Motherlines (6 page)
Authors: Suzy McKee Charnas
Tags: #Dystopian, #General, #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic
Barvaran, at her shoulder, said, ‘Those are free fems, come to trade from their camp in the eastern hills. They’ll go right to the chief tent; we have to get our trade goods together. You go ahead.’ She patted Alldera awkwardly on the shoulder and joined Shayeen in rummaging inside the tent.
Reining close, Nenisi leaned toward Alldera. ‘I have to ride out again. Alldera – if the free fems say anything that confuses you, I’ll try to explain it later. It would be best if you didn’t mention your child to them.’
Something was wrong; Alldera could feel Nenisi’s anxiety, but she could not read its source. Nenisi galloped off.
Alldera walked slowly toward the chief tent, alone. She felt dizzy with excitement and apprehension.
Everyone crowded around outside the chief tent, many women laden with goods – piles of skins and hides, sacks and pouches of dried food. The fems had parked their wagon out of the camp. They made a procession to the chief tent, carrying loads balanced on their heads. Their heavy sandals scuffed the ground as they advanced. They had left their spears, but each one wore a hatchet looped to her belt. To Alldera they looked coarse and graceless, out of place here. Each of them chewed a wad in her cheek and spat brown juice.
The smocks they wore were of cloth, patterned with colors. As they walked the smocks swung, and the colors appeared to move. Suddenly, jarringly, Alldera saw how drearily brown the women and their surroundings were. Around her stretched the low plain with its yellowing grasses, under the wide tan sky. The camp itself was earth brown, leather brown, the various red and yellow and black browns of the women’s hair and skin, and the colors of animal hides.
Why, the women were like their horses – as there were so many dun horses in the camp’s herds, so many blacks, so many stripe-legged bays, so there were this many dark-skinned lines of women like the Conors and the Clarishes over there, so many lines with red hair, so many sallow women like those Tuluns bending over their stacked goods, hair like coal and bodies as narrow and muscular as the necks of horses. Grouped at the chief tent, they were like some woven design in which each broad, clear thread could be traced in the image of each Motherline, repeated from individual to individual and from generation to generation.
She shook her head and blinked, frightened by this vision and the distance it put between herself and the women.
One of the fems came forward and spoke with the Shawden chiefs. Then they all laid out their goods in rows before the tent. The women milled up and down the narrow aisles, picking up bricks of tea and sniffing them, shaking out coils of rope. The fems watched, tight-mouthed, sharp-eyed, and spoke only when they were asked questions.
Alldera was glad she had not run out to meet the wagon. She stayed at the outer edges of the crowd, peering at the newcomers. When they spoke she found their voices grating after the women’s liquid speech. Their truculent attitude was evident in their glances, their asides to one another, the way they withdrew slightly to avoid contact with passing women. Their demeanor repelled her. She wanted – what? Certainly not these closed and suspicious faces.
She turned and wandered away among the tents to where the ferns’ wagon stood, outside the camp. Troubled, she drew nearer. Femmish leaders had designed her escape so that she might bring back a pledge of aid from free ferns. Now here were real free ferns; she felt off balance, flooded with guilt for her abandoned task.
She walked the length of the wagon, touching the bleached and weathered wood of its lower walls; it smelled of dust and tea and sweat. Suddenly it rocked under her hand. Someone jumped down from inside and looked around the end wall at her, then leaned back to speak tensely to a hidden companion. Another face appeared.
‘That’s no woman, that’s a fem – look at the butt and legs on her, sprinter’s muscle. You know these wild people never walk if they can ride, let alone run anywhere.’
‘Then it’s her,’ said the long-faced one.
‘She’s young,’ said the other, shaking back dark hair, eyes measuring Alldera from head to foot. ‘Hey, don’t they keep watch on you? Where’s your guard?’
‘I have no guard.’ Alldera stood where she was, suddenly wary. The two had a predatory look.
