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  At first she reveled at the sight of female people running their own lives without so much as a scent of men about them; even the several very pregnant women seemed sturdy and capable and utterly unworried by their vulnerable condition.

  Her jubilation receded as the hot, dry weeks wore on. She was invaded by weariness, depressed for days at a time by her undeserved survival into freedom and by the conviction that she would never learn to manage all the newness surrounding her. Loneliness assailed her. She longed sometimes to caress Shayeen’s glowing skin, and often caught herself staring at the sculpted beauty of Nenisi’s long dark face. The conviction of her own unworthiness turned her desires back on herself. She did not dare approach these women, except in her dreams.

  The blazing afternoon skies began to fill with clouds each day now, and the women stood outside watching in the heat. Four dry months almost behind them, they said; four rainy months coming, then four cool months after that, making up the year. The Dusty Season was about to end.

  One afternoon it rained not at the camp but a distance to the south. Alldera could see the clouds trailing sweeps of rain past the horizon.

  The camp sprang into motion, shaking her sharply out of her lethargy. In a riot of shouting and laughter the women brought all thirty tents of Stone Dancing Camp down in the middle of the day. Alldera stood aside with the cub slung warm against her back, and she watched Holdfaster Tent reduced swiftly to leather and rope, all stowed away in capacious saddle packs. The tent poles were hitched in bundles alongside the flanks of a brown horse, the butt ends trailing on the ground.

  Every tent was similarly transformed into a dozen laden pack ponies. Everywhere were horses, their noise, their smell, their bulky powerful bodies moving in the dust they raised. One round-bellied animal exploded twice out of the hands of its packer and was rapidly reloaded each time. Alldera was terrified of being trampled or kicked by a horse that she would not see until too late.

  She watched Shayeen, covered in dust, first tugging a cinch strap with both hands, then slugging the pony in the flank with her fist so that it gasped out its deeply held breath and the buckle on the cinch could be closed.

  To Alldera’s immense relief no one suggested putting her on top of a horse. She half lay, half sat on a sled of heavy leather slung between the tent poles out of reach of the brown horse’s heels. Cub in lap, she rode the jouncing progress of the pole-butts. The brown horse, urged on by Nenisi on a spotted mount, led a string of others from the emptying campground. Around Alldera groups of horses plodded in the charge of other mounted figures. She saw the childpack darting among them and heard the children’s shrieks of excitement.

  The whole crowd of mounted women and pack horses descended from the low ridge on which they had been camped. As they poured down onto the salt flat below, the group shook itself into a crowd of mixed riders and pack animals surrounded by a wide ring of scouts. Within this circle of outriders the childpack ranged freely.

  Alldera recalled something Nenisi had told her of another creature of the plains, one Alldera had not yet seen: a low running beast furred in all the colors of the plains. The women hunted these ‘sharu’ and wore their skins and ornaments made of their curved claws and teeth. The sharu ate anything, from grass and seeds to meat. That was why the childpack, which wandered at will all day, slept every night within the perimeter of the camp. She guessed that that was also why they ranged today inside the ring of scouts.

  This gave her a very secure feeling. She knew herself to be something of a child herself here, carried along while everyone else rode.

  Discomfited by the idea of Sheel seeing her in just that way, she asked where the rest of the family was. Nenisi pointed across the moving crowd at one of the scouts on the far side: ‘That’s Sheel.’ Then she waved in the direction of the long, low curtain of dust drifting ahead of them well to the left. ‘The others are helping to move the herds.

  ‘Pass our daughter up here to me – the air is fresher, and the sooner she gets the feel of a horse’s back the better.’

  Despite the miasma of heat and dust surrounding them the women talked and laughed as they traveled toward where they had seen the rain. Nenisi threw her head back once and sang part of a song about how when they got to the new campsite the grass would already be up.

  A pack horse up ahead got kicked by another and broke away squealing. The childpack swarmed after, getting in the way of the rider in charge of the pack string. The rider laughed and snapped her rein ends above their heads in mock threat.

