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  No one else spoke. Alldera looked at Nenisi, who silently rocked the sprawling child. Sheel’s brush dragged on the leather.

  They all went out to a shooting contest next day except for Nenisi, who stayed behind with aching teeth. Alldera gave up the place in the contest that she had been practicing hard for and stayed with Nenisi. They talked about the argument of the day before.

  ‘I told you I wouldn’t treat you like a child any more,’ Nenisi said. ‘You can’t fight this out with Sheel, she’s in your family. Have you thought some more about bringing her persecution of you up in the chief tent?’

  ‘Not unless I know what a Gather is all about. What happens at the Gathers that Sheel thinks I shouldn’t see?’

  Nenisi took another mouthful of pain-killing brew and spat it out again. The medicine steamed in a pot between them under the tent fly, souring the air. Finally she said, ‘You must have guessed. Matings happen.’

  Alldera frowned. It was a hot day; she wiped at her neck with her headcloth. ‘What do you mean, “matings”? You told me that you used some fluid to start your seed.’

  ‘The fluid comes from a stallion. We mate with stallions.’

  Alldera was stunned. She could not think. From where they sat they could see the women out beyond the edge of the camp, shooting at leather targets pegged tightly to the ground. A flight of arrows winked in the air. A moment later came the sounds of impact, like drops of hard rain on a leather wall. Nenisi could not be talking about the archers.

  Shakily Alldera began, ‘Come on, Nenisi. That’s just a thing women tell the fems to shock them, Barvaran even said it to me once – ’

  ‘Yes, she told me; she’d forgotten how it seems to strike fems, and she was afraid she’d embarrassed or upset you, so she let it drop. But what she said was true.’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Alldera objected desperately. ‘Nenisi, I know that a stallion’s cock is as long as your arm. You’d have your guts shoved right out through your mouth if you let one – do that to you.’

  Nenisi rubbed at her jaw and said reasonably, ‘That would be true, for ferns. This is our way; it was worked out for us by the first daughters. They saw that after the Wasting there wouldn’t be any places like the lab, and we would need some way to breed simpler than the lab way. So these lab-changed women designed their daughters’ reproduction to be set off by the seed of a stallion. Take Shayeen; she has a bloodchild over in Floating Moon Camp. The horse she mated with is not that child’s sire; his seed only started Shayeen’s seed growing, and Shayeen’s seed was complete with Shayeen’s traits, no room for any others. We are not half horse, as ignorant free fems tell each other.’

  Alldera sat silent, her hands on her knees, looking out at the shooting. She tried, but she could not make sense of what Nenisi said. This horse mating was like a river that Nenisi and the others had just crossed on an inexorable journey that they were making away from her into a mysterious and incomprehensible distance. And not the first river; there had been others, now she recognized them: the childpack, the Motherlines, love without bonds, the brutal killing of horses, warfare as a game, the leaving of the dead for the horrible sharu whom women hunted but also fed … She began to be afraid that all the time she had thought she was catching up with the women, they had been leaving her farther and farther behind, that she would never be able to reach them.

  She knew the relaxed pitch of Nenisi’s voice was intended to calm her: ‘Why don’t we drop this for now. You could go and watch the shooting.’

  ‘I need to understand this,’ Alldera insisted.

  Nenisi cleared her throat. ‘Let me try to explain. We make the mating as safe as we can. There’s a lot of size difference in any generation of colts. We choose them small and arrange things so that full penetration is impossible. Thickness is more the danger than length. As young women we train and exercise beforehand to stretch ourselves. The horses hardly ever tear us.’

  Alldera felt stifled by this dreamlike amiability of Nenisi. She shut her eyes and saw her beautiful lover coupling with a horse. She saw it as she knew a Holdfast man would see it: as something titillating, Nenisi’s dark legs parted by the long pink shaft of a stud reared up and shaking the brambles of his mane above her. It was unbearable to think of Nenisi as gross and comical, she whose body Alldera had stroked and kissed.

