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  ‘That’s no woman, that’s a fem – look at the butt and legs on her, sprinter’s muscle. You know these wild people never walk if they can ride, let alone run anywhere.’

  ‘Then it’s her,’ said the long-faced one.

  ‘She’s young,’ said the other, shaking back dark hair, eyes measuring Alldera from head to foot. ‘Hey, don’t they keep watch on you? Where’s your guard?’

  ‘I have no guard.’ Alldera stood where she was, suddenly wary. The two had a predatory look.

  ‘You mean you’re not a prisoner? We came to rescue you, fem.’

  It was too late to pretend that they were wrong, that she was a Riding Woman. ‘No one’s held me prisoner,’ Alldera said. ‘I live like the others here.’ She realized that it would be a mistake to tell them she had not learned of their existence until today. She could picture their sneers at that, their knowing glances.

  One said, ‘Don’t tell us you’ve just been living here contented as one of their stupid horses, ignoring your own people.’ Their hatred of the women came off them like heat.

  ‘Come on, what are you waiting for?’ the long-faced one said. ‘Get into the wagon, quick, while nobody sees. We’ll go get a few others, haul off as if we were going to make an early camp for the night, and just keep on going. The rest will catch up. Then let those Mares come galloping after us and try to take you back!’

  Alldera moved a few steps back toward the tents, alarmed by visions of blood and battle.

  ‘Where are you going?’ The black-haired one closed in on her.

  Alldera glanced around for help, a witness, anything. She heard the long-faced fem say low-voiced to the other, ‘Look at that, they must have bewitched her to keep her from us.’

  Too late, Alldera bolted.

  They sprang after her. A spear shaft thrust between her legs brought her down with a racking pain in her shin. She could not help it, she lay and hugged her leg, and they dropped their weapons and took hold of her, lifting her toward the wagon.

  ‘You explain to Elnoa back at the tea camp,’ the black-haired fem growled. ‘We want to know why they’ve kept you from us, and everything you know about them. Nobody’s lived among them as long as you have, we need your information.’

  ‘You can’t take me!’ Alldera cried through tears of pain, as if in a nightmare that they meant to take her to their master. ‘Let me stay – ’ A hard hand clamped over her mouth, cupped to avoid her teeth.

  ‘Mare lover!’ spat one of the ferns.

  As they wrestled her back against the tail of the wagon, trying to heave her inside, something jarred a cry from the one on her left. The other fem gasped and let go. Alldera twisted free. Sprawled on the ground, she heard the thump of blows, saw the frenetic figures of children leaping up from the tall grass to fling stones at the ferns.

  She looked up at the black-haired fem’s angry face squinting at her from inside the wagon where the two of them had taken shelter. She heard the furious words: ‘Come in here, curse you, while you have the chance! Come on, what is it, you like these horse-fuckers, these dirty, rag-tag savages that bathe in their own sweat, dirty beasts, cock-worshippers – ’

  The wagon rattled and shook with the impact of the childpack’s missiles. The long-faced fem paused for breath. There was blood on her cheek and a bruise swelling where a stone had hit her.

  ‘Have they gone and mated you to one of their stallions, then?’ she cried. ‘You got fucked by a horse and you like it, is that what’s happened?’

  Alldera got up and ran. The childpack raced past her, touching, laughing, and vanished.

  Curled around her own misery and confusion, she lay in the tall grass on a rise outside the camp, watching from hiding until the free fems had packed up their goods and left. They moved the wagon out, pulling it in the midst of a ring of scouts like women moving camp. The scouts, on foot, did not go any great distance from the wagon, perhaps for fear of losing sight of one another behind a swell of ground.

  From the rise Alldera listened to the sounds of evening descending on Stone Dancing Camp. As women lit their tea fires, voices spoke and laughed. Riders came home from settling the horses on night pasture. Each sang a personal song that identified her to the woman who met her with a bowl of food and who took from her the mounts she had brought to be tethered in camp for the night.

