‘Try avoiding the reputation of the sort of person who attacks other women with a dung rake,’ Jesselee suggested.
Ignoring this, Sorrel went on, ‘I want to have a dozen wild raider daughters and then go wandering with you, Sheel, and the bravest of my pack mates. I’ll be the scourge of the plains and make my daughters rich with gifts of the finest horses in the camps.’
‘A dozen daughters?’ Jesselee said. ‘After a dozen daughters you’ll be lucky if you can still get your legs together around a horse’s ribs.’
‘Really?’
‘No, not really, silly. Worry about real dangers, like having your arm broken in a fight.’
Sorrel laughed. ‘I’ll get Alldera to teach me kick fighting so I can kick Saylim’s eye out if she comes after me again.’
‘I don’t like that kind of bloodthirsty talk,’ Jesselee began in a tone that promised a lecture; but then some youngster put her head into the tent and shouted,
‘Pillo fight starting!’
‘I’m coming,’ Sorrel said, jumping up.
Sheel said, ‘Youngsters’ rules – no rough stuff.’
‘It’s no fun then,’ Sorrel objected.
‘We’ll be careful,’ said the girl at the entry, having learned more than Sorrel about placating her elders. ‘Come on, Sorrel. I bet you my old gray horse can – ’
They were gone, their voices already locked in argument.
Jesselee lifted one knee and began kneading her calf. ‘Cramp,’ she groaned. ‘Hits me even in the middle of lovemaking, no respect for an old woman’s last few pleasures …’ She sighed. ‘The child is right, Sheel. She should get one good raid behind her so that women will start to think of familying with her for her own children. I’d like to see her show everyone her quality myself, before I die.’
‘You want me to organize her maiden raid for her?’
‘Which of her mothers would do it better than you?’
Why am I hesitating? Sheel thought, frowning over her work. Sorrel has courage and intelligence, there’s no sign yet of her femmish heritage. But after her first raid – the next step is preparing her for her mating. That’s where it could come out.
‘Heartmother, what’s going to happen to that child if she turns out not to be fertile to a stud horse but only to a man, like her femmish bloodmother?’
‘You, daughter of my heart, know better than I do that a woman’s worth doesn’t lie only in the children of her body – though sometimes women do lose sight of that truth.’
‘It would make a difference,’ Sheel said. ‘Sorrel has no blood relations to keep her line among us. If she has no children of her own body, after her death she’ll just – disappear.’
‘Would you forget her?’
‘Never.’
‘The self-songs of many lines have words in them about women who “disappeared” that way when whole chains of descent ended. Those women are not completely lost.’
Sheel said, ‘I don’t want Sorrel to be lost at all.’
Sheel asked Sorrel to come with her to choose horses for the raid they were planning. Delighted, Sorrel dug out her favorite gift, a light leather shirt covered with big flakes cut from the hooves of dead horses and sewn into a sort of armor of overlapping scales.
‘I want to see how it feels,’ she said as they rode out toward the grazing grounds. ‘Maybe I’ll take it with me when we go raiding. I like to hear the little pieces all click and rub together.’
‘A fancy shirt like yours is only a gift thing, something to make bets with. Women don’t wear them.’
Sorrel promptly wrestled the shirt off over her head and tied it behind the cantle of her saddle.
A little distance from the grazing horses most of the new fems had gathered, sitting like Riding Women in the shadows of their mounts. One of them walked a spotted mare back and forth before the others. Their voices carried clearly. They were agreeing, more and more confidently, that the horse was lame.
Alldera, sitting chin on fist among them, demanded, ‘Which leg?’
‘Off fore,’ said a blond fem. What a pale people they were under their sunburn, not a black skin among them, Sheel thought.
‘How can you tell?’
‘By the way she walks.’
Alldera directed that the horse be led away and then toward the group again, head on. ‘Which leg?’
‘Near foreleg,’ Sorrel whispered to Sheel. ‘See how she drops her head?’
‘I know,’ Sheel said dryly.
