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  Nenisi groaned. ‘You and I have been out of touch, Sheel. Don’t provoke me here at the Gather. My teeth are already sore enough. I went only once, after the last Gather, to tell her that our child had joined the childpack. She said when we send for her to attend the child’s coming out, she’ll come.’

  ‘So,’ Sheel said. ‘What of it?’

  ‘Someday at a Gather like this it will be our daughter, and hers, mating with a stud horse. I know it’s hard to think about any daughter that way when she’s still only a wild creature running with the pack. But look forward a little, Sheet: when this child comes out, we won’t be much help to her as mothers if our feelings about her – and about her bloodmother – aren’t warm and loving.’

  ‘Loving!’ Sheel snorted. ‘I hardly think about the man-used bitch now that our tent family has separated, and it’s never with love.’

  The women of Holdfaster Family had gone traveling after the years of staying at Stone Dancing Camp to tend their baby. They would reassemble to welcome the child when she was ripe to emerge from the childpack. Meanwhile Shayeen kept Holdfaster Tent running as a shelter for visitors unable, for one reason or another, to stay with their own relatives in Stone Dancing.

  Nenisi said, ‘What will you do, Sheel, when the family comes back together for this child’s coming-out ceremonies?’

  ‘I’ll help,’ Sheel said promptly, ‘but nothing we do will place that child properly and securely among us.’

  Nenisi slapped the hard ground between them. ‘Why not? Why do you say that?’

  Sheel frowned, considering. She disliked talking about ceremonial matters, but it was a long time since she had seen Nenisi and she wanted to be understood. She explained slowly, picking her way. ‘We are in touch with strong currents that hold all the things and beings and forces of the plains in balance. Any woman here can be helped to find that balance, or to regain that balance if it’s been lost. We help. The horses help. But you can’t put in balance something that never belonged at all.’

  ‘We’ll make it work, if we try hard enough,’ Nenisi insisted. ‘We will make that child into one of us, complete with relatives, duties and honor.’

  Sheel studied her and saw in the dark, smooth-planed Conor face that tightness of anxiety she had noticed so often in Nenisi since the fem had come among them. Easy enough for me, she thought now; I just hate the fems, no complications. Nenisi’s feelings are all gummed up with rights and wrongs. Does she know how she really feels?

  She saw Nenisi’s pride, the Conor pride in being right. It was a Conor trait and part of Nenisi’s beauty. Once Sheel had been comfortable with Nenisi, before Holdfaster Family.

  ‘The horses won’t dance with her, Nenisi. Her mothers won’t be able to bring her out properly. It can’t work.’

  Next day the huge camp of the Gather, a camp composed of all the women’s camps, was quiet. The games and the races and the settling of quarrels were all over; the time for the mating drew near.

  Women filed in and out of the sweat tents all day long. Sheel sat quietly cleaning and repairing the belongings of her tent with other women. They all went inside during a brief, hard shower of rain at midday.

  In the afternoon Sheel, among the last women to use a sweat tent, walked out toward the great dancing ground outside camp. She shook out her clean wet hair and swirled her long leather cloak in elaborate passes. The sound of the capes whishing through the air drew the women from their tents. Talking and laughing, they joined the growing procession flowing out of the camp.

  Looking back, her arms already aching from wielding the weight of the cape, Sheel saw the sailing cloaks like a camp of tents taking flight over grass still bright with beads of rain.

  The childpacks of the camps swarmed among the women, circling, piping and screaming, ducking under the billowing leather, diving into gaps between the walkers. Around and around the dancing ground the procession flowed until it formed a noisy wall of women ringing the flat space. Overhead great ragged cloaks of cloud streamed slowly across the clean blue sky. The moon, a mere edge away from full, was a fragile white disc against the blue.

  In a little while the first childpack went racing away from the dance ground, scattering out on the plain. Others followed. Several packs sorted themselves out of a whirling free-for-all and ran in another direction. Too excited by the procession to stay afterward for a dull dance, the children preferred to ambush each other over the thick southern turf or harry the horses left unattended. If they returned too soon, there were women stationed outside the dancing ground to turn them away, with whips if necessary.

