Motherlines (23 page)
Authors: Suzy McKee Charnas
Tags: #Dystopian, #General, #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic
Daya was telling an ugly Holdfast story about a man who betrayed his lover and how his lover killed him with a whip and ran his flayed skin up the flagpole of their company hall next morning.
‘Mother Moon,’ sighed Tua, leaning her head back against the wagon wall, ‘I don’t miss the men and their mad, mean city, but how I miss the smell of the great salt sea!’
A flood of reminiscence followed.
‘The sea,’ they said. ‘The taste of fresh laver, when we could steal it.’ ‘Remember the look of the beach at Lammintown on a bright morning, with the town coiling up the hills behind it?’
‘Once we got hold of some prime manna that belonged to the master of a friend of mine – ’ ‘Remember how quiet the City got when the men went dreaming on manna? You could sit in your quarters, cool and waiting, and listening to how quiet it was. You could think about how it would be if those quiet buildings belonged to us, no masters there at all.’ ‘Remember the sound of the sea, and the beaches shining hot in the sun?’ ‘The moon was better. A poor fem could look straight at the moon and not be roasted or blinded by it, and it spread the sea with a cool, silver light.’
‘In my company’s hall they had four different sets of tableware and another dozen small sets for the Senior men – all the colors you’ve ever seen, each set to go with a different meal. The eating hall used to glow with the brightness of it. We never minded washing up, it was such a pleasure handling those glossy plates and platters.’ ‘I never handled anything but a weed hoe and a ditching shovel, but I remember how the land smelled. We used to stumble around half dreaming at manna harvest time.’
‘I used to polish my master’s jewelry for him and pin it on my lover when the master was gone,’ Daya said. ‘We made ourselves splendid for each other! There was a brooch of silver in the form of a kneeling boy, with eyes of colored stones …’
They spoke of greenness all year round, the smell of the river, fog in the morning, storms that shook the cliffs of Lammintown and threw the sea up against the sky; of good, strong beer from the City breweries, of the excitement of inter-company skirmishes fought in the big square, of the brutal, crazy arrogance of the men and the sly, perilous stratagems of fems.
Alldera listened with her head bowed, for she knew they did not see what she did: the vast rift between these cherished memories and the songs of pain they had sung for Sorrel. The fems’ blindness made her feel dismal and exhausted.
For years they had sat around their fires here in the Grasslands and carefully picked over their Holdfast lives, extracting the few bearable bits, embroidering them for their own and others’ comfort.
Pity for their need wrenched at her. Pity for herself, too; their cheering stories were just fantasies to her. She shared only the anguish of their bitter songs.
What are we, here? Alldera thought, looking around at the rapt, firelit faces. Outsiders, eking out a living at trading, which women must have handled perfectly well for themselves before free fems ever came here. The women don’t need us, there is no next generation of fems that need us, we don’t need ourselves. If we vanished tonight, whisked away like dream people, who would miss us?
Someone was absent from the gathering, the one fem who had always seemed to her to belong to the Grasslands. Leaning nearer to Tua, Alldera murmured, ‘Where is Fedeka?’
‘She left,’ came the answer. ‘She said that with the rest of us staying in Stone Dancing Camp, she wouldn’t have to worry about leaving the child here among women.’
‘The rest of you are staying?’
Other conversations ceased. Everyone was looking this way. Several of them said yes, nodding, and a fem back in the shadows called, ‘Daya says we’re all your cousins, that’s the way the Mares think of us. Your cousins can visit you, can’t they? Your cousins can learn from you what Daya has learned.’
They came for the child and now they mean to stay and have me teach them to ride and shoot and track … It was what Alldera had feared, or part of it. She felt anger – would they never cease to complicate her life? – and yet some pride. It did not do to underestimate them, ever. They needed to show that they mattered; they needed to make their marks on the Grasslands.
