Motherlines (24 page)
Authors: Suzy McKee Charnas
Tags: #Dystopian, #General, #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic
Alldera and Daya entered Holdfaster Tent, weary and dusty.
‘You just missed your child,’ Jesselee said, as if this were Alldera’s fault. ‘She’s out hunting. Why did you stay away so long?’
Shayeen, the only other woman in the tent, added, ‘We were beginning to worry about you. It takes only a day or two to patch a leak in a granary roof and not much longer than that to put on a whole new layer of oiled hides.’
Alldera said, ‘We stayed out to build a new granary building, out of stone. The sharu will never be able to get in and eat the grain again. We even paved the floor.’
‘Paved – ?’ Shayeen was clearly unfamiliar with the word.
Alldera explained.
No one commented at first. Shayeen sat frowning at the tangle of straps in her lap, a bridle she was mending.
At length Jesselee said, ‘Mud-walled, earth-floored granaries have served for years. Why change?’
Daya said, ‘The sharu have always raided your granaries. Now in the Dusty Season the horses can have the grain the sharu used to take.’
Jesselee shrugged. ‘We steal stores from sharu burrows sometimes. It’s a proper thing that the sharu should sometimes steal from us.’
A low voice said, ‘This work of the fems is surely meant as a gift.’ It was Nenisi, lying unnoticed till now in her bedding, deeper in the recesses of the tent.
‘What’s the matter with Nenisi?’ Alldera asked, full of alarm.
‘Her eyes still, but worse today,’ Jesselee said. She turned her head and added solicitously, ‘If we’re annoying you, Nenisi, we can go outside to talk.’
‘Stay,’ Nenisi said. ‘I want to hear you.’
The old woman sighed. ‘You won’t like it.’ To Alldera she said, ‘All you were to do was make the old granaries rainproof. Anything else should have been the decision of the whole camp.’
Alldera drank from the shake milk bag hanging by the entry. She said, ‘My cousins have skills that you women lack. Can’t you give them recognition for what they’ve done, instead of complaining?’
‘What Alldera means,’ Daya said sweetly, ‘is that we aren’t afraid of a job that lasts more than a few days or needs careful planning. We’re not too proud to dig a foundation ditch or trim a stone.’
Shayeen snorted. ‘You fems make no sense about what you call work. Women need time to talk and play and ride out hunting, not just to work. You work all the time, learning something, building something. We do what satisfies us.’
‘Yes,’ Daya said, ‘women are satisfied to do the same things over and over, year after year. It’s a woman who is satisfied when every year her horses fall to the butcher knife to keep them from starving for lack of grain.’
Jesselee’s reply crackled with anger: ‘A person is in the world to live in it, not to make it over. Only a creature who belongs to nothing has to keep making things to belong to. A woman isn’t like that.’
Alldera saw the glittering tears of anger in Daya’s eyes and swiftly said to her, ‘Our cousins are growing hungry while we stand here arguing. You’d better start setting up for a meal. I’ll come later.’
With Daya gone, Alldera felt free to go to Nenisi. There was a bowl of water by her. Alldera took the cloth from Nenisi’s eyes, dipped it and wrung it. She saw that Nenisi’s eyelids were swollen shut and crusted around the lashes. She replaced the cloth across the black woman’s face.
Nenisi said, ‘I bet you wish you hadn’t come back. Excuse our bad tempers – the Gather was out of balance this year. There were some fights, and two women got hurt in the mating.’
‘And more will be hurt,’ Jesselee said ominously.
They told Alldera about some quarrel that had sprung up at the Gather between the Conors and the Periken women. Insults, warnings, scuffles that ruined games and races – it was a messy affair of obscure roots, which Jesselee was trying to explain when Nenisi said finally,
‘Oh, leave it, it’s not worth talking about, I’m sick of it!’ She groped for Alldera’s hand and clasped it with her thin, dark fingers.
‘This quarrel of yours isn’t connected with my femmish cousins in some way, is it?’ Alldera said.
