Motherlines by Suzy McKee Charnas Page A

thick sound, his tongue dragging on the sand. Swiftly she cut into the base of his throat, threw down the knife and reached for the leather bowl, which she held to catch his blood as it streamed from the wound.
    Crouching there inside the curve of his neck, still murmuring to him while she bled away his life, she seemed to Alldera to enact an obscene parody of a woman resting curled against her prone and trusting mount. The colt made no further sound at all, but subsided into a graceless, ugly heap.
    On shaking legs Alldera walked back to her own horse, to try to soothe its nervousness while she waited for Nenisi. She felt sick and miserable and could scarcely meet Nenisi’s eyes when the black woman came up and told her they would leave the dead horse for the team that would come and drag it off to the butchering site. They rode out double on the gray horse to catch a lame mare next. The hands clasped around Alldera’s waist were the hands she had just seen wiped clean of blood.
    It was as if Alldera was suddenly touched by some raw, cruel current hidden till now under the sunlit surface of the women’s lives.
    At another dip in the land Nenisi killed the lame mare the same way. She looked up from scrubbing her knife clean with sand and said sharply, ‘What’s the matter? It was a good kill. The next one will be harder – that star-faced gelding.’ She shook her head. ‘I helped to get him born, turned him in the womb where he was lying crooked. I nearly got my arm squeezed off doing it.’
    ‘Then how can you kill him?’ Alldera protested. ‘Bleeding them to death – ’
    Nenisi did not look up from the knife again, she did not help. She gave no sign that she hated this horrible work.
    As they walked to where Alldera had tied up the gray, Nenisi said at last, ‘We need the blood, and we use it; it is dried and kept for making broth later in the year. You’ve drunk it, remember? The death itself is pretty painless, and never carelessly inflicted. Bones, hide, hoofs and hair, nothing goes to waste; and we’re grateful for it all.’
    There was one more horse to kill. Each woman of the tent had one or more assigned to her to slaughter, and Nenisi was doing Alldera’s killing as well as her own. Holding the nervous gray, Alldera kept thinking, that woman loves the horses but she doesn’t hesitate to kill them. I don’t love them, and I can’t bear to watch.
    After the last kill they rode back toward camp to prepare for a turn at butchering the carcasses. Nenisi said without emotion, ‘Do you want Sheel to see you looking so stunned? Get hold of yourself. You’ll kill a horse yourself, in time.’
    As Alldera stripped down in the tent, she became aware of a rider galloping through the camp shouting. She rushed out and saw the sky above the butchering ground black with smoke. Grass had ignited from one of the fires there, the women were yelling. If the wind shifted, the camp itself would be in danger. Even if not, vital ranges of grass would be burned.
    She helped Nenisi to drag out all the tent’s bedding, ride to the rock pool the camp was using for water, and throw everything in. Other women were doing the same, jumping from their horses’ backs to trample the blankets and leathers into the water and get them saturated. Then with sodden bundles heaped before them they galloped for the butchering ground and into a pall of smoke and flying ash.
    The soaked blankets were snatched by others who used them to beat on foot at the margins of the fire. Everywhere among cooking pots and bones and heaps of meat and offal, women raced.
    ‘Like this!’ Nenisi shouted. She clamped a shank of rope between her thigh and the saddle, and Alldera did the same with the rope she was handed. ‘Ride with me, keep up, a woman’s length apart!’
    Leaning against the weight they were hauling, the two of them fought their horses into a gallop along the edge of the fire where the beaters had fallen back. The flames were not