The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series) (49 page)

It was autumn. The night would be chill. By the dictates of their natural life cycles, the goblin jills would now be dead, the mated jacks jealously patrolling their egg caches, unmated jacks wandering solitary.

Rowan did not doubt her ability to dispatch a single goblin jack— and did not doubt that any demon-voice would wake her instantly.

She lit the fire, took her dinner of dried fish and bread beside it as the sun set, then took out her logbook, pen, and ink and made her daily entries. This task she completed very quickly.

Above her camp, the stars above were clear, as sharp and bright as on a winter’s night. There, the Eastern Guidestar; there, the Western.

Friends of the traveler, reliably giving direction; friends of the farmer, telling the season by what stars lay behind them in the evenings. Timekeepers, winking out in turn, as each passed into the world’s own shadow.

The steerswoman regarded them; and they, she knew, regarded her. The Guidestars watched, heeded commands, undertook actions— behaved, in a way, as if alive.

Her face tilted up, Rowan wondered: How alive? She knew they made records of events. Did they ponder the events they saw, did they speculate? In the times between enacting the commands of their masters, did the Guidestars dream?

The idea disturbed her.

The fire writhed its flames upward; the dunes around her lit intermittently, flashing in her peripheral vision.

She was tired, body and mind. She must rest. She rose and went to bury the fire.

Motion. She turned.

Nothing, and then a flicker: shadows shifting among the stones of the second cairn, responding to the moving flames. In one dark hollow between two stones, something white flicked in and out of visibility, illuminated and darkened.

Rowan stood and scanned the night beyond her small circle of light, found it impenetrable. She listened: insect noises, some of which she recognized from the Inner Lands, some from the Outskirts; the snap of the fire; and the pause and rush of breakers. Nothing else.

She pulled a small branch of burning driftwood from the fire and carried it to the pile of stones. Moving it back and forth, she tried to elicit the flicker of white again.

In a gap between rocks, she saw darkness and, peering closer, whiteness. She pulled out two stones that seemed designed to be pulled.

Inside, a human skull gazed out at her emptily.

Rowan quickly drew back and as quickly recovered and leaned forward again. The superstitions of her childhood had long been supplanted, and she had only a moment’s distress.

Rowan considered. Then she opened the crypt further.

There were several individuals interred, all of them bones merely, with no clothing, no remnants of flesh. Perhaps they were very old.

But humans had been here. A good sign.

Closer examination must wait until daylight, Rowan decided. She returned to the fire, doused it with sand, and wrapped herself in her bedroll.

She returned to the crypt as soon as the light permitted. There was dew; and a trace of fog.

She pulled out more stones and found the bones inside neatly stacked, in a rather specific arrangement: long bones outlining a square, smaller bones within, each obviously representing an individual. The skulls were separate, lined up around the walls of the structure, each one facing a small chink in the wall. There were seven persons altogether.

There was an undeniable ritual aspect to the arrangements, but it was no ritual the steerswoman recognized.

The condition of the bones puzzled her. In some individuals, most bones were broken, especially ribs and long bones: thighs, shins, and arms. Two of the skulls had been reconstructed from crushed fragments, now held together with clay.

In others, the bones were clean, unmarked, and their former owners apparently healthy and not elderly. The cause of their deaths was not evident . . .

But the spray from a demon would not melt human bones.

The remains interred nearest the entrance were of a woman apparently near Rowan’s own age. She seemed to have warranted special care, her bones arranged in her allotted space with an almost obsessive precision. Only she retained a possession from her former life: on top of the overlapping pattern of ribs lay a rope bracelet of complicated knotting, such as sailors made in their idle hours—

Rowan had a sudden vision: a ship, swept by the currents up to, onto, over the Dolphin Stairs themselves, and falling, shattering in the churning water—

And the people: some drowned, some dead of injury, and some few surviving . . . for a while.

A fragment of information presented itself: Among Janus’s own people in the upper Wulf valley, it was believed that the dead remained interested in the living world and wished to observe it from the afterlife.

The steerswoman carefully replaced the skulls she had moved, setting each one face-out at its own tiny window, and closed the crypt.

Janus’s mapped route lay directly along the beach, and at first Rowan followed it exactly. Presently, she altered her plan, for two reasons: first, the dry sand shifted beneath her feet with each step, making walking more tiring; and second, the beach began to stink.

Every seashore had its odor. Persons who lived by the sea either ignored what others called a stench or, like Rowan, grew to positively enjoy it. The scent had pleasant associations for her, and whenever she approached the sea from a distance, her heart would lighten and she would feel a happy thrill when the first wind-borne hint of it reached her.

This was different.

She noticed it first rising from the occasional bit of unidentifiable sea wrack, borne in by the waves and stranded by the ebbing tide. Soon, there was more.

Foot-wide, jagged black fronds glistening with sour-smelling blue oil; yellow hollow spirals wafting up a strong scent that somehow made her think of new-broken rock; red chitinous pentagons, weirdly regular in shape, ranging from the size of her thumbnail to the size of her hand. These last, when overturned by her toe, revealed broken stubs of jointed legs, an abdomen of overlapping plates.

None of them any animal or plant she knew or knew of.

She left them behind; but there were still more ahead. Other offal joined them: rotting debris once alive, now existing apparently only in order to foul the air.

Wondering if it were normal for this new sea to wash up such great amounts of dead matter, Rowan incautiously kicked aside a helmet-shaped green sphere.

