Motherlines

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  For the present, there was something else to pursue. One of the crew fems had left a request that Daya speak for her with Elnoa while the crew was gone. The present of a bag of first-quality tea shavings assured that Daya would make a strong case for her.

  Later, inside the big wagon when the traders had gone, Daya murmured to Elnoa, ‘Poor Suda is having a terrible time with a debt she can’t pay. No doubt you know all about it already, but maybe you hadn’t heard that she was drunk at the time they were gambling or she wouldn’t have risked so much. Now if she doesn’t pay up out of her share of this trip’s profits – ’

  Elnoa signed, Not yet, tell me about that later. Tell me now why you like it out on the plains.

  Daya began to speak softly about what it was like out there. Elnoa sat looking through her current volume of accounts, occasionally smiling and looking up when something Daya said particularly pleased her. At such times Daya thought of herself as the tender guardian of some wealthy invalid.

  Mornings in the Cool Season, old Ossa hung around the cooking pots to keep warm. Daya was cooking up the rare treat of a fresh meat stew – someone had speared a sharu at the spring the day before – and she found Ossa flicking out chunks of meat with a sharp stick and popping them into her mouth. Furious, Daya slapped her away. Ossa made a great show of falling down, and shrieked at her in a voice that could be heard all over camp:

  ‘Be careful, you stupid, clumsy bitch! Do you want to kill the first child conceived by a free fem in the Grasslands, the daughter of Moonwoman herself?’

  By noon the old creature was the talk of the camp. She claimed she had spent the night of the previous full moon outside and Moonwoman had magically impregnated her. Her cub was to grow up to reproduce merely by willing it. That was Moonwoman’s promise, and everyone had to acknowledge, however snidely, that Ossa’s wrinkled belly had begun to swell.

  Daya smiled with the rest. This was not the first false pregnancy to be known in the tea camp, only the most grotesque and unlikely. It soon came to an end. Ossa drank another fem’s ration of beer, ‘because it was good for the baby’s hair.’ She got kicked in the belly for it, and the swelling vanished.

  Then, around the cooking kettles behind Elnoa’s wagon, Daya heard Alldera being blamed for Ossa’s misadventure: ‘Ossa says Alldera killed the child by witchery.’

  ‘What’s the witchery in a good, hard kick?’

  ‘Who knows what the runner learned, living so long with the Mares.’

  ‘What would you say if Ossa accused Froya, there?’ Laughter.

  ‘But it’s Alldera, not Froya.’

  ‘The runner should have brought us her cub. What right did she have to decide to leave it?’

  ‘Ossa’s right about that. Alldera never talks of the cub. We’re only fems, you know, not good enough to hear about the cub she left with the high and mighty Mares.’

  Daya noticed that the runner’s name came up in conversation often, and usually with disapproval. There was a mad tale of her trip out, before Daya’s return to camp, with a mapping party headed by Froya. The group had dragged home days overdue, still streaked with desert dust, and complaining bitterly that Alldera had gone off alone into the desert so that they’d all had to troop after her to bring her back.

  Taxed with endangering the entire expedition and reminded that the free fems could ill afford to risk losing anyone, Alldera had defended herself by saying she had thought they were to go into the desert, not just along its edge making drawings of what they could see from there.

  All very true, Daya reflected, if one insisted on taking symbolic action for the real thing. This was a distinction the runner seemed incapable of learning. No wonder she had enemies.

  Not long after Ossa’s ‘pregnancy’, Daya heard that Alldera was asking Elnoa to discipline fems who did not turn out for running practice. Daya had to put up with Elnoa’s subsequent ill humor, which included thrown objects, bursts of incoherent and ugly noise when mere gestures would not carry the weight of her anger, and sometimes – praise Moonwoman’s mercy – merely the sulks. She had her work cut out, restoring Elnoa to a decent frame of mind. She wondered how people here could think a pet’s life was all sweet drippings from a master’s plate.

  Couldn’t Alldera see that the tea camp went slack when Kobba was gone with a trading crew? Elnoa worked everyone very hard at weaving and dyeing but did not interfere at all with what else they did. Her business was the accumulation of goods. Kobba’s job, when she returned, was to slam on the discipline again and push ahead with the plan.

