Motherlines by Suzy McKee Charnas

Author:Suzy McKee Charnas
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Dystopian, General, Science Fiction, Fiction, Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic
ISBN: 9781466821156
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 1978-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

Daya had never known the rains to last so late into the start of the Cool Season. A Generation Feast was always held shortly before the first wagon was scheduled to leave on its trade journey. This year the feast began in a rainstorm. Daya and those assigned to help her prepare food worked all day sheltered by awnings, cursing the leaks and the muddy footing.

Daya chose and combined the ingredients of the stew kettles, then left the tending of the cooking to her subordinates. She reserved for herself the oversight of the little covered pots that steamed all day over small fires. Each pot was filled with a fertility douche concocted to a formula of Fedeka the dyer’s.

By evening the rain had stopped. Satiated with food and hot beer, the fems assembled quietly in the yard. Kobba stood on the porch at Elnoa’s right hand. Tonight she spoke to them not in Elnoa’s voice but in her own, that clanged like iron bars over the crackling from the fires and the desultory dripping of rainwater.

‘We gather tonight, ferns,’ she said, ‘to try once more to find a starter that will make new life in us. The Mares conceive without men, and so will we – but we won’t turn to beasts to do it.

‘Now, you may say – some say it every year – why do we want cubs at all? Once we made them for our masters, just like we made cloth or food or furnishings – for their use. And if the cubs weren’t perfect, the men killed us for it. Even at best, with so much breeding it was awful for us. All of you remember old fems so torn from cubbings that they went raw-legged and stinking because they couldn’t hold their piss. I myself have wondered, if cubs don’t come to us in the course of things, why run after all that pain again?

‘I’ll tell you a story, friends.

‘Back in the Holdfast I worked in the mines. The ore was crushed by machines that the Ancients had stored away in stacks underground. The pieces were big, they could tear loose under a miner’s foot and smash the people lower down. We had to be strong and lightfooted. You see my hands, my feet? No calluses, no scars. We miners were given shoes and gloves so we wouldn’t slice ourselves on wire and jagged edges or get acid burns. That’s how valuable we were. I went through a dozen pair of palm pads a month.

‘It was always damp down there. We worked by lamplight. The rust cough ate out everyone’s voice in the end. But I didn’t stay till the end.

‘Everytime I came up from the mines I smelled that good clean smell coming east on the wind. I knew our side of the borderlands because I’d been marched up and down in the scrubby trees there with a search gang, looking for new mining sites. When the time came, I ran west laughing.

‘A man

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