Motherlines

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Alldera said. ‘The sharu have come and gone.’

  ‘I’m wearing my bleeding cloth. Couldn’t they smell me and come after us?’

  ‘They won’t.’ She pointed to the tracks. ‘There’s only this one around here, left behind because she’s old or sick, maybe. Don’t you know why the sharu never bother Fedeka? The plants she looks for are weeds that take root where the earth has been disturbed and the grass roots broken up. That’s the way the sharu leave land after they’ve foraged over it. So Fedeka ends up trailing behind the sharu around their feeding range, following them by a growing season or two.’

  ‘Mother Moon, the things you know!’ Daya exclaimed.

  Alldera almost laughed, the pet looked so astonished; half an act of course, but that made it funnier. ‘I’m tempted to show off when you don’t know.’

  Daya did not defend herself. She looked pensive. She said, ‘Don’t tell Fedeka; what you just said, about the sharu.’

  ‘As long as she doesn’t tell me that Moonwoman keeps her safe.’

  Alldera said nothing to Fedeka. How could she? She admired the dyer too much for her ability to live alone, her harmony with her life.

  Gathering brush for fuel along a dry watercourse, they startled wild horses that fled in a flurry of dust. Alldera recognized a brown stud that had driven off two of the Calpapers’ mares one year when she had been in the women’s camp. Transported for a moment back into that existence, she felt her loss of it. All that seemed long gone now, another life outgrown.

  She told of the brown stud.

  ‘Imagine a wild horse stealing from the Mares,’ Daya said in obvious delight. ‘It must be pretty clever to set the Mares’ horses free.’

  ‘They’re not free. A bunch of wild horses is mostly mares, all of them the property of a stallion, their master. He sires all the foals, he bullies and bosses his mares and fights off other studs. Just like in the Riding Women’s herds.’

  Daya looked up from tugging at a stubborn dead root that projected from the earth bank. ‘Doesn’t that bother the Mares – to see female creatures harried and owned by males?’

  ‘Women say that animals live as they must. They say women live as they must too, but also as they think right, which is what makes them more than just animals.’ She could not keep from adding bitterly, ‘What the free fems seem to think is right is to make one of themselves master and serve her. How could the Riding Women think well of them?’

  ‘That’s what you really care about, isn’t it?’ Daya said. ‘What the Riding Women think. Well, maybe we’re not good enough for them, but you aren’t either, or you’d still be living with them.’

  ‘They didn’t send me away. I left. To be with my own kind – who make themselves slaves when they could be free – to be part of their stupid plan, that miserable lie – ’

  ‘You don’t know that the plan won’t happen.’

  ‘I know,‘Alldera said with disgust. She snapped off branches of the brush that straggled like dry, tangled hair down the side of the gully and she threw pieces into the rope net on the ground. ‘I know. I’m a fem myself.’

  Ah, this quarreling is bad for me, she groaned inwardly.

  Daya said, ‘Who are you, to demand that we all act as you’d choose for us to act?’

  Alldera stood over the hoofprints of the wild horses. Trying to sound reasonable she answered, ‘I just want to see the free fems break out of the old order, not make it all over again here. Some of them know it, but they haven’t the courage to act. They should live, grow, become something besides playthings or drudges for Elnoa. Anything would be better than the way you plod along letting that gross creature dominate your lives.’ It sickened her to recall how she had begged Elnoa to send her out trading.

  ‘If you had your way,’ Daya replied, ‘we’d become your slaves and drudges, doing what you want instead.’.

  ‘Maybe that’s the only way to get you all moving, to make you all alive.’ Alldera felt angry and out of control.

  ‘I see,’ taunted Daya in an oily voice. ‘You’d like to astonish us all, both Mares and fems, by seizing the initiative and driving us all before you to go save our people, like the hero of a Holdfast story. I recognize the pattern. It’s a compelling story; I’ve told it often; but it isn’t life. You have to wait till you’re dead and gone before your doings can take on the shape of such lying legends.’

