The Slave and The Free Books 1 and 2 of 'The Holdfast Chronicles': 'Walk to the End of the World' and 'Motherlines'

In these highly acclaimed and immensely popular 1970s novels, Charnas explores the Holdfast, where women are Fems enslaved to men, and the land of the Riding Women, where men are known only as a shadowy threat on the other side of the hills, a horror story told around the campfires.

Suzy McKee Charnas is the author of over a dozen works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, including the Holdfast series from Tor Books and the Sorcery Hall series of books for young adults. She is the winner of the Hugo Award (for her short story "Boobs") and has won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award twice, once retrospectively for the first two Holdfast books and then for The Conqueror's Child, final volume of the Holdfast series. Her most recent book is My Father's Ghost, a narrative nonfiction work about her father's old age. She adapted her novel, The Vampire Tapestry, for the stage in the late 1990s.

She was born and brought up in New York City, the setting for the Sorcery Hall books, and she currently lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

1
 
 
In an alley of the silent Pennelton compound in Lammintown, a man waited, his hands tucked into his sleeves against the night's chill. He was a Rover Captain in full uniform under his disguise of blanks. He stood alone in the shadow of a doorway.
Most of the lamps fixed to the corners of the buildings had been smashed. By the light of one that still burned he could discern obscene and insulting figures scratched into the granite walls. The Pennelton Company was assigned away south this five-year, and young men of other Lammintown companies had turned the empty compound into a temporary skidro. He had followed a group of wild lads down here, seekers of illicit pleasures.
The one whose services they had hired tonight was the one he was after; d Layo the DarkDreamer, a young man too, but of no company, no order, and no legitimate use to his fellows.
Heavy-muscled, smooth-moving, a tawny-colored night-slinker, a prowling predator with a broad, blunt-nosed face and wide-curling mouth, d Layo padded before his mind's eye. D Layo really did look like that, though it wasn't manly for the captain to think of even such a corrupt man as an actual beast.
The Lammintown trumpets brayed, as they did every quarter-hour. The captain began silently reciting the Chant Protective, to drive away visions. The chant opened with a reckoning of the size and reach of the Holdfast and of all the fellowship of men living in it; not a great or impressive tally, but it served to remind a man of his brothers and of what they expected from him.
The Holdfast was a strip of plain bisected by a river. A good runner could cross the plain north-to-south at its widest point in three days or run the length of the river from the coast to 'Troi in seven. The river descended from 'Troi on the high inland plateau. Further east, the City overlooked the river's fork: the southern branch reached down over the flats to Bayo; the northern branch emptied in Lammintown under the pale cliffs. These were the holdings of men - bastions of order, clear-thinking and will - to which the rest of the world one day would be added again.
But not, the captain thought morosely, if the Reconquest depended on men like himself. He let the chant drop. It wasn't because he stood alone in the dark that he saw beast-ghosts, though darkness encouraged such lapses in the manliest of men. At night the earth could be felt stretching away on all sides, its vast stillness stirred only by the currents of wind and water. The mind, shrinking from such expanses of emptiness, tended by supply populations of spirits.
However, the captain's personal vice was to envision other men - even decent, manly men - in beast shapes. Not many benefits derived from the Wasting that had turned the world into scrub-desert; the extinction of all creatures lower than man was one. To think of the beasts was like willfully calling up the ghosts of dead enemies.
He glanced up at the sky, hoping the DarkDreamer would come out before moonrise. The moon was the ally of brutes like d Layo. The captain, without his usual complement of Rovers, had no allies.
Trumpets blared; a pot shattered somewhere along the stone-paved streets. D Layo emerged from a narrow passage between two buildings. He was alone and seemed to be in a state of mild dreaming-shock, for he veered as he walked and ran one hand along the wall for guidance. Not many DarkDreamers would venture out still dream-dazed; but d Layo was reputed to be a rash young man.
The captain had the urge to clear his throat of the tightness that commonly afflicted him just before a clash. He waited until d Layo had meandered past. Then he sprang at him, clamping a forearm across the DarkDreamer's throat and a leg around his legs to prevent him from kicking, and he threw himself and his captive backward seeking to brace his own shoulders against the wall.
