‘The rest of you are staying?’
Other conversations ceased. Everyone was looking this way. Several of them said yes, nodding, and a fem back in the shadows called, ‘Daya says we’re all your cousins, that’s the way the Mares think of us. Your cousins can visit you, can’t they? Your cousins can learn from you what Daya has learned.’
They came for the child and now they mean to stay and have me teach them to ride and shoot and track … It was what Alldera had feared, or part of it. She felt anger – would they never cease to complicate her life? – and yet some pride. It did not do to underestimate them, ever. They needed to show that they mattered; they needed to make their marks on the Grasslands.
Eagerly they told her of what had been suffered already in her cause. They spoke of fights and bitterness in the tea camp between fems wanting to join Alldera and those remaining loyal to Elnoa. Many said they had wished to come to Stone Dancing Camp sooner, but a fading allegiance to Elnoa had held them back, till now; till Sorrel’s coming out. The Plan was just the Plan, always in the future, but Alldera’s child was real now, and they kept hearing of real things happening now at Holdfaster Tent – free fems on horseback, free fems with bows.
So they came, newly bold, animated with the daring of their decision. Telling her, they watched her face. She blinked water from her eyes, shook her head without speaking because she did not trust her voice.
Daya said, ‘Time for another story.’ She sat alert, resourceful-looking since she had taken up riding; grown-up, Alldera thought. As these others will soon be.
‘This one is about Kobba. She’s with a group of us that goes to Bayo to rescue some fems that are said to be trapped there by men. The free fems try to storm Bayo town, but the men have fire throwers and dart throwers and slings, and the fems run out of arrows. Kobba and her troop are driven back into the swamp, up to their thighs in water, struggling southward through the sucking mud among the reeds and the roots. In the night they hear the prisoner fems singing, calling for help as we all used to speak to each other in songs.’
‘I don’t like this story,’ Kenoma said. Others shushed her.
‘Deeper into the swamps, Kobba sees her companions cut their own throats rather than fall into the hands of the pursuing men. She refuses to die or be caught. She eats roots, she drinks marsh water and doesn’t let sickness slow her down. She forces herself on even when the swamp is silent and she knows the men no longer follow. She thinks she has caught the smell of smoke. She finds a broken sandal strap.
One day she stumbles onto the shore of a huge island in the marsh, where reeds give way to trees. Someone is watching there – a fern, scar-backed, solid, one of those who slipped away from Bayo and hid in the swamp. There are many others with her.
‘They have houses of reeds and clothes of grass, and they’ve found live creatures to catch and eat in that warm southern water. Some creatures the fems have tamed and trained to attack men.
‘The swamp fems welcome Kobba. They say they thought all the fems of the Holdfast were dead, for none have slipped out to join them in a long time. But Kobba tells them, Come and help me, the men still hold Bayo and twenty of our kind prisoners there, many of them pregnant with cubs we need. This time we will surely batter through the walls.
‘We have a better way, say the free fems of the south. They follow Kobba carrying not bows or even spears, but cages full of swift water creatures with poison in their mouths. Kobba and a few others go close to the walls of Bayo and from hiding shout taunts at the men. The men attack and chase them into the swamps as before – but the fems step onto solid ground that they have marked in their minds, and they release the water creatures.
‘The creatures swim along the channels of the swamp and find the men and fasten onto their feet and legs, flooding their bodies with poison. The men die loudly. They have no discipline, they scream and cry and flounder in the water, they beg to be saved. The fems listen from hiding. They want to laugh, but they stay silent.
‘Dead men drift in the water and lie on the banks where they have hauled themselves up to die. Then the swamp fems call their water creatures by slapping the water quickly and lightly, and the creatures feel this through the water and return.
‘The fems still do not laugh. They hug Kobba, but silently. They will not laugh, they will not triumph, until the prisoners are rescued – and that’s another story for tomorrow evening.
‘We won’t laugh either when we go back, armed with our new strengths and new weapons, until we’ve rescued all the fems still living there.’
