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body’s effort to get rid of the last clotted blood. She felt nothing like that now.
    ‘You’re better off than I am,’ Nenisi said, her long, dark lips pulling down at the corners in self-mockery. ‘My teeth are hurting me today – an affliction of my line, among several other afflictions, so if I complain women just shrug. I’m taking advantage of you while you’re still new among us and you’ll listen to me tell you about my horse-farting teeth.’ She exposed the offending teeth. They looked large, sound, and very white. She leaned closer, regarding Alldera attentively, seriously. ‘It must feel very strange to you, all this – ’ Her slender hand floated as she indicated the interior of the tent.
    ‘Beautiful,’ Alldera said fervently. ‘It seems beautiful to me. Where I come from – ’ Her voice failed and she turned her face away. Her lips were trembling.
    ‘There are no men at all,’ the black woman said. ‘None. You’re safe.’
    Alldera wept, and was ashamed of her tears. But Nenisi only waited, watching sympathetically, and waved away Alldera’s attempts to apologize for her outburst.
    Nenisi took up a bundle that unrolled into a sort of rug and she settled herself on the sandy floor. Her limbs looked very long and thin. The flashing pallor of her palms as she gestured and the pink cave of her mouth working in her dark face bemused Alldera.
    ‘You’ve been with us a long time already, though it probably doesn’t seem so to you. You came to us in the Cool Season, and now the Dusty Season has begun. We’ve kept you in a healing sleep, a thing we do for fems rescued from the borderlands. Most women are too lively for healing sleep, but we find that a few months of complete rest are good for fems fresh from crossing over. You needed time for yourself and your child to recover tranquilly from a rough trip.’
    ‘What magic did you do to save me?’ Alldera said wonderingly. ‘I was dying when your people found me; I felt myself dying.’
    ‘Hardly,’ Nenisi laughed. ‘You had your own magic with you – your child. Why, I recall once in my fourth month of pregnancy, stones were thrown at my home tent over this very point. My friends – most of them as big-bellied as I was – wanted to get me free of my hovering share-mothers so I could ride with them in a three-day race that had been forbidden me.’ She sighed. ‘Everyone knows that any normal female is tougher and healthier in the first half of pregnancy than any other time in her life, and my friends just could not accept the fact that Conor women are exceptions. We lose our babies easily – I never did bring a child of my body to term. There are other lines just as delicate, like the Soolays and the Calpapers, and it’s always a struggle to keep their youngsters slowed down so they don’t miscarry.
    ‘You, however, are as normal as they come, and you could say that that baby kept you alive out there.’
    ‘Funny. I was going to try to kill her,’ Alldera mused, but then she saw by Nenisi’s face that she had said something terrible, and she steered hastily for safer waters: ‘How did you keep me asleep for so long?’
    ‘Asleep,’ Nenisi murmured. ‘Yes, I suppose you’re not really wide awake yet, are you? You’ll soon find your balance. All we use is medicine made from plants and soothing talk. We were even able to coax you into moving about in your sleep, to keep your body healthy and fit to bear.
    ‘While you were lying there dozing and healing yourself, your senses were taking in a lot of what was going on around you – us, the way we live, the way we talk. Not everything will be completely strange to you.’
    I love the way you talk, Alldera thought. Nenisi’s speech was little different from Holdfastish, but she drew everything out with a singing drawl, nudging in extra syllables, lilting up and down the scale. Alldera did not want to break into that music with the hard-edged, barking speech of the Holdfast.