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together, their skinny limbs asprawl, they lay snoring and snuffling under the wide fly of one of the tents. Repelled, she retreated a step, jostling Barvaran.
    ‘You’ll get used to them, too,’ Barvaran said. ‘I know it’s not much like your country here.’
    The truth was that, like Barvaran herself, the childpack was all too much like something from the Holdfast. The pack reminded Alldera of a batch of very young fems in one of the wide, deep pits where fem kits were kept between the time they were weaned and the time they were taken for training. She thought of her own life in the pits, bitter with hunger and struggles against others just as hungry, and of a time she had spent immobilized in her own filth by illness while her companions ate up all the scant ration thrown down to them by the men …
    These camp children did not seem hungry, only dirty and wild, and Barvaran herself seemed not alien and forbidding but familiar. Alldera said hesitantly, ‘Barvaran, can I ask you – how do you have children, without men?’
    ‘Oh,’ Barvaran said, ‘we mate with our horses.’
    Shocked with embarrassment, Alldera felt her own cheeks heat. Clearly she had asked an improper question and had been turned with a crude joke about those monster-like beasts. She would not ask again.
     
    The other question, the necessary question, haunted her, dammed in by timidity and a feeling that it would be somehow absurd and insulting to ask it. Finally it broke clumsily out of her one day when she found herself alone with Nenisi, who was hunched under one of the tent flies straightening bent arrow shafts over a small fire. Finding Nenisi by herself was not easy, and Alldera leaped at the opportunity without thinking.
    ‘Will you help us?’ she said.
    Nenisi looked up at her.
    Alldera rushed on, stammering, ‘I wasn’t just running away, I was sent to find help in the Wild, some hope – I didn’t think there really was anyone, and I’d given up and was just trying to save myself, but now – you—the other fems still enslaved back there – ’
    ‘There is no help,’ Nenisi said. She sighted down the arrow in her hand. ‘It was decided long ago that we women would never risk the free world of our children by invading the Holdfast for the ferns’ sakes. We all agreed.’
    ‘I see.’ Beneath her numbness Alldera felt feeling stir.
    ‘Besides, it’s too late. No one, man or fem, has come out of the east in months; not since we found you, in fact. We think they’re all dead – ’
    ‘Yes, I understand,’ Alldera insisted. That was what she had sensed herself, alone in the borderlands. That was what she had wanted to hear. She turned away to hide the horror of her feelings: the dark surge of grief for her lost people was shot through with the joy of being truly free of them at last.
     
    At first she reveled at the sight of female people running their own lives without so much as a scent of men about them; even the several very pregnant women seemed sturdy and capable and utterly unworried by their vulnerable condition.
    Her jubilation receded as the hot, dry weeks wore on. She was invaded by weariness, depressed for days at a time by her undeserved survival into freedom and by the conviction that she would never learn to manage all the newness surrounding her. Loneliness assailed her. She longed sometimes to caress Shayeen’s glowing skin, and often caught herself staring at the sculpted beauty of Nenisi’s long dark face. The conviction of her own unworthiness turned her desires back on herself. She did not dare approach these women, except in her dreams.
    The blazing afternoon skies began to fill with clouds each day now, and the women stood outside watching in the heat. Four dry months almost behind them, they said; four rainy months coming, then four cool months after that, making up the year. The Dusty Season was about to end.
    One afternoon it rained not at the camp but a distance to the south. Alldera could