The helmet moved, but the former inhabitant, unfortunately, did not. It lay there, yellow, wet, rotting, and emitting a truly horrific odor that seemed to actively clamber up Rowan’s nostrils, find a home somewhere behind her eyes, and there apparently attempt to expand—

She fled the water and took refuge in a stand of stunted sea oats, their sweet green scent almost painful in the wake of the helmet creature’s stink. Rowan resisted, then succumbed to a fit of retching.

She walked behind the dunes for the rest of that day and for the next; but the following day with the breeze suddenly fresh, she wandered down to the beach before breakfast and found it pristine, marked only by the swirls of colored sand: gold and black, like the markings on a sleeping tabby cat.

The change was eerie, even more unnatural than the offal. But by noon, when she reached the next cache, some litter had returned, in what struck her as a more normal amount: bits of this strange sea’s strange plants; coral-like twigs; the odd pentagonal shell, hollow and scentless.

32

S
he reached the first numbered site; reached it and passed it before she realized she had done so. She paused at a field of boulders, and in confusion pulled out her map.

The boulders were very clearly marked, definitely just beyond the location of site one. Rowan looked back, scanned the landscape. There was nothing remarkable.

The locations numbered one through three had been crossed out on the chart. Something had interested Janus here initially, if not ultimately.

The steerswoman doubled back, circled and searched, and eventually ended at a field of sandy hummocks. She had noticed them on her first pass and had thought little of them. But when she entered the field and stood in its center, she saw what she had missed before.

It was a village— or had been, once.

Five clear paths joined together where she stood. Between the paths, five clusters of sand piles stood, obviously marking the former locations of structures. Of the structures themselves, nothing remained.

Rowan approached one of the groups, prodded the sand with her foot. No wood, no brick. No pot shards. Not a scrap of cloth, not a nail, no single sliver of glass.

Far too clean. Unnaturally so. Had Rowan arrived here a year later, or even six months, the sand itself would have been dispersed by wind and rain, leaving no hint at all of the former inhabitants.

A departure both impossibly complete and apparently inexplicable.

Standing in the center of the former village, Rowan closed her eyes and listened intently.

No sound of demons. The steerswoman left the silent ruins behind and returned to the shoreline.

Strange; but whatever had caused the villagers to leave, and however brief their dwelling here, they must have been very resourceful indeed. Wresting a living out of so difficult a country—

So
extremely
difficult a country. Rowan stopped short and stood surveying the landscape.

No greenlife was present, none whatsoever. She had not noted its passing; she noted now its utter absence.

Where scrub pine and beach plums should stand, now only tanglebrush and some strange, taller blue-leaved bushes, entirely unknown to her.

No sea oats, but maroon-blossomed spike-grass.

Not cutgrass but the new variety of blackgrass, fat-leaved, unmoving in the light breeze.

No sign of humans; no sign of life that would support humans. There seemed no place for people here.

Rowan made her way slowly to the water’s edge, slipped out of her pack, clambered onto a boulder that thrust itself up out of the shallow surf. She looked down.

No seaweed, no crabs or mussels. Instead, a collection of lithe, pale blue rods that writhed blind heads just beneath the surface, in motion completely independent of the waves’ action. Their lower bodies descended in the clear water to terminate among angular black crystal encrustations.

Rowan captured a passing stick of tanglebrush driftwood, used it to prod at the crystals; the blue rods startled, then communally twisted and knotted themselves around the stick, which Rowan was forced to abandon to them.

She stood. She gazed out to sea for some minutes.

Even the sea seemed strange to her; as well it might, being an entirely different sea. That wave, for instance, breaking far out against a submerged sandbar; who knew what distance it had traveled? Who knew how far away lay this ocean’s other shore?

Who knew, in fact, if it even possessed one?

And in a single, elegant movement of thought, so graceful it astonished Rowan herself, the steerswoman created in her mind both the largest map she had ever conceived and the smallest, simultaneously.

The largest was of the world itself, whose shape and size she knew from the secret and intimate interplay of mathematics, but which she now seemed to see whole, all open sweep beyond all horizons, curving to meet itself at the other side, complete, entire— and huge, so huge.

The smallest map was, to scale, that part of the world known by humankind.

The smallest map was crowded; the greatest, nearly empty.

And there, just outside the smaller map, the steerswoman with casual precision marked her own position, as if with a bright, silver needle; and she saw and felt the greater map rock, turn, orient, descend (or ascend, she could not tell which), approaching, adjusting and finally matching, point for point those distant cliffs, those nearer hills, this shoreline, this rock-strewn beach, the spray-splashed boulder on which Rowan stood, wet to the knees, arms thrown wide, head tilted back, breathing salt-tang air, and laughing for wonder.

Two days later, in the evening, she reached Site Two. She moved with caution; the shoreline had evolved into a marshy estuary, and she had certain experience with such areas in the Outskirts. She did not care to meet a mud-lion.

Janus had indicated the best route across the uncertain terrain, and Rowan was required to swing slightly north and then west. She approached the site from the east, sunset dazzling her eyes, the sky above her a raddled pink expanse of herringbone clouds.

Ahead, silhouettes: rounded shapes taller than she stood, clustered. She sidled through clattering tanglebrush, found a path on dryer ground, and entered the village, walking where many feet had walked before her.

Abandoned— but far more recently than Site One. And she could see now why so little had remained there.

These dwellings were mere mud huts, the most primitive she had ever seen. Without maintenance, weather itself would eventually reduce them to hummocks of dirt.