Jesselee put the child in the cradle and with a little urging was soon absorbed in working out for Alldera the likeliest route to White Wind Camp. Alldera got it all, maps in the dirt and even a history lesson: ‘Right here it was, I got caught sneaking up on Red Sand Camp all by myself, trying to grab Meryan Golashamet’s prize dun mare, and oh, she gave me such a licking – ! I was an arrogant child, I wouldn’t promise to give up on that horse.’
When she knew all she needed to know, Alldera grabbed up food and water, weapons and tack, and ran outside to saddle the one horse left with them, Dark Tea. Jesselee shouted after her, but she rode away.
From a long way off she saw them, two rough lines of women brandishing their broad-bladed knives at each other over about thirty meters of bare ground. Behind one of the groups the stolen horses were being held by two riders.
Someone dashed out into the open space between the two lines of women. Alldera, galloping down a long roll of grassy ground, heard the voices shrilling high and the whickering of horses.
The lone rider curvetted her mount there in the open, standing in her stirrups to yell at the smaller group, the raiders. She rode up and down between the two ranks, she flung down her knife and threw out her arms, shaking her fists. Shouts, whistles, some movement among the White Wind women. The rider leaned down and scooped up her weapon and rode back to her own line.
Alldera thought of her bow, but the range was too great for her from a horse’s back.
Someone had seen her, rode hard to meet her – Nenisi, her dark skin smeared with dirt and sweat. Pulling up beside Alldera in a flurry of dust she cried, ‘What are you doing here? You shouldn’t have left all the tent work on Jesselee’s back!’
‘Why do I have to be the one to stay behind?’
‘You’re not fit yet to fight women!’
Swallowing anger and disappointment, Alldera shot back. ‘You aren’t fighting either, and we outnumber them.’
‘Of course we’re fighting! Sheel has already taken Noralen Clarish captive – see her, she’s that one that’s almost as dark as I am. They had a fine fight, you’ll hear all about it tonight in the chief tent.’ Nenisi looked wild with excitement, her eyes flashed wide.
Below, two riders now circled each other between the opposing ranks, guiding their horses with their legs, buffeting and cutting at each other. One had a small hide shield; the other had whipped off her headcloth and wound it around her arm, and she deflected blows with that.
‘You stay here,’ Nenisi commanded. ‘I’m going back – the raiders are tired and thirsty, they’ll break and run any minute.’
Down below, one of the fighters’ horses stumbled to its knees but she pulled it up again and rode back into her own group.
Eager now herself to join in, Alldera said, ‘I’ll string my bow and pick them off from here as they run.’
Nenisi drew rein so suddenly that her horse reared, and a gout of foam from its mouth landed wetly on Alldera’s knee. ‘Never!’ said Nenisi in a furious voice that struck Alldera silent. ‘Do you see a bow in my hand, in any hand down there? What kind of coward are you, to suggest cutting down women from a safe distance?’
‘But they’re enemies,’ Alldera cried, shrinking back.
‘What enemies? Those are women. What could you do with a bow except kill dishonorably and bring a feud on your line? That’s what a bow is for – a feud; or for the borderlands.’
Then Alldera remembered Barvaran in the desert that time years ago, raising a bow toward her before realizing that she was not a man but a fem. She wanted to speak, but she was flooded with confusion.
In a roar the women of Stone Dancing charged. Nenisi whirled her mount and raced away, angling to cut off a fleeing White Wind rider.
Alldera sat where she was while Dark Tea blew and sighed beneath her. She watched the sprawling indiscipline of the battle with slow-dawning bitterness. These were not warriors destroying enemies who had treated them unjustly, but wild women brawling over prizes.
The struggling mass broke into small skirmishes and pursuits. The stolen horses, unheeded, streamed down into a gully and away. Within moments of the charge only one pair of riders was visible, locked together and heaving at each other while their mounts plunged under them and carried them out of sight behind a fold of land.
