Sheel craved the cleansing power of violence, the release. A good, rough game of pillo gave that. She could hardly wait for the coming clash, and part of the red horse’s impatience he had picked up from her.
The twelve women who were Sheel’s opponents lined up at the opposite end of the field. They held their lances point downward, aslant beside their horses’ shoulders. Hidden behind these riders was the ‘burrow’, a sheet of leather propped up on sticks like a tent. Sheel’s object was to ride through the opposition without losing the pillo, which she would try to sling into the mouth of the burrow and earn a goal. Each other rider would try to prevent her goal by pinning the pillo to earth with a well-placed lance thrust.
Around Sheel friends and rivals laughed, called bets and counter-bets, commented on the states of the horses and riders in this second half of play. Shayeen moved around the red horse, checking its gear and its feet. She need not have bothered; nothing short of a broken leg would stop the stud, a five-year-old named Fire. Like other stallions, he was no use in a real race or a raid, either of which entailed a run of three days or so; only the wiry little mares had that kind of endurance. For a day’s hunting or a pillo fight, he was superb.
‘What are we waiting for?’ Sheel groaned.
In the center of the field a dark woman of the Clarish line sat on her horse, lance raised straight in the air. From its end drooped a white horse tail. When the horse tail dropped the play would resume. She was looking from one end of the field to the other.
The sky was overcast, presaging the end of the Dusty Season and the coming of rain. Over the distant mountains seams of sunlight opened in the dark, rich layers of cloud. Assured of new grass by a week of thunderous skies, the women had used the last of their precious grain to strengthen their fittest horses for the game.
Sheel shivered in the breath of a breeze. She was wet with the sweat of anticipation. If fems were permitted in the game, there might now be femmish blood spilled by a woman of the Torrinor line. But pillo was a clean game, not for slaves from the lands of men.
The red horse snorted and mouthed the bit. He had gone four rounds already and his coat was dark with sweat. He jigged and fretted for the start of his run, one eye on the Faller’s high-tailed mare.
The Clarish’s lance dipped.
‘Go!’ the women screamed.
Fire shot forward. Sheel lay along his neck, riding him with weight and legs. Her right arm yanked back the taut rope with the pillo bounding at the end of it, preparing a low, skimming whip-stroke to catch the legs of the oncoming horses.
The riders came like a dust storm, yelling and jostling, their lances cocked shoulder high to jab at the pillo. Sheel slung the pillo forward on its line, and the horses rushing toward her sprang aside.
The red stud ignored the gap they left. He veered toward the Faller woman on her foam-streaked bay mare, fifteen meters down the field on the left. Sheel hauled on the reins and beat him over the shoulders with the knotted end of the rope. He would not turn.
‘I’ll kill you!’ she screamed into his back-laid ears. ‘You’re dead as you run, sharu-vomit!’
The Faller’s mare, trying to stop and piss, swung broadside across other riders coming up along her flanks. Women on the sidelines shrieked warnings to their friends and curses at the Faller.
Then someone swept up alongside and punched the distracted Faller out of her saddle. This player lashed the mare across the rump with her rein ends and headed her back full tilt the way she had come, while the Faller skipped about on foot in a panic, trying to avoid being trampled. A friend caught the Faller up and carried her out of the melee.
Fire stopped trying to stand on his hind legs. He plunged after the Faller’s mare at a dead run, and into a swarm of riders. Other horses cannoned against him; Sheel felt him stagger. Flying clods were hurled up by the hooves of the horses as they dug for purchase. Sheel shortened the rope swiftly with both hands so that it would not drop slack and foul her own mount’s legs. She laid about her with the knotted end, beating the riders, whooping.
She was at a disadvantage. Everyone was too excited to feel much pain, force was all that mattered. They hooked at her with knees and elbows. To beat them back she used the rope with both hands. Women swung aside, dripping red where the pillo had struck. The press thinned about her. She brought Fire’s blocky quarters over hard against the shoulder of a pursuing mare and had the satisfaction of hearing the rider curse as she was jarred from the saddle. At last Sheel was in the clear.
