Motherlines Page 7

  ‘I see you sitting at the chief tent often these days, as I pass by on other business.’

  ‘I like to hear women talk about family situations,’ Alldera admitted. ‘In case. Well, in case Sheel’s nastiness gets unbearable. I want to be able to go and speak there for myself.’

  Nenisi straightened from examining a strand of reeds. ‘Tch’, she said, ‘you’ve been managing her meanness very well lately, it’ll never come to that.’

  As she cut the reeds she began singing her self-song, addressing the reeds as if identifying herself with them.

  You know me.

  In the Gather of the blind foal year I put eight arrows into the air, one behind the other, before the first fell to the ground.

  You know me.

  My mother Tesh Periken taught me to bite out a colt’s balls with my good front teeth. The horse scarcely swells, the wound never festers, but I’m one of those whose teeth hurt her a lot. Is it the geldings’ revenge? I say, do your own gelding, but use your knife.

  You know me.

  If you offer me sausage of fine fat and berries, I’ll eat it all up and leave you nothing but my belches.

  You know me.

  I helped Tomassin Hont to cure the finest sharu hide she ever took, I put my scraper right through it, I was so much help.

  There was a lot more; Alldera found herself laughing. ‘How can you say such things about yourself?’

  ‘The Conors may always be right, but I don’t mind reminding everybody that Nenisi Conor can be as wrong as anybody else.’ Nenisi handed her more reeds. ‘Every woman needs her own personal history.’

  Alldera looked over to where the grazing horses were visible, drifting against the skyline that ran forever, flat and broad.

  ‘In all this space,’ she said, ‘I suppose everything that helps tell one person from another or one place from another is very important.’

  The black woman straightened again and smiled. ‘It’s good, the way you see in fresh ways the things that are old to me. But things which unite us in all this space are also very important.’ She wiped her knife and sheathed it. Then she took off her belt and dropped it to the ground. ‘Come sit here.’ She pulled Alldera down on the sand beside her, pushed away the bundle of reeds, and, laughing, slipped her arm around Alldera’s neck.

  Alldera yielded uncertainly, was pressed to Nenisi’s sharp-boned side.

  ‘Don’t be nervous,’ Nenisi murmured. ‘We’re together, that’s all; friends. No one is master of the other. We do what we like, and we stop when we like. No need to be shy about your scars – give me your hand. A sharu sliced my ribs once when I was being foolish, and feel this great ridge I’m left with! We Conors can’t hide our mistakes, we scar badly; no wonder we try not to make any.’ Now when she laughed the sound was richer, roughened with excitement. ‘You and I will learn to cherish each other’s faults.’

  They made love together. Alldera asked no questions. She had felt shut out from the women’s constant patting and clasping and stroking of one another; at the same time their closeness had offended her.

  Now she wanted nothing to intrude on the joy of touching and being touched, freely and sensually. It was a triumph to feel Nenisi’s cabled body loosen and flow as she held it. Her own limbs slackened and trembled when Nenisi stroked her, seeking out the sensitive places that turned the light tickle of fingers in a deep, sinking sweetness almost too intense to be borne.

  That night she lay awake in Nenisi’s bedding, warm and drowsing, for a long time. As she snugged herself close against the smooth curve of Nenisi’s back, she thought of the Holdfast ferns. There had been some moments of passionate contact, usually in a corner of the crowded room that served as night quarters for the members of her master’s femhold. She remembered tension, haste, the need for silence. The others would thump you in the head to keep you quiet so that they could get the sleep they needed for their next day’s work

  … bad dreams out of a hideous life, but rich with excitement and danger.

  She remembered a pretty fem, only recently demoted from pet status for some trifling error or other, the only really pretty partner Alldera had ever had. In the dark tangle of their embrace, this one had thrust an object into Alldera’s hand, begging her in a smothered voice to use it, to root in her body with it like a man. Alldera had tried to break the wooden phallus against the bars of the window. Others had pulled her down; don’t let the little pervert upset you, they’d said.

