Once she thought she heard the monsters up ahead crying to each other in high, shivering voices.
When it was too dark for her to see their tracks, she stopped and sat down beside a prow of rock. Chewing very slowly – her teeth hurt, and she had no saliva to moisten the food – she ate one small, hard loaf from the bag. There were four more left.
Sounds woke her at morning. Her trough was still deep in shadow under softly lit ridges above on either hand. As she rubbed the dust out of her eyes and tried to remember what it was that she had heard, sounds came again, high, almost whistling, shaking as if with rage, and then a shout very like a human voice, not far away.
Alldera clawed her way up the side of the nearest ridge, scraping her hands and feet on the rocks and starting a small slide of dirt and rubble behind her. She felt heavy, slow and desperate, thinking of them traveling on while she toiled after them, more slowly today than yesterday, more slowly still tomorrow. Breasting the blunted ridge top, she could see the dust-coated foliage of trees a few furrows over. She stood up on the rounded spine of the ridge.
Not twenty meters off figures moved in one of the rough passes between two furrows; monsters indeed – three of them.
Their bodies were long, slung horizontally on two pairs of legs. Two trunks rose from their backs, one human-shaped with arms, the other smooth and topped with a head like a log of wood stuck on at an angle, and a sweep of hair hung from the back end, like one lock from the top of a shaven scalp.
They were terrible to look at, but they were her only chance to live. Alldera filled her lungs and screamed.
Two of the monsters checked in the pass, bumping each other. The third turned and took great plunging leaps to the top of the ridge they were crossing. It halted and faced Alldera. The humanlike trunk extended something toward her, a stick held out straight up and down at the full length of the arm as if warding off the sight of her. There was something threatening in the stillness behind the gesture, the concentration before delivering a blow.
Alldera waved her strengthless arms and called out again.
The long head of the monster dipped and murmured. The human head uttered a cry, excited words and what sounded like laughter. The stick weapon was lowered, tucked away somewhere. Incredible, to manage all those limbs at once –
The monster came apart.
The human torso vaulted into the air and landed on two human legs beside the creature on which it had been sitting. With terrible clarity Alldera saw her error: they were men, nothing but men, who had somehow caught and tamed true monsters to obedience.
She slid down the steep side of the ridge in a spout of choking dust and began to run waveringly down the trough floor. There were shouts and the pounding of steps behind her; running was hopeless. She knew the art of kick fighting, but that was beyond her now. Raging, she bent and groped in some flood wrack for a rock, a stick, something to take in her hand.
The beast drove toward her in bounds, its fistlike feet hurling up sprays of earth. The rider had a coil of rope in his hands. As Alldera cocked her arm, holding a rock that she knew she hardly had the strength to toss, something swished through the air and slapped her around the chest and shoulders. She was jerked off her feet as the beast tore past her and she crashed flat on her back, her body ringing with shock, unable even to roll onto her side or her stomach to protect herself.
She heard him dismount, his soft-footed steps approaching, the play of muscle, bone and clothing as he squatted beside her.
Framed by a long, loose cloth that he wore over his head and falling down his shoulders, his smiling face was red and small-eyed, with dirt ground into the creases around his features. He wore a belted tunic with big, flap-topped pockets in the skirts over pants of the same weaveless, greasy material, and boots tied snugly under the knee. He stank.
Alldera strained for control of her bruised and exhausted body, promising herself, I will swallow my tongue and die. Before he can raise a hand to me.
The stranger opened his crack-lipped mouth and spoke. There was a peculiar light singsong pattern to his voice. Alldera did not register the words; she had been without the sound of another human voice for a very long time.
The stranger pulled off his headdress, freeing a thick fall of gray-shot hair. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said again slowly, and Alldera understood. ‘Don’t be scared of me.’
He caught up her hand and pressed it against his own body. Under the slick-surfaced tunic Alldera felt the unmistakable soft shape of a female breast.
