Motherlines (19 page)
Authors: Suzy McKee Charnas
Tags: #Dystopian, #General, #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic
Daya went outside to see that the horses were securely hobbled for the night. Clouds masked the moon’s bright face, and all the sky seemed crowded with heavy shapes edged in brilliant light. There was so much life in the sky here, she thought, even at night. She went to the horses and stood among them, rubbing their soft noses and lips and the muscles behind their ears, grateful for their undemanding warmth.
The hostility she had felt in the wagon worried her. Maybe she had made a wrong decision. But she did not want to go back with Roona’s crew to the tea camp. She did not want to have to figure out – for her own safety – who had tried to poison her in that whirl of passion and intrigue around Elnoa. The suspicion and self-absorption of the wagon crew tonight had struck her as strange and unpleasant.
Now that she rode a horse herself the idea of staying a while among the Mares seemed less alien. She would have to be careful not to use the insulting term ‘Mares’ in their hearing, though.
In the morning Fedeka was gone. She had left the gear and belongings of Alldera and Daya in a neat heap on the ground. The horses grazed nearby.
Alldera packed up. Daya did the same. The dark young Mare, Patarish Rois, sat watching in the shadow of her horse while working at her kinky black ringlets with a wooden comb. The fems watched from the wagon.
Daya said, ‘Alldera, a couple of the crew fems came to me early this morning and said they would like to go with us.’
‘What for?’
‘To see what it’s like with the Mares. To learn riding.’
‘No!’ Alldera busied herself knotting the saddlestrings around one end of her roll of bedding. ‘We have no horses for them. Besides, it would make more bad feeling than ever between us and the tea camp if we ride off with part of Roona’s crew.’ The horse swung its head and nipped at her shoulder. She slapped it over the nose, and it jumped. She said, ‘What did they pay you to get me to agree?’
‘Some good tea,’ Daya said, gauging the distance between them in case she should have to duck a blow.
‘You’d better give it back to them, then.’
‘They paid me for my effort.’
‘I thought we knew each other pretty well by now,’ Alldera said, mounting and looking down at her. ‘I hope I wasn’t too far off the mark about you.’
‘There’s always more to know,’ Daya said. You had to keep a little distance from strong people if you were not to be mastered by them.
Two fems from the wagon crew trotted after them for some little distance, shouting abuse. Before turning back one of them threw a rock.
Patarish Rois rode with her eyes fixed politely straight ahead. She did not, during the days and nights that followed, try to take the horses and run away or cut the fems’ throats while they slept. Alldera’s confident courtesy toward her was at first hesitantly and then routinely returned. The Rois was soon talking animatedly with her, waving her dark hands in this direction and that as they discussed how to thread their course among the women’s migratory routes.
They expected Alldera’s camp to be on the move in the early rains by the time they reached its range. Their first stop on the way for food, water and grain was to be Singing Metal Camp.
On a hot morning they topped a rise overlooking the Singing Metal herds. They paused, wiping the sweat from their faces, adjusting their gear, clearing their throats of dust. Their own horses, footsore and thirsty, pricked up their ears and neighed to the horses of the grazing herds. The hot wind blew in their faces, tearing away the sound.
The women of Singing Metal Camp, according to Alldera, had a special hostility toward fems. They resented the femmish contention that the women’s skills at working Ancient scrap had been learned from fems rather than from the ancestors of Singing Metal women.
Daya was not reassured by the way Patarish Rois sat tugging nervously at the fringes of her sleeve, or by Alldera’s silence. They had no choice, however. They needed the use of Singing Metal’s wells.
Patarish Rois led them down. They did not make directly for the tents but circled to approach from the side opposite to the grazing herds. Alldera explained. ‘We don’t want to seem to be sizing up their stock for a raid later on. This young Rois has a lot to lose if we’re treated badly or laughed at, so she’ll help us. Don’t worry; that is going to go well.’