The DarkDreamer plunged like the ocean; he seemed to have no fear at all. He flung himself and the captain headlong across the alley so that both their heads smacked against the opposite wall. The captain grunted and tightened his grip. He scrabbled for a foothold on the cobbles and used his weight to hurl the DarkDreamer down with force. D Layo's head glanced against stone; he made a muffled sound and went slack.
Kneeling on the DarkDreamer's back, the captain glanced quickly around. There was no one. He thought longingly of the knife sheathed on his thigh. It would be gratifying to carry out his original assignment and simply kill this brute.
Instead, he took hold of d Layo's thick hair and pulled his head up. ‘A Senior wants to talk with you,' he said to the blank, handsome face.
D Layo groaned. The groan turned into hiccups. There was the sweet scent of manna, the dreaming-drug, on his breath.
In a harsh whisper, the captain repeated his message. Then he got up and stepped clear. He felt exhausted. This sort of work was better done in the bright, clean light of the sun, and by younger men.
D Layo sat up. He rubbed at his face and held up his hand to see if there was blood. A thick, compartmented bracelet of metal slid down his lifted arm, glinting. He said, unsteadily, ‘Are you the cunningcock that's been sniffing me for the past two months? To give me that message?'
‘Until last week, my orders were different,' the captain growled.
‘You're Captain Helms, aren't you?'
‘Rover Captain Kelmz, of Hemaway Company.'
‘Ah.' D Layo got up, making ineffectual brushing-off motions with both hands. There was some blood; in the feeble lamplight, the captain could see the dark line weaving down around the socket of d Layo's eye. ‘Tell your Senior to meet me on the beach, in the sheds. Only one is in operation; tell him to follow his nose.'
‘No. You're to come with me to meet him.'
‘Hell-ums,' d Layo crooned, putting an irritating softness into his speech, ‘be rational. You don't need my cooperation to kill me, but you do need it to talk with me. So we'll do this my way - unless you feel like another round?'
The captain did not feel like another round. He felt worn out and heavy in the hands.
‘It's a let-down, I know,' the DarkDreamer added, ‘after you've tagged along behind me all this time hoping for a taste of my blood.Forget it, Hell-ums. You have managed to cause me a good deal of inconvenience recently; settle for that.' The dreaming-shock was gone now. D Layo's voice was as the captain had first overheard it months ago: light, lazy, and sweet with malice. ‘You may have another chance to kill me sometime, cheer up. By the way, which of my many good friends told you where to find me tonight?'
‘Go eat femshit.'
D Layo laughed.
* * *
Lammintown was a storm-battered, cold-gnawed place, ‘rock on rock' its men said, boasting of their halls made of blocks hewn from the cliffs. They said that Lammintown men carried the Holdfast on their tough shoulders, because no one could survive without the harvests of long kelps, called lammins, from the bay.
There was an edginess in Lammintown these days. For several seasons and more noticeably this past summer the lammin-take had been alarmingly scant. The Lammintown Juniors who had charge of the offshore waters this five-year blamed the moon's influence over the shifting currents of the sea. They claimed that unusually warm water had impeded the maturing of the young kelps. But the Seniors maintained that the young men had mistimed the placing of rocks on the bay floor during the previous autumn, so that the new lammin spores had found no footholds and had died or drifted elsewhere. This crop failure came on top of a long series of economic setbacks in the Holdfast.
Seniors had begun turning up on the work-turfs of the Juniors without warning, hoping to catch them in the act of stealing portions of the scarce harvest for themselves. These Seniors came with escorts of Rovers, often dispensing with the formality of bringing officers to command them. Rovers were powerful defenders of the Seniors and their interests, but they were hard to control, and most Seniors were not skilled in handling them personally.
There had been incidents, and rumors.
The young men of 'Ware Company, whose work-turf that five-year was the whole waterfront complex of lammin-works, had grown more and more restive. Between their resentment and the suspicion of the Seniors, a moonlit night was hardly the time for prudent men to venture into the sheds of Lammintown beach.