Alldera spoke to the fems with the faintest trace of weariness. ‘The leg she drops her head over is the leg all her weight is going on, to spare the sore one.’
‘Near foreleg,’ someone volunteered.
‘Good. Now, leg or foot?’
Some of the fems had noticed the two onlookers and a few called to the child to join them. She had become immensely popular with them after a period of shyness on both sides.
‘Go on, then, if you want to,’ Sheel said. She settled to watch and listen herself a while, one leg crooked across her saddle bow.
Sorrel hobbled her horse and sat down next to Daya, who seemed to be her favorite among the fems; not so terrible a choice as Sheel would once have thought. The little fem with the scars had done all right during the sharu swarming.
Alldera continued her instruction with only a glance at her child: ‘If she takes a short step, the foot is sore. Soreness in the shoulder would make her swing her leg out stiffly to keep from using those muscles. See? Maybe it isn’t the kick she took that’s bothering her at all. Lora, go ahead and find out what the trouble is.’
‘Can somebody hold her for me?’ the blond fem said nervously.
Sorrel whispered, Daya whispered back, knotted cheek close by smooth one. Sheel could see that the slow method of instruction was not for Sorrel, who had grown up with these horses while in the childpack.
Alldera said, ‘You. have to be able to handle your own horse, Lora. There may not be anybody with you when trouble comes up. If she were skittish – which she isn’t, but suppose she were – how would you control her while you looked her over?’
Visibly unhappy, Lora untied a strip of soft leather from her belt and bent to hobble the horse’s front feet.
‘But you’ll have to lift her forefoot to look at it,’ Sorrel pointed out politely to her. ‘Better hobble the back feet instead.’ She flung Sheel one bright, amused glance over her shoulder.
‘She won’t kick me?’ Lora inquired, looking anxiously at the mare’s shining eye.
Alldera said tartly, ‘Not if you do as our expert there suggests.’
It had all been gone over before, and would be again. How could they bear it? Sheel supposed that by femmish standards they were quick learners, or they would never have survived their deadly crossing from the Holdfast. Yet all these lessons seemed so excruciatingly repetitious. Alldera worked away session after session, as if she were polishing hard stones.
Hard stone heads, Sheel thought, looking over at the big one, Kobba, a relatively new arrival, fierce and melancholy. All of the free fems were living at Stone Dancing these days except for the one said to be so huge that it would take two horses to carry her, and one or two who had stayed behind with her. Women of Royo Camp, returning from cutting tea in the hills for themselves, reported the tea camp deserted and its great central wagon shut up tight. Hearing this, Daya had said that the fat one, the free fems’ former leader, must have withdrawn to the caves where she kept her books, to stay with them until they were found. No one understood what she meant by this but the fems, who seemed subdued by the idea. A few even wept.
The one-armed one, Fedeka the wanderer, still wandered. She stopped at Stone Dancing often, however, and always took time to talk privately with Sorrel before leaving again. Sorrel said she told even stranger stories than Daya did. Daya had assured the women of Holdfaster Tent that the dyer meant no ill, and had appointed herself a sort of special guardian to Sorrel for some vague time in the future when
the girl would need her.
The newly arrived fems studied horses and the bow so hard with Alldera and Daya that women joked about how they must be meaning to make Riding Women of themselves. They had given up their ungainly wagons and now had their own fem tent pitched next to Holdfaster Tent.
Even Sheel, unwilling as she was, had to admit to herself that the longer they lived here in the camp the more their slavish ways fell away from them. Everyone noticed that they all quarreled and intrigued far less among themselves than they had when they had been only a handful. With women, their manner was no longer brashly alien, but guarded and self-contained. Except for Alldera, they chose their lovers only among their own ranks now; even Daya did.
‘I don’t sleep with Daya anymore,’ Grays Omelly had told Sheel. ‘When she looks at me, I feel like a ghost. They see us and hear us, but they’re all gone away.’
These days Grays’s circular spell designs were turning up everywhere, and Grays was found crying among the tents that everything was losing its place. Sheel had brought her back twice from outside the camp where she had been sitting, beating on a drum at the full moon ‘to make it stay where it belongs’.