  That memory had no power to hurt her. She was a woman now. She pressed her cheek to the back of Nenisi’s neck, breathing in the faintly musky scent and feeling the giddy joy of her own liberty.

  In the Holdfast Alldera had been a messenger trained to run. She had not run in some three years now. That Cool Season she took it up again. It was hard. Months of riding had firmed up new muscles and slackened others.

  She ran with the horizon flowing past on one side and the tents of camp wheeling by on the other, and she thought of other runners she had known in the Holdfast; like great Kanda of the long, thin legs who ran with a tireless, bounding stride, her hands flapping loosely at waist height as if she exerted herself no more than the wind does when it blows. Not thought of in all this time; dead now, probably.

  Women came to look as Alldera ran, clearly not comprehending her devotion to this outlandish way of making herself sweaty and exhausted on her own two feet. Sometimes she pushed herself, happily showing off for them.

  6

  In time her gladness dimmed.

  ‘There has been strain between us these past months,’ Nenisi said one morning.

  Alldera said nothing. She had felt the safety and happiness of their closeness wearing away for some time, and had not known what to do.

  ‘The Rainy Season is nearly over,’ the black woman continued. ‘The seed grasses are tall in the gullies. Leave your running for a while, and come grain gathering with me. We need some time alone.’

  That would be good, Alldera thought gratefully. She would be happier not having to share Nenisi with others. Nenisi’s apparent unfaithfulness with women of the camp had been weighing on her mind.

  Trailing their spare mounts and pack ponies they rode together into the vast quiet of the plain.

  On the first morning, Alldera brought herself at last to speak. She wished that her cheeks would not grow so hot with embarrassment. Taking the tea bowl that Nenisi offered, keeping her eyes on it, she said as quickly as she could that she appreciated so much having Nenisi to herself finally, knowing there was no other bed waiting to be warmed by Nenisi’s body.

  Very quietly Nenisi said, ‘Alldera, I want you to understand something about us here. It’s a sickness to fix on only one person and keep everyone else out. It’s as if to say, only I and my lover are true women, the rest of you are false and worthless.’

  ‘You think it’s sick, but – ’

  ‘Listen. You should find some other women to love, too. Do you want me to wear myself to nothing, trying to be all the women in the camp to you?’

  ‘I don’t want all the women in the camp.’

  The black woman sighed and drank from her bowl. ‘You will have to learn, but not from me. For us two to talk about this will only lead to quarreling. But I will show you how we think of love so you can see it, all right?’ She made a scooping motion over the surface of the ground by her knee and thrust out her hand, showing a little clutch of pebbles in her dark-lined palm.

  ‘Look, here is womanness. Why should we separate from each other two by two? What makes it right for two to be alone, when it’s not right for one to be?’

  There was some sort of sense in it; if one bit of smooth gray gravel stood for Barvaran, say, then another just like it would be Barvaran’s mother, and another her daughter. The rest would be cousins in her Motherline, all alike. If someone – if Nenisi – loved Barvaran, how avoid loving all the others?

  ‘It’s different where I come from,’ Alldera muttered, and was relieved that Nenisi
did not press her.

  The women liked to make noise out in the open, Alldera had noticed, asserting themselves against the emptiness. Nenisi sang and talked incessantly as they rode. Eventually Alldera plucked up the courage to try on her the self-song that she had composed:

  I don’t look like anyone here.

  Where I come from there were many like me, sweating fear.

  That’s left behind, but I lived it.

  Our heads were bent because we couldn’t look our masters in the eyes. We just sidled by, nursing our lives along.

  That’s left behind –

  Nenisi said suddenly, ‘No, that’s not the idea at all. That song is all about fems, not about yourself.’

  ‘I was trying to please you,’ Alldera said. She wished she knew why things kept going wrong between them.

