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Keep silence, she thought; listen and learn.
    ‘I want you to understand,’ Nenisi went on, ‘you’re to rest, take your time, not worry. Don’t fret about your baby; women are trampling all over each other trying to take the best care of her that any baby of this camp has ever had. You have family here.’
    Family, kindred; suddenly Alldera was afraid. Perhaps they took her for something other than what she was, to give her such unreserved welcome, warmth in which her bones and sinews seemed to be dissolving. When the mistake was discovered they might turn on her –
    ‘Who are you?’ she whispered. ‘Why do you care?’
    ‘We’re the Riding Women, the women of these plains – ’
    There came the sound of running steps, very light and swift, and a high babble of voices. Then the tent was full of moving figures, small, naked, and filthy, jostling and pressing close to Alldera as they passed her.
    They were a skinny, grimy mob. Their matted hair bounced on their shoulders as they spun away in a swirl of shouts and high-pitched laughter, and they flowed back out of the tent. They brushed past an adult figure in the doorway and were gone.
    The newcomer, a sharp-featured woman, ducked inside. Alldera thought she knew that predatory face from her tumbled, nightmare memories of the journey through the desert to the plains.
    ‘No wonder the childpack is running away,’ commented the woman. ‘That slave is uglier awake than she was asleep.’
    Nenisi’s chin lifted, giving her an armed and guarded look. ‘The childpack is looking for all the excitement and feasting that surrounds a new baby, as you know very well, Sheel. They didn’t find that here, so they left. And Alldera is not a slave. Where there are no masters, no one can be a slave.’
    The sharp-faced woman moved silently on naked, sinewy feet. She wore trousers and a cloth looped around her neck and crossed over her breasts to tie in the back. She took up a wooden bowl and filled it with white liquid from a bag hanging on a pole.
    ‘Ferns are so fitted to slavery that they’ll find masters wherever they go. Be careful this one doesn’t turn you into her master, Nenisi.’ She drank.
    Nenisi sighed and said to Alldera with exaggerated regret, ‘This is Sheel Torrinor. Good manners are not among the Torrinor traits. Like me, Sheel is of your family. I hope you can stand her.’
    ‘You don’t mind being a fem’s sharemother,’ the newcomer said, ignoring the black woman’s bantering tone. ‘I hate it.’
    Alldera did not dare to say anything. She was relieved when Sheel Torrinor walked out, bowl in hand.
    And yet, there had been something bracing about her attitude. Under Sheel’s cold dislike, the helpless, melting feeling of being more beholden than any human being could bear had receded and ceased to overwhelm Alldera. Enmity from an icy bitch was something she understood from the Holdfast, where she had known boss fems like that: ruthless but effective overseers, most of them. Sheel’s contempt had yanked her roughly back into reality.
    She was an escaped fem taken in by a strange, marvelous people, befriended by a black person whose teeth hurt, rejected by another stranger as slim and hard-looking as a knife.
    ‘I’m sorry she’s so rude,’ Nenisi said.
    ‘But she’s part of my “family”?’ Alldera ventured cautiously. ‘What’s a “sharemother”?’
    ‘One who shares the mothering of your child with you. I’m one of your sharemothers. Sheel, unfortunately perhaps, is another.’
    ‘But why should she be, if she doesn’t want to?’
    ‘Good reasons.’
    ‘I’d rather not have her forced to – ’
    ‘Don’t worry about her. She’ll do what’s right, however ungracefully,’ Nenisi said; and she talked of other things.
     
    Four women inhabited ‘Holdfaster Tent’ with Alldera as her family of sharemothers. When they came in to eat and talk that evening, they seemed to bring with them the spirits of a hundred other