  As the early risen moon grew more substantial, a channel opened through the women’s ranks. Horses poured into the circle, all stallions, nervous at having been separated from the mares. Those women who had walked the horses to the dancing ground closed the gap, penning them in. The horses milled inside the human enclosure, calling, darting one way and then another.

  Her arms linked in those of the women on either side of her, Sheel whooped and stamped with them when the horses ran near her sector of the crowd, and the beasts whirled back the way they had come. Her voice skirled joyfully in her throat, she threw her fresh-washed hair from side to side as if it were the mane. Let the land stretch dry and dusty over the rocky bones of the world; the horses were a tumultuous river flowing past her, rough, swift, life-sharing.

  Now the young women who had been working with the horses for months had their moment. Dropping their cloaks, they stepped from the crowd and ran naked among the horses. Amid the plunging shadows they swung up onto the studs’ backs, where they balanced or leaped. A young woman sprang over a dark colt’s back, just touching him in passing, and landed on her feet. Another, a bright-haired Salmowon, stepped from the dipping back of one horse to the back of another as lightly and surely as if crossing a stream on stones.

  Sheel remembered, her whole body moved with remembering. Every childpack danced the horses. You skipped over their backs, leaping, vaulting to touch the ground an instant before bounding back up onto another horse’s back. Around you and beneath you ran the horses in a chaos of dust and din. You played them until they moved as a group, until they learned the game, you danced them to a lathered standstill. Then next day you laughed at the adults’ dismay at finding their horses worn out.

  When you were grown you danced the stallions under the round moon before all the women. You felt your strength flow to the horses, and then back again to you, made stronger. All beings found their rightful places in these exchanges, and the balance of all things was reaffirmed.

  A young Hont woman came whirling out of the mob, a bay horse with her. It curvetted past her, rearing and shaking its head, and then turned back to come to her shoulder and rub its knobby face against her. The Hont’s mothers came out to lead her and the lathered horse quietly away, both to be prepared for mating tomorrow.

  By dawn the last stallion and the last dancer had been escorted away, the dust had settled, and the bedding chute was built. The Hilliars had put it together this year, in the neat casual-looking way that they did everything. Some called it ‘the saddle’ because this was the horse’s turn to ride.

  It was a rectangular box with three closed sides, an open top, and a high floor. The insides of the floor and walls were padded with leather cushions. Arched across the open top and joining the two long walls was a carefully padded super-structure to take the weight of the stallion and the grip of his forelegs. It would suspend his body over the young woman lying inside the box. There were ropes to release an escape trap for a woman whose mating went wrong and endangered her.

  The women assembled as they had for the dancing, forming an oval of spectators surrounding the bedding chute. Here a voice rose in song, there another. The members of each Motherline sang all the self-songs of the past generations of their line. The singing of each Motherline unfurled like a banner against the paling sky.

  ‘I crossed the Sunset River to raid my enemy’s herds,’ sang a
yellow woman next to Sheel. That was an old song from the days before the camps had discarded streambeds as boundaries because they were places of confrontation and fighting.

  Sheel sang the song of her own bloodmother. It was composed largely of affectionate descriptions of the horses the woman had taken during her lifetime of raiding, and the names of women she had faced in feuds and duels. Sheel sang it with passionate pride.

  The moist wind stirred the hair of the young Hont candidate who stepped first into the open. She was thickset like all her line, but the simple leather cloak she wore disguised her body’s lack of grace. With her clean golden hair falling down her back, she looked her best. You forgot the big-featured Hontish face.

  Sheel approved, and found the Hont’s showing off appealing. The youngster strolled the circumference of the dance ground, smiling, waving to women who called her name in the midst of their singing.

  Someone slipped an arm through Sheel’s: Barvaran, her red face shining with happiness. She herself had been to the stud horses three times, and she had three living bloodchildren as robust and good-natured as herself.