  If Alldera had not worked that out for herself, she was heading for disaster. Daya saw no reason to enlighten her. She knew the type: proud, demanding, impatient, withdrawn into herself out of disappointment with others, but lacking inner resources, particularly imagination.

  Only action would suit her, and she was not going to get the kind of heroic nonsense that she wanted. Not here. Daya could have told her.

  Someone came pounding across the yard shouting, ‘It’s a Mare! A Mare’s come to the valley!’

  Roused from a slumbrous afternoon in the big wagon, Daya went with Elnoa to the perimeter of the camp. A Mare as dark-skinned as the horse she rode was down by the spring, in plain sight of the sentries, if there had been any sentries. There was no telling how long she had been waiting there till someone noticed her.

  Elnoa had Alldera sent for.

  Daya’s head was full of wild suppositions. She stared down at the rider, fascinated. She had never been this close to one of them for this long with nothing to do but look. She thought the Mare’s appearance rather grand.

  Under the back-thrown headcloth the Mare’s face was an unreadable darkness lit by the glint of her eyes. She led two spare horses by ropes on their necks. How obedient her horses seemed, how patient. Her mount leaned down in a leisurely fashion to rub its head on its foreleg. All of them lacked the scruffy flash of wild horses. Daya wondered what the Mare had done to tame them so completely. They did not look scarred or starved.

  Alldera appeared below, padding swiftly down the trail to the spring.

  The yellow tones of the plain, visible beyond the mouth of the valley, had faded as the days lengthened and heated toward the early Dusty Season. Daya imagined the bold Mare riding alone through that landscape, as it was gradually leached of color by the increasing power of the sun …

  The Mare leaned down and as she spoke touched Alldera, a swift flicker of the hand. While trading in Marish camps Daya had often seen them do that among themselves, casually, as if they owned each other. One of the led horses stepped forward and put its nose against Alldera’s shoulder. Alldera laid her hand on its flat forehead. The watching fems stirred.

  For a moment Daya wished strongly that she were down there too, and she was almost jealous of Alldera. What did it feel like to be touched by a woman as black as char and to stroke a creature that was not even human at all?

  Alldera and the black Mare talked in distant voices. The runner’s voice seemed choppy and hard, the Mare’s richly liquid. An experienced storyteller’s voice, Daya thought, and what an attentive audience she had in the fems strung out along the wall of wood and brush and stone on the hillside above. She was so black, a dramatic shadow-person; she gave Daya the shivers.

  Alldera nodded curtly to the Mare and turned back up toward the tea camp. All the fems began to talk excitedly at once. The Mare gathered her headcloth about her shoulders and rode away down the valley with her horses.

  When Alldera came to Elnoa she said, ‘That was someone who looks after my cub for me. She says that the cub has gone into the childpack of Stone Dancing Camp. They always tell the bloodmother. It’s a custom.’

  What are you supposed to do? Elnoa signed.

  Alldera shrugged. ‘Nothing. I’m just supposed to know.’

  Froya said in a sceptical tone, ‘You told us the cub was nothing to you.’

  ‘It’s important to Stone Dancing Camp that I know,’ Alldera said, s
peaking directly to Elnoa. ‘The rider comes of a bloodline that cares a lot about doing what’s right.’

  ‘If the Mares did what was right,’ Froya sneered, ‘they would have brought your cub to us. If they did what was right, they wouldn’t let their horses screw them.’ That raised a snicker among the others. Froya never knew when to quit. ‘Do you think she’s fucked with that brown one she was riding?’

  ‘Idiot,’ Alldera said with contempt, ‘she was riding a mare. Can’t you tell a male horse from a female?’

  Froya’s cheeks patched red over the high, narrow bones. ‘From this distance only an expert could,’ she snorted. ‘Someone who knows them as well as the Mares do.’

  Alldera dropped into a fighting stance, and Froya jumped back with a shout, ‘Oh no, I know your fancy kicks; you could put my eye out while I was watching your hands.’

  The runner straightened and said angrily, ‘It’s not my fault that you don’t know how to block a kick or throw one. I offered to teach kick fighting, remember? Only some people decided it was too dangerous.’

