Motherlines (17 page)
Authors: Suzy McKee Charnas
Tags: #Dystopian, #General, #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic
‘I hear Alldera doesn’t fit in with her own people any better than she did with us.‘Sheel and Nenisi sat together in a sunny patch outside the tent of Nenisi’s cousins, where Nenisi was staying during the Gather. Nenisi looked just as she always had. The dark-skinned lines hardly aged at all, Sheel thought. She added, ‘They say you go and visit Alldera among the free fems.’
Nenisi groaned. ‘You and I have been out of touch, Sheel. Don’t provoke me here at the Gather. My teeth are already sore enough. I went only once, after the last Gather, to tell her that our child had joined the childpack. She said when we send for her to attend the child’s coming out, she’ll come.’
‘So,’ Sheel said. ‘What of it?’
‘Someday at a Gather like this it will be our daughter, and hers, mating with a stud horse. I know it’s hard to think about any daughter that way when she’s still only a wild creature running with the pack. But look forward a little, Sheet: when this child comes out, we won’t be much help to her as mothers if our feelings about her – and about her bloodmother – aren’t warm and loving.’
‘Loving!’ Sheel snorted. ‘I hardly think about the man-used bitch now that our tent family has separated, and it’s never with love.’
The women of Holdfaster Family had gone traveling after the years of staying at Stone Dancing Camp to tend their baby. They would reassemble to welcome the child when she was ripe to emerge from the childpack. Meanwhile Shayeen kept Holdfaster Tent running as a shelter for visitors unable, for one reason or another, to stay with their own relatives in Stone Dancing.
Nenisi said, ‘What will you do, Sheel, when the family comes back together for this child’s coming-out ceremonies?’
‘I’ll help,’ Sheel said promptly, ‘but nothing we do will place that child properly and securely among us.’
Nenisi slapped the hard ground between them. ‘Why not? Why do you say that?’
Sheel frowned, considering. She disliked talking about ceremonial matters, but it was a long time since she had seen Nenisi and she wanted to be understood. She explained slowly, picking her way. ‘We are in touch with strong currents that hold all the things and beings and forces of the plains in balance. Any woman here can be helped to find that balance, or to regain that balance if it’s been lost. We help. The horses help. But you can’t put in balance something that never belonged at all.’
‘We’ll make it work, if we try hard enough,’ Nenisi insisted. ‘We will make that child into one of us, complete with relatives, duties and honor.’
Sheel studied her and saw in the dark, smooth-planed Conor face that tightness of anxiety she had noticed so often in Nenisi since the fem had come among them. Easy enough for me, she thought now; I just hate the fems, no complications. Nenisi’s feelings are all gummed up with rights and wrongs. Does she know how she really feels?
She saw Nenisi’s pride, the Conor pride in being right. It was a Conor trait and part of Nenisi’s beauty. Once Sheel had been comfortable with Nenisi, before Holdfaster Family.
‘The horses won’t dance with her, Nenisi. Her mothers won’t be able to bring her out properly. It can’t work.’
Next day the huge camp of the Gather, a camp composed of all the women’s camps, was quiet. The games and the races and the settling of quarrels were all over; the time for the mating drew near.
Women filed in and out of the sweat tents all day long. Sheel sat quietly cleaning and repairing the belongings of her tent with other women. They all went inside during a brief, hard shower of rain at midday.
In the afternoon Sheel, among the last women to use a sweat tent, walked out toward the great dancing ground outside camp. She shook out her clean wet hair and swirled her long leather cloak in elaborate passes. The sound of the capes whishing through the air drew the women from their tents. Talking and laughing, they joined the growing procession flowing out of the camp.
Looking back, her arms already aching from wielding the weight of the cape, Sheel saw the sailing cloaks like a camp of tents taking flight over grass still bright with beads of rain.
The childpacks of the camps swarmed among the women, circling, piping and screaming, ducking under the billowing leather, diving into gaps between the walkers. Around and around the dancing ground the procession flowed until it formed a noisy wall of women ringing the flat space. Overhead great ragged cloaks of cloud streamed slowly across the clean blue sky. The moon, a mere edge away from full, was a fragile white disc against the blue.
In a little while the first childpack went racing away from the dance ground, scattering out on the plain. Others followed. Several packs sorted themselves out of a whirling free-for-all and ran in another direction. Too excited by the procession to stay afterward for a dull dance, the children preferred to ambush each other over the thick southern turf or harry the horses left unattended. If they returned too soon, there were women stationed outside the dancing ground to turn them away, with whips if necessary.
As the early risen moon grew more substantial, a channel opened through the women’s ranks. Horses poured into the circle, all stallions, nervous at having been separated from the mares. Those women who had walked the horses to the dancing ground closed the gap, penning them in. The horses milled inside the human enclosure, calling, darting one way and then another.
Her arms linked in those of the women on either side of her, Sheel whooped and stamped with them when the horses ran near her sector of the crowd, and the beasts whirled back the way they had come. Her voice skirled joyfully in her throat, she threw her fresh-washed hair from side to side as if it were the mane. Let the land stretch dry and dusty over the rocky bones of the world; the horses were a tumultuous river flowing past her, rough, swift, life-sharing.
Now the young women who had been working with the horses for months had their moment. Dropping their cloaks, they stepped from the crowd and ran naked among the horses. Amid the plunging shadows they swung up onto the studs’ backs, where they balanced or leaped. A young woman sprang over a dark colt’s back, just touching him in passing, and landed on her feet. Another, a bright-haired Salmowon, stepped from the dipping back of one horse to the back of another as lightly and surely as if crossing a stream on stones.
