Motherlines (18 page)
Authors: Suzy McKee Charnas
Tags: #Dystopian, #General, #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic
The handlers praised and patted him as they led him away to rejoin the herd. He left between them as modestly as he had arrived.
Others of her family reached to help the young Hont up, but she was already on her feet in the chute. She swung her robe about herself with a grand gesture that showed as well as anything could her triumphant success. They closed around her, checking her for injury, mopping the milky overflow from her thighs. With her arms on the shoulders of two of them, she walked briskly from the dance ground.
A new candidate had already stepped out from the crowd. A sorrel horse, thick-maned and heavy-headed, came into the circle. Snorting at the crowd, he bounced along half sideways. Sheel knew that horse. She had taken him from the herds of Chowmer Tent in Windgrass Camp last year. She hoped he was smoother as a rider than he was as a mount.
She thought angrily of Nenisi. The black woman was mad to insist that the child of a fem could lie down for a stud like a woman. Holdfaster Tent was just a dream anyway, Nenisi’s fantasy of righteousness.
There was a story about a free fern, long ago – she had been taken up briefly by the Golashamets because she had looked so much like them. She had attended a mating, just once. Women said that after the first stud, the fem had turned and vomited on the woman next to her.
When the cool months started the three fems returned to the plain. They brought the horses that Alldera had caught. Fedeka’s open dislike of the animals abated when she saw that not only could they help carry baggage from campsite to campsite, but they could bear many more than the number of plant samples that she normally packed on her own back.
For Daya, their presence was magical; she rode whenever she could. She had begun, timidly, to learn how under Alldera’s tutelage and had discovered a horse’s power to transform its rider.
Alldera had made Daya a saddle of padded leather sewn wet onto a wooden frame so as to shrink as it dried to make a strong seat. The saddle was trimmed with straps and strings to lash on bottles, blankets, and other equipment. The leather required frequent applications of soap and oils to keep it supple and uncracked. Daya used the heavy saddle gladly on long rides, but she loved better riding bareback, seat and legs fitted to the horse’s body, wearing pants cut off at the knee so that she could feel the living flank of the horse along her calves.
The dun mare had a big, ugly head and at rest its lower lip drooped and exposed its yellow teeth in a comical, foolish-looking manner. But it was responsive, almost tireless, Daya’s favorite mount. Alldera said with a trace of jealousy that Daya was a natural rider. She admitted to Daya that she herself did not love the horses; what she loved was having the mastery of them. Daya loved their rich appeal to her senses and the joining of her own meager strength to their power. Crouched on the shoulders of her galloping mount, she reveled in the ecstasy of speed. Alldera often had to remind her that the Mares did not gallop everywhere and that Daya too should practice the slower, less wearing gaits.
Riding under drifts of illuminated cloud, Daya dreamed of tearing down the far side of the mountains scattering terrified men, battering them down with the shoulders of her mount and pounding them under its hooves. Her horse was invincible. She heard in her mind the thudding of heavy, blunt blows on flesh and the crack of bone. Or she dreamed of nothing at all, but lived totally and raptly in the warm, driving reach of her horse under her.
On foot little changed for her. She still spoke softly, moved automatically out of another’s way and shed tears instead of shouting when she was angry. She knew these ways were forever part of herself, not to be changed by her joy in the horses and the new strength that they had lent her.
As she rode with Alldera, Daya began to talk about their former lives and even to ask questions about Alldera’s adventures with her two outlaw masters in the last days of the Holdfast. Alldera seldom raged against Elnoa’s free fems any more. Now when she spoke of them it was painfully, questioning earnestly why they were as they were. Sometimes she would ask Daya for an opinion and then ride silently a while before replying, if she replied at all.
They slept together only occasionally, yet Daya felt them growing closer, knit together by quiet conversations and companionship. The gradual weaving of this connection delighted Daya and frightened her; it was new, an unreadable part of the mystery of the horses.
Sometimes they talked about Alldera’s years with the Mares.
‘They’ll send for me when my blooddaughter, my cub, is ready to come out of the childpack,’ Alldera said once. ‘The sharemothers come together to receive her, and stay together for however long it takes – a few months, even several years, depending on her maturity – to prepare her for her mating and the forming of her own family.’
‘Will you go when they send for you?’
