Motherlines (25 page)
Authors: Suzy McKee Charnas
Tags: #Dystopian, #General, #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic
‘Daya, must the free fems go back to the Holdfast? Not the free fems of your stories, mind you. The real ones.’
‘I can only tell you about myself. Look at me, Alldera – a first-quality pet fern, marred certainly, but still – ! Here I am, dressed in stinking leather, with dirt caked in the roots of my hair, living among beasts and very little above them in houses of their skins. I own my clothing, my saddle, a few ornaments, and the knife on my belt. Oh, and that gray horse the tent gave me to make up for butchering my dun. I spend my time tending animals or fixing things or talking – about old times, another life. I drift over the plains as aimlessly as the clouds, my direction dictated by weather, by grass. I love the horses, the women too; but my life is just floating past me here.’
Angrily Alldera said, ‘Must the free fems go back because you are bored?’
Daya touched her lightly, pleadingly. ‘Don’t you ever think of the richness, the excitement and color of the old days in the Holdfast? It wasn’t all horror and pain. Nenisi is certainly a splendid person in her way – even rather stylish; but what about the brilliance, the music – ’
‘I have only pain and anger from those times.’
‘Maybe that’s what we have to go home to do, then,’ Daya said. ‘To give the pain and anger to our masters, if there are any of them left, and take the brightness for ourselves. It was all built on our backs. Can you blame us now for wanting to claim it?’
‘And if we find nothing but bones?’
‘Then we’ll make something beautiful out of bones,’ Daya replied, her eyes lustrous with excitement. ‘Here, everything is already made and it all belongs to the women. We can only borrow. At home, what we find and what we make will be ours.’
‘Ours. All twenty-two of us?’
‘The others will come too. Except Fedeka, probably, and Elnoa.’
‘Elnoa! She’s led them for years. They won’t all desert her, she won’t let them.’
‘She’s a leader only as long as we follow her,’ Daya pointed out.
Women’s reasoning, Alldera noted with grim amusement, and in the women’s country, true.
She laughed ruefully. ‘Recently a woman came to me and asked me to interfere in the private affairs of one of us. I said no, and she said in a sneering way, “Why not, you’re their chief.” I told her I hadn’t spent all that time alone here in Stone Dancing without learning a few things – like how not to be a master. I thought that was a pretty smart answer at the time.’
‘Left to yourself you’d stay here forever, wouldn’t you,’ Daya said. ‘I’m sorry. It’s a pity that we should require you after you’ve made peace with this place, but you’re part of what draws the free fems. It isn’t me, you know. I’m like the others, I make my peace with the people around me, moment by moment.
‘Don’t look so astonished. I know you expect to hear such clever things only from Nenisi. The Conors are wise, the Conors are always right, and besides you love Nenisi and you still don’t think much of me.’
It was still so shamefully easy to forget that Daya’s feelings could be hurt. Alldera shook off the pain of having caused pain and capitulated. ‘You win, Daya. I can’t see fems come galloping in, red with the blood of sharu and grabbing for more arrows, and pretend not to know that the free fems are spoiling for war. It’s my doing, some of it. I’m even proud of how strong they’ve grown, but that doesn’t make going back any less wretched for me.’
‘I told them you understood, I told them I knew you!’ Daya exclaimed. ‘Some fems said you’d been bewitched by Nenisi, but I knew better. Alldera, if word gets to the tea camp that we’ll take in anyone else who wants to learn to ride and shoot, they’ll come – they’ll all come. Say you want them and I’ll get them for you. We can be more than forty strong when we ride home!’
‘Go ahead,’ Alldera said, kicking savagely at the edge of the fire with her booted foot. ‘It’s the best story you’ve had for them so far. They’ll trample each other finding places for themselves in it. Put it all down to the will of Moonwoman, that’s what Fedeka would say. Only I wish you’d told some stories about fems staying with the Riding Women, living good lives here, instead of about going home.’
‘I tell the stories that come to me to tell; don’t be bitter,’ Daya begged. ‘Even you say “home” now when you mean the Holdfast. It’s your triumph too, that we turn homeward at last.