In time women came drifting back toward the well, several of them riding double on droop-headed horses – captives, Alldera assumed, or tent mates picked up after being unhorsed. Some riders drove horses before them. One woman rode in holding her bloody arm and reeling in the saddle. Her friends closed in quickly to support her.
Alldera turned Dark Tea back toward camp, hard-handed with anger so that the horse fought the bit. How could they shut her out of this game, she who had fought real war all her life?
Riding alone, she made speeches in her head till her throat was raw with the parching from her breath, and her eyes pricked with tears: who has more courage, who has endured more? While you rode and hunted and hugged each other here, men beat me and starved me, a man threw me down on my back in the mud and fucked me and made me eat dirt to remind me how much power he had over me. I fought back when I could, I escaped. How many of you would have killed yourselves or gone crazy with despair?
But there was no one to make speeches to, not unless she wished to go address them that night when they reveled in the chief tent. The drumming and shouting rang right through the walls of Holdfaster Tent, where she stayed, thinking, arguing with herself.
After a while she went to join them, whether to speak out or not she did not know.
Just outside the chief tent someone touched her arm and said, ‘Wait, we want to talk to you.’
Four women surrounded her. By the dim glow coming through the chief tent wall she recognized a young woman of Barvaran’s bloodline. Another was a blotch-skinned Monotay, and she did not know the other two.
One took her arm. ‘You showed a keen edge, Alldera Holdfaster, riding to our battle. You’re not the dry old stick we took you for.’
The Monotay whispered, ‘Come into the long grass with us tonight.’ There were sounds of approval from the others.
Someone slid an arm around Alldera’s waist; she stiffened.
‘You’re shy,’ the Monotay said admiringly.
The young one who looked like Barvaran said in a coaxing voice, heavy and slow, ‘Come on, Alldera. Nenisi has told us what a fine, sweet lover you are.’
Alldera pulled free and fled. She ran to Holdfaster Tent, rolled herself into Barvaran’s empty bedding and held very still. Someone entered, went over to where Alldera normally slept, and left again. Alldera heard the sound of a muffled conference outside, and that was all.
Come to me, Nenisi – the threads holding me here to you are breaking, she wept.
The winds of the Dusty Season blew hot and hard; there was not going to be enough grass for all the horses. The women could not wait and let some horses starve. They had to butcher some while they were still fat, to save more grass for the survivors and to get the most meat from the slaughter for themselves. It was like this most years.
‘I want you to come help me with this,’ Nenisi said to Alldera. ‘I think we’ve been leaving you out of too much of our lives.’
Sadly and tortuously the women of Holdfaster Tent debated which horses to slaughter. They chose males and weak or barren females, animals that could not help increase the herd again when times were better. They chose many, and Alldera saw how it hurt them. She asked at one point why the women did not get their meat by killing sharu instead.
There was an appalled silence. Alldera did not wait for Nenisi to step in on her behalf, but said as calmly as she could, ‘I think I’ve said something wrong. I apologize for my ignorance.’
She had the satisfaction of hearing old Jesselee mutter, ‘Well said,’ but Sheel snarled, ‘No one eats sharu but the filthy free ferns. They eat the flesh of scavengers because they’re scavengers themselves. Go to them for a taste
.’
‘Heartchild,’ Jesselee chided mildly, ‘you speak like a lesser woman than Alldera.’ To Alldera she added, ‘The only meat we eat is horses’ meat. We eat no sharu because the sharu eat our dead.’
Alldera could not hold back an exclamation of revulsion, and was instantly ashamed. Jesselee expounded thoughtfully on the ability of sharu to find and dig up anything edible that had been buried, and the foolishness of wasting scarce fuel to burn corpses; and Jesselee was nearer than any of them to having her body left for the sharu to devour, thought Alldera, shuddering.
With the other sharemothers Alldera helped to make killing hammers, choosing carefully the stone heads, the wooden hafts, and the sinews to fasten both together. On culling day she went with Nenisi from the place where the herds were being held. Nenisi rode bareback on a colt to be killed. Alldera, on a stolid gray, carried the hammer and a leather bowl. She was apprehensive but reassured herself that a fem from the Holdfast could take any harshness that this plains life had to offer. They went to a sandy dip below a ridge spined with brush. Alldera was instructed to tie her horse securely behind the brush, upwind. Then she walked back down to Nenisi with the tools.