Eagerly they told her of what had been suffered already in her cause. They spoke of fights and bitterness in the tea camp between fems wanting to join Alldera and those remaining loyal to Elnoa. Many said they had wished to come to Stone Dancing Camp sooner, but a fading allegiance to Elnoa had held them back, till now; till Sorrel’s coming out. The Plan was just the Plan, always in the future, but Alldera’s child was real now, and they kept hearing of real things happening now at Holdfaster Tent – free fems on horseback, free fems with bows.
So they came, newly bold, animated with the daring of their decision. Telling her, they watched her face. She blinked water from her eyes, shook her head without speaking because she did not trust her voice.
Daya said, ‘Time for another story.’ She sat alert, resourceful-looking since she had taken up riding; grown-up, Alldera thought. As these others will soon be.
‘This one is about Kobba. She’s with a group of us that goes to Bayo to rescue some fems that are said to be trapped there by men. The free fems try to storm Bayo town, but the men have fire throwers and dart throwers and slings, and the fems run out of arrows. Kobba and her troop are driven back into the swamp, up to their thighs in water, struggling southward through the sucking mud among the reeds and the roots. In the night they hear the prisoner fems singing, calling for help as we all used to speak to each other in songs.’
‘I don’t like this story,’ Kenoma said. Others shushed her.
‘Deeper into the swamps, Kobba sees her companions cut their own throats rather than fall into the hands of the pursuing men. She refuses to die or be caught. She eats roots, she drinks marsh water and doesn’t let sickness slow her down. She forces herself on even when the swamp is silent and she knows the men no longer follow. She thinks she has caught the smell of smoke. She finds a broken sandal strap.
One day she stumbles onto the shore of a huge island in the marsh, where reeds give way to trees. Someone is watching there – a fern, scar-backed, solid, one of those who slipped away from Bayo and hid in the swamp. There are many others with her.
‘They have houses of reeds and clothes of grass, and they’ve found live creatures to catch and eat in that warm southern water. Some creatures the fems have tamed and trained to attack men.
‘The swamp fems welcome Kobba. They say they thought all the fems of the Holdfast were dead, for none have slipped out to join them in a long time. But Kobba tells them, Come and help me, the men still hold Bayo and twenty of our kind prisoners there, many of them pregnant with cubs we need. This time we will surely batter through the walls.
‘We have a better way, say the free fems of the south. They follow Kobba carrying not bows or even spears, but cages full of swift water creatures with poison in their mouths. Kobba and a few others go close to the walls of Bayo and from hiding shout taunts at the men. The men attack and chase them into the swamps as before – but the fems step onto solid ground that they have marked in their minds, and they release the water creatures.
‘The creatures swim along the channels of the swamp and find the men and fasten onto their feet and legs, flooding their bodies with poison. The men die loudly. They have no discipline, they scream and cry and flounder in the water, they beg to be saved. The fems listen from hiding. They want to laugh, but they stay silent.
‘Dead men drift in the water and lie on the banks where they have hauled themselves up to die. Then the swamp fems call their water creatures by slapping the water quickly and lightly, and the creatures feel this through the water and return.
‘The fems still do not laugh. They hug Kobba, but silently. They will not laugh, they will not triumph, until the prisoners are rescued – and that’s another story for tomorrow evening.
‘We won’t laugh either when we go back, armed with our new strengths and new weapons, until we’ve rescued all the fems still living there.’
There were murmurs of approval. They were all looking at Alldera.
She left the wagon, descending into the dark. She walked among the tents, keeping to the dark places, sorting out her thoughts.
They want to go back to the Holdfast. They are sure of me now, and they want me to teach them fighting and riding so they can invade the Holdfast like women going to war – that’s the fantasy Daya has woven for them with her stories!
Ferns have always learned what they needed to survive. They could learn to ride and shoot, not like women who’ve done those things all their lives, but well enough. But what would they be once they learned? They’d still be no stronger than I am, no more skilled or brave, just people like me – not witches armed with killing spells. We’d be a pathetic little band, desperate fems trusting to tools only recently come into our hands, keeping each other’s courage up with stories and lies. It’s impossible.
