“I have no sisters.”
”You do now,” Gerrel said, and leaned forward to lay a warm hand on her foot.
“Welcome, Marghe daughter of Acquila and John, to our hearth and home, to your sisters Gerrel and Thenike and Hilt”–they stood up, one by one, and surrounded her and Wenn–“and Leifin and Huellis, Moss and Otter, and Kenisi.” She stretched out one gnarled hand and helped her partner stand. “And myself, Wenn.”
“Thank you,” was all Marghe could think to say.
“We will feed you, and clothe you, share everything that’s ours with you, without reservation, without condition. You in your turn must do the same. Will you do that?”
Marghe looked at Gerrel’s eager face, knew that behind her Thenike would be smiling. Family. Yes.
They ate together. Gerrel was full of herself, and Hilt told a story of her last voyage, but Marghe was too shy to say much. She huddled next to Thenike, who seemed to understand her need for quiet. She felt tired, and a little ill.
They were talking about her again. Gerrel leaned over and tugged her sleeve. “You’re not a guest anymore,” she said, “which means you can’t really use the guest room. You’ll have to share. Do you want to share with me?”
Gerrel was pleasant to be with, for a little while, but Marghe simply did not have the energy to deal with her all the time. She tried to frame an answer.
Kenisi saved her the trouble. “Gerrel, Marghe’s not healed yet. She’ll need the peace and quiet of the guest room awhile longer.”
“But she could decide now whether or not she–”
“Gerrel, the poor woman’s almost falling on the floor with fatigue.”
“But–”
“Later.”
Thenike touched Marghe’s shoulders. “I’ll help you back to bed.”
Now that Marghe felt safe, or at least safer than she had felt before, she started to question Thenike in earnest: How had Ollfoss come to be? How long had it been settled? What about population fluctuations?
“There’s a map in Rathell’s house you might want to see.”
Rathell and her family lived in one of the bigger houses in the west of Ollfoss. Rathell herself showed them into the great room. “There it is. When you’ve seen all you want to see, come and find me. I’ll probably be in the kitchen. We’ll share a pot of dap.”
The map hanging on the western wall was huge, perhaps four meters wide and three deep, and old. The paper was stiff, and close up Marghe could see where sections had been glued together. The inks, here and there brilliant blue or gold, were mostly faded to the color of old blood, brown on brown. From what Marghe could remember of the precise computer representations of the planet she had called up aboard Estrade, the map looked surprisingly accurate. It was crammed with tiny representations of villages, herd grounds, rivers, caves, and dangerous currents.
Significantly, each picture was labeled in tight, careful script. It was English, the variety that had been spoken three or four hundred years ago.
“You can read this?”
Thenike shrugged. “Where the writing is clear, yes. Look, here.” She pointed to a picture, a waterfall just inside the southern edge of the forest. “Ollfoss.”
“Can everybody read this?”
“Most people here, perhaps, yes. Not everyone wants to learn.”
“You did. Why?”
The viajera smiled. “I like to learn everything. How to sing olla, how to dye cloth, how to throw pots and chip stone. How to hum to a herd bird and skin a taar. Everything.”
“So you didn’t learn to readjust so that you could understand this map, so that you had accurate directions?”
“No. All I have to do is ask.”
“What if you forget?”
Thenike’s eyes were very soft, light brown. They reflected the sepias and dark ivory of the map. “Viajeras don’t forget.”
Marghe thought back to Thenike telling her We rememberand wondered if, somehow, the virus conferred extraordinary memory on those who called themselves viajeras. Thenike was watching her. “Are there other writings?” Marghe asked her. Maybe there would be some kind of ship’s record, something that would say where these people had come from, and when. How it had been for them.
“Some. Not many. Paper doesn’t last as well as message stones or knots. Or as long as memory.”
“Are there any records from the beginning? From when your ancestors first came here?”
“What is it that you wish to know?”
“Many things.” Thenike was offering to tell her, from her memory, from the oral tradition. “But I want to also see the records. The records themselves are important to me, as important as the account they may contain. Are there any?”
