Thenike reached out and touched her hand. “I’ve watched you the last few days, winding up tighter and tighter, like a bow. Talk to me, and perhaps we can sort something out that does not rely upon cutting your beautiful hair.”
“I feel… trapped. No, that’s not the right word. It’s just that this place, Ollfoss, is so small. I see the same people, who talk about the same things. And every day I go into the garden, and I pull up the weeds from a different patch. And then I eat the same food. It’s… I want to know what’s happening in other places. Has my message got to Danner yet, and what does she think? How will Sara Hiam feel about me not testing the vaccine to the limit? And there’s so much I want to know. Here I am, stuck up here in the north–” She broke off, remembering that this was Thenike’s home. And yours.
Thenike merely gestured for her to go on.
“I’m here, in this small place, when there’s a whole world to see! The deserts and mountains, the swamplands and canyons. And the seas. Talking to you, before, while I was recovering from frostbite and exposure, before I got the virus, you made me realize who I really am, what it is that I like: new places, new people, discovering both, and how they influence each other. And since I realized that, all I’ve done is stay here, in one place. I need to be out there”–she waved her arm–“seeing a different horizon. I want to see old Ollfoss. The place where everything began, where all these different societies started. You’ve no idea how exciting that would be for me. To actually see the one place from which all this spread! I know, I know, there’s nothing there, probably, but I just want to seeit. It’s history.” She wanted to go, taste the air, touch the dirt, imagine how it had felt for those people.
“And I haven’t even seen the forest. Not really. And soon I won’t be able to get out and about. I’ll be stuck here.”
Thenike was quiet awhile, seemingly absorbed in watching her hands slide through the water under the suds. Marghe wondered what she was thinking.
“Your message,” she said at last, “should be in Danner’s hands by now. How she feels, what she’s doing, how your other friends are, that I can’t tell you.” She looked up from the water. Marghe saw herself reflected in the dark brown eyes. “But I can help a little with the rest. How you feel sounds familiar. It’s spring, the season for wandering, for adventure. For love and danger and new things. Probably everyone here in Ollfoss feels it. But you feel it more keenly, because you’re becoming a viajera. I feel it, too. That’s why we areviajera. Journeywomen. We travel because it’s in our blood: to see new things, always. To find out why a thing is, but not always interested in the how.” She nodded. “Yes, I know how you feel. Perhaps it’s time for us to travel.”
To travel, to see new places, smell new air, see new skies…
But Thenike was not finished. “But you and I have a debt, to this family, to this place. Wenn and Leifin, and Gerrel and Huellis and Kenisi, took you in. You’ve yet to repay them. We’ll travel just a little, this summer, to North Haven, perhaps.”
“And old Ollfoss.”
“It’s on the way,” Thenike agreed. “We’ll go to old Ollfoss, and North Haven, then come back. We’ll bear our children here early next spring, and then we’ll see. By then you’ll have brought in one harvest, and be well on the way to another. You’ll have cooked and eaten and slept with the family for more than a year. You’ll belong. Then, when we leave, and come back now and again, they will welcome you not with grumbles, but with open arms and smiling faces, as they do me, because you’re part of them. Can you do this?”
Marghe looked at Thenike, at her planed face, the hollow by her collarbone where a soap bubble clung, the strand of brown‑black hair stuck to her forehead. “Yes,” she said, and cupped a hand over her belly, barely beginning to round. She already belonged.
The path through Moanwood was not too bad, even with their packs and heavy water bottles, until the second day, when Thenike stopped on the path–such as it was–and pointed east through the trees.
“Old Ollfoss is that way. Perhaps a day’s journey.”
The trees looked so thick that Marghe found it hard to imagine anyone had walked through them in a hundred years.
