Ammonite

by Nicola Griffith

  “You’re the second one up so early,” the woman volunteered. “Uaithne rode off north and east before the moons set.”

  The tribeswoman had been guarding the herd all night, Marghe realized, and had probably not heard about the stranger woman humiliating Aoife in public. She could not know that Uaithne’s was the last name Marghe wanted to hear. Marghe borrowed one of Aoife’s tactics and simply ignored the guard until she clucked her mount back into the middle of the sleeping taars.

  Marghe contemplated the snow on her boots. Uaithne often disappeared for days at a time; no one knew where she went. Why should this be any different? But she sensed that it was.

  She had other things to think about. After another drink of water so cold it burned all the way down to her stomach, she set the jug back down in the snow and pulled her wristcom from a pocket.

  “As the Echraidhe use it, the term soestre means those who are born after their mothers somehow synchronize their bio‑rhythms and, through a process which I assume bears similarities to the control by a trained person of her otherwise autonomic nervous system, stimulate each other’s ova to divide.” It sounded bizarre, but the Echraidhe reproduced somehow, and unless the entire tribe was crazy or lying, then some of the daughters of these women, the ones they called soestre, were not genetically identical to their mothers. Which was impossible. Except it happened. How? “Tentative theory: that this ovular stimulation by another somehow encourages genetic information that is recessive to become dominant.” That might account for some of the differences like eye and hair coloring. But what about height, or bone structure? She did not know enough to be certain whether or not these could be explained by the differences the fetuses encountered in the womb.

  She drank some more water.

  “The deep trancing necessary for reproduction has acquired mystical aspects for the Echraidhe. The rite of passage is attended by a ritual trance, called deepsearch, which, the Echraidhe claim, allows the adolescent to somehow access the memories of her ancestors. The trancing is so deep that psychosis may occur, or may go on so long that it becomes physically detrimental to the subject.”

  The Echraidhe accepted access to memories of past lives as casually as others believed in their gods, in reincarnation, in hellfire and damnation. She would not make a judgment on the matter.

  She clicked RECORD again, then changed her mind and hit OFF. There were only a few hours of chip space left. She could speculate any time. When the chip was full, she would have to lift her face from the here and now, from her perspective as a woman researching a primitive tribe, and face her future. But the chip was not full yet.

  Inside the tent she laced the flap closed behind her. There was just enough light to make it back to her nightbag without treading on anyone. Aoife stirred.

  “Aoife?” There was no reply, but she could feel Aoife watching her in the dark. “I’m sorry. I…” There was no way she could explain how she felt. “I’m sorry,” she repeated.

  The next day, and the day after that, Aoife got her up before dawn and kept her out on the plains until after dark. Marghe wondered if the tribeswoman was keeping her out of harm’s way.

  This time, there was no storytelling. Aoife was grim, speaking only to explain how to tell the difference between the vein and artery in a taar’s neck, and which was the right one to cut if she needed a quick kill, or to explain how to hold the skinning knife to take a skin whole from a just‑butchered taar. There were endless lessons, and it seemed to Marghe that Aoife was trying to teach her in one winter everything there was to being an Echraidhe. She wondered at that. Before the night in the Levarch’s tent, Marghe would have thought Aoife’s actions arbitrary, but now she wondered what the tribeswoman saw ahead to prompt this hard, uncompromising work.

  Marghe still resented Aoife, because she was her guard, the one who watched her constantly, the one who stood between her and freedom. But as they labored on the plain, Aoife patiently repeating what must have seemed to her a basic lesson, Marghe trying over and again to master something any Echraidhe child could do with ease, she came to see that they were not that different. Aoife only did what she thought was right–and Aoife, too, was alone.

  At night, they both lifted their heads at the sound of hoof‑beats, lowered them again when the hoofbeats passed and it was not Uaithne.

  Five nights after the incident in the Levarch’s tent, Marghe woke up in the dark, listening. Hoofbeats. Uaithne. Pulling on her boots was difficult; they were as stiff as her arms.

