Motherlines

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  Someone got up and told a story about Alldera’s past among the Mares, something about a hunt. Other stories were told, branching out to feats of her ‘family’ members at Holdfaster Tent and their relations, and news of their doings since her departure from Stone Dancing. The women seemed a little anxious, possibly because they had never before been confronted with someone who stood in need of several years’ news all at once.

  They did their best: raids, races, hunts, horse swaps, quarrels sparked and put out, journeys made, gifts given, a death here and a birth there, good seasons and bad, people grown ill or well or staying the same. They did not speak of Alldera’s cub, nor did she ask.

  She told them about her capture of the wild horses, which seemed to impress them. They asked many questions. Daya felt proud of her.

  At length food was brought, and Daya realized that at least some of her weariness was due to hunger. A brace of foals, roasted and cut into steaming joints and chunks, was served on trays of stiff leather. The stringy meat had a strong scent, but a sweet taste.

  Daya thought Alldera looked extraordinarily natural in this setting. Indeed she could have been one of the women. Muscular and brown, greasy to the elbows from her meal, she gestured wildly as they did and had swiftly fallen into their patterns of intonation and pronunciation. Her hair, trimmed by Fedeka to shoulder length, was bound back Marish-style with a rawhide thong to keep it from getting plastered to her cheeks with meat juices. She seemed to understand what would interest them most about the pasture and the wells she had passed on the way here.

  Abashed by the Mares’ frank stares, Daya withdrew into herself. Their yammering dinned in her ears. The odors of unwashed leather and horse sweat, added to the stink of burning dung, made her feel queasy. She sucked at one of her scars where it bulged inside her cheek. She felt very tired, disturbed and put upon. It was a great relief to her when they were told that a special sweat tent had been prepared so the two of them could bathe in privacy.

  Much later, outside the sweat tent in the dusk, she and Alldera sluiced each other down with water from buckets left there for them. The sudden cool gush was remarkably pleasant and refreshing. The whole experience of the sweat tent had been unexpectedly agreeable. Watching Alldera drying off, Daya wondered idly what the Mares’ bodies looked like under their leather clothing.

  No one seemed to be around. The tents glowed faintly in the dusk by the light of small fires. The Bawn chiefs had provided fresh clothing for the two of them, laid out on a leather platter by the sweat tent. Daya had never put on a full Marish outfit before – trousers, boots, breast wrap, tunic, and the striped headcloth of wild cotton. Alldera dressed with obvious pleasure.

  ‘These are wild people, remember,’ Daya said, unnerved by a feeling that Alldera was changing into one of them in front of her eyes. ‘They despise fems. Why did you leave them before, if it wasn’t because they’re savages?’

  ‘The trouble wasn’t with them, it was with me,’ Alldera said. ‘I demanded too much of them, I think.’ She chuckled ruefully. ‘A fault of mine. I’m older now, I think I know a little better.’ Then, somberly, she added, ‘I liked them even then, and I like them better now. I need to remember who my own people are when I’m here. That’s why I asked you to come with me.’

  Daya whispered anxiously, ‘But also because you love me?’ knowing it was only habit that made her worry.

  Alldera’s hands rested on her shoulders. ‘A lot of people have loved you, a lot more will,’ she said. ‘Perhaps some women of the camps will love you. We both know that you and I aren’t much as lovers together. I need your friendship here.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Daya murmured, full of anxiety still – was she no longer desirable?

  Alldera stood before her, solid, indistinctly outlined in the dusky light, not touching her; waiting.

  Daya had never been a friend before.

  KINDRED

  12

  ‘Heartmother,’ Sheel murmured, rising on one elbow in the darkness. She knew the smell of the woman crouching by her bedding: Jesselee Morrowtrow, her own closest mother. She followed the limping woman quietly out of the tent.

  There was a faint dawn pallor in the sky against which loomed the low, spreading shapes of the tents of Floating Moon Camp. The air was cold. Somewhere nearby a horse ruffled its breath loudly through its nostrils.

  Sheel embraced her heartmother and leaned her head against the weathered cheek. ‘I’m glad to see you. Let me get you some tea and some food.’