‘Listen, here’s a story for you: we are a small, grim army drawn up on some high path on the far side of the mountains, looking out in silence – except for the stamp of an impatient pony’s hoof, the creak of leather as someone rises in her stirrups to see better – over our own country, green to the horizon line of the sea …’
Sheel was making a new boot patterned on the leathers of an old one. Outside the air was crisp. The tent was closed and the fire glowed under the draft of the smoke hole.
Sorrel lay on the bare floor of the tent, kept in on account of various abrasions and one furiously multi-colored eye. She had put on muscle and weight since coming out, but she was no match for a crowd of her pack mates.
The tent was quiet. Guests had come, a daughter of Barvaran’s traveling with a couple of cousins. They and the fems and the rest of the family were all out gossiping and borrowing extra bedding and supplies for tonight. Jesselee was home doing nothing, Shayeen was in charge of the food, and Sheel was in charge of Sorrel.
Sorrel said, ‘I don’t like Saylim Stayner.’
‘You still shouldn’t have tripped her with the dung rake,’ Shayeen scolded. She was pounding dried meat for the evening meal. ‘You made gossip for the whole camp. If the others hadn’t given you a licking for what you did, you’d probably come up in the chief tent for a fine.’
Her words were barely audible over the pounding. Sorrel was making faces at Sheel, trying to convey the joke of not being able to hear the rebuke.
Sheel said, ‘Shayeen’s right about the dung rake.’
‘Oh, Saylim didn’t get hurt or anything. Just insulted.’
‘Don’t sound so satisfied.’
‘She insulted me first!’
‘How?’ This was Jesselee, listening from her bedding.
Uncharacteristically, Sorrel paused. Sheel watched her push the floor sand around with her fingers, making ridges and valleys. Then Sorrel said, ‘Saylim said the self-song I was making left out the most important part: about my bloodmother being from over the mountains, and how she had a master there. She said it sly and droopy-eyed, as if it meant something rotten.’
Shayeen whacked the meat one last time, scraped it into a bowl, and marched off.
The youngster brushed the hair back from her face, showing the bruised eye in all its splendor. ‘I don’t much like my mother Shayeen Bawn either,’ she muttered.
‘Why not?’ Sheel began punching holes around the edges of a leather piece with an awl.
‘She’s always telling me what to do.’
‘Let’s talk about the Stayners for a minute,’ Sheel said. ‘Myself, I don’t like that line. The Stayners pick their noses.’
‘Rosamar says – ’
‘I know, they always say they have some kind of funny crookedness inside their noses that bothers them. I don’t care. They could still blow their noses as other women do.
‘And I don’t like the Ohayars because they’re sneaky. The Fowersaths are quick-tempered, the Mellers borrow things and don’t return them, the Churrs have ice cold hands, the Hayscalls mumble till you think you’re going deaf.’
Jesselee joined in zestfully, ‘The Clarishes are vain, the Perikens exaggerate everything, the Farls are lazy and their fingers turn back in a sickening way and make a horrible wet cracking noise doing it besides. As for the Morrowtrows’ – she was one herself, of course, gappy-toothed and wide in the jaw – ‘they like to stick their noses into everything that happens, especially to children of their own families.’
‘However,’ Sheel said, ‘there isn’t one of those lines that we don’t both have kindred in. I forgot to add the Bawns. I don’t love the Bawns, but here I am, sharemothering you with Shayeen Bawn.’
She wished she had not said that. After all, it was not a matter of choice that she was familying with Shayeen.
‘You don’t know, though, what it’s like to have Shayeen as one of your mothers,’ Sorrel said, doodling a frowning face in the sand with her finger.
Sheel set her foot into the curve of the boot sole. She had cut the thin sole wet and set it days earlier to dry in a sand mold of her footprint. It was a comfortable fit. ‘No, but I do have mothers I don’t love.’
Jesselee interrupted. ‘Sorrel, you’ll be related to women all your life whom you don’t love or even like – raid mates, pack mates, relatives of your mothers, captives – you may even find that you don’t care for your own bloodchildren. Liking women has nothing to do with being related to them, and you might as well work that out and get used to it right here in your own family.