  ‘But sure,’ she stammered, ‘surely you could – you could get the stallion’s seed without – without – and put it in – ’

  ‘We don’t have such fine lab ways; and if we could do it another way, then it wouldn’t mean the same thing. Sheel doesn’t want to keep you away to spare your feelings, though we all know how upset fems get about this – you’re different anyway, you’ve lived with us a long time, you’ll understand eventually.’

  She spoke as though in the chief tent, winding up a long debate. ‘What Sheel says is that you have no place around a mating because you have no bond with the horses. We do have a bond, of our bodies and theirs. The balance of all things includes us and acts on us, and animals – even the sharu in their way – are our links with that balance. We celebrate it every year at the Gather of all the camps, where young women mate.

  ‘The Gather is part of our bond with each other too, you see. Every woman has trusted herself to a horse this way, or is blood kin to another woman who has. Sheel says you can’t go raiding either because you might kill someone, and no woman knows what would happen to the spirit of one of us killed by a stranger.’ She laid her slender hand on Alldera’s knee. ‘You see what I mean by “stranger”. It would be like – like being killed by some man from the Holdfast. Maybe you shouldn’t do your own horse killing either. It’s going to take us time to decide.’

  The more she explained, the more she seemed to recede from Alldera. Gravely, imperturbably, she went on. ‘You’re not bound to us to begin with by being part of an old Motherline, and you won’t be truly bound until your bloodchild mates. Shayeen says that meanwhile you should open to a horse yourself even with no chance of issue, but that’s absurd, you’re not young and flexible enough any more to safely – ’

  ‘No, I can’t,’ Alldera gasped. ‘Why are you talking like this to me? Don’t you see I can’t follow?’

  ‘Are you worried about your child’s mating?’ Nenisi said with concern. ‘Don’t be. The stud doesn’t attack anyone, he means no harm, no abuse or degradation. He’s innocent. He has to be led and coaxed and trained to do his part, with our help. It’s nothing at all like a man overpowering a fem just to show her who’s master. You’ve heard me mention my sharemother Sayelen Garriday, who was jumped by her gray stud once, but it turned out – ’

  Alldera felt as if she were wandering in the Wild again, mystified by a monster’s footprint. In a small, exhausted voice she said, ‘Nenisi, please stop, it’s no good. I think it would be better if you would just tell me how to find the free fems.’

  FREE FEMS

  7

  Daya loved the sweeping yellow plain. Yet she always enjoyed returning to the tea camp in the foothills. The space and silence of the open country was pleasing only up to a point, for she had lived her whole life among other fems, first in the kit pits and later in her master’s populous femhold. Conversation, lively companions and the pleasing tension of intrigue made up her natural surroundings. Her periodic excursions with the trade wagons were passages in a special dream life of loneliness and survival amid elemental forces.

  Today the tang of wet weather was in the air, and clouds stood on one another’s shoulders obscuring the mountains. She looked forward to the comforts of the tea camp and to seeing Elnoa again. She would be warm with Elnoa, and generous. She could always extend herself to her conquests.

  The wagon she walked beside was a sturdy openwork structure of wicker and light wood pulled by a crew of twelve ferns. They did not sing as they leaned into the ropes and straps of the harness. They had sung at work as slaves in the Holdfast, and they were free people now. Daya missed the old mus
ic.

  In the quiet of her own mind she sang a load-carrying song as she walked looking for seasoning plants for the stew pot.

  See how the muscles run in our arms,

  See how the strength swings in our stride.

  What is the weight that we could not carry?

  Where is the riverboat we could not haul?

  Mother Moon, send us a task fit for our

  power.

  Not that Daya herself had ever been a labor fem. She was too small and slight. But she remembered the labor gangs’ voices.

  Again her thoughts turned eagerly toward camp. Perhaps she would find a tense scene in Elnoa’s wagon: she pictured ferns’ faces lighting with relief to see her, for there lay Elnoa prostrate on the edge of death – losing weight – insisting that to none but Daya would she reveal the hiding place where she hoarded her treasure of precious objects, to none but Daya would she relinquish her great leather account books …

  The first free fems to settle here had grouped their wagons under the trees by the spring that flowed down the heart of the narrow valley. The abandoned hulk of an old wagon marked the spot, a trysting place Daya had often used. By Elnoa’s time the camp had been moved to an elevation backed by the southern hills, overlooking the spring and much of the valley. Signs of an effort to build walls of fired mud brick on the hill remained. Daya had heard a tale that the move and the attempt at fortification had been a response to a period of especially tense relations with the Mares.

