Motherlines (12 page)
Authors: Suzy McKee Charnas
Tags: #Dystopian, #General, #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic
Daya hung about all day when the last wagon was being packed for its journey. The crew stacked it full of chests of wooden tools, ornaments, and great odorous piles of tea brick. There were boxes of small goods, too, utilitarian items like buckles and fine glazed beads. Holdfastish products, Daya thought approvingly, for the wild, ignorant Mares.
It was the wagoneers’ custom to travel all the way west to the Great Salty River during the cool weather while there was water to drink in the slowly drying rain pools along the way. Then they would trade tea for salt from the Mares of Salt Wind Camp. Turning, they would work slowly back eastward trading tea, salt and other goods in the camps on the way back for meat, milk, leather and metal. As the Dusty Season advanced the camps of the Mares homed to their wells and so were easily found.
‘Daya, you can still come with us if you want to.’ Kobba looked up from her tally during a pause while the crew was busy picking up and recoiling some rope that had dropped out of a wicker chest. ‘Your cooking kept my crew happy on our last trip.’
‘Come along, Daya!’ shouted Kenoma. ‘I’ll keep you warm. It’ll be like old times.’
Times, a year or so back, best forgotten, Daya thought. Yet she would go if she could. With longing she pictured the huge, high-clouded sky of the Cool Season, the broad golden land patched with shade and bright sunlight. Kobba was a good boss, scrupulous about rations and work loads. She did not permit much fighting. There were others along besides Kenoma to choose for protector and bedmate. Tempting—only Daya was not really in a position to go. She was not about to give up this time in camp with Elnoa that she had intrigued all Rainy Season to obtain.
Watching Emla helping to buckle the hauling harness to the wagon, she began to feel quite cheerful. The masseur’s fortunes at Elnoa’s side had sunk while Daya’s, carefully tended, had risen. Emla’s turn would come again if Daya meddled too much in camp affairs and Elnoa sent her travelling again. Daya intended to hold her place this time.
While the crew drew the oiled cover over the wagon frame, Kobba had her final consultation with Elnoa. Daya made herself busy on the porch of Elnoa’s wagon to watch and listen. Kobba wanted Alldera to be added to her crew. She said it would do the runner good to take orders with others instead of leading them out running as she had been doing. ‘She must sweat with the rest of us.’
She is out running now, Elnoa signed. Your crew will do better without her discontent. I will keep her busy here.
Daya had heard Alldera say that the tea camp sometimes seemed just like a big femhold with Elnoa as master. Did Elnoa know that? If not, there might be a profit, sometime, to be made out of the runner’s imprudent statement.
For the present, there was something else to pursue. One of the crew fems had left a request that Daya speak for her with Elnoa while the crew was gone. The present of a bag of first-quality tea shavings assured that Daya would make a strong case for her.
Later, inside the big wagon when the traders had gone, Daya murmured to Elnoa, ‘Poor Suda is having a terrible time with a debt she can’t pay. No doubt you know all about it already, but maybe you hadn’t heard that she was drunk at the time they were gambling or she wouldn’t have risked so much. Now if she doesn’t pay up out of her share of this trip’s profits – ’
Elnoa signed, Not yet, tell me about that later. Tell me now why you like it out on the plains.
Daya began to speak softly about what it was like out there. Elnoa sat looking through her current volume of accounts, occasionally smiling and looking up when something Daya said particularly pleased her. At such times Daya thought of herself as the tender guardian of some wealthy invalid.
Mornings in the Cool Season, old Ossa hung around the cooking pots to keep warm. Daya was cooking up the rare treat of a fresh meat stew – someone had speared a sharu at the spring the day before – and she found Ossa flicking out chunks of meat with a sharp stick and popping them into her mouth. Furious, Daya slapped her away. Ossa made a great show of falling down, and shrieked at her in a voice that could be heard all over camp:
‘Be careful, you stupid, clumsy bitch! Do you want to kill the first child conceived by a free fem in the Grasslands, the daughter of Moonwoman herself?’