She clamped the shank of the rope hard between her leg and the saddle, leaned forward with both hands on the red horse’s mane, and summoned breath to call to him. He groaned and stretched out over the ground in a flat run. If anyone caught the pillo now as it streaked and bounded along at the rope’s end, it would tear free, unhorsing her, but she did not care, did not even look back. Fire ran on, laboring. The women roared.
Judging her moment, Sheel caught up the rope and with a triumphant sweep of her arm she slung the pillo at the burrow. The frayed rope parted in midair, the heavy leather bag flew wide. Groans came from the sidelines.
‘Sharu drink my blood!’ Sheel swore. She turned the red horse in a long, faltering curve off the field. Dismounting, she stepped away to keep from hitting him. Her eyes stung and her legs shook under her.
Women crowded around, patting her on the back, hugging her, congratulating her on a game well played despite the bad rope. Her bruises began to ache.
Close at her side Nenisi said, ‘I hate that lumpy red horse of yours, but he is a pusher in a game – once you get him to concentrate on the business at hand, that is.’
Women laughed.
Limping back to Holdfaster Tent, Sheel leaned on Nenisi. A flying stirrup iron had struck her in the calf; she remembered the impact, now that she felt the pain.
Good pain; she was still well within reach of other women’s hands, their buffets as well as their caresses. She still belonged despite Daya and Alldera and the other fems.
She hugged Nenisi’s shoulders more tightly and flinging back her head shouted out a victory song that pressed at her chest and throat like the onset of weeping. There were no words to the song, there was only her rough, glad voice.
13
Under a wet-season sky ripe with clouds the mothers and the child of Holdfaster Tent moved in procession around Stone Dancing Camp. Alldera found the slow pace maddening. Nenisi’s descriptions of the coming-out ceremonies kept settling in her mind. This was the last stage of their child’s absorption into the lives of the women, and she kept wondering if some unexpected intrusion might yet break it all up and leave the child unclaimed – or even back in her own hands. She did not know how she would take that.
The child walked close at Barvaran’s side, a naked, dirty rain-streaked figure, its face half hidden by its mat of greasy hair. Looking at it, Alldera felt detached. She reminded herself many times as they wound their way among the tents, this is the child of my body. It was incredible! The child had matured rapidly into a young adolescent.
She seemed to Alldera rather stocky, certainly not tall. She had a wide, well-shaped mouth and her alert eyes looked everywhere, at everyone and everything. Sometimes she licked her lips, or clenched her hand on Barvaran’s so that her dirty knuckles paled. Alldera saw she was afraid, but there was no whimpering or shrinking. Alldera approved in an abstract way.
This is the child of my body.
At every tent women came out smiling to embrace the sharemothers, laughing, congratulating them, eyeing but not touching the child. Each clasped Alldera’s hands or stroked her shoulders or straightened her hair. Alldera was continually reminded of the day, years ago, when she had given birth among them. To this child.
The sweat tent was not quite ready. The five sharemothers waited outside wrapped in their leather capes while other relatives – including free fems from the wagons, four of them now besides Daya – finished preparations for the ritual. Jesselee, as a grandmoth
er, directed all this.
Alldera could not stop yawning with nerves. Her belly rumbled, and her left side, where she had been hurt once in the tea camp, ached from the Rainy Season dampness. She looked at Nenisi standing close by, her face lit with joy. The child had come out late, a month after the pack mates of her generation, and she was small. She would not mate at this year’s Gather, or even next year’s. But she had come out, and Alldera could see the women’s relief and was glad of it. Now it was only required that this go well, that the gift to the women – to Nenisi, really, who wanted it so badly – be accomplished, whatever else might happen.
As they went inside the sweat tent, Nenisi’s hand brushed Alldera’s and tightened briefly on her fingers.
Scrapers had been laid out on a leather mat, fresh white slivers of soaproot gleamed, and the floor had been strewn with aromatic grasses. The sharemothers spread their leather capes on the floor and sat upon them, nude.
The child crouched by Barvaran’s side. Her instant affinity for the red-faced woman meant that Barvaran would be her heartmother. Alldera felt relieved. For the moment there was no necessity of close contact between herself and the youngster, contact for which she felt totally unready in spite of all Nenisi’s preparations.
