Read Online Motherlines by Suzy McKee Charnas - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Suzy McKee Charnas
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curse you, while you have the chance! Come on, what is it, you like these horse-fuckers, these dirty, rag-tag savages that bathe in their own sweat, dirty beasts, cock-worshippers – ’
The wagon rattled and shook with the impact of the childpack’s missiles. The long-faced fem paused for breath. There was blood on her cheek and a bruise swelling where a stone had hit her.
‘Have they gone and mated you to one of their stallions, then?’ she cried. ‘You got fucked by a horse and you like it, is that what’s happened?’
Alldera got up and ran. The childpack raced past her, touching, laughing, and vanished.
Curled around her own misery and confusion, she lay in the tall grass on a rise outside the camp, watching from hiding until the free fems had packed up their goods and left. They moved the wagon out, pulling it in the midst of a ring of scouts like women moving camp. The scouts, on foot, did not go any great distance from the wagon, perhaps for fear of losing sight of one another behind a swell of ground.
From the rise Alldera listened to the sounds of evening descending on Stone Dancing Camp. As women lit their tea fires, voices spoke and laughed. Riders came home from settling the horses on night pasture. Each sang a personal song that identified her to the woman who met her with a bowl of food and who took from her the mounts she had brought to be tethered in camp for the night.
Alldera recognized Nenisi’s self-song. She saw Nenisi ride in and give something to Barvaran: a bundle in a leather sling. That was what she had gone to do, then: take the child further out of camp while the free fems were there.
Alldera got up and limped down toward camp. Nenisi came out on foot to meet her. They stood beyond the outermost tents in the dusk.
‘Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you,’ Nenisi said. ‘They’ve gone. That’s their fire, way over there.’ A wasteful blaze. ‘You look upset. What did they say to you?’
How many are there like them?’ Alldera said.
‘Maybe half a hundred, all free fems found by us in the borderlands, as you were found.’
So many, all this time. ‘They said I was a prisoner here.’
‘Sit down with me, let’s talk. They themselves are the prisoners – not of us, but of the way things are. They say they wish to return to the Holdfast, invade it, save the fems there. They live in a camp of their own in the foothills and make preparations to go home. When they venture too far toward the Holdfast, our patrols turn them back. This makes them bitter against us.
‘But anyone can see that it would be foolish of us to go and show ourselves to the men of the Holdfast or let the fems go back and speak of us there, when we’ve kept the secret of our existence from men for so long. Even if there are only a few men left – and many of us feel that – we have a right to protect ourselves; don’t you think so?’
Alldera realized guiltily that she had accepted that desert, too, as she had accepted that the free fems were a myth. She said, ‘You took me in among you; why not the free fems too?’
‘You have a child here; kindred. The free fems aren’t related to anyone.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me about them before?’
‘Why would you need to know? We are your family. Anyway, you never asked.’ A sigh of defeat. ‘Maybe not telling you was a mistake.’
‘How can they be so different that you can’t take them in among you?’
‘Their beginnings and ours differ,’ Nenisi said. ‘Around the onset of the Wasting that ruined the world of the Ancients, there was made a place called the lab, where the government men tried to find new weapons for their wars. We don’t know just what they were looking for, but we think it was mind powers, the kind that later got called ‘witchery’. The lab men – and lab women, who had learned to think like men – used females in their work, maybe because more of them had traces of the powers, maybe because it was
The wagon rattled and shook with the impact of the childpack’s missiles. The long-faced fem paused for breath. There was blood on her cheek and a bruise swelling where a stone had hit her.
‘Have they gone and mated you to one of their stallions, then?’ she cried. ‘You got fucked by a horse and you like it, is that what’s happened?’
Alldera got up and ran. The childpack raced past her, touching, laughing, and vanished.
Curled around her own misery and confusion, she lay in the tall grass on a rise outside the camp, watching from hiding until the free fems had packed up their goods and left. They moved the wagon out, pulling it in the midst of a ring of scouts like women moving camp. The scouts, on foot, did not go any great distance from the wagon, perhaps for fear of losing sight of one another behind a swell of ground.
From the rise Alldera listened to the sounds of evening descending on Stone Dancing Camp. As women lit their tea fires, voices spoke and laughed. Riders came home from settling the horses on night pasture. Each sang a personal song that identified her to the woman who met her with a bowl of food and who took from her the mounts she had brought to be tethered in camp for the night.
Alldera recognized Nenisi’s self-song. She saw Nenisi ride in and give something to Barvaran: a bundle in a leather sling. That was what she had gone to do, then: take the child further out of camp while the free fems were there.
Alldera got up and limped down toward camp. Nenisi came out on foot to meet her. They stood beyond the outermost tents in the dusk.
‘Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you,’ Nenisi said. ‘They’ve gone. That’s their fire, way over there.’ A wasteful blaze. ‘You look upset. What did they say to you?’
How many are there like them?’ Alldera said.
‘Maybe half a hundred, all free fems found by us in the borderlands, as you were found.’
So many, all this time. ‘They said I was a prisoner here.’
‘Sit down with me, let’s talk. They themselves are the prisoners – not of us, but of the way things are. They say they wish to return to the Holdfast, invade it, save the fems there. They live in a camp of their own in the foothills and make preparations to go home. When they venture too far toward the Holdfast, our patrols turn them back. This makes them bitter against us.
‘But anyone can see that it would be foolish of us to go and show ourselves to the men of the Holdfast or let the fems go back and speak of us there, when we’ve kept the secret of our existence from men for so long. Even if there are only a few men left – and many of us feel that – we have a right to protect ourselves; don’t you think so?’
Alldera realized guiltily that she had accepted that desert, too, as she had accepted that the free fems were a myth. She said, ‘You took me in among you; why not the free fems too?’
‘You have a child here; kindred. The free fems aren’t related to anyone.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me about them before?’
‘Why would you need to know? We are your family. Anyway, you never asked.’ A sigh of defeat. ‘Maybe not telling you was a mistake.’
‘How can they be so different that you can’t take them in among you?’
‘Their beginnings and ours differ,’ Nenisi said. ‘Around the onset of the Wasting that ruined the world of the Ancients, there was made a place called the lab, where the government men tried to find new weapons for their wars. We don’t know just what they were looking for, but we think it was mind powers, the kind that later got called ‘witchery’. The lab men – and lab women, who had learned to think like men – used females in their work, maybe because more of them had traces of the powers, maybe because it was
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