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  The voices of the others joined in a throaty singing. Their song took its rhythm from her breathing and reinforced it. She surged over the pain on their music. The words, which were beyond the tight center of her attention, must have included humor. Rills of laughter erupted and were carried in the song.

  She poured with sweat. After the first huge passage of the head she felt the cub’s shape, limb and shoulder, work its way out of her. Always before she had been too frightened to feel anything but pain.

  A person with long, shining black hair was crouching between Alldera’s legs. She put out her hands and something dropped into them. Another leaned in and carefully pinched the last of the blood down the cord. Alldera was astonished at the simplicity of what they did, their calm. The black-haired person bent and sucked the plugs of mucus from the tiny mouth and nose of the raw, squirming bundle in her hands.

  People came and put their faces against Alldera’s streaming face. Hands massaged her body. In that lilting ripple of speech that she found she understood easily now, several said that she had done well.

  She could not gather strength to reach out to any of them or answer in words, but she thought fiercely each time one of them approached her, I love you forever for this. At that moment she felt capable of it. If she had not been a fem, trained for her life’s sake to hide feelings, she would have wept.

  The cub, washed and dried, was placed against her in the crook of her arm. It was a wrinkled, splotchy-looking female, unfocused in every wandering movement and every shapeless murmur from its wet little mouth. On its angular head was a crop of moisture-darkened hair. There was nothing to tell Alldera which of her masters had sired it. The cub looked very much like the other two she had borne back in the Holdfast, but fatter. Holdfast-born cubs were always skinny. This one was heavy, tiring to hold. She could not imagine how it had had time to grow. Surely only a few weeks had passed since these people had taken up dam and cub in the desert, both of them little but bone.

  Odd, this was the creature she had planned to kill. She was glad now not to have done it.

  Someone relieved her of the warm, soft, wriggling weight.

  ‘Here it comes,’ someone else said cheerfully. Alldera thought in alarm, Mother Moon, not another – were there two, and I didn’t know? But it was only the afterbirth, and she wanted to laugh.

  She woke, her senses sharp and clear. The soothing haze of the previous weeks seemed gone for good.

  She saw that she lay in a broad tent. Under the taut roof a skirting painted with designs in faded colors encircled a floor covered with tawny sand. It seemed a wide, dim, comfortable place. Chests and boxes, dark with use, squatted along the wall. Near the folded-back flaps of the entryway stood some contraptions of straps and uprights. Bags and bundles were piled around what she took to be the hearth, a blackened metal cage set on a tray. Close beside the cage on a broad platter were heaped little lumps of what must have been fuel.

  One by one she identified the sounds outside: voices, footsteps, the breathy calls of horses.

  Where was her cub?

  Someone came in. ‘Awake?’

  An apparition stood there, a person whose skin was as dark as smoke. From Holdfast songs and chants Alldera knew of the Blacks who had been among the enemies of the mighty Ancients – a lie, no doubt, like most of the men’s beliefs. But she could not help shrinking back as the dark person came forward and dropped into an angular crouch beside her, bringing their faces almost level. The stranger’s features were rounded and smoothed as if by many rubbings with fine sand. She was barefoot and wore only a twist of tan, soft stuff knotted around her hips. A string of blue stones crossed the base of her neck.

  ‘I’m Nenisi Conor,’ she said, ‘one of your family. The others are still showing the baby around and celebrating it. How do you feel?’ Nenisi asked.

  In past pregnancies Alldera had suffered strong afterpains in her body’s effort to get rid of the last clotted blood. She felt nothing like that now.

  ‘You’re better off than I am,’ Nenisi said, her long, dark lips pulling down at the corners in self-mockery. ‘My teeth are hurting me today – an affliction of my line, among several other afflictions, so if I complain women just shrug. I’m taking advantage of you while you’re still new among us and you’ll listen to me tell you about my horse-farting teeth.’ She exposed the offending teeth. They looked large, sound, and very white. She leaned closer, regarding Alldera attentively, seriously. ‘It must feel very strange to you, all this – ’ Her slender hand floated as she indicated the interior of the tent.