  The sky was almost clear of cloud. It was the dark of the moons, but stars were strewn in a thick twist, like old jewels, across the sky. The air was crisp and bright. She could hear the horse clearly. Others did, too; tent flaps were unlaced, and feet stamped in the snow to warm hastily donned boots.

  Aoife appeared at her shoulder, stood close.

  “It’s Uaithne,” Marghe said, and felt the tribeswoman nod. Suddenly she wanted to put her arms around the small, fierce‑faced woman and hold her close, protect her from more hurt. A rush of loneliness made her throat ache.

  The drum of hoofbeats got louder; they heard the harsh breathing of an animal pushed too hard. Then it was there. Someone held the horses while Uaithne slid from the saddle and held up both arms.

  “It has begun,” she shouted. In the starlight, the blood on her hands looked black.

  Chapter Eight

  THAT NIGHT THE sky remained clear, fading from black to a dark, almost navy blue near morning. The air was bitterly cold, brittle as glass. The change in the weather signaled time for the herds to be culled, the old and weak killed that the fodder might last the rest of the herd over winter and that their flesh and bones and blood keep heat in the tribe’s veins during the Moon of Knives and the Moon of Silence, when the world itself seemed to slow to a stop and hesitate before spinning on to spring.

  Shards of light thrown up by the snow had the taars shying and skittish as Marghe and Aoife and others, on foot, herded them all into one pen. The women called to one another, shouted at the stupid beasts that milled in confusion, cursed when one enterprising animal made a run for the open plain. Uaithne’s braids burned in the sun like rivers of hot Irish gold as she chased it and brought it down in a tangle of legs.

  Marghe wondered how the taar had felt, running to freedom one moment, brought crashing to the snow in a gust and swirl of laughter the next.

  Marghe surreptitiously did her best to keep the herd between herself and Uaithne, Uaithne whose teeth flashed whiter than snow as she laughed and lunged her horse this way and that, Uaithne who was strong and healthy and unconcerned about what she had done. A few laughed with her. The shocked silence of last night had given way to mutterings which had become resignation, then calm acceptance: Uaithne had killed a Briogannon, yes, had plunged them into a feud with another tribe that might be the death of them all before spring, but she was also Echraidhe, one of them, their sister, and her madness–if it was madness–was bright and proud and beautiful.

  Aoife said nothing. She had remained silent since the night before.

  The Echraidhe separated out the culls. It was hard work, and confusing: women slapping at rumps with palos, twirling nooses, cutting out taars from the rest seemingly at random and herding them to one end of the pen. Marghe watched Aoife and tried to follow her lead, using her palo to nudge an old or thin or limping taar away from its more healthy siblings, Once she almost got trampled by two taars running blindly from the swinging palos and had to scramble on all fours across the dung‑spattered snow. She looked up to find Uaithne watching her with an almost sexual intensity. She flushed. Uaithne laughed and turned away.

  The morning wore on and Aoife still said nothing. Marghe was nervous. She stayed too fast and light on her feet, blinking too often, throwing her noose and missing, jerking her head up at every shadow, thinking it was Uaithne. By the time Mairu whistled and stopped everything for food, Marghe was exhausted. Marac and Scatha and two other youngsters she did not know
brought around bowls of dap and grain. She ate.

  Someone stood next to her, her shadow sharp against the ice‑granule snow. She looked up, expecting Aoife. It was Uaithne. She leaned against the fence; her hood was down and snow clung to her hair. Her skin was creamy, fresh, with a delicate flush of exertion, and very smooth. Her gloves were tucked under her belt, next to her knife. The carving on the bone handle was worn smooth with use. She smiled.

  “You should eat that before it freezes,” she said, and nodded at the fingerful of grain and butter Marghe still held halfway to her mouth. Marghe, knowing she would be unable to swallow it, put it back in her bowl. Aoife was nowhere in sight. Uaithne took out her knife and began picking dirt and grease from under her nails. “Why do you stay?” she asked conversationally.

  “Why do I stay?” Sun gleamed on the tiny golden hairs on the backs of Uaithne’s fingers and ran like bronze along the polished black blade. Marghe wondered if she had killed the Briogannon with the same knife, pushed it deep into her stomach and twisted.