Barvaran began to speak softly to the child in the quick, fluid slang of the childpack. Alldera felt a startling stab of jealousy. If she were to address the child in Holdfastish, there would be no understanding between them. Never mind, she thought; what would I have to say to her?
She sat down near the stone pit, feeling the heat tighten her skin. Nenisi, squatting next to her, began pounding soaproot into paste. Cheerful Barvaran, handsome Shayeen whose reserve Alldera had never pierced, and Sheel, more wiry than ever and seeming very deliberate today, the family was gathered again. Naked, all but Nenisi and coppery Shayeen were pale-skinned except on their hands and faces, which sun and wind had weathered.
Alldera looked down at her own thighs – once brown from exposure below the short working garment of the fems, now pale from the protection of the pants she had adopted from the women – her own darkened hands resting on them.
It amazed her to think that Sheel the raider, Sheel the fierce who rode stallions, killed men and hated fems, had once entered a tent like this as a child among her own mothers. But so had all the women.
At the first hiss of steam from the stone pit the child shrank back into the enclosure of Barvaran’s arms. Gently, still speaking in a low voice, Barvaran scooped up a handful of lather and soaped the child’s shoulder while the others watched. The child glanced from one of them to another and back down at the shining film of soaproot that Barvaran spread with great tenderness on her skin.
‘She has clear hazel eyes,’ Shayeen commented, ‘and her teeth look good and straight.’
Sheel said, ‘I think a horse bit her there, on the arm.’
‘Neat hands and feet,’ Nenisi said. ‘She isn’t big, but she’s well shaped, with good proportions.’
Barvaran held up one of the child’s arms and gently moved the hand in a circle with both of hers. ‘Something happened here,’ she said with concern. ‘A break, I can feel the knob where the bones knit. But the wrist moves smoothly.’
The tricky part of the ritual bath was coming; apparently all the youngsters fought against the discomforts of having their hair washed and untangled. Nenisi said that this was good: in her struggles to avoid her mothers’ attentions a child learned that though they overpowered her, they did not harm her; she could trust them.
‘I think she’s going to give us a good fight,’ Shayeen predicted approvingly.
Barvaran began lathering the child’s hair. In a moment the youngster let out a yell of outrage and tried to lunge away. The women rushed to help hold the slippery, thrashing limbs so that Barvaran could finish the hair wash.
Alldera hung back, reluctant to lay hands on this strange young body.
‘Come on,’ Shayeen shouted to her, ‘get the feel of your child, and let her get the feel of you!’
Alldera thrust her own body among the bodies of the others. They were all dripping and lathered now. Helping to pinion the thin, flailing arms, Alldera kept her head pressed next to the child’s head to avoid being smacked in the face by her hard skull. Stinging soap had gotten into her eyes and she could not see, but she could feel the muscles pull and thrust under her grip, and she smelled the first blood flow which had led the childpack to expel the child. She kept remembering with disbelief that these straining limbs belonged to her own offspring.
A douse of rinse water left them gasping and ready for the next stage.
Barvaran blotted the child’s long, tangled hair in a blanket. The child still tried to pull away, abusing them all in pack slang. She yanked out her menstrual plug twice before Barvaran could get her to accept its presence in her body. Barvaran sat with her, grooming her sleek hair and talking quietly in her ear while the other sharemothers washed their own hair and scraped each other down. They showed off to one another the red marks where the child had hit them and ruefully compared bruises.
The entryway was tightly laced. Alldera saw how the child’s eyes kept flashing in that direction; she no longer fought back, but she had not given up.
Alldera thought, this child would never have lived to come out of the Holdfast kit pits. The older fems would have judged her too ready to fight. Before she could break some man’s teeth for him and bring a flood of femmish blood in reprisal, we would have killed her ourselves. An ordinary idea, in my old life.
The child watched each of the adults warily. For an instant her eyes met Alldera’s. There was no spark of special feeling. She seemed rather ordinary now, a draggled youngster, hair dark with moisture, skin dark with years of running naked, flickering eyes of an indeterminate color in the silvery light of the sweat tent; hazel, Shayeen had said.
