Ammonite

by Nicola Griffith

“So, I sat there by the pit and watched the goth die. They’re tough. It had no food and no water, but it took ten days to die. Ten days. After three or four days it started scrabbling around. It tried sucking the dirt at one point. Thirst drove it mad, I suppose. I wondered about helping it along a bit, killing it with my spear, but that would’ve put a hole in the pelt and put blood all over it. That would have been a waste. So I just watched. After a while, it seemed to give up. It just sat in a corner of the pit and sort of hooted to itself.” She stopped. “Perhaps it was singing. Anyway, it sounded terrible, so I threw things at it, nothing that would damage it, of course, soft stuff mostly.”

  Marghe could imagine. Perhaps the goth had been trying to taunt Leifin into killing it. But Leifin herself must have been more than half mad at this point. How many days had she gone without food?

  “It hooted on and on and on. I don’t mind telling you how relieved I was when it got too weak to make any noise. A day or so after it shut up, it lay down on the floor and didn’t move. By this time, of course, I was hungry myself. It would have been easy at this point to relax and go forage in the forest, but I waited.”

  Marghe imagined a gaunt and more‑than‑half‑crazy Leifin, obsessed with watching the goth starve to death.

  “Why not just go away a few days and come back when it was dead?” one of the other women asked.

  “You don’t understand. I wanted that pelt perfect. Perfect. If I hadn’t been there the whole time, who knows what or who might have come along and chewed on it when it was dead. No, I had to stay there, share its death.”

  Leifin shook her head, as if to clear it. “So, anyway, eventually it laid down and died. But I waited awhile, just to make sure. Then I lowered a noose down, and strangled it for a while. It’s always best to make sure. But it didn’t move. It was definitely dead. It took me a whole day to get it out of the pit.”

  Marghe did not want to hear how smart Leifin had been to get the enormous goth out of the pit by herself. Leifin made it all sound so reasonable. It was not reasonable. Leifin was obsessed by perfection and possessions. It was an obsession that prevented her from seeing any difference between carving something beautiful and killing another thinking, feeling being for its fur.

  “–and the skull is enormous.” Leifin held her hands about two feet apart. “I think I’ll lime it clean, carefully, then wax it. Beautiful. Someone will buy it. And the pelt… it took me two days’ careful cutting just to get it off. The starvation helped, of course. It was virtually hanging off already. I’m going to take my time curing it. It’s the most fabulous–”

  Marghe walked away. If only she had the same talent Thenike had; if only she could take Leifin’s own words, and turn them back on the hunter, make her seewhat she had done, make her feelit in heart and gut; show her what that goth had gone through just so Leifin could have a pelt to play with. But maybe she could. Maybe Thenike would teach her how to reach into another’s psyche with words and music and a powerful beat. Then she could change people like Leifin.

  But would it do any good?

  She stopped in midstride. Thenike had already sung for Leifin, had already made her see that killing goth was not the same as killing wirrels. There was something fundamentally twisted inside Leifin. Perhaps nothing, no one, could mend it. Except Leifin herself.

  Marghe thought about her mother, of the miners on Beaver, of Danner, of Aoife; of herself. People could not be made to change. It had taken her a long time to learn that. People had to want to change themselves.

  “The Nemora’s due back in port in four days,” Thenike said.

  “Vine’s ship?”

  “It’s been along the coast to Luast. It’s due back here to pick up some pelt and wool”–Marghe thought of the goth–“and continue on to High Beaches.”

  “Will they take us on board?”

  Thenike grinned. “Ships are pleased to have a viajera. Two is twice as good. Being at sea can be boring. We’ll tell them stories and sing them songs and they’ll take us wherever we want to go out of sheer gratitude.”

  Marghe smiled. Being a viajera was not all fun and free rides. “We’ll have to send messages to Danner, and Cassil.”

  “And High Beaches. We’ll need a guide across the countryside. If the rainfall’s been low, the Glass might not support Nid‑Nod’sdraft and we’ll need the use of one of their punts to get up the river.”