To keep the heat under the vats high without tending all night the wall-mats of the shed had been rolled down and secured. The waiting men were confined with the bitter stink of boiling lammin and the roaring of the furnaces under the two working vats.
A brace of Rovers, under Kelmz' command, flanked the Senior whom they escorted. They were nervous in this strange atmosphere, but they would answer to Kelmz' voice and hands. The Senior himself looked no different here than he looked when at ease in his home-compound in the City. He stood with his stumpy legs planted apart, his hands folded neatly on his belly. Despite the heat, he hadn't even bothered to draw the starched folds of his mantle down from around his neck and shoulders. His round, balding head was tilted back.
High above them, a network of taut, heavy ropes webbed the mouths of the vats. Two young men ran barefoot over the lines, flickering like visions. Now and then one of them would pause for an instant to cast a wide and measuring glance over the heaving surface of the ‘soup' they tended. The metal hooks they carried swung gleaming from each hand. Their skins were sweat-bright and smudged with smoke. They shaved themselves hairless to keep the soup clean, and they wore only shorts. The hooks, part of their balance, hung as naturally from their hands as fingers from the captain's own. ‘Lose your footing and lose the soup,' warned the workchants of the sheds.
It was unarguably the dirtiest work men had to do in the Holdfast. Periodically, proposals were made to turn it over to fems instead, but this phase of the processing of a staple of men's diet was considered too important to be entrusted to fems. Besides, attachment to the sheds for a time was a handy punishment for insolent young men. Only one of the pair now running wore the 'Ware Company sign, sewn to the hip of his shorts. The other wore no emblem and was doing time.
Hooks smacked suddenly into the heavily wrapped handle of one of the vat-ladles. The runner's body arced out in a leap from one line to another, by its weight and momentum turning the ladle in the soup. The captain looked hastily away. It made his stomach lurch to see one of those gleaming bodies suspended in the steaming air, like a beast that in Ancient times had leaped in the branches of tall trees…
The Rovers stirred uneasily: d Layo had entered the shed. He must have somehow bought himself the freedom of the 'Wares' work-turf, for the runners never even bothered to look down. That was the worst of brutes like d Layo, they corrupted others.
‘Servan,' said the Senior, projecting his voice above the roar of the furnaces without actually shouting, ‘where can we talk?'
‘Right here, Senior,' the DarkDreamer replied. ‘It's safe. The patrols keep the beach clear at night now, and the lads up there can't hear us.' He sat down on the lid of a fuel-box and patted the space beside him.
The Hemaway Senior stood where he was and took a deep, deliberate breath.
‘Now, Senior - Bajerman, is it?' d Layo said, before his breath could be expelled in speech. ‘It's been some time since our last meeting. Oh, please, let's have no apologies over all that, the past is the past. In the interests of brotherly harmony, let's comport ourselves like men newly met. You don't mind the suggestion coming from a younger man, I hope.' He beamed amiably. The Senior ignored his impudence, and d Layo went smoothly on, ‘Now, what can this humble young man do for so great a Senior? Nothing too strenuous, I hope? Your messenger found me at an awkward time; I'm all dreamed out for the moment.'
‘It's not d Layo the DarkDreamer I've come to see,' the Senior said calmly.
‘Servan the outlaw, then?'
The Senior said, ‘You romanticize yourself.'
‘Which laws do you want broken, Senior?' d Layo smiled. ‘It must be very important for you Seniors to give up wanting my blood and start negotiating for my services.'
‘Some laws must be bent, so that they may spring back into firmer shape than before.'
‘I hope,' d Layo said piously, ‘that the years will bring me wisdom as great as your own.'
Knowing things that were not his business had never brought the captain anything but trouble. He withdrew into his own thoughts, yet kept alert. An officer's eyes were trained to be ceaselessly on the move. His success depended on his ability to notice and counteract any inadvertant cues that might set his Rovers off, especially in unfamiliar surroundings.
