The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series) (47 page)

“Solving the loop is not a test,” Rowan told him. “It’s a demonstration.”

“Demonstration of what?”

“Of everything you just did,” Zenna said.

“But what’s the point?”

“The point,” Rowan said, “was to make you do it. Tell me: was it hard or easy?” Steffie became wary, but Rowan assured him: “It doesn’t matter whether it was hard or easy. But just tell us: Which was it?”

“Well . . .” The loop, hanging from his hand, fluttered in the breeze; he held it more tightly. “Some of it was hard, and some of it was easy. And doing one hard part made some of the other hard parts easy. I wasn’t thinking about it being hard or easy. I guess I was too busy.” He regarded it again, shrugged. “Mostly, it was just different. Something different to think about. A different way to think about things. Do you have any more?” he asked suddenly.

“More?”

He held it up. “More things like this that make you think different.”

“Why?” Rowan asked.

He was taken aback. “Well, because, if you do, I’d like a crack at them.”

“Why?” Zenna repeated.

“Why?” He looked back and forth between the women. “I liked it. I want to do it again.”

“And again after that?” Zenna asked.

“Well . . . sure.”

“For the rest of your life?” Rowan asked.

“Yes.” The answer came immediately, and almost inaudibly, as if the word had spoken itself before Steffie could think to take a breath to speak it. He himself seemed surprised to hear it and, with his gaze turned inward, more amazed still by all that lay behind the word inside him.

Then he did take a breath, a deep one as if to shout, but he spoke in a normal tone of voice. “Yes,” he said.

Rowan felt a grin on her face and was surprised by the amount of pride in him she felt. “Now, what did you just learn?”

“That I want to know. I want to find out.” No hesitation. No uncertainty.

“Then, join us.”

“Well,” he began, but took a moment to wipe his eyes with the heels of his hands, “I think I’ll do exactly that.”

The air threatened rain for days, but never made good on its threat. White haze crept up the sky from the southwest, and sunlight beat down on the ship, damp and hot, like a solid, sweltering blanket. Each morning and evening, Rowan impatiently tapped the blown— glass flute of the barometer, in a vain attempt to encourage the fluid level to change. The level stubbornly continued to indicate low pressure.

The Guidestars remained invisible throughout the nights, and in daytime the sun became more and more blurred behind the mist overhead. The steerswomen could not tell direction other than vague east in the mornings and vague, red west in the evenings. The ship crept across the water, with a sluggish breeze three points aft of starboard.

On the fourth day, the horizons began to close in.

Rowan and Zenna stood in the bow, grimly watching the fog move in.

“We can’t afford to wait this out.”

“No.”

The women stood regarding the weather. “There’s no way to tell where we are.”

Rowan sighed. “Let’s take soundings. As long as we have deep water, there’s a chance we’re moving in generally the correct direction.” Janus’s charts showed the shallower water closer to the north shore of the channel and even had some indications in place on the southern shore. The center of the channel had been too deep to sound.

They set Steffie in the bow with the sounding line, laboriously tossing out the bolt that had replaced its original weight and reeling it in; but his call was always, “No bottom!”

In the afternoon, the breeze lifted, backed, and they permitted the ship to run before it, now not wishing to move more quickly, for fear of running into shallow water too soon to react. Steffie’s voice became a comforting rhythm.

Then the wind stiffened, and the fog began to pocket, opening and closing about them. “At last,” Rowan muttered, relieved to see clear water in the passing breaks.

Both women startled at silence, when Steffie did not call on cue. “Steffie?” Zenna shouted.

He cried out, wordlessly.

Rowan ran forward; but he was already scrambling aft. “It ends!”

“What?”

“The water, it ends, I saw it in a break— ”

“Land?” Rowan was stunned. They must be far, far off course.

“How far ahead?” Zenna asked.

“No, not land! The water just
ends
, in a straight line, straight ahead!”

“That can’t be right,” Rowan said, “the sea can’t simply end— ”

He clutched her shoulders, shouted at her, terrified. “Straight across, nothing past it,
dead ahead
!”

“Jibe!” Zenna yelled. “Get the boom, I’m jibing to port, now.”

Rowan ran to the mainsail sheet, pulled the knot loose just as Zenna shoved the tiller hard about. Rowan and Steffie grabbed the boom, forced it into the wind, past it. The boom tore from their hands, swinging wide and fast, as the sail caught. They stumbled, clutched the flailing rope, lashed it. The jibe snapped the line taut, the sail filled with a clap like thunder, and the little ship shook and shuddered from the blow.

Zenna fought to hold the tiller, bracing her foot on the cockpit side, then found her balance and the ship’s simultaneously. They were heeled wildly over to starboard; but the clumsy vessel suddenly loved the angle and, almost as if surprised, gave itself to a sweep of glad speed.

Rowan found herself braced with her feet in the ropes tying down the tarp, her back against the port side rail, her right fist clutching the back of Steffie’s shirt, fingers slipping in old silk. Steffie was scrabbling with his hands, kicking, trying to avoid tumbling into the tarp-covered hole.

Looking out, but feeling from the angle as if she were looking up, Rowan saw that the fog had lifted off the starboard side.

The sea ended.

Perhaps three miles distant: a geometrically perfect line, a false horizon beyond which the gray sky seemed too close.
It’s fog,
the steerswoman thought,
a line of fog
; but a line a fog so perfectly straight was no less impossible.

Steffie had quieted beside her, found a grip on the railing above him, and turned himself around. The two stayed so, staring, quiet, trembling.

Eventually Steffie said in a small voice, “Met an old Christer once who said the world was flat.”

“The world is not flat,” the steerswoman said immediately.

“Right.”