‘It’s an old dispute come alive again, that’s all,’ Nenisi said. ‘You don’t really think that everything that happens among us involves you, do you?’
In some years vast numbers of sharu swarmed over the plain devouring everything. They could overrun a camp and consume food, grain, leather gear, even tethered horses or women immobilized by accident or illness. They ravaged the grazing land, gnawing the grass down to the subsoil and scattering the women’s herds beyond retrieval for months after.
Sorrel, Barvaran and Sheel came back from their hunting with reports of large bands of sharu traveling roughly east to west toward the Great Salty River, on a path which would bring them across the Stone Dancing lands.
Stone Dancing Camp became a moving war center against the sharu. Groups of women ranged in all directions, each rider armed with two bows and several quivers of arrows, to destroy or deflect any sharu hordes they could find a day’s ride from camp.
The free fems wanted to join the hunt. Alldera explained that fems would be more useful taking over camp duties so that more women could go after sharu.
There was no argument against her advice. Daya simply came to her and said, ‘Tua and Lexa and a couple of the others want you to know: they are going out of camp to hunt sharu on their own.’
‘When?’
Eyes down, Daya said, ‘I can’t tell you. We need to go. We’re not old women or children in the pack.’
‘So you’re going too?’ Alldera said. ‘Eager for sharu blood yourself?’
‘Oh, no,’ Daya said, looking very domestic. ‘I don’t like the bow, you know that – I’m not proportioned for the thick arms that archery can give you. But I’ll find a way to be useful.’
Alldera spat out the dregs of the milky tea she was drinking. ‘What am I supposed to do?’
Daya waited silently.
Alldera said, ‘Tell Tua and the others to meet me out by the herds in the morning.’
They were changing. The quarreling and lying and stealing were giving way to other things: pride in new skills, ambition, some kind of group spirit. Standing together openly against her mistrust, they forced her to look again and re-evaluate them.
She assessed the abilities of each of the fems with horse and bow, consulting with Daya in front of all of them in the cold dawn. The fems stood eagerly soaking it all in, their breaths misting before their faces. Alldera assigned each fem to accompany one of the groups of women going out that day. She had talked with the women the night before, enlisting Nenisi to help overcome the reluctance of some who feared they would be distracted from their work against the sharu by having to save the lives of incompetent fems. A schedule had been made by which fems would take turns riding out just as women did.
Since their arrival at Sorrel’s coming out, the fems of the wagon crew had been working furiously with horse and bow. What they had not yet mastered they now learned fast under pressure. There were no complaints from women about the free fems’ efforts, once it was apparent that they really were able to handle their mounts and their weapons. Suddenly, Alldera’s worrisome ‘cousins’ were transformed into useful allies.
Sorrel came clamoring to her mothers to be allowed a part in the killing, saying that if even her bloodmother’s cousins were involved, she could surely be. It made Alldera uncomfortable to think of this handsome youngster, with her alert, quick-smiling face and beautiful hair, at risk among the sharu.
There was risk. A woman of the Shawden tent fell from her horse when her girth strap broke; she was torn apart by sharu before she could be picked up. Another, her arrows spent, met a sharu’s charge with her lance. The sharu took the point in its breast and kept coming, impaling itself but ripping her knee with its teeth and claws as it died.
Alldera did not have to speak against Sorrel’s pleas. The women in the tent said firmly that Sorrel might help with weapons, childpack, horses, or with any work in the camp, and perhaps in emergencies she might run messages; but that was all.
‘Just like your age mates from the pack,’ Jesselee said.
‘Most of them are pregnant,’ Sorrel objected. ‘I’m not.’
‘And you never will be, if some sharu claws your insides out.’
To Alldera’s surprise, Daya did not turn to making arrows or to some other protected, camp-bound task. She became a collector of arrows for the archers. Looking back, Alldera would see her riding in long sweeps back and forth behind a shooting party, leaning steeply out of her saddle to retrieve arrows from dead and dying sharu. Daya rode gauntleted and booted in boiled leather like that which shielded her horse’s legs. Unwounded sharu sometimes turned from devouring their own injured to attack a passing rider, and even in dying the beasts could be lethally quick and strong. Daya’s leather armor was soon black with blood. She looked like some dream warrior, the more terrible for her stained armor, her neat, small figure, her scarred beauty.