There were murmurs of approval. They were all looking at Alldera.
She left the wagon, descending into the dark. She walked among the tents, keeping to the dark places, sorting out her thoughts.
They want to go back to the Holdfast. They are sure of me now, and they want me to teach them fighting and riding so they can invade the Holdfast like women going to war – that’s the fantasy Daya has woven for them with her stories!
Ferns have always learned what they needed to survive. They could learn to ride and shoot, not like women who’ve done those things all their lives, but well enough. But what would they be once they learned? They’d still be no stronger than I am, no more skilled or brave, just people like me – not witches armed with killing spells. We’d be a pathetic little band, desperate fems trusting to tools only recently come into our hands, keeping each other’s courage up with stories and lies. It’s impossible.
But suppose we did it: went back, found the Holdfast in ruins but some men alive, took it all over, made it ours. How many of us are fit to bear a new generation? How many captured men would be young enough to father healthy cubs? Would we all want to bear cubs if we could?
They envision taking over the masters’ luxuries but the Holdfast must be in ruins. We might have to kill our horses for food, assuming we could get them that far to begin with. What good is an archer if she can’t move around quickly on horseback? In seconds a man can charge too close for an arrow shot and break her head with a rock.
No one has come across the borderlands since I came, ten years ago, or is it eleven now? The Holdfast people may all be dead. We could spend our last months wandering an empty land, turning on each other in our hunger before we finished.
If we ever got there to begin with. Free fems have already come to blows over joining me here. Elnoa has lost a whole wagon crew to me now; she’ll defend her place as leader harder than ever. And the women will fight to keep us from going back. They have to protect themselves too. The men would only have to catch sight of us, armed and mounted, to know that over the mountains there’s more than emptiness and the monsters of their foolish legends. They would come, they would invade the Grasslands looking for slaves. I would do anything rather than endanger the freedom of the Riding Women.
I once wanted to move the free fems to action. Now they move despite me, and they mean to sweep me with them. It doesn’t matter to them that I am happy with the women. No wonder I’ve been afraid.
She walked in the darkness among tents murmurous with the voices of women still awake, or silent with sleep. It seemed to her that the surface of the plain stirred slowly, purposefully, inexorably beneath her feet, carrying her and all of them east toward the mountains like waves to the rocks.
When it was time for the Gather, the free fems of Holdfaster Tent – twenty-one of them now, with Alldera – went off to work on the Stone Dancing granaries. They labored hard, well, and without incident.
On the way back Daya rode with Alldera, fiddling with the string of small bells she wore in her hair, a gift from Grays Omelly. She said, ‘They’re very attractive, these women. At best they have a crude sort of power. Sheel has it, all armed against you – against me, too. Haven’t you felt it? She looks at you as if she’d like to bite the heart out of your body, but you’re too strong for her, so she just glares and glares.’
Daya’s intrigues, Daya’s sensitivity, Daya’s fantasies – today th
ey exasperated Alldera beyond measure. There was much else on her mind that she needed to speak to the pet fem about, but somehow whenever they managed to get a moment alone lately there were other matters in the way, or the time felt wrong. She saw now that Daya wanted to talk, not listen, and she held her tongue. She watched Daya twine the bells into her horse’s mane.
‘It bothers you, doesn’t it – me and Grays? Well, you’ve never feared finding your bed empty, like me,’ Daya said. She pulled the bells out, looped them around her wrist.
Alldera tried to answer evenly. She knew by now the feelings of small worth that sometimes unreasonably afflicted the pet fem. ‘Grays Omelly wouldn’t have been my choice.’
‘No, I know your choice, but it’s different for me. I’m not strong Alldera the runner, proud Alldera who brought a cub over the mountains, tough Alldera whom women respect and fems learn from. Look at me: Daya that was a man’s pet, a man’s toy, good at games. So your Marish friends see me, though they know little enough what it means. I had to take those who’d take me, like Grays.’ She added in a voice turned half playful, ‘Were you jealous, a little, of Grays and me?’