  The first day at sea, they kept in sight of land. Thenike was taking a nap–too hot out of the shade, she said–but Marghe stood on Nemora’sdeck, aft of the livestock pen, taking advantage of the cool sea breeze on her neck. The sun streamed down from a dark blue sky and shivered back from the surface of the water, bright enough to hurt her eyes. Thenike’s skiff bobbed behind them, secured firmly by two cables.

  All the sailors worked bare‑chested. Some wore breast straps; some, the younger ones whose hands were not yet callused enough to deal with coarse wet rope without damage, wore leather palm straps. Some wore caps to protect their hair from salt spray; some did not bother. Marghe watched them work to swing the mainsail and the small bowsail into the breeze, and wondered how it was to spend a life on the water.

  The shore was a greenish‑blue line of forest. That night, or the next day, they would swing out due east to find the safe channel through the Mouth of the Grave. Open sea for a while. Marghe did not look forward to the prospect. She was used to large vessels of alloy and plastic, equipped with satellite navigation, and Nemoraseemed too small, too frail.

  The ship was about seventy feet long; the rudder was fixed, in the stern, and the ship steered by means of a tiller, not a wheel. The top of the mainmast still had twigs attached to the wood; the yard was made of two small lengths of wood lashed together with rope. The deck was not solid, just planks resting on thwarts, easily removed for larger cargo. Some of them looked new, and smelled of raw, fresh lumber. The only cabin was a wicker‑walled enclosure in the bows, used mainly as a shade when the sun was fierce. At night, the crew slept on deck. One enormous rope ran from one end of the ship to the other over forked posts and disappeared around the stern and bows. Marghe touched it thoughtfully.

  “Big, isn’t it?” The accent was not one Marghe had heard before. Southern, perhaps. She turned to find a tall, broad‑shouldered woman standing beside her. “I’ve seen you with Thenike. You must be Marghe Amun. I’m Vine.”

  She did look a little like Roth: same height and cap, and clinking with clay disks. But her face was more leathery, and her eyes were hazel with white lines in the tan fanning out from the corners. She was not wearing a shirt. Marghe found it hard to keep her eyes off the terrible scars on her bare back: a web of ugly white and pink welts, like worms. “It is big, yes. I’ve been trying to figure out what it’s for.”

  “Stops the ship hogging.” Those eyes scanned the horizon, the deck, the sails, then back again. Marghe found it disconcerting. But the eyes came back to Marghe’s face long enough for Vine to see that Marghe did not understand. “Drooping at the ends,” she explained.

  “Drooping?” They used a rope to tie the ship together?

  The white lines around Vine’s eyes disappeared as her face wrinkled up in a smile. “Don’t worry. It’s something all ships do. Or would do if it wasn’t for the rope. That’s what it’s for. Keeps the bows pointing up nicely.”

  “That doesn’t sound too good.”

  “It’s the safest ship in the world,” Vine said with confidence. “Look, here.” She pointed over the side at the overlapping planks; Marghe looked, too. “Clinker‑built. I helped to choose the wood myself.” She straightened, scanned the ship again. Marghe was beginning to get used to it. “What do you know about wood? Not much? Well, the first thing about building a ship is getting the right timber. Depending what grain you use, how the wood is sawn, you can just about eliminate the effects of hogging. So for these lengths I chose wood that was quarter‑sawn, so it warps against the hogging.”

  Marghe nodded, understanding the
principle if not the details.

  “See this”–Vine pointed to the tiller, fixed to an enormous paddlelike rudder–“not many ships have these. They’re much better than those side‑rigged thing’s you’ll see a lot of around here. You can only dock on one side of the boat if the rudder isn’t in the stern. The Nemoracan dock anywhere. Steers better, too. Mind you, that’s partly because we’ve got the artemon. Foresail,” she explained, for Marghe’s benefit. They went over to the mainmast, picking their way past what seemed to Marghe a jumble of ropes, strung in no particular order. “See these side stays and shrouds?” She was talking about the thick ropes running from the top of the mast to the decking. “Lots of ships don’t have these. Only backstays. But these shrouds mean we can take sideways pressure on the mast, too. We can tack. We don’t always have to have the wind right behind us.”

  Marghe nodded. If Vine said so.