  Sheel thought of her own two blooddaughters, one lost in the pack and the other to an epidemic of fever. She no longer grieved for them or for her own failure to bring adult daughters to her Motherline. It was true, as women said; no one rides only one horse on a long journey. There were all the daughters of her sisters and her cousinlines, young women as like to her own dead bloodchildren as they were to Sheel and to each other. She sang a brief self-song for the child which had lived long enough to come out of the pack, and then her own self-song of hunts, raids, and the deaths of men.

  The Hont climbed into the chute and lay down on her back. One of her sharemothers got in with her to encourage and caress her so she would be moist and open to her stud. Sheel remembered well feeling the smooth wooden rests against which she had braced her bare feet and watching the support frame dark against the sky. Poli Rois, her friend, had lain down with her, kissing her neck.

  Poli was gone now many years, struck dead in her saddle by lightning while still a youth.

  Into the circle of onlookers came two of the Hont’s family. The bay stallion stepped along neatly between them. They walked with their hands on his withers and his neck. They talked into his flicking ears. Small, sedate, groomed so the sunlight shimmered on his hide, he was scarcely recognizable as one of the wild-eyed studs of last night’s dance. His feet were filed and oiled, and ribbons of dyed leather were braided into his mane and tail. He was called Tiptoe, and was bred from the home herd of Salmowon Tent in Melting Earth Camp.

  Sheel’s first stud had been a nameless chestnut with a lop ear. She had looked up and seen his familiar crooked silhouette and the little beard of whiskers on his jaw, so well known to her and so ridiculous that all her fear had dissolved. Awe and joy had filled her, that the instrument of her own joining with the great patterns of the world should be so ordinary a creature. Well, so was she, yet both she and the stud embodied the dependence of all beings on each other and the kinship of creatures. That was the mystery of the mating, its beauty and necessity.

  She had spoken softly to him above the singing voices of the gathered women, and he had entered her as smoothly as the staff of oiled leather with which she had stretched herself in practice for him. After the culling that year his flesh had gone to help nourish the child he had started in her belly.

  Her second stud, a barrel-bodied gray, had sired a number of fine foals after mating with her. She had ridden him for years until an infected sharu slash had made it impossible for him to keep up with the herd any more. It had taken two hammer blows to drop him for butchering. Poor Cloud.

  The singing had sunk to a soft murmur. The faces of other women showed Sheel that they too were thinking of the dead; dead horses, dead children, dead women who had bled to death after bad matings.

  The handlers rubbed the neck and chest of the little stallion. They stroked his face and nostrils with pads that had been run under the tails of mares in season. He began to throw his head and snort, and within a few moments they had him erect. Under the touch of hands well known to him he reared high and clamped his forelegs on the padded support frame. He gripped the leather roll at the chute’s head and rattled it with his teeth. Standing outside the chute, the handlers stroked his sweating neck and shoulders and bent to guide him.

  Suddenly he thrust forward against the wooden braces which prevented him from entering fully. He oscillated his rump, snorting loudly, and his tail jerked, marking the rhythm of his ejaculation. Within seconds, it seemed, he pulled back and stood dark with sweat, droop-headed, quiet.

  The handlers praised and patted him as they led him away to rejoin the herd. He left between them as modestly as he had arrived.

  Others of her family reached to help the young Hont up, but she was already on her feet in the chute. She swung her robe about herself with a grand gesture that showed as well as anything could her triumphant success. They closed around her, checking her for injury, mopping the milky overflow from her thighs. With her arms on the shoulders of two of them, she walked briskly from the dance ground.

  A new candidate had already stepped out from the crowd. A sorrel horse, thick-maned and heavy-headed, came into the circle. Snorting at the crowd, he bounced along half sideways. Sheel knew that horse. She had taken him from the herds of Chowmer Tent in Windgrass Camp last year. She hoped he was smoother as a rider than he was as a mount.

