Motherlines by Suzy McKee Charnas

wealthy cousin of Shayeen in what seemed eternal enmity against someone of the Faller tent. This naturally involved Sheel because of a sister of hers who was a sharemother in that tent. Dozens of women were mixed up in the quarrel, including women of other camps.
    Shayeen had her enemies, Nenisi had hers, and Sheel had many. Even Barvaran was entangled in some huge row of years’ standing which appeared to turn on horses used in payment of a debt and the different valuations placed on those horses by at least six sides in the dispute.
    No one ever asked Alldera about the Holdfast, and she was glad; that life seemed to her to have been infinitely inferior to the women’s lives here, and she would have been embarrassed to speak of it. Besides, as a slave she had never been free to speak except on command, and she was still shy.
    Two riders passed by the open front of the tent, turned to shout questions. Answers came from other tents, and the two riders came back again and stopped. Sheel and Nenisi jumped up and ran out to embrace the newcomers as they dismounted, talking, patting and stroking them in the way the women had.
    Watching, Alldera thought enviously that they did not know what it was to be always at the mercy of men’s hands.
    One of the visitors was old, brown-skinned, gray-haired, well-wrinkled. She limped badly. The other might have been Nenisi, except that Nenisi already stood there. This visitor was slender, black-skinned, with the same smooth-featured, mobile face, the same hands flashing pale palms as she talked.
    Alldera was beginning to get used to the way these people appeared sometimes in identical pairs, trios, or even more. At first she had thought it a powerful magic, for in the Holdfast twins were a sign of witchery and were killed at birth with their dam. Here, Nenisi had told her patiently many times over, there were whole strings of blood relations called ‘Motherlines’, women who looked like older and younger versions of each other. They were mothers and daughters, sisters and the daughters of sisters. Nenisi said the look-alikes did not live together but were scattered through the tents of this camp and other camps.
    The dark woman standing like Nenisi’s living shadow was a Conor from another camp, a woman whose teeth must also be prone to ache when she was anxious, as Nenisi’s did. Alldera had heard Nenisi grinding her teeth in her sleep; this woman must grind hers, too.
    Nenisi drew her double into the tent by the hand. ‘This is the child of my sister, cousin Marisu Conor from Windgrass Camp; and this is Jesselee Morrowtrow, one of Sheel’s mothers.’
    The old woman studied Alldera, head to one side, not speaking. Sheel took her by the hands, called her ‘Heart-mother’, and seated her near the fire with her back half-turned to Alldera.
    ‘At the last Gather when I asked where you were,’ Sheel said to her mother, ‘they told me that a horse had kicked you while you were doctoring her. I thought it would be healed up by now. Live around horses, you’ll limp half your life.’
    ‘Don’t believe everything you hear,’ the old woman said. ‘A crocodile bit me.’
    ‘Nenisi, what’s a crocodile?’ Alldera whispered. She feared for a moment that she had asked the wrong Conor cousin, but then she saw Nenisi’s blue necklace and was reassured. She did not often make such errors any more.
    ‘A joke,’ Nenisi murmured, ‘though they do say such Ancient creatures still live, far to the south where the plain turns to forest and marsh.’
    ‘A crocodile!’ Sheel marveled. ‘Like the one whose skin you showed me once when I was little – only that turned out to be a sheet of bark stripped from a fresh tent pole.’
    Unperturbed, Jesselee continued, ‘There I was, prowling the shoreline marshes by the Salty River. I’d dreamed of one of the drowned cities of the Ancients, and I thought that meant that some treasure would be washed up for me. Instead here comes this knobby