  “And when the wind gets too much,” Vine was saying, “we can furl the sail. No boom, you see.”

  The Nemorastill looked like something from the Bayeux tapestry, but maybe they would survive the Mouth of the Grave after all.

  Marghe and Vine stood in companionable silence for a while.

  “You found each other, then.” Thenike’s eyes were soft with sleep, and there were creases on her face. She was wearing a pair of short breeches and her hair was up inside a cap. “Hot out here.” She slid one arm around Marghe’s waist, the other around Vine’s.

  “It’ll get worse before it gets better.” Vine was scanning the horizon again, but Marghe noticed the sailor was leaning into Thenike’s arm. They were very comfortable with each other. Old, old friends. Here was a part of Thenike’s past; she wanted to know all of it.

  “How long have you two known each other?”

  “Long enough,” Vine said, without turning, but she smiled out at the horizon. “Hasn’t she told you how she got that scar on her thumb, yet?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, story for story, viajera. I’ll tell you how I met Thenike, here, if you tell me how she found you.”

  “Let’s find some shade if we’re going to talk all afternoon,” Thenike suggested.

  “I like the heat,” Marghe said.

  “Good, but sun and water can burn you faster than you think. We need shade.”

  Marghe wondered if the scars on Vine’s back burned more easily than the rest.

  “And something to occupy our hands,” added Vine. “We can work while we talk.”

  Soon they were seated in the shadow of the wicker wall, splicing rope. Marghe watched the other two; she did not have their skill and speed born of long practice, but after a while she was able to do a passable job.

  “It was fourteen summers ago,” Vine said, “and I came into South Meet after my first voyage to Eye of Ocean. The trading had gone well, and the island was a beautiful place, but the voyage was long and we’d hit some bad weather on the way back. We’d been on short rations for a while, and had had to work hard to get home, which made me bad‑tempered. I climbed up out of the ship’s boat and onto the wharf, and nearly tripped over a young woman with the thickest, blackest hair I’ve ever seen.”

  “Thenike,” Marghe guessed.

  “Thenike,” Vine agreed. “She was lying down in the sunshine on the grass that grows by the wharf, half asleep. Drums getting tight in the heat. Leading the life of leisure, I thought. I was young–”

  “And foolish,” Thenike said with a smile. “The two generally go together.”

  “I was young,” Vine said, ignoring the interruption, “and not as knowledgeable as I am now, and it seemed to me all of a sudden that viajeras never had to do much for themselves. Always eating other people’s food and getting free rides. Just for telling stories. And here was me, having almost starved to bring back things that this young woman would use but not appreciate.”

  “You made those feelings quite plain, as I recall.”

  “I made some loud comments about lazy good‑for‑nothings and how some people had never done a useful day’s work in their lives. And this woman, who I thought might have been quite pretty if she hadn’t looked so lazy, opened one eye and said, “Well, sailor, what is it that you think you can do that I can’t?”

  “I was angry,” Thenike said. “I’d been up all night helping a local healer with a difficult birth, and here was this… this lout disturbing my rest. She was good to look at, too, which somehow made it worse.”

  “So I challenged her to a contest. And she–”

  “I was really cross by this time, and wanted to beat her at something she probably thought she was superior at.”

  “So she challenged me to a fish‑gutting contest. She was good, too,” Vine said, admiration in her voice for that young woman of long ago, “but I’d spent most of my life gutting fish. There could only be one winner.”

  “I couldn’t accept that, though, and just went faster and faster.”

  “Until the slick fish guts proved her undoing. The knife slipped, and suddenly there was red everywhere. Blood all over the fish, all over the docks, all over my barrel of fillets. And there was Thenike, hand gaping wide and bleeding like a stuck taar, looking furious.”

  “I was furious. It hurt. And I knew I’d been stupid.”

  “But she was still clutching the filleting knife, and I thought she was going to attack me with it, so we both just stood there, while she bled more.”

  Thenike and Vine were both quiet for a moment, remembering. A sail flapped noisily overhead. The wind was picking up.

  “And then?” Marghe prompted.