Daya was not convinced. She felt very vulnerable, riding among the Mares’ tents. Women peered out at them as they moved toward the largest tent. Tethered horses lifted their heads and whinnied. Someone was working at a forge, throwing out an irregular, clinking rhythm.
Two people stepped out of the big tent as they drew near, handsome look-alikes with coppery skin and black hair.
‘Bawns,’ Alldera breathed. ‘We’re all right. Shayeen, one of my child’s sharemothers in Holdfaster Tent, is a Bawn.’
There was nothing about the two, no insignia or finery or attendants, to show that they were chiefs. They were smililng, but did not speak. They were so clearly at a loss that Daya was embarrassed for them.
Alldera dismounted, took a breath and announced herself. ‘Alldera Holdfaster, of Stone Dancing Camp. This is one of my femmish kin, Daya. And this is my guest, Patarish Rois of Windgrass Camp. We’re going home to Stone Dancing to see to the horses that Patarish’s kindred will be sending to us there, as soon as they hear that she and I are related by the rein.’ Meaning, Daya remembered, by Alldera’s having captured her.
The younger Bawn looked as if she had been struck.
‘Welcome,’ the older one said at last. ‘Come out of the sun and take tea with us.’
The younger one added nervously, ‘Come tell us your news.’ As if the greatest of their news was not already told.
The older one embraced Alldera, and Patarish Rois jumped down from her horse and hugged the other. Alldera drew back, signed to Daya to dismount, and said firmly, ‘Will you greet my cousin Daya?’
The Bawns hung back, almost visibly trying to work out in their heads the consequences of any action they might take. Alldera they plainly knew by name if not by appearance; she was a relation, though a fern. Daya, in a femmish smock and Marish pants like Alldera but without headcloth or boots, was so obviously a wagon fem that the Bawns did not seem to know what to make of her as a relative.
Finally, with a gusty sigh the elder Bawn hugged Daya too. Enveloped in a muscular grip and a smell of horse sweat, smoke and the lingering pungency of tea, Daya said through dry lips, ‘Cousin,’ as Alldera had instructed her to do. She averted her face, hating the scars on her own cheeks.
The younger Bawn took charge of their horses. Daya watched jealously, noting how the woman eyed the dun as she handled it.
In the coolness of the Bawns’ wide-winged tent some twenty women of Singing Metal Camp were gathered, and the guests were invited to sit with them. More women arrived, murmuring greetings, patting and embracing earlier arrivals as they took their places to sit. Everywhere were soft sounds of whispering and movement. The first of the tea was passed in shallow wooden bowls holding no more than a couple of swallows each.
Daya took a pouch from her belt and poured some shavings of tea into her own food bowl. Among such rough folk she felt it was only right for a civilized person to make the gracious gesture the occasion called for, even if it beggared her and was not properly appreciated. She passed the bowl.
The Mares looked curiously at this offering. Each one took a bit as long as the supply held out, though none chewed it as fems would have done.
Alldera had warned Daya that to soften bad feeling that might arise over the capture and ransom of a prisoner, it was the prisoner’s right to tell the first version of her own downfall. She was entitled to make as much fun of her captor as she liked. Patarish Rois launched into a long preamble. It seemed to Daya that she was narrating all the raids she had ever been on, and acting them out complete with imitations of women involved – and, Daya thought at several points, of horses – to roars of appreciative laughter and comment. She would stick out her chunky rear and prance in a little circle, or stab her fingers through her wiry hair until it stood up on end. In one or two cases Daya could even see that she produced a creditable impression of someone present in the tent.
Women were elbowing each other in the ribs and grinning. Then Patarish told how Alldera had felled her from the saddle.
Silence and unbelieving stares. Alldera had said once that it was very unusual for a woman on foot to bring down a mounted one, let alone kick her down. The idea of a fem doing such a thing was plainly incomprehensible.
Then Alldera moistened her mouth with tea and took her turn. The women listened intently. At the end, when she said that she would gladly demonstrate the exact kick she had used except that she had nearly crippled herself doing it the first time, there were some smiles.