  ‘You’re like the rest of them,’ Alldera burst out. ‘The free fems will never follow me or anyone home, they’ll just sit around making excuses for their cowardice until they die!’

  Tears appeared in Daya’s eyes. ‘We did more for ourselves even in the Holdfast than you think; the masters could never completely crush us.’

  At this Alldera closed in on her: ‘Oh, yes, you and your stories of clever fems outwitting their masters! Your romances of the past are as false as your romances of the future. We were slaves. A few of us, fems like Elnoa, were smarter, better placed to protect themselves, or luckier. Even when those tales are true they don’t mean anything. We were slaves. That’s our real history. Better to fight and die.’ She snapped a bundle of sticks over her knee with a downward plunge of both fists. ‘You are everything slavish about us, everything I hate.’

  Daya stood sideways to her, twisting a piece of wood in her hands, crying. ‘Most of us burned out our courage crossing the borderlands. What great task must I now perform to satisfy your standards?’

  She threw the wood at Alldera’s feet and said, ‘Of us two, I’m not the one who’s ashamed of who she is.’

  The hot weather came full strength. ‘Now I’ll take you to a place north of here,’ Fedeka said. She led them to a small grassy valley among the foothills. She had dug a well there and transplanted trees to shade it. They put up the tent under the trees and drew out Fedeka’s great simmering-pots from the brush shelter she had made for them.

  Alldera woke the next dawn, while the others slept. She walked the cool slopes alone and looked down on their little encampment, feeling rested but not calm. Her spirits rode high on a tingling wave of anticipation: then the meaning of this place grew clear.

  Fedeka had made this, a retreat such as no slave had ever had. But she did not hide here, growing fat and easy. She always returned to the plain with its dangers and its beauties. Because-it must be – out there, alone, was where she had found the strength to make this.

  As quietly as she could Alldera got out water bottle, hip pack stuffed with dried food, rope; but Daya heard, raised her head, and said in a voice husky with sleep, ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’ll be back before the dust storms start.’

  Running toward the plain Alldera felt light and swift and tireless, at her best.

  9

  Daya steadied the great pot as Fedeka levered sodden cloth out of it with a pole. Her muscles taut, the dyer transferred the dripping weight to another vessel full of the steaming, smelly solution that fixed the color in the fibers.

  The trees had fruited with fantastic colors and shapes: Fedeka’s bright pennants hanging up to dry. Daya resented Alldera’s escape from all the work there was to do: drawing water from the well with the creaking windlass, tending the fires under the dye pots or scouring out the pots to clean them for new colors, setting out cloth to dry or taking it in.

  Was Alldera dead or alive out there, near or far off on the long, flat, empty horizon of the plain? It was months now. The figure of the runner stayed in her mind’s eye.

  While they worked Fedeka listened with bursts of appreciative laughter to Daya’s anecdotes of tea camp life.

  Daya sighed. ‘You’re my best audience, as always. I think I miss you a lot when I’m back in the tea camp.’

  ‘Me too,’ Fedeka said. ‘Pity we’re not better suited. But my nature doesn’t much suit anybody in the long run, so it’s a good thing I suit myself.’ Fedeka sat with the pottery mortar locked between her legs, grinding dried plants to powder with a strong, patient moti
on of her single arm.

  ‘What kind of company was Alldera before I came?’ Daya asked idly.

  ‘Quiet company.’ Fedeka dipped a finger into the mortar, withdrew it, and spat on the film of dark material on the tip. She peered at it, and at that moment Daya knew herself to be forgotten.

  To get the dyer’s attention she said, ‘I’m completely healed now, thanks to you; but am I sterile, do you think?’

  ‘Not if you’ve attended to your prayers.’ Daya knew that Fedeka really believed that someday, if it were Moonwoman’s will, a free fem would conceive without a man. Her fertility solutions were, to her, merely instruments of the deity.

  ‘Do you think Alldera is alive out there?’

  ‘If she’s attended to her prayers, yes,’ Fedeka said. Sometimes her piety could be irritating. Now she frowned, grinding the pestle round and round. ‘I can see why she had trouble in the tea camp. Nothing suits her, she has no place else to go, but she can’t seem to accept herself and the life around her. It’s a sickness I have no medicine for.’

