Motherlines

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  A person with this power would not be just a runaway fem among the Mares. If riding were all there was to it …

  ‘There’s what you call a family waiting for you to join it, Alldera. What would I be, among the Mares?’

  ‘I’ve thought about that. You’d be my cousin Daya. As my relation, you’d be their relation.’

  Daya thought of the tea camp; her place by Elnoa was occupied, but surely not if she chose to return and claim it. It would be dreadful to be abandoned among strangers once Alldera had settled with the Mares again and wearied of the novelty of showing off her pretty pet friend.

  She said, ‘But what sort of position would I have, myself, with the Mares?’

  Alldera looked impatient. ‘They have no positions, only relations. You don’t need a position when you have kindred.’

  Yes, now Daya remembered: waking among the Mares years ago after her own rescue by a patrol and her own healing sleep, and being unable to work out who was important among those who tended her.

  ‘I won’t know anyone there, Alldera. You wouldn’t – drop me, and leave me on my own?’

  ‘No,’ Alldera said. ‘I promise.’

  ‘I never thought you’d want me,’ Daya murmured.

  By the time the Dusty Season came, Fedeka was talking with undisguised anticipation of the rendezvous with one of the trade wagons toward which they slowly made their way. She had been acting more and more distant, and Daya knew that with Fedeka it could not be jealousy. Probably the dyer was just tired of company and hoped that her two guests would join the wagon and leave her to wander on. It seemed to Daya that Alldera was not likely to find a welcome with the tea fems, but there was no point in talking to Fedeka about that.

  The trade wagon was not at the wells of Steep Cloud Camp where they had expected to meet it. Fedeka glared with frustration at the stubbled flats.

  ‘They must be still back at Royo Camp,’ she said. ‘I need tea. I need cloth. They have to pass this way. We’ll wait.’

  The hot, dry days dragged past. No one talked about what was to happen when the wagon finally did arrive, and this increased the tension of waiting.

  Alldera and Daya endured it, riding out daily in search of grass for the horses. They were returning one evening, discussing the possibility of trading for grain from the Mares to sustain their animals, when a sudden rush of hoofbeats engulfed them. The dark heads and shoulders of running horses dodged around them.

  The dun mare bolted, throwing her head forward so suddenly that she jerked the rein from Daya’s hand. For thirty long strides, gasping in fear and exultation, Daya clung with her fingers twined in the dun’s mane. Then something slammed at her body. Off-balanced, she jumped for her life, rolling like an acrobat when she hit the ground so that she ended up standing on wavering legs.

  The dun ran on in the dust of the other horses, holding her head high and to one side so as not to tread on the reins hanging from her mouth.

  A rider came toward Daya – Alldera, surely.

  Two riders, three, half a dozen; all in a rush they flowed around her, a wall of horses, faces peering down at her past the horses’ necks and heads.

  ‘Who’s this on foot?’ rang a voice she did not know, a Marish voice, rich and imperious. ‘Who unhorsed you, woman?’

  A new rider galloped up, leading the dun mare. She stood in her stirrups. ‘Where is she? Stand back, I knocked her down and I claim the capture!’ She pressed past the others and with a swift gesture threw the slack of her bridle rein around Daya’s neck. ‘I claim ransom! How many horses have you at your tent to give to Patarish Rois of Windgrass Camp?’

  Daya was paralyzed by fear of them and dizzy with their stench of sweaty leather.

  Someone said in a puzzled tone, ‘Looks like one of the Carrals to me, but she hasn’t got a big enough behind.’

  Then a rider raced up behind the others, leaped from her horse, and rushed into the center on foot. It was Alldera. She snatched the rein from around Daya’s neck so fast that it burned Daya’s skin.

  The first speaker, bending deeply out of her saddle for a closer look, whooped. ‘It’s that fem Alldera Holdfaster that used to live in Stone Dancing Camp! This must be another one. You’ve caught two fems, Patarish!’

  One woman laughed. Another cried, ‘Sorry, fems!’ Wheeling their horses they rode away, calling to Patarish Rois to follow them.