‘Yes. Now I have some horses to give for the tent herd. I’ll leave the dun mare with you.’ After a glance at Daya’s face she added hesitantly, ‘Unless you’d consider coming with me?’
They were watering the horses. Sitting on the dun mare’s back, Daya looked down at the sunlight breaking on the water and spreading in circles from the mare’s hot muzzle. Her hands moved over the sleek shoulders, feeling the glide and pull of muscle under the skin as the animal stepped forward, lifting its dripping mouth. A tightening of the rein, a tap of the heels, and it would move on, obedient to the will of the small, weak creature on its back.
A person with this power would not be just a runaway fem among the Mares. If riding were all there was to it …
‘There’s what you call a family waiting for you to join it, Alldera. What would I be, among the Mares?’
‘I’ve thought about that. You’d be my cousin Daya. As my relation, you’d be their relation.’
Daya thought of the tea camp; her place by Elnoa was occupied, but surely not if she chose to return and claim it. It would be dreadful to be abandoned among strangers once Alldera had settled with the Mares again and wearied of the novelty of showing off her pretty pet friend.
She said, ‘But what sort of position would I have, myself, with the Mares?’
Alldera looked impatient. ‘They have no positions, only relations. You don’t need a position when you have kindred.’
Yes, now Daya remembered: waking among the Mares years ago after her own rescue by a patrol and her own healing sleep, and being unable to work out who was important among those who tended her.
‘I won’t know anyone there, Alldera. You wouldn’t – drop me, and leave me on my own?’
‘No,’ Alldera said. ‘I promise.’
‘I never thought you’d want me,’ Daya murmured.
By the time the Dusty Season came, Fedeka was talking with undisguised anticipation of the rendezvous with one of the trade wagons toward which they slowly made their way. She had been acting more and more distant, and Daya knew that with Fedeka it could not be jealousy. Probably the dyer was just tired of company and hoped that her two guests would join the wagon and leave her to wander on. It seemed to Daya that Alldera was not likely to find a welcome with the tea fems, but there was no point in talking to Fedeka about that.
The trade wagon was not at the wells of Steep Cloud Camp where they had expected to meet it. Fedeka glared with frustration at the stubbled flats.
‘They must be still back at Royo Camp,’ she said. ‘I need tea. I need cloth. They have to pass this way. We’ll wait.’
The hot, dry days dragged past. No one talked about what was to happen when the wagon finally did arrive, and this increased the tension of waiting.
Alldera and Daya endured it, riding out daily in search of grass for the horses. They were returning one evening, discussing the possibility of trading for grain from the Mares to sustain their animals, when a sudden rush of hoofbeats engulfed them. The dark heads and shoulders of running horses dodged around them.
The dun mare bolted, throwing her head forward so suddenly that she jerked the rein from Daya’s hand. For thirty long strides, gasping in fear and exultation, Daya clung with her fingers twined in the dun’s mane. Then something slammed at her body. Off-balanced, she jumped for her life, rolling like an acrobat when she hit the ground so that she ended up standing on wavering legs.
The dun ran on in the dust of the other horses, holding her head high and to one side so as not to tread on the reins hanging from her mouth.
A rider came toward Daya – Alldera, surely.
Two riders, three, half a dozen; all in a rush they flowed around her, a wall of horses, faces peering down at her past the horses’ necks and heads.
‘Who’s this on foot?’ rang a voice she did not know, a Marish voice, rich and imperious. ‘Who unhorsed you, woman?’
A new rider galloped up, leading the dun mare. She stood in her stirrups. ‘Where is she? Stand back, I knocked her down and I claim the capture!’ She pressed past the others and with a swift gesture threw the slack of her bridle rein around Daya’s neck. ‘I claim ransom! How many horses have you at your tent to give to Patarish Rois of Windgrass Camp?’
Daya was paralyzed by fear of them and dizzy with their stench of sweaty leather.
Someone said in a puzzled tone, ‘Looks like one of the Carrals to me, but she hasn’t got a big enough behind.’
Then a rider raced up behind the others, leaped from her horse, and rushed into the center on foot. It was Alldera. She snatched the rein from around Daya’s neck so fast that it burned Daya’s skin.
The first speaker, bending deeply out of her saddle for a closer look, whooped. ‘It’s that fem Alldera Holdfaster that used to live in Stone Dancing Camp! This must be another one. You’ve caught two fems, Patarish!’