  Daya let out her breath, watching Alldera stalk away. What a foolish thing to say, since word was that Elnoa herself had forbidden those lessons, probably rightly. The free fems quarreled frequently among themselves and were too few to add new risks of serious injury.

  This Alldera was no realist. She was nervy, though. You had to grant that – always remembering the foolhardy ones were just the sort that got themselves killed by irate masters in the end.

  Kobba’s wagon came home late in the Rainy Season, battered by a flash flood that had caught it in the foothills. Emla had almost been swept away in the flood. A white swatch in her hair, just noticeable at her departure and now wider, was suddenly being attributed to the accident. She took her time recovering from the shock, Daya noted, indulging freely in fits of nervous tremors and weeping, keeping weakly to Elnoa’s wagon. She was, unfortunately, far too distraught to help Daya with the cooking and cleaning.

  Elnoa played along with the act. Probably she was angry because Kobba’s poor judgment had cost most of the cargo. Solicitude for Emla, poor victim, seemed to Daya a neatly calculated way for Elnoa to continually remind Kobba of her mistake. Of course, this was only Daya’s suspicion. There was really no telling with Elnoa.

  Daya was bored. The months since the Mare’s visit had rolled uneventfully by. Getting Emla displaced from her new closeness to Elnoa seemed a diverting and useful project.

  She decided that Emla’s weakness was her greed. The masseur liked to wait till she thought no one saw and then grab an extra pot of beer or a bar of Elnoa’s own best tea. She tried to be the last one to leave a wagon, and might slip into one while all its inmates were away. Caught, she would say, ‘Sorry, I thought I heard voices inside.’

  It was all small-scale pilfering. Elnoa surely knew, but chose not to punish.

  All that would be necessary would be to raise the suspicion that Emla had found the hiding place of Elnoa’s private treasure trove. Each of the free fems had a secret cache hidden in the hills. The whole area was planted with belongings of the living and the dead; sometimes fems died without revealing their hiding places. More than one member of the tea camp had been hurt or even killed because of the suspicion that she had found – by accident or by craft —another’s hiding place.

  Elnoa surely had the greatest fortune hidden and the most to fear from a thief. It was Daya’s business to know secrets, and she had known for years the location of Elnoa’s treasure cave, though she had never entered it herself.

  Pity she could not come up with some really original plan; but old tricks work best.

  Elnoa had recently given Emla a bracelet of blue gems set in fine braided leather. It was perfect for Daya’s purpose. It had no catch and tied on. Emla had complained that the knot worked loose so that the bracelet kept dropping off and getting lost. No free fem who found that bracelet would dare to keep if for herself; she would recognize it and remember its august source.

  It took three days of careful observation to discover where Emla kept her bracelet. She had wound it around the catch of one of the unused sleeping platforms. Daya pulled out the spare bedding from all the platforms to be aired, and in the process she slipped the bracelet down into an opening in the hem seam of her smock.

  Then she left camp early with her herb basket for the part of the hills where she knew the tea cutters would be working that day.

  There was no way of knowing just what Elnoa would do if Daya were caught at this. The risk made her heart speed with excitement. The voices of the tea cutters rang in the sparkling morning air. They were catching up with her. She could see their heads bobbing above the tea bushes and hear the blows of their hatchets. A long arm flashed as someone reached for a promising-looking branch.

  Daya set the bracelet in a tea bush right over the concealed entrance to Elnoa’s treasure cave, positioned as if it had caught on a branch there. Then she slipped back to camp and waited. Oh, there would be a furor, everyone asking angrily what the owner of the bracelet had been doing out among the treasure-laden hills when she was supposed to be in Elnoa’s wagon, laid up sick with nerves.

  The scene later in the wagon began the way Daya had imagined it, right down to the outrage in Emla’s scratchy voice. Emla said exactly the right things, at first – about thieves, a cherished possession never carelessly worn, and how she was too feeble these past weeks to move far from her bed. She hunched up in her blankets trembling, making the most of her weakness.

  Elnoa sat amid her cushions with the bracelet on her massive knee, chin sunk on palm. Daya knew Elnoa could not show her full anger and alarm, for then other fems might guess that the bracelet had been found near her own secret location.

  No more, Elnoa signed, the bracelet’s blue stones glittering now in her moving hand. You have not always been in my wagon. You have been out.