Alldera looked away. What came next would exclude her because she was not a Riding Woman. Nenisi had prepared her. She withdrew to watch and sat with her back against one of the tent poles.
The others rose to their feet and stood in a group near the stone pit, leaving the child apart for a moment.
Something very small and simple happened. The child jumped up and glanced quickly at the entry; as she did so, the women turned their heads toward her. That was all, but there was something in the carriage of their heads, the wideness of their eyes. They seemed to Alldera to mimic with extraordinary power the way that horses lift their heads from grazing to look and listen.
Then Sheel squatted, and moving backwards on her haunches she began to smooth the sand outward from the pit toward the sweat tent wall behind her. Time had touched her, Alldera saw; veins and tendons stood high under the skin of her forearms and hands. Nenisi and Shayeen did as Sheel did, palming the sand flat. Barvaran stood with a hand on the child’s shoulder and still talked to her, pointing, smiling, as the smoothed sand was marked by the others with lines, dots, circles, zig-zags, all oriented to the stone pit, which symbolized the present campsite of Stone Dancing.
This was how women gave a child the plains.
As heartmother, Barvaran took the first turn, leading the reluctant youngster about the tent by the hand. The other women walked in attendance as Barvaran named all the places that were special to her, places mapped by the markings on the floor. She walked the child over their world; all heads bent to follow Barvaran’s stubby, pointing finger: ‘The Star Saddle,’ Alldera heard her murmur, ‘where we found water just in time coming back from a long, hard patrol, and here is the spring of the split-hoofed horse …’
There could be no turn for Alldera in this, Nenisi had said; ‘The first place you show the child is where the bones of your own bloodmother were left for the sharu.’
Nenisi came out of the group and sat by Alldera at the tent wall. With the back of her hand she pushed aside the hair plastered to her gleaming black forehead. Her eyes were on the other women. ‘It’s going well. Is it making some sort of sens
e to you?’ she said.
Alldera thought of that moment of magic when their heads had turned. ‘I think so.’
‘Good!’ Nenisi hugged her. ‘A great day, finally, this coming out. Some say that on such a day all elements of the world are placed fresh: living and nonliving, past and future, the spirits of animals and of grass and wind and time passing and even the spirits of stars. Each time we make again the web that is the inner pattern of all things, all things are balanced, the world is made steady.’
Alldera did not say aloud, Are not the men and fems beyond the mountains elements of the world? She did not want to disrupt the ceremony or the triumphant mood of Nenisi, whom she loved.
Then it was Nenisi’s turn to take the child walking over the world. Alldera sat back, thinking.
She recalled Nenisi’s joy at her return, months back now, and her own almost sensuous delight at what had taken on the color of a true homecoming, so familiar had everything seemed.
Coming from her years away with the free fems, she had at once noticed the changes that only a woman of Stone Dancing Camp would notice: this person gone, these horses newly arrived or newborn, such and such a family richer than before while another once prosperous group used other women’s cast-off tent leathers and awaited its turn of luck. Rayoratan Tent had gone, having packed up after a quarrel with the Shawden chiefs and joined Waterwall Camp in the north. Shan the bow-maker who had made Alldera’s first bow was dead, carried off by a bout of lung fever. When Alldera expressed her shock and even a touch of real sorrow, the women nodded and patted her just as if she were one of them and had a right to mourn.
She was no longer trying to catch up with them. Their distance from her – when she felt it – was now simply part of their nature and their beauty. She found that she did not need Daya to remind her of who she was.
From the first the little pet had been much more than a shadowy companion. She had become a teacher of other fems and lover of Grays Omelly, of all women! Alldera knew she had underestimated the pet fern. She had asked Daya to come as a companion of her own kind, thinking it could make no difference to the women. The effect that Daya made among them delighted her. Despite the women’s low opinion of free fems, the little pet’s grace, her elegant manners, her beautiful marred face as serious and watchful as an animal’s, intrigued them. Also, they could not hide their startled admiration of her skill with horses.