  Daya said, ‘She takes everything too seriously, starting with herself. That’s her trouble.’

  Fedeka gave a decisive shake of her head. ‘She doesn’t see. Moonwoman could help her see. When I first saw one of those Marish drum heads of leather all covered in designs rubbed in with red willow juice, I started to see color everywhere; that was a gift from Moonwoman, a great gift. Eyes that always look inward miss everything.’

  Eyes that look upward at the moon or down at color plants don’t see everything either, Daya thought; knowing and liking Fedeka well, she did not speak her thought out loud. She found with surprise that she was missing Alldera a little. Arguing with the runner could be painful, but it was not as monotonous as discussion with Fedeka could get once the name of Moonwoman was invoked.

  Among the rocks topping a knob at the mouth of Fedeka’s valley Daya searched for a yellow herb. She paused a while to watch the dust storms drift above the plain like dirty finger smudges on the sky. It was a hot, bright morning.

  She saw someone approaching over the plains on horseback. Thinking it was a Mare come looking for Alldera, she ran down the hillside shouting to alert Fedeka. She saw the visitor gallop into their hollow, fling herself from her mount and stride forward to meet the dyer.

  It was Alldera, her leather shirt scraped and rent, her hair matted and her lips blackened and split, her teeth white as salt in her brown, grinning face. Her stench was so strong close up that Daya could hardly breathe. She had ridden in on the bare back of a gaunt, shaggy brown horse, trailing two others that followed her like the docile herd beasts of the Mares.

  ‘You’ve been to the Mares,’ Fedeka accused. ‘And what have you brought back? Horses! Mares’ mates!’

  One of the horses lifted its head, made a low, breathy sound, and took a step forward. Fedeka bent to snatch up a stone.

  ‘She’s not after you,’ Alldera said. ‘They smell the water in your well. Let me see to them, and then we can sit in the shade and talk, if I can keep awake. I rode all night to avoid the heat.’

  She twitched on the rope that she had tied around the head and jaw of her mount, and the horse followed her. The other two fell in after it.

  Daya could not stop staring at her. How strong and brown she looked, how effortlessly she commanded the horses. Her eyes were bright with excitement, and she grinned and grinned like some exuberant spirit. Daya had never seen Alldera like that.

  Alldera drew water for the horses and tied their front feet loosely together with leather to keep them from straying out of the hollow. She pulled off her tattered clothes and sluiced herself down with cold water. Then she settled under the trees draped in a blanket. Brewing up tea, she told them what she had done. She kept laughing in the middle of what she said and reaching to clasp their hands as she spoke.

  ‘I never went to the Mares, that wasn’t the point at all. These are my horses. They were wild. I caught them, I tamed them.’

  Daya marveled. She basked in the vitality of Alldera’s muscular body. She had an urge to touch Alldera, to hug her around the waist.

  Alldera had gone from watering hole to seeping spring, all the places where water somehow persisted through the Dusty Season weather in amounts too small for the herds of the Riding Women but enough for a wild band. Where she found recent horse tracks, she waited.

  The wild horses, a roaming troop of fifteen, returned to drink. Scenting her presence, they ran away. Alldera followed. She did not need to keep them in sight. She had only to jog along on their tracks until she came upon them where they had stopped to graze. At the sight of her they bolted again. Again she followed, and so it went for a number of days.

  ‘But a horse can run faster than a person,’ Fedeka objected. ‘Why didn’t they just run right away from you?’

  Alldera shook her head. ‘No horse without a rider covers great stretches at speed. It’s only an animal, it runs until the danger is out of sight and then forgets and gets back to its business of eating. Besides, these horses were in poor condition. Even the women have to harden their horses for long trips in the Dusty Season.

  ‘But I was in good shape, and I could eat enough on the run to keep me going and drink water that I carried with me.

  ‘The horses got sore-footed and sore-muscled, and they couldn’t get enough to eat because I was always showing up and scaring them off. I know where the water holes are, so I could figure out which water the stud was headed for, cut across to get there first, and scare them off before they drank.