By noon the old creature was the talk of the camp. She claimed she had spent the night of the previous full moon outside and Moonwoman had magically impregnated her. Her cub was to grow up to reproduce merely by willing it. That was Moonwoman’s promise, and everyone had to acknowledge, however snidely, that Ossa’s wrinkled belly had begun to swell.
Daya smiled with the rest. This was not the first false pregnancy to be known in the tea camp, only the most grotesque and unlikely. It soon came to an end. Ossa drank another fem’s ration of beer, ‘because it was good for the baby’s hair.’ She got kicked in the belly for it, and the swelling vanished.
Then, around the cooking kettles behind Elnoa’s wagon, Daya heard Alldera being blamed for Ossa’s misadventure: ‘Ossa says Alldera killed the child by witchery.’
‘What’s the witchery in a good, hard kick?’
‘Who knows what the runner learned, living so long with the Mares.’
‘What would you say if Ossa accused Froya, there?’ Laughter.
‘But it’s Alldera, not Froya.’
‘The runner should have brought us her cub. What right did she have to decide to leave it?’
‘Ossa’s right about that. Alldera never talks of the cub. We’re only fems, you know, not good enough to hear about the cub she left with the high and mighty Mares.’
Daya noticed that the runner’s name came up in conversation often, and usually with disapproval. There was a mad tale of her trip out, before Daya’s return to camp, with a mapping party headed by Froya. The group had dragged home days overdue, still streaked with desert dust, and complaining bitterly that Alldera had gone off alone into the desert so that they’d all had to troop after her to bring her back.
Taxed with endangering the entire expedition and reminded that the free fems could ill afford to risk losing anyone, Alldera had defended herself by saying she had thought they were to go into the desert, not just along its edge making drawings of what they could see from there.
All very true, Daya reflected, if one insisted on taking symbolic action for the real thing. This was a distinction the runner seemed incapable of learning. No wonder she had enemies.
Not long after Ossa’s ‘pregnancy’, Daya heard that Alldera was asking Elnoa to discipline fems who did not turn out for running practice. Daya had to put up with Elnoa’s subsequent ill humor, which included thrown objects, bursts of incoherent and ugly noise when mere gestures would not carry the weight of her anger, and sometimes – praise Moonwoman’s mercy – merely the sulks. She had her work cut out, restoring Elnoa to a decent frame of mind. She wondered how people here could think a pet’s life was all sweet drippings from a master’s plate.
Couldn’t Alldera see that the tea camp went slack when Kobba was gone with a trading crew? Elnoa worked everyone very hard at weaving and dyeing but did not interfere at all with what else they did. Her business was the accumulation of goods. Kobba’s job, when she returned, was to slam on the discipline again and push ahead with the plan.
If Alldera had not worked that out for herself, she was heading for disaster. Daya saw no reason to enlighten her. She knew the type: proud, demanding, impatient, withdrawn into herself out of disappointment with others, but lacking inner resources, particularly imagination.
Only action would suit her, and she was not going to get the kind of heroic nonsense that she wanted. Not here. Daya could have told her.
Someone came pounding across the yard shouting, ‘It’s a Mare! A Mare’s come to the valley!’
Roused from a slumbrous afternoon in the big wagon, Daya went with Elnoa to the perimeter of the camp. A Mare as dark-skinned as the horse she rode was down by the spring, in plain sight of the sentries, if there had been any sentries. There was no telling how long she had been waiting there till someone noticed her.
Elnoa had Alldera sent for.
Daya’s head was full of wild suppositions. She stared down at the rider, fascinated. She had never been this close to one of them for this long with nothing to do but look. She thought the Mare’s appearance rather grand.
Under the back-thrown headcloth the Mare’s face was an unreadable darkness lit by the glint of her eyes. She led two spare horses by ropes on their necks. How obedient her horses seemed, how patient. Her mount leaned down in a leisurely fashion to rub its head on its foreleg. All of them lacked the scruffy flash of wild horses. Daya wondered what the Mare had done to tame them so completely. They did not look scarred or starved.
