Motherlines

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  Alldera had never considered the free fems who admired Daya and who would be attracted and reassured by tales of her presence here. Four had come, and maybe there would be others. Their presence made Alldera uneasy.

  They brought friction. There was their inveterate stealing, their pathetic arrogance, their clannishness. And Daya’s affair with Grays Omelly – how long before other free fems moved into the beds of other women, with what consequences? Fems were intense and jealous lovers, totally opposite to the casual behavior of women. They insisted on wearing sandals, chewed tea instead of drinking it, spat everywhere in a way that the women found offensive …

  So many irritating matters, so difficult to cope with and to explain. Even Nenisi did not fully understand; and there was an aspect of the fems’ presence that Alldera could not even try to explain at all. Perhaps Sheel felt it too – the unpredictable influence of a number of free fems living in a women’s camp.

  Alldera had wanted to make changes, first in herself and then in the free fems, but never in the lives of the women. Now changes had followed her to Stone Dancing Camp, and she could not see where it would lead. It frightened her.

  Alldera felt that she and the black woman were closer than ever. She no longer took lessons at Nenisi’s knee. Often they did not speak together at all, but clung close in simple gratitude for each other’s presence. They shored each other up; maybe Nenisi was not as confident as she seemed. Don’t think that. She’s no more perfect than anyone, but grant her her strengths …

  There were traces of gray in Nenisi’s kinky hair now, like curls of pale ash in charcoal. Nenisi was not afraid, and she was wise. Didn’t the women say, Those Conors are always right? If Alldera said what she was thinking, Nenisi would say, Why these gloomy, anxious thoughts? This is a day of gladness for your child’s sake, our daughter’s sake.

  The women were sitting grouped around the stone pit now, home from walking over the world. They hugged the child and patted her, and she shyly accepted their embraces.

  Barvaran murmured something to the child, who rose from among the women and came to stand in front of Alldera. She put her hands on Alldera’s jaw and tilted her head back to study her face: warm hands, light and steady, that Alldera did not resist.

  ‘Is my nose flat in the middle like yours?’ the girl said, frowning over the unfamiliarity of the language of adults or perhaps over the idea of having a flat nose.

  ‘No.’ Alldera paused. She searched the bold young face before her. ‘You’ll be better looking than I am.’

  The youngster laughed like metal chinking on metal. ‘But we’re blood kin, how could one of us be prettier?’

  Alldera found that she could not now remember the face of either of the two men who might have been this child’s father.

  Jesselee, in charge of the coming-out arrangements, did not alter the traditions in any way for this unique child. There was feasting, dancing on the dance ground, gift giving, and gift acceptance, all centered on the child and her introduction to the women of other tents. These ceremonies involved the rest of the family, but not the bloodmother. The bloodmother always tended the tent herd. The effect was to insulate the bloodmother and the child from each other.

  The bloodmother looked at her child and saw her own image made young, her replacement in the world, Nenisi said. The child saw in her bloodmother the pattern for her own being. Women said it was best not to let this powerful connection unbalance all the other relationships that guided their two lives, and so it was appropriate that the bloodmother and child be separated for a time.

  ‘Such a fuss,’ Daya said, riding with Alldera on the second morning after the coming out. Daya had brought a flask of blood broth from which Alldera drank gratefully. ‘Not that we ourselves hold back. Tua’s given the cub a tooled leather belt. The other three made her sandals.’

  ‘She’ll never wear them. What did you give?’

  Eyes downcast and showing some embarrassment, Daya said, ‘Fedeka’s here, traveling a while with a trade wagon. I got the kit a jar of perfume in case she should ever want to smell like something besides horses, sweat, and old leather.’

  Alldera said soberly, ‘Couldn’t you persuade the other fems with us to go back to the tea camp with the trade wagon?’