2
Sheel strode into the sweat tent, humming, and pulled off her shirt, savoring the idea of calling a duel on a woman who had spoken persistently against her during the inquiry about this new fem.
Redder in the face than ever, Barvaran came in to join her in cleansing themselves for the judgment of the camp. She had brought in the last of the hot stones on the prongs of a long wooden fork. She placed the stone among the others in the pit in the middle of the floor and stood back, rubbing water from her forehead with the back of her thick, red wrist. She looked sullen and distressed. Sheel regretted not having Shayeen there with them; Shayeen was still too sick to come.
Sheel knelt at the entry to lace the door flaps up tight. She looked over her shoulder. With only the two of them in it the tent looked vast. Ordinarily there would have been a dozen women filling the space. Barvaran seemed a figure of red sandstone glistening with rain across an expanse of earthen floor.
Picking up the water bucket, Sheel joined her by the pit. The whiplike ends of the tent poles were lashed together with special knots well above their heads. There, where the roof was highest, Sheel stood up and tugged off her breast wrap, dropped it by her shirt and pants.
Barvaran took the horsetail sprinkler from the bucket and flicked a spatter of drops onto the hot stones. With a thunderous cracking sound, steam shot up, heat spread in a stifling cloud. Sheel endured it for a moment, breathing the searing air in small sips. Then she sat down; the air was cooler near the ground. She took a hardwood scraper from the tray nearby and turned it in her hands, examining it. She still had a scar from a scraper that somebody had nicked by working on a hide with it.
‘They won’t be long about it,’ Barvaran said miserably. ‘There isn’t anything to think over. Shayeen was sick, you used the excuse of her illness to ride past that food cache instead of checking it, and I let you do it. We left that fem there to die.’
‘We didn’t know she was there.’ Sheel was bored and impatient with the argument. ‘And it was Shayeen who almost died.’
‘She says she wasn’t so badly off that we couldn’t have spared time to go and check the cache, like any other patrol heading home.’
Sheel did not answer. Sweat stung her eyes, she could feel her skin cooking over bones. She thought of the bowl of cold water set outside the entry, but she would not be the first one to reach for it.
Barvaran’s expression still accused her.
‘I didn’t know the fem was there,’ Sheel repeated for the hundredth time. ‘It’s months since anyone has found man or fem in the borderlands, everyone knows that. I was right to say we should get Shayeen home as fast as we could, and you were right to agree. Look how sick she still is.’
Barvaran got up and went to the entry. She reached out beneath the laced flaps and a little sip of cool air came in from outside. She drank, and brought Sheel the bowl. The cool water was a joy on the lips.
‘We were wrong,’ she said mournfully.
Sheel expelled her breath in an exasperated hiss. She began picking over the bits of soaproot laid out on the tray by her knee. To try to lighten the mood and prevent a real quarrel she said, ‘Did you have a look at this fem Alldera when they got her cleaned up? I bet she didn’t have to escape. I bet the Holdfast men kicked her out so they wouldn’t have to look at her any more.’
She grimaced, thinking of the fern: a plate-faced creature, the bridge of her nose flattened so that there was no strong feature to
balance her wide, heavy-lipped mouth; eyes a nondescript green-brown, wideset below a broad band of forehead and above the sweep of the cheeks; brown hair too fine to add height to the wide skull. For the rest, she was all bone and belly, with a blunt, square frame. Altogether no prize, yet Sheel knew she would have to suffer on the worthless slave’s account.
She muttered fiercely, ‘I wish all those fems were dead.’
Through the shimmering, steamy air she saw Barvaran arrested, hands lifted to wring out her thick gray hair. ‘No Riding Woman has a right to say that,’ Barvaran exclaimed. ‘For all the history of the plains we’ve rescued any fem that came as far as Long Valley, saved her and healed her and sent her to the free fems – ’
Sheel mashed a piece of root with a stone, making sudsing paste. She hit hard, pounding out the sound of Barvaran’s rough, anxious voice. Bits of slippery white fiber shot in all directions.
