Alldera sat knotting the dry fibres spread on her knee into a menstrual plug. She could not yet turn out dozens of them during a conversation without looking down at her work, as the women did; but she could make enough for her own needs. There was no water to spare during the dry, dusty weather to wash out a fem-style bleeding rag.
She looked up now and again at Sheel, who nursed the cub and helped Nenisi cook – so strange to see that soft round cub head against Sheel’s conical breast.
The two sharemothers talked as women talked whenever there was time: of horses, water, grass and weather, but most often of their kindred. Alldera loved to listen and took pride in being able to follow more and more all the time. Tangled skeins of events were unrolled, like the history which pitted a wealthy cousin of Shayeen in what seemed eternal enmity against someone of the Faller tent. This naturally involved Sheel because of a sister of hers who was a sharemother in that tent. Dozens of women were mixed up in the quarrel, including women of other camps.
Shayeen had her enemies, Nenisi had hers, and Sheel had many. Even Barvaran was entangled in some huge row of years’ standing which appeared to turn on horses used in payment of a debt and the different valuations placed on those horses by at least six sides in the dispute.
No one ever asked Alldera about the Holdfast, and she was glad; that life seemed to her to have been infinitely inferior to the women’s lives here, and she would have been embarrassed to speak of it. Besides, as a slave she had never been free to speak except on command, and she was still shy.
Two riders passed by the open front of the tent, turned to shout questions. Answers came from other tents, and the two riders came back again and stopped. Sheel and Nenisi jumped up and ran out to embrace the newcomers as they dismounted, talking, patting and stroking them in the way the women had.
Watching, Alldera thought enviously that they did not know what it was to be always at the mercy of men’s hands.
One of the visitors was old, brown-skinned, gray-haired, well-wrinkled. She limped badly. The other might have been Nenisi, except that Nenisi already stood there. This visitor was slender, black-skinned, with the same smooth-featured, mobile face, the same hands flashing pale palms as she talked.
Alldera was beginning to get used to the way these people appeared sometimes in identical pairs, trios, or even more. At first she had thought it a powerful magic, for in the Holdfast twins were a sign of witchery and were killed at birth with their dam. Here, Nenisi had told her patiently many times over, there were whole strings of blood relations called ‘Motherlines’, women who looked like older and younger versions of each other. They were mothers and daughters, sisters and the daughters of sisters. Nenisi said the look-alikes did not live together but were scattered through the tents of this camp and other camps.
The dark woman standing like Nenisi’s living shadow was a Conor from another camp, a woman whose teeth must also be prone to ache when she was anxious, as Nenisi’s did. Alldera had heard Nenisi grinding her teeth in her sleep; this woman must grind hers, too.
Nenisi drew her double into the tent by the hand. ‘This is the child of my sister, cousin Marisu Conor from Windgrass Camp; and this is Jesselee Morrowtrow, one of Sheel’s mothers.’
The old woman studied Alldera, head to one side, not speaking. Sheel took her by the hands, called her ‘Heart-mother’, and seated her near the fire with her back half-turned to Alldera.
‘At the last Gather when I asked where you were,’ Sheel said to her mother, ‘they told me that a horse had kicked you while you were doctoring her. I thought it would be healed up by now. Live around horses, you’ll limp half your life.’
‘Don’t believe everything you hear,’ the old woman said. ‘A crocodile bit me.’
‘Nenisi, what’s a crocodile?’ Alldera whispered. She feared for a moment that she had asked the wrong Conor cousin, but then she saw Nenisi’s blue necklace and was reassured. She did not often make such errors any more.
‘A joke,’ Nenisi murmured, ‘though they do say such Ancient creatures still live, far to the south where the plain turns to forest and marsh.’
‘A crocodile!’ Sheel marveled. ‘Like the one whose skin you showed me once when I was little – only that turned out to be a sheet of bark stripped from a fresh tent pole.’