Someone got up and told a story about Alldera’s past among the Mares, something about a hunt. Other stories were told, branching out to feats of her ‘family’ members at Holdfaster Tent and their relations, and news of their doings since her departure from Stone Dancing. The women seemed a little anxious, possibly because they had never before been confronted with someone who stood in need of several years’ news all at once.
They did their best: raids, races, hunts, horse swaps, quarrels sparked and put out, journeys made, gifts given, a death here and a birth there, good seasons and bad, people grown ill or well or staying the same. They did not speak of Alldera’s cub, nor did she ask.
She told them about her capture of the wild horses, which seemed to impress them. They asked many questions. Daya felt proud of her.
At length food was brought, and Daya realized that at least some of her weariness was due to hunger. A brace of foals, roasted and cut into steaming joints and chunks, was served on trays of stiff leather. The stringy meat had a strong scent, but a sweet taste.
Daya thought Alldera looked extraordinarily natural in this setting. Indeed she could have been one of the women. Muscular and brown, greasy to the elbows from her meal, she gestured wildly as they did and had swiftly fallen into their patterns of intonation and pronunciation. Her hair, trimmed by Fedeka to shoulder length, was bound back Marish-style with a rawhide thong to keep it from getting plastered to her cheeks with meat juices. She seemed to understand what would interest them most about the pasture and the wells she had passed on the way here.
Abashed by the Mares’ frank stares, Daya withdrew into herself. Their yammering dinned in her ears. The odors of unwashed leather and horse sweat, added to the stink of burning dung, made her feel queasy. She sucked at one of her scars where it bulged inside her cheek. She felt very tired, disturbed and put upon. It was a great relief to her when they were told that a special sweat tent had been prepared so the two of them could bathe in privacy.
Much later, outside the sweat tent in the dusk, she and Alldera sluiced each other down with water from buckets left there for them. The sudden cool gush was remarkably pleasant and refreshing. The whole experience of the sweat tent had been unexpectedly agreeable. Watching Alldera drying off, Daya wondered idly what the Mares’ bodies looked like under their leather clothing.
No one seemed to be around. The tents glowed faintly in the dusk by the light of small fires. The Bawn chiefs had provided fresh clothing for the two of them, laid out on a leather platter by the sweat tent. Daya had never put on a full Marish outfit before – trousers, boots, breast wrap, tunic, and the striped headcloth of wild cotton. Alldera dressed with obvious pleasure.
‘These are wild people, remember,’ Daya said, unnerved by a feeling that Alldera was changing into one of them in front of her eyes. ‘They despise fems. Why did you leave them before, if it wasn’t because they’re savages?’
‘The trouble wasn’t with them, it was with me,’ Alldera said. ‘I demanded too much of them, I think.’ She chuckled ruefully. ‘A fault of mine. I’m older now, I think I know a little better.’ Then, somberly, she added, ‘I liked them even then, and I like them better now. I need to remember who my own people are when I’m here. That’s why I asked you to come with me.’
Daya whispered anxiously, ‘But also because you love me?’ knowing it was only habit that made her worry.
Alldera’s hands rested on her shoulders. ‘A lot of people have loved you, a lot more will,’ she said. ‘Perhaps some women of the camps will love you. We both know that you and I aren’t much as lovers together. I need your friendship here.’
‘I don’t know,’ Daya murmured, full of anxiety still – was she no longer desirable?
Alldera stood before her, solid, indistinctly outlined in the dusky light, not touching her; waiting.
Daya had never been a friend before.
‘Heartmother,’ Sheel murmured, rising on one elbow in the darkness. She knew the smell of the woman crouching by her bedding: Jesselee Morrowtrow, her own closest mother. She followed the limping woman quietly out of the tent.
There was a faint dawn pallor in the sky against which loomed the low, spreading shapes of the tents of Floating Moon Camp. The air was cold. Somewhere nearby a horse ruffled its breath loudly through its nostrils.