  “Yes,” Uaithne said. The knife twitched, drawing blood. She did not seem to mind. “Why do you stay, and why did you come?”

  Because you forced me, Marghe wanted to say. Because you pointed your spear at my stomach and Aoife threw me across her horse. But Uaithne was staring out across the snow, and Marghe sensed she was no longer waiting for an answer, that she already had her own.

  “And why did you send the other one? To test me?”

  Other one? Where was Aoife? She dared not turn her head away to look for her.

  “But I passed her tests,” Uaithne went on. Blood dripped onto the snow, perfect round ruby drops. “Oh, she threatened me, searching for weakness, but I laughed at her promises of demon voices that curve around the belly of the world, of light that kills, of rafts that glide on rivers of air faster than the fastest horse can gallop.”

  Sleds. The woman was talking of comms and lasers and sleds.

  “I showed her the ways of the Death Spirit, I showed her I was worthy. I ignored all her pleas and killed her slowly, one piece at a time. One piece at a time.” She seemed to shake herself back to the present. “So why have you come? To test me again?”

  One morning when Marghe was eight and running through the door on her way to play outside in a hot, steamy rainfall, her mother had caught her by the arm and told her she could not play until she had tidied her room. Marghe had pulled free and said plaintively, “But I already did that.” She must have sounded a lot like Uaithne did.

  Unthinkingly, she said the same thing now as her mother had said then. “I don’t believe you.” But she did.

  Uaithne dipped her bloody hand in a pocket and pulled free something that glittered in the sunlight. Marghe reached out reflexively and took it. After so long handling only bone and wood and leather, the metal felt slick and slippery.

  A wristcom. Broken.

  “See, the same as the one you wear.”

  Marghe examined the wristcom. No way to tell whose. Fear pushed at her guts like an expanding bubble of air. “When did you take this? How long ago?”

  Uaithne shrugged. “Sixteen moons, perhaps less.”

  Winnie. She had killed Winnie. “You killed my assistant.” She was angry now.

  Uaithne shrugged again. “I cut off her fingers, then her toes, but she kept testing me, threatening me with the light‑killing demons on rafts, to see if I would stop. So I cut off her arms, to show I was worthy–”

  Marghe shook her head, trying to shake the world away, but the sun stayed in the same place, her breath still steamed in the cold, this woman was still talking about murdering Winnie Kimura, torturing her to death.

  “–she died squealing like a two‑day‑old foal until I cut out her tongue. She lived a long time. You send strong messengers.”

  Deep breaths. In. Out. “I sent no one,” she said, then remembered she had just told Uaithne that Winnie was her assistant.

  Uaithne smiled slyly. “She said you would come, and here you are. You almost fooled me, too, coming on a horse instead of a raft. But I know who you are. I’ve met you before.” She shifted the knife to her other hand. Blood stained the hilt. A ritual cadence crept into her words. “You have spoken to me in my waking dreams, for I have tranced and I have seen Death. Now we are in a living trance, and you have come. Speak to me, sing to me, tell me what you need of me.”

  Madness and worship glittered in her eyes like chips of ice, and Marghe was afraid. Fear spiked under her ribs and fluttered under her skin. Sweat burst out on her face and began to freeze.

  “Marghe.” The voice came from behind her. Marghe only dared turn her head slightly. Aoife was standing there empty‑handed, balanced like a dancer, ready, eyes fixed on the knife in Uaithne’s bloody hand. “You are not needed here, Marghe,” she said softly, still not moving. Uaithne was swaying now. “Go help Borri in the yurti.”

  Marghe backed away slowly, out of reach and out of earshot, until her legs threatened to give way and she had to stop. Aoife spoke to her soestre softly, moved a step closer. Uaithne stopped swaying and Marghe wondered what she had said. Aoife rested her hand gently on Uaithne’s arm, still speaking. She pointed to the taars. Uaithne nodded, listening. Aoife talked on. Uaithne smiled, clapped her hand on Aoife’s back, returned her knife to its sheath almost as an afterthought. She laughed and walked away. Aoife joined Marghe.