‘For all the history of the plains,’ she said, when Barvaran had paused for breath. ‘What about the history of the Holdfast? Think of that. Can you tell me we have some duty to help such cowardly weaklings?
‘Back in the Wasting, when our lines’ first ancestors shaped their own freedom and ours after them, what was the fem’s ancestor doing? Trotting after her bosses, following those high government men into hiding from the ruin they themselves had brought about with their dirty ways and their wars and their greedy dealings. And when the men looked out of their Refuge and saw the world outside sinking into wreckage and they turned around and blamed the women, did those women fight?’
‘Some of them must have,’ Barvaran said uncertainly. She rubbed sudsing paste patiently into her hair. ‘A few.’
‘Yes, but how many, and how hard did they fight? Their female descendants still came out of the Refuge as slaves when the Wasting was over. They let themselves be turned into the “fems” who built the men their new country, their miserable Holdfast.’
This time Barvaran did not answer. It was too easy to shut her up, to overwhelm her plodding mind. Sheel pressed her, ‘Are you listening? And all that time our ancestors, women mind you, not fems, were building a life that Holdfast men would destroy if they knew it existed.’
‘I don’t know what any of this has to do with this fem Alldera and her baby.’
Sheel began raising a lather in her own hair with stabbing fingers. ‘She’s just like the rest of them, the runaways, the “free fems” – they crawl all their lives under the whips of Holdfast men, and those that can’t take it any longer run away. We find them, make them a place here on the plains, praise them for their courage – courage, to run off and leave the rest of your own kind to rot!’ She paused for breath. What a pleasure it was to speak freely against what all the camps agreed was right.
Barvaran leaned to throw more water on the stones. The steam was less, but the heat seemed to build higher and faster than before. Rubbing at an old hunting scar on the hard red calf of her leg, she said in her slow, stubborn way, ‘That’s all over now, Sheel. This fem says they’re wiping each other out back there, men and men and men and ferns. It had to happen, with their food so scant all those years and the young men half starved under the rule of the old, greedy ones. You’re angry at a dead place.’
‘Not dead, still living – here. We have the runaway fems with us. Weaklings, misfits – what would have become of us women if we were as soft with our own as we are with them?
‘And now there’s this new one, and her cub besides.’
‘Her child,’ Barvaran corrected gently. She took up a scraper and moved so that she could use it on Sheel’s skin. The wooden blade rode deftly over the long plane of Sheel’s thigh. Barvaran had fine control of those great red hands of hers, even now in her distress. She never hurt where she could caress. Useless to try to make her understand the shame, the insult these fems brought to the clean life of the plains.
‘It could be a male child,’ Sheel growled. ‘Would you speak up for it so tenderly then?’
‘The fem says she’s had two other children, both female. And Layall Fowersath has examined her and thinks this one will be female also.’
Sheel snorted. ‘The fem is so weak and confused she doesn’t know what she’s saying; and as for Layall Fowersath, like all Fowersaths she can usually tell accurately the sex of an unborn foal. But this isn’t a horse’s offspring we’re talking about. This is a man’s cub from the men’s world. Male or female it’s dangerous – like anything from there.’
‘The free fems have never hurt us.’
‘Just wait. You’ll see some day that I’m right.’
‘You said all this at the inquiry,’ Barvaran said. ‘Nobody agrees with you.’
‘More do than you think, but they keep it to themselves.’ Sheel turned her leg more firmly against the scraper’s edge. With another such tool she drew down the curve of Barvaran’s torso in a neat pattern of overlapping strokes. The heat brought out fresh moisture as soon as the old was swept away.
Barvaran looked at her. ‘Some women say you can’t tell fems from their masters, Sheel. Everyone knows we should kill men because they are dangerous and crazy. They don’t even know how to die. But you almost killed a fem this time. Fems are damaged and need our help, but you treat them as if they were men too. Some women say you’ve killed too many men, Sheel, and the killing has crippled your spirit, and you shouldn’t go out on patrol again.’