“Rathell keeps many old things in here, handed down from mother to daughter. She showed me, once…” Thenike moved over to a wooden chest, old enough to have had its corners rounded by time and polishing. “I don’t think she’ll mind.” Inside were several bundles wrapped in cloth. Thenike opened one: it held a broken pot. She rewrapped it, unfolded another. “Is this what you’re looking for?”
Disks. But big ones, as big as her palm, cheerful with refracted color. They were like nothing she had ever seen before, except in old records. Useless. There was no way she could read these. Unless… Perhaps Letitia Dogias could do something with them, if their notoriously fragile information storage had not been long since destroyed. Disks. What a wealth of information there might be here. “Wrap them, put them back. I can’t read them. Perhaps, in time, someone who can will come and take a look.”
Thenike wrapped them carefully and laid them back in the chest. Marghe tried to set aside her disappointment and wandered back over to the map. South of Ollfoss there was a picture of standing stones. Anxiety hit her like a fist in her stomach. She breathed in and out. She was with family now. She looked at the map again. There were two or three communities near where she imagined Port Central to be. She pointed. “I didn’t know these were here.”
“They’re not. Burnstone moved them on a long, long time ago. They’re here now, at Three Trees and Cruath.” She pointed with a long brown finger. Her nail was glossy pink, and a long‑ish scar ran from the thumb joint over the back of her hand.
Thenike seemed to be enjoying her interest, so Marghe examined the map more closely. She thought she could still detect a faint hint of blue in the picture of the waterfall at Ollfoss. Waterfall, foss. Ollfoss. “I haven’t seen the foss,” she said.
“It’s no longer here. Or, rather, we are no longer there. The soil was poor. When you’re well, I’ll show you the old valley and foss.”
And the way Thenike said it, something in the way she tilted her head and accented whento leave no possibility of if, Marghe knew that the viajera meant not only after you have recovered from walking out of Tehuantepecbut after you have been sick with the virus, and have lived. Thenike had said more than once that she, Marghe, must save all her energy, hoard it until the time came to face the virus.
Thenike, she had discovered, was as much of a healer as Kenisi: “All viajeras are healers,” she had told Marghe, “to some extent or other.” She had not explained further.
Marghe hobbled, then limped, along the paths that ran between the gardens of Ollfoss where women from different families worked, sweeping the dirt free of snow, breaking in the ground with hand hoes–preparing the huge communal plots for the snarly nitta and goura shoots, the squat soca bushes that were harvested and traded every summer in North Haven. She waved at those she recognized. Sometimes she helped Gerrel and Kenisi carry their family’s share of bread and soup to the kitchens in Ette’s house where the women would gather for lunch.
The weather improved, as did Marghe. Gerrel, seeing the improvement in both, took it upon herself to show Marghe the small family garden and teach her what needed to be done.
The sky was blue and clear, and an end‑of‑winter wind gusted from the treeline, filling her hair with the smell of snow and green.
Marghe moved her tatty mat of what had once been taar skin a few feet along the furrow and knelt, glad to get the weight off her feet. Her sharp stone hand hoe cut easily into the first few inches, but she had to work to dig deeper. The hoe slipped; she added her three‑fingered left hand to her right, bunched her muscles, and pushed.
The pressure made the scar tissue on her left hand ache. She shook her hand. Such little things, fingers; she wondered if she would ever stop missing them, mourning them. At least she had her feet. And her life. She was still here to enjoy the cold, wet roughness of fresh‑turned dirt and the sharp wind on her face. She would not dwell on her scars. She would not.
She dug into the loosened dirt with her right hand, plucked out small stones and tossed them aside, pulled up weeds. She was alive. Alive. She paused and felt carefully around the bulbs that were just beginning to root, found another stone. She yanked up a clump of creeping lichen and shook it vigorously, freeing the dirt from the roots. The lichen had to be gotten rid of, but the soil was rich, and had to be kept.
“Are you trying to kill it?” Thenike grinned down at her. The viajera was holding a steaming mug. “This is for you.”