Here was Alldera surrounded by her own kind, obviously in her place. Yet to Sheel she did not look happy, only intent and serious.
Lora edged closer to the spotted mare again, her face tight with fear and determination.
‘Help, if you’re going to, Sorrel,’ Alldera commanded suddenly. ‘I don’t want this horse to think it can frighten us.’
Covertly Sheel studied Alldera’s face. No humor there; hardness and hostility showed in the set of the wide mouth. No wonder; Sorrel knew in her blood and bones from her earliest life so much that these clumsy, thick-headed outlanders were laboring to grasp. The youngster would make a better teacher than her bloodmother, if she were patient enough to command the fems’ attention for long.
Sorrel went to the mare’s head and took hold of the reins, patting its nose and scolding it in a cheerful voice. Her cheeks were flushed; she knew when she was the center of attention and enjoyed it. She looked down at Lora, who had bent to lift the horse’s hoof in her hands.
‘You tap the foot lightly all around with a stone,’ Sorrel explained, ‘to find the sore place.’
She looked over the ground for a stone. The horse, taking advantage of Lora, leaned more and more of its weight on her. Lora did not realize that the horse was using her as support, but Sorrel saw, called it a sharu’s foal, and gave it a punch in the shoulder with advice to mend its manners.
Sheel and the watching fems grinned, and even Alldera smiled. Sorrel was clearly playing to her bloodmother. She turned toward Alldera her most appealing glances to make sure Alldera would miss nothing that she did.
Sheel thought of other bloodmothers she had seen with their daughters. There was always a period of assessment; then each began to think about taking the first tentative steps toward the other. The coming together always took time. Without the pull of identically patterned minds and bodies to help, it might take unusually long for Alldera and Sorrel to meet. But Sheel recognized the beginning – on one side that cautious attention to the child, a touch perhaps of wary pride, and, on the other, curiosity and eagerness to please. A strange thing, the start of such closeness between a femmish bloodmother and a woman-child.
Yet Sheel had to admit to herself that Alldera was no longer the anxious, touchy, self-absorbed young fem who, thanks to Sheel’s own error, had come to Stone Dancing years ago and lived as a woman. Now she had no time for the women, only time for her own. Sheel hardly saw her in Holdfaster Tent. Alldera was like a hard, scarred stud nursing a wild band along through a dry, dry season toward water. Her face bore what the women called ‘chief lines’, marks of unremitting concern.
Startled, Sheel thought, Why, she came to us still in her youth, and her youth has been long gone.
Moved in some way that she did not wish to be moved, Sheel pulled her mount’s head up from its browsing and rode slowly toward the tent’s horses. Sorrel would soon tire of the instructor’s role and catch up with her. As she rode, her practiced eye noting the condition of each mare and of the grass they grazed, Sheel became more and more convinced that Grays was right: if things were not exactly out of place, they were at least in a new alignment, moved by some deep, slow, powerful shift of events, long in the making and still only dimly perceptible.
Sheel could remember now how it had been once: thinking about correcting her original mistake and killing Alldera; rejecting that course because she would not stoop to be outlawed on account of a dirty little fem. The thoughts came back and even some of the fierce feeling, but none of it seemed to apply in the least to Alldera Holdfaster sitting over there teaching her followers about horses.
Which was strange, because plainly the thing Sheel had always feared – that the free fems would truly determine to return to the Holdfast, with unforeseeable consequences for all women – was clearly happening. As a nightmare, the idea had maddened her. Now, with the phantoms of angry imagination vanished in the face of reality, it became simply a fact of the future to be dealt with in its time.
She felt saddened by the loss of her hatred. There would be no brilliant, satisfyingly violent clash between herself and Alldera. The fems, and Alldera among them, belonged to whatever current had drawn them to Stone Dancing Camp, where now they toughened themselves to be drawn elsewhere on that current.
