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out how long she had been with the People by generations, but she kept going
back and back so far that all the faces and personalities blurred together in
her mind. She did remem-ber vaguely coming across an immense river in a very
large canoe powered by the Spirit of the Wind, with huge, ugly men dressed in
bright cloth and metal, with four-legged an-imals that they rode. She recalled
that sometime afterward she had been beaten and whipped by some of those men
and had fled into the jungle, but even that was a blur now, fading and soon to
disappear with the rest of the past.
She had a hazy memory, almost a dream, of fleeing in-land, encountering a
tribe, and settling with them.
She had felt safe, but something had happened an accident and she d lost a
hand. She could never remember which hand it was, anyway, since it wasn t
important. It wasn t the loss that had caused the trouble with the tribe but,
rather, the fact that the hand eventually had grown back. She had been cast
out by the tribal leaders, men who had come to fear her, and she had pressed
on, learning when to stay with a tribe and when to leave it, until she had
found the People.
Legend said it had been a tribe where the men had grown lazy and no longer
provided for the women and chil-dren or respected the gods and spirits. The
women had learned how to hunt and forage and do all the things men did, after
which the spirits had slain the men for their evil abandonment of their
natural duties. Since that time they had allowed no man in the tribe. Now and
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then they would find men of other tribes in the forest and capture some of
them, and, using the ancient potions made from the forest plants, the
prisoners would be kept drugged and would mate with whoever of the tribe chose
to do so. After a while the men would again be put to sleep and carried back
to where they had been captured, to wake up wondering whether their experience
had been real or some kind of dream. Male children born of these unions would
be taken to some other mixed tribe and left. Only girl children were kept by
the
People. It was a part of the blood oath taken at adulthood, and there was a
stark but well-understood price for not agreeing to do so: death to the
mother, although not to the child, who was then taken to another tribe. It was
a hard rule, but this was a hard life in a very hard land, and it had kept
them free.
Was that one of her rules? Or had that been here before her? She couldn t
remember. She wasn t even really certain if the People had predated her
arrival or had come about as a mixture of circumstance and her own invention.
Certainly she strictly enforced the rules: Use nothing not of nature, or of
your own making, or the making of those you know. All things of others, even
of other tribes, are unclean, to be buried when found and the handler purified
afterward. Re-fuse nothing that another needs; have nothing that you would not
willingly give away.
She worried about that sometimes, that perhaps she was not helping these women
but was instead forcing them into a system to meet not their needs but hers.
But wasn t that what a deity did? They did not seem to hate her for it, were
not unhappy. If, perhaps, her perception of them as being happier than their
counterparts in the more traditional tribes was colored by her own need to be
right, they never seemed less content than the others. That would have to be
enough. Provided that the tribe could continue to exist, that the forest would
continue to exist, even her worries would not trouble her, for even now it was
hard to imagine that she had not always been here.
She took no man herself, nor had she in such a long time, she could barely
remember the experience.
She felt no need for it anymore, and, more important, the survival of the
tribe depended on procreation, particularly when they could keep only the girl
children; she knew she was barren. There was only one man who was of her own
kind, a man of godlike power that she did remember, but she could not remember
even him with much clarity.
Still, while she d banished all the worries of the past, she was concerned
about the future. What made the People so attractive to her was their
permanence, their unchanging yet challenging life, and their isolation. But it
was getting a lot harder to maintain that isolation. The forest was being
chewed up by monstrous machines, cleared, farmed, then abandoned because the
land was neither loved nor under-stood by those new men and women who
exploited her. The tribe had moved many times and more than once had barely
escaped discovery, and it was getting harder and harder to find a place that
would provide for the needs of the People in their jungle wilderness. Watching
the cutting and burning of the forest had brought back old hatreds and fears;
it was no less rape for being inflicted on the land rather than on a woman,
and it was no less brutally violent.
That was why they were near the remote impact site, searching out a new place
to call a home, a new refuge against the rapists of the land. It was a good
region and held much promise, although there were others about violent men,
men with deadly weapons and a callous disre-gard for life, who were also
planting and growing in the region. These men, at least, seemed to protect the
forest to hide their activities from the rest of the world as much as she
wanted to hide the People from those same eyes. That made them less of a
problem to her and one she could ac-cept. Their traps were elaborate and
particularly nasty, but she could discover them easily, and they posed no real
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threat. And with the poisons and potions that were the leg-acy of tens of
thousands of years of experience by the for-est people, an uneasy truce was
possible. The men understood that the People had no interest in what they were
doing and wished only to be left alone. They also un-derstood that in the
forest their murderous guns and traps were little help should they decide to
hunt down the forest tribes. After a few disastrous attempts, the men had
aban-doned any ideas of that.
This place would probably do, but locating a good site for a more permanent
village would take some time. In the meantime, they would camp and move as
one.
It had been quite late, and only the guards and the forest were awake. There
had been good hunting, the
Fire Keeper had a good flame, and everyone had a full belly and was content.
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