Marghe gave the handful of greenery one more shake, then threw it onto the pile that would be kept for compost. She took the offered mug, sniffed. More of the foul brew Thenike cooked up for her every day; it would remove the poisons in her body put there by the vaccine, she said. The viajera had broken one of the softgels open into her hand and touched the oily pink mess delicately with her tongue. Marghe wondered how she had been able to tell about the cumulative toxic effect of the adjuvants just from that test, but had not doubted that she could, and was glad to find someone who thought she could help her body get rid of them. She set the brew aside in the snow to cool and went back to her hoeing.
“What’s this?” Thenike asked, gesturing at the newly broken ground.
“Right now, a mess,” Marghe said, “but if I get rid of all these weeds, by midsummer it should be a patch of cetrar.”
Thenike knelt beside her and watched. Marghe dug up a bulb by mistake.
Thenike picked it up, weighing it in her hand. “Such small roots.”
They did look too flimsy–lacy, almost–to do the job. “The purple bits, growing out of the top, here”–Marghe pointed with a dirt‑rimed fingernail–“will be the stalk, and these tiny buds will be the sprouts.”
Thenike looked at it carefully. The buds were the size of aphid eggs, almost invisible. “It’s hard to believe that a lumpy vegetable comes from such a delicate‑looking thing.” She pushed it back into the dirt.
Marghe dug it back up again. “How long is it since you planted something?”
“Along time.”
“Too long. Cetrar needs loose dirt. Like this.” She dug a hole, dropped the bulb in, pushed dirt back on top with her hand, gave it a quick pat.
“You’ve learned a lot.”
Marghe sat up and lifted her face to the weak sun. “I have, haven’t I?” After a moment she started digging again, but with her hands. She enjoyed the feel of soil between her fingers. Thenike watched. Marghe looked up. “If you want to help me, you could start on those weeds.”
They worked together quietly for a while.
All through the Moon of Cracking Frost, Thenike gardened with her, bathed with her, sat next to her when the family ate, and listened. Marghe sometimes rambled, reliving happy memories, but often she had questions for Thenike.
They were in the kitchen, washing a basket of freshly dug tubers for Kenisi in the huge stone sink, when Marghe asked Thenike when she had first known she was going to be a viajera.
Thenike paused, tuber in one hand, brush in the other. “As soon as I could crawl, I wanted to follow strange paths and talk to different people. Drove my family mad; I was always wandering off. By the time I was seven or eight, my choose‑mother had to take me along with her and Hilt, who was old enough to crew by then, whenever they took out the trading ship from North Haven because none of my sisters or mothers would watch me. Too much trouble.” She resumed scrubbing. “Whenever we came into a new place, I waylaid strangers and dragged their stories and songs and jokes from them before they even had a chance to find out my name. Then when we were sailing back to North Haven I drove everyone to distraction by repeating the songs and the stories until my mother threatened to unship the dinghy and tow me home behind them. She did that once, when I was nine.” Thenike smiled. “It didn’t make much difference.”
“So who taught you how to be a viajera?”
“Everyone I met. My blood mother taught me to drum. I learned the pipes from a sailor, Jolesset, and a woman called Zabett showed me how to judge when to charge a lot, and when to charge a little. Supply and demand, she called it.”
“How old were you?”
“I picked everything up in bits and pieces. When I was fourteen, two years after my deepsearch, I left home on my own for the first time. I was only gone ten days. After that, I went more often, and stayed away longer, until when I was seventeen, my mother moved back from North Haven to Pebble Fleet. I’d been born in North Haven, didn’t think of Pebble Fleet as my home. So after that, I wandered.”
“And you just go anywhere, whenever you want.”
“No, not really. I’ve been a lot of places, but for now I seem to have settled on an area I travel regularly: North Haven, Sliprock, Three Trees, Cruath. Ollfoss, of course, though I don’t get to stay here as often as I’d like. And sometimes I get as far south as Holme Valley, to see T’orre Na and the herders on the grasslands around there. I traveled with T’orre Na for a while, a few years ago.”