Sheel remembered, her whole body moved with remembering. Every childpack danced the horses. You skipped over their backs, leaping, vaulting to touch the ground an instant before bounding back up onto another horse’s back. Around you and beneath you ran the horses in a chaos of dust and din. You played them until they moved as a group, until they learned the game, you danced them to a lathered standstill. Then next day you laughed at the adults’ dismay at finding their horses worn out.
When you were grown you danced the stallions under the round moon before all the women. You felt your strength flow to the horses, and then back again to you, made stronger. All beings found their rightful places in these exchanges, and the balance of all things was reaffirmed.
A young Hont woman came whirling out of the mob, a bay horse with her. It curvetted past her, rearing and shaking its head, and then turned back to come to her shoulder and rub its knobby face against her. The Hont’s mothers came out to lead her and the lathered horse quietly away, both to be prepared for mating tomorrow.
By dawn the last stallion and the last dancer had been escorted away, the dust had settled, and the bedding chute was built. The Hilliars had put it together this year, in the neat casual-looking way that they did everything. Some called it ‘the saddle’ because this was the horse’s turn to ride.
It was a rectangular box with three closed sides, an open top, and a high floor. The insides of the floor and walls were padded with leather cushions. Arched across the open top and joining the two long walls was a carefully padded super-structure to take the weight of the stallion and the grip of his forelegs. It would suspend his body over the young woman lying inside the box. There were ropes to release an escape trap for a woman whose mating went wrong and endangered her.
The women assembled as they had for the dancing, forming an oval of spectators surrounding the bedding chute. Here a voice rose in song, there another. The members of each Motherline sang all the self-songs of the past generations of their line. The singing of each Motherline unfurled like a banner against the paling sky.
‘I crossed the Sunset River to raid my enemy’s herds,’ sang a yellow woman next to Sheel. That was an old song from the days before the camps had discarded streambeds as boundaries because they were places of confrontation and fighting.
Sheel sang the song of her own bloodmother. It was composed largely of affectionate descriptions of the horses the woman had taken during her lifetime of raiding, and the names of women she had faced in feuds and duels. Sheel sang it with passionate pride.
The moist wind stirred the hair of the young Hont candidate who stepped first into the open. She was thickset like all her line, but the simple leather cloak she wore disguised her body’s lack of grace. With her clean golden hair falling down her back, she looked her best. You forgot the big-featured Hontish face.
Sheel approved, and found the Hont’s showing off appealing. The youngster strolled the circumference of the dance ground, smiling, waving to women who called her name in the midst of their singing.
Someone slipped an arm through Sheel’s: Barvaran, her red face shining with happiness. She herself had been to the stud horses three times, and she had three living bloodchildren as robust and good-natured as herself.
Sheel thought of her own two blooddaughters, one lost in the pack and the other to an epidemic of fever. She no longer grieved for them or for her own failure to bring adult daughters to her Motherline. It was true, as women said; no one rides only one horse on a long journey. There were all the daughters of her sisters and her cousinlines, young women as like to her own dead bloodchildren as they were to Sheel and to each other. She sang a brief self-song for the child which had lived long enough to come out of the pack, and then her own self-song of hunts, raids, and the deaths of men.
The Hont climbed into the chute and lay down on her back. One of her sharemothers got in with her to encourage and caress her so she would be moist and open to her stud. Sheel remembered well feeling the smooth wooden rests against which she had braced her bare feet and watching the support frame dark against the sky. Poli Rois, her friend, had lain down with her, kissing her neck.
Poli was gone now many years, struck dead in her saddle by lightning while still a youth.
Into the circle of onlookers came two of the Hont’s family. The bay stallion stepped along neatly between them. They walked with their hands on his withers and his neck. They talked into his flicking ears. Small, sedate, groomed so the sunlight shimmered on his hide, he was scarcely recognizable as one of the wild-eyed studs of last night’s dance. His feet were filed and oiled, and ribbons of dyed leather were braided into his mane and tail. He was called Tiptoe, and was bred from the home herd of Salmowon Tent in Melting Earth Camp.
Sheel’s first stud had been a nameless chestnut with a lop ear. She had looked up and seen his familiar crooked silhouette and the little beard of whiskers on his jaw, so well known to her and so ridiculous that all her fear had dissolved. Awe and joy had filled her, that the instrument of her own joining with the great patterns of the world should be so ordinary a creature. Well, so was she, yet both she and the stud embodied the dependence of all beings on each other and the kinship of creatures. That was the mystery of the mating, its beauty and necessity.
She had spoken softly to him above the singing voices of the gathered women, and he had entered her as smoothly as the staff of oiled leather with which she had stretched herself in practice for him. After the culling that year his flesh had gone to help nourish the child he had started in her belly.
Her second stud, a barrel-bodied gray, had sired a number of fine foals after mating with her. She had ridden him for years until an infected sharu slash had made it impossible for him to keep up with the herd any more. It had taken two hammer blows to drop him for butchering. Poor Cloud.
The singing had sunk to a soft murmur. The faces of other women showed Sheel that they too were thinking of the dead; dead horses, dead children, dead women who had bled to death after bad matings.
The handlers rubbed the neck and chest of the little stallion. They stroked his face and nostrils with pads that had been run under the tails of mares in season. He began to throw his head and snort, and within a few moments they had him erect. Under the touch of hands well known to him he reared high and clamped his forelegs on the padded support frame. He gripped the leather roll at the chute’s head and rattled it with his teeth. Standing outside the chute, the handlers stroked his sweating neck and shoulders and bent to guide him.
Suddenly he thrust forward against the wooden braces which prevented him from entering fully. He oscillated his rump, snorting loudly, and his tail jerked, marking the rhythm of his ejaculation. Within seconds, it seemed, he pulled back and stood dark with sweat, droop-headed, quiet.
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