One woman laughed. Another cried, ‘Sorry, fems!’ Wheeling their horses they rode away, calling to Patarish Rois to follow them.
She did not. She hung darkly above the two fems, smouldering with outraged pride. Daya moved silently behind Alldera, sheltering from the Mare’s rage.
‘What are fems doing on horseback?’ cried the rider. ‘No fems own any horses that I’ve ever heard of, and any Riding Woman who lets fems ride her mares deserves to lose them. You know who I am. Let the woman who lent you horses come to me to claim her property if she dares!’ Her mount danced and snorted. The dun mare tried to break away from its captor, lifting its head and tugging at the reins in alarm.
‘No,’ Daya whispered, clutching Alldera’s arm. The tears of anger welled in her eyes.
Alldera grasped the woman’s rein just under the jaw of her mount. ‘That dun horse belongs to us.’
‘Nothing on the plains belongs to a fern! Stand aside, I’m taking the brown horse too.’
Like a whip lashing, Alldera struck. She spun in the air so that one foot shot high above her own head, and she landed crouched to kick again. There was no need. The Mare’s horse had bounced sideways with a terrified snort, and the woman fell like a sack out of the saddle. Alldera caught the woman’s horse and stood clutching the stirrup, as if holding herself up.
‘See if she’s all right, will you?’ she said in a strained voice. ‘I haven’t done anything like that in years. I think I’ve ruptured myself.’
The high hoops of the long expected trade wagon loomed beside Fedeka’s fire. As they rode in, Roona’s crew sprang up. Daya saw faces well known to her from Elnoa’s camp. It occurred to her that the crew fems may have expected fems on horseback, but never a Mare riding with them. These closed, defensive masks that greeted her must be what fems often presented to the eyes of the Mares. Now she sat a saddle herself and looked uncomfortably down at her own people.
The captive woman ignored them all. She dismounted stiffly after Roona invited her to. She politely tasted everything they offered her to eat. No one spoke to her. When she went to lie down a little distance off, curled in her blanket beside her hobbled horse, the fems all crowded into the wagon.
Roona turned at once to Daya and said, ‘What is this, Daya, what’s happened?’
Daya told them. The fems grew furious at Alldera: what would the Mares do in return? they cried; what would happen to the trade, the fems’ welcome here? Roona kept pulling off her leather cap, polishing her bald head with her palm, then jamming the cap on again as if she had come to a decision. But all she said was, ‘No one has ever done such a thing before!’
Alldera sat on a bale of hides massaging the long tendons of her groin and thighs and the base of her belly. At length she said, ‘Listen to me, everyone. It’s no use for you to try to figure out what to do. No one is going to be put at risk with the women on my account. I’ll see to this myself.
‘In the morning I’ll start for Stone Dancing Camp with my guest – which is how this young woman is to be treated by all of you. At the first camp I’ll stop and have her relatives send word of what’s happened to her home tent. It will be up to her own Motherline members and her family at Windgrass Camp to gather horses from their herds and deliver them to me as ransom. They’ll object, but in the end they’ll pay, and I’ll leave the prize horses in the herd of Holdfaster Tent. That way the free fems won’t be involved, since no horses will come into your hands.’
Fedeka asked urgently, ‘But why go? Turn the woman loose, forget it ever happened, and hope they’ll be willing to forget too.’
‘I can’t. If I just let her go it would mean I thought she was without value, not worthy of a ransom, and I’d be giving her and all her relations a deadly insult. The other way is much better. It’s getting near the time my cub should be coming out of the childpack anyway. I’d already decided to go back for that. I’ll just start for Stone Dancing Camp earlier.’
There were protests: the Mares would be enraged to see fems on horseback, let alone with a woman prisoner. They would take it out on all the fems. A few said darkly that the whole thing was a trick of Alldera’s, too complicated for them to understand. Others, their first panic eased, spoke in tones of shy admiration.
Fedeka gripped Alldera’s hand and pumped it to punctuate the single point she made over and over. ‘I don’t like to see you return to those wild people. They don’t believe in Moonwoman.’
She gave up and retreated into silence when Daya admitted that she was going to Stone Dancing Camp too. The atmosphere in the wagon became quiet, but distinctly strained.
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