Read Motherlines for Free Online Page B

Now we can freely travel our country again.’
    Alldera bent her head; the sense of their freedom had taken her by the throat. They could move where they liked. The physical fact of their liberty as she felt it at that moment, drowning in dust, bumping along at the brown mare’s heels, made her weep.
    Sometime that night they stopped; the rising sun showed among the rough circle of freshly raised tents a scatter of thin green grass on the damp earth.
    After that, Alldera began to fit into the women’s life.

4
     
    Daya leaned her back against Kenoma’s long-muscled leg and watched the flames. The angry talk drifted over her and into the surrounding night.
    The free fem crew was gathered at the tailgate of their wagon where a tall fire burned. They kept their backs turned to the dim shapes of the Marish camp called Windgrass some distance away, dark and silent tents against the stars. They cursed the Mares and everything Marish, as free fems did after a day of trading with them.
    Daya stopped listening. She was bored with their sniping and thought ridiculous the rumors of a new fem hidden somewhere in the Mares’ camps. She relaxed into the pleasure of being enfolded in the enormous spaces of the sky and the land, for already this crew were on their way back to the tea camp in the foothills. Their trade journey over the plains was nearly ended, and she was sorry.
    She loved it out here. She loved to be one of the many points of living warmth that peopled the vast darkness over the Grasslands. She loved the grit of the soil under her thighs and palms, the glimmer of firelight on the yellow stubble beyond the edges of the camp, the evening stir of air as the day’s heat drifted starward. She felt her thoughts flowing out over the tableland. She pictured horses dozing or listening with upswung heads for a rustle in the grass; and the wide-flung camps of the Mares, groups of broad-winged tents herding loosely together in drowsy silence; and the hungry sharu sleeping in their networks of burrows; and of course all the free fems, radiating outward crew by crew across the great expanse from one Marish camp to another. She loved this life at least as much as she loved life in the tea camp in the hills.
    Of course there were risks, difficulties, irritations in living anywhere. Daya had been a pet, bred for the pleasure of men’s eyes as well as other pleasures. Despite the scars that marred her beauty now, she was still young, small and slender enough to be attractive even when she had no wish to attract. She did not enjoy being fought over by other free fems, so she took pains to acquire a companion like Kenoma whose truculence discouraged ardor in others. But jealousy inclined Kenoma to turn her banked violence on Daya at the smallest provocation.
    Right now by the fire Daya could feel the tension in Kenoma’s thigh drawing tighter, promising release in a scene, perhaps a thrashing, later on. Kenoma was only safe for a short while longer; the risks of staying at her side were beginning to outweigh the advantages of her companionship.
    Daya did not want to worry about that now. She held the sweetness of the brush smoke deep in the chambers of her nostrils. She felt Kenoma stir and tauten, and heard her say harshly, ‘This is the last fem they’ve brought out, maybe the last one they ever will bring out. She’s ours.’
    How annoying, how foolish, Daya thought. What does it mean even to say ‘last’? Time was different here. Life did not rush from crisis to crisis and turn instantly into some new and dangerous course at a master’s whim, as it had in the Holdfast. There were different rhythms in the Grasslands, long and slow and repetitive. Nothing came in ‘firsts’ and ‘lasts’ here, but as ‘another’ or ‘again’. The Grasslands was like a great disc of earth revolving endlessly under the great disc of sky and season. They should not talk of a new fem as if she were unique, as if she were capable of making a