  Day after day they rode the muddy watercourses, shaking the heavy seed heads from the grass on the banks into baskets fastened over the horses’ shoulders. One afternoon Alldera spoke of the fems of the Holdfast, harvesting hemp plants under the whips of the overseers.

  Again Nenisi interrupted her: ‘Why think about that? It’s over.’

  ‘Nenisi, no one ever asks me about the Holdfast – very considerate of them all; or is it that nobody is interested? It is part of my past, part of my life.’

  ‘No. This is all of your life.’ Grass stems bent, heads of grain rattled into the baskets. The black woman said, ‘I hate to see you unhappy. I think that maybe I treat you a little like a child sometimes, and you don’t like it. That’s good, that you don’t like it. Only to me you are still something of a child. While you drifted in healing sleep, you sucked milk from me like a baby. And you are not done learning to be a woman. Look how well you ride, better all the time; and Barvaran is making a stronger bow for you when we get back, instead of that child’s bow you’ve been using.’

  ‘I wasn’t wakened from a nightmare, you know,’ Alldera said. ‘The first life was real too. It’s as you say – like being born twice.’

  Nenisi looked at Alldera sideways from her eyes with the warm-stained whites, the centers like wet dark stones. ‘I’ll try to remember that you’re growing out of your childhood.’

  When the deep arroyos were swept clean Nenisi refused to work the shallow ones on foot. ‘Leave something for the sharu,’ she said.

  The trip to the granaries, low buildings by the Dusty Season wells, took days of driving laden pack horses before them. Then they had to fill the granary bins and baskets with the gathered seed heads.

  ‘Won’t the sharu dig their way in here?’ Alldera said, kicking at the thick mud wall.

  ‘Sometimes they do.’

  ‘You could have someone stay here to keep them off. And then you’d have seeds enough to plant – there’s plenty of water on the ground in the Rainy Season – and grow more grain.’

  Nenisi threw out her hands in a gesture of incomprehension. ‘More for what? We gather enough seed heads for the horses and for our flour. If we had more – well, there’d soon be too many horses to feed and care for and milk. Women aren’t slaves to tend the earth. We just live here as best we can.’

  ‘It’s stupid to do things this way when there’s a better way.’

  ‘Make your suggestion at the chief tent,’ Nenisi said, thrusting out her dark lips in irritation. ‘As a woman does.’

  No woman would let Alldera give to her. Angrily Alldera slammed her shoulder against the wooden door, wedging it tightly into its frame to keep out the animals that would only burrow in under the walls instead.

  Close to Nenisi that night and fearful of sharu – for they had found recent sharu-sign at the granaries – Alldera shivered.

  ‘Cold?’ Nenisi said, turning toward her.

  ‘This isn’t cold,’ Alldera said. ‘I’m scared of sharu. Let me tell you a story now about real cold, Holdfast cold. One winter evening I went to a certain company in Lammintown on my master’s business. Out in the icy pen by the men’s hall the company fems piled together to sleep under the stars, and I was put in with them. It was near the shore, and all night a raw wind blew. In the morning two fems were found frozen, hugged in each other’s arms by the gate. They must have hoped to get at the soup pot first in the morning. Mother Moon, how my master lit into the young men in charge of the fems for putting his trained runner in danger of freezing to death!’

  Nenisi said, ‘Why didn’t all you fems break into the hall and throw the men out to freeze?’

  There just wasn’t any point in trying to explain. Alldera turned over and tried to sleep.

  When they got back to Stone Dancing she found that something important had happened in their absence. Every year the women held a Gather of all the camps. When pressed, Barvaran said it was a sort of social meeting, with games and political arrangements about horses, grass and water, and so on. Alldera had gone through her first Gather all unknowing in healing sleep, and last year only a few families from Stone Dancing had attended, for some reason too complicated and obscure for Alldera to unravel.

  ‘Not everyone in a camp can go every year,’ Barvaran said. ‘There are always other things that need doing around the same time.’

