Ammonite

by Nicola Griffith

  Except perhaps Aoife. Aoife, who had carved her the palo and given her the knowledge she had needed to stay alive, but who had tried to keep her captive in a place where she would have died slowly of being less than human.

  Marghe had asked Thenike why the Echraidhe were so inflexible, so bound by tradition.

  “Because they are so few,” Thenike had said. “Because their sisters’ mothers are also their choose‑mothers’ sisters. They’re born too close. All their memories interlock and look down the same path to the same places. Each memory reflects another, repeats, reinforces, until the known becomes the only. For the Echraidhe, it’s not real if it can’t be seen elsewhere, in their mother’s memory, or their mother’s mother. For them, perhaps, there is no such thing as the unknown.” Thenike shook her head. “It’s a danger to all who are able to deepsearch into their memories well, or often.”

  “Viajeras.”

  “And those who might have become viajeras,” Thenike agreed. She seemed focused somewhere deep inside. “You can see so much of the world through others’ memories, places you’ve never been, faces you’ve never seen and never will, weather you’ve never felt and food you’ve never tasted, that sometimes it’s hard not to want to just feel, taste, see those familiar things over and over. Truly new things become alien, other, not to be trusted. There are those who know their village so well, through the eyes and hearts of so many before them, that they can’t leave it to go somewhere else, they can’t bear to place their feet on a path they have never trodden, on soil they have never planted with a thousand seeds in some past life as lover or child. Some become unable to leave their lodge or tent, or can’t sail past the sight of familiar cliffs. Many who can deepsearch powerfully enough to be a viajera end like this.”

  “And you?”

  Here Thenike had smiled, though Marghe saw memories of bitter times written on her face. “I’m fortunate enough to have the memories of a thousand different foremothers, some clear, some not. Fortunate, too, to become bored with the past and eager to sail over the horizon or walk over the crest of the hill and see what’s on the other side.”

  Strike the gong, it was just after midday. Marghe shivered, cold after sitting all morning.

  The results of the virus, the abilities it conferred, could send a person mad. Uaithne had been proof enough of that. How would it affect her? Would she be able to see into her past, the past of her mother, her aunts? Her father? No one at Port Central had mentioned any of this to her, no strange memory effects… but how many had tried? It was not a thing that just happened. It involved ritual and discipline. Perhaps, though, it involved more than that. Perhaps the virus had to be part of the cells from birth, even before birth.

  Strike the gong.

  Early afternoon. Marghe saw a tiny figure walking out of the gathering dark and across the snow toward her. She could not spare the figure her whole attention; part of her body was always listening, attuned to Jeep. Waiting. The figure grew, stepping carefully. Carrying something. Food. Gerrel put down the covered tray an arm’s length from Marghe’s feet and withdrew without speaking. It struck Marghe, then, just how much she knew about Gerrel: not only her name, her house, soestre and antecedents, but what foods made her wrinkle her upper lip in distaste, what stories she liked to be told when it was cold and gloomy outside, what made her laugh or blush. That knowledge told her a great deal about herself, about her attitudes to this place: these people were becoming real to her.

  She could live here, for a while.

  Marghe ate, listened, struck the gong. Listened and felt and struck the gong. It grew dark. The stars came out, and the moons, but the clouds reduced them to shimmery blurs. The blurs sank down into the horizon, faded. The smell of the forest changed, grew wilder, darker; Marghe thought she heard something large prowling along its edge.

  Gerrel brought her breakfast before dawn. She did not eat it. The world seemed very wide and thin.

  When the sun came up, Marghe waited, struck the gong one more time, then stilled its vibration with her fingertips and laid the padded stick along the top. She stood, swaying a little, then bent and took the half goura from the bowl on the untouched tray. The trees seemed to call her. Listen, they said to her, we ring to the same beat as you, to the same beat as the virus, the same beat of the world. This might be the place to stay and finally learn what it meant to have a family and friends. She wandered off into the forest; she did not want to see anyone just yet.