  ‘Mind you, I guessed wrong twice, and had to go track them down again to different watering places. Otherwise, I would have been back long ago!

  ‘I never changed my clothes or washed myself. They could recognize me from a good distance if the wind was right, and they began to get used to my smell. They learned that though they let me get closer and closer, nothing bad ever came of it. A day came when even the old stud could hardly drive them to run from me, they were so tired and gaunt and bored with running away from something just as familiar as a harmless clump of grass or a rock. It was the morning after that that they came down to drink, even the old stallion, though I was right there at the spring.

  ‘When they left, I left with them; just walking, wandering along on the outskirts of the band at first, but later right among them. There was a roan mare that acted as if she’d been gentled before; stolen from some women’s herd by the stud, probably. I cut her some grass and she let me handle her a bit. By the time the horses were rested enough to make it hard for me to keep up with them, she let me ride her. I just lay back on her rump at first, until she and the others accepted what I was doing. Then I sat up and rode properly. What a luxury, to be carried after all that walking! But I only did enough riding to keep up. I didn’t want to wear her out.

  ‘Meanwhile I began working on some of the others, the way the women gentle their horses: riding alongside and rubbing their backs, leaning my weight on them, getting them used to being handled and laden. Most of the band were scrubs, not worth taking. The old stud, while I was working on them, got into the habit of snoozing all day and leaving the job of lookout to me.

  ‘Signs of sharu or fems or women were all signals for me to give the alarm, just as if I were really a wild horse myself. It didn’t happen often. Traveling like that out there, you’d be surprised how few traces of human life you come upon. I talked to the horses sometimes, though I knew words meant nothing to them.

  ‘I brought these away with me. They don’t look like much, but they’ll fill out, and there’s plenty of grass here for just three.’

  Fedeka eyed her curiously. ‘You never thought of staying out there, living on your own with the horses?’

  Alldera sipped tea from her bowl. She said, ‘Let me put it this way. One morning the old stud wanted to head the bunch in one direction, and I wanted to go in another. I was riding that dun mare at the time. I had my knife. I could have given the stud a fight and whip
ped him, too. He stood there snorting, pawing the ground, throwing his head and swelling his neck to threaten me, and I thought it would give me pleasure to beat him, considering how he bullied his mares.

  ‘Then I thought, suppose I drive him off or kill him, what do I win? The leadership of a bunch of horses. So I grabbed up a handful of stones to sling at him if he chased me, cut out my three head, and left.

  ‘And that’s all there is,’ she finished on a note of happy satisfaction. She yawned.

  ‘But what did you do it for?’ Fedeka looked around at the horses in dismay. ‘What’s to be done now?’

  ‘I wanted to see if I could do it. I’ll take care of them, don’t worry.’

  ‘One thing I want to know now,’ Fedeka said, lowering her voice. ‘This old stallion, the leader of the herd – did he ever think you were another of his herd? The Mares get male horses to mate with them; weren’t you afraid what the stallion might do to you?’

  Alldera blinked at her. ‘I didn’t say I got to smell like a horse, only like myself,’ she protested. ‘I never gave off the right odors to rouse the stallion. Well, I did when I bled, but then I stayed well away from the band til that was finished, just in case. I don’t think a horse has any choice about mating, when the time comes. If I had smelled right, he couldn’t have helped it, he’d have had to try to mount me. Since I took care not to be around him unless I smelled wrong, I never feared to turn my back on him. The women are right – horses may do things that look like what humans do, but the meaning is all changed.’ She stretched. ‘I’ll go sleep now. I can hardly sit up.’

  10

  ‘I hear Alldera doesn’t fit in with her own people any better than she did with us.‘Sheel and Nenisi sat together in a sunny patch outside the tent of Nenisi’s cousins, where Nenisi was staying during the Gather. Nenisi looked just as she always had. The dark-skinned lines hardly aged at all, Sheel thought. She added, ‘They say you go and visit Alldera among the free fems.’