Ammonite

“Marghe? Are you well?”

“No,” she said.

“Lean on me. It’s not far.” The arms that Thenike wrapped around her waist for support were strong and hard. Marghe wanted to lean into them and weep for what she had lost, though she did not know whether her loss was good or bad, or even real. Instead, she started the painful walk back to the guest room.

She allowed Thenike to help her into bed, grateful when the viajera stooped to add wood to the carefully banked fire and stoked it into a blaze. When she turned back to Marghe, her face was ruddy. “That should keep you warm. Do you need anything else?”

Stay with me, Marghe wanted to say. Don’t leave me alone with my thoughts. “No.”

“Then I’ll check on you later.”

Marghe was tired. The fire was hot. She fell asleep.

In her dream, she walked along a long, bleak shore littered with bladderwrack and feathers and seashells. Someone was down by the surf. Thenike. She held something out to Marghe, something hard and bright, crusted with wet sand. A chambered nautilus. “Do you see, Marghe,” she said, opening it as though it were on a hinge, “shells are not empty.” Chamber after gleaming chamber was filled with soft, wet life. Such a fragile and beautiful thing. Precious. Then the shell and Thenike were gone, and Marghe was running up and down the beach, listening desperately for the cries of her mother, who was trapped inside one of the shells and being swept away on the tide.

But something caught her attention, something dark and wet, gleaming in a nest of seaweed. She stooped for it. A fossilized shell, an ammonite. It was cold and heavy in her maimed hand, like stone. But her mother was being swept away. You can’t lose me now, it whispered, you’ve onty just found me. And while she watched, it sank into her palm and disappeared. When she looked up, all the other shells were gone.

Marghe jerked awake. Her left hand was numb; she had slept on it. She shook it until it began to tingle, shivered as her sweat dried. She remembered her dream, the fossilized shell…

Or do you just study people like shells found on a beach? Thenike’s question had passed Marghe’s barriers and gone deep; it demanded an honest answer. To herself, at least.

Very well.

She had lived alone for as long as she could remember, her father and mother had always been so busy. She had buried herself in study, in observation and analysis. People were there to be watched, not related to. And now her mother was dead and her father estranged, and she had no friends. She had no friends, because whenever she began to get close to someone it felt like unknown territory, and it scared her; she ran away to a new place, to find new people to study, people to whom she did not necessarily have to be a person back.

To be a person back. She was not sure she knew how.

She was staring at the coverlet, trying to digest that revelation, when Thenike came back.

“How are you?”

“I don’t know.”

Thenike sat on the end of the bed. “What is it?”

Marghe did not dare look up from the coverlet. But she had to talk to someone about this, make it real. “There are some things I haven’t told you.” So many things.“About my mother. About what happened to my face.” She touched her nose, the break that only she could see. “About… about why I feel so alone.”

Thenike took her hand. “You’re not alone. I’m listening.”

“Sometimes… sometimes I feel that all I’ve got is my job. I study people, that’s who I am: studier of people. What you said this morning was true. I treat people like interesting specimens, not like humans. And I do it because… because I don’t know how else to behave. It’s as though all I am is my job. All I am is an empty shell. I look all right from a distance, but up close there’s nothing there, nothing behind the pretty whorls and brittle exterior. But I don’t have that job anymore. No shell. But If I don’t have that, then what do I have?”

She did not mention her dream of the ammonite, sinking heavy and solid, complete, into the bones of her hand.

“What did you have before your job?”

Slowly, Marghe told Thenike about how her mother, Acquila, had been an anthropologist before her, how Marghe had taken up the studies because it was a way to be close to her mother when she wasn’t there, which was often. She told her about Company. About her beating. About the death of her mother and her fear of the virus.

It was not everything, not nearly everything, but it was a start.

They were sitting peacefully, watching the fire, when Gerrel came in with lunch for herself and Marghe.

Thenike looked up. “That smells good.”

“There’s some left in the kitchen. Do you want me to get it for you?”

“Thank you.”

“Here, then. You two start in on these and I’ll bring another bowl for me.”

“If you put them by the fire, they’ll stay warm. We’ll wait for you to rejoin us,” Marghe said. She suddenly needed the company of this unconcerned child and the woman who denied she was wise. She felt depressed and uncertain, not yet ready to be alone with her new and fragile thoughts.

Marghe and Thenike talked every day. Marghe learned of linn cloud, the waterfall cloud in multilayers which brought very heavy rain; of n’gus, queen daggerhorn, sky–stately and slow‑moving like the beasts of the forest; of pilwe sky, soft, white undulating cloud that could hide the sun for a whole moon.

She did not know what Thenike learned, but Marghe told her of coming to Jeep, of the trata agreement with Cassil in Holme Valley, of how Holle and Shill had lent her Pella and given her the knife that helped keep her alive. She spent one whole afternoon talking about Aoife.

“She made this for me”–she showed Thenike the palo–“but she hit me more than once. Sometimes she treated me like I wasn’t human, but sometimes… Thenike, I know she cared! Sometimes I think she came to care more for me than she had done for anyone for a long time. But she wouldn’t let me go. There was one time when I thought she might, I really thought… I tried to ask why. But it was as though she was two people. The tribe, the tribe, nothing but the tribe. It was all she knew. I just didn’t matter to her, in the end. I belonged to the tribe, I was subhuman, even though everything in her heart told her otherwise. How can people do that?”

“Perhaps she did what she could to help.”

“She was my jailer.”

“She taught you how to survive.”

“So that I could be a good and productive member of the tribe!”

“Nonetheless.”

Marghe brushed that aside impatiently, winced as her healing hands banged on the edge of her cot. “She kept me like a caged animal. Until I didn’t know who I was anymore. Thenike, there were days on Tehuantepec when I wished Uaithne would kill me, just to end everything. No, that’s not true. I didn’t care enough about anything to even bother to actively want anything. I just didn’t care, I was nothing. A blank. Have you ever felt like that? It’s the most terrible thing in the world.” She was crying, but did not bother to brush away her tears. “I nearly didn’t try to run, when I had the chance. I saw the fire and the first thing I thought was, Why bother to run, why not go back, at least it’ll be warm.” She laughed, heard the pain in it. “And you know what the worst thing is? I thought, It won’t be fair to Aoife if I run away. Not fair to Aoife. How can I live with that?”

“But you did decide to live.”

“Yes. I did, didn’t I. I wonder why.”

“Do you think it matters why?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know.” She was quiet awhile. “It was hard, Thenike. I had to fight and fight and fight. All the time. When my compass broke. When I escaped. Through the blizzard. To keep moving, to get to the trees. To keep living. There has to be a powerful reason to stay alive through all that.”

“You’re a survivor.”

“I don’t know what I am.” She wiped away the tears that were drying, cold, on her cheeks. “I don’t want to be Marghe the anthropologist who examines seashells on the beach and moves on. I don’t think I am her anymore. But I don’t know who I want to be.”

“Do you want to know?”

Marghe thought carefully. “Yes.”

“Then in a few days, when you’re stronger, there’s something you can do that might help you find out.”

It was the last day of the Moon of Silence, and the air was still and cold. The structure that sheltered the gong stood near the edge of the forest. It was rough, four timber posts holding up a shingled roof, and lay open to any woman of Ollfoss who might walk by. None did. This was Marghe’s place for the next day and night.

Marghe, tented inside her felt cloak, knelt on the patch of moss she had swept free of snow and contemplated the gong. It hung from the roof by two weathered ropes and was made of hammered metal that caught the light like copper but turned buttery silver in the center where the hammer dents of its making were almost worn smooth from generations of use. Thin morning light cast a blurred reflection of her face onto its uneven surface. Like a moon.

She studied the pale silent face before her, remembering Aoife naming the moons. Moon of Silence: Aoife’s name for this month of midwinter; now Marghe’s name for her own face.

The cavity formed between a planetary body and its ionosphere acts as a natural resonator; most people who lived on Earth were unaware that they lived on a gigantic gong that boomed out exactly sixty‑nine times every day. On Gallipoli, a much smaller body that pulsed more frequently, the colonists were equally unaware. Here on Jeep, the people knew. Three times a year–before sowing the gardens with their seed and bulbs, when the fruits and grains were ripening, and as the last of the harvest was being gathered–a woman of Ollfoss was chosen to sit by the gong all day and all night, sounding it in time to the pulse of the world. The rhythm, Thenike said, helped the crops. It would also help Marghe; if she could still herself enough to hear, she would learn what she needed to know of herself.

Extended meditation. Marghe knew it would not be sound that she would hear through her ears, but something she would sense, as she had the Tehuantepec stones. She sat by the gong and breathed gently, slowly, long, long inhalations and steady exhalations, and sank her awareness down into her own electromagnetic field; when this world rang, her body would tell her.

At the right moment, when she felt her lungs would fill forever with the no‑longer‑alien sticky resin smell of green and dirt and small mammals’ nests, when it seemed the world waited for just a brief hitch of time, when she heard and felt and was the electromagnetic pulse of Jeep, its laugh, its breath, she rose up onto her knees, lifted the wooden rod she held in her right hand and struck the gong with the padded end. Vibration seeped through Ollfoss like the smell of grass after rain, resonating with the pulse of the world, its heartbeat. She sat back down on her heels. Long after the sound faded, she sensed the air humming as the gong quivered on its ropes.

The metal’s vibration slowed. She sat and breathed and watched the reflection of her face reform. The reflection watched her back.

She was not who she had been. Like dull, raw glass in the hands of a skilled blower, she had become something different. Something cold, brilliant, and still. On her left hand were two fingers, a thumb, and two scars. The face that had been beaten into a different shape on Beaver carried new marks. Once again it was no longer her face.

She contemplated that while she listened to the waiting green silence of Moanwood, to the slow breath of the world: the muscle of its dirt, the bones of its rock, the blood of its seas. She heard the world humming deep in its throat, and when it rang with its soft pulse, she leaned forward to strike the gong.

Again and again her face shivered to splinters; again and again it re‑formed.

Marghe knew that this meant something: she listened to the world with her body; she hit the gong; her new face swam apart and came back together.

Strike the gong.

They were connected: the world, her body, her face. Perhaps she should not be asking who she was but, rather, of what she was a part. The world was telling her: her blood, the tides in her cells, and the fluctuations in her nerves already beat to its rhythm, just as they had once resonated to the electromagnetic surges of Earth. Her body rang with this world. She had a place here; she could take it up, if she chose.

Strike the gong.

Marghe drank down the cold, still air, felt it suck heat from her lungs. She expelled it gently through her mouth in a deliberate cloud of breath crystal that dulled the surface of the gong. Her mark.

She raised her head. The sky was covered with endless round humps of dark cloud, like a shoal of blue‑backed salmon broaching the sea, poised forever before diving. A nerka sky. Those clouds were made of her breath and the breath of a million women who had made peace with the world; women she had set out to study, like seashells.