  ‘Beautiful,’ Alldera said fervently. ‘It seems beautiful to me. Where I come from – ’ Her voice failed and she turned her face away. Her lips were trembling.

  ‘There are no men at all,’ the black woman said. ‘None. You’re safe.’

  Alldera wept, and was ashamed of her tears. But Nenisi only waited, watching sympathetically, and waved away Alldera’s attempts to apologize for her outburst.

  Nenisi took up a bundle that unrolled into a sort of rug and she settled herself on the sandy floor. Her limbs looked very long and thin. The flashing pallor of her palms as she gestured and the pink cave of her mouth working in her dark face bemused Alldera.

  ‘You’ve been with us a long time already, though it probably doesn’t seem so to you. You came to us in the Cool Season, and now the Dusty Season has begun. We’ve kept you in a healing sleep, a thing we do for fems rescued from the borderlands. Most women are too lively for healing sleep, but we find that a few months of complete rest are good for fems fresh from crossing over. You needed time for yourself and your child to recover tranquilly from a rough trip.’

  ‘What magic did you do to save me?’ Alldera said wonderingly. ‘I was dying when your people found me; I felt myself dying.’

  ‘Hardly,’ Nenisi laughed. ‘You had your own magic with you – your child. Why, I recall once in my fourth month of pregnancy, stones were thrown at my home tent over this very point. My friends – most of them as big-bellied as I was – wanted to get me free of my hovering share-mothers so I could ride with them in a three-day race that had been forbidden me.’ She sighed. ‘Everyone knows that any normal female is tougher and healthier in the first half of pregnancy than any other time in her life, and my friends just could not accept the fact that Conor women are exceptions. We lose our babies easily – I never did bring a child of my body to term. There are other lines just as delicate, like the Soolays and the Calpapers, and it’s always a struggle to keep their youngsters slowed down so they don’t miscarry.

  ‘You, however, are as normal as they come, and you could say that that baby kept you alive out there.’

  ‘Funny. I was going to try to kill her,’ Alldera mused, but then she saw by Nenisi’s face that she had said something terrible, and she steered hastily for safer waters: ‘How did you keep me asleep for so long?’

  ‘Asleep,’ Nenisi murmured. ‘Yes, I suppose you’re not really wide awake yet, are you? You’ll soon find your balance. All we use is medicine made from plants and soothing talk. We were even able to coax you into moving about in your sleep, to keep your body healthy and fit to bear.

  ‘While you were lying there dozing and healing yourself, your senses were taking in a lot of what was going on around you – us, the way we live, the way we talk. Not everything will be completely strange to you.’

  I love the way you talk, Alldera thought. Nenisi’s speech was little different from Holdfastish, but she drew everything out with a singing drawl, nudging in extra syllables, lilting up and down the scale. Alldera did not want to break into that music with the hard-edged, barking speech of the Holdfast. Keep silence, she thought; listen and learn.

  ‘I want you to understand,’ Nenisi went on, ‘you’re to rest, take your time, not worry. Don’t fret about your baby; women are trampling all over each other trying to take the best care of her that any baby of this camp has ever had. You have family here.’

  Family,
kindred; suddenly Alldera was afraid. Perhaps they took her for something other than what she was, to give her such unreserved welcome, warmth in which her bones and sinews seemed to be dissolving. When the mistake was discovered they might turn on her –

  ‘Who are you?’ she whispered. ‘Why do you care?’

  ‘We’re the Riding Women, the women of these plains – ’

  There came the sound of running steps, very light and swift, and a high babble of voices. Then the tent was full of moving figures, small, naked, and filthy, jostling and pressing close to Alldera as they passed her.

  They were a skinny, grimy mob. Their matted hair bounced on their shoulders as they spun away in a swirl of shouts and high-pitched laughter, and they flowed back out of the tent. They brushed past an adult figure in the doorway and were gone.

  The newcomer, a sharp-featured woman, ducked inside. Alldera thought she knew that predatory face from her tumbled, nightmare memories of the journey through the desert to the plains.

  ‘No wonder the childpack is running away,’ commented the woman. ‘That slave is uglier awake than she was asleep.’