Sheel embraced her heartmother and leaned her head against the weathered cheek. ‘I’m glad to see you. Let me get you some tea and some food.’
‘Don’t trouble yourself. I have food from my travels.’ Jesselee lowered herself awkwardly to the ground and laid out a pair of bulky saddlebags, which she set about unlacing.
Sheel crouched opposite her. ‘You’re the only one with a thought for me. My other relatives have just barged right in and started haranguing me even if it was the middle of the night, regardless of who was with me.’
‘I may shout a little myself, Sheel Torrinor. Who else has come to see you?’ Jesselee poured something into a bowl and handed it to Sheel.
‘Who hasn’t come? Women I haven’t spent time with in years, Jesselee, women I’d almost forgotten.’ She drank; cold tea, not bad. ‘Mates from my first raid, my other two living mothers – Derebayan wept buckets and made a spectacle of herself – several cousins and a Hont woman who familied with my Carrall mother two generations ago! The only person I really wanted to see was you.’
‘Tch, I’m not magic, you know,’ Jesselee said. ‘I’ll only tell you what everybody else tells you.’ She turned her head from side to side. ‘This camp smells of fresh meat. Who slaughtered?’
‘Sharavess Tent. They had a feast last night to return gifts they were holding for their tent child. The pack brought its body in yesterday morning – some quick illness, we think.’
‘Pity I’m too late,’ Jesselee said. ‘I know good stories about the Sharavess line that I could have told.’
The sky was lighter, and Sheel could see her better now: a dumpy figure gnawing patiently and with effort on a strip of dried meat with the teeth on the good side of her mouth. She looked smaller than when Sheel had last seen her.
‘What’s the problem, Sheel? You are a mother of the child of Holdfaster Tent, and she’s due to come out of the childpack soon. You should be at Stone Dancing Camp. Even I’m going, as a family member, though I should be taking my last comfort in my own home tent before dying; so what keeps you away?’
As long as Jesselee kept talking about her own death, she was unlikely to do anything about going to meet it. Sheel, loving her, had to smile. Yet she hesitated; daughter and mother of heart closeness were privileged to talk by themselves, but she did not enjoy the idea of being seen trotting out her troubles to her heartmother like a worried girl.
She said, ‘Let me do your hair for you while we talk.’ That would relax them both. She settled herself behind Jesselee and began to undo and do up again in a new pattern the small tight braids in which the old woman’s gray hair was tied.
‘There are fems in Holdfaster Tent.’ Word had reached Sheel that Alldera had shown up at Stone Dancing Camp after the last Gather with Patarish Rois as her prisoner and another free fem companion. The Rois had been ransomed and released soon after. Now it was mid-Cool Season, two months later, and women said that Alldera and the other fem were still living in Holdfaster Tent.
‘Alldera knew she should be home for the child’s coming out,’ Jesselee said.
‘With another of her kind?’ Sheel turned her head and spat. ‘Alldera alone is bad enough. Because of her I haven’t been allowed to go on a borderlands patrol in years. Because of her the Torrinors had to pay horses for the tent herd of Holdfaster Tent.’
Jesselee moved her head from under Sheel’s hands. ‘I love having my hair braided up but it always puts me to sleep. Come around here where I can see you, now that the sun’s getting up. Good. Now, tell me more about how you feel.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Aren’t you curious?’
‘No.’
‘Not about the visiting ferns; about your child.’
‘No.’
Jesselee sighed. With both hands she eased her leg into a slightly different angle of rest. It always hurt Sheel to see her do that. She could remember her heartmother as an active young woman, lithe and strong. Now every time they met, Jesselee was a little stiffer, her limp more pronounced.
‘Let me tell you what I’ve dreamed three nights since I left Stone Dancing,’ Sheel said. ‘I dream that I’m back on patrol. I go to the food cache in Long Valley by myself. There I find Alldera, swollen with her cub. I charge her and kill her and throw her body in the river. Then I ride to the others and say no one was there.