‘You mean you’re not a prisoner? We came to rescue you, fem.’
It was too late to pretend that they were wrong, that she was a Riding Woman. ‘No one’s held me prisoner,’ Alldera said. ‘I live like the others here.’ She realized that it would be a mistake to tell them she had not learned of their existence until today. She could picture their sneers at that, their knowing glances.
One said, ‘Don’t tell us you’ve just been living here contented as one of their stupid horses, ignoring your own people.’ Their hatred of the women came off them like heat.
‘Come on, what are you waiting for?’ the long-faced one said. ‘Get into the wagon, quick, while nobody sees. We’ll go get a few others, haul off as if we were going to make an early camp for the night, and just keep on going. The rest will catch up. Then let those Mares come galloping after us and try to take you back!’
Alldera moved a few steps back toward the tents, alarmed by visions of blood and battle.
‘Where are you going?’ The black-haired one closed in on her.
Alldera glanced around for help, a witness, anything. She heard the long-faced fem say low-voiced to the other, ‘Look at that, they must have bewitched her to keep her from us.’
Too late, Alldera bolted.
They sprang after her. A spear shaft thrust between her legs brought her down with a racking pain in her shin. She could not help it, she lay and hugged her leg, and they dropped their weapons and took hold of her, lifting her toward the wagon.
‘You explain to Elnoa back at the tea camp,’ the black-haired fem growled. ‘We want to know why they’ve kept you from us, and everything you know about them. Nobody’s lived among them as long as you have, we need your information.’
‘You can’t take me!’ Alldera cried through tears of pain, as if in a nightmare that they meant to take her to their master. ‘Let me stay – ’ A hard hand clamped over her mouth, cupped to avoid her teeth.
‘Mare lover!’ spat one of the ferns.
As they wrestled her back against the tail of the wagon, trying to heave her inside, something jarred a cry from the one on her left. The other fem gasped and let go. Alldera twisted free. Sprawled on the ground, she heard the thump of blows, saw the frenetic figures of children leaping up from the tall grass to fling stones at the ferns.
She looked up at the black-haired fem’s angry face squinting at her from inside the wagon where the two of them had taken shelter. She heard the furious words: ‘Come in here, curse you, while you have the chance! Come on, what is it, you like these horse-fuckers, these dirty, rag-tag savages that bathe in their own sweat, dirty beasts, cock-worshippers – ’
The wagon rattled and shook with the impact of the childpack’s missiles. The long-faced fem paused for breath. There was blood on her cheek and a bruise swelling where a stone had hit her.
‘Have they gone and mated you to one of their stallions, then?’ she cried. ‘You got fucked by a horse and you like it, is that what’s happened?’
Alldera got up and ran. The childpack raced past her, touching, laughing, and vanished.
Curled around her own misery and confusion, she lay in the tall grass on a rise outside the camp, watching from hiding until the free fems had packed up their goods and left. They moved the wagon out, pulling it in the midst of a ring of scouts like women moving camp. The scouts, on foot, did not go any great distance from the wagon, perhaps for fear of losing sight of one another behind a swell of ground.
From the rise Alldera listened to the sounds of evening descending on Stone Dancing Camp. As women lit their tea fires, voices spoke and laughed. Riders came home from settling the horses on night pasture. Each sang a personal song that identified her to the woman who met her with a bowl of food and who took from her the mounts she had brought to be tethered in camp for the night.
Alldera recognized Nenisi’s self-song. She saw Nenisi ride in and give something to Barvaran: a bundle in a leather sling. That was what she had gone to do, then: take the child further out of camp while the free fems were there.
Alldera got up and limped down toward camp. Nenisi came out on foot to meet her. They stood beyond the outermost tents in the dusk.
‘Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you,’ Nenisi said. ‘They’ve gone. That’s their fire, way over there.’ A wasteful blaze. ‘You look upset. What did they say to you?’
How many are there like them?’ Alldera said.