  She did not. She hung darkly above the two fems, smouldering with outraged pride. Daya moved silently behind Alldera, sheltering from the Mare’s rage.

  ‘What are fems doing on horseback?’ cried the rider. ‘No fems own any horses that I’ve ever heard of, and any Riding Woman who lets fems ride her mares deserves to lose them. You know who I am. Let the woman who lent you horses come to me to claim her property if she dares!’ Her mount danced and snorted. The dun mare tried to break away from its captor, lifting its head and tugging at the reins in alarm.

  ‘No,’ Daya whispered, clutching Alldera’s arm. The tears of anger welled in her eyes.

  Alldera grasped the woman’s rein just under the jaw of her mount. ‘That dun horse belongs to us.’

  ‘Nothing on the plains belongs to a fern! Stand aside, I’m taking the brown horse too.’

  Like a whip lashing, Alldera struck. She spun in the air so that one foot shot high above her own head, and she landed crouched to kick again. There was no need. The Mare’s horse had bounced sideways with a terrified snort, and the woman fell like a sack out of the saddle. Alldera caught the woman’s horse and stood clutching the stirrup, as if holding herself up.

  ‘See if she’s all right, will you?’ she said in a strained voice. ‘I haven’t done anything like that in years. I think I’ve ruptured myself.’

  The high hoops of the long expected trade wagon loomed beside Fedeka’s fire. As they rode in, Roona’s crew sprang up. Daya saw faces well known to her from Elnoa’s camp. It occurred to her that the crew fems may have expected fems on horseback, but never a Mare riding with them. These closed, defensive masks that greeted her must be what fems often presented to the eyes of the Mares. Now she sat a saddle herself and looked uncomfortably down at her own people.

  The captive woman ignored them all. She dismounted stiffly after Roona invited her to. She politely tasted everything they offered her to eat. No one spoke to her. When she went to lie down a little distance off, curled in her blanket beside her hobbled horse, the fems all crowded into the wagon.

  Roona turned at once to Daya and said, ‘What is this, Daya, what’s happened?’

  Daya told them. The fems grew furious at Alldera: what would the Mares do in return? they cried; what would happen to the trade, the fems’ welcome here? Roona kept pulling off her leather cap, polishing her bald head with her palm, then jamming the cap on again as if she had come to a decision. But all she said was, ‘No one has ever done such a thing before!’

  Alldera sat on a bale of hides massaging the long tendons of her groin and thighs and the base of her belly. At length she said, ‘Listen to me, everyone. It’s no use for you to try to figure out what to do. No one is going to be put at risk with the women on my account. I’ll see to this myself.

  ‘In the morning I’ll start for Stone Dancing Camp with my guest – which is how this young woman is to be treated by all of you. At the first camp I’ll stop and have her relatives send word of what’s happened to her home tent. It will be up to her own Motherline members and her family at Windgrass Camp to gather horses from their herds and deliver them to me as ransom. They’ll object, but in the end they’ll pay, and I’ll leave the prize horses in the herd of Holdfaster Tent. That way the free fems won’t be involved, since no horses will come into your hands.’

  Fedeka asked urgently, ‘But why go? Turn the woman loose, forget it ever happened, and hope they’ll be willing to forget too.’

  ‘I can’t. If I just let her go it would mean I thought she was without value, not worthy of a ransom, and I’d be giving her and all her relation
s a deadly insult. The other way is much better. It’s getting near the time my cub should be coming out of the childpack anyway. I’d already decided to go back for that. I’ll just start for Stone Dancing Camp earlier.’

  There were protests: the Mares would be enraged to see fems on horseback, let alone with a woman prisoner. They would take it out on all the fems. A few said darkly that the whole thing was a trick of Alldera’s, too complicated for them to understand. Others, their first panic eased, spoke in tones of shy admiration.

  Fedeka gripped Alldera’s hand and pumped it to punctuate the single point she made over and over. ‘I don’t like to see you return to those wild people. They don’t believe in Moonwoman.’