  Alldera’s mouth tasted of earth; yet their exuberance was catching, and her heart beat fast. ‘Everyone’s in such good spirits,’ she said, wanting to show that she felt it too, but shy of intruding on a joy that she did not understand.

  ‘Of course,’ Nenisi answered, ‘the rain frees us from our wells, you see. Now we can freely travel our country again.’

  Alldera bent her head; the sense of their freedom had taken her by the throat. They could move where they liked. The physical fact of their liberty as she felt it at that moment, drowning in dust, bumping along at the brown mare’s heels, made her weep.

  Sometime that night they stopped; the rising sun showed among the rough circle of freshly raised tents a scatter of thin green grass on the damp earth.

  After that, Alldera began to fit into the women’s life.

  4

  Daya leaned her back against Kenoma’s long-muscled leg and watched the flames. The angry talk drifted over her and into the surrounding night.

  The free fem crew was gathered at the tailgate of their wagon where a tall fire burned. They kept their backs turned to the dim shapes of the Marish camp called Windgrass some distance away, dark and silent tents against the stars. They cursed the Mares and everything Marish, as free fems did after a day of trading with them.

  Daya stopped listening. She was bored with their sniping and thought ridiculous the rumors of a new fem hidden somewhere in the Mares’ camps. She relaxed into the pleasure of being enfolded in the enormous spaces of the sky and the land, for already this crew were on their way back to the tea camp in the foothills. Their trade journey over the plains was nearly ended, and she was sorry.

  She loved it out here. She loved to be one of the many points of living warmth that peopled the vast darkness over the Grasslands. She loved the grit of the soil under her thighs and palms, the glimmer of firelight on the yellow stubble beyond the edges of the camp, the evening stir of air as the day’s heat drifted starward. She felt her thoughts flowing out over the tableland. She pictured horses dozing or listening with upswung heads for a rustle in the grass; and the wide-flung camps of the Mares, groups of broad-winged tents herding loosely together in drowsy silence; and the hungry sharu sleeping in their networks of burrows; and of course all the free fems, radiating outward crew by crew across the great expanse from one Marish camp to another. She loved this life at least as much as she loved life in the tea camp in the hills.

  Of course there were risks, difficulties, irritations in living anywhere. Daya had been a pet, bred for the pleasure of men’s eyes as well as other pleasures. Despite the scars that marred her beauty now, she was still young, small and slender enough to be attractive even when she had no wish to attract. She did not enjoy being fought over by other free fems, so she took pains to acquire a companion like Kenoma whose truculence discouraged ardor in others. But jealousy inclined Kenoma to turn her banked violence on Daya at the smallest provocation.

  Right now by the fire Daya could feel the tension in Kenoma’s thigh drawing tighter, promising release in a scene, perhaps a thrashing, later on. Kenoma was only safe for a short while longer; the risks of staying at her side were beginning to outweigh the advantages of her companionship.

  Daya did not want to worry about that now. She held the sweetness of the brush smoke deep in the chambers of her nostrils. She felt Kenoma stir and tauten, and heard her say harshly, ‘This is the last fem they’ve brought out, maybe the last one they ev
er will bring out. She’s ours.’

  How annoying, how foolish, Daya thought. What does it mean even to say ‘last’? Time was different here. Life did not rush from crisis to crisis and turn instantly into some new and dangerous course at a master’s whim, as it had in the Holdfast. There were different rhythms in the Grasslands, long and slow and repetitive. Nothing came in ‘firsts’ and ‘lasts’ here, but as ‘another’ or ‘again’. The Grasslands was like a great disc of earth revolving endlessly under the great disc of sky and season. They should not talk of a new fem as if she were unique, as if she were capable of making a difference to the wide wheeling patterns of these plains.

  Yet this new fem’s long stay with the Mares had touched the free ferns’ imaginations: ‘Maybe she brings a message the Mares don’t want us to have.’ ‘Maybe the men are preparing an invasion, and the Mares are keeping her with them to get information out of her.’ ‘No, it’s the Mares that are preparing an invasion, so they’re pumping her all about the Holdfast first.’

