wouldn’t call it a test,” Zenna said, “not exactly.”

“Not in the usual sense of the term. Just go ahead and tell us everything you can about that loop.”

He winced, shrugged, then returned to the question with dogged determination. “Right. Well, it’s made out of paper and glue. And it’s about an inch wide. And a foot long, I mean the paper it’s made from was a foot long, before it was turned into a loop. But now it’s a loop, so it doesn’t have any ‘long’ to it anymore, it’s just got an ‘around.’ ” He blinked. “Two ‘arounds.’ Around the inside and around the outside.” A pause. “With a twist. I mean a half twist.” Another pause. His brows knit. “Where the sides . . . switch . . .”

Rowan was attempting to keep her face impassive; Zenna did not bother, but sat half turned at the tiller, watching with a broad catlike smile.

Steffie seemed to derive equal encouragement from both their expressions. “The sides switch,” he said more definitely. “So the outside goes inside, and the inside goes outside. Right there.” The twist. “But . . .” More thought. “If that half of a twist was there all along, then the outside that’s switching to inside was the inside already.”

He had ceased addressing his comments to the steerswomen. “Where d’they switch back?” He was asking only himself. “ ’Cause, I don’t see it happening.” He stopped turning it and merely regarded it, rapt. And Rowan found it extremely interesting that he did not do as she had, when first she saw such an object: trace the loop with one finger, moving along it until, impossibly, the finger ended its trip precisely where it had begun with no break, no jump, no switching of sides.

Instead, all such action was taking place in Steffie’s mind only; and he reached his conclusion alone. “It’s . . . the same side, on the inside and outside. Always. That’s only one side the thing has.” His voice was quiet with wonder. “This is a thing with just one side.” He became more excited. “And look here, see?— the twist, that’s what makes it
be
. Because you can’t just have a side all by itself, can you, hanging on to nothing. Everything else has got two sides— a this side and a that side, leaning right up against each other, sort of, and making the thing
be
. But this one side, all by itself . . .” He grinned suddenly. “Right! That half a twist flips the side over, and lets it lean right up against
itself
. So that’s how come . . . that’s how come it’s not just an idea you can think about, it’s a real thing that you can hold in your hand.” He laughed. “Now, that’s about the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen, barring demons. No, forget that; this is weirder even than demons— ” He looked up to find the two women regarding him, and seemed a bit surprised to find them there. He recovered. “So . . . did I get it right? I know I did, I’m sure of it. I passed the test?”