They rode quietly. Alldera thought again of bringing up the whole question of going back to the Holdfast; the other fems had dropped back a little. But the fact was, Alldera could not seem to get it straight enough in her own mind to discuss, even when an opportunity came.
Daya said. ‘There’ll be no more games with Grays, anyway. She came into the wagon nights and listened to us telling stories. She said she knew the stories were spells to get us home to the Holdfast, and she wanted to hear them. Then, a few mornings before we set out for the granaries, she came to me and said she couldn’t be with me any more. She told me she felt like someone moving without sound or weight through our femmish dreams. She asked me to kiss her. “Make me as real as you,” she said. I tasted tears when I kissed her.’
Alldera and Daya entered Holdfaster Tent, weary and dusty.
‘You just missed your child,’ Jesselee said, as if this were Alldera’s fault. ‘She’s out hunting. Why did you stay away so long?’
Shayeen, the only other woman in the tent, added, ‘We were beginning to worry about you. It takes only a day or two to patch a leak in a granary roof and not much longer than that to put on a whole new layer of oiled hides.’
Alldera said, ‘We stayed out to build a new granary building, out of stone. The sharu will never be able to get in and eat the grain again. We even paved the floor.’
‘Paved – ?’ Shayeen was clearly unfamiliar with the word.
Alldera explained.
No one commented at first. Shayeen sat frowning at the tangle of straps in her lap, a bridle she was mending.
At length Jesselee said, ‘Mud-walled, earth-floored granaries have served for years. Why change?’
Daya said, ‘The sharu have always raided your granaries. Now in the Dusty Season the horses can have the grain the sharu used to take.’
Jesselee shrugged. ‘We steal stores from sharu burrows sometimes. It’s a proper thing that the sharu should sometimes steal from us.’
A low voice said, ‘This work of the fems is surely meant as a gift.’ It was Nenisi, lying unnoticed till now in her bedding, deeper in the recesses of the tent.
‘What’s the matter with Nenisi?’ Alldera asked, full of alarm.
‘Her eyes still, but worse today,’ Jesselee said. She turned her head and added solicitously, ‘If we’re annoying you, Nenisi, we can go outside to talk.’
‘Stay,’ Nenisi said. ‘I want to hear you.’
The old woman sighed. ‘You won’t like it.’ To Alldera she said, ‘All you were to do was make the old granaries rainproof. Anything else should have been the decision of the whole camp.’
Alldera drank from the shake milk bag hanging by the entry. She said, ‘My cousins have skills that you women lack. Can’t you give them recognition for what they’ve done, instead of complaining?’
‘What Alldera means,’ Daya said sweetly, ‘is that we aren’t afraid of a job that lasts more than a few days or needs careful planning. We’re not too proud to dig a foundation ditch or trim a stone.’
Shayeen snorted. ‘You fems make no sense about what you call work. Women need time to talk and play and ride out hunting, not just to work. You work all the time, learning something, building something. We do what satisfies us.’
‘Yes,’ Daya said, ‘women are satisfied to do the same things over and over, year after year. It’s a woman who is satisfied when every year her horses fall to the butcher knife to keep them from starving for lack of grain.’
Jesselee’s reply crackled with anger: ‘A person is in the world to live in it, not to make it over. Only a creature who belongs to nothing has to keep making things to belong to. A woman isn’t like that.’
Alldera saw the glittering tears of anger in Daya’s eyes and swiftly said to her, ‘Our cousins are growing hungry while we stand here arguing. You’d better start setting up for a meal. I’ll come later.’
With Daya gone, Alldera felt free to go to Nenisi. There was a bowl of water by her. Alldera took the cloth from Nenisi’s eyes, dipped it and wrung it. She saw that Nenisi’s eyelids were swollen shut and crusted around the lashes. She replaced the cloth across the black woman’s face.