  Daya was handed a bowl of beer to drink and she let her fingers slip along the hand of the giver. Kenoma noticed, slapped the bowl out of her hand, and kicked the other fem so that she nearly fell into the fire. Sandaled feet scattered the coals as fems jumped up, cursing, ready for a fight but amused too; Daya was famous for her amours and the problems they brought her.

  She dodged and evaded Kenoma’s angry blows, and seeing that the big fem had taken off her sandals earlier to ease her feet, managed to draw her to the scattered fire. Everyone roared with laughter to see Kenoma bellowing and hopping on first one foot and then the other.

  ‘A story,’ Daya cried, holding up her hands in mock terror as Kenoma, limping, closed in on her. ‘A story, in exchange for peace! Let me tell you how it is that this poor pet fem became marked goods, too ruined to be worth your anger, Kenoma.’

  Daya was a favorite storyteller among the free fems, and it made no difference that they all knew the story she proposed to tell. This crew had all been labor fems of one sort or another in the Holdfast, regarding pets like Daya as pampered traitors. They loved any tale told and retold of the haughty brought low. Under their urging, Kenoma’s fury gave way to sullen acquiescence.

  ‘There I was,’ Daya began, ‘fresh from my training in Bayo, up for the bidding on the steps of the Boardmen’s Hall in the City.’ She sprang up, she paraded before them, moving in the sinuous, exaggerated style of a highly trained pet fem. Languorously she blinked at them as if they were men come to buy.

  She told the drama of the bidding to be her master and of how a man of the blues named Kazzaro had bought her. She imitated her master Kazzaro’s high-shouldered, nervous posture and showed them how he fretted about his clothing and patted his spreading bald spot. He had been clean, decent-looking, and relatively rich, and she had counted herself fortunate. ‘He had the eye of a man who sees a fem for her sex, not just her decorative and useful qualities. I knew I could make him itch for me no matter how he might hate himself for it. He was the sort of man who has young men hanging on him for favors in return for their love, but who watches the serving fems and then looks away, ashamed of his interest in mere females. You can tell that I was young, because it never occurred to me that such a man would already have a pretty fem or two dancing attendance on him.’

  She told of his house, the magnificence of the tiled walls, the floors cushioned in thick carpets of heavy hemp dyed vibrant blues and greens. Enthralled, nodding, murmuring, the free fems drank in details of carved wooden shutters, painted roof beams, rich glazes and luxurious pillows, sweet scents wafting on the warm air. The more she embellished, the better they liked it. She added a tinkling mobile of metal chips, and a display of Kazzaro’s prize collection of small ceramic figures used in the game of Tail.

  ‘I was young and naive, but not so naive that I showed him how impressed I was by all this opulence. I walked like this behind him, as cool as if I had been raised in such surroundings instead of in the shitty, stinking straw of the kit pits.

  ‘But how my heart thundered, how I longed to be alone so that I could touch all those luxurious things!

  ‘He opened the door behind the metal gate to the fem quarters. There was another pet fem, lying there on a couch and watching the small fire.’ Daya let her fingers crook into claws and curled her lips back from her teeth in a snarl. ‘Does the world hold anything more cruel than the jealousy of a pet fem for her place?

  ‘I thought, I can hold my own here. The other fem was not young, and her beauty – clearly wonderful once – had faded.’

  She told how Kazzaro had taken her over to the couch too, so that at first Daya had thought, he wishes us to do sex together before him. She had been taught how to do this for a master’s entertainment, but she could not help being nervous the first time she was called on to actually perform.

  She told how slowly, through misunderstanding and confusion, she had come to realize that Kazzaro was captivated by the older fem, Merika; that he was so besotted with her that he kept her shut up for safekeeping. He feared that some older man would see her, want her, and take her from him.

  Merika was prey to the suicidal melancholy that often strikes a beauty as age advances. She dreaded the day when her master would realize that she was losing her looks. She needed companionship, that was Kazzaro’s reading of her state, and so he had bought her Daya.