‘Have you slept with anybody yet? Since the pack, I mean.’
Her face burning, Sorrel nodded.
‘A pack mate who came out ahead of you? Yes. Well, when you start yearning after a grown woman see that you go and lie with Shayeen. Then you’ll like her better.’
‘You shouldn’t talk that way about things like that,’ the youngster whispered hoarsely.
‘Save me from foal love,’ Jesselee groaned. ‘Who are you sleeping with – that young Bay that lost a finger roping a sharu instead of lancing it like a woman?’
Sorrel’s blush deepened. ‘Not everybody would be so brave.’
‘Not everybody would be so stupid. Archen Bay risked herself and her tent’s best hunting horse just to show off.’
‘My leg hurts,’ Sorrel said disconsolately. ‘One of those piss faces kicked me.’ When no sympathy was forthcoming she tried a new subject. ‘I don’t know why you bother making yourself a pair of boots, Sheel. I have three pair. You’re not much bigger than I am in the hands and feet. One of my pair would fit you.’
‘Then the woman who gave that pair to you would be unhappy with both of us.’
Sorrel brushed the sand flat. ‘Do you like my bloodmother?’
‘No,’ Sheel said.
‘Why don’t you like the ferns?’ Sorrel had spent more time with them since the sharu swarming.
‘Why do you like them?’
‘Oh …’ Sorrel made a ludicrously long and dreamy face. ‘I think they’re very strong and sad because of their terrible lives.’
‘They’re from the Holdfast,’ Sheel said. ‘I don’t like things from the Holdfast.’
‘Am I from the Holdfast too?’
‘You’re one of us.’
‘I am a little Holdfastish in my blood, and special.’
Irritably Jesselee said, ‘Don’t get stuck on yourself. Everyone’s flawed, everyone is still a woman.’
‘I know my faults,’ Sorrel said, sulky again. ‘I ought to. Everybody’s always telling me.’
‘So they should,’ Sheel answered. She refrained from adding, they should because you have no real Motherline to look at and see your faults mirrored in it. There were always the oddest gaps in her conversations with Sorrel.
‘What’s it like, beyond the borderlands?’ Sorrel asked.
‘No one’s been there.’
‘My bloodmother and her cousins have.’
‘Then ask them.’
‘I don’t always understand what they say,’ Sorrel admitted, ‘and if I say they don’t make any sense, they get angry or shrug and change the subject. Is it true that a man has a hanger-and-bag, just like a stallion, and hair on his face like the Chowmers?’
‘More hair than the Chowmers,’ Jesselee said absently, mouthing a bit of food or the memory of a bit of food, ‘less hanger than a stallion.’
Sorrel snorted. ‘It sounds silly and clumsy, like carrying a lance around with you all the time.’ She sighed. ‘I wish my bloodmother liked me. Maybe she will after I make a good raid.’ She rolled over and sat up, wincing slightly. ‘Why can’t I go raiding with Shelmeth’s band?’
‘No. Shelmeth Sanforath is not experienced enough to lead a raid,’ Jesselee said.
‘But nobody will be expecting us, it’s so early in the season! It’s going to be a triumph!’ Sorrel blazed with enthusiasm.
Sheel began to stitch the uppers to the sole. ‘Early raids have been tried before. It takes good judgment to pull them off successfully.’
‘I want to go!’
‘No,’ Sheel said. ‘You’ve asked about this before. Jesselee says no, Shayeen says no, Barvaran says no, I say no, and Nenisi says no.’
‘You all treat me like a baby, but I’m too big to ride in a hip sling, you know. I have to go on my maiden raid sometime. How am I supposed to find women to sharemother my first child with me if I don’t start now to get a good reputation?’
‘Try avoiding the reputation of the sort of person who attacks other women with a dung rake,’ Jesselee suggested.
Ignoring this, Sorrel went on, ‘I want to have a dozen wild raider daughters and then go wandering with you, Sheel, and the bravest of my pack mates. I’ll be the scourge of the plains and make my daughters rich with gifts of the finest horses in the camps.’