  Elnoa had entrenched the free fems in their higher location. Under her direction they had begun to park their wagons to form a hollow square and to mount a patrol of sentries on the perimeter. Broken-down and tenantless wagons, now used for storage, were interspersed with occupied ones. The spaces between them and the gaps left by wagons gone out trading were filled with temporary walls of rock and brush. This patchwork parapet enclosed a wide, bare yard in which the free fems lived and worked, either in the open or under awnings stretched from the wagon roofs to poles planted in the dirt. There were no trees. Elnoa’s own huge vehicle, holding the center of the yard, dominated everything.

  On a wet day like this the place looked dead, and Daya quailed a little at the sight of it. What have I come back to? she wondered. Awnings of oiled leather were stretched over racks of smoking tea, some stacked tea bricks, and a pile of raw leaf. The heavy weaving looms were similarly sheltered, looking like big-boned creatures standing gloomily together out of the wet.

  While the crew pulled aside a mound of brush to let their wagon through, Kobba, the crew boss, entered the muddy, deserted yard. She paced about heedless of the rain. Daya had noticed that no sentries were walking the perimeter or the skyline above and behind the camp. She knew Kobba would have grim interviews with those she had left on guard. Some would soon sport black eyes and swollen lips. There were always fems foolish enough to ask Kobba what there was to watch for. The Mares patrolled the borderlands to the east, so the men of the Holdfast could never spring a surprise attack. Kobba always said she was not interested in what the Mares did, she was interested in what the fems did, particularly about their own security.

  Swiftly the crew parked the trade wagon, checked the lashings of its cover, and climbed into their friends’ wagons for shelter, hot beer, and a night of talk.

  Elnoa’s own wagon was walled with solid wood, elaborately carved and stained. Its immense weight did not matter, since it was never moved. Under the shelter of its eaves Daya wiped the mud from her legs, wondering who would be the present members of the favored circle that Elnoa admitted to her wagon. There were sure to be changes since Daya had left with the trade wagon, two seasons ago. There were always new members Elnoa had introduced, others she had unpredictably discarded.

  Beside Daya, Kobba tugged vainly at the knotted thongs of one of her sandals. Rain had swelled the leather. Daya knelt to help. She liked touching Kobba.

  Kobba was tall, lanky in the limbs, and blessed with well-formed hands and feet. The skirts of her smock clung wetly to her long, powerful legs. Her belt – a wide strap of leather with an unpolished metal disc for a buckle – fitted slantwise from one shoulder down between her breasts to her hip, where her hatchet hung on a leather loop. The brim of her broad hat cut on an angle across her face half hiding the ruin of one cheekbone, smashed long ago in a fight. Like most free fems she wore her hair long, flaunting the freedom to grow it for her own pleasure rather than for the profit of a master who sold it to the fur weavers of the Holdfast. Daya kept her own hair shorter, more in Marish style, because it was flattering; but she found a heavy mane like Kobba’s attractive.

  What a pity Kobba was so uncompromisingly faithful to Elnoa the Green-Eyed. Elnoa and Kobba were long-term lovers despite their separations in the cause of trade. Elnoa indulged herself with others; everyone knew this. No one, not even Kobba, held it against her. They accepted as her natural prerogative the sexual appetite, nourished on power, which they derided in others – Daya, for instance.

  Daya went up the slippery steps first and parted the bead curtain in the doorway. Voices from within greeted her as she tried to adjust her vision.

  As always, coals glowed in ceramic bowls around the inside of the wagon; Elnoa was easily chilled. The air was thick with aromas of tea and perfume. Elnoa insisted that her people wear strong scents in her presence. She held that freedom meant, among other things, the privilege of breathing air that did not stink of sweat.