Nenisi said, ‘I bet you wish you hadn’t come back. Excuse our bad tempers – the Gather was out of balance this year. There were some fights, and two women got hurt in the mating.’
‘And more will be hurt,’ Jesselee said ominously.
They told Alldera about some quarrel that had sprung up at the Gather between the Conors and the Periken women. Insults, warnings, scuffles that ruined games and races – it was a messy affair of obscure roots, which Jesselee was trying to explain when Nenisi said finally,
‘Oh, leave it, it’s not worth talking about, I’m sick of it!’ She groped for Alldera’s hand and clasped it with her thin, dark fingers.
‘This quarrel of yours isn’t connected with my femmish cousins in some way, is it?’ Alldera said.
‘It’s an old dispute come alive again, that’s all,’ Nenisi said. ‘You don’t really think that everything that happens among us involves you, do you?’
In some years vast numbers of sharu swarmed over the plain devouring everything. They could overrun a camp and consume food, grain, leather gear, even tethered horses or women immobilized by accident or illness. They ravaged the grazing land, gnawing the grass down to the subsoil and scattering the women’s herds beyond retrieval for months after.
Sorrel, Barvaran and Sheel came back from their hunting with reports of large bands of sharu traveling roughly east to west toward the Great Salty River, on a path which would bring them across the Stone Dancing lands.
Stone Dancing Camp became a moving war center against the sharu. Groups of women ranged in all directions, each rider armed with two bows and several quivers of arrows, to destroy or deflect any sharu hordes they could find a day’s ride from camp.
The free fems wanted to join the hunt. Alldera explained that fems would be more useful taking over camp duties so that more women could go after sharu.
There was no argument against her advice. Daya simply came to her and said, ‘Tua and Lexa and a couple of the others want you to know: they are going out of camp to hunt sharu on their own.’
‘When?’
Eyes down, Daya said, ‘I can’t tell you. We need to go. We’re not old women or children in the pack.’
‘So you’re going too?’ Alldera said. ‘Eager for sharu blood yourself?’
‘Oh, no,’ Daya said, looking very domestic. ‘I don’t like the bow, you know that – I’m not proportioned for the thick arms that archery can give you. But I’ll find a way to be useful.’
Alldera spat out the dregs of the milky tea she was drinking. ‘What am I supposed to do?’
Daya waited silently.
Alldera said, ‘Tell Tua and the others to meet me out by the
herds in the morning.’
They were changing. The quarreling and lying and stealing were giving way to other things: pride in new skills, ambition, some kind of group spirit. Standing together openly against her mistrust, they forced her to look again and re-evaluate them.
She assessed the abilities of each of the fems with horse and bow, consulting with Daya in front of all of them in the cold dawn. The fems stood eagerly soaking it all in, their breaths misting before their faces. Alldera assigned each fem to accompany one of the groups of women going out that day. She had talked with the women the night before, enlisting Nenisi to help overcome the reluctance of some who feared they would be distracted from their work against the sharu by having to save the lives of incompetent fems. A schedule had been made by which fems would take turns riding out just as women did.
Since their arrival at Sorrel’s coming out, the fems of the wagon crew had been working furiously with horse and bow. What they had not yet mastered they now learned fast under pressure. There were no complaints from women about the free fems’ efforts, once it was apparent that they really were able to handle their mounts and their weapons. Suddenly, Alldera’s worrisome ‘cousins’ were transformed into useful allies.
Sorrel came clamoring to her mothers to be allowed a part in the killing, saying that if even her bloodmother’s cousins were involved, she could surely be. It made Alldera uncomfortable to think of this handsome youngster, with her alert, quick-smiling face and beautiful hair, at risk among the sharu.
There was risk. A woman of the Shawden tent fell from her horse when her girth strap broke; she was torn apart by sharu before she could be picked up. Another, her arrows spent, met a sharu’s charge with her lance. The sharu took the point in its breast and kept coming, impaling itself but ripping her knee with its teeth and claws as it died.