They took turns forcing a path. It was not like an earth forest; the trees seemed to grow in patches of the same species. Marghe saw what looked like broadened, rougher versions of the skelter tree, with precisely ordered branches and symmetrically placed blue‑black leaves. Beyond that, there were trees that looked to Marghe as though they were upside down: roots more spread, and thicker, than the branches that sprang from the crown of a trunk whose girth increased with its height. It reminded her of the baobab of Madagascar, but that had evolved in dry conditions. She picked her way over the treacherous root systems that threaded the forest floor like an enormous pit of maggots, forever frozen, and crunched through the dry mosslike growth that covered the roots and made them hard to see and even more dangerous. Perhaps the cold climate meant there was very little free moisture available.
After the shrieking wirrels and chia birds of Ollfoss, Marghe expected the noise under the canopy to be constant, but even to her enhanced hearing there was very little audible life under the trees.
“There’s always an abundance of life at the edges of places: where forest meets plain, where water meets land,” Thenike said. “Here, the animals are fewer, and more shy.” Marghe glanced around but saw nothing.
“There. On that tree. Halfway up the trunk.” Thenike pointed. “A whist.”
It was long, not much less than a meter, and shaped like one of the ropelike hangings that twined about the trees. Marghe could not tell which way up it should go.
“Touch it,” Thenike said, “if you can.”
It looked as though it might be slow‑moving. Marghe inched cautiously toward it, taking care to make as little noise as possible. When she was two strides away, she lifted her arm to reach out.
The whist disappeared.
Marghe touched the trunk uncertainly. Thenike pointed. At the top of the tree hung a new rope, vibrating slowly.
“When I was a child, I spent hours trying to touch a whist, wondering what they’d feel like under my fingers. I never caught one. Never. I don’t know anyone else who has, either. They move too fast.”
Marghe wondered what their prey was, that they had to move so quickly. Or their predator.
They walked on. Marghe, paying more attention now, spotted a strange, scuttling thing that raised its head above the mosslike undergrowth for a moment, flicked its tongue once, and disappeared back to its dry, crackling world. Everywhere there were berries, in greens and earthy reds and bluish black, but all had a milky quality, like neat’s‑foot once it was picked.
Toward dark, they stopped for a rest. “The moons will be almost full this evening,” Thenike said as Marghe handed her a handful of dried fruit. “Bright enough to keep walking, if you’ve the energy. Your choice: we could sleep in old Ollfoss tonight, if you like.”
They rested until the moons came up, then set off. After half an hour, the undergrowth began to thin, disappearing in patches here and there. Marghe could sense a breeze coming through the trees from somewhere ahead, and the sound of water, feint but definite.
The clearing, or what had been a clearing, was enormous. It was floored with dark green ting grass instead of the mosslike undergrowth, and the trees were few, scattered here and there. None looked very old. All seemed to have sprung up from the shells of ruined buildings. In the moonlight, the scene looked like an old woodcut washed with silver gilt.
“How long ago was this abandoned?” She fought the urge to whisper.
“Two hundred years ago. Perhaps more. Things grow slowly here.”
In the center of the clearing, the sound of rushing water was loud. Marghe turned her head this way and that, trying to pinpoint the direction. “Where is it?”
Thenike smiled. Her teeth and the whites of her eyes gleamed. In the moonlight, all in monochrome, she looked less like a
woman than a creature of polished wood, heartwood exposed for a century and honed by wind and rain to a stylized shape, a symbol. “This way, Amun.”
They walked through the clearing and past a thin stand of trees, toward the sound of water.
“Menalden Pool.”
It was sleek and black in the moonlight. At the western end, water fell endlessly from rock that looked slippery and metaled. Moonlight gave the spray a ghostly quality, and Marghe half expected a nymph to step out from under the sheet of water, singing, wringing her hair.
“This way.” Thenike led her around the foss, to the quiet, northern edge of the pool, where a single tree with outspread branches like an enormous candelabra dipped its roots into the gently lapping water. The journeywoman seemed to look around for something. “Here.” She sat down on a flat rock slightly behind the tree, and to one side, patted it for Marghe to join her, Marghe did, and gasped.