‘Feeling – dreaming such anger – I don’t want the child to sense that in one of its own mothers!’
‘Let me tell you what’s been worrying me for some time,’ said Jesselee. ‘I hear that you’ve been traveling around lately with one of those Omelly women. Now, I have nothing against the Omelly line; they are women like ourselves and worthy of companionship and affection. But it doesn’t do to be careless with them, Sheel. They’re dangerous.’
‘Grays Omelly and I are thinking of raiding together when the Dusty Season comes,’ Sheel said. ‘Omellys make raid mates as good as anyone, if you don’t let them provoke you and you watch your own behavior so you don’t set them off. I can handle Grays.’
‘Then you can handle Holdfaster Tent.’ Now Jesselee’s lined face was fully visible: thick eyebrows arched as if in perpetual surprise, heavy mouth droop-lipped, nose spread out on the face. She looked to Sheel like one of those leather dolls, features lined on with dye, that mothers sometimes made for their daughters. But Jesselee’s eyes, drilled deep and small, glittered sharp as stars. Oh, those Morrowtrows were homely women! For as long as she could remember Sheel had connected that homeliness with warmth and enfolding support.
‘Except for you, Sheel, there would be no Holdfaster Tent. You cared for that baby, you nursed it, just as the other sharemothers did. That child will look for you in Holdfaster Tent, and she won’t find you in Nenisi or Shayeen or Barvaran or Alldera and her femmish friend. You are the only Sheel Torrinor there is. The child has a claim on your mothering right to the end of her childhood, whatever her background may be, whoever her other mothers are.’
‘All right,’ Sheel sighed. ‘I’ll go.’
However obscurely, a heartmother was always on your side.
Jesselee said, ‘I’ll look for you there.’
Later, while cleaning her horse’s feet, Sheel told Grays Omelly that she was returning to Holdfaster Tent. The Omelly breathed, ‘Sharu!’ and gave her the flickering, nervous glance everyone watched for in women of her line. It meant the onset of the unpredictable anxiety which plagued the Omellys and could make them dangerous.
Sheel said, ‘I can’t fight off my heartmother.’
‘No,’ the Omelly said. She had a length of rawhide in her hand and she twisted it first one way and then another. ‘I guess she decided you’d spent enough time with a crazy Omelly.’
‘Not exactly,’ Sheel said, bracing more firmly on her thigh the horsehoof she was picking clean. ‘Come with me to Stone Dancing.’
‘Ikk. You won’t catch me hanging around a tent with fems in it. Fems smell.’
‘Everything that lives smells.’ The horse jerked its leg. Sheel said, ‘Ho, there!’ The horse breathed in groans as if Sheel’s careful extraction of packed dirt were torture.
‘I’m going raiding as we planned,’ Grays said. ‘Maybe later I’ll stop by and give you a horse for your sharechild. I’m curious to see a fem’s child.’
Sheel let go the hoof and it clumped back to earth. ‘You have seen her. You were at the last Gather. She’s in the Stone Dancing pack. Didn’t you go out viewing the packs at the Gather like everybody else?’
‘You know Grays,’ Grays said, snapping the knotted end of the rawhide against the tent wall beside her. ‘They all look alike to Grays, she can’t tell one from another till they come out and their families clean them up.’
Someone inside the tent shouted, ‘Will you stop that tapping, whoever’s doing that? You’re driving us crazy in here.’
Sheel said, ‘I have to go to my family. It’s not any sort of insult to you.’
‘Nobody insults the crazy Omellys,’ Grays answered. ‘You never know what they might do in return.’
When Sheel reached Stone Dancing Camp, the days were beginning to lose their cool bite and turn dry against the skin. She had taken her time, stopping to visit along the way. Jesselee was already in Holdfaster Tent. The tent child had not yet come out.
Alldera looked older, steadier, more muscular than Sheel remembered. They avoided each other.