Alldera appeared below, padding swiftly down the trail to the spring.
The yellow tones of the plain, visible beyond the mouth of the valley, had faded as the days lengthened and heated toward the early Dusty Season. Daya imagined the bold Mare riding alone through that landscape, as it was gradually leached of color by the increasing power of the sun …
The Mare leaned down and as she spoke touched Alldera, a swift flicker of the hand. While trading in Marish camps Daya had often seen them do that among themselves, casually, as if they owned each other. One of the led horses stepped forward and put its nose against Alldera’s shoulder. Alldera laid her hand on its flat forehead. The watching fems stirred.
For a moment Daya wished strongly that she were down there too, and she was almost jealous of Alldera. What did it feel like to be touched by a woman as black as char and to stroke a creature that was not even human at all?
Alldera and the black Mare talked in distant voices. The runner’s voice seemed choppy and hard, the Mare’s richly liquid. An experienced storyteller’s voice, Daya thought, and what an attentive audience she had in the fems strung out along the wall of wood and brush and stone on the hillside above. She was so black, a dramatic shadow-person; she gave Daya the shivers.
Alldera nodded curtly to the Mare and turned back up toward the tea camp. All the fems began to talk excitedly at once. The Mare gathered her headcloth about her shoulders and rode away down the valley with her horses.
When Alldera came to Elnoa she said, ‘That was someone who looks after my cub for me. She says that the cub has gone into the childpack of Stone Dancing Camp. They always tell the bloodmother. It’s a custom.’
What are you supposed to do? Elnoa signed.
Alldera shrugged. ‘Nothing. I’m just supposed to know.’
Froya said in a sceptical tone, ‘You told us the cub was nothing to you.’
‘It’s important to Stone Dancing Camp that I know,’ Alldera said, speaking directly to Elnoa. ‘The rider comes of a bloodline that cares a lot about doing what’s right.’
‘If the Mares did what was right,’ Froya sneered, ‘they would have brought your cub to us. If they did what was right, they wouldn’t let their horses screw them.’ That raised a snicker among the others. Froya never knew when to quit. ‘Do you think she’s fucked with that brown one she was riding?’
‘Idiot,’ Alldera said with contempt, ‘she was riding a mare. Can’t you tell a male horse from a female?’
Froya’s cheeks patched red over the high, narrow bones. ‘From this distance only an expert could,’ she snorted. ‘Someone who knows them as well as the Mares do.’
Alldera dropped into a fighting stance, and Froya jumped back with a shout, ‘Oh no, I know your fancy kicks; you could put my eye out while I was watching your hands.’
The runner straightened and said angrily, ‘It’s not my fault that you don’t know how to block a kick or throw one. I offered to teach kick fighting, remember? Only some people decided it was too dangerous.’
Daya let out her breath, watching Alldera stalk away. What a foolish thing to say, since word was that Elnoa herself had forbidden those lessons, probably rightly. The free fems quarreled frequently among themselves and were too few to add new risks of serious injury.
This Alldera was no realist. She was nervy, though. You had to grant that – always remembering the foolhardy ones were just the sort that got themselves killed by irate masters in the end.
Kobba’s wagon came home late in the Rainy Season, battered by a flash flood that had caught it in the foothills. Emla had almost been swept away in the flood. A white swatch in her hair, just noticeable at her departure and now wider, was suddenly being attributed to the accident. She took her time recovering from the shock, Daya noted, indulging freely in fits of nervous tremors and weeping, keeping weakly to Elnoa’s wagon. She was, unfortunately, far too distraught to help Daya with the cooking and cleaning.
Elnoa played along with the act. Probably she was angry because Kobba’s poor judgment had cost most of the cargo. Solicitude for Emla, poor victim, seemed to Daya a neatly calculated way for Elnoa to continually remind Kobba of her mistake. Of course, this was only Daya’s suspicion. There was really no telling with Elnoa.
Daya was bored. The months since the Mare’s visit had rolled uneventfully by. Getting Emla displaced from her new closeness to Elnoa seemed a diverting and useful project.
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