Between the ship and the end of the sea, gray shapes humped and sank between the waves: one, three, then half a dozen, a dozen. “Big fish,” Steffie noted inanely. One broke the water, arced down again.

“Dolphins,” Rowan breathed.

Zenna called out, her voice tight from her straining muscles, but her words cheery. “Well, my loyal crew, I believe we’ve come a bit further than we suspected.” And past the clean straight line of water, the fog receded further, lifting, and revealing more sea beyond— but more distant than it ought to be, and seeming further down, as if they were looking past a ledge down some great height.

“The Dolphin Stair!” Steffie cried out, now glad. “It’s
got
to be!”

“That’s my guess,” Zenna said. “And if we don’t want to roll over the top”— and the tiller creaked— “someone better help me with this.”

Steffie clambered across the tilted deck to lend his back to Zenna’s work. But Rowan remained wedged, staring out across the stretch of water, to the far horizon beyond, thinking:
Can stairs be made of water?

30

T
hey could.

The travelers stood with their backs against the foot of the great cliffs on the northern shore of the channel. The narrow strip of ground at their feet was covered in small, loose shards, fallen through the years from the rocks above.

The straight edge, the end of the Inland Sea, was a mere two hundred feet away; they dared not try to get closer.

The lip ran south by southwest, stretching off to become invisible in the hazy distance. On the far horizon: a tiny, dim, gray shape— another cliff. The eye could not doubt that the sun-silvered line ended at that place.

Seawater poured over the edge, seeming almost static in its smoothness. But the power of the moving water was revealed by the sound: a continual, rushing roar, so loud it seemed more matter than sound. It was as if the noise itself possessed mass, weighting the three people in place under its pressure.

Past the edge of the lip, and down: another expanse of water, spreading eastward, ending in another lip. Past that lip: another, further down. And again, and more as, in a series of unnatural waterfalls, the Dolphin Stair guided the water of the Inland Sea down to join the distant Ocean.

Zenna’s grip on Rowan’s arm tightened, and when Rowan turned to look, the other steerswoman indicated with a lift of her chin.

Dolphins had been pacing them offshore, possibly the same group sighted three days before. Now they began a series of leaps and dives, then as a group turned toward the edge and raced at it. First one, and then a crowd of dolphins: leaping just as they reached the water’s end, each gray, muscular body arcing up and out into the bright blue air. In mid-flight, each dipped its nose downward, and vanished past the edge.

And that, Rowan saw, was how the dolphins used their stair, leaping over edge after edge, eventually to reach the open ocean.

They had found Janus’s anchorage that morning, after three days of sailing north, keeping well back of the top of the stair. The anchorage lay between a barren island and a little rocky cove. Rowan had been prepared to dive overboard to search the cove’s floor for a boulder large enough to replace the lost anchor, but this proved unnecessary: Janus had sunk a mooring line. The line was marked by a sphere of murky yellow glass, the float from a fishing net.

Alone, Rowan swam ashore, and discovered Janus’s camp.

Above the tide line there was a small but solid hut constructed of Inner Lands wood, nestled against a rock wall. Inside: a pallet made of old blankets, a battered chair, a lath crate beside the bed, and a lamp with a tin of oil— conditions hardly different from Janus’s room above the cooper’s. The steerswoman immediately checked inside the crate and was disappointed to find that it held no papers or charts, only some pots and a boning knife. A small store of firewood, much of it driftwood, lay stacked at the foot of the bed, safe from the elements.

Outside, water barrels crowded against the hut, some holding rainwater, some upended and empty, some in various stages of being reduced to firewood. These last gave Rowan an eerie feeling; there remained here a feeling of work interrupted. Rowan caught herself looking around warily, half expecting someone to suddenly return.

After a moment spent thinking how she herself would arrange such a camp, she immediately found a storage hole, with sacks of vegetables, a crate of salt fish, and a barrel holding sacks of wheat flour tucked inside.

Returning to the water’s edge, Rowan waved to her friends and then used an exaggerated version of the wood gnomes’ language of gestures to communicate to Zenna that she had found the camp, that there was no danger, and that there was food here.

They spent their first night ashore in three weeks.

In the dusk, by the snapping fire, Rowan studied her copy of the chart of the land past the Dolphin Stair, laboriously comparing it to the smaller version she had drawn in the first pages of her fresh logbook. Should she lose her copies, she did not want to depend on memory. She found nothing to amend but still repeated the action obsessively, until she was stopped by the distinct feeling that she had done all this before, under other circumstances—

Of course: at the Archives, when she and Bel were preparing to depart for the Outskirts. When she had made all the preparations possible; when, nevertheless, the amount of unknown contingency still remained too large to be comfortable with, and she had continued to feel that, somehow, there must be more she could do.

Her mouth twisted. She ordered the charts, slipped them into their tubular case, packed them away in her backpack.

Across the fire, the other steerswoman was involved in her own pursuit: with paper, pens, and ruler, Zenna was calculating the size and strength of the underwater dams that surely must delineate each edge of each step of the Dolphin Stair. The numbers had become huge; she was working now in compressed notation. She turned a moment, to shout out behind her, “Oh, loyal crew, your captain is definitely not going to spend her time tending this stew!”

Steffie emerged from gloom at the water’s edge, looking sheepish. “Sorry.” He came to the fire, where a small pot was bubbling. He dutifully stirred the contents with a well-worn and half-burned wooden spoon, but again and again he turned back to glance toward the water. Catching Rowan watching him, he said simply, “It’s so beautiful.”

Rowan nodded, hugging her knees against the chill. In the dimming light, the top ledge of the stair, thread-thin, seemed to hang suspended between two blue worlds: the deep shadowy blue of the dimly moving sea and the flat, featureless gray-tinged blue of the sky.