  ‘Don’t trouble yourself. I have food from my travels.’ Jesselee lowered herself awkwardly to the ground and laid out a pair of bulky saddlebags, which she set about unlacing.

  Sheel crouched opposite her. ‘You’re the only one with a thought for me. My other relatives have just barged right in and started haranguing me even if it was the middle of the night, regardless of who was with me.’

  ‘I may shout a little myself, Sheel Torrinor. Who else has come to see you?’ Jesselee poured something into a bowl and handed it to Sheel.

  ‘Who hasn’t come? Women I haven’t spent time with in years, Jesselee, women I’d almost forgotten.’ She drank; cold tea, not bad. ‘Mates from my first raid, my other two living mothers – Derebayan wept buckets and made a spectacle of herself – several cousins and a Hont woman who familied with my Carrall mother two generations ago! The only person I really wanted to see was you.’

  ‘Tch, I’m not magic, you know,’ Jesselee said. ‘I’ll only tell you what everybody else tells you.’ She turned her head from side to side. ‘This camp smells of fresh meat. Who slaughtered?’

  ‘Sharavess Tent. They had a feast last night to return gifts they were holding for their tent child. The pack brought its body in yesterday morning – some quick illness, we think.’

  ‘Pity I’m too late,’ Jesselee said. ‘I know good stories about the Sharavess line that I could have told.’

  The sky was lighter, and Sheel could see her better now: a dumpy figure gnawing patiently and with effort on a strip of dried meat with the teeth on the good side of her mouth. She looked smaller than when Sheel had last seen her.

  ‘What’s the problem, Sheel? You are a mother of the child of Holdfaster Tent, and she’s due to come out of the childpack soon. You should be at Stone Dancing Camp. Even I’m going, as a family member, though I should be taking my last comfort in my own home tent before dying; so what keeps you away?’

  As long as Jesselee kept talking about her own death, she was unlikely to do anything about going to meet it. Sheel, loving her, had to smile. Yet she hesitated; daughter and mother of heart closeness were privileged to talk by themselves, but she did not enjoy the idea of being seen trotting out her troubles to her heartmother like a worried girl.

  She said, ‘Let me do your hair for you while we talk.’ That would relax them both. She settled herself behind Jesselee and began to undo and do up again in a new pattern the small tight braids in which the old woman’s gray hair was tied.

  ‘There are fems in Holdfaster Tent.’ Word had reached Sheel that Alldera had shown up at Stone Dancing Camp after the last Gather with Patarish Rois as her prisoner and another free fem companion. The Rois had been ransomed and released soon after. Now it was mid-Cool Season, two months later, and women said that Alldera and the other fem were still living in Holdfaster Tent.

  ‘Alldera knew she should be home for the child’s coming out,’ Jesselee said.

  ‘With another of her kind?’ Sheel turned her head and spat. ‘Alldera alone is bad enough. Because of her I haven’t been allowed to go on a borderlands patrol in years. Because of her the Torrinors had to pay horses for the tent herd of Holdfaster Tent.’

  Jesselee moved her head from under Sheel’s hands. ‘I love having my hair braided up but it always puts me to sleep. Come around here where I can see you, now that the sun’s getting up. Good. Now, tell me more about how you feel.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Aren’t y
ou curious?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not about the visiting ferns; about your child.’

  ‘No.’

  Jesselee sighed. With both hands she eased her leg into a slightly different angle of rest. It always hurt Sheel to see her do that. She could remember her heartmother as an active young woman, lithe and strong. Now every time they met, Jesselee was a little stiffer, her limp more pronounced.

  ‘Let me tell you what I’ve dreamed three nights since I left Stone Dancing,’ Sheel said. ‘I dream that I’m back on patrol. I go to the food cache in Long Valley by myself. There I find Alldera, swollen with her cub. I charge her and kill her and throw her body in the river. Then I ride to the others and say no one was there.

  ‘Feeling – dreaming such anger – I don’t want the child to sense that in one of its own mothers!’

  ‘Let me tell you what’s been worrying me for some time,’ said Jesselee. ‘I hear that you’ve been traveling around lately with one of those Omelly women. Now, I have nothing against the Omelly line; they are women like ourselves and worthy of companionship and affection. But it doesn’t do to be careless with them, Sheel. They’re dangerous.’

