Motherlines

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  Alldera did not have to speak against Sorrel’s pleas. The women in the tent said firmly that Sorrel might help with weapons, childpack, horses, or with any work in the camp, and perhaps in emergencies she might run messages; but that was all.

  ‘Just like your age mates from the pack,’ Jesselee said.

  ‘Most of them are pregnant,’ Sorrel objected. ‘I’m not.’

  ‘And you never will be, if some sharu claws your insides out.’

  To Alldera’s surprise, Daya did not turn to making arrows or to some other protected, camp-bound task. She became a collector of arrows for the archers. Looking back, Alldera would see her riding in long sweeps back and forth behind a shooting party, leaning steeply out of her saddle to retrieve arrows from dead and dying sharu. Daya rode gauntleted and booted in boiled leather like that which shielded her horse’s legs. Unwounded sharu sometimes turned from devouring their own injured to attack a passing rider, and even in dying the beasts could be lethally quick and strong. Daya’s leather armor was soon black with blood. She looked like some dream warrior, the more terrible for her stained armor, her neat, small figure, her scarred beauty.

  She worked closer to the sharu than anyone. Alldera noted with satisfaction that even Sheel received her arrows from Daya with a civility verging on respect.

  Sorrel did get into the field, in a fashion, by racing out one morning to tell Alldera that Daya had been injured.

  Dropping back from her group of archers, Alldera said, ‘Tell me, quickly.’

  ‘A big sharu jumped on her horse’s rump and raked her down the back. She had an arrow in her hand, and she jabbed the point right into the sharu’s eye and killed it. They say they found her bent down from her saddle, streaming blood, trying to work the arrow back out of the eye socket, but the barb had caught, and Tico says it was the coolest thing she ever saw, but Daya was weeping and screaming the whole time and kept throwing up all the way back.’

  Sorrel had come armed with a lance, not a bow, so there could be no excuse for her staying. The plain shifted and rippled with moving sharu only thirty meters off.

  ‘Thanks for the message,’ Alldera said. ‘Now go back.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to ride home and see how she is?’ Sorrel cried. ‘I could relieve you here. Jesselee says – ’

  ‘I’ll come like everyone else, when I’m out of arrows.’

  ‘But I want – ’

  ‘A good messenger takes back the answer as soon as she has it.’

  ‘I’ll tell Daya you’re all right, I’ll tell her you’ll come.’ Sorrel galloped away.

  Later, Alldera found the pet fem sitting by Holdfaster Tent, her torso and one arm wound in a band of soft leather, a bloody shirt draped over her slim shoulders. She looked very white but composed, and she was stirring one of Jesselee’s pots of medicine with her free hand.

  ‘Poor Daya,’ Alldera said. ‘More scars.’

  ‘I got the arrow back.’ Daya invited her, with a graceful wave of the stirring spoon, to sit.

  ‘I need to change horses,’ Alldera said.

  ‘You need to rest,’ Jesselee said. ‘I can see the muscles in your arms jumping with fatigue. If you go right out again, you’ll only shoot wildly and make more work for others.’ She got up stiffly, laying aside the leather she had been cutting into strips. ‘I’ll go shift your saddle to a fresh horse, if I can find one.’

  She limped away, chirruping to Alldera’s mount which plodded at her shoulder.

  Alldera sat down with Daya in the sun outside the tent. ‘What horse were you riding?’

  ‘Dark Tea. She was cut badly, but Jesselee has stitched her up. Poor beast, she’ll have scars worse than mine.’

  ‘They could have given you something younger. I rode that horse when I was first here, years ago.’

  ‘That sharu jumped right up onto her. She staggered, but she didn’t fall or bolt, so I had my balance and could put some thrust behind the arrow in my hand. She’s a good, steady mount, Dark Tea. Though my dun would have been better.’

  Daya stirred the steaming brew erratically. Some of it slopped over the rim of the kettle now and then and made the fire underneath hiss.

  The camp was unusually quiet. Most of its inhabitants were out shooting sharu, and the childpack was confined safely in the sweat tent. There was a faint smell of decay on the wind. Not enough sharu were swarming in this area any more to eat up their own dead.

  ‘How long can this last?’ Alldera muttered.