  Windows of scraped thin leather let in little light and less sound. Daya had helped Elnoa design her quarters to mute the noise of the tea camp. Layers of blankets hung on the walls, masking the sleeping platforms that were raised against the paneling during the day. More blankets carpeted the floor deeply enough for the foot to sink in them. Any wood that showed was so intricately carved that it could scarcely be recognized as a hard surface. The chests and wicker baskets set around the long central space were heaped with pillows of the deep gold and orange tones Elnoa loved. Seven or eight fems, Elnoa’s current circle, reclined among them and waved greetings to the newcomers.

  Daya took a pillow from a pile by the doorway on her way in. The heat, the syrupy air, the rich colors welcomed and delighted her. She almost forgot, as one was meant to, the outer casing of wood and moved into a warm, cushioned world of hushed voices and languorous privilege. Even the chiefs among the Mares did not live like this. In the Holdfast itself only rich old men could afford to surround themselves with comparable luxury.

  Elnoa had been lying on her stomach for a massage. Moving slowly and with great sureness, she sat up and tucked the hem of her embroidered smock down around her legs. Her shape was not flabby but thick and cylindrical, and she leaned on her couch of pillows like a monumental tower against a bank of cloud. Even in the soft, flattering light her skin showed creases at the corners of her mouth and eyes, and gray streaked her hair. In her broad, handsome face her eyes were perfect, brilliant and enormous. Daya envied her those eyes. She did not envy Elnoa’s eminence; influence, she knew, was subtler and more versatile than authority.

  Elnoa’s greeting was in handspeech. Decades ago when she had first bossed her masters’ femhold, one of the fems under her command had argued and denied a charge of theft instead of taking her punishment with her mouth shut. Following tradition, the master had ordered Elnoa’s tongue removed to impress upon her that she was responsible for the silent submissiveness of those she bossed.

  ‘This is a special day, my friends,’ said Kobba, translating Elnoa’s hand signals in a mellifluous, formal tone that she reserved for Elnoa’s words. She was Elnoa’s voice, a conspicuous luxury since every fem knew handspeech. ‘I’m happy to see my friends Daya and Kobba again. Let them come sit beside me and tell us the news of the plains.’

  They talked plains gossip, camp gossip. A fine set of glazed spitting cups, everyone’s favorites, was brought out. Emla, the masseur, took a bar of fresh, pungent tea from a storage chest and sliced it. The slivers were strong-flavored when
chewed. Because of the scars on her cheeks Daya could scarcely chew solid food, let alone chew tea, without lacerating her own flesh with her teeth. She tucked her portion into her belt pouch. Elnoa’s tea was good currency.

  It pleased her to note that Emla was looking sulky. She thought, in Elnoa’s wagon Emla and I are like two pans of a scale, one swinging high and the other low, and then the reverse. Emla, high now, sees me here and feels the balance shifting.

  Mean-mouthed Froya was here, she noted resignedly. Old Ossa of the milky eyes was still here, homecoming after homecoming. But not the cheerful, eager fem who had sung so sweetly and whom Daya had made love to the night before leaving camp with this trade wagon. Fems died off year by year, and no new runaways had come over the borderlands recently to fill the gaps. Elnoa chose her intimates from among ever smaller numbers.

  Like addicts turning to their drug, the free fems fell to discussing the plan. The great plan. It was Elnoa’s idea. According to her, the free fems would one day slip past the Mares’ patrols and return to the Holdfast, where they would infiltrate the population and take over, capturing the men and freeing the fems enslaved there. Kobba’s scouting parties, under the pretense of searching out the best growth of wild tea plants, had penetrated the borderlands as far as the desert, which they were secretly mapping. Elnoa’s stores of food, clothing and weapons were essential. When the time to go drew near, the scouts would distribute Elnoa’s stores in various caches intended to provision and sustain the whole band of free fems on their route homeward. Just how this was to be done without drawing the attention of the Marish patrols was not, it seemed to Daya, very clear. The free fems did not have a high opinion of Marish intelligence.

  Daya suspected that she was not the only one who thought the plan absurd. The Mares had patrolled the borderlands for generations, preventing the men from learning of their existence and coming over the mountains in force. Marish patrols had never once let a man come as far as the Grasslands; surely they were capable of preventing fifty fems from returning to the Holdfast.