The tree in front of her was alive with light reflected from the water. Light ran like electricity along the underside of its black glossy branches; the tree flickered and shimmered, like a menorah made of fiber optics, a dendrite flashing with nerve impulses. Like lightning.
“I found it the first time I traveled to Ollfoss from North Haven. I was very young. I stayed up half the night, watching it, half dreaming. Every time I make this journey I stop here.”
Marghe nodded, still lost in wonder.
“I think of it as my tree, my levin tree. You’re the first person I’ve ever shown it to.”
Marghe wrapped her arms around Thenike. “You give me so much.”
”I have something else for you.” She reached inside her tunic and untied the belt pouch. “Here.”
It was a suke, with a bas‑relief carving on both sides: an ammonite.
“I drew it for Leifin. She carved it, I polished it and drilled the hole.” Marghe touched the silky raised carving. So much love. “Here’s a thong. For your waist or neck.”
Marghe threaded the braided leather through the hole.
“Do you want me to tie it?”
Marghe shook her head. “I’d like to just hold it awhile.”
They sat side by side, watching the water, listening to the soft thunder of the foss. Marghe held the suke more tightly than she would have clutched a diamond.
“The pool’s named after the menalden that used to live here.” Thenike leaned forward and traced an outline in the sand with her finger. “A menalden. They’re dappled, like forest shadow.”
It looked like an awkward‑legged deer, with a flat, rudderlike tail and splayed feet. Menalden. Dappled deer. From menald, seventeenth‑century dialect for “bitten,” or “discolored,” or “dappled.”
Marghe’s heart thumped. How did she know that? She had no idea how she knew it, but she did, and suddenly she knew why the women of this world used ancient Greek words and Zapotec words and phrases from Gaelic, languages dead for hundreds of years. The words just came, and they fitted. Whether that particular knowledge of the menalden had lain in her unconscious for years, after a cursory leaf through a dictionary, and then been pulled up by some incredible feat of memory made possible by me actions of the virus, she was not certain. That explanation seemed easier to believe than the only other one she could come up with: that this might be some kind of race memory stirred by the virus, a memory of someone who had lived long ago and used such a dialect.
Marghe looked at the levin tree, and leaned against the warmth of Thenike’s shoulder.
“What is it, Amu?”
“Just as I thought I was beginning to know this world and understand it, it throws more magic at me.”
“What’s life without magic? Turn your magic into a song, share it with others.”
“You know I can’t sing.”
“A story, then.”
They found a ruined house with most of its roof still intact. Thenike fell asleep straightaway, but Marghe lay awake, thinking of moonlight and magic, and how she could tell a story about what she had just seen so that others would feel what she had felt.
Thenike was already up and about when Marghe woke. Sunlight worked as well as moonlight on the water and the levin tree, she found, though it did not have the same eerie magic. She splashed her face with water from the pool, then leaned forward a little to admire her reflection and the look of the suke on its thong around her neck.
Thenike laughed. “You’ll fall in if you’re not careful.” She was carrying a freshly caught fish.
After breakfast, when they had damped the fire and rolled up their nightbags, Thenike showed Marghe what she had really come to see of old Ollfoss.
“This is all there is left.”
It was a huge valley, gouged out of the side of a hill, ending in a curiously shaped hump; not natural, because it did not follow the gradient, as a stream or glacier might have done. Gouged by human–or at least intelligent, Marghe amended–hands. And so big. It was carpeted with ting grass, and big, bell‑shaped blue flowers that nodded in the slight breeze and filled the air with the scent of spring mornings and sunshine.
“What are they?”
“Bemebells. Or bluebells. There’s a children’s song that tells how at dawn and dusk, fairies creep out from under the eaves of the wood and play upon the bemebells with drumsticks made from grass and the anthers of other flowers.”
Marghe contemplated the valley, with its raised hump at the far end, glad that Thenike had not shown her this in the moonlight; there was too much melancholy here.