  ‘We needed the practice,’ Daya said. ‘We need to be thoroughly blooded before going back. It’s different, wearing armor, seeing the teeth of a ravening sharu snap shut only a hand’s breadth from your face. I feel strong – the way I did when I first learned to ride.’

  Alldera leaned forward, elbows on knees, looking out past the tents at where wheeling groups of mounted archers drew gouts of dust from the plain. Her arms and chest and back ached. She felt as if she had had no rest for months. Wearily she surrendered to the inevitable subject: ‘You really mean it, don’t you. Going back,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve never talked about it with me,’ the pet fem said. ‘It’s been on everyone’s mind for so long. What do you think about it?’

  ‘Daya, must the free fems go back to the Holdfast? Not the free fems of your stories, mind you. The real ones.’

  ‘I can only tell you about myself. Look at me, Alldera – a first-quality pet fern, marred certainly, but still – ! Here I am, dressed in stinking leather, with dirt caked in the roots of my hair, living among beasts and very little above them in houses of their skins. I own my clothing, my saddle, a few ornaments, and the knife on my belt. Oh, and that gray horse the tent gave me to make up for butchering my dun. I spend my time tending animals or fixing things or talking – about old times, another life. I drift over the plains as aimlessly as the clouds, my direction dictated by weather, by grass. I love the horses, the women too; but my life is just floating past me here.’

  Angrily Alldera said, ‘Must the free fems go back because you are bored?’

  Daya touched her lightly, pleadingly. ‘Don’t you ever think of the richness, the excitement and color of the old days in the Holdfast? It wasn’t all horror and pain. Nenisi is certainly a splendid person in her way – even rather stylish; but what about the brilliance, the music – ’

  ‘I have only pain and anger from those times.’

  ‘Maybe that’s what we have to go home to do, then,’ Daya said. ‘To give the pain and anger to our masters, if there are any of them left, and take the brightness for ourselves. It was all built on our backs. Can you blame us now for wanting to claim it?’

  ‘And if we find nothing but bones?’

  ‘Then we’ll make something beautiful out of bones,’ Daya replied, her eyes lustrous with excitement. ‘Here, everything is already made and it all belongs to the women. We can only borrow. At home, what we find and what we make will be ours.’

  ‘Ours. All twenty-two of us?’

  ‘The others will come too. Except Fedeka, probably, and Elnoa.’

  ‘Elnoa! She’s led them for years. They won’t all desert her, she won’t let them.’

  ‘She’s a leader only as long as we follow her,’ Daya pointed out.

  Women’s reasoning, Alldera noted with grim amusement, and in the women’s country, true.

  She laughed ruefully. ‘Recently a woman came to me and asked me to interfere in the private affairs of one of us. I said no, and she said in a sneering way, “Why not, you’re their chief.” I told her I hadn’t spent all that time alone here in Stone Dancing without learning a few things – like how not to be a master. I thought that was a pretty smart answer at the time.’

  ‘Left to yourself you’d stay here forever, wouldn’t you,’ Daya said. ‘I’m sorry. It’s a pity that we should require you after you’ve made peace with this place, but you’re part of what draws the free fems. It isn’t me, you know. I’m like the others, I make my peace with the people aro
und me, moment by moment.

  ‘Don’t look so astonished. I know you expect to hear such clever things only from Nenisi. The Conors are wise, the Conors are always right, and besides you love Nenisi and you still don’t think much of me.’

  It was still so shamefully easy to forget that Daya’s feelings could be hurt. Alldera shook off the pain of having caused pain and capitulated. ‘You win, Daya. I can’t see fems come galloping in, red with the blood of sharu and grabbing for more arrows, and pretend not to know that the free fems are spoiling for war. It’s my doing, some of it. I’m even proud of how strong they’ve grown, but that doesn’t make going back any less wretched for me.’

  ‘I told them you understood, I told them I knew you!’ Daya exclaimed. ‘Some fems said you’d been bewitched by Nenisi, but I knew better. Alldera, if word gets to the tea camp that we’ll take in anyone else who wants to learn to ride and shoot, they’ll come – they’ll all come. Say you want them and I’ll get them for you. We can be more than forty strong when we ride home!’