D Layo and the Senior could arouse the Rovers themselves with harsh tones or sharp gestures; but they weren't arguing. Far from it. The DarkDreamer teased and mocked with both voice and gestures. The Senior sat back stiffly, resisting; again and again he spoke with the insistence of a man trying to restate the serious core of a wandering discussion. Both men knew this game well and played it with pleasure. They ignored even the rumbling of a ladle rolling in its socket overhead, intent as they were on the levels of their game.
The captain's own game began in his head; he saw the Senior as a large, horn-headed beast. The red-and-black mantle became the burnished hide of a thick-shouldered creature, slow but strong, confident and patient, ready to outlast the subtle prowler opposite him, the tawny hunter d Layo. Come to my teeth and my claws, coaxed d Layo; come to my horns and my hooves, lowed the other. They smiled and played their strategies of menace and attraction.
Kelmz shook his head; but he could no more shake free of these visions than he could shake the roar of the fires out of his ears while he stood within reach of their heat. He hugged his ribs with his elbows, blotting the tickling runnels of sweat on his skin. He was bruised from his struggle with the DarkDreamer. Kelmz was too old for such tussles.
It looked as if Senior Bajerman had gotten what he wanted now. He was winding up the conversation, expounding on the need for the raw strength of young men to be curbed by the wisdom of their elders.
‘So true,' murmured d Layo. ‘You'll permit me to take a mature man with me on this journey so that I can have the benefit of his wisdom? A man with experience running Rovers would be most helpful.' His dark eyes mocked the captain.
‘No!' Kelmz blurted, but he had to pause to calm the Rovers, who reacted to his own agitation. This pause gave him time to steady himself as well. He said, ‘I mean, Senior, if d Layo means me, I'd rather not.'
‘D Layo means you,' the DarkDreamer said. He rose and arched his back, as if bored with a matter already settled.
‘You are commanded, Captain,' the Senior said.
Kelmz bent his head in submission and to hide his angry face. It was clear from the Senior's smug look that he had expected d Layo's request.
The Senior said he would take over direct control of Kelmz' two Rovers for his trip back upriver to the City, adding in a kindly tone, ‘It should be welcome to you, Captain, to be relieved of your ordinary responsibilities for a time.'
Saying nothing, the captain unclasped his bracelet of office and surrendered it to the Senior. In its compartments were the carefully measured doses of manna with which an officer bound his Rovers to him. Kelmz looked at the Rovers, the best of the new squad. He didn't think he would command them or their like again. His arm felt as light as if he had given up its bones.
‘Hero!' said the Senior to the Rovers. ‘I need your escort through danger!'
They stepped forward, speaking passionately and both at once of their prowess as escorts through danger. There was no actual resemblance between them, but the eagerness of their expressions made them look alike. They were very tense; transferring command was always a touchy business. The Senior spoke the traditional calming responses several times; this would serve until he could take time to bind them formally under his control with a manna-dream.
The imagined dangers dream-fixed in the Rovers' minds made them not only alert and fierce, but indiscriminately dangerous unless skillfully handled. Each Rover, in his isolated vision of himself as a hero constantly on guard, imagined all orders to be for his ears alone and himself to be the sole subject of all events. Rover-egotism was considered a sign of healthy, manly individualism and was encouraged, so that getting even two to work efficiently together as a brace was difficult.
Kelmz momentarily wished that the Senior wouldn't be able to hold them; but whatever happened to Senior Bajerman in that case, the Rovers would have to be destroyed as rogues, so it was hardly a thought worthy of an officer.
‘Safe journeys,' said the Senior. He drew aside his mantle for a parting salute. The skin of his shoulder was elaborately patterned with the dark dyes of high rank.
Kelmz and the Rovers all touched their own shoulders and bowed. But the DarkDreamer smiled.
‘Have you forgotten your salutes?' the Senior said, sharply.
‘Have you forgotten that when a man is expelled his shoulder is stripped? He has no salute to give. It's one of the charms of being without standing in the companies.'
‘Do this job, and you'll have standing again.'
‘Provided the Senior remembers me when the job is finished.'
‘I'll remember you,' Senior Bajerman said drily. ‘You are a memorable young man.'
He turned and left them, the Rovers pacing alertly at his back.
 
Walk to the End of the World copyright © 1974 by Suzy McKee Charnas.