  ‘They didn’t come here just for me, Alldera, and they won’t leave just because I tell them to. Maybe if you said something to them – ’

  ‘I’d look pretty foolish, telling them to go home to Elnoa after what I used to say about her. Look, Daya; I have something on my mind.’ Although there was no one near them on the green and glistening plain, Alldera lowered her voice: ‘It’s the naming. Nenisi told me how it’s supposed to be – I smile and produce a name and use the formula: that the name came into my mouth with the food I ate or with the water I drank from the wells.

  ‘Only no names come. Nothing.’

  ‘How about “Tezera”?’ Daya said hopefully. ‘That’s a pretty name.’ She listed several others: ‘Fenessa, Maja, Leesha, Tamsana.’

  Alldera disapproved. ‘Those are all femmish names that a master would give a new-bought slave.’

  She saw Daya’s eyes widen slightly. ‘She is a femmish cub, Alldera.’

  ‘Is that what they say at the trade wagon?’

  ‘Yes,’ Daya admitted. ‘They think she should have a femmish name, ending in “a”. We’ve all kept our slave names, in respect for our past. And she was conceived back there.’

  Alldera laughed. ‘A femmish name wouldn’t make any difference. The women would just drop the “a”, since to them she’s a woman, not a fem – unlike ourselves, who wobble along somewhere in between.’ She kicked her horse into a brisker stride.

  Daya kept pace alongside. ‘Some fems are saying that we should insist on taking the child and dedicating her to Moonwoman. They’d be furious if they knew I’d told you.’

  ‘Why do they care about her all of a sudden?’

  ‘You know many fems in the tea camp thought from the beginning that you were wrong to leave the cub with the Mares,’ Daya replied. ‘They thought you should have brought her with you to the tea camp so she would grow up with her own people. These Mares are admirable in their way, but she doesn’t belong with them.’

  ‘The fems talk as if I owe them something.’ Alldera thought angrily of her broken ribs. She pressed Daya: ‘What about you? Do you believe I owe you and Fedeka and the rest of the wagon ferns?’

  ‘No; but I think that we do need, for our own sakes, to make a claim on that cub.’

  ‘What’s this “for our own sakes”, Daya? Is this you?’ Daya looked older, more beautiful and less mischievous – something of a stranger. ‘Go and tell them that I won’t have them – or anyone – meddling with the child’s life, not in any way. This cub has nothing to do with them. You had nothing to do with her. That’s the men’s disease, thinking they’re so important that everything connects to them and their schemes and desires. How I hate that mixture of the worst in both men and fems – cowardice and conceit together! That’s what they’d teach the child if they could get her.’

  ‘Alldera, don’t turn on me,’ the pet fem said unhappily. ‘I’m not your enemy.’

  The rough words had not been meant for Daya, Alldera knew. She was sorry, and they rode on without speaking. Then she tapped Daya’s knee. ‘I’ve got to find a name! Not a name from the old life, like those you’ve suggested. Think of a name that’s not the property of the fems and not the property of the women either.’

  Daya smiled her scarred smile. ‘Call her “Alldera”.’

  The flaps of Holdfaster Tent’s front wall were pinned back to make a wide entrance. The women of Stone Dancing Camp had assembled outside, all but the Holdfaster sharemothers, who sat expectantly within. Alldera, seated by the fire cage, could see the child coming flanked by Sheel and Shayeen. The two women were bringing the last of the child’s presents. It was time for the naming.

  All the femmish names from Alldera’s memory se
emed harsh and ugly. My mother, whoever she was, never named me, she thought as the child drew nearer. I chose no names for my other two cubs. The master did that. Why do they leave the naming to me? Her palms and her face began to sweat, and she sat there thinking over and over, the one who gives the name is the master.

  Sheel and Shayeen brought the child into the tent, and she went right to Barvaran, her heartmother. Standing before the red-faced woman, the child said formally what she had been told to say: ‘Heartmother, I am not wild any more. Stone Dancing Camp has welcomed me among women. I need a woman’s name.’

  Barvaran said, ‘Your bloodmother has a name for you.’

  The child turned to Alldera.