  When Marghe came out of the trees, she walked through the gardens and up the path that led through Ollfoss to Thenike’s door. She lifted her hand to knock and realized she was still holding the half‑eaten fruit. She knocked with her other hand. No one answered. She knocked again.

  Thenike came to the door. Her eyes sharpened when she saw Marghe.

  Marghe spoke without preamble. “I want to stay here, at Ollfoss. There are things I have to learn. Help me.”

  Chapter Eleven

  IF YOU WANT to stay, you need to talk to Leifin,” Thenike had said that morning. “She found you and brought you here. If she didn’t have a good reason for it at the time, then she does now, though I couldn’t begin to guess what. She always has a reason for everything, a plan, an explanation.” She paused to rake out the ashes and blow the embers to a glow.“She found you; in that sense, she’s responsible for you and will have a large say in what happens next.”

  “Do you like her?”

  “Huellis said to me once that she thought Leifin spent too much of her time thinking and not enough feeling.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “No. But it’s an answer you’ll have to wait for until you’ve made up your own mind. Go see her. Talk to her. Tell her you want to stay. See what she has to say.”

  Marghe suddenly felt reluctant to talk to Leifin. “There’s no other way?”

  “Of course there are other ways.” Thenike sounded irritable. “Nothing will get decided without the whole family’s approval, and yours. But it’ll help you to know Leifin’s reason, or reasons. She’s the right place to start.”

  Leifin was sitting on a stool by the south hearth in the great room, carefully shaving layers from a small block of wood on her lap. Stone and olla tools lay in a neat row on a worn strip of leather; shavings curled in a heap at her feet. Marghe could smell the new wood from the doorway. The infant soestre, Otter and Moss, were lying on a beautiful fur rug near the fire; one–Marghe could not tell them apart–was awake, with her fist in her mouth. The great room was long and slope‑ceilinged. It took up the whole of the west side of the house and was the only room Marghe had seen so far in Ollfoss that had a vertical window. In proportion to the room, the window was small, but it was glazed–thick, wavy olla glass stained with hints of cream and rose. The floor was polished wood, like the heavy furniture, and there was a hearth at both ends.

  The room was full of beauty: wall carvings, tapestries, furs–on the floor and the walls–intricately patterned doorframes, and gorgeous wooden candlestick holders. But the centerpiece of the whole room was a huge sculpture, low on the floor–the torso and arms of a woman swimming, arching her back as she reached as far as sinew and bone would permit for her next backstroke.

  When Marghe stepped into the room and closed the door behind her, Leifin looked up briefly, nodded, then returned her attention to her carving. The expression on her face was the same one Marghe had seen when she had first stepped out of the trees just behind the goth: intent, focused. A hunter’s look.

  Marghe went to the fire and sat down next to the sleeping baby, content to wait. Eventually, Leifin put down the knife she had been using and selected a chisel.

  “Is that your work?” Marghe asked, gesturing at the floor sculpture.

  “Yes.”

  She stroked the fur she sat on. “And this?”

  “No, that’s an old one. Some of these others are mine.” She pointed her chisel at a magnificent blue‑gray fur hanging over the back of a ben
ch. “I did that one before I chose my name.” She waited to see if Marghe would ask anything else, then went back to her work. If she was curious about Marghe’s reason for staying there, she did not show it.

  The chisel was sharp and Leifin worked deftly, skimming the blade again and again down one side of the block. Rich golden brown slices fell at her feet, and gradually Marghe saw a curve developing in the wood. Sawdust clung to the dark hairs of Leifin’s forearm.

  After a while, Leifin paused, put down her chisel, lifted the block of wood, and turned it this way and that in the light. Marghe wondered if Leifin studied a dead animal that way, too, before cutting for the hide.

  Leifin looked up and misinterpreted the question on Marghe’s face. “I’m tracing the grain, trying to follow it with my tools to bring out the best in both the wood and the sculpture. To give it strength.”

  She found what she wanted and went back to work, lifting one tool after another, always replacing them in the right place on her leather roll. She worked methodically, patiently, like a trapper noting the strengths and hunting out the weakness of her prey. The pile of shavings grew.