  Nenisi’s chin lifted, giving her an armed and guarded look. ‘The childpack is looking for all the excitement and feasting that surrounds a new baby, as you know very well, Sheel. They didn’t find that here, so they left. And Alldera is not a slave. Where there are no masters, no one can be a slave.’

  The sharp-faced woman moved silently on naked, sinewy feet. She wore trousers and a cloth looped around her neck and crossed over her breasts to tie in the back. She took up a wooden bowl and filled it with white liquid from a bag hanging on a pole.

  ‘Ferns are so fitted to slavery that they’ll find masters wherever they go. Be careful this one doesn’t turn you into her master, Nenisi.’ She drank.

  Nenisi sighed and said to Alldera with exaggerated regret, ‘This is Sheel Torrinor. Good manners are not among the Torrinor traits. Like me, Sheel is of your family. I hope you can stand her.’

  ‘You don’t mind being a fem’s sharemother,’ the newcomer said, ignoring the black woman’s bantering tone. ‘I hate it.’

  Alldera did not dare to say anything. She was relieved when Sheel Torrinor walked out, bowl in hand.

  And yet, there had been something bracing about her attitude. Under Sheel’s cold dislike, the helpless, melting feeling of being more beholden than any human being could bear had receded and ceased to overwhelm Alldera. Enmity from an icy bitch was something she understood from the Holdfast, where she had known boss fems like that: ruthless but effective overseers, most of them. Sheel’s contempt had yanked her roughly back into reality.

  She was an escaped fem taken in by a strange, marvelous people, befriended by a black person whose teeth hurt, rejected by another stranger as slim and hard-looking as a knife.

  ‘I’m sorry she’s so rude,’ Nenisi said.

  ‘But she’s part of my “family”?’ Alldera ventured cautiously. ‘What’s a “sharemother”?’

  ‘One who shares the mothering of your child with you. I’m one of your sharemothers. Sheel, unfortunately perhaps, is another.’

  ‘But why should she be, if she doesn’t want to?’

  ‘Good reasons.’

  ‘I’d rather not have her forced to – ’

  ‘Don’t worry about her. She’ll do what’s right, however ungracefully,’ Nenisi said; and she talked of other things.

  Four women inhabited ‘Holdfaster Tent’ with Alldera as her family of sharemothers. When they came in to eat and talk that evening, they seemed to bring with them the spirits of a hundred other women whom they had spoken to or heard about or seen doing this or that during the day. All of that was laid out in conversation during the long, hot twilight over pots and pots of the bitter drink they called tea.

  The mounts on which women had ridden home to the tent were tethered outside for the night. Alldera heard the horses snuffling at the ground, sighing and groaning like humans, talking briefly to each other in their peculiar voices. She shivered at their strangeness; there had been no animals at all in the Holdfast.

  Of all the voices in the tent Nenisi’s was the most supple, a rich and rippling contralto which she seemed able to turn reedy or plummy by turns, like a musical instrument. She made the others laugh a lot. They did not keep the small, smelly fire going after sundown, and when Nenisi’s dark skin vanished into the gloom she became a sort of invisible spirit with a playful voice.

  Sheel sat across from Alldera. She had a narrow jaw and her front teeth projected so that she had to hold her lips closed over them. The strong muscles around her mouth gave her face a sculpted, rapacious look.

  She did not speak to Alldera.

  There was a woman called Shayeen, visible by the fire’s embers as a shining being of smooth, red-brown metal, black hair that looked oiled, and a gleam of bright metal at wrist and throat. She spoke rarely, and then mainly of games and contests, wins and losses, in the past and to come. Twice she asked Alldera polite questions without real meaning beyond perhaps the wish to acknowledge her presence.

  The fourth woman of the family sat on Alldera’s other side and nursed the cub. She kept stroking the top of its fuzzy head with her big, square, chap-knuckled hands. Her name was Barvaran, and she was squat and coarse-looking. There was dirt in the creases of her skin, as there had been when she had first leaned over Alldera after capturing her back in the desert. The others reeked of horses and sweaty leather, but Barvaran smelled strongly of herself.