  Alldera recognized Nenisi’s self-song. She saw Nenisi ride in and give something to Barvaran: a bundle in a leather sling. That was what she had gone to do, then: take the child further out of camp while the free fems were there.

  Alldera got up and limped down toward camp. Nenisi came out on foot to meet her. They stood beyond the outermost tents in the dusk.

  ‘Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you,’ Nenisi said. ‘They’ve gone. That’s their fire, way over there.’ A wasteful blaze. ‘You look upset. What did they say to you?’

  How many are there like them?’ Alldera said.

  ‘Maybe half a hundred, all free fems found by us in the borderlands, as you were found.’

  So many, all this time. ‘They said I was a prisoner here.’

  ‘Sit down with me, let’s talk. They themselves are the prisoners – not of us, but of the way things are. They say they wish to return to the Holdfast, invade it, save the fems there. They live in a camp of their own in the foothills and make preparations to go home. When they venture too far toward the Holdfast, our patrols turn them back. This makes them bitter against us.

  ‘But anyone can see that it would be foolish of us to go and show ourselves to the men of the Holdfast or let the fems go back and speak of us there, when we’ve kept the secret of our existence from men for so long. Even if there are only a few men left – and many of us feel that – we have a right to protect ourselves; don’t you think so?’

  Alldera realized guiltily that she had accepted that desert, too, as she had accepted that the free fems were a myth. She said, ‘You took me in among you; why not the free fems too?’

  ‘You have a child here; kindred. The free fems aren’t related to anyone.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about them before?’

  ‘Why would you need to know? We are your family. Anyway, you never asked.’ A sigh of defeat. ‘Maybe not telling you was a mistake.’

  ‘How can they be so different that you can’t take them in among you?’

  ‘Their beginnings and ours differ,’ Nenisi said. ‘Around the onset of the Wasting that ruined the world of the Ancients, there was made a place called the lab, where the government men tried to find new weapons for their wars. We don’t know just what they were looking for, but we think it was mind powers, the kind that later got called ‘witchery’. The lab men – and lab women, who had learned to think like men – used females in their work, maybe because more of them had traces of the powers, maybe because it was easier to get them with so many men tied up in war.’

  Alldera tore at the grass with her hands. ‘Nenisi, is this going to be another tale of slavery?’ What she wanted to say, and could not bring herself to say, was Why did you hide my cub, and why did they say you mate with horses – Barvaran had said that too, once.

  ‘It’s all right, this story has a happy ending,’ Nenisi said softly. ‘The lab men didn’t want to have to work with all the traits of both a male and a female parent, so they fixed the women to make seed with a double set of traits. That way their offspring were daughters just like their mothers, and fertile – if they didn’t die right away of bad traits in double doses.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Alldera said. ‘How could they do that?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Nenisi sounded a little impatient. ‘No one denies that the men of those times were clever. It was the combination of their cleverness and their stupidity that caused the Wasting in the first place.

  ‘Now, in the lab, the change of trait-doubling was bred into the daughters, to be passed on ever since.’

  ‘To you.’

  ‘Yes. The daughters got
together and figured out how to use the men’s information machines. They found out all about the Wasting, the wars and famines and plagues going on outside, and how the lab could be made self-sustaining if things outside collapsed completely. They laid plans of their own.

  ‘They got the information machines to give a false alarm warning of an attack in the offing and ordering the lab men to rush off to the Refuges and save themselves. The lab men believed the orders; they knew the leaders were already hidden in Refuges made for themselves and their helpers, and the lab men had high ideas of their own importance. So off they went with great speed and excitement.’

  She paused. Alldera thought, giving me time to take it in, treating me like some stupid hulk of a free fem. ‘Tell me the rest, please,’ she said, to show that she understood.

  Nenisi cleared her throat. ‘I’m used to talking about this with young girls just out of the pack. I hope it doesn’t sound childish to you.