“I’ve heard of T’orre Na.” Marghe counted the tubers. “I think we’ve got enough here for today. Put the rest in the cellar.” They started cutting the clean tubers into thick slices. “So tell me how you came to be part of Wenn’s family.”
“Ollfoss was the first place I came to on my own. Wenn was younger then. When I walked out of the forest, she was struggling with an old tree stump on her land. I helped her drag it out. She invited me to share supper with the family. I did. Told them stories and what news there was. I came back many times, often just for the good food. They began to feel like family. Sometimes I brought Hilt. And then when our mother left for Pebble Fleet, it just seemed natural to choose this place as home.” She sighed, and pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes with her forearm. “I should spend more time here. But Wenn understands. I get… restless.”
“Tell me about the others. Tell me about Leifin.”
“You don’t like her, do you?”
“It’s more that I don’t quite trust her. Maybe I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for her, but there’s something about her that’s just too calculated for me. And I don’t understand her. I mean, how could someone who can see a beautiful shape in a piece of wood and spend hours lovingly carving it, polishing it, how can that same person then go off and slaughter animals just for their furs? Why can’t she see the beauty in the living animal?”
“I think it’s that she sees the world differently. For Leifin, a thing is beautiful if she can reach out and put her hand on it any time.”
“If she owns it.”
“Yes.”
By manipulating the family into accepting Marghe, Leifin expected to gain materially from trata: more wealth buys more things. Marghe did not want to think about Leifin any more.
“So tell me about Gerrel. She used to have a soestre.”
“She had two, twins, who died along with their mother, Gerrel’s blood mother’s lover, when they came too early. We took Gerrel because Kristen couldn’t bear to look at her daughter.”
Sometimes it would be Thenike who asked the questions, and they would talk until the moons were up. More than once, they wrapped up in furs and cloaks and walked through the garden in the moonlight, still talking. Sometimes they just walked in silence, and Marghe thought she could hear Thenike’s heart.
The first time she saw The
nike with the drums was one night in the family great room, after eating. It had been a good meal, and most of the family were still picking their teeth when Leifin announced she was going on a hunt in a few days.
Marghe went very still. “What will you hunt?”
“Oh, queen daggerhorn, wild taars. Whatever’s there.”
“Not goth?”
Leifin laughed. “Goth? They only walk through old stories. Not in Moanwood.” She turned to the rest of the family. “Have any of you ever seen a goth?”
“I have,” Marghe said steadily. “And you were hunting it.”
“And when was that?”
“When you found me. At the edge of the forest.”
Leifin smiled. “Marghe, you were more than half delirious. You were crawling, crawling mind, in circles. Your eyes were sunken, more than half gummed together with the same blood and mucus that slimed your furs.” She laughed, looked at the rest of the family, drawing them in. Gerrel, Marghe was pleased to note, scowled. Thenike was expressionless. The others smiled. “You drew a knife on me, do you remember, Marghe? Thought I was an Echraidhe. Now, if you could think that one Ollfoss woman on foot was a mounted savage, you could have mistaken a tree for a goth, or a chia bird for a… dragon.”
“It was a goth.”
“If you say so. Though, even supposing for just a moment that you’re right, what’s wrong with that?”
Leifin must know as well as she did what was wrong with hunting goth, Marghe thought, but Gerrel spoke before she could frame an answer.
“You hunt too much!” she burst out. “And we don’t need any more meat. We’ve plenty of furs. I think you just–”
“There’re never enough furs for trade up in North Haven,” Leifin contradicted gently.
“But…” Gerrel trailed off in frustration. Marghe sympathized. Leifin made it all sound so reasonable.
Thenike stretched and looked up and down the table. “I think tonight would be a good time for a song.”
“Sing the one about how the rivers first decided to run to the sea,” Gerrel said instantly.
“I’ve a mind to sing something special,” Thenike said, and looked at Marghe with an indecipherable expression. “I'll need my drums.” Her skirts swirled as she stood, and Marghe caught the warm, musky smell of her skin mixed with the sharper, sweeter scent of the herb sachets Kenisi made for the family to lay in with their clothes. The door closed quietly behind her.
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