But suppose we did it: went back, found the Holdfast in ruins but some men alive, took it all over, made it ours. How many of us are fit to bear a new generation? How many captured men would be young enough to father healthy cubs? Would we all want to bear cubs if we could?
They envision taking over the masters’ luxuries but the Holdfast must be in ruins. We might have to kill our horses for food, assuming we could get them that far to begin with. What good is an archer if she can’t move around quickly on horseback? In seconds a man can charge too close for an arrow shot and break her head with a rock.
No one has come across the borderlands since I came, ten years ago, or is it eleven now? The Holdfast people may all be dead. We could spend our last months wandering an empty land, turning on each other in our hunger before we finished.
If we ever got there to begin with. Free fems have already come to blows over joining me here. Elnoa has lost a whole wagon crew to me now; she’ll defend her place as leader harder than ever. And the women will fight to keep us from going back. They have to protect themselves too. The men would only have to catch sight of us, armed and mounted, to know that over the mountains there’s more than emptiness and the monsters of their foolish legends. They would come, they would invade the Grasslands looking for slaves. I would do anything rather than endanger the freedom of the Riding Women.
I once wanted to move the free fems to action. Now they move despite me, and they mean to sweep me with them. It doesn’t matter to them that I am happy with the women. No wonder I’ve been afraid.
She walked in the darkness among tents murmurous with the voices of women still awake, or silent with sleep. It seemed to her that the surface of the plain stirred slowly, purposefully, inexorably beneath her feet, carrying her and all of them east toward the mountains like waves to the rocks.
When it was time for the Gather, the free fems of Holdfaster Tent – twenty-one of them now, with Alldera – went off to work on the Stone Dancing granaries. They labored hard, well, and without incident.
On the way back Daya rode with Alldera, fiddling with the string of small bells she wore in her hair, a gift from Grays Omelly. She said, ‘They’re very attractive, these women. At best they have a crude sort of power. Sheel has it, all armed against you – against me, too. Haven’t you felt it? She looks at you as if she’d like to bite the heart out of your body, but you’re too strong for her, so she just glares and glares.’
Daya’s intrigues, Daya’s sensitivity, Daya’s fantasies – today they exasperated Alldera beyond measure. There was much else on her mind that she needed to speak to the pet fem about, but somehow whenever they managed to get a moment alone lately there were other matters in the way, or the time felt wrong. She saw now that Daya wanted to talk, not listen, and she held her tongue. She watched Daya twine the bells into her horse’s mane.
‘It bothers you, doesn’t it – me and Grays? Well, you’ve never feared finding your bed empty, like me,’ Daya said. She pulled the bells out, looped them around her wrist.
Alldera tried to answer evenly. She knew by now the feelings of small worth that sometimes unreasonably afflicted the pet fem. ‘Grays Omelly wouldn’t have been my choice.’
‘No, I know your choice, but it’s different for me. I’m not strong Alldera the runner, proud Alldera who brought a cub over the mountains, tough Alldera whom women respect and fems learn from. Look at me: Daya that was a man’s pet, a man’s toy, good at games. So your Marish friends see me, though they know little enough what it means. I had to take those who’d take me, like Grays.’ She added in a voice turned half playful, ‘Were you jealous, a little, of Grays and me?’
They rode quietly. Alldera thought again of bringing up the whole question of going back to the Holdfast; the other fems had dropped back a little. But the fact was, Alldera could not seem to get it straight enough in her own mind to discuss, even when an opportunity came.
Daya said. ‘There’ll be no more games with Grays, anyway. She came into the wagon nights and listened to us telling stories. She said she knew the stories were spells to get us home to the Holdfast, and she wanted to hear them. Then, a few mornings before we set out for the granaries, she came to me and said she couldn’t be with me any more. She told me she felt like someone moving without sound or weight through our femmish dreams. She asked me to kiss her. “Make me as real as you,” she said. I tasted tears when I kissed her.’
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