No longer.

It was possible now for her to put aside that person she had been and choose to accept Thenike, or Cassil or Holle and Shill, even Danner and Lu Wai and Letitia Dogias, as nothing more and nothing less than equals from whom she could learn and derive comfort, to whom she could offer advice or a strong hand. If she chose.

Strike the gong.

She struck it harder than she needed to and set it dancing on its rope. The sound clashed and jarred around the clearing. Choose, it seemed to be saying. Choose. But there was no real choice; that decision was made already. All she had to do was accept it: Jeep the world, Jeep the virus, would become part of her now whether she wanted it or not. There was not enough FN‑17 to last her back to Port Central. Even if she was fit enough to travel, even if the tribes and their feud were not making it impossible to cross Tehuantepec, even if the weather didn’t mean no ships could make the passage south until the Moon of the Aches, there was not enough. There was not enough. The virus was going to invade her, cell by cell, sliding cold fingers into her cells and curling around her genes. She would never get rid of it. Never.

She could stop taking the FN‑17 voluntarily, let Jeep in with open arms. It was coming anyway. This way she could prepare herself. It might make a difference, Thenike said; she might stand a better chance of living if her mind was not fighting her body, if she was struggling toward the possible, toward staying alive, rather than fighting for the impossible, to keep the virus out, right out from under her skin.

To make that choice, to voluntarily set aside the FN‑17, she would have to take a step into the unknown; she would have to step out from behind her professional persona and be naked, vulnerable. Herself.

Marghe squirmed. Maybe she should keep taking the vaccine. After all, it was possible that Danner even now might be working miracles, might be establishing new relays, or moving satellites, or sending Mirrors north to track her SLJC. Then she could go up to Estradebefore the six months were over. She would not have the virus. She…

No. All dreams. She would contract the virus; she would be infected and survive, or she would be infected and die. The rest was just details.

Strike the gong.

The face that re‑formed was gaunt and pale, and reminded her of her mother.

At the back of all her fears lay her mother. Her mother coughing and sweating. Dying. There were no decisions to be made after dying.

Her mother had died on the bed in the cottage’s spare room, the one that was not really big enough. She had lain there, looking as though she might still take a small tearing breath and start coughing again, and Marghe had waited, holding her own breath, hoping. But her mother remained quiet. Marghe had stood there for almost an hour, not believing what had happened. It had taken just three days to turn her mother from a laughing woman striding along the Welsh hillsides to this waxy, thin mannequin. There was nothing left of that vital, bright woman now, except the memories buried deep within her daughter.

Marghe stared at the gong, at the pale, featureless reflection. If she died here, who would remember her, and how? She had been Marghe the SEC representative, or Marghe the vaccine guinea pig. No one knew Marghe the woman.

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 bench. “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; there’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…?”

“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 Thenike 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.

The family waited, listening to the crackle of the fire, sipping their wine.

Thenike returned, sending flames leaping in the door’s draft. She squatted near the fire and set her drums to warm, turning them occasionally. The rasp of wood on stone as she moved them was the only sound in the room.

When the drums were sufficiently warmed and the skins stretched tight, Thenike drew her knees up and settled the drums between her skirts. She looked at Marghe with that same indecipherable expression.

“Once upon a time, if there ever was such a time, the world was different. It was round, as it now is round, and the sun rose in the east and set in the west, as now it does, but it was younger, much younger. Where now there is plain, there was forest; where now there is a valley, there once stood a sea. Mountains reared their shoulders high, and were worn away. Rivers formed, grew, and cut through rock as they ran to the ocean. The world turned.

“In these times, upon that raised plain we now know as Tehuantepec there stood a forest. This was the mother of all forests, and her trees stretched east and west from Pebble Fleet to the Oboshi Desert, and south and north from the Trern Swamplands to the northern coast, though there was no woman here to speak those names. This mother of a forest stretched even beyond the north coast, for in those days there was no sea lying between here and what we now call the icy wastes, and those far northern lands were fair and fruitful. On and on the forest stretched, and down and down upon it shone the sun, more strongly than it does today.”

While she spoke, Thenike’s hands moved gently over the drums, stroking and tapping, cupping the sounds, bringing them to life beneath her long brown fingers. Then she stopped talking, and set the scene to her tale with drums alone. The drums spoke of warm rain and a forest floor steaming with mist, of strange flying creatures whose shrieks rang through the trees and whose feathers flashed purple and gold.

Something about Thenike’s utter concentration warned Marghe that she was about to witness something she had never seen before, something that was at the heart of being viajera. Tonight she would hear more than a pretty tale set to a nice tune.

The viajera’s eyes glittered with reflected torchlight. Her black hair, wound in a careless knot on top of her head, did nothing to disguise the tautness of her neck. Her head moved slowly from side to side to the beat of her drums, and shadows caught and dissolved in the hollows of her cheeks and temple and skull. Her whole body swayed lightly. The rhythm built.

For one fleeting moment, Marghe wanted to run. Thenike was in some kind of trance. The beat of her drum was pulling Marghe in; she could feel her heart beating with the thud of the viajera’s palms on the drumskin, and her breath sucked in and out to the rhythm of Thenike’s swaying body. Marghe knew, without knowing how she knew, that what the viajera was about to do was dangerous–for Marghe, and for herself. But then Thenike opened her mouth to sing, and Marghe was caught.

Thenike sang.

Marghe did not hear the words. She was there, living it. Though she knew she was sitting by a fire in Ollfoss, her mind was taken back to a place, a glade, where tall animals that were not animals swung long‑handled axes at the trees. She was one of them, uncomfortably warm in her thick ivory‑colored fur. She watched, fascinated, as her three‑fingered and two‑thumbed hand swung the ax and the clearing grew.

The scene shifted: north, where it was pleasantly cool. The one before her had a leather strap over his shoulder; it wound about his waist, then up again over her shoulder and round her waist, and on to the one behind her, and another behind him. They were straining to pull a huge stone. Within hooting distance, on her left, another group of six were struggling with their stone. They had been working for months. The gods would be pleased.

Time moved on. Back to the clearing, at the southern tip of their great nomadic ellipse. The stones were set, twenty‑seven of them in a circle. They hummed. Laid in the center of the circle were three six‑sided dressed flagstones. A towering green sculpture of woven vegetable stuff–grasses, moss, leaves, vine–stood on the flags. She sang with the others, a great booming hymn to their gods of sky and earth, and set fire to the sculpture. It burned with an acrid stink. With the others, she took her turn walking through the smoke. Colors writhed at the edge of her vision and sounds swam slowly, like live things. A drug. They danced, and boomed, and mated. She wrote the name of her mate in the ashes with her finger.

Time sped up and Marghe leapt centuries, watched while the snows came earlier and earlier and the northern trees began to die and still she and her descendants traveled south and gathered at the stones to mate and worship. Eons passed like heartbeats: a sea surged between the south forest and the ailing north. Years passed; even in summer icebergs floated in the sea, and the north was white and icy. She and her kind were reduced to grubbing under trees for frozen berries and weeping great yellow tears as their younglings died. None of their number had braved the icy water and the floating bergs for generations.

And then one winter the sea froze.

They sang their booming hymns of praise, wrapped their young as warmly as they could, and set out south. South, to the mating place of their ancestors, to build a fire to their gods, to appease their anger and bring back the sun.

The trek was hard. Their feet bled on the ice; there was not enough food. When the younglings curled up and stopped whimpering, and died one by one, each was laid on the ice, with a song for a grave. There were not many left when they reached the snow‑shrouded forests on the southern shore of the sea.

None of the survivors had ever been near the stones, but memories buried in their bones showed them the way. They went forward through the trees with sure strides. But they had hardly lost sight of the shore when it seemed the sky was split by light and thunder and a bolt from god thrashed down and through the trees in a trail of noise and fire. They were knocked over by the blast, and the ground trembled under their feet as the black bolt ground and smashed through the trees. There was a great burning, and alien smells.

They fled back north, back across the frozen sea, back past the frozen bodies of their young, back to the cold and ice and stunted trees, for they had received a message, and the message was plain: the gods did not wish for them to journey south. They were to obey the gods’ will and return north, return to scratching at the ice for moss and poor shriveled berries, return to their lonely fastness where their numbers would grow fewer and fewer…

“Oh, my people,” Marghe whispered to the dying fire, then looked up, confused. People? Thenike sat, weary and still, drums on the floor. The glitter was gone from her eyes; they were dark and withdrawn. Leifin’s cheeks were bloodless, and she breathed heavily. Gerrel looked bewildered and a little afraid. Wenn and Kenisi were holding hands, drawing comfort from each other. Huellis and Hilt were both looking at Leifin, the former thoughtful, the latter grim. Marghe wondered if she looked the same. She felt Thenike’s hooded gaze resting on her, and turned.

“Thenike…” She did not have the words. Thenike had done something she did not understand and could barely believe. More than that, she had told a story which, if true–and it fitted the facts that Marghe herself had ascertained–held staggering implications. People…

The next day, Marghe worked in the gardens as usual. Thenike did not come. Marghe went to find her.

The viajera was in her room, sitting cross‑legged on the bed. Light streamed in, staining the white walls lemon, picking fire from a picture painted directly onto the northern wall. Thenike looked like a tired, dark smudge in the middle of so much light; the dark circles under her eyes stood out clearly, and her skin looked pale, almost translucent. Marghe could see a faint blue tracery of veins under her skin. The room was cool.

“I was wondering where you were,” Marghe said, standing by the half‑pulled‑back door hanging. Thenike looked insubstantial; Marghe wanted to put her arms around her, make sure she was all there and all right. She cast around for some plausible excuse for intruding and could not find one. “I was worried,” she said simply.

Thenike smiled, a tired smile, but warm. “Come. Sit up here with me. I’ve been thinking about you. Tell me what you thought of my story yesterday.”

“It seemed true. Real.” Thenike waited. Marghe struggled to give her the truth. “You, the story… possessed me.”

Thenike nodded slowly. “Many viajeras have sung for your people. Your people smile and say ‘Very nice,’ but they don’t hear, they don’t see. We used to think you were all blind. Until you.” Thenike seemed to go away somewhere inside herself for a moment. Marghe set aside her curiosity and waited. “You followed me in deepsearch.”

Deepsearch. The Jeep ritual of naming, of conception, of bonding. Deepsearch. She was not sure if she wanted to believe Thenike. “I thought the virus was part of it.”

“Perhaps.”

Did that mean the virus was already inside her? No, it couldn’t be. She tried to remember what Lu Wai had told her about incubation periods; she knew that contracting a virus and displaying symptoms were not simultaneous. But no, it could not be the virus. The FN‑17 would still be in her blood, wouldn’t it? She remembered waking in Ollfoss and finding that one soft‑gel was missing. Had she taken it or lost it?

