Motherlines by Suzy McKee Charnas Page A

dark form, floating silently nearer and nearer – ’
    ‘And it gobbled you up,’ said Marisu Conor, snapping her teeth loudly together. They all laughed, Sheel loudest of all.
    Imagine, being so easy and happy with a grown woman who had suckled you and with whom your relations stretched back through your entire life! It was wonderful to bask on the edge of the ease the women had with each other, the rich connectedness.
    They showed Jesselee the cub, which went into one of its fits of sudden activity and nearly blacked the old woman’s eye. She seemed pleased, laughing and commenting that it seemed to have plenty of spirit. She said she would be staying a while.
    They talked about Salt Wind Camp where Sheel had grown up, way to the west. The winds which sometimes blew damply off the river had weakened her chest, Sheel said sadly, and had etched the cold into her bones, so that she seldom returned there. She said she could not forget the wind patterns on the water, though, or the whispering reeds along the water’s edge. ‘I used to play, as a child, that I was an invader from over the river or else a gallant defender of our camp. I didn’t know in those days who the real intruder would be.’
    She glared at Alldera, who had passed the point at which Sheel’s unkindness could reduce her to tears. Alldera looked at Jesselee and said diffidently, ‘I’m glad you’ll stay with us, Jesselee. I think I know all my sharemothers’ tales by now.’
    Jesselee rubbed at her stiff knee and nodded. ‘I’m sure I can recall some new ones to tell you. Even someone as close as one’s heartchild always has something still to learn – a tale, a skill, some manners.’
    Sheel bit her lip but said nothing, and Alldera felt filled with victory.
     
    First you made sure that the long Rainy Season dampness had not made the tea moldy. Then you shaved it fine. Alldera had only been given the job of making the midday tea once before, and she had used water that was too hot and had had to sit by and watch the family members gulp down the bitter stuff anyway, because tea was too valuable to be wasted.
    She leaned over her work, sat back again to shake the hair out of her eyes. Over the months her hair had grown out long and as healthy as it ever got, and she was always meaning to cut it shoulder length, the women’s favorite style, and never getting around to it.
    Unintentionally she caught the eye of a woman who was walking past, one arm slung companionably over the withers of a spotted mare that ambled beside her like a friend. The woman smiled. Alldera did not recognize her, but smiled timidly in return, and bent to her work again.
    Concentrating on the tea making was hard. Behind her Barvaran and Shayeen were chatting together about childhood. Shayeen, seeding peppers for the array of kettles in front of her, complained intermittently about the stinging of her fingers. She had piles of fresh-picked peppers still to cut, for it was the Holdfaster Tent’s turn to lay out food for the childpack today.
    The children knew it and were gathered nearby, giggling and fighting around the edges of a huge puddle on the margins of which their feet slid and splashed. They pushed each other into it. A few of them squatted down to imitate the adults over make-believe fires of piled stones.
    Barvaran kept an eye on them, stopping her conversation to shout warnings at them now and then. She was simmering milk and laying out the squeezed dregs from the pots in lumps to dry on the tent fly. The children were notorious thieves of whatever food they found lying around, perhaps because they were never punished.
    Alldera braced the tea brick on her knee, watching a shaving curl away from her knife blade. The scent of cooking milk was making her mouth water. She had developed an inordinate fondness for the fragile plates of fresh cream cake that could be lifted from the surface of a cooled pan of simmered milk. The milking of mares in foal took much of