  ‘Grays Omelly and I are thinking of raiding together when the Dusty Season comes,’ Sheel said. ‘Omellys make raid mates as good as anyone, if you don’t let them provoke you and you watch your own behavior so you don’t set them off. I can handle Grays.’

  ‘Then you can handle Holdfaster Tent.’ Now Jesselee’s lined face was fully visible: thick eyebrows arched as if in perpetual surprise, heavy mouth droop-lipped, nose spread out on the face. She looked to Sheel like one of those leather dolls, features lined on with dye, that mothers sometimes made for their daughters. But Jesselee’s eyes, drilled deep and small, glittered sharp as stars. Oh, those Morrowtrows were homely women! For as long as she could remember Sheel had connected that homeliness with warmth and enfolding support.

  ‘Except for you, Sheel, there would be no Holdfaster Tent. You cared for that baby, you nursed it, just as the other sharemothers did. That child will look for you in Holdfaster Tent, and she won’t find you in Nenisi or Shayeen or Barvaran or Alldera and her femmish friend. You are the only Sheel Torrinor there is. The child has a claim on your mothering right to the end of her childhood, whatever her background may be, whoever her other mothers are.’

  ‘All right,’ Sheel sighed. ‘I’ll go.’

  However obscurely, a heartmother was always on your side.

  Jesselee said, ‘I’ll look for you there.’

  Later, while cleaning her horse’s feet, Sheel told Grays Omelly that she was returning to Holdfaster Tent. The Omelly breathed, ‘Sharu!’ and gave her the flickering, nervous glance everyone watched for in women of her line. It meant the onset of the unpredictable anxiety which plagued the Omellys and could make them dangerous.

  Sheel said, ‘I can’t fight off my heartmother.’

  ‘No,’ the Omelly said. She had a length of rawhide in her hand and she twisted it first one way and then another. ‘I guess she decided you’d spent enough time with a crazy Omelly.’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Sheel said, bracing more firmly on her thigh the horsehoof she was picking clean. ‘Come with me to Stone Dancing.’

  ‘Ikk. You won’t catch me hanging around a tent with fems in it. Fems smell.’

  ‘Everything that lives smells.’ The horse jerked its leg. Sheel said, ‘Ho, there!’ The horse breathed in groans as if Sheel’s careful extraction of packed dirt were torture.

  ‘I’m going raiding as we planned,’ Grays said. ‘Maybe later I’ll stop by and give you a horse for your sharechild. I’m curious to see a fem’s child.’

  Sheel let go the hoof and it clumped back to earth. ‘You have seen her. You were at the last Gather. She’s in the Stone Dancing pack. Didn’t you go out viewing the packs at the Gather like everybody else?’

  ‘You know Grays,’ Grays said, snapping the knotted end of the rawhide against the tent wall beside her. ‘They all look alike to Grays, she can’t tell one from another till they come out and their families clean them up.’

  Someone inside the tent shouted, ‘Will you stop that tapping, whoever’s doing that? You’re driving us crazy in here.’

  Sheel said, ‘I have to go to my family. It’s not any sort of insult to you.’

  ‘Nobody insults the crazy Omellys,’ Grays answered. ‘You never know what they might do in return.’

  When Sheel reached Stone Dancing Camp, the days were beginning to lose their cool bite and turn dry against the skin. She had taken her time, stopping to visit along the way. Jesselee was already in Holdfaster Tent. The tent child had not yet come out.

  Alldera looked older, steadier, more muscular than Sheel remembered. They avoided each other.

  Shortly after Sheel’s arrival, two more fems came. They had deserted their wagon crew to join Alldera and Daya, and they arrived hunched wretchedly on the backs of spare horses belonging to women of Towering Camp. The women had been heading for Stone Dancing and the fems, claiming kinship with Alldera, had begged them to guide them there. Since the Towering Camp women were related to Barvaran and to Shayeen, they had felt bound to honor the kinship claim, and had assented.

  The women had not enjoyed traveling with the fems. One of them reported to Sheel, ‘They made a fire of their own every night and cooked their own food as if our food were dirty.’