Thenike smoothed the coverlet with her palms. “Some viajeras can sing from within trance, from deep inside their own memories. They can bring others into their trance, make them see what they see, feel what they feel. Be what they’ve been.”

“But you’ve never been a…”

“Goth? Perhaps not. But part of what you call the virus may have part of what we call the goth embedded in its essence.”

Marghe realized that Thenike was telling her that the virus contained goth DNA and some of their memories. And then the virus became part of human DNA. She shook her head. That was not possible. She was not even sure she believed that goth existed.

But the stones existed; she had been there, And they were impossibly old.

The trance, then, she thought. What about the trance? That was possible; she had not imagined it. Of course sharing a trance was possible. Mass hypnosis was well documented. And what else was a drum but hypnotic? And singing, too. Rhythm, sound, the heat of the fire. Her body was well trained to follow patterns and rhythms; that was essentially the way one learned to control one’s own biofeedback.

“It’s a matter of training, that’s all.” She wished she had not said that so loudly.

“Like being a viajera.” Thenike eyed her speculatively. “Can you drum?”

“No.”

“I’ll teach you.”

The sun had been hidden behind cloud for two days. The fire in Thenike’s room roared; the door hanging was closed. Marghe put the drums aside on the bed, pulled off her felt overtunic, wiped the sweat from her face, and settled the drums back between her knees. She tapped the right drum, the treble, with the tip of her right middle finger, then the left drum with what had been the middle finger on her left hand. She was more clumsy with the left.

Thenike, who had been standing by the fire, listening, came over. She took Marghe’s left hand in her own. “Do these scars still hurt?”

“No.”

”Then stop protecting them. Hit the drum, sharp and swift.” She demonstrated, striking out like a snake: hand from wrist, finger from hand. The drum sang once, perfectly. “Again.”

So Marghe did it again, and again, until both sides of the drum sang with the same depth and the same volume, no matter which hand she struck with. She hit them faster and faster, pleased with herself.

”Now try this.” Thenike played an effortless paradiddle with finger, then palm, both drums. Marghe looked dismayed. “Try it.”

She tried. Over and over. “It’s no good.” She wiped at her sweating face with her forearm.

“Move over, and forward.” Marghe gripped the drums between her knees and shuffled forward awkwardly. Thenike climbed onto the bed and sat behind her, arms snaking around to the drums, stomach pressed up against Marghe’s back.

Marghe felt her nostrils flare slightly and the muscles in her stomach tighten. “Lay your hands on mine. Lightly. Now. Feel what I do.” Thenike tapped out the paradiddle very slowly, beat by beat, then again, and again, getting slightly faster. Marghe tried to concentrate on the feel of muscle and tendon under her hands, to gauge at what angle the heel of the hand came down, at what point the hand swung and the finger took the lead, but all she could feel was the slide of warm skin under her own, the ruffle of Thenike’s breath at her neck. She tried harder.

“Good. Now, on your own.” Thenike laid her arms down on her skirts but stayed behind Marghe. Marghe resisted the urge to lean back into the viajera’s warmth and applied herself to her drum lesson.

Marghe took off her muddy boots and walked barefoot over the warm wooden planking of the bathhouse floor. She loved the Ollfoss bathhouse with its smell of lime and minerals, its high, airy space, and the huge stone tubs that descended in height and water temperature from near the ceiling to close to the floor and were worn smooth by generations of use.

Two women she vaguely recognized, Bejuoen and Terle of Ette’s family, were wringing out a coverlet. Only one more garment floated lumpily in the rinse pool; they would be gone soon. She nodded at them, and pumped vigorously at the wooden lever that forced hot water up from the spring and through stone pipes. When the water was flowing, she slid the wooden stream dam over to the left and watched while water began to flow into a shallow basin set at ankle height. She plugged the hole in its bottom with a stopper and began stripping off her clothes, filthy with the rich garden mud. When the basin was half‑full, she pumped up some cold water, setting the flow dam to direct it into the basin. She dropped her clothes into the water, piece by piece, and climbed in after them.

She enjoyed trampling the heavy clothes in lukewarm water, feeling mud slide out from between her toes. When the water began to turn reddish brown, she leaned down and pulled the stopper free. Filling the basin again, she resumed her trampling.

She nodded good‑bye to Bejuoen and Terle.

When the water stayed clear, and she could feel the fibers beneath her feet again instead of slippery mud, she climbed out of the basin, took out the stopper, and reset the wooden dams near the pumps. The larger basins began to fill while she wrung out her clothes and transferred them to the laundry basin proper, to soak in the cold, biting mineral water that seeped up from the ground beneath Ollfoss. She would not need to use soap.

The big tub was full. Marghe diverted the hot water to a lower tub and climbed up the short ladder toward the steam. She lowered herself in inch by inch, sighing as the heat slid over her skin and enveloped her aching muscles.

“You sound like you need that.”

Marghe peered over the edge: Thenike, holding a bowl of the foul medicinal tea.

“Do you want company? I could just leave this down here.”

“No, come on up.”

After a moment Thenike came up the ladder naked, holding the bowl. She had pinned her braid up on top of her head, and the ladder rungs threw shadows over the tight stomach and lean slabs of muscle over her ribs. Hard muscle, soft skin, taut sinew. Marghe wondered how that would feel. Thenike handed her the bowl. Marghe sighed and drank it down in one long swallow. It was bitter, but it warmed her from the inside as the bath did from the outside.

Thenijce slid into the water opposite Marghe, near the wooden tray that held soap cakes and brushes. “Ah, that feels good.” She splashed hot water over her shoulders. Marghe watched the play of muscle and shadow. “I see that someone has been digging over the south gardens. Your work?”

Marghe nodded. “And I ache all over to prove it.”

The viajera picked up the hand brush, the one with soft bristles. “If you’ll come over here, I’ll rub your back. Ease some of those muscles.”

Marghe sat in front of Thenike, as if they were playing the drums. Only this time, Thenike’s legs were naked alongside hers; this time, she felt Thenike’s breasts touching the skin just below her shoulder blades. This time, there was no mistaking the slow, heavy wave of desire that rose and sank through her guts. She could not help arching a little as Thenike stroked the brush over the small of her back. One of Thenike’s hands lay loosely on Marghe’s hips, and she could feel every palm line, every whorl, at the tips of those strong, lean fingers. Desire wrapped its arms around her and held her still, helpless, able only to breathe.

“There. You can do mine now.” Thenike put both palms on Marghe’s lower back and pushed her away, through the water. Marghe’s breath caught.

She made a slow turn, felt the warm water rise up over her belly and breasts. She took the brush. Thenike was studying her.

“Marghe. The vaccine you took, the poisons, the adjuvants, they would have kept away, pushed down, your need for sex.” She nodded at the empty wooden bowl. “As this gets rid of the poisons, so your need for sex returns.” Marghe watched her. The viajera’s lips were very red, very soft. “But I don’t think you should make sex with anyone. Not yet. Your body and your mind need to be clear, uncluttered, for what lies ahead. Marghe? Do you understand?”

Marghe felt embarrassed, stupid. She knew she was flushing. This was Thenike’s way of saying she was not interested. She nodded. “I understand.”

Thenike sighed. “I wonder.”

Chapter Twelve

MARGHE PUSHED THE stick into the dirt, dropped in a seed from her left hand, and smoothed the dirt over the hole. She sneezed. She jabbed another hole, dropped in a seed. Her hands were cold; the wind had been from the north for the last two days and was bitter, dragging with it heavy gray cloud that shrouded the sun. At least it was not raining.

She made another hole, dropped a seed. It missed. She put down the stick, intending to poke the seed into the hole with her finger. Her hands were stiff and aching; she must be colder than she thought. She sneezed again, which set her head thumping.

Fear stabbed under her ribs. She tried to breathe steadily, and coughed. No, she thought, it cannot possibly be. Not yet. It’s only the last third of the Moon of Aches. It should be days yet.

Not if she had not taken that missing softgel.

The pain in her head was getting worse. She levered herself to her feet. Her knees hurt. What was it Lu Wai had said? My joints ached, knees and hips mostly… and then the headache started. It’s only about a mile from the station to my mod, but I had difficulty walking those last few yards, it hits that fast… Thenike knew what to do; so did Kenisi. She looked around. No one. Well, it was only a few hundred yards to the house. She started to walk.

After about fifteen steps, she knew she would not make it. The path wavered in front of her, and she was shivering so hard that her head felt like it was going to fall off. After thirty steps, she was staggering. So fast, so fast. Impossibly fast. Keep going, she had to keep going. Warmth, liquids, Lu Wai had said. Warmth. She could not afford to fall down here, in the mud. Could not.

It was hard to breathe now. Ten more steps, she told her legs. Find Thenike.

“Marghe!”

Gerrel’s face loomed by her left shoulder. Marghe stood, swaying. Confused. How did she get there? “Sick,” she said, then tottered forward another step.

Gerrel caught her as she staggered. Marghe sagged in the girl’s arms. “Marghe.” Rest. She wanted to rest. “Marghe.” Gerrel shook her. “I can’t hold you by myself. You’re too heavy. You’ve got to help me.”

Marghe felt a dim tugging under her arms. She tried to lift her head. “Warm,” she said, then burst into a hacking cough. Gerrel managed to drag her a few yards. It hurt to breathe. “Got to. Keep warm.”

“As soon as we get you inside.”

Marghe tried to set aside the fire that was in her knees and her hips, that squeezed tight around her head threatening to burst through her eyes. Walk. One leg in front of another.

They moved unsteadily forward. Her lungs burned; she could not breathe.

“Don’t struggle. Marghe, don’t struggle. I’ve got you. You’ll be warm soon. Just walk. Walk. Left leg first. Come on. Marghe! Left leg. Good. Now the right.”

It was like trying to walk through fire. Fire that burned her legs and leapt down her throat to sear her lungs all the way to her stomach; fire, too, that threatened to boil her eyes in her head. But she tried.

“Not far now. Keep your legs moving. Another few steps and you’ll be warm and safe. And then I’ll bring Thenike. And Kenisi. You’ll be well in no time. No time at all. But we have to get there first.” Gerrel’s voice seemed to come from a long way off. “Please, Marghe. Please. Just a few more steps.”

Marghe never remembered falling on the bed, or Gerrel crying and trying to wrap her in furs. She did not know it when Kenisi came running. It seemed to her only that some cruel beast with talons and beak steeped in fire and acid ripped at her body, over and over. She screamed, but there was no escape.

Later, days or hours, the beast retreated for a while. Marghe was aware of lying on her back. Her throat was stripped raw and her tongue felt swollen and dry. Thenike was sitting by the bed holding her hand, a hand that seemed miles away, unconnected with the rest of her body. It was difficult to breathe; her chest felt weighed down under a hot stone.

Thenike stroked her hand.

“Thenike…” It was a croak.

“Hush. Rest. I’m here.”