‘The hammer,’ Nenisi said from the colt’s back. She took the hammer in both hands and set the colt trotting in a tight curve past Alldera. She was speaking as she rode, addressing the colt in a low, grave tone. Alldera could not hear the words.
Suddenly, all the cords in her arms standing with effort, Nenisi whipped the hammer down on the horse’s head.
Even before he stumbled, muzzle to the ground, she was off him and drawing her knife. She threw her weight against his shoulder and he fell heavily onto his side, his breath rushing out in a thick sound, his tongue dragging on the sand. Swiftly she cut into the base of his throat, threw down the knife and reached for the leather bowl, which she held to catch his blood as it streamed from the wound.
Crouching there inside the curve of his neck, still murmuring to him while she bled away his life, she seemed to Alldera to enact an obscene parody of a woman resting curled against her prone and trusting mount. The colt made no further sound at all, but subsided into a graceless, ugly heap.
On shaking legs Alldera walked back to her own horse, to try to soothe its nervousness while she waited for Nenisi. She felt sick and miserable and could scarcely meet Nenisi’s eyes when the black woman came up and told her they would leave the dead horse for the team that would come and drag it off to the butchering site. They rode out double on the gray horse to catch a lame mare next. The hands clasped around Alldera’s waist were the hands she had just seen wiped clean of blood.
It was as if Alldera was suddenly touched by some raw, cruel current hidden till now under the sunlit surface of the women’s lives.
At another dip in the land Nenisi killed the lame mare the same way. She looked up from scrubbing her knife clean with sand and said sharply, ‘What’s the matter? It was a good kill. The next one will be harder – that star-faced gelding.’ She shook her head. ‘I helped to get him born, turned him in the womb where he was lying crooked. I nearly got my arm squeezed off doing it.’
‘Then how can you kill him?’ Alldera protested. ‘Bleeding them to death – ’
Nenisi did not look up from the knife again, she did not help. She gave no sign that she hated this horrible work.
As they walked to where Alldera had tied up the gray, Nenisi said at last, ‘We need the blood, and we use it; it is dried and kept for making broth later in the year. You’ve drunk it, remember? The death itself is pretty painless, and never carelessly inflicted. Bones, hide, hoofs and hair, nothing goes to waste; and we’re grateful for it all.’
There was one more horse to kill. Each woman of the tent had one or more assigned to her to slaughter, and Nenisi was doing Alldera’s killing as well as her own. Holding the nervous gray, Alldera kept thinking, that woman loves the horses but she doesn’t hesitate to kill them. I don’t love them, and I can’t bear to watch.
After the last kill they rode back toward camp to prepare for a turn at butchering the carcasses. Nenisi said without emotion, ‘Do you want Sheel to see you looking so stunned? Get hold of yourself. You’ll kill a horse yourself, in time.’
As Alldera stripped down in the tent, she became aware of a rider galloping through the camp shouting. She rushed out and saw the sky above the butchering ground black with smoke. Grass had ignited from one of the fires there, the women were yelling. If the wind shifted, the camp itself would be in danger. Even if not, vital ranges of grass would be burned.
She helped Nenisi to drag out all the tent’s bedding, ride to the rock pool the camp was using for water, and throw everything in. Other women were doing the same, jumping from their horses’ backs to trample the blankets and leathers into the water and get them saturated. Then with sodden bundles heaped before them they galloped for the butchering ground and into a pall of smoke and flying ash.
The soaked blankets were snatched by others who used them to beat on foot at the margins of the fire. Everywhere among cooking pots and bones and heaps of meat and offal, women raced.
‘Like this!’ Nenisi shouted. She clamped a shank of rope between her thigh and the saddle, and Alldera did the same with the rope she was handed. ‘Ride with me, keep up, a woman’s length apart!’