  ‘Go ahead,’ Alldera said, kicking savagely at the edge of the fire with her booted foot. ‘It’s the best story you’ve had for them so far. They’ll trample each other finding places for themselves in it. Put it all down to the will of Moonwoman, that’s what Fedeka would say. Only I wish you’d told some stories about fems staying with the Riding Women, living good lives here, instead of about going home.’

  ‘I tell the stories that come to me to tell; don’t be bitter,’ Daya begged. ‘Even you say “home” now when you mean the Holdfast. It’s your triumph too, that we turn homeward at last.

  ‘Listen, here’s a story for you: we are a small, grim army drawn up on some high path on the far side of the mountains, looking out in silence – except for the stamp of an impatient pony’s hoof, the creak of leather as someone rises in her stirrups to see better – over our own country, green to the horizon line of the sea …’

  EPILOGUE

  14

  Sheel was making a new boot patterned on the leathers of an old one. Outside the air was crisp. The tent was closed and the fire glowed under the draft of the smoke hole.

  Sorrel lay on the bare floor of the tent, kept in on account of various abrasions and one furiously multi-colored eye. She had put on muscle and weight since coming out, but she was no match for a crowd of her pack mates.

  The tent was quiet. Guests had come, a daughter of Barvaran’s traveling with a couple of cousins. They and the fems and the rest of the family were all out gossiping and borrowing extra bedding and supplies for tonight. Jesselee was home doing nothing, Shayeen was in charge of the food, and Sheel was in charge of Sorrel.

  Sorrel said, ‘I don’t like Saylim Stayner.’

  ‘You still shouldn’t have tripped her with the dung rake,’ Shayeen scolded. She was pounding dried meat for the evening meal. ‘You made gossip for the whole camp. If the others hadn’t given you a licking for what you did, you’d probably come up in the chief tent for a fine.’

  Her words were barely audible over the pounding. Sorrel was making faces at Sheel, trying to convey the joke of not being able to hear the rebuke.

  Sheel said, ‘Shayeen’s right about the dung rake.’

  ‘Oh, Saylim didn’t get hurt or anything. Just insulted.’

  ‘Don’t sound so satisfied.’

  ‘She insulted me first!’

  ‘How?’ This was Jesselee, listening from her bedding.

  Uncharacteristically, Sorrel paused. Sheel watched her push the floor sand around with her fingers, making ridges and valleys. Then Sorrel said, ‘Saylim said the self-song I was making left out the most important part: about my bloodmother being from over the mountains, and how she had a master there. She said it sly and droopy-eyed, as if it meant something rotten.’

  Shayeen whacked the meat one last time, scraped it into a bowl, and marched off.

  The youngster brushed the hair back from her face, showing the bruised eye in all its splendor. ‘I don’t much like my mother Shayeen Bawn either,’ she muttered.

  ‘Why not?’ Sheel began punching holes around the edges of a leather piece with an awl.

  ‘She’s always telling me what to do.’

  ‘Let’s talk about the Stayners for a minute,’ Sheel said. ‘Myself, I don’t like that line. The Stayners pick their noses.’

  ‘Rosamar says – ’

  ‘I know, they always say they have some kind of funny crookedness inside their noses that bothers them. I don’t care. They could still blow their noses as other women do.

  ‘And I don’t like the Ohayars because they’re sneaky. The Fowersaths are quick-tempered, the Mellers borrow things and don’t return them, the Churrs have ice cold hands, the Hayscalls mumble till you think you’re going deaf.’

  Jesselee joined in zestfully, ‘The Clarishes are vain, the Perikens exaggerate everything, the Farls are lazy and their fingers turn back in a sickening way and make a horrible wet cracking noise doing it besides. As for the Morrowtrows’ – she was one herself, of course, gappy-toothed and wide in the jaw – ‘they like to stick their noses into everything that happens, especially to children of their own families.’

  ‘However,’ Sheel said, ‘there isn’t one of those lines that we don’t both have kindred in. I forgot to add the Bawns. I don’t love the Bawns, but here I am, sharemothering you with Shayeen Bawn.’

  She wished she had not said that. After all, it was not a matter of choice that she was familying with Shayeen.

  ‘You don’t know, though, what it’s like to have Shayeen as one of your mothers,’ Sorrel said, doodling a frowning face in the sand with her finger.