  It was two days since the beginning of the coming out. Looking at her now, Alldera saw something new: the color of her hair, which hung dry and clean and fire-glossed. She saw very suddenly and strongly the color of the two men who had fucked her shortly before her flight from the Holdfast: one tawny, the other pale-skinned with thick black hair. She said the first thing that came into her head:

  ‘You haven’t got the color of either of them. Your hair is like the coat of Shayeen’s sorrel mare.’

  She saw the look of consternation on the women’s faces.

  Then the child of the tent, oblivious, laughed her shining laugh and announced with her thin arms outflung, ‘My name is Sorrel! I’ll ride nothing but red horses all my life, so watch out for me, you who keep red horses in your herds!’

  ‘A lucky beginning,’ old Jesselee muttered. She got up and closed the tent. The naming part was over.

  Shayeen began her self-song:

  My blaze-faced bay carried me for seven days,

  From Red Sand Wells to the Great Salty River,

  And she was twelve years old then,

  The year I first raided for horses –

  Each sharemother was to sing her self-song, and Alldera was to sing last. With Nenisi’s help she had put together lines telling of her escape and her life among the women. She hoped she could remember them. She was still shaking inwardly with relief that the naming had gone off all right.

  Something noisy was happening outside. Alldera stopped breathing. Shayeen turned, glaring as she sang.

  There were furious voices, and someone fought loose the pins that closed the edges of the entry flaps. Fedeka strode inside, fierce-faced, a one-armed vision. Ferns from the wagon crew peered in past her.

  ‘Alldera! You forgot us!’ Fedeka cried.

  Sheel had her hand on the haft of her knife.

  Alldera sprang up. ‘What are you doing here, Fedeka?’

  ‘Why is she singing? Why the women’s songs?’ Fedeka demanded. Her eyes glittered hard as metal, and below the drooping line of her long nose her mouth was grim with anger. ‘You should be singing for the cub, Alldera.’

  ‘Get out of here,’ Shayeen commanded, outrage cracking her habitual calm. ‘You’re not supposed to be at this ceremony.’

  Panic gripped Alldera, she could not think well. Who knew what the invaders from the trade wagon might do? Didn’t Fedeka understand that Alldera’s turn to sing would come later? Was she infuriated by the child’s non-femmish name? With relief Alldera saw that Daya was sidling into the tent at Fedeka’s back. She would appeal to Daya for support; but then Fedeka shouted, ‘We have our songs too!’ and opened her mouth wide and wailed out a verse:

  The greedy whip scorches, the load burns me down, the eyes of my master are everywhere.

  My lover has fled, I will not pursue her.

  Shall I see her bloody footprints halted by a closed City door

  And the flames of the masters’ eyes suck at her face and hair?

  The greedy whip scorches, the load burns me down …

  It made the women flinch. Sorrel stared open-mouthed.

  When the singing stopped, Daya said in her soft manner, ‘Women of Holdfaster Tent, that is a song of Alldera’s bloodline. Not a self-song – we fems had no self-songs – but we did sing our lives.’

  ‘We’ll go back outside now,’ Fedeka said, ‘but not far. We know whose cub it is, so we came.’ She stared reproachfully at Alldera. ‘Even though the dam forgot us.’

  Daya put a hand on Alldera’s arm. ‘I said they should come,’ she whispered under the sound of Shayeen’s renewed singing.

  ‘You want to tear me in two, you want to force me to choose,’ Alldera whispered back.

  Daya replied, pleading, ‘You said I shouldn’t let you forget who you are.’ She left. No one looked at Alldera except Sorrel with her wide, dazed eyes and Nenisi.

  Sheel sang next, her voice breaking with fury. Barvaran sang, Nenisi sang, Jesselee sang. The tea bowl was handed to Alldera so she could moisten her throat. She sipped, hiding her face with the bowl. Into the silence came the singing of the wagon fems from outside. Muffled by the walls of the tent, their voices were to Alldera like the voices of generations of ghosts far away in the Holdfast.

  Alldera said over the singing, ‘I resign my right to sing for my bloodchild. Let my femmish kindred sing in my place.’