  She thought angrily of Nenisi. The black woman was mad to insist that the child of a fem could lie down for a stud like a woman. Holdfaster Tent was just a dream anyway, Nenisi’s fantasy of righteousness.

  There was a story about a free fern, long ago – she had been taken up briefly by the Golashamets because she had looked so much like them. She had attended a mating, just once. Women said that after the first stud, the fem had turned and vomited on the woman next to her.

  11

  When the cool months started the three fems returned to the plain. They brought the horses that Alldera had caught. Fedeka’s open dislike of the animals abated when she saw that not only could they help carry baggage from campsite to campsite, but they could bear many more than the number of plant samples that she normally packed on her own back.

  For Daya, their presence was magical; she rode whenever she could. She had begun, timidly, to learn how under Alldera’s tutelage and had discovered a horse’s power to transform its rider.

  Alldera had made Daya a saddle of padded leather sewn wet onto a wooden frame so as to shrink as it dried to make a strong seat. The saddle was trimmed with straps and strings to lash on bottles, blankets, and other equipment. The leather required frequent applications of soap and oils to keep it supple and uncracked. Daya used the heavy saddle gladly on long rides, but she loved better riding bareback, seat and legs fitted to the horse’s body, wearing pants cut off at the knee so that she could feel the living flank of the horse along her calves.

  The dun mare had a big, ugly head and at rest its lower lip drooped and exposed its yellow teeth in a comical, foolish-looking manner. But it was responsive, almost tireless, Daya’s favorite mount. Alldera said with a trace of jealousy that Daya was a natural rider. She admitted to Daya that she herself did not love the horses; what she loved was having the mastery of them. Daya loved their rich appeal to her senses and the joining of her own meager strength to their power. Crouched on the shoulders of her galloping mount, she reveled in the ecstasy of speed. Alldera often had to remind her that the Mares did not gallop everywhere and that Daya too should practice the slower, less wearing gaits.

  Riding under drifts of illuminated cloud, Daya dreamed of tearing down the far side of the mountains scattering terrified men, battering them down with the shoulders of her mount and pounding them under its hooves. Her horse was invincible. She heard in her mind the thudding of heavy, blunt blows on flesh and the crack of bone. Or she dreamed of nothing at all, but lived totally and raptly in
the warm, driving reach of her horse under her.

  On foot little changed for her. She still spoke softly, moved automatically out of another’s way and shed tears instead of shouting when she was angry. She knew these ways were forever part of herself, not to be changed by her joy in the horses and the new strength that they had lent her.

  As she rode with Alldera, Daya began to talk about their former lives and even to ask questions about Alldera’s adventures with her two outlaw masters in the last days of the Holdfast. Alldera seldom raged against Elnoa’s free fems any more. Now when she spoke of them it was painfully, questioning earnestly why they were as they were. Sometimes she would ask Daya for an opinion and then ride silently a while before replying, if she replied at all.

  They slept together only occasionally, yet Daya felt them growing closer, knit together by quiet conversations and companionship. The gradual weaving of this connection delighted Daya and frightened her; it was new, an unreadable part of the mystery of the horses.

  Sometimes they talked about Alldera’s years with the Mares.

  ‘They’ll send for me when my blooddaughter, my cub, is ready to come out of the childpack,’ Alldera said once. ‘The sharemothers come together to receive her, and stay together for however long it takes – a few months, even several years, depending on her maturity – to prepare her for her mating and the forming of her own family.’

  ‘Will you go when they send for you?’

  ‘Yes. Now I have some horses to give for the tent herd. I’ll leave the dun mare with you.’ After a glance at Daya’s face she added hesitantly, ‘Unless you’d consider coming with me?’

  They were watering the horses. Sitting on the dun mare’s back, Daya looked down at the sunlight breaking on the water and spreading in circles from the mare’s hot muzzle. Her hands moved over the sleek shoulders, feeling the glide and pull of muscle under the skin as the animal stepped forward, lifting its dripping mouth. A tightening of the rein, a tap of the heels, and it would move on, obedient to the will of the small, weak creature on its back.