The Outskirter's Secret (30 page)

Rowan blinked at the old woman, seeing her
with difficulty through expanding and dispersing spots of blue
light. Chess was smiling a thin, happy smile, perfectly content.
"Bel," Rowan began. "Excuse me, Chess—Bel . . . what exactly have I
gotten myself into?"

Bel turned back, suppressing a grin. "You've
gotten yourself into Outskirter customs." She approached. "Pardon
us, Chess, while I instruct this foreigner." Bel stooped down
beside Rowan. "Drinking erby muddles your mind and puts you at a
disadvantage. When people agree to drink with each other, they
agree not to gain an advantage. If one person drinks, another has
to, at the same time.

"If you're in a group, you pick one person,
catch his or her eye, and drink; the other person has to drink,
too. You make sure to pick a different person each time, and spread
the effects. If it's just two people," and her grin escaped
control, "you have to drink anytime the other person does. And she
has to drink when you do. You stay even."

Chess ostentatiously took a large sip. Rowan
hesitated, then did the same. The cheesy substance insulated her
tongue from the effects of the alcohol, half of which ventilated
her throat again; the other half found a new route to her brain, by
way of her eyeballs. "I see," Rowan said, although literally, she
could not, quite. Bel was a shadow against faintly blue light. "How
does one ever stop?" She decided that the need for this information
would soon be urgent.

Bel's form weaved in the air. "If one person
doesn't take a sip, the other has nothing to match. If the second
person also doesn't take a sip, the first has nothing to match.
Then it's over."

"Ah." Experimentally, Rowan drank again, saw
Chess do the same. "But," Rowan said, "but, what if one person
never stops?"

"Oh, she will," Bel assured her, "one way or
the other."

Bel seemed to vanish; Rowan watched as Chess
charged both cups again, from each jug. "Why," Rowan asked, "don't
you just put it all in one jug? Is it," she searched for the word,
"a ritual?"

"Ritual, perhaps; a ritual of necessity,"
Chess replied. Rowan was amazed that the elderly mertutial could
enunciate so clearly. "If you put it all together at once, it'll
turn itself into cheese and vapors. Can't drink it then."

"Well," Rowan said. "Well." She studied her
cup; her vision began to clear, although it acquired a liquid
quality. The air on her body seemed tangible; her skin prickled.
Her eyes possessed no bodily connection whatsoever to her face. "So
this is how Outskirters celebrate?"

"Sometimes," Chess informed her, then
gestured with her own mug, "when you're with a friend you can
trust." She sipped, smacked her lips again.

Conforming to custom, Rowan drank. "Well,"
she said again, then forgot her planned statement: Chess, something
about Chess. She found it. "I certainly can trust you, Chess. You
cook everything I eat. If you wanted to kill me, you'd have done it
by now." After the fact, she hoped the comment did not constitute
an insult.

But Chess considered the statement seriously.
"Yes, indeed I could have, Rowan the clever fighter! I couldn't
fight you with a sword!" She blinked. "Not now, that is."

"You were a fighter," Rowan observed, "once."
Of course she had been; all mertutials had been, once.

"One of the best, if you believe it."

Rowan was relieved to discover a basis for
conversation. "How many people," she asked, "have you killed in
your life?" She would be interested in the answer.

The mertutial let out a gust of breath. "Hoo.
Plenty." She sipped; Rowan sipped. "By the time I was twenty,"
Chess continued, "I'd killed twenty. I decided then to make thirty
by thirty; but by the time I was thirty, counting seemed silly. You
can't kill people just to keep up a tally."

"No, indeed," Rowan said. "You might need to
kill a friend, to maintain the numbers."

This was apparently the wisest thing Chess
ever heard. She nodded, and tapped Rowan's knee. "True, true," she
said. "You have to be careful who you kill."

"I'll keep that in mind."

"But twenty by twenty," Chess went on,
"that's something. Because I didn't kill anyone at all before going
walkabout. So, you see, that's twenty in six years."

"A truly remarkable achievement." Rowan was
proud of the phrase. She drank again.

"I started off strong," Chess said, after
matching Rowan. "I took down three when I went walkabout."

Walkabout. Rowan decided that she wanted to
know about walkabouts. "How did that happen?"