Unperturbed, Jesselee continued, ‘There I was, prowling the shoreline marshes by the Salty River. I’d dreamed of one of the drowned cities of the Ancients, and I thought that meant that some treasure would be washed up for me. Instead here comes this knobby dark form, floating silently nearer and nearer – ’
‘And it gobbled you up,’ said Marisu Conor, snapping her teeth loudly together. They all laughed, Sheel loudest of all.
Imagine, being so easy and happy with a grown woman who had suckled you and with whom your relations stretched back through your entire life! It was wonderful to bask on the edge of the ease the women had with each other, the rich connectedness.
They showed Jesselee the cub, which went into one of its fits of sudden activity and nearly blacked the old woman’s eye. She seemed pleased, laughing and commenting that it seemed to have plenty of spirit. She said she would be staying a while.
They talked about Salt Wind Camp where Sheel had grown up, way to the west. The winds which sometimes blew damply off the river had weakened her chest, Sheel said sadly, and had etched the cold into her bones, so that she seldom returned there. She said she could not forget the wind patterns on the water, though, or the whispering reeds along the water’s edge. ‘I used to play, as a child, that I was an invader from over the river or else a gallant defender of our camp. I didn’t know in those days who the real intruder would be.’
She glared at Alldera, who had passed the point at which Sheel’s unkindness could reduce her to tears. Alldera looked at Jesselee and said diffidently, ‘I’m glad you’ll stay with us, Jesselee. I think I know all my sharemothers’ tales by now.’
Jesselee rubbed at her stiff knee and nodded. ‘I’m sure I can recall some new ones to tell you. Even someone as close as one’s heartchild always has something still to learn – a tale, a skill, some manners.’
Sheel bit her lip but said nothing, and Alldera felt filled with victory.
First you made sure that the long Rainy Season dampness had not made the tea moldy. Then you shaved it fine. Alldera had only been given the job of making the midday tea once before, and she had used water that was too hot and had had to sit by and watch the family members gulp down the bitter stuff anyway, because tea was too valuable to be wasted.
She leaned over her work, sat back again to shake the hair out of her eyes. Over the months her hair had grown out long and as healthy as it ever got, and she was always meaning to cut it shoulder length, the women’s favorite style, and never getting around to it.
Unintentionally she caught the eye of a woman who was walking past, one arm slung companionably over the withers of a spotted mare that ambled beside her like a friend. The woman smiled. Alldera did not recognize her, but smiled timidly in return, and bent to her work again.
Concentrating on the tea making was hard. Behind her Barvaran and Shayeen were chatting together about childhood. Shayeen, seeding peppers for the array of kettles in front of her, complained intermittently about the stinging of her fingers. She had piles of fresh-picked peppers still to cut, for it was the Holdfaster Tent’s turn to lay out food for the childpack today.
The children knew it and were gathered nearby, giggling and fighting around the edges of a huge puddle on the margins of which their feet slid and splashed. They pushed each other into it. A few of them squatted down to imitate the adults over make-believe fires of piled stones.
Barvaran kept an eye on them, stopping her conversation to shout warnings at them now and then. She was simmering milk and laying out the squeezed dregs from the pots in lumps to dry on the tent fly. The children were notorious thieves of whatever food they found lying around, perhaps because they were never punished.
Alldera braced the tea brick on her knee, watching a shaving curl away from her knife blade. The scent of cooking milk was making her mouth water. She had developed an inordinate fondness for the fragile plates of fresh cream cake that could be lifted from the surface of a cooled pan of simmered milk. The milking of mares in foal took much of everyone’s time, and the whole camp lived on fresh milk these days. Alldera could not pick up the trick of seizing the small, waxy teat way up under a mare’s leg, so she felt guilty about her appetite for the pale, sweet food.