  She gave up and retreated into silence when Daya admitted that she was going to Stone Dancing Camp too. The atmosphere in the wagon became quiet, but distinctly strained.

  Daya went outside to see that the horses were securely hobbled for the night. Clouds masked the moon’s bright face, and all the sky seemed crowded with heavy shapes edged in brilliant light. There was so much life in the sky here, she thought, even at night. She went to the horses and stood among them, rubbing their soft noses and lips and the muscles behind their ears, grateful for their undemanding warmth.

  The hostility she had felt in the wagon worried her. Maybe she had made a wrong decision. But she did not want to go back with Roona’s crew to the tea camp. She did not want to have to figure out – for her own safety – who had tried to poison her in that whirl of passion and intrigue around Elnoa. The suspicion and self-absorption of the wagon crew tonight had struck her as strange and unpleasant.

  Now that she rode a horse herself the idea of staying a while among the Mares seemed less alien. She would have to be careful not to use the insulting term ‘Mares’ in their hearing, though.

  In the morning Fedeka was gone. She had left the gear and belongings of Alldera and Daya in a neat heap on the ground. The horses grazed nearby.

  Alldera packed up. Daya did the same. The dark young Mare, Patarish Rois, sat watching in the shadow of her horse while working at her kinky black ringlets with a wooden comb. The fems watched from the wagon.

  Daya said, ‘Alldera, a couple of the crew fems came to me early this morning and said they would like to go with us.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To see what it’s like with the Mares. To learn riding.’

  ‘No!’ Alldera busied herself knotting the saddlestrings around one end of her roll of bedding. ‘We have no horses for them. Besides, it would make more bad feeling than ever between us and the tea camp if we ride off with part of Roona’s crew.’ The horse swung its head and nipped at her shoulder. She slapped it over the nose, and it jumped. She said, ‘What did they pay you to get me to agree?’

  ‘Some good tea,’ Daya said, gauging the distance between them in case she should have to duck a blow.

  ‘You’d better give it back to them, then.’

  ‘They paid me for my effort.’

  ‘I thought we knew each other pretty well by now,’ Alldera said, mounting and looking down at her. ‘I hope I wasn’t too far off the mark about you.’

  ‘There’s always more to know,’ Daya said. You had to keep a little distance from strong people if you were not to be mastered by them.

  Two fems from the wagon crew trotted after them for some little distance, shouting abuse. Before turning back one of them threw a rock.

  Patarish Rois rode with her eyes fixed politely straight ahead. She did not, during the days and nights that followed, try to take the horses and run away or cut the fems’ throats while they slept. Alldera’s confident courtesy toward her was at first hesitantly and then routinely returned. The Rois was soon talking animatedly with her, waving her dark hands in this direction and that as they discussed how to thread their course among the women’s migratory routes.

  They expected Alldera’s camp to be on the move in the early rains by the time they reached its range. Their first stop on the way for food, water and grain was to be Singing Metal Camp.

  On a hot morning they topped a rise overlooking the Singing Metal herds. They paused, wiping the sweat from their faces, adjusting their gear, clearing their throats of dust. Their own horses, footsore and thirsty, pricked up their ears and neighed to the horses of the grazing herds. The hot wind blew in their faces, tearing away the sound.

  The women of Singing Metal Camp, according to Alldera, had a special hostility toward fems. They resented the femmish contention that the women’s skills at working Ancient scrap had been learned from fems rather than from the ancestors of Singing Metal women.

  Daya was not reassured by the way Patarish Rois sat tugging nervously at the fringes of her sleeve, or by Alldera’s silence. They had no choice, however. They needed the use of Singing Metal’s wells.

  Patarish Rois led them down. They did not make directly for the tents but circled to approach from the side opposite to the grazing herds. Alldera explained. ‘We don’t want to seem to be sizing up their stock for a raid later on. This young Rois has a lot to lose if we’re treated badly or laughed at, so she’ll help us. Don’t worry; that is going to go well.’