Shortly after Sheel’s arrival, two more fems came. They had deserted their wagon crew to join Alldera and Daya, and they arrived hunched wretchedly on the backs of spare horses belonging to women of Towering Camp. The women had been heading for Stone Dancing and the fems, claiming kinship with Alldera, had begged them to guide them there. Since the Towering Camp women were related to Barvaran and to Shayeen, they had felt bound to honor the kinship claim, and had assented.
The women had not enjoyed traveling with the fems. One of them reported to Sheel, ‘They made a fire of their own every night and cooked their own food as if our food were dirty.’
Sheel saw that Alldera herself looked grim to see more fems come. Maybe she was selfish about losing her unique status here. But how could that be, since she had brought the first of them herself?
The new fems draped hides over the inner tent ropes, screening off one wing for themselves. This had never been done before in the camps and mortified Sheel. Alldera sometimes joined them behind this divider, though she seldom slept there at night; she was sleeping with Nenisi again. The scarred one, Daya moved her own bedding behind the divider, however.
According to Nenisi, the new fems said they put up the curtain because they felt they were being watched – and judged – all the time by the women of Stone Dancing.
Sheel fervently wished they would make a tent of their own and live in that, because the curtain of hides did not shut out their femmish voices. They argued incessantly. At first women stopped to listen, but few could follow the rapid Holdfastish speech. One Calpaper woman said, ‘When they quarrel they sound like sharu in rut.’
As tormenting for Sheel as their voices was the sweet smoke of the drug the fems called manna. Women occasionally brewed up a medicine from the plant for use in the treatment of certain conditions, but these fems put bits of the leaves on the fire and breathed the smoke. The fumes made Barvaran sleepy and silly, and Shayeen said she got dizzy from them. Sheel found the odor cloyingly sweet and heavy. The fems would not give up the drug or use it outside where, they claimed, the smoke would escape and be wasted.
One evening the fems came out from behind their curtain and joined Sheel and some other women who were gathered outside the tent. The pretty fem called Tua announced, ‘Daya is going to tell a story. We thought maybe you’d like to hear it too.’
Everyone was polite and interested, and a few women drifted over from other tents to sit and listen as the little scar-cheeked fem began:
‘Let me tell you all how it will be when we fems return to our own country, the Holdfast. We will find the men hiding in burrows in the ground like sharu, sharpening their teeth on the bones of the dead. At night they come out, scavenging for food in the burnt ruins of the City. We’ll be able to smell them through the walls. They’ve let their hair grow to cover their bodies, because they have no clothing without fems there to weave and sew for them.
‘One day I find a sick one creeping and hiding. I catch him with my rope, and I bring him back to feed and keep for my amusement. He trots after me for his handful of food, and I kick him or beat him as I like. He won’t run away because where else would he get food and a warm place to sleep? He knows nothing of making food grow without slaves to do the work for him, so starvation has tamed him. I ride his shoulders when I choose not to walk, and everyone envies me and pays me to borrow the use of this creature that was a man. We’ll have found another way to make cubs by then, so the man I own will keep his genitals only to piss through and for us to mock when we use him as our clown; as the horrible example that we show our children to teach them how debased a human being can be.
‘I take my man pet into the City’s ruins. I let him visit his former private quarters – he was a rich man – for the pleasure of seeing him weep and sniffle into his beard as he handles the fragments of the statues that once stood in his garden.
‘On this day one of the statues leaps up to attack me! It’s another man, a wild creature all hair and teeth. He charges me, a broken-bladed knife in one hand, the other brandishing his penis, for the wild men have stories that the fems in the old days worshipped the rod that beat them.
‘I draw back my arm to hurl my hatchet at the wild creature, but my man pet throws himself on the attacker before I can do it. The two roll in the dirt, leaving spots of their blood where the splinters of brick and broken tile pierce their skins. My pet gets the other by the beard and smashes the back of his head against a fountain rim. Then he bites his throat out – after all, he was used to eating raw flesh. I whip him back from his prey.
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