‘Maybe half a hundred, all free fems found by us in the borderlands, as you were found.’
So many, all this time. ‘They said I was a prisoner here.’
‘Sit down with me, let’s talk. They themselves are the prisoners – not of us, but of the way things are. They say they wish to return to the Holdfast, invade it, save the fems there. They live in a camp of their own in the foothills and make preparations to go home. When they venture too far toward the Holdfast, our patrols turn them back. This makes them bitter against us.
‘But anyone can see that it would be foolish of us to go and show ourselves to the men of the Holdfast or let the fems go back and speak of us there, when we’ve kept the secret of our existence from men for so long. Even if there are only a few men left – and many of us feel that – we have a right to protect ourselves; don’t you think so?’
Alldera realized guiltily that she had accepted that desert, too, as she had accepted that the free fems were a myth. She said, ‘You took me in among you; why not the free fems too?’
‘You have a child here; kindred. The free fems aren’t related to anyone.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me about them before?’
‘Why would you need to know? We are your family. Anyway, you never asked.’ A sigh of defeat. ‘Maybe not telling you was a mistake.’
‘How can they be so different that you can’t take them in among you?’
‘Their beginnings and ours differ,’ Nenisi said. ‘Around the onset of the Wasting that ruined the world of the Ancients, there was made a place called the lab, where the government men tried to find new weapons for their wars. We don’t know just what they were looking for, but we think it was mind powers, the kind that later got called ‘witchery’. The lab men – and lab women, who had learned to think like men – used females in their work, maybe because more of them had traces of the powers, maybe because it was easier to get them with so many men tied up in war.’
Alldera tore at the grass with her hands. ‘Nenisi, is this going to be another tale of slavery?’ What she wanted to say, and could not bring herself to say, was Why did you hide my cub, and why did they say you mate with horses – Barvaran had said that too, once.
‘It’s all right, this story has a happy ending,’ Nenisi said softly. ‘The lab men didn’t want to have to work with all the traits of both a male and a female parent, so they fixed the women to make seed with a double set of traits. That way their offspring were daughters just like their mothers, and fertile – if they didn’t die right away of bad traits in double doses.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Alldera said. ‘How could they do that?’
‘Who knows?’ Nenisi sounded a little impatient. ‘No one denies that the men of those times were clever. It was the combination of their cleverness and their stupidity that caused the Wasting in the first place.
‘Now, in the lab, the change of trait-doubling was bred into the daughters, to be passed on ever since.’
‘To you.’
‘Yes. The daughters got together and figured out how to use the men’s information machines. They found out all about the Wasting, the wars and famines and plagues going on outside, and how the lab could be made self-sustaining if things outside collapsed completely. They laid plans of their own.
‘They got the information machines to give a false alarm warning of an attack in the offing and ordering the lab men to rush off to the Refuges and save themselves. The lab men believed the orders; they knew the leaders were already hidden in Refuges made for themselves and their helpers, and the lab men had high ideas of their own importance. So off they went with great speed and excitement.’
She paused. Alldera thought, giving me time to take it in, treating me like some stupid hulk of a free fem. ‘Tell me the rest, please,’ she said, to show that she understood.
Nenisi cleared her throat. ‘I’m used to talking about this with young girls just out of the pack. I hope it doesn’t sound childish to you.
‘Anyway, the first daughters sealed themselves up safely in the lab and using the information machines began to plan for after the Wasting. They took the lab animals and tried to breed them to be ready to live outside when the world was clean again. A lot of animals were let out too soon and died. The sharu were bred up from some tiny animals the men had been using to find out about ferocity, and once let out they flourished – an unhappy surprise, but not bad in the long run. Sharu have their place too.’
Alldera had seen sharu tracks, the splintered bones of sharu kills, the torn-up areas which they had stripped even of grass roots in their voracity. They horrified her, and she could not imagine what sort of ‘place’ they could have.
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