“I hurt… don’t leave me…” Marghe did not know if Thenike could understand the thick, mucous sounds that struggled out of her mouth. “Don’t go. I need you.” The beast scored her throat with its claws. She coughed and coughed and suddenly could not breathe through the clump of phlegm in her throat. Thenike let go of her hand. “Don’t leave me!” Marghe whispered. “I love you.” But Thenike was moving away to bring back a cup for her to spit in, and Marghe could not say any more, for the beast with hot claws had returned with a vengeance.

Later, much later, Marghe watched the ceiling. She could not move her head, or even her eyes. Now the beast had become a thing of cold, with thin fingers sliding under her skin and beneath her fingernails. She wanted to go away, to a place where she would never hurt again. Go away. Anywhere. She closed her eyes. It would not be hard.

“Marghe!” Thenike’s voice. Marghe did not bother to open her eyes. She was already drifting away, to somewhere warm and soft, where she would never hurt again.

“Marghe, I won’t let you go. I’m here. I have your hand. Do you hear me? I won’t let you go.”

Thenike’s skirts rustled, then her weight settled next to Marghe on the bed.

“Listen to me. I know you can hear. Feel my hand. I can feel yours. It’s warm, alive. Blood is beating along your arm, through your wrist. Just as it does in mine. You’re breathing. You’re tired, yes, almost worn out. But all you have to do is keep breathing, keep that blood pumping from your heart. You’ve done it for two days. Just one more, and you’ll be strong again. Do that for me, Marghe. For me. And for Gerrel.”

But Marghe did not want to return to her body. It was no longer entirely hers. The virus lived in it now, in every pore, every cell, every blood vessel and organ. It slid, cold and in control, through her brain. If she recovered, she would never be sure what dreams and memories were her own, and which were alien. She belonged to Jeep. She wanted to shout, Don’t you see? It’ll never let go. I’ll never be clean again…?

“In me,” she gasped. “Unclean.”

Thenike must have understood. “Unclean? No. Your body is changing, just as it does every time you get sick and another little piece of something else comes to live inside you. If a child gets red fever, then when she is grown and her children get the spots, she will not become ill, because the disease is part of her already, and accepts her. Is this unclean? No. It’s life. All life connects. Sometimes, one kind of life is stronger than another. As happened with your mother.”

Marghe tried to remember her mother. Could not.

“But, Marghe, you’re strong, and what you call virus is weak. Accept it. Let it into the deepest parts of you. It’s the fighting that takes your strength. Let it be. Just breathe, listen to your blood sing through your veins. Here. Feel.” Thenike lifted Marghe’s hand and laid it against her breast. “Feel my heart beat.” She put her wrist along the underside of Marghe’s other hand. “Feel my blood. Feel yours. Breathe with me. In. Out. That’s it. In. Out. In. Out…”

Marghe’s body responded automatically, taking up the rhythm. She was too tired to fight it. She kept breathing. Too tired. After a while, she slept.

She woke gradually, without opening her eyes. She ached all over, and her throat was still raw and her chest thick with phlegm, but it seemed that the beast with its hot claws and cold fingers was gone, and her mind was clear. Someone was stroking her head, and humming. She smiled.

“Marghe?”

She opened her eyes. Gerrel was bending over her, looking worried.

“Good morning.” It was a creaky whisper, but Marghe was pleased with it.

Gerrel’s face split into a wide grin. “It’s afternoon. You’ve slept all yesterday, all night, and most of today.”

“Could sleep more.”

“I’ll go get Thenike. She’s been here most of the time. But then I think she got fed up with you always being asleep and went to find something to eat.” Gerrel cocked her head. “You’re probably hungry. Shall I bring something?”

At the thought of food, Marghe felt ill. “Nothing for me.” She was terribly tired.

Gerrel hesitated by the door. “If you’re sure? Well, then. I’ll be quick.”

Marghe listened to her light footsteps turn to a run once she was outside. She smiled again.

Alive. She was alive. She turned her head slowly, looked at the wall. It seemed different. And the bed felt… not the same. She looked more carefully. This was not her room. Not the guest room.

Something chittered and sang outside. From the forest. A bird? She wanted to be out there, walking through the trees, smelling the life, hearing animals scuttle and sing and wind riffle through boughs overhead. She wanted so many things, and was surprised at how hard she wanted them. She felt different. Again.

Thenike opened the door, carrying a tray. Gerrel squeezed in behind her.

“I want to see the sky,” was the first thing Marghe said. Her voice was stronger already.

“No. First you eat. Then you sleep again. Then you eat again. Then, maybe, you go outside and see the sky.”

“Not hungry.” She felt tired again.

“I tried to tell her,” Gerrel said, leaning forward over Marghe, “but she said–”

“I said,” Thenike interrupted, “that you needed food. The fever has burnt the flesh from your bones.” She put the tray down on the swept hearth. “But first, I want to have a look at you. No,” she said as Marghe struggled to lift herself upright, “you relax. Gerrel and I will lift you.”

They lifted her up, propping her with pillows, while Thenike listened to her chest. “Breathe. Deep.” Marghe had to lean forward, her weight resting on Gerrel, for Thenike to listen to her lungs from the back. From this angle, she could see a half‑finished tapestry on the floor, some folded clothes that she recognized on the shelf: this was Gerrel’s room. “Breathe.” Thenike tapped and listened. Marghe coughed.“Good. Good.” They laid her back against the pillows and pulled the covers back up to her chin. “All that rubbish in your lungs should be gone in a day or two. If you do as I suggest.” She gestured to Gerrel, who brought the tray. “So first, eat.”

Marghe only managed about half the soup, then, to her chagrin, felt her eyes begin to roll. Thenike made her drink a bowl of lukewarm water before she lay down again. She was asleep before Gerrel could lift the soup dish back onto the tray.

She woke again just before evening. This time she stayed awake long enough to eat a large bowl of stew, and to ask Thenike why she was in Gerrel’s room: because Gerrel had panicked and brought her to the safest place she could think of, her own room, explained Thenike. Marghe fell asleep with a smile on her face. Gerrel was her sister.

Her recovery was rapid. Almost too rapid, Marghe thought. It seemed as though there was a fountain, a hot spring of energy inside her fizzing and bubbling and demanding to be let out.

“I feel different,” she said to Thenike.

“You are different.”

“No, I feel…” she hunted for a way to describe the incredible well‑being she felt, “like I could live for a year on sunshine and fresh air, like I might never get sick again.”

Thenike laughed, and Marghe listened to that laugh: rich, smoky, warm, it rolled like the breaking waves on a flat beach, as if it could go on forever, changeless. “Oh, you will,” the viajera said, and Marghe heard music in her many‑layered voice.

“You even sound different. And I can smell…” Everything. She could smell everything, and the scent was excitement: her own, Thenike’s. She watched Thenike’s dark brow tighten a little in the center, noticed for the first time how the lines were slightly asymmetrical, canting down toward her right eyebrow, like old timbers sagging at one end. Except it was not just sight and sound and smell, it was something else–a different kind of sensitivity that made Thenike’s voice almost visible, that sharpened Marghe’s sight so that what she saw seemed to have texture, more meaning than mere color or shape.

“It may be that the poisons fed to you as part of the vaccine are out of your system now, that the virus has cleaned you.”

Symbiosis, Marghe thought. Like allowing spiders to spin their webs in a house so that the flies and mosquitos were kept to a minimum. Like the E. colithat flourished in her gut and helped her digest proteins and process fibers, the result of some bacterial infection in a million‑years‑distant ancestor.

Outside, something sang, a long call that started out yellow, dipped in the middle to blue, then rose to scintillating gold and orange, as though the caller had decided that it was not, after all, sad. Marghe smiled. “What was that?”

“The chia bird. She’s been singing for two days now. A little early: today is only the first day of the Bird Moon.”

“What does she look like?”

“Come see for yourself.”

The chia, perched on top of the house, was like a palm‑sized replica of the pictures of herd birds Marghe had studied at Port Central: bony crest, grayish, slippery‑looking skin blushing to pink where the capillaries webbed the near surface, stringy pectorals that powered two true wings like those of a bat, and a fixed gliding wing like delicate parchment. When it turned to examine its observers, Marghe saw that its eyes were startling and green, like a cat’s.

The days got warmer, and Marghe moved back into the guest room. There was more sun, and she heard more chia birds calling and more wirrels chittering from the forest, There were insect noises and the soughing of wind in trees, though it was not the same as hearing wind in Earth trees; the leaves were stiffer, the sound higher pitched. Sometimes it hissed.

Marghe turned the soil in the garden and listened to the wind. So many sounds twined into that hissing: insect carapaces scraping the undersides of dead leaves, living leaves shivering in the wind, an empty nutshell rolling up against a tree trunk with a soft tck. It would be a long time before she grew tired of her newly virus‑sharp senses.

As she worked, she thought about what Thenike had taught her, about deepsearching, about patterning, about pregnancy.

They were all part of the same process. She rooted out a weed and tossed it onto the pile she would use for compost. Deep‑search. Something that all did, once they thought they were ready. Often some time around puberty, though earlier or later was not too unusual. The searcher looked within, to find out… what?

“Whatever she looks for,” Thenike had said unhelpfully. “Almost always a name. Sometimes what she would like to do with her life.”

It intrigued Marghe. What did they see, and how did they see it? Like a movie, an interactive net holo, an abstract painting? Maybe it was audio, or tactile. Olfactory.

“All,” Thenike said, and added, just when Marghe was beginning to feel satisfied with that answer, “or none, or a mix.”

The more Marghe had pressed, the less clear the viajera’s answers had seemed. “You’re not being clear,” she had said, frustrated. “How do you mean, exactly, ‘listen to what’s inside you’?”

“Try it for yourself,” Thenike had said. “Then you explain it to me.”

That had been yesterday. Marghe did not want to take the viajera up on her suggestion. She was afraid.

She pondered that as she dug and rooted. Now and again she moved one plant away from another, or closer to its neighbor. She was not sure why she did this, only that it was good for the different plants; it felt right. When the plants were wrongly ordered, it felt on some dim level as though someone were screeching metal down metal, setting her teeth on edge. When she moved the plants, the discomfort stopped. At first she had been disturbed by the fact that she was behaving without identifiable empiric reason, and had tried not to do so. But the feeling became unpleasant. Now she allowed herself to act automatically and tried not to worry about it.

She stood up and stretched, moved to the patch of garden she wanted to break in for the jaellum seedlings growing indoors in the nursery, just off the great room. The ground was hard, still frosty in places. She dug until she was damp with sweat inside her tunic.

She straightened her back. Something was not right. She sat quietly, letting her mind idle, and then she knew: the jaellum seedlings would do better over on the south side of the garden, in the more sandy soil. Which meant she had broken this ground for nothing. She swore softly. It would take hours to dig over a new patch, and she would have to transfer the goura bulbs she had planted earlier in the sandy patch.