Sheel looked back again. The wide plain, the deep sky glowing blue overhead, the curves of the leather tents, even the drifting horses, were like a picture painted on a tent wall, against which were thrown the free fems’ coarse shadows.
15
Alldera would not have believed that a woman’s death could affect her so strongly. Everyone was stunned: who could have imagined Barvaran, red-faced and crude and good-hearted, caught up somehow in Nenisi’s quarrel with the Perikens and rushing into a duel on the dancing ground?
Returning from a ride to check the location of the next campsite, Alldera found the Holdfaster women assembled by Barvaran’s bedding. Barvaran lay gasping, her mouth frothing blood. There was a wound in her chest that opened with every breath she drew. The woman who had struck her had fled to seek refuge with relatives in another camp.
Barvaran was dead by morning. They took her body, lashed limply over the back of a horse, to abandon it in the grass far from camp. They laid the body down, washed clean and clothed, and they left it for the sharu. That was all. Women did not speak over corpses. Their farewells had been taken during the night, while Barvaran’s spirit still lived and struggled.
Shayeen said, ‘Later we will think of who should die for this, which well-loved woman of the guilty line.’
Sorrel argued furiously with Jesselee all the way back to the camp and wept and insisted she was going to find the killer and cut her throat. She lashed her horse into erratic bursts of speed and bloodied its mouth with her wrenching on the reins until Sheel rode up, yanked her from the saddle, and set her on her feet on the ground.
‘The horse has done no harm,’ Sheel said. ‘If you can’t ride like a woman, walk like a fem.’
The youngster hugged her mare around the neck, remounted, and on a slack rein let herself be carried homeward, crying bitterly.
Alldera trailed behind them, wondering what would be good to say to comfort Sorrel; thinking that it was better the fems had stayed behind rather than coming along to criticize the women’s death customs; thinking most of all of Barvaran’s red face looming above her in a gully in the desert years ago before Sorrel was born, the way Barvaran’s breast had yielded under her hand, that first touch of a Riding Woman, that first amazement …
Who would have thought that Barvaran and I would live together as members of a family? My family, the family of my child that I brought to them, gave to them.
Shared, she thought suddenly; I shared her with her sharemothers. One part of Sorrel isn’t given and can’t be – my share.
> I really did it. I was no mother, I didn’t know how to become one – I was just a Holdfast dam. But I go her away from the men and I found her a whole family of mothers, and saw her into her free life as a young woman. Not that I set out to do it, and it’s not all I’ve done on this side of the mountains, but it’s done.
She looked at the dejected figure of Sorrel up ahead. Will she ever realize, and thank me for it? Not that a family is forever, your mothers leave you – Barvaran, maybe Jesselee, myself, soon. Still, it’s something.
What’s she going to be like, I wonder? I’ll come back and find out, if I can.
Nenisi rode up alongside Alldera. Strapped to the bridge of her nose she wore a wooden mask with a slit across the center, used for protecting the sight from flying stone slivers when chipping flint. Now it protected her swollen eyes from the sun and the wind.
Along the hard ground flickers of light seemed to dance: leaves from a brush bank, curled and dry, were being driven in skipping circles by cool eddies of air. The sky was half skinned over with high white clouds, against which there floated smaller cloud puffs of exquisitely modulated grays and silvers. To the south the sky was clear, a blue of burning intensity in which these same subtly shaped and tinted clouds hung with a melting softness, sweet to Alldera’s eye.
Nenisi said abruptly, ‘You will leave us.’
‘No!’ That was a lie. ‘I don’t want to.’ The truth.
Nenisi went on as if Alldera had not spoken: ‘For generations women have watched so that no free fems would go back to the Holdfast and turn the men’s attention toward the plains. That was right to do as long as we were few and the men were many, and as long as the free fems were strangers to whom we owed nothing.
‘Now that relationship has changed. The free fems are kindred of the camps and free to go where they like – and I’ll say so, as a Conor, when the question arises whether we should let you all return across the borderlands. But women like Sheel may charge that I can no longer speak as a Conor in this matter because of my feelings.
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