  Daya and Merika became lovers, being closed in each other’s company and finding each other’s character congenial.

  ‘I was young, sure of myself, and credulous. Did I realize how it affected the aging pet when our master noted the pleasure of his guests when he lent me to them in Merika’s place? On the other hand, it pleased her that I replaced her monthly in the breeding rooms. Kazzaro could not bear to send her there. Did I see the satisfaction on her face when I was swollen with pregnancy? Did I understand why she kept plying me with the richest titbits of her own food, I who was as slim as a boy and so doubly fetching to our master? He was a man, after all, with a man’s natural interest in his own sex and a proper male lover named Charkin. In me he could have male and female beauty both at once, while Merika grew softer and rounder and plumper all the time, for want of exercise and because of her age.’

  Inevitably, Merika’s fear of losing her privileged place overcame her desire for Daya’s company.

  ‘You all know,’ Daya said, making her eyes mournful, ‘the treachery of pet fems toward each other. Hear now how Merika treated me!’

  Meticulously she set the scene of the private appointment of Kazzaro and Charkin at Kazzaro’s house: the careful cleaning of the room, its decoration with magnificent hangings, the day-long preparation of special dishes in the kitchens below, Kazzaro’s meditations on his wardrobe and what scents to wear.

  For Charkin, his own chief lover, he liked to have Merika and his other pets come and serve the food. It was an extravagant use of slaves trained in more rarified arts, and this amused him. He had to be able to show Merika off sometimes to get the full value of owning her. So the two pets had enjoyed the privilege of attending his guest.

  The evening had gone ill from the beginning. Charkin was nasty and ambitious by nature even for a man. He argued that Kazzaro could be a greater patron still if he would stop spending all his wealth on pets. Then he would be able to buy a bigger house and support many more young men – and Charkin would of course be the first and highest among them.

  The free ferns watched eagerly as Daya mimicked first one man’s voice and manner, then the other’s. She shifted to Merika’s stealthy doings down in the serving pantry. Merika had carefully broken the best serving dipper across the bowl and stuck it back together with a thin coat of glue.

  Later, when Daya ladled up a portion of hot food for the guest, Merika had only to knock the edge of the stew bowl against the dipper, and the heated glue gave way. The dipper split, slopping blue stew all over Charkin.

  ‘He let out a roar, Merika shrieked and bolted, and I was lef
t standing there too startled to move. Charkin snatched up a broiling spit that he’d just eaten clean. He lunged and drove it through my face from one side to the other! I felt it tear my cheeks and smash two teeth, and my mouth filled up with blood.’

  The free fems sighed, half horrified, half satisfied.

  The skewer had not been hot enough to make clean wounds. They festered. Kazzaro sent Daya down to work in Blue Company’s kitchen where she could learn to handle food utensils more carefully and where, more important, he would not have to look at her. The ferns around the wagon savored the part that followed, the tale of a pet fem set down in their sort of world. They nodded and commented while she rounded out the story.

  ‘To my surprise, I liked it in the kitchens. It was always warm, and there wasn’t anything like the rivalry I’d seen in the pet quarters. The men overseeing the kitchens were young, and the older men kept them hungry. What we fems did didn’t matter as long as we weren’t caught stealing food. The overseers themselves stole food all the time, but we were better thieves than they were. I enjoyed learning to cook, too, for it’s a great art.

  ‘But have you ever heard of a pet fem without enemies?’ She spoke of how certain kitchen fems had maneuvered to get her into difficulties with their boss fem by making Daya look like a troublemaker. Any time fems fought out their private quarrels, Daya’s enemies said her flirting had provoked the fighting. The boss fem could not afford to have a demoted pet fem full of spite making problems in her crew, or all would suffer. So she got Daya slated for transfer to the brickyards. Faced with having to try to fit herself in among yet another set of labor fems there, Daya preferred the risks of the Wild. It was at that point that she had made her run for the border – another story.