  Naturally Emla had been out; Daya had guessed that too. Emla had certainly pilfered from the cargo of the unlucky wagon. She must have made at least one stealthy trip to her own treasure with her takings. To pretend otherwise was a mistake.

  ‘I did go out,’ Emla admitted, ‘to see to my own property. But why accuse me? We all look after what belongs to us. I know one person who wanders the hills constantly by herself, no matter how many times people have warned her. She hasn’t lived with us long enough to have amassed any wealth of her own. She’s smart and secret and neither labor fem nor house pet. Alldera the runner has stolen my bracelet and lost it in the hills.’

  The unpopular newcomer! Daya had forgotten her completely.

  ‘I saw her trotting off alone only two days ago,’ someone volunteered anxiously, and suddenly everyone was talking. At Elnoa’s command two of the tea cutters hurried out and brought the runner back with them.

  It seemed to Daya that she had a reckless look these days, which did not help. Surrounded by the silent, resentful group, Alldera listened to what Emla had to say. She laughed at the charge. In an angry tone she said, ‘You can’t mean you believe I did this.’

  Someone shouted, ‘Why not? You haven’t had time to build up a treasure of your own, except from our belongings. Why do you keep wearing that Marish shirt of skins instead of a good smock from our looms? Maybe you like those pockets they wear in front, maybe they’re handy for putting stolen things into?’

  Alldera said furiously, ‘I don’t like to wear a slave smock as if I were still somebody’s property back in the Holdfast, that’s why!’ She stared desperately from face to face. ‘I can’t believe this. It’s as if I’d never left the Holdfast at all – fems spending their lives laboring for someone else’s profit, squabbling among themselves over trifles – ’

  They murmured; some faces showed uncertainty. Then Emla yelled, ‘Thief! Where did you get that hair binder you’re wearing?’

  ‘I traded Lora a bag of pine nuts for it.’ Alldera was looking over their heads now as though disdaining their questions, but Daya saw the sweat gleam
ing on her face. ‘Go ask Lora.’

  Seeing her fully on the defensive now, the fems pressed in, demanding, accusing. Elnoa was obviously just letting the tide of anger roll; Daya, appalled, could think of nothing to do. Now everyone was hostile to Alldera, and the runner seemed unwilling or unable to placate them. When faces grew red and fists were clenched, Elnoa sent for Lora. But by the time word was brought that Lora was out on sentry duty, it was all over. Only the question of punishment remained.

  Elnoa signed her judgement: Alldera is confined to camp. No more running at all.

  ‘Who are you to give me orders?’ Alldera blazed. ‘You’re not my master! I’ve stolen nothing. Prove that I’ve taken anything from anyone!’

  Elnoa stared at her. The bracelet of blue stones was wrapped around her thick fingers like a weapon. Go away, she signed. You are lucky not to be treated more harshly. Perhaps you have done this, perhaps not. You are an arrogant young know-it-all. I think you would like to take our goods and run off to be rich among your Marish friends.

  Alldera rejoined her fiercely, ‘At least my Marish friends had some notion of right and wrong – ’

  Edging closer to her, Daya whispered in anguished agitation, ‘Go, you’re in danger here! You’ve really made her angry!’

  Spinning on her heel, Alldera pushed her way out through the crowd. The others shuffled after her, taunting her for a thief.

  Now Elnoa’s eyes were fixed on Daya’s face. Clumsy with nerves, Daya began to straighten the floor blankets rucked up by trampling feet. Don’t panic, Elnoa knows nothing, she only suspects, she told herself. The wagon smelled of sweat now, and cushions lay tumbled everywhere.

  Emla leaned at ease among her pillows. When she met Daya’s furtive glance she smiled.

  Elnoa isn’t through with me, Daya thought wretchedly. She had an instinct about these things.

  The next morning she woke early and could not get back to sleep. She crept outside and stood on the back porch, trying to rub the tension out of her neck and shoulders. The wide yard lay empty all around her under a drift of mist, and she could see no one stirring at the wagons in the perimeter. She wondered what she could do so early for distraction from her worries, thought about going back in for a blanket – it was chilly out – but shrank from the possibility of waking Elnoa, seeing that massive, brilliant-eyed face turned coldly toward her in the gloom …