‘A dozen daughters?’ Jesselee said. ‘After a dozen daughters you’ll be lucky if you can still get your legs together around a horse’s ribs.’
‘Really?’
‘No, not really, silly. Worry about real dangers, like having your arm broken in a fight.’
Sorrel laughed. ‘I’ll get Alldera to teach me kick fighting so I can kick Saylim’s eye out if she comes after me again.’
‘I don’t like that kind of bloodthirsty talk,’ Jesselee began in a tone that promised a lecture; but then some youngster put her head into the tent and shouted,
‘Pillo fight starting!’
‘I’m coming,’ Sorrel said, jumping up.
Sheel said, ‘Youngsters’ rules – no rough stuff.’
‘It’s no fun then,’ Sorrel objected.
‘We’ll be careful,’ said the girl at the entry, having learned more than Sorrel about placating her elders. ‘Come on, Sorrel. I bet you my old gray horse can – ’
They were gone, their voices already locked in argument.
Jesselee lifted one knee and began kneading her calf. ‘Cramp,’ she groaned. ‘Hits me even in the middle of lovemaking, no respect for an old woman’s last few pleasures …’ She sighed. ‘The child is right, Sheel. She should get one good raid behind her so that women will start to think of familying with her for her own children. I’d like to see her show everyone her quality myself, before I die.’
‘You want me to organize her maiden raid for her?’
‘Which of her mothers would do it better than you?’
Why am I hesitating? Sheel thought, frowning over her work. Sorrel has courage and intelligence, there’s no sign yet of her femmish heritage. But after her first raid – the next step is preparing her for her mating. That’s where it could come out.
‘Heartmother, what’s going to happen to that child if she turns out not to be fertile to a stud horse but only to a man, like her femmish bloodmother?’
‘You, daughter of my heart, know better than I do that a woman’s worth doesn’t lie only in the children of her body – though sometimes women do lose sight of that truth.’
‘It would make a difference,’ Sheel said. ‘Sorrel has no blood relations to keep her line among us. If she has no children of her own body, after her death she’ll just – disappear.’
‘Would you forget her?’
‘Never.’
‘The self-songs of many lines have words in them about women who “disappeared” that way when whole chains of descent ended. Those women are not completely lost.’
Sheel said, ‘I don’t want Sorrel to be lost at all.’
Sheel asked Sorrel to come with her to choose horses for the raid they were planning. Delighted, Sorrel dug out her favorite gift, a light leather shirt covered with big flakes cut from the hooves of dead horses and sewn into a sort of armor of overlapping scales.
‘I want to see how it feels,’ she said as they rode out toward the grazing grounds. ‘Maybe I’ll take it with me when we go raiding. I like to hear the little pieces all click and rub together.’
‘A fancy shirt like yours is only a gift thing, something to make bets with. Women don’t wear them.’
Sorrel promptly wrestled the shirt off over her head and tied it behind the cantle of her saddle.
A little distance from the grazing horses most of the new fems had gathered, sitting like Riding Women in the shadows of their mounts. One of them walked a spotted mare back and forth before the others. Their voices carried clearly. They were agreeing, more and more confidently, that the horse was lame.
Alldera, sitting chin on fist among them, demanded, ‘Which leg?’
‘Off fore,’ said a blond fem. What a pale people they were under their sunburn, not a black skin among them, Sheel thought.
‘How can you tell?’
‘By the way she walks.’
Alldera directed that the horse be led away and then toward the group again, head on. ‘Which leg?’
‘Near foreleg,’ Sorrel whispered to Sheel. ‘See how she drops her head?’
‘I know,’ Sheel said dryly.
Alldera spoke to the fems with the faintest trace of weariness. ‘The leg she drops her head over is the leg all her weight is going on, to spare the sore one.’
‘Near foreleg,’ someone volunteered.
‘Good. Now, leg or foot?’
Some of the fems had noticed the two onlookers and a few called to the child to join them. She had become immensely popular with them after a period of shyness on both sides.
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