  The baby who was not asleep took her fist out of her mouth and began to cry, waking up the other, who joined her.

  “They’re hungry.” Lerfin carefully put the curving piece of wood next to her tools and brushed the worst of the sawdust from her arms. She scooped up the one who was screaming the loudest and jiggled her on her knee while she unlaced her leather‑and‑fur tunic. “There, little one.” The baby sucked lustily. “Rock Moss, would you?”

  Marghe picked up the infant gingerly, remembering to support her head. “How old are they?”

  ”They were born just after the harvest.”

  Four moons ago, or three and a half months. “They’re lucky. To have a family.”

  Leifin nodded, waiting.

  “You helped me. The family’s caring for me. I like it here.” Marghe hesitated. “I want to stay.”

  “Go on.”

  “That’s it. I want to stay, here, at Ollfoss.”

  “With this family?”

  “Yes,” Marghe said, surprised. Who else would she stay with?

  “Why?”

  “You’re the ones who have helped me. And I’m beginning to know some of you: Thenike, and Gerrel, Kenisi… I’ve hardly met anyone from the other families. Not yet.”

  “And you don’ want to wait until you’re well enough to get to know the others first?”

  “No.”

  Leifin was looking at her with that intent, hunter’s look. “Good. Then I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t. Soon.” She smiled and held out her hand. It was warm and firm; it should have felt friendly, but it did not. Leifin, Marghe thought, had an agenda of her own.

  On the second day of the Moon of Cracking Frost, the family of Leifin and Thenike, Gerrel, Hilt, Kenisi, Kenisi’s partner, Wenn, and Huellis and the infant soestre Otter and Moss met to discuss Marghe’s petition to join them.

  The day outside was dull and gray, and the light that struggled through the milky glass of the single unshuttered window did not do much to thin the fire shadows that danced over the women sitting around the hearth on their rugs. A pot of dap simmered by the fireside. Even though fire was burning at both ends of the room, Marghe was cold. She huddled between Gerrel and Thenike, her allies, pulled her furs closer, and listened.

  “You taught me,” Gerrel said to Wenn, “and you, Kenisi, and you yourself, Leifin, you all taught me that actions lead to responsibility. Leifin found Marghe, saved her life. Marghe allowed her life to be saved. These two are, now, responsible to each other. How else could it be?”

  Marghe slid her hand into her pocket in an automatic search for reassurance, and for the second time that day was shocked to find the pocket empty. The vial of FN‑17 was still in the guest room, where she had laid it aside. She breathed deep, in and out, keeping her anxiety down. She was safe, safe. This was Ollfoss; these women were not Echraidhe. No one was going to pull a knife or hit her for no reason.

  “Perhaps we can fulfill our responsibility another way,” Huellis ventured.

  Kenisi sighed. “Marghe, Leifin brought you here. We acknowledge the responsibility to feed and shelter you until you are well enough to leave. Is this not enough?”

  “I ask to join your family.”

  “You haven’t been here long. Will it not wait?”

  “No.” She had tried to explain, earlier, tried to tell them all how much she needed to belong, belong now, before the virus crept in and started to lever her away from life. Thenike, she knew, understood, and Gerrel would be happy to have a new sister. Leifin was on her side for reasons she neither understood nor trusted, but the others… They understood her danger, but not her fears.

  The next question was inevitable.

  Attention shifted around the circle, came to rest on Wenn. The old woman was blunt. “Why should we give you a place with us, a place in our hearts, when in two moons from now you could be dead?”

  Because I’m afraid, she wanted to say. Afraid that she had used up all her self‑reliance surviving Tehuantepec, afraid that there was nothing left inside her but empty space. To face the virus, she needed to be able to put down one taproot, to be able to say, There, it would matter to these people if I died. She needed to know she belonged somewhere, that the virus would not simply sweep her up in a vast, dark undertow and carry her away forever, with no one to remember, no one to mourn. She needed and was afraid of needing, because if she was refused now, she might never get the chance to try again.