Maybe she was wrong. It would be easier if she was wrong. She would continue breaking this ground. Yes. After all, she had no real reason, no good reason, to believe they would flourish better in a different location.

By gritting her teeth, she managed to work for about another half an hour, but eventually she had to stop; her discomfort was almost painful. She admitted defeat. Whether or not she knew how she knew it, the seedlings would fare better in the sandy south garden. All she was doing was wasting time and energy. What needed doing needed doing.

She sighed, climbed to her feet, and took her taar‑skin mat and roll of wet felt over to the goura. She starting digging up the shoots, one by one, and laying them carefully on the unrolled felt. Next time she would listen more attentively to her instincts.

She paused, trowel in hand. What needed doing needed doing.

Deepsearch. If Marghe was honest, she herself knew she ought to do it. Ignoring the need did not make it go away.

She thrust her trowel deep into the soil and took her hand away. The handle gleamed, rounded and polished by a hundred human hands. She wondered how old it was, whether a woman of Ollfoss using the trowel could look inside her past and see her mother or grandmother or many‑times‑great‑grandmother handling the same trowel, bending over the same patch of dirt. The thought terrified her, but what scared her more was the idea that she might look inside herself and find nothing.

Eight women pattern‑sang for Marghe; she made the ninth. When she had asked Thenike why always nine, Thenike shrugged. “Nine is the right number.”

Marghe decided not to take that any further. “How long does it take?”

“A few moments, or the whole day. Everyone’s different. It depends how far you go, and how easy it is. Many of the young ones are frightened, which makes it harder. You’ll go in fast, I think. How long you stay is up to you.”

Not long, Marghe thought, not long.

They gathered outside in the early afternoon. It was almost warm, but Thenike had warned her to wrap up well. Standing motionless for hours did not produce much body heat. Two chia birds sang back and forth to each other.

Six of her family were there: Thenike, Gerrel, Hilt, Leifin, Wenn, Huellis. Kenisi and the two youngsters were with Namri, who had put her back out. Kristen and Ette made up the eight.

Thenike would keep her safe.

Gerrel, who had made her first deepsearch only last midsummer, started the singing. She hummed deep, tunelessly. The others took up the hum until it sounded like a creaky tree song, the rubbing together of branches. It wove back and forth like the wind high in the forest, apparently aimless. The singers took breaths according to their own rhythms and exhaled in the wavering hum that climbed and sank and wandered without apparent form. Marghe closed her eyes. Two, then three women began to breathe and hum at the same time, then a fourth, and a fifth. Marghe imagined she could hear their hearts mumping together. Her own breath ran with theirs.

Between one heartbeat and another, they all breathed and sang together, great powerful gusts of sound beating at Marghe like rain, rain that grew in intensity, spattering her face, running then pouring over her, pooling at her feet, until she felt she was standing under a waterfall of sound. The sound pulsed endlessly, like the world. Deep inside her cells, something responded.

Thenike will keep me safe.

She followed the plunging water down, where it wanted to go.

Marghe came up from her not‑dream. She felt stiff from standing still so long, and her pattern singers were gone, except for Thenike. Marghe smiled at her, but said nothing; she did not want to talk yet.

In silence, Thenike helped her walk through the evening shadow of the trees until her joints unstiffened. Undergrowth rustled beneath their feet.

Marghe felt she had been gone a long time, much longer than the two or three hours it had taken for the world to turn away from the sun and toward the arms of evening. She had been inside herself in a way she had never thought possible; listening to her body as a whole, a magnificent, healthy whole. And she had done more: reliving memories of her childhood she had forgotten, experiencing again days she had never been wholly aware of. Now she knew how it felt to be a baby just ten days old, and that baby had been as alien to her as any species she had encountered since. There had been more: what felt like days of communication between herself now and herself of many thens. She had sent a question down all the avenues that opened before her: what is my name? And echoing back had come: Marghe. And again: Marghe. And then, whispered in a voice she knew: Marghe, and more.

She was on a thin and misty beach; her mother walked from the shadows and held out her hand. On her palm was the ammonite.

“Primitive cultures thought they were coiled snakes, petrified, and called them snake‑stones,” Acquila said. “But the word ‘ammonite’ comes, of course, from the medieval Latin, cornu Ammonis, horn of Ammon, due to its resemblance to the involuted horn of Ammon, or Amun, the ram‑headed god of Thebes.”

She put the cold thing in Marghe’s whole right hand. “His name, Amun, means ‘complete one.’ He acquired the power of fertility formerly invested in Min, the ancient Egyptian god of reproduction.” She looked amused. “Min was very popular. But his time passed.”

Her mother had faded, leaving the ammonite. Marghe had not been surprised when it sank into her hand. And now she was herself, and more. The complete one.

Marghe smiled. “I have been so many places…”

“Yes,” Thenike said. “Mind this root here.”

“I see it.”

Two more chia birds called back and forth. The same ones? Marghe stopped and tilted her head to listen. “Do many women keep their child names?” she asked.

“Some. Not many.”

“What was yours?”

“Gilraen.”

“Gilraen…”She considered the woman next to her, with her rich hair, pinned up, her soft brown eyes and strong fingers. “A nice name, but not yours.”

“No.”

They started walking again. After a moment, Marghe said softly, “My name is Marghe Amun.”

The complete one.

No one suggested that Marghe move out of the guest room, but she wondered if she should. There was something she needed to do, she was sure of it. But what?

Marghe felt the need to do this unspecified something as a subtle pressure against her skin, as when the weather was about to change. She did not mention it to anyone. She gardened, and ate, and talked to Thenike and Gerrel and, now and again, Wenn or Huellis. Leifin disappeared on a hunt.

Marghe became restless. When she dug in the garden, she dug with hard, vicious jabs, and took pleasure in her aching muscles when she sank into the hot tub in the evening. She lay in the almost‑scalding water hoping, longing for the heat to soothe her. It did not. It was as though she had a muscle, somewhere, that had not been exercised.

She dried herself off thoughtfully. A muscle that needed exercising. Perhaps that was it. She had to find out what she could do now, now that she had part of Jeep living inside every cell of her body; she had to find out how she had changed.

In the guest room–she could not think of it as hers–she lit a small fire, did some gentle stretching and breathing to ease her sore muscles, and then settled down cross‑legged on the warm flags near the hearth.

Three breaths triggered a trance easily. Too easily. She jerked herself out, frightened. Such a deep meditative state should normally take twenty minutes or more.

She smoothed her heart rhythm, thought about that. Was it anything to be scared of? She was not sure. Was it something that she could control? Probably. Then she would try again.

As easily as before, she sank into a trance, her breathing slow and deep and regular. Her electrical rhythms, her brain activity, began to cycle hugely and slowly, like an enormous skipping rope. Behind her eyelids, she imagined her blood as a thick red river full of amoeba‑like creatures: T cells, lymphocytes, phagocytes, doughnut‑shaped hemoglobin, tumbling over and over, rushing past. The overwhelming impression was one of vigor, a good, cleaned‑out feeling. No sluggish streams or narrow places, no dead‑seeming backwaters where toxins gathered.

She had never been so healthy, or seen it so clearly.

She moved her mind’s eye on, roaming glandular production, the lymph system, her gut. She paused by an E. coli, moved on, settled on a cheek cell. She remembered a long‑ago biology lesson: scraping cheek cells onto a slide, examining them under a microscope. It had been nothing like this.

The cell was like an enormous helium balloon in which she floated, swimming through cytoplasm and around mitochondria, bumping gently against the nucleic mass where DNA writhed like a nest of snakes. She moved inward. There, running through the center of the DNA like a bright electoral thread, was the virus. It thrummed like a tuning fork. She glided around it, examining it. So small. She reached out to touch it, pulled back at the last moment. Another time.

When she withdrew back up to conscious level, she found that the fire was long dead and she was shaking with cold.

She discovered that it was too tiring to trance more than once every three or four days, and too frightening. She persevered. Now that she had started, she needed to know more, much more. This was herself she was exploring, uncovering. Discovering. If she was ever to be truly Marghe Amun, the complete one, then she needed to know what she could do, who she was.

The more she discovered, the more she realized there were places she wanted to go, things she needed to do and see, that might be dangerous for her to attempt now, alone.

One day, eating lunch with Gerrel, she remembered Thenike using the drums to take her to an impossible memory vision of the goth, and the way she had used her own body rhythms to keep Marghe alive.

Early the next morning, shivering slightly because it was cold under the trees, she went to find the viajera. The grass was still wet with dew; she followed Thenike’s bootprints and found her some way into the forest, gathering nuts for the family’s breakfast. Marghe watched her for a while. Thenike seemed separate from everything around her, distinct, as though coated in crystal; she moved here and there in the forest, stooping, tossing nuts into her basket, pausing now and again to look up at some wirrel’s chitter or chia’s call. Her hair was loose on her shoulders, like a wood‑colored waterfall.

Marghe stepped out from the shadow.

“Marghe! It’s a beautiful morning. Come and help me with these nuts.”

“I need your help,” Marghe blurted.

Thenike put down her basket of nuts, sat down by a smooth‑barked tree. “Tell me.”

Marghe stepped further into the clearing. “There’s so much I need to know, and I can’t do it on my own. Link with me in search.”

Thenike selected a nut, cracked the shell, and chewed. “Why me?”

“Because you’re a viajera. You’re skilled in these matters.” She was standing right next to Thenike now. “And because I trust you.”

Thenike nodded slowly, then gestured for Marghe to sit next to her. She took Marghe’s hand and seemed to study her a long time. “Very well.”

Linking was hard, Thenike said, and required preparation. They fasted one day, ate lightly of the same things at the same times the next, repeated the cycle, over and over. Fast, eat, fast, eat. As much as possible, they did everything together: walked, ate, cooked, bathed. They slept next to each other in the same bed; sometimes Marghe lay awake listening to their matched breath, and sometimes she fell asleep immediately, knowing that Thenike listened. Day after day, night after night they spent together, and Marghe began to feel a fierce energy building between them, heating and shrinking, pulling them in, like a star about to go nova.

A morning came that filled their room with streaks of shadow and lemon sun, and birds sang, and women laughed outside their window, but the thing between them had pulled them close and all either heard was the sound of the other’s breath as it moved in the same rhythm as her own.

They lay facing each other, naked, skin to skin. They stroked each other’s face, hands, arms. Rested fingertips on the pulse at the other’s wrist. Marghe’s forehead was damp with perspiration, and they were both breathing fast. Thenike’s eyes were black as olla, her sharp cheeks underpainted with red.

“Is this it?” Marghe asked. She was scared.

“No. This is something different. Do you feel it?” She touched Marghe’s forehead with a fingertip. Marghe’s bones seemed full of hot, liquid gold. She could feel the heat of Thenike’s belly and groin close to her own.