She worked closer to the sharu than anyone. Alldera noted with satisfaction that even Sheel received her arrows from Daya with a civility verging on respect.
Sorrel did get into the field, in a fashion, by racing out one morning to tell Alldera that Daya had been injured.
Dropping back from her group of archers, Alldera said, ‘Tell me, quickly.’
‘A big sharu jumped on her horse’s rump and raked her down the back. She had an arrow in her hand, and she jabbed the point right into the sharu’s eye and killed it. They say they found her bent down from her saddle, streaming blood, trying to work the arrow back out of the eye socket, but the barb had caught, and Tico says it was the coolest thing she ever saw, but Daya was weeping and screaming the whole time and kept throwing up all the way back.’
Sorrel had come armed with a lance, not a bow, so there could be no excuse for her staying. The plain shifted and rippled with moving sharu only thirty meters off.
‘Thanks for the message,’ Alldera said. ‘Now go back.’
‘Aren’t you going to ride home and see how she is?’ Sorrel cried. ‘I could relieve you here. Jesselee says – ’
‘I’ll come like everyone else, when I’m out of arrows.’
‘But I want – ’
‘A good messenger takes back the answer as soon as she has it.’
‘I’ll tell Daya you’re all right, I’ll tell her you’ll come.’ Sorrel galloped away.
Later, Alldera found the pet fem sitting by Holdfaster Tent, her torso and one arm wound in a band of soft leather, a bloody shirt draped over her slim shoulders. She looked very white but composed, and she was stirring one of Jesselee’s pots of medicine with her free hand.
‘Poor Daya,’ Alldera said. ‘More scars.’
‘I got the arrow back.’ Daya invited her, with a graceful wave of the stirring spoon, to sit.
‘I need to change horses,’ Alldera said.
‘You need to rest,’ Jesselee said. ‘I can see the muscles in your arms jumping with fatigue. If you go right out again, you’ll only shoot wildly and make more work for others.’ She got up stiffly, laying aside the leather she had been cutting into strips. ‘I’ll go shift your saddle to a fresh horse, if I can find one.’
She limped away, chirruping to Alldera’s mount which plodded at her shoulder.
Alldera sat down with Daya in the sun outside the tent. ‘What horse were you riding?’
‘Dark Tea. She was cut badly, but Jesselee has stitched her up. Poor beast, she’ll have scars worse than mine.’
‘They could have given you something younger. I rode that horse when I was first here, years ago.’
‘That sharu jumped right up onto her. She staggered, but she didn’t fall or bolt, so I had my balance and could put some thrust behind the arrow in my hand. She’s a good, steady mount, Dark Tea. Though my dun would have been better.’
Daya stirred the steaming brew erratically. Some of it slopped over the rim of the kettle now and then and made the fire underneath hiss.
The camp was unusually quiet. Most of its inhabitants were out shooting sharu, and the childpack was confined safely in the sweat tent. There was a faint smell of decay on the wind. Not enough sharu were swarming in this area any more to eat up their own dead.
‘How long can this last?’ Alldera muttered.
‘We needed the practice,’ Daya said. ‘We need to be thoroughly blooded before going back. It’s different, wearing armor, seeing the teeth of a ravening sharu snap shut only a hand’s breadth from your face. I feel strong – the way I did when I first learned to ride.’
Alldera leaned forward, elbows on knees, looking out past the tents at where wheeling groups of mounted archers drew gouts of dust from the plain. Her arms and chest and back ached. She felt as if she had had no rest for months. Wearily she surrendered to the inevitable subject: ‘You really mean it, don’t you. Going back,’ she said.
‘You’ve never talked about it with me,’ the pet fem said. ‘It’s been on everyone’s mind for so long. What do you think about it?’
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