Now: start with the cold water to moisten the shavings or it comes out too bitter. Enough cold, she hoped; then water from the hot kettle, but slowly, not too much, cold again right away so that not all the powerful taste would be leached out in the first steeping. That seemed good; the rising scent was mild and minty.
Barvaran was speaking with affectionate humor of a pack game that hinged on guessing whether a child who was ‘it’ had a finger in her nose or not by just listening to her talk in the dark. It was weird even now to think of these women as having once lived the life of the childpack and to think of the cub of Holdfaster Tent joining that life. She was growing fast. Alldera remembered how the leather sling had sagged against Nenisi’s back this morning when the black woman had ridden out to the milking lines carrying the cub with her.
Barvaran and Shayeen talked of a wild dancing game played with the horses, of sleepy sex games, and – in a subdued manner – about harrying the unfit from the pack. Many died in their first pack year. When the children brought in one of their number who was ill to be tended by the adults, that child was generally discovered to have exceptional qualities.
With a rush of confidence Alldera decided to take the next step: the mixing of flour and water to make noodles, which the women put in their tea along with milk and salt, making it into a meal. She hoped no one would insist on helping.
They were too deep in talk. Shayeen was saying wistfully, ‘You start to bleed, and the younger ones drive you out, and that’s the end of the free life. There’s no place to go but to the tents, where you remember women once carried you and nursed you and mopped your bottom. And sure enough, there they are, all waiting to make you into a proper woman with a name and a family.’
‘Oh, it’s a terrible time, I remember,’ Barvaran agreed. ‘There I was with blood running down my legs and a new smell of myself, all hateful and sour, in my nostrils. My pack mates had to beat me away. Somebody finally whacked me on the head with a horse bone, I still have the mark, look here. That did it.’
‘Blood at both ends is a strong argument,’ Shayeen said. ‘Did you ever hear of a Maclaster child who ran with her camp’s pack for almost seventeen years? Just would not start bleeding.’
‘Some funny traits show up in that line sometimes.’
Sitting back, her work completed, Alldera suddenly noticed how cool the morning was once she was not bending over the heat of the tea fire. She tightened her breast wrap – by now she could adjust the knot behind her back by herself – and slipped her long leather shirt on over her head. She put on her headcloth and the rawhide crown that snugged it to her head, and stood up.
The pants that Barvaran had lent her fit fairly well, closing at the waist with a drawstring; but the legs had to be tugged down every once in a while because Alldera did not like to wear the soft boots that helped to anchor them. She had gone barefoot all her life.
She sheathed her knife and buckled on her belt. The women wore the knife sheathed at the small of the back, where the tip could not catch the thigh upraised to mount a horse. Alldera stayed clear of the horses and wore her knife at her hip. The horses’ size and strength and impenetrable mixture of cunning and stupidity terrified her, and she still thought of the women’s power over them as a kind of magic.
Someone called outside – Nenisi’s voice. There she sat on her best bay mare, straight-backed and masterful, having left the cub with someone out at the milking lines. Hastily, Alldera poured out some tea and took it to her.
Nenisi did not drink. ‘Look,’ she said, and pointed with her chin, as the women often did.
Out beyond the tents a group approached on foot over the plains, hauling a wagon. The wind was blowing the wrong way. Alldera could barely hear the creaking of the wagon’s wheels and only scraps of voices, though the group was at no great distance from Stone Dancing Camp.
She knew them at once for ferns. They had a squat, stiff-jointed look about them, none of the suppleness of riders, and the silhouettes of their clothing reminded her unmistakably of Holdfastish dress. As they came closer she could make out the broad, shallow hats they wore and, instead of shirt and pants, smocks with skirts mid-thigh over bare legs. Some of them carried staffs in their hands or across their shoulders. Each staff was tipped with a glinting point.
Fems carrying weapons and traveling unmastered: a dream of her own people.
Flooded with a great sense of relief, of homecoming, Alldera dropped the tea pannikin and began to cry. Yet she did not want to run to greet them.