Thenike traced Marghe’s lips with her fingertip, then her chin, her throat. Marghe tilted her head back, mouth opening, arching. Thenike slid a hand under her hip, ran the other over Marghe’s back, fingers spreading over ribs, thumb brushing her breast. Marghe made a noise deep in her throat, trembled. Thenike slid on top of her, muscle against muscle, slick skin on skin, her hair trailing over Marghe’s face.

Marghe reached up and sank both hands into that hair, hair that was dark with all the shades of brown Marghe could name, and many she could not: brown like mahogany and teak, like dry oak leaves, like fresh‑turned loam and the shining chestnut of a sweating horse; locks and tresses and strand upon strand. Marghe wanted to lose herself in that hair, lose herself in Thenike.

They searched blindly for each other’s mouth, clinging like fish, swimming slowly closer and closer, breast on breast, belly on belly, arms wrapped around the other’s ribs like great hoops of oak, breath coming in powerful tearing gasps. Marghe was not sure whose mouth was whose, where her thigh ended and Thenike’s belly began, all she knew was heat, a heat like the core of the world, like the energy of all living things as they broke down food and burned oxygen and fueled more life, more heat.

They moved, breath coming in sobs, muscles taut and plump beneath wet skin, until need burned like a sun between their bellies, flaming hotter and hotter, orange to yellow to white, then roared out over them, searing, magnesium‑hot under their skin, unbearable.

The room was full of sunshine and smelled of the minerals Thenike had washed her sheets in, and sweat, and the soft musky scent of their skin. They lay side by side, Marghe still on her back, Thenike on her stomach. Marghe was rolling a coil of Thenike’s hair between her fingers, enjoying its strong, coarse feel as they talked.

“I think everyone, everywhere, should choose their own name, when they’re ready,” Marghe said.

“Who chose your child name?”

“My father, I think. At least, he had an aunt called Marguerite. And I can’t see my mother picking a name like Angelica. Although…” Marghe smiled. You never knew.

“But now you have a new name.”

“Yes.”

“Amun.”

It was strange to hear it from another’s mouth. “Do you like it?”

“Explain it to me.”

“It started with a dream.” She told Thenike about the dream of shells, and the ammonite, the way it sank into her hand, became part of her. Was her, really.

Thenike frowned. “I can’t imagine what it looks like. The ammonite.”

Marghe hopped off the bed, brushed a pile of ashes together on the hearth, and smoothed them. She drew with her finger. Thenike leaned over to watch. “They’re smaller than this, but they curve around and around, in on themselves. Many‑chambered. And they’re slate blue.” She rested her hands on her thighs, careless of the ash. “I found one on the beach once, in England. Carried it around for days. It felt so good in my hand.”

“Like a stone that fits just right.”

“Yes. Exactly.” She jumped back on the bed. “So what does your name mean?”

“In the Trern Swamplands they make boats from hollow tree trunks and they have many words to describe the kind of sound a log makes when hit. That’s how they test the strength of the wood, by the sound it makes when they tap it. Thenike means something like ‘ring true’ or ‘deep and clear.’ ” She smiled at Marghe. “It’s how I like to think of myself.”

Marghe smiled back. From what she knew of Thenike, the name suited her exactly… and she knew a great deal now, more than she had known about anyone in her life. And Thenike knew more about her, Marghe, than anyone else ever had.

Marghe felt the first faint stirrings of panic. Thenike knew too much about her. Too much. She moved restlessly.

“Marghe, Amun, what’s the matter?”

“I’m fine.” Her throat felt tight. “I’m fine,” she said again, too loudly. “It’s just too hot in here. And I’m hungry.”

“Then we’ll get breakfast.” Thenike sat up.

“No.” Too fierce. “No,” she said again, more quietly. “I want to be on my own for a while.” She could not meet Thenike’s gaze. She got up, found her clothes, pulled on her tunic. “I need to… walk, breathe some fresh air. Think about all this.” She gestured helplessly at the crumpled bed and fled, trying not to see the hurt in Thenike’s eyes.

All that day, and the next, Marghe avoided Thenike, eating and gardening alone. She spent the nights in the guest room, trying not to remember Thenike rolling on top of her, the feel of muscle warm and hard under her belly, the way their mouths met. No one bothered her. Most of the family was busy; Leifin had returned from a hunt and they were helping her tan the skins and cure the meat.

The third night, Marghe tossed and turned for hours, too tense to sleep. She got up and pulled a cloak around her shoulders; she needed fresh air. Outside, only one moon was visible, blurred behind clouds. She walked hard, fast, stamping through the trees, glad when she startled a pair of wirrels into shrieking and running.

She missed Thenike. But she was scared. If she went back, it meant deliberately putting aside her barriers, letting Thenike right inside, right in where she could see those parts of herself that Marghe had never shown anyone. Those parts she barely knew herself.

Parts she never would know, if she stopped now.

She paused, then strode on, angry. She could not stop now. Not after surviving Tehuantepec, not after fighting off the virus, choosing her name, discovering so much about herself…

She had to choose: Thenike, and the knowledge of who she, really was or might be, or old habits that stemmed from fear that no longer had any foundation.

She turned around, marched back toward the house. She wanted Thenike–wanted to earn the name she had chosen for herself, to find out what it meant to be Marghe Amun, to be complete, whole. She’d be damned if she would give up now.

She knocked on Thenike’s door, then knocked again when there was no reply.

Thenike opened it, a coverlet draped over her shoulders and her face creased with sleep. They looked at one another.

“Come in,” Thenike said, and stepped to one side. The room was dim. Thenike lit a candle from the banked fire.

They faced one another. Thenike looked soft and smelled of sleep. Marghe wanted to gather her up in her arms.“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m just so scared.” And burst into tears.

The candle was guttering, and Marghe’s face was tight with dried tears. They lay in each other’s arms, breathing easily, softly. Flame and shadow flickered over Thenike’s skin, turning it reddish bronze and tinting her hair with copper. Marghe knew that she could match her lover’s heartbeat whenever she wanted, match her breath, her pulse; that their rhythms were still connected.

“I want to do it now,” she said suddenly. “Before I get too scared.”

“Put your hand on mine. Feel the pulse in each fingertip, mine and yours. Yours and mine.” Thenike slid on top of her, muscle on muscle, her mouth an inch from Marghe’s. “Breathe with me. Breathe my breath.”

It was hot; their skin was hot, and their breath. In and out, in and out. And Marghe gave up everything, gave her breath to Thenike, took Thenike’s into her lungs. Then their arms were wrapped around each other, eyes open, staring deep, and Marghe let herself slide down that long deep slope, that slippery slope, sinking in, right in, right down until she wasThenike, was Thenike’s pulse, Thenike’s breath, until she could skip back and forth: her breath, Thenike’s breath, back and forth. Back and forth.

They slid past each other like slippery same‑pole magnets, going in.

And Marghe was standing before the cathedral that was Thenike’s body and all its systems, as Thenike stood before hers. She stepped inside.

It stretched far over her head, a vast, echoing space. She wandered, laying a hand here, against the muscles sheathing the stomach, a hand there, between ribs. She stopped and looked in a side chapel where bronchioles narrowed to alveoli. She wandered on, noting cells and bones and connective tissue, glands and tubes. Ovaries.

One ovary felt different from the other. Marghe stopped. She felt its heat, and something else, a bulge, a ripe readiness. The bulge swelled. Marghe watched, fascinated, as it split, opened, released its egg. Marghe followed the egg as waving cilia gentled it down the oviduct.

Thenike was ovulating, and because Marghe knew their rhythms were matched, she knew that this would be happening in her body, too, and that Thenike would be watching. Marghe stepped closer, reached out cautiously. The electrum thread inside shimmered and sang, and the ovum almost… changed. Marghe withdrew her hand.

The virus had altered everything. She saw how she could change the chromosomes, how she could rearrange the pairs of alleles on each one. If she reached in and touched this, enfolded that, the cell would begin to divide. And she could control it–she and Thenike could control it.

Marghe felt the connecting tension as Thenike stood waiting.

She could do it. She would do it; Thenike would match her.

She reached out again, and the thrumming electrum strand that was the virus coiled and flexed and the cell divided. Marghe searched her memory of those long‑ago biology lessons: mitosis. But altered, tightly controlled and compressed by the snaking virus until it resembled a truncated meiosis. Chromosomes began their stately dance, pairing and parting, chromatids joining and breaking again at their chiasmata, each with slightly rearranged genetic material. But the chromatids did not then separate again and migrate to the cellular poles in a second anaphase; instead they replicated. This daughter would be diploid, able to have her own daughter.

It was like watching beads on a string rearrange themselves. Gorgeous colors, intricate steps, every bead knowing just the right distance to travel. Precision choreography, again and again, as cells divided, normally now, and the one‑celled ova became two‑celled, four‑celled, eight‑celled.

As they multiplied, Marghe felt the tight tension, the connection between these cells that would divide and multiply inside Thenike, and those that would grow inside her own body: fetuses. Fetuses that might one day be born as soestre.

Marghe sat up in bed, the coverlet wrapped around her, watching Thenike coax the fire back to life. The candle, forgotten, had long since burned out. The only light was the dull red of the hearth, sending Thenike’s shadow high over the ceiling.

She watched her lover in silence; words would have been too big, too solid, for what they had done together.

Thenike added some dry sticks. The flames leapt, sending her shadow swaying and jumping over the walls. She examined her handiwork and added a log. “You could be a viajera. If you chose. You have the skill.”

Marghe cradled her stomach with her right hand. She had done this. They had done this. She did not want to think about anything else. “They’ll be soestre,” she said. A new thought struck her. “How would I travel as a viajera with a baby?”

Thenike turned to look over her shoulder. “We’d travel together. While they’re young, we’ll travel smaller distances at a time, and less often. And when we get there, we’ll stay longer. We’d be safe, together.”

Marghe imagined the Nid‑Nodtossed by a storm, Thenike wrestling with the tiller, Marghe trying to reef the sail and stop both babies from being washed overboard.

“What are you smiling at?”

“The future.” And Marghe knew then that she did want to be a viajera, a teacher and wanderer, a newsbearer, arbitrator, and traveler. “Wenn will be disappointed. I think she’d rather I stayed as a gardener.”

“More useful to her way of thinking,” Thenike agreed.

“I can’t sing.”

“Not necessary.”

“Teach me what to do.”

“I have been doing.”

When they woke up the next morning, they hugged each other tight, then let go.

“Thenike, I need to get a message to Danner, at Port Central. Tell her where I am, what’s happening.” Now that she herself knew, finally, what she wanted, she owed it to them, to Danner and to Sara Hiam, to let them know the vaccine worked, that she had chosen to discontinue taking it; that she was going to stay here with Thenike and have a child.

“It’s a long journey from here to there. Will it wait until the weather’s better, until we can send by herd bird?”

“I should have sent word weeks ago.”