There was only one thing this could be, only one thing that made immediate sense: this was the landing site of the ship that had brought the women and men of Jeep to this world for the first time. Marghe did not know enough about such things to determine whether or not it was a crash landing, but she thought not. Forced, perhaps, for who would want to land here in the north when there were more hospitable areas south?
How had it felt, she wondered, to land in such a strange place, where they could see nothing but walls of trees and a lid of cloud? It must have seemed that there was not enough room to breathe. And then, when they began to sicken, and it became clear that the men would not recover… They had been brave.
“What’s under the mound?”
“Nothing,” Thenike said. “What there might have been has been dug up and used and reused, long before today.”
Nothing. “You’re sure? Yo’ve dug there yourself?”
“In other times, yes.”
Marghe wondered if she would ever get used to the fact that her lover could talk about memories that belonged to women long dead and rely upon them, trust them as she would her own. She did not want to believe Thenike, not this time.
“But that heap, it must have been something.”
“Nothing but dirt rucked up like a lover’s skirt.”
Nothing but dirt. It seemed fitting, somehow.
Marghe sighed, and turned away. She had not expected anything useful, had just wanted to find something, some piece of broken ceramic or discarded plastic, something she could hold in her hand and imagine being whole and new. But she did not need artifacts; there were the people themselves– people like Thenike. They carried their history with them. As she herself did now.
They walked out of Ollfoss with their packs on their backs and their water flasks bobbing full at their belts, and Thenike sang the bemebell song for Marghe Amun. It was simple and rhythmic, with lots of repetition and places where children were supposed to clap their hands and slap their thighs and stamp their feet in time to the music. The two women sang, and clapped, and smiled at the echoes in the forest, and walked on through the trees toward North Haven.
On the day of their arrival, North Haven was humming with the simultaneous arrival of new ships and an unseasonable wind that blew cold and hard from the Ice Sea.
“Though now, during Lazy Moon, the ice will be mostly water,” Thenike said. “At least in the more southerly reaches.” Then she pointed out a ship with two masts, whose sails migh
t once have been blue‑green. “I think that might be the Nemora, out of Southmeet. We’ll find out soon enough.” She smiled but said no more, and Marghe decided that some old friend must be aboard.
Apart from its size, what struck Marghe about North Haven was its life: women on the stone wharfs, unloading fish and baskets of what looked like turtle shells, mending nets and splicing ropes, tossing buckets of water over piles of fish guts while fast cadaverous‑looking birds quarreled over the mess. It was noisy; women called greetings and shouted insults, water crashed against the stone wharfs and hissed up to the wattle quays farther down the coast, and baskets and ropes creaked as catches were hauled up from the decks. And everywhere there were children: some busy, some just playing an incomprehensible game of tag that involved running and hiding and getting underfoot, and much whooping and shrieking when someone was caught.
Some of the children recognized Thenike: did she have news? Would she sing? Could she spare a comb of krisbread, or a slice of goura? A tune on her pipe? Who was her confused‑looking friend?
Marghe felt bewildered by their rapacity and their hard, bright little voices, but Thenike just kept walking, answering questions as she went: yes, she had news, though how would they pay for it? She would sing, all in the proper time. There was no krisbread in her pack, no goura. No doubt she would play them a tune, if they came with their families, and if their families made it worth her while. Her companion was Marghe Amun, who was only confused because she was not used to such rudeness as displayed by the children of North Haven, and she was a fine player of drums and teller of stories who would, no doubt, not deign to display her talents for such rude daughters of herd birds!
Marghe watched Thenike as she laughed and shouted at the children, loving her. The children, being children, noticed.
“Haii! The journeywomen are in love!” one of the older ones called. “The journeywomen are in love!” the others chanted, pleased with themselves. “The journeywomen are in love!” Marghe felt her cheeks go red, but Thenike laughed and took her hand. “And we’d be in love with a good meal of something that hasn’t been in our packs for five days. Is the inn full?”
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