  ‘Anyway, the first daughters sealed themselves up safely in the lab and using the information machines began to plan for after the Wasting. They took the lab animals and tried to breed them to be ready to live outside when the world was clean again. A lot of animals were let out too soon and died. The sharu were bred up from some tiny animals the men had been using to find out about ferocity, and once let out they flourished – an unhappy surprise, but not bad in the long run. Sharu have their place too.’

  Alldera had seen sharu tracks, the splintered bones of sharu kills, the torn-up areas which they had stripped even of grass roots in their voracity. They horrified her, and she could not imagine what sort of ‘place’ they could have.

  ‘There were horses at the lab for making medicines with their blood. Some of the lab men had also kept good horses of their own in the lab stables. But the horses’ chances were poor. They bred slowly, and they were delicate from living so many generations with humans to take care of them. The daughters made them tougher and faster-breeding without worrying about their looks, and the horses came out and flourished too – a happy surprise.’

  ‘And what did they do for themselves, these great witches,’ Alldera said, ‘so that they could breed without men?’

  ‘Not witches, but dedicated and intelligent women,’ Nenisi continued carefully, almost formally. ‘They perfected the changes the labs had bred into them so that no men were needed. Our seed, when ripe, will start growing without merging with male seed because it already has its full load of traits from the mother. The lab men used a certain fluid to start this growth. So do we.’

  Simple and clean, compared to rape in the Holdfast. No wonder jealousy drove the free fems to slander. ‘Nenisi, why do you keep me with you? I’m no more like you than those other fems are.’

  ‘You brought us a live child. Only one other fem did that, and that child we couldn’t save. Your child is alive; that makes you kin to us.’

  Her slim fingers brushed Alldera’s very lightly. ‘We change little, do you understand? Some, of course: the Wasting left slow, strong poisons in the earth and water of the world. They sometimes alter a child from its mother’s traits. We don’t try to judge whether a change is good or not. The child survives the childpack or not, that’s all. Sometimes a cousinline, even a whole Motherline, is lost. No new ones are gained, only variations of the old.’

  ‘Then my cub – ’

  ‘New seed, new traits, the beginning of the first new Motherline since our ancestors came out of the lab. That’s how important your child is to us. My ancestor, a woman almost exactly like me, stepped out of the lab and lived, and now though she’s generations dead there are many of us Conors. So it will be for your child’s blood descendants.’

  She sounded moved by what she said, and still she was blind to how every word she spoke folded in Alldera’s child but shut out Alldera herself. Alldera turned on her in the darkness: ‘But it’s a Holdfastish cub, with dam and father! How can it be like you? You’re raising a free fem among you, that’s all.’

  ‘No, we don’t think so. When you came to us, that child was still forming inside you. We made you sleep to rest and strengthen you both. We fed you the milk of our breasts and the food chewed in our mouths, the food of Motherlines that we feed our babies. We fed your child, through your blood while she was still in your womb. We think she’s become like our own children. We still feed her – that’s why we do all her nursing. You see how healthily she grows, how fast, just like other babies here. We don’t have our forebears’ wisdom or the wonders of the lab to change her to be like us, but we’ve tried to do it with what we have.’

  ‘So you hid her from the free fems.’ Why did that make Alldera uncomfortable? The women had saved the cub’s life, they had fed it their food, they had made it theirs.

  Nenisi said, ‘What sort of life would she have among a dying race?’

  ‘Well, what life will she have with you if she turns out to be barren without men, like the free fems?’

  Nenisi answered quickly, ‘It would still be better. There are those among us who have no children, out of necessity or by choice. They still have relatives, sharedaughters, kindred. Do you see? Does that satisfy you?’

  Alldera could not explain without sounding selfish and ungrateful; if she had known about the free fems sooner, she would have had a chance to consider the cub’s future as if there were choices to be made about it. The women had not kept the free ferns’ existence secret from her, exactly; their plans as Nenisi outlined them were clearly good ones, probably the best choice that could have been made anyway. Alldera saw no way to voice her unease, nor even exactly what there was to object to.

  Nenisi got up. ‘Come to the tent soon, there are sharu wandering tonight.’ She left.