  And that was all that she, or anyone, would say about it.

  She came fighting out of sleep to find the tent shaking with the aftermath of swift action. The poles were quivering, but no one was left inside in the dim predawn light but herself and old Jesselee. The others were nothing but faint cries and a dwindling drumbeat of hooves.

  ‘What is it?’ Alldera stood in her bedding, her knife in her hand, her pulse ringing in her head, thinking of Holdfast men swooping down on the camp to take slaves –

  ‘Raiders,’ said Jesselee. ‘It’s got to be a party from White Wind Camp. I heard that Poleen Sanforath of Steep Cloud Camp is visiting family up there – did I ever tell you how she hid a prize mare in her tent one night, when she and what’s her name, from down at Towering, were raiding rivals? She’s been after that red stud of Sheel’s for years. I wonder what else they got?

  ‘Well, there are chores to be done. Leave the child with me, you go on ahead and pull the bedding outside to air.’

  Alldera guessed the old woman had noticed how little interest she showed in the child. Well, it was their child; Nenisi had made that very clear.

  Returning from work at midday Alldera found meat, milk and flour noodles stewing in a pot over the fire. She filled her bowl half full. It was early in the Dusty Season, and already women were eating small while waiting for the first rains and their supply of fresh milk. Alldera no longer accepted oversized guest portions.

  ‘You eat like a Riding Woman,’ Jesselee said approvingly. ‘Now you won’t weigh down your horse.’

  ‘What difference does it make?’ Alldera said moodily. ‘When it’s something important like a Gather or a raid, I get left behind.’

  Jesselee shifted the child in her arms. It was long-limbed now, a heavy burden. It belched and muttered sleepily to itself. Jesselee said, ‘I wish I could have gone too, but it isn’t fair to load down a pursuit party with a rider who might die on them.’

  And what about me, stuck here with all the work and an old woman’s ramblings to listen to?

  ‘I’m getting weak. Your baby has more teeth than I do and better ones too. It’s a sad thing to have to ask other women to chew your meat for you because you can’t manage for yourself any more.’

  Alldera swished water in her bowl and drank. ‘Then you must be farther gone than I thought,’ she said brutally, hoping the old woman would retreat into silence.

  ‘I make my way along, not too fast or too slow.’ The creaking voice took up the theme, sounding calm and even contented. ‘After I live my life and die, I’m still part of my Motherline, with women of my flesh before me and behind me. Death is nothing to get excited about.

  ‘I remember, I can still hear the Hanashoshes who fought against their own deaths, every one of them screaming and yelling like gutshot sharu. Strange wom
en. They said they had the right to act how they liked about their own deaths.’

  Alldera warmed to these women who had insisted on meeting death their own way, no matter what other women did. ‘Are they those yellow-skinned women, there’s one now in Calpaper Tent?’

  ‘No, no that’s a Tayang. The Hanashoshes died out.’ Jesselee snickered, as if the hard diers’ dying out amused her.

  The stillness of the camp played on Alldera’s nerves. She looked outside angrily. ‘Almost everyone’s gone. The raiders could double back and attack the camp; there’d be hardly anyone to defend it.’

  Jesselee grunted, chewing slowly and loudly. ‘Don’t be foolish, who’d attack a camp? Where’s the honor in stealing other women’s cooking pots?’

  ‘Well, they still didn’t all have to run off and leave us everything to do here today.’

  ‘What do you expect? Women get itchy after several Dusty Seasons without a single raid. Did you think we lived such a quiet life all the time?’

  Women get itchy, and I get to do the tent work, Alldera thought. Well, I won’t. She said, ‘I heard that the raiders came and went before moonrise last night. How can our riders catch them?’

  ‘Things are dry enough so the raiders will have to stop to water the horses. Our women will try to get to the wells first, on the raiders’ way home, and hold them up – our horses back in exchange for water.’