  Daya was not convinced. She felt very vulnerable, riding among the Mares’ tents. Women peered out at them as they moved toward the largest tent. Tethered horses lifted their heads and whinnied. Someone was working at a forge, throwing out an irregular, clinking rhythm.

  Two people stepped out of the big tent as they drew near, handsome look-alikes with coppery skin and black hair.

  ‘Bawns,’ Alldera breathed. ‘We’re all right. Shayeen, one of my child’s sharemothers in Holdfaster Tent, is a Bawn.’

  There was nothing about the two, no insignia or finery or attendants, to show that they were chiefs. They were smililng, but did not speak. They were so clearly at a loss that Daya was embarrassed for them.

  Alldera dismounted, took a breath and announced herself. ‘Alldera Holdfaster, of Stone Dancing Camp. This is one of my femmish kin, Daya. And this is my guest, Patarish Rois of Windgrass Camp. We’re going home to Stone Dancing to see to the horses that Patarish’s kindred will be sending to us there, as soon as they hear that she and I are related by the rein.’ Meaning, Daya remembered, by Alldera’s having captured her.

  The younger Bawn looked as if she had been struck.

  ‘Welcome,’ the older one said at last. ‘Come out of the sun and take tea with us.’

  The younger one added nervously, ‘Come tell us your news.’ As if the greatest of their news was not already told.

  The older one embraced Alldera, and Patarish Rois jumped down from her horse and hugged the other. Alldera drew back, signed to Daya to dismount, and said firmly, ‘Will you greet my cousin Daya?’

  The Bawns hung back, almost visibly trying to work out in their heads the consequences of any action they might take. Alldera they plainly knew by name if not by appearance; she was a relation, though a fern. Daya, in a femmish smock and Marish pants like Alldera but without headcloth or boots, was so obviously a wagon fem that the Bawns did not seem to know what to make of her as a relative.

  Finally, with a gusty sigh the elder Bawn hugged Daya too. Enveloped in a muscular grip and a smell of horse sweat, smoke and the lingering pungency of tea, Daya said through dry lips, ‘Cousin,’ as Alldera had instructed her to do. She averted her face, hating the scars on her own cheeks.

  The younger Bawn took charge of their horses. Daya watched jealously, noting how the woman eyed the dun as she handled it.

  In the coolness of the Bawns’ wide-winged tent some twenty women of Singing Metal Camp were gathered, and the guests were invited to sit with them. More women arrived, murmuring greetings, patting and embracing earlier arrivals as they took their places to sit. Everywhere were soft sounds of whispering and movement. The first of the tea was passed in shallow wooden bowls holding no more than a couple of swallows each.

  Daya took a pouch from her belt and poured some shavings of te
a into her own food bowl. Among such rough folk she felt it was only right for a civilized person to make the gracious gesture the occasion called for, even if it beggared her and was not properly appreciated. She passed the bowl.

  The Mares looked curiously at this offering. Each one took a bit as long as the supply held out, though none chewed it as fems would have done.

  Alldera had warned Daya that to soften bad feeling that might arise over the capture and ransom of a prisoner, it was the prisoner’s right to tell the first version of her own downfall. She was entitled to make as much fun of her captor as she liked. Patarish Rois launched into a long preamble. It seemed to Daya that she was narrating all the raids she had ever been on, and acting them out complete with imitations of women involved – and, Daya thought at several points, of horses – to roars of appreciative laughter and comment. She would stick out her chunky rear and prance in a little circle, or stab her fingers through her wiry hair until it stood up on end. In one or two cases Daya could even see that she produced a creditable impression of someone present in the tent.

  Women were elbowing each other in the ribs and grinning. Then Patarish told how Alldera had felled her from the saddle.

  Silence and unbelieving stares. Alldera had said once that it was very unusual for a woman on foot to bring down a mounted one, let alone kick her down. The idea of a fem doing such a thing was plainly incomprehensible.

  Then Alldera moistened her mouth with tea and took her turn. The women listened intently. At the end, when she said that she would gladly demonstrate the exact kick she had used except that she had nearly crippled herself doing it the first time, there were some smiles.