  Sheel set her foot into the curve of the boot sole. She had cut the thin sole wet and set it days earlier to dry in a sand mold of her footprint. It was a comfortable fit. ‘No, but I do have mothers I don’t love.’

  Jesselee interrupted. ‘Sorrel, you’ll be related to women all your life whom you don’t love or even like – raid mates, pack mates, relatives of your mothers, captives – you may even find that you don’t care for your own bloodchildren. Liking women has nothing to do with being related to them, and you might as well work that out and get used to it right here in your own family.

  ‘Have you slept with anybody yet? Since the pack, I mean.’

  Her face burning, Sorrel nodded.

  ‘A pack mate who came out ahead of you? Yes. Well, when you start yearning after a grown woman see that you go and lie with Shayeen. Then you’ll like her better.’

  ‘You shouldn’t talk that way about things like that,’ the youngster whispered hoarsely.

  ‘Save me from foal love,’ Jesselee groaned. ‘Who are you sleeping with – that young Bay that lost a finger roping a sharu instead of lancing it like a woman?’

  Sorrel’s blush deepened. ‘Not everybody would be so brave.’

  ‘Not everybody would be so stupid. Archen Bay risked herself and her tent’s best hunting horse just to show off.’

  ‘My leg hurts,’ Sorrel said disconsolately. ‘One of those piss faces kicked me.’ When no sympathy was forthcoming she tried a new subject. ‘I don’t know why you bother making yourself a pair of boots, Sheel. I have three pair. You’re not much bigger than I am in the hands and feet. One of my pair would fit you.’

  ‘Then the woman who gave that pair to you would be unhappy with both of us.’

  Sorrel brushed the sand flat. ‘Do you like my bloodmother?’

  ‘No,’ Sheel said.

  ‘Why don’t you like the ferns?’ Sorrel had spent more time with them since the sharu swarming.

  ‘Why do you like them?’

  ‘Oh …’ Sorrel made a ludicrously long and dreamy face. ‘I think they’re very strong and sad because of their terrible lives.’

  ‘They’re from the Holdfast,’ Sheel said. ‘I don’t like things from the Holdfast.’

  ‘Am I from the Holdfast too?’

  ‘You’re one of us.’

  ‘I am a
little Holdfastish in my blood, and special.’

  Irritably Jesselee said, ‘Don’t get stuck on yourself. Everyone’s flawed, everyone is still a woman.’

  ‘I know my faults,’ Sorrel said, sulky again. ‘I ought to. Everybody’s always telling me.’

  ‘So they should,’ Sheel answered. She refrained from adding, they should because you have no real Motherline to look at and see your faults mirrored in it. There were always the oddest gaps in her conversations with Sorrel.

  ‘What’s it like, beyond the borderlands?’ Sorrel asked.

  ‘No one’s been there.’

  ‘My bloodmother and her cousins have.’

  ‘Then ask them.’

  ‘I don’t always understand what they say,’ Sorrel admitted, ‘and if I say they don’t make any sense, they get angry or shrug and change the subject. Is it true that a man has a hanger-and-bag, just like a stallion, and hair on his face like the Chowmers?’

  ‘More hair than the Chowmers,’ Jesselee said absently, mouthing a bit of food or the memory of a bit of food, ‘less hanger than a stallion.’

  Sorrel snorted. ‘It sounds silly and clumsy, like carrying a lance around with you all the time.’ She sighed. ‘I wish my bloodmother liked me. Maybe she will after I make a good raid.’ She rolled over and sat up, wincing slightly. ‘Why can’t I go raiding with Shelmeth’s band?’

  ‘No. Shelmeth Sanforath is not experienced enough to lead a raid,’ Jesselee said.

  ‘But nobody will be expecting us, it’s so early in the season! It’s going to be a triumph!’ Sorrel blazed with enthusiasm.

  Sheel began to stitch the uppers to the sole. ‘Early raids have been tried before. It takes good judgment to pull them off successfully.’

  ‘I want to go!’

  ‘No,’ Sheel said. ‘You’ve asked about this before. Jesselee says no, Shayeen says no, Barvaran says no, I say no, and Nenisi says no.’

  ‘You all treat me like a baby, but I’m too big to ride in a hip sling, you know. I have to go on my maiden raid sometime. How am I supposed to find women to sharemother my first child with me if I don’t start now to get a good reputation?’