  They walked back to the yurti in silence. Marghe was perturbed by her sense of security in Aoife’s presence, recognizing the feeling for what it was: the passing of responsibility for her personal safety from herself to Aoife. That scared her almost as much as Uaithne had.

  She dreamed of the cull: red knives flicking, blood pumping over well‑muscled arms wrapped around the necks of terrified taars and running into clay pots. Only fill them half‑full, Aoife said, or the pots will break when they freeze. And Uaithne picking up a bowl, nodding to her and smiling, and drinking, drinking until sticky red poured down her chin, slicked her furs, began to fill the tent like a dark whirlpool. Learn to swim, Uaithne whispered, learn to swim, and the children of the Echraidhe laughed and splashed and played as the blood rose higher and higher until it lapped thickly at her chin.

  Marghe surged up out of her nightbag, panting. Everyone was asleep. The hearth still glowed; the inside of the tent was red and full of other people’s breath. She groped in the dim light for her overfurs.

  It was snowing, a soft, silent fall. She walked away from the yurtu, away from the pens, past the Levarch’s tent, until she was alone in the dark quiet. Soon it would be time for the days of dark–nine days of twilight. She hated Tehuantepec.

  According to her wristcom, it was still early, hours before dawn. She could just keep on walking out here, forever, until she was exhausted. The snow would cover her tracks. She would probably die of hunger and exposure before Aoife found her. Maybe dying was better than staying here, like this, like some domestic animal kept for its breeding potential–its ability to bring fresh blood, new genes to the pool.

  Breeding potential. She laughed out loud as she walked and the laugh was swallowed by the soft snow, the same empty dark that waited to swallow her. The dark was many things: the cold, the alien world, the virus, her own fear. Her FN‑17 would not last forever. But if she managed to escape, she would die of cold or be caught. She stopped walking. Snow fell on her face, her hair. But if she stayed here, she might die anyway. She walked again. But if she ran, they might send Uaithne after her, with her knives that cut off toes and fingers and tongues…

  She sat down in the snow, careless of the freezing cold, and pulled out her wristcom. She would externalize her thoughts. She was a rational woman. All she needed to do was list her options, then make the most sensible decision.

  “Problem: the long‑term survival of SEC representative Marguerite Angelica Taishan. Options: to give up and stay here in the camp of the Echraidhe; to attempt escape right now; to attempt escape at some point in the future when the Echraidhe
may be less vigilant. Pertinent information to be considered: One, assuming escape is possible, where does she go? She’s lost. Even if, by some miracle, she managed to reach Port Central before the experimental vaccine is all gone, she might still die. However, medical facilities will be available.” She paused, thought a moment of the conversation with Lu Wai about the virus. “The most important thing to consider, direction‑wise, is that she must be under shelter when the vaccine runs out and the virus hits.”

  She pulled the FN‑17 from her pocket, tipped the softgels carefully into her palm, and counted them one by one back into the vial. “Assuming the incubation period is thirty days, and reckoning in a safety factor, estimated onset of the virus is approximately four moons from now. If, therefore, she attempts to escape, she should head for the nearest shelter, wherever that may be.”

  It was too dark to look at her map, but she had examined it many times before. It did not help much. She had tried to estimate the distance covered on horseback from the ringstones to the Echraidhe camp, but she had spent much of that journey upside down over a saddle and without access to her compass. The camp could lie anywhere within a circle whose radius might be seventy or more miles. Using a discarded leather thong, carefully marked to her map scale, she had measured possibilities. From everywhere but the most southwesterly segment of the circle, Ollfoss, or at least Moanwood, was closer than Holme Valley. Practically, then, it would make sense to head north and east, to Ollfoss. How far north, and how far east, depended on her exact position, which she did not know.

  “Second consideration: should she wait out the onset of the virus here, in the camp of the Echraidhe? Borri seems to be a competent healer. Weighed against this is the danger posed by the tribeswoman Uaithne.”

  Her legs were going numb. She closed her eyes, took the three deep breaths that triggered light meditation, and sent blood pumping around her veins, squeezing into the capillaries in her fingers and toes. Her legs began to warm. She shivered.