Leaning against the weight they were hauling, the two of them fought their horses into a gallop along the edge of the fire where the beaters had fallen back. The flames were not very high but they threw off such intense heat that Alldera felt her lashes and brows curling. Looking back, she saw what it was they were dragging: the carcass of a horse, split open down the belly and spread wide to suffocate the fire with its moisture and weight. Along the path the carcass made, women on foot rushed in again with blankets.
The smoke gradually thinned, the fire’s roar diminished to a spiteful crackling. Confined within charred boundaries, beaten back from all sides, the flames shrank and spat.
Alldera’s horse staggered. She turned over her drag rope to another rider and went off slowly with a load of scorched bedding that needed soaking again.
On her way back with the heavy blankets she saw Nenisi trying to mount a fresh horse, a sidling, rearing mare bridled only with a rope. Alldera hesitated: it was, she knew, something of an insult to help a woman with her horse. But the black woman seemed to be having trouble. Something was wrong with the saddle, and she wound the bridle rope around her wrist to secure it so that she could use both hands on the girth.
The horse shied and leaped, pulling the woman off her feet, and it tore away over the blackened ground dragging her under its battering hooves.
Alldera’s howl of anguish was lost in the cries that went up. The fire beaters hurled themselves at the horse, grabbed at the taut rope and were knocked away. Alldera flung down the blankets and galloped after, sobbing, lashing her mount. Her vision was filled by that dark figure jouncing and twisting at full stretch of the one entangled arm.
She heard a whining sound and saw an arrow strike the runaway on the neck, slowing its wild career. Someone raced in ahead of her from the side and with the flash of a knife parted the horse from its dragging burden.
Alldera looked down past the heads of the women standing gathered there. The blackened shape left lying wound in rope was not Nenisi. This was a Calpaper woman, long-limbed like the Conors, dark-skinned and frizzy-haired, made black by soot and now blacker still with char from the burnt stubble over which she had been dragged. The ropes trailing around the sprawled legs were not ropes. They were guts, torn out by the pony’s hooves.
The raw, ugly underside of things again. It could have been Nenisi; she had imagined this corpse was Nenisi, she had nearly burst with terror for Nenisi. Now she burned with resentment, as if her love had been offered all along to a false image – to matchless Nenisi, revealed today as a hard and bloody-handed slaughterer.
Alldera brooded on this often in the weeks that followed, tormented by her sense
of having been betrayed. Brutality she had known in the Holdfast; in that life she had been cruel herself by necessity. Here she had thought herself free of that necessity, because she had not seen cruelty among the women.
Now to find brutality in the person she respected most horrified her and made her feel cheated – cheated of the free, clean life she thought she had found.
She had wanted the women to be perfect, and they were not.
She watched Nenisi take chewed food from her own mouth and poke it between the child’s lips. Almost too large to carry now for any length of time, the child still nursed but had begun to accept solids. It had been Alldera’s own head against that dark, smooth breast once – in her healing sleep when the women had fed her and through her fed her unborn baby. The thought gave her feelings too complicated to unravel, sweet and sour at the same time like everything here.
She studied Nenisi’s face, freshly scarred pink over the brow. One of the new ransom horses had snapped at her and broken the skin of her forehead as she jerked back out of the way. Alldera’s resentment had faded. Looking at Nenisi, hearing her speak, was what Alldera stayed for these days.
Barvaran was saying something about the next Gather, and spoke Alldera’s name.
‘Not her,’ said Sheel firmly and loudly. ‘That fem is going to the wells.’
‘To the wells?’ Alldera said. ‘What for?’
‘Our ropes drag loose the stones along the tops of the walls. They need mending.’
Alldera protested, ‘Last year I went grain gathering. It’s someone else’s turn to miss the Gather.’
Sheel said, ‘This year you’re one of the well menders. It’s not a big job.’ She did not bother to look up. She was painting in the bodies of running horses that she had first outlined on pegged-out skin with a burnt twig.
Heatedly Alldera said, ‘How long are you going to go on maneuvering to keep me from your precious Gather, Sheel?’
‘As long as I can.’