  They listened in silence to the fems singing:

  Wash all clean, black sea, roll stones,

  Break walls, salt sand, spare none.

  Men will moan, and fems will roar.

  We breathed earth all our generations.

  We can breathe an ocean of dead men and not care.

  In the trading fems’ wagon late that night the fire bowls were lit, and there was a scent of manna. Alldera came because she could not stand the angry looks of the women, and she did not want to be alone tonight. The naming of the child had made her feel old and unimportant.

  She needed to find out how the free fems would greet her.

  They made room for her without fuss, and she sat down with weary relief amid the tea-scented bundles of trade goods and the rolls of bedding of the crew. The atmosphere in the wagon was vibrant with victory. From their triumphant glances at her she guessed they felt they had repossessed not only the child but its mother.

  Daya was telling an ugly Holdfast story about a man who betrayed his lover and how his lover killed him with a whip and ran his flayed skin up the flagpole of their company hall next morning.

  ‘Mother Moon,’ sighed Tua, leaning her head back against the wagon wall, ‘I don’t miss the men and their mad, mean city, but how I miss the smell of the great salt sea!’

  A flood of reminiscence followed.

  ‘The sea,’ they said. ‘The taste of fresh laver, when we could steal it.’ ‘Remember the look of the beach at Lammintown on a bright morning, with the town coiling up the hills behind it?’

  ‘Once we got hold of some prime manna that belonged to the master of a friend of mine – ’ ‘Remember how quiet the City got when the men went dreaming on manna? You could sit in your quarters, cool and waiting, and listening to how quiet it was. You could think about how it would be if those quiet buildings belonged to us, no masters there at all.’ ‘Remember the sound of the sea, and the beaches shining hot in the sun?’ ‘The moon was better. A poor fem could look straight at the moon and not be roasted or blinded by it, and it spread the sea with a cool, silver light.’

  ‘In my company’s hall they had four different sets of tableware and another dozen small sets for the Senior men – all the colors you’ve ever seen, each set to go with a different meal. The eating hall used to glow with the brightness of it. We never minded washing up, it was such a pleasure handling those glossy plates and platters.’ ‘I never handled anything but a weed hoe and a ditching shovel, but I remember how the land smelled. We used to stumble around half dreaming at manna harvest time.’

  ‘I used to polish my master’s jewelry for him and pin it on my lover when the master was gone,’ Daya said. ‘We made ourselves splendid for each other! There was a brooch of silver in the form of a kneeling boy, with eyes of colored stones …’

  They spoke of greenness all year round, the smell of the river, fog in the morning, storms that
shook the cliffs of Lammintown and threw the sea up against the sky; of good, strong beer from the City breweries, of the excitement of inter-company skirmishes fought in the big square, of the brutal, crazy arrogance of the men and the sly, perilous stratagems of fems.

  Alldera listened with her head bowed, for she knew they did not see what she did: the vast rift between these cherished memories and the songs of pain they had sung for Sorrel. The fems’ blindness made her feel dismal and exhausted.

  For years they had sat around their fires here in the Grasslands and carefully picked over their Holdfast lives, extracting the few bearable bits, embroidering them for their own and others’ comfort.

  Pity for their need wrenched at her. Pity for herself, too; their cheering stories were just fantasies to her. She shared only the anguish of their bitter songs.

  What are we, here? Alldera thought, looking around at the rapt, firelit faces. Outsiders, eking out a living at trading, which women must have handled perfectly well for themselves before free fems ever came here. The women don’t need us, there is no next generation of fems that need us, we don’t need ourselves. If we vanished tonight, whisked away like dream people, who would miss us?

  Someone was absent from the gathering, the one fem who had always seemed to her to belong to the Grasslands. Leaning nearer to Tua, Alldera murmured, ‘Where is Fedeka?’

  ‘She left,’ came the answer. ‘She said that with the rest of us staying in Stone Dancing Camp, she wouldn’t have to worry about leaving the child here among women.’