“I’ll talk to Hilt.“

Thenike pointed at the map on the wall of Rathell’s great room. “Hilt plans to leave for North Haven in the last third of this moon.” It was already the Moon of New Grass. Spring. “From there, her ship takes her south and east”–her fingernail swung out into the blue‑painted Eye of Ocean–“through the Summer Island channels. Then south and west, past the Gray Horn, out into Silverfish Deeps and on, down to Pebble Fleet. From there, she’ll be able to find a messenger willing to travel north and west up the Huipil and over the hills to your Port Central.”

Marghe frowned, and studied the wide‑swinging route. “Why doesn’t she sail through here?” She pointed to a narrow channel between the largest of the Summer Islands. “Wouldn’t that cut more than a few days off the voyage?”

“No ship could get through the Mouth of the Grave at this time of year.”

“And there’s no other way to get the message to Danner?”

Thenike shook her head. “The herd birds can only fly long distances when the air gets hot enough to lift them, let them glide.”

“When will that be?”

“Depends on the weather. Perhaps early during Lazy Moon. It would take… ten, fifteen days, maybe more, depending on who was herding where, and how much their birds were needed. If you’re in a hurry, sending a message with Hilt on her ship would be faster.”

Marghe sighed, and accepted the situation. “How much can I say with a message knot?”

”What do you want to say?” Thenike took a cord and several different threads from a bundle that lay on a shelf.

“That I stopped taking the vaccine. That I contracted the virus about a month later. That I’m here at Ollfoss, I’m well, and I’m pregnant.”

Thenike knotted rapidly, weaving sometimes one color, sometimes several, into elegantly shaped knots. When she ran out of cord, she took up another, tied it to the first, and continued.

“That’s it?” Marghe took the rope, ran the knots and colors through her fingers. “You’d better teach me to do that.”

Chapter Thirteen

DANNER, THOUGH SHE would not have admitted it to another soul, was enjoying herself.

She stood on a slight rise, eight kilometers from what was left of the Port Central perimeter, and watched the four groups of Mirrors pacing off their marks, pausing a moment to wipe the sweat from their brows with wristbands, aiming, loosing the crossbow quarrels, and trudging back to check their accuracy. Now and again, the late spring breeze carried the dull chunkof quarrel hitting mark, then the drifting curses after a poor aim, or the crows of accuracy.

Her Mirrors.

She had thirty‑two of them down below on the plain, shooting with a mix of differently tipped quarrels–ceramic, plastic, sharpened wood–and competing on a team basis. They seemed to be enjoying it.

Spring was spring on any world; soldiers got restless. Danner had talked to unit commanders, subs and higher: keep them busy, get their morale up. So here they were, being told only that they were testing the research of various specialists, Mirror and civilian, who were experimenting with the possibilities of local materials. As she overheard one of them say: crossbows were crazy when you had state‑of‑the‑art firepower, but it beat standing pointless guard eight hours out of twenty‑four.

Other specialists were busy, too. Botanists were roped in to select trees for their wood, and the geologists, dubious at first, were now happy to use their previously mothballed talents–one did not test‑drill and core‑mine around burnstone–to track likely deposits of clay and olla. They and the soil specialist were happily muttering about geest and marl, fuller’s earth and alluvium. Climatologists and ecologists were off with Ato Teng, surveying for possible resettlement sites. If Company abandoned them, they had to find a better place than Port Central, somewhere fertile and warm, with good access to trade routes. Somewhere defensible.

Danner breathed the soft warm air of Jeep and smiled. Right now there were probably several reports waiting to be downloaded for her attention, but she was happy to stay here, just be. Be herself, Hannah Danner, feeling sunshine and an alien breeze on her face.

South, just visible if she shaded her eyes with her hand and squinted against the sun, was the thready glint of the Huipil, the river that drained the Irern Swamplands. West was the Ho valley, its wide bottom sliding with the river in its slow‑moving middle phase; well over a thousand kilometers long, that river. East, half‑a‑day’s journey across the plain by sled–perhaps a week on foot–was the sea, Silverfish Deeps.

She turned north. Representative Marguerite Angelica Taishan was somewhere up there. Danner compressed her lips. She would give a great deal to have Marghe in her office right now, alive and healthy, answering questions. So much depended upon the health of one woman. If the FN‑17 worked, then Company would simply vaccinate their employees and all the potential vacationers and real estate agents and miners who could turn Jeep from a financial embarrassment to a reasonable investment. Then all this surveying and crossbow practice and examination of local materials for possible practical use would be no more than an exercise in morale.

North was the direction Danner faced every morning, unconsciously waiting for news.

The wind died and the sun suddenly felt much stronger. Danner sighed. There was work to be done. Teng might have the preliminary site reports ready. Previous satellite surveys indicated several possibilities on the western bank of the Ho valley, both north and south. South would be better–warmer. Damn Marghe, Danner thought. She could have been useful, like that trata stuff, now. They could have used that to bargain some breeding animals from the locals, if she had stayed here instead of running off on a wild‑goose chase.

Danner walked down the hill, moving slowly, wanting to savor the last few minutes of sunshine and fresh air before closing herself up in her office. A faint cry soared up the rise. She turned to look. A figure was jogging toward the Mirrors from the north. Past that she could see something, moving fast. Maybe a sled.

Down below, the jogger reached the clump of Mirrors in the foreground. One dropped her crossbow, raised her wrist to her mouth. Danner’s wristcom beeped.

“Commander, this is Sergeant Leap.”

“Go ahead.”

“Commander, one of my Mirrors reports there’s a sled approaching from the north. Four occupants.”

That would be Lu Wai and Letitia, with Day. But that made only three. “Four? You’re sure?”

Danner watched as the tiny figures below conferred. “Yes ma’am. Four. That’s what the observer said.”

In the distance, the sled suddenly slowed. Danner nodded to herself: Lu Wai was giving them a chance to prepare a reception committee. She was glad that the lieutenant had had the sense not to comm ahead the identity of her passengers; Danner would not be able to keep Day’s presence unofficial if Company got to hear of it. And they would hear of it if the spy was still monitoring communications. “Thank you, Sergeant. Select two officers, ones who look reasonably presentable if that’s possible, and detail them to meet me at the bottom of this hill. I want you to take the rest of your troop west two kilometers and continue weapons exercise. Out.”

No point taking chances. Whoever that fourth passenger was, Danner wanted to know here, now, with only one or two witnesses.

She wiped the sweat from her face, snapped her collar tight, and started deliberately down the hill. Whoever was in that sled might be important; it would not do to present a bad image.

One of the officers waiting at the bottom of the hill was old to be still a private posted to off‑Earth duty. Danner compared the short gray hair and hard face with the files in her head and made a match: Pat Twissel. Two disciplinary hearings, one suspension. Made sergeant once, almost made it to lieutenant before that first hearing busted her back to private. Efficient, but adamantine. If an order fitted with Iwissel’s particular world‑view, then that order would be carried out flawlessly, tirelessly, brilliantly. If Twissel did not agree with what had to be done, she was never overtly disobedient, but things somehow kept going wrong. Willful, too independent for Company Security. Danner was tempted to dismiss her and just keep the younger officer, whose name she could not recall. But willfulness and independence were traits she might need sometime.

They saluted. “Officers Twissel and Chauhan reporting as ordered, ma’am.”

Twissel’s voice was surprisingly soft. Danner nodded approval of their tidy hair and tight collars.

“Good turnout on short notice. But, Chauhan, see if you can get that muck off your left boot.”

Chauhan blushed, which made her look startlingly young, and scrubbed hurriedly at the offending boot with a handful of grass.

The whine of a sled going slower than it should cut through the slight hiss of the wind on grass.

“There are four people on that sled,” Danner said conversationally. “Two are Sublieutenant Lu Wai and Technician Letitia Dogias. You may or may not recognize one or more of the others. If you do recognize them, you are not to display that recognition, or comment upon it, either now or to anyone else at any future time. Is that clear?”

“Clear, ma’am,” Twissel said, and Danner hoped that whatever was going on under that gray hair was in her favor.

“Chauhan?”

“Oh. Clear, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.”

“Stay behind me. If either of our visitors requires assistance, you will render it without being asked.” The sled was just two hundred meters away. “When I have escorted the visitors to Port Central, you will wait for my debriefing, or that of Lieutenant Lu Wai. You may have to wait several hours. Clear?”

“Unobtrusive assistance, don’t recognize anyone but Dogias and Lu Wai, wait for the lieutenant’s or your debriefing only, Yes, ma’am.”

The sled grounded and began to power down. The hatch flipped up. The first out was Dogias, then a stocky woman with long hair going gray. She moved easily enough, but was looking around too much; tense. Day. Danner caught Twissel’s jerk of surprise from the corner of her eye.

The third figure was slight, but jumped down to the grass easily and pushed back her hood. The slight woman looked around, saw Danner, held out her hands in welcome.

“Hannah.”

“T’orre Na.”

“They tell me you’re commander, now.”

“It’s been a long time.” Danner was smiling. “Too long.” She took the journeywoman’s hand. There were one or two new lines.on T’orre Na’s face, but not much else to show that five years had passed. “You look well.”

“You look older. And worried. I have news that you must hear.”

“As soon as I can. For now, welcome.” Danner squeezed T’orre Na’s hand, then let go. She turned to Day, bowed slightly in formal greeting. “Day, welcome.”

Day looked older, thicker around the waist. “Commander.”

“Call me Hannah, if you would; I have promised to relinquish my command over you. My thanks for coming.”

Day did not relax. “Letitia said it was urgent, but I’d feel happier continuing this once we’re under cover. Not that I’m very sure what it is you think I can do to help.”

Trust is earned, Danner reminded herself. “Very well. We’ll take the sled.”

They were in Danner’s mod. Day finished her coffee, poured more. “So, in the absence of the representative, you want me to be a sort of cultural interpreter.”

“Exactly.”

“But you say you already have trata with Cassil in Holme Valley. I don’t see why you need me.”

“Holme Valley is a long way from here. There are locals closer that we should be dealing with. And you know what we want, you can understand our needs.”

“I’m not sure I can anymore. Living out there for five years changes you.” She sipped at her coffee. It had been a long time since Danner had seen anyone savour coffee that way.“Besides, now that you have trata with Cassil, you’re more or less obliged to put things their way first. Coming to me is breach of protocol.”

“That’s exactly the kind of information I need! Look, just say you’ll stay here for a few months, six months. In return I’ll–”

“You’ll what? Agree not to throw me in the brig for going AWOL?”

Danner kept her temper. “I believe I have already agreed that you will remain officially missing. You could walk out of here right now, and that would still be the case. I keep my promises, where possible.”

“It’s that ‘where possible’ that bothers me. I know how it is to be a Mirror; if it becomes expedient to suddenly reopen my file and query my status, then you will. Oh, don’t get all righteously angry. You know it’s true.”