"Well." Chess arranged herself to tell a
story. "It was me and Eden, two young girls, off alone on the veldt
. . ." Rowan struggled to imagine it: Chess, with her remarkable
collection of wrinkles, straggled hair and all, once a young,
strong girl. Abruptly, an isolated corner of her mind, a calm and
intelligent segment, caught up the concept and gifted her with a
mental image brighter and clearer than the true one before her
eyes: Chess would have been a small girl with wiry cords of
muscles, quick of reflexes, determined of will. One little package
of danger and death, never faltering . . . And Eden—

Chess began to recite:

"Odd Eden, awkward and tall,

Chess chided, cheering;

'Fear no foe, make no fault,

We will be warrior women together . . .' "

Rowan listened, as Chess and Eden spent days
crossing the fearsome wilderness: two children, alone in the
Outskirts. They stayed within signal distance, but the signals
passed were for recognition only: I am here. Each, alone, found and
faced small, single dangers.

Until the day they crossed, unknowing,
pastures held by another tribe. Eden sighted a guard, tried to
angle away; the children had no quarrel with the strangers. But for
reasons unknown, the guard decided to attack, and Eden found
herself pursued. By the time she determined that escape was
impossible, by the time she turned to face her enemy, Chess was at
her side.

"Hurrying, then holding, Chess halted.

Eden must attack alone,

And deliver death; but Eden was daunted,

Faltering, failing, filled with fear . . ."

Chess stepped forward and dispatched the
enemy, rescuing her partner. Then from the grass around the girls
three more warriors appeared, intent on destroying their comrade's
killer. Eden struck down one of them quickly, with a blow born more
of panic than intent. Chess injured another, then assisted Eden
against a woman who called out a name as she fought: the name of
her beloved, dead by Eden's sword. When that foe fell, Chess
returned to the man she had injured. She gave him the freedom to
escape; he did not take it, but turned to face her, and was brought
down by a fighter all of fourteen years old.

"Then Eden," Rowan said when the poem ended,
"Eden failed the test. She didn't become a warrior." She was as
breathless as if she had fought by the side of the children.

"Not that time." Chess refilled both cups.
"She had to go again two years later, with Kester." She looked up
in sudden surprise at the memory. "And she rescued
him
!"

Rowan clapped her hands together. "Good for
her!" She found herself serious. "But walkabout, walkabout is
dangerous." She drank again, thoughtfully: a toast to the bravery
of children.

Chess nodded and took a contemplative draft.
"You need good warriors. You need people who can face danger. If
someone thinks he can't ever be a warrior, well, he can go straight
to mertutial, and the tribe will thank him for his sense. Like
Deely. Deely was born on the far side of the line—that's how we say
it."

Rowan was following the tracks of some idea;
she couldn't quite recall what idea it was, but the tracks seemed
very clear. "People die sometimes." That wasn't quite it.
"Children. When they go out on the veldt."

"Oh, yes." Chess was saddened.
"Sometimes."

"When Fletcher went on his walkabout," Rowan
began, then decided she didn't like the grammatical structure of
her sentence: how did the Outskirters say it? "When he went
walkabout," she corrected, "his partner—" She paused to recover the
thrust of her statement. "Did his partner die?" The thought of the
death of a child abruptly forced a false sobriety upon her. The
wavering tent walls became suddenly stable, although the air
remained murky. Rowan felt it was very important to pay respectful
attention.

"Ah!" Chess nodded, slowly, with heavy
deliberation. "Mai," she said. "Mai, Jannsdotter, Alace."

That was the idea Rowan had been pursuing:
Jann's daughter, as she had suspected. "And Jann blames
Fletcher."

"Jann and Jaffry do, yes. You see," Chess
said, raising one finger, "he should have come straight back. He
shouldn't have vanished, stayed away, then come trailing in months
later. It looked bad, like he had run." She looked into her cup as
if it held an answer. "Like he had run," she repeated.

Rowan considered long before asking the next
question. "Did he?"

Chess weaved as she thought, a motion similar
to Bel's characteristic movement. "Who's to say? I'm sure there was
more to the story than he told." She took another sip.

Rowan forced herself to do the same,
attempting to cling to her clarity of thought. "He didn't want to
come back," she said, remembering Fletcher's comment in Kammeryn's
tent.

"He was hurt," Chess said.

"Injured? How badly?"

Chess shook her head. She thumped her chest.
"No, inside. In his heart. Because of what happened. I think he
wanted to die."

"What did happen?"

Chess sighed, shifted, and uncrossed her
legs, stretching them out straight; for its age, her gnarled body
seemed remarkably flexible. "Now, I have this from my boy, who got
it from Averryl, who filled in the spots where Fletcher didn't say
much, which was most of it, except my boy had a few things from
Fletcher himself, so he figured out the rest and it makes sense in
the end."