‘Who says so?’
‘If I tell you, you’ll go feuding with the one who said it. I just think you should know: women say that when you speak of fems, you talk like a woman with no kin.’
Sheel slapped a gob of suds back up out of her own eyes. ‘We’ll have a feud right here between the two of us in a minute,’ she began threateningly, and stopped. Who was this wretched fem to set her against good, dull Barvaran?
The lacing of the entry was suddenly pulled loose, admitting a rush of cool air. Two women entered, stooping, and walked to the center where the others rose to meet them. Even at its highest point the curved tent roof brushed the raincloud hair of Nenisi Conor, who was tall, angular and dark like a woman’s shadow on the ground in late afternoon. One of the black-skinned Conor line and imbued with the Conor trait of justice giving, she was a perfect speaker for the camp, unimpeachable. The Conors are the shadows of our consciences, women said.
Nenisi Conor looked at Sheel. ‘Women think you did wrong to be careless about the lives of the fem Alldera and her child.’
The other woman was of Sheel’s own line, a lean replica of Sheel herself, yellow-haired and blade-faced. Her name was Palmelar. She was famous for being poor in horses because she gave away her wealth to needier women. She was well chosen also, someone whom Sheel had to respect.
To her Sheel said harshly, ‘Does our Motherline agree with this that other women think?’
Palmelar nodded and met her eyes, smiling as if rejoicing in the judgment.
And here I am looking foolish with soap all over my head, Sheel thought furiously. She stared away over their heads. ‘Well, how many horses am I fined?’ Each horse paid out of her home herd she would replace if it took her the rest of her life.
Nenisi answered, ‘The fem has no use for your horses. But there is her child. You must forfeit half your home herd to the child of the fem Alldera.’
Half. And for a fern!
Barvaran was looking from one of them to the other. ‘But what good are horses to a fem’s child?’
‘Our child,’ Palmelar said happily. ‘The fem’s child is to be one of us.’
Sheel could not hold back an ugly bray of laughter. Had they all lost their senses? A fem’s child could never be a Riding Woman for a dozen reasons. She said the one thing that summed up everything else: ‘The child will have no kin!’
‘She’ll have all the kin she needs,’ Nenisi said. ‘Alldera Holdfaster the fem will be bloodmother to her. Barvaran will be one of her sharemothers, to offset negligence of duty on patrol; and Shayeen, who was too sick to be blame
d but who was there; and I myself, as spokeswoman for the judgment; and you too, Sheel, so that you can pay for your ill will and the deaths that it almost caused. We’ll all be her family, which is an honor; the child from the Holdfast may grow up to found a new Motherline among the camps of the plains.
‘Now, is the judgment sound, Sheel Torrinor?’
Sheel could not speak. Barvaran cried, ‘Yes!’ The three of them wept and hugged each other while she stood in their midst, stifled with her own rage.
THE WOMEN
3
The comfortable doze in which Alldera had floated for so long dissolved at last. She found herself in a warm, dim place walled and roofed with some pale, translucent material. All around her were activity, voices murmuring, laughter. Something soft cushioned her back. She could see sharp blue sky through an opening off to one side.
What’s happening, where am I, what dangers threaten?
A contraction twisted her belly. She cried out at the familiar pain. People closed around her, patting her, whispering encouragement, holding her hands firmly. Her feet were gripped and braced against the backs of people seated on the heap of bedding.
Someone at her side said briskly, ‘Breathe. Remember. You know how to make your breathing work for you.’
She did remember, though she could not now tell whether this was knowledge learned in the secret world of Holdfast fems or in her long dreaming here. There was a way to use the rhythm of respiration to mobilize the body so that it worked not against its own strengths but with them. Fear vanished. She felt full of power, as if she could burst the cub out of her body with one great thrust. It surprised her to find that time was needed, and pain.