  “She threw down the knife and stalked off, and all I had left of the encounter were two barrels of fish and a puddle of blood and fish guts. I thought that was that, until the next day. We were at the inn, drinking more wine than was good for us to celebrate the fact that we were alive, and rich, when in walked the fish‑gutting viajera with her hand wrapped in bandages. ‘I’m going to sing you something,’ she said, and snatched Byelli’s harp right out of her hands and began to play. And you know what a voice she has.”

  Marghe did. She loved to listen to Thenike sing, with her smoky, rich voice and multiple harmonics.

  “Well, it seemed to me all of a sudden that she was beautiful, and I kept her singing half the night.”

  “Which is what I wanted, of course,” Thenike said smugly.

  “And then it seemed that she thought I was beautiful–”

  “Which you are.”

  “–which I am, to some. And I ended up inviting her to come to my room and play the harp. And four days later when we left to sail to the Necklace Islands, I asked her to come along. We sailed together for two years. As lovers, then friends. Then Thenike decided it was time to move on, go where she could work properly as a viajera, where she was most needed, and we’ve seen each other only five times in the last twelve years.” She put down the rope she was working on and leaned over to hug Thenike. “It’s good to be sailing with you again, even if it’s only for a little while.” She released her, held her at arm’s length. “You’re looking good.”

  “I’tn feeling good, better than I have in years.”

  And Marghe felt a sudden, fierce love for Thenike, and the heat seemed softer, the sea more blue, and the world more alive than it had been.

  They took half a day tacking back and forth to find the right current, then shot through the Mouth of the Grave, passing within spitting distance of rocky teeth sharp enough to rip the bottom out of the Nemora. Marghe was more exhilarated than scared by the danger and the heady rush of white water.

  Once they were past the Summer Islands, the weather changed dramatically: the light breezes were replaced by hot winds heavy with moisture. The days were languorous and thick, and Marghe spent hours at the taffrail, gazing out on a sea that shimmered like a dragon’s wing and a sky that was glazed with soft light. Once, Marghe saw a bird with a wingspan of more than three meters skimming the swells; its third, fixed wing was the color of
cinnamon.

  The Nemoraplowed steadily southwest, and the sea changed slowly from blues and grays to a deep, sliding palette of greens and azures: Silverfish Deeps. Marghe saw thousands of silver fish, gliding beneath the surface in great shoals that flickered and swung silver like a bead curtain as they changed direction.

  Marghe and Thenike were on deck, Marghe sitting comfortably on the sun‑warmed planking near enough to the rails to watch the wake curve out behind them, Thenike stretched out with her head on Marghe’s thigh. It was morning, and a sailor, Ash, was in the bows with a sandglass and a log attached to a length of rope tied off at intervals with knots. Ash threw the log, counted, and when another sailor in the stern shouted, tipped the sandglass and hauled the log back aboard. They did this three times.

  “What are they doing?”

  “Judging our speed.” Thenike raised herself onto her elbow. “Hoi, Ash! How fast?”

  “Nine knots,” the sailor called.

  “Good speed. And yesterday?”

  “About the same.”

  “My thanks.” She lay back down. “If the wind holds, we’ll be at High Beaches in three or four days,” She closed her eyes.

  Marghe stroked her hair. Four days, then perhaps another six or seven to get to Port Central. Very good time. Something bright on the horizon caught her eye. “There’s something out there.”

  “Um,” Thenike said without opening her eyes.

  “It looks big, and bright. Seems to be traveling towards us.” She watched a moment. “I think it’s moving faster than we are.”

  Thenike sat up, peered between the rails, then stood for a better view. The object grew. “A seavane,” she breathed, “and it’s going to pass us.”

  The two sailors with the log and sandglass had seen it, too, and paused to watch.

  Its submerged body, rolling out of the water now and again, scales glistening, was immense, but it was the vane itself, like a sail twice as tall as the Nemora’s mast, that would glide through Marghe’s dreams for years afterward. It flared between the sky and sea like an enormous stained‑glass window, with slender supporting ribs like the great vaulting arches of a cathedral roof. Sunlight streamed through the transparent webbing and was split into soft, shimmering azures and indigos and golds and greens that cycled through the spectrum, over and over, endlessly, like a Gregorian chant.