  She sat helplessly, not knowing how to say any of it.

  “We should admit Marghe formally into our family because she is already in our hearts.” All eyes turned to Leifin. “Already, Gerrel feels as though she has a sister to replace the soestre she lost–” Marghe looked at Gerrel; she had not known that. Gerrel managed to grin and blush at the same time, “–and Thenike has someone to focus her teaching to stop her fretting while she’s trapped here for the winter.”

  Thenike smiled faintly, but Marghe already knew her well enough to see that it was not a particularly friendly smile.

  “There’s nothing to stop Marghe staying with us for the winter, earning her keep until she wants to leave in spring,” Wenn said irritably. “Longer, if necessary. And if she wants to ask again to join us in a year or two, then maybe we’d be more inclined to say yes.”

  “I didn’t have to earn my keep first, nor Thenike,” Hilt said quietly.

  “That was different. We knew your family.”

  “No, you didn’t.” Thenike’s voice was soft.

  “Well, we knew where to find them, anyway. What do we know about Marghe?”

  Being talked about in the third person reminded Marghe of the Echraidhe Levarch assigning her to Aoife like so much baggage. She felt something hot and brittle move under her ribs, but did not know if it was anger or desperation.

  She stood up. They looked at her. She felt horribly vulnerable. These women could accept her or reject her, and there was no professional facade to hide behind, no separate place to which she could retire and remain aloof. She looked at Thenike, who smiled, very slightly, and Gerrel, who was frowning. She cared for these people. Two of them, anyway.

  Her voice shook. “I accept that my need does not equate to yours, but I ask nonetheless that I be taken in as one of your kith. I have nothing in the way of possessions, but I have my knowledge, which is varied, my limbs, which are strong and willing, and my heart, which is true. Will you take me?”

  “I’ll accept you,” Thenike said immediately.

  “And I.” Hilt.

  “Me, too.” Gerrel.

  But Wenn was shaking her head. “We don’t even know where you come from, Marghe, who your people are, nothing.”

  “But we do.” Leifin again, sounding calm. “At least, we know she has powerful friends who have trata with Cassil in Holme Valley. These women won’t stay where they are forever; ther
e’s not enough land there at their Port Central for them to grow food. When they move, we need to know what they might do, where they might go. Who they might trade with. If Marghe becomes a part of our family, then it’s ustrata families will come to in Ollfoss; they’ll know we have the ear of a powerful new kindred from the south. Think about it.”

  Wenn looked thoughtful.

  Marghe looked at Huellis, who was nursing Moss. Now she had an idea how the poor woman had felt: like a pawn in the greater game of trata. She remembered what Thenike had said– She seems happy enough with it now–and almost did not say anything. But she wanted to be accepted for herself, not for something she might not be able to provide. “I can’t negotiate trata with you on behalf of the women in Port Central. Asking to join you means I to no longer part of their… family.”

  She sat down. Wenn’s thoughtful expression had not changed.

  “Perhaps not,” Wenn said, “but we could learn a great deal from you.”

  “And you’re strong and healthy. Or you will be; you heal fast enough,” Kenisi added.

  Leifin’s words had done their work. Marghe looked at Gerrel, at Thenike and Thenike’s blood sister Hilt. At least they would be accepting her for the right reasons. Maybe Leifin liked her, as well as seeing her as a way for their family to spread its trata tentacles; and Wenn and the others did not exactly dislike her, they were just wary. She would have a family, of sorts. Perhaps love would come later.

  Wenn was nodding now. “Yes, yes, this might work. I don’t see any reason why not. Huellis? Kenisi?” They both nodded. “Very well, then.”

  One of Wenn’s knees cracked as she stood up. She held out her arms to Marghe, who scrambled to her feet. “Welcome, Marghe, daughter of…?”

  “Acquila. And John,” she added, “my father.” They did not understand the word; there was no word for father in the Ollfoss dialect. She did not want to use the approximation sire, it did not mean the same thing at all.

  “Daughter of Acquila and John, sister to…?”