  Sheel saw that Alldera herself looked grim to see more fems come. Maybe she was selfish about losing her unique status here. But how could that be, since she had brought the first of them herself?

  The new fems draped hides over the inner tent ropes, screening off one wing for themselves. This had never been done before in the camps and mortified Sheel. Alldera sometimes joined them behind this divider, though she seldom slept there at night; she was sleeping with Nenisi again. The scarred one, Daya moved her own bedding behind the divider, however.

  According to Nenisi, the new fems said they put up the curtain because they felt they were being watched – and judged – all the time by the women of Stone Dancing.

  Sheel fervently wished they would make a tent of their own and live in that, because the curtain of hides did not shut out their femmish voices. They argued incessantly. At first women stopped to listen, but few could follow the rapid Holdfastish speech. One Calpaper woman said, ‘When they quarrel they sound like sharu in rut.’

  As tormenting for Sheel as their voices was the sweet smoke of the drug the fems called manna. Women occasionally brewed up a medicine from the plant for use in the treatment of certain conditions, but these fems put bits of the leaves on the fire and breathed the smoke. The fumes made Barvaran sleepy and silly, and Shayeen said she got dizzy from them. Sheel found the odor cloyingly sweet and heavy. The fems would not give up the drug or use it outside where, they claimed, the smoke would escape and be wasted.

  One evening the fems came out from behind their curtain and joined Sheel and some other women who were gathered outside the tent. The pretty fem called Tua announced, ‘Daya is going to tell a story. We thought maybe you’d like to hear it too.’

  Everyone was polite and interested, and a few women drifted over from other tents to sit and listen as the little scar-cheeked fem began:

  ‘Let me tell you all how it will be when we fems return to our own country, the Holdfast. We will find the men hiding in burrows in the ground like sharu, sharpening their teeth on the bones of the dead. At night they come out, scavenging for food in the burnt ruins of the City. We’ll be able to smell them through the walls. They’ve let their hair grow to cover their bodies, because they have no clothing without fems there to weave and sew for them.

  ‘One day I find a sick one creeping and hiding. I catch him with my rope, and I bring him back to feed and keep for my amusement. He trots after me for his handful of food, and I kick him or beat him as I like. He won’t run away because where else would he get food and a warm place to sleep? He knows nothing of makin
g food grow without slaves to do the work for him, so starvation has tamed him. I ride his shoulders when I choose not to walk, and everyone envies me and pays me to borrow the use of this creature that was a man. We’ll have found another way to make cubs by then, so the man I own will keep his genitals only to piss through and for us to mock when we use him as our clown; as the horrible example that we show our children to teach them how debased a human being can be.

  ‘I take my man pet into the City’s ruins. I let him visit his former private quarters – he was a rich man – for the pleasure of seeing him weep and sniffle into his beard as he handles the fragments of the statues that once stood in his garden.

  ‘On this day one of the statues leaps up to attack me! It’s another man, a wild creature all hair and teeth. He charges me, a broken-bladed knife in one hand, the other brandishing his penis, for the wild men have stories that the fems in the old days worshipped the rod that beat them.

  ‘I draw back my arm to hurl my hatchet at the wild creature, but my man pet throws himself on the attacker before I can do it. The two roll in the dirt, leaving spots of their blood where the splinters of brick and broken tile pierce their skins. My pet gets the other by the beard and smashes the back of his head against a fountain rim. Then he bites his throat out – after all, he was used to eating raw flesh. I whip him back from his prey.

  ‘That’s when my pet first sees clearly the bearded face of the dead man. He recognizes his own lover of years before. He screams, he rushes away and hurls himself into the river.

  ‘But I am not unhappy to have lost my pet. Ask any master: a crazy pet is worse than no pet at all.’

  It was, Sheel thought, a very peculiar story. Women of other tents who had stopped to listen did not stay to comment and discuss it, but thanked Daya politely and wandered on to chat at other fires. Many women talked about the last remark afterward. No one claimed to understand it.

  Sheel said to Jesselee, ‘They meant to provoke us. They know we’ll never allow them to return to the Holdfast.’