  Alldera wanted to edge away from her. She had known labor fems as ungainly and unlovely as this back in the Holdfast. The drudges of that world, they had been too dull to be anything better and had been saved from extinction only by the strength of their thick backs.

  Though Barvaran seemed to have no nursing cub of her own she did have milk, as indeed they all did. The sharemothers passed the cub around for a suckle at each one’s breast before unrolling their bedding for the night. Milk, they said, came easily to them, and nursing was something Alldera would seldom have to do. She was relieved, for to her it was simply a boring, immobilizing job.

  Outside she heard the sounds of horses and somewhere not far distant the high chatter of the childpack moving closer and farther, closer and farther, and finally stopping.

  She woke with a full bladder and blundered about in the darkness looking for a pot, or failing that the entryway so that she could step outside to relieve herself. She was slowed by her weakness after the cub’s birth.

  One of the women got up, handed off the cub – which she had kept sleeping with her – to someone else, and guided Alldera out. It was, Alldera guessed by the scent and bulk of her, Barvaran, who led her past the edge of the camp to a sandy gully that she called ‘the squats’. Alldera crouched, wincing, in the dry watercourse. The rawness of her vagina made urination an ordeal.

  The sky was beginning to pale. As they made their way back among the closed tents, Barvaran said, ‘You’ll get used to drinking tea after a while and it won’t wake you so early any more. Camp is nice now, isn’t it – quiet and tidy-looking.’

  In this thin light and with her clangorous voice toned down out of mercy for the sleep of others, Barvaran seemed quite different: warmly sympathetic, manner a little shy, an honest soul sunk in a crude and odorous frame.

  Alldera almost walked into the childpack. Heaped together, their skinny limbs asprawl, they lay snoring and snuffling under the wide fly of one of the tents. Repelled, she retreated a step, jostling Barvaran.

  ‘You’ll get used to them, too,’ Barvaran said. ‘I know it’s not much like your country here.’

  The truth was that, like Barvaran herself, the childpack was all too much like something from the Holdfast. The pack reminded Alldera of a batch of very young fems in one of the wide, deep pits where fem kits were kept between the time they were weaned and the time they were taken for training. She thought of her own life in the pits, bitter with hunger and struggles against others j
ust as hungry, and of a time she had spent immobilized in her own filth by illness while her companions ate up all the scant ration thrown down to them by the men …

  These camp children did not seem hungry, only dirty and wild, and Barvaran herself seemed not alien and forbidding but familiar. Alldera said hesitantly, ‘Barvaran, can I ask you – how do you have children, without men?’

  ‘Oh,’ Barvaran said, ‘we mate with our horses.’

  Shocked with embarrassment, Alldera felt her own cheeks heat. Clearly she had asked an improper question and had been turned with a crude joke about those monster-like beasts. She would not ask again.

  The other question, the necessary question, haunted her, dammed in by timidity and a feeling that it would be somehow absurd and insulting to ask it. Finally it broke clumsily out of her one day when she found herself alone with Nenisi, who was hunched under one of the tent flies straightening bent arrow shafts over a small fire. Finding Nenisi by herself was not easy, and Alldera leaped at the opportunity without thinking.

  ‘Will you help us?’ she said.

  Nenisi looked up at her.

  Alldera rushed on, stammering, ‘I wasn’t just running away, I was sent to find help in the Wild, some hope – I didn’t think there really was anyone, and I’d given up and was just trying to save myself, but now – you—the other fems still enslaved back there – ’

  ‘There is no help,’ Nenisi said. She sighted down the arrow in her hand. ‘It was decided long ago that we women would never risk the free world of our children by invading the Holdfast for the ferns’ sakes. We all agreed.’

  ‘I see.’ Beneath her numbness Alldera felt feeling stir.

  ‘Besides, it’s too late. No one, man or fem, has come out of the east in months; not since we found you, in fact. We think they’re all dead – ’

  ‘Yes, I understand,’ Alldera insisted. That was what she had sensed herself, alone in the borderlands. That was what she had wanted to hear. She turned away to hide the horror of her feelings: the dark surge of grief for her lost people was shot through with the joy of being truly free of them at last.