Rowan was extremely confused by the sentence
and became angry: at the state of her mind, at Chess for causing
it, and at Outskirter custom for enforcing it. She tried to
remember who Chess's "boy" might be. Then it came to her: Mander.
The necessary physical intimacy of healers with their patients
often inspired commensurate emotional confidences under other
circumstances. Between Mander's information and that of Fletcher's
closest friend, the story that would follow was likely the most
accurate version available.

"As Fletcher tells it," Chess continued,
"they were coming up on a swamp, with a kilometer between them, Mai
ahead, at about two by Fletcher. He didn't see her go down, but he
heard her shout, and he started to go to her. And then she was
screaming. And then she wasn't.

"He killed the creature—he called it a
mud-lion"—Rowan nodded, remembering Fletcher's descriptions of the
swamp creatures—"after a bad fight, but too late for Mai. She
wasn't dead, but she couldn't speak. And she didn't know who
Fletcher was. She couldn't think anymore, my boy says, from shock.
She should have died right away, but she didn't."

They drank again.

"Now, you know that I've seen plenty of
blood, in my time. But my boy, he didn't like to tell it to me, how
Mai died. Something about the way the beast's jaws worked—they
don't tear, they squeeze and cut at the same time, sealing the
wounds. The girl was in pieces, and there were plenty of pieces."
She blinked at the image she created for herself, then dropped her
head a bit and spoke more quietly, looking up at Rowan from under
her grizzled brows. "She was cut through the middle, as well, still
alive. So there she was, just a piece of a girl, most of the top
half, in the mud, looking around, dying . . ." The old woman's eyes
fell, her voice faded away, and she sat, looking blindly at the cup
resting in her lap. It came to Rowan that the girl in the story had
been a real, living person, known to Chess since her birth.

"I don't want to talk about it," Chess
announced. She sat up, recovering a degree of animation. "We're
supposed to be celebrating, and here I am telling sad stories." She
ostentatiously took a long swallow.

Rowan pointedly did not do the same. "I
want," she said, "the rest of this story. I like Fletcher. When I
see him sad, I worry." A small, hazy corner of her mind was
surprised at how true this statement was.

"I like him, too," Chess said. "He's
peculiar, but I like that. When you get to be my age, you learn
that peculiar is good. Young people don't understand that."

Rowan refused the digression. "The story,"
she prompted.

Chess shook her head. "That's all. Mai died,
and Fletcher just put his face east and started walking."

"Planning never to return?"

"Planning nothing, I suppose. You've seen how
he looks when he remembers it." Her voice became heavy. "Planning
nothing, not even thinking. Just walking away."

Rowan tried to imagine it. It seemed like
death. "But he came back."

"He came back." Chess paused. "Fletcher is a
good warrior. Now, that is. I had my own doubts before. Since
coming back . . . it's like he put more of his heart into being a
warrior. He takes it seriously. We lost Mai, but we got a better
Fletcher than we had before." She puzzled a moment, made to drink,
then recalled that Rowan had not matched her. She waited, puzzling
some more. "Fletcher's good now, but . . . but in a strange
way."

"How so?" Rowan, conceding, drank; a smaller
sip than perhaps was polite.

Chess gave further thought to the question;
it rated yet another sip. "He doesn't look good," she said at last.
"When you watch him walking, you think he's going to fall over his
own feet. I've seen him practice, and he just barely holds his own,
though he does seem to have a lot of stamina. But the thing is—"
She leaned forward, tapping the rug for emphasis. "The thing is,
and I have this from Eden who had it from her girl"—Kree, Rowan
remembered—"that if you put him out on the circle, that position is
damned well secure. If he pulls duty as temporary scout, he'll come
back with good report, clear, full of things he wasn't asked to
find out. He makes a lot of jokes, but don't let him fool you. He's
got good eyes, and a sharp mind, and sometimes he just sees things,
things other people miss—like your demon egg. He figures out
exactly where to go, and what to do, to get results. If he's all
alone and something happens, he can deal with it." She stopped,
blinked. "Mind you, he'll just barely scrape by. But, see, that's
it, that's it." She became excited by her discovery of the fact.
"Any other warrior would be good straight off, or fail and die
straight off, but Fletcher scrapes by—all the time. It's like you
can always depend on him scraping by, all the time." She peered up
at Rowan, at an angle. "That's useful. Do you see how useful that
is? That's useful." She had begun to list to starboard.