  The stars threw a dim light by which Alldera could dimly see the wide tents. The ferns’ wagon was invisible. Their fire had gone out. It was true, she thought, their road came from destruction and led to destruction, and if she found herself fortunate enough to be on another path, why turn back? She reminded herself of the prime lesson of a slave’s life: protect youself, be selfish.

  Next morning she put on her belt with the knife sheathed in back and she said, ‘Nenisi, will you teach me to ride?’

  Nenisi grinned. ‘I was afraid you’d never ask.’

  Alldera, responsible today for raking out horse dung to dry into usable fuel, was late to the chief tent and had to sit outside with the overflow. They were debating not the usual personal complaints beyond the abilities of the families and Motherlines to settle, but a diplomatic matter: whether or not to accept the offer of some grazing rights from neighboring Red Sand Camp. Women feared that Red Sand would come around later – as they had done to another camp in the past – and say the grass had been a loan, and demand repayment. In such a discussion Nenisi Conor would surely speak.

  The tea bowl was handed round; Alldera sipped and passed it on. Listening was thirsty work. Sometimes she thought the Shawdens were chiefs because they could afford to serve endless rounds of tea to half the camp day after day. It was certainly not because they took the lead in anything.

  The slow, oblique movement of debate was mesmerizing. She remembered the way the men – and fems, imitating men – had decided things, quickly, by command. Here, anyone with something to say could speak, which made for long hours of exhaustion or entertainment, depending on the interest of a given case. Their ease at speaking their minds still awed her. She sometimes spoke herself now, of grass and horses, over the evening tea fire; she sought to share their free flow of conversation.

  She nibbled at a callus that had formed on her hand from the pressure of the rein. Many months’ work had made her a decent rider, but she was not yet familiar enough with horses to make one lie down and doze, like that Faller woman over there, so that she could curl up against its flank and stay warm. Never mind, by midday the sun would strengthen and they would all be shedding headcloths, shirts, breast wraps.

  At last Nenisi arose. No one interrupted as her calm, rea
sonable voice recounted the history of feeling between both camps. She said, ‘Sharu have ravaged our northern pasture. What will you do when you hear your horses wandering and calling in hunger at night in the Dusty Season? Our friends and sisters and cousins, our daughters and mothers in Red Sand Camp say, take this gift of grass.

  ‘Now, is Red Sand Camp the same this season as the Red Sand that broke down the walls of new wells sunk by Steep Cloud Camp because those wells were too close to Red Sand grass? Or is it the same as the Red Sand that gave forty horses to Salt Wind Camp the year that poison grass wiped out half of Salt Wind’s herds?

  ‘There are new families in Red Sand since both those times. How many here have sisters and other close kin now in Red Sand Camp that did not have them there five years ago; two years ago; last year? A woman is constant in her actions through her life according to her traits until at last she dies. But a camp changes all the time as its women come and go, and it lives forever.’

  When she drew her headcloth about her and sat down again, no one applauded. But speaker after speaker got up and gave another version of what she had said, until those opposed to accepting the gift gave in and made the same sort of speech themselves. One woman next to Alldera shook her head and murmured, ‘Those Conors are always right.’

  Alldera sat straight and smiling, warm with admiration, rejoicing in her own unbelievable good luck in having Nenisi for her friend.

  Walking with the black woman later – Nenisi was cutting reeds for arrows – Alldera said, ‘I’m proud to hear you speak at the chief tent. I wish you did it more often.’

  ‘Oh, women are perfectly able to do without the Conors’ nagging most of the time, and we don’t believe in wasting our influence or growing self-indulgent by too much talking. We take care to be selective. I could have mentioned today a time when Stone Dancing Camp women themselves behaved very badly toward a neighbor camp. Of course there was the excuse that we hadn’t yet recovered from one of the earth tremors that give this camp its name, but it was long before my time and no one really knows for certain what was in women’s minds … Anyway, bringing that up just would have caught everyone up in an old argument, and nothing would have been decided about Red Sand for days yet.