Danner was angry, but saw no point in protesting Day’s statement. “Perhaps. But what I was about to say was that I would help you in any way I could. We have metal you could use for trade goods, or we could pass information on weather systems along to you at critical times. During the herd’s birthing season, for example.”

They were silent. The air system hummed. “I need some sunshine,” Day said abruptly. “I don’t know how you stand it in this box without windows.” She stood up, then startled Danner by smiling–a brief, wry smile. “I know what’s wrong with me. It’s the coffee. I need to go for a walk. I’ll come back in an hour or two.” She paused. “You know, Danner, we might be able to work something out, but whatever we decide, you really should talk to T’orre Na first.”

“I will, thank you. I’ll detail an officer to find her, but if you see her first, please ask her to come and find me as soon as she can.”

Day looked thoughtful. “Communications not reliable, Commander?”

“A question of security.”

Day looked around. “Letitia told me some of it. Company has big ears. This room?”

“As secure as we can make it.”

“I gather ‘we’ includes Letitia and Lu Wai. They mentioned a Sergeant Kahn. Twissel?”

“No.”

“You might like to consider her. She knows I’m here now, and that something’s happening. She’s bright, should have made captain a long time ago, and she’ll put two and two together. Better to have her on your side than against you.”

“I’ll take that under advisement. And, Day, when you’ve finished your walk, I’d like you to come back and sit in on my talk with the journeywoman. I’d like your input. Sometimes T’orre Na can be a bit, well, a bit alien.”

“I imagine she feels the same way about you.”

T’orre Na sat cross‑legged on the bed, just as she had all those years ago when she had come to Port Central with Jink and Oriyest to demand that Company make recompense for the burn they had started, the burn that had destroyed Jink and Oriyest’s grazing grounds. Danner had been a lieutenant then. It seemed longer, much longer than five years ago, but some things never changed: Danner had been as off balance then as she was now.

“Cassil wants what?”

“Your help. The tribes are raiding everything north of Singing Pastures. It’s only a matter of time before they spread south.”

“What does she think I can do from down here? And why should I?”

“Cassil demands a return on trata. She helped you, your family, through Marghe. Now she wants you to help her.”

“You know that we’re not a family, no matter what Cassil thinks.”

“The trata was made in good faith. I was there. So was one of your Mirrors, Lu Wai. She is under your direct command, which makes you responsible.”

Danner chose to ignore that for a moment. “It sounds like a territorial squabble. Surely Cassil and the others can sort that out themselves.”

“If they could deal with it, they would. That’s the way of trata, to always keep the advantage. They lose it by asking your help.”

Danner set aside trata and its promise of Byzantine complexities and concentrated instead on what she could understand. “These tribes…”

“The Echraidhe and Briogannon.”

“Echraidhe and Briogannon. Yes. Is this something they do a lot? Attack people? Tell me about them.”

“This has never happened before. It’s new. Something’s changed, but I don’t know what, or why. No one does. It seems that the Echraidhe have some sort of new leader who has bypassed the authority of the Levarch. Her name is Uaithne, but she’s calling herself the Death Spirit, riding at the front of her tribe, and killing, killing, killing. She killed half the Briogannon first, to make them join her, and now she slaughters the flocks and herds of Singing Pastures. The pasture women have fled to Holme Valley, but without the herds the people will die. If Uaithne does not kill them first herself.”

“Just killing? That’s senseless.”

“Not to them. It’s one of their legends, that the Death Spirit will come and destroy the people. Uaithne has proclaimed herself that spirit.”

Danner had been caught in one religious war, on her second tour of duty as a cadet, patrolling Company’s interests in Aotearoa in the Tasman sea. Vicious, bloody, incomprehensible. Not about territory or livelihood, but about ideas she could not begin to grasp. “Dirty business, religion. But you said only the herds of Singing Pastures have been affected. Why does Cassil come to me?”

“Singing Pastures has trata with Holme Valley.”

“And Cassil has trata with me.” Damn Marghe. “Let me think. How about this: I’ll be happy to advise the women of Singing Pastures and Holme Valley on how to organize a militia, but I’m not prepared to make the journey myself, or send any personnel.”

“You must.”

“I can’t, T’orre Na. You’ve no idea of my situation here.”

“I think I do. Bluntly, you’re on your own.”

“Well, that’s not quite how I’d–”

T’orre Na talked right over her. “You need all the help you can get. Allies. Support. The best way is through trata. You must honor your bargain.” Her voice was low, intense, totally focused on Danner. “You must. For Cassil, for yourselves. Go to Holme Valley and stop Uaithne.”

In the silence, Danner’s screen bleeped. Glad of the excuse to look away, she swiveled her chair to her terminal and punched accept.

“I hope this is urgent, Vincio.”

“Ma’am, a patrol picked up a native heading for Port Central. She’s here. Calls herself Sehanol, says she’s a messenger, from a place called Scatterdell.”

“Between the Huipil and swamplands, two days south of here,” T’orre Na interjected.

“Ma’am, she says she has a message from Marghe, I assume she means Representative Taishan, who is at Ollfoss. I think. It’s hard to understand her. The bad news is that the vaccine didn’t work. Apparently, Taishan got the vir–”

“Enough, Vincio.” It had taken Danner a second to understand what Vincio was blabbing all over the net. She gathered her wits too late. “Is the messenger still there?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’ll send an escort for her. I want a code five on this, effective immediately.”

The code‑five silence was bolting the stable door after the horse had run. Damn T’orre Na, damn Cassil. If she had not been thinking about this trata, she might have stopped Vincio in time. Now the spy would already have the information on its way to the Kurst: the vaccine did not work. Already, Company would be making decisions. It was all over now. No more time.

T’orre Na opened her mouth with a question. Danner held up a hand. “A moment. I need to think.” She punched in Lu Wai’s code. “Lu Wai? Detail Kahn to go to my office, to escort a native, Sehanol, to my quarters. I want you to implement start of Operation Ascent. Immediately. It’s happening, Lu Wai.”

She got hold of Dogias next. “This is Danner. Top priority. Track and jam any off‑world communication, excluding my channel to Estrade. Move fast, Letitia. It may already be too late.” She signed off and punched in Sara Hiam’s code, drumming her fingers impatiently.

The doctor looked tousled, sleepy. “What–”

“Sara, it’s happened. I don’t have all the details yet, but I’m setting things in motion at my end. Are you ready?”

Watching Hiam absorb the news was like seeing a slow‑motion picture: the doctor’s face seemed to contract muscle by muscle until it was hard and tight. “There’s no way I could be ready for this. But we’ll manage.”

Danner knew how much it must be costing the doctor to not ask questions; Hiam had worked hard on that vaccine. She must be as full of professional curiosity and disbelief as Danner would have been if she had heard that a fully armed troop had been routed by five‑year‑olds armed with sticks. Danner could not think of anything comforting to say.

They looked at each other helplessly. Danner cut the connection and stared at nothing. It was really happening.

She lifted her head, saw the quick compassion in T’orre Na’s eyes, and wondered what her face must look like. She felt ravaged, bereft. If only the vaccine had worked. This was it. All over. The full weight of what would happen next fell on Danner like a boulder. She felt as though her world were whirling away out of reach.

“How long will it take Sehanol to get here?” T’orre Na asked.

“What? Oh, twenty minutes.”

“And how long would it take me to find and bring back refreshments?”

“Refreshments?”

“Eating or drinking is good for shock.”

“I’m not hungry. But if you need something”–she waved her arm vaguely–“I can have someone bring it.”

“I would rather go myself.”

“Fine.”

“But I need directions.”

Danner pulled herself together briefly. “Left. About four hundred… paces. Third door. Any argument about payment, have them call me.”

When T’orre Na was gone, Danner sat and stared at nothing. There was so much to do. So much. Later, later. For now, she wanted to grieve but felt nothing, nothing at all. It was as though she were swaddled in cotton wool.

T’orre Na came back with a hot rice dish and four cans.

Danner looked at it incredulously. “Beer?”

“I like Terrene beer.” T’orre Na popped the can efficiently, drank deep. “Here, the rice is for you.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Have some beer, then.”

It suddenly struck Danner as funny. Why not? There was nothing else to do for the moment. They sat in contemplative silence, drinking.

“Try some rice. You might be too busy later.”

T’orre Na was right, of course, it just seemed… inappropriate to eat and drink and make merry as everything threatened to fall to pieces around her. But there was no good reason why she should not.

They both ate. Danner felt better for the food, more in control. “Perhaps when the messenger comes, T’orre Na, she would respond better to questions from you.”

Danner was glad T’orre Na was there. She had a working knowledge of the basic language, but the messenger’s accent or dialect was so thick Danner could barely understand one word in six. She made a mental note to ask Day which would be the most important dialects to learn–yet another thing Marghe could have helped them with.

After several minutes of question and answer, the messenger accepted a beer, tasted it cautiously, and put it down. Danner noticed she did not drink from it again. Not all natives liked beer, then. She was obscurely glad, though she could not have said why. Perhaps she was already experiencing the faint beginnings of the need to keep her culture separate, like all immigrant peoples on all worlds. For that’s what she and the other Mirrors and technicians were now–immigrants.

She listened harder.

It seemed that the messenger was uncertain about something, and the journeywoman was questioning her hard. Eventually, T’orre Na seemed satisfied, and had the messenger repeat something twice. She nodded and turned to Danner.

“The message goes like this. Marghe Amun, now of Wenn’s family at Ollfoss, to Danner, at Port Central. Greetings. I became ill with this world’s sickness during the Moon of Aches–that’s the Moon of Rain, as we would reckon it, some sixty or seventy days ago– and made myself with child thirty days later. The viajera Thenike and I will bear soestre next spring, I am well and happy. Give my regrets and apologies to the healer.” She repeated it while Danner taped it, for the record.

“Sehanol says the message knot came via ship to Pebble Fleet. Message stones were left by the banks of the Huipil by one of their herders and read by her daughter, Puiell. The stones had been disturbed. Sehanol thinks that some of the message may be missing.”

“Not the important part: Marghe got the virus; the vaccine didn’t work.” The end of everything. “ Marghe Amun,” Danner said slowly. “I wonder why she did that.” Perhaps the virus had affected the representative’s mind. Danner had heard vague rumors of Company personnel going crazy when they contracted the virus. They were usually the ones who died.

“Marghe Amun. And she’s with child. Soestre to the viajera Thenike.” Danner could not identify T’orre Na’s expression. It looked like something akin to wonder.

Sehanol said something.

“She wants to leave now,” T’orre Na said. “There’s work to be done in Scatterdell.”

Danner looked at Sehanol, whose eyes were very bright and who had obviously been following what they said. Danner spoke clearly and carefully. “Before you leave, Sehanol, I want you to know that you have my personal thanks and gratitude. If you and yours at Scatterdell need some small favor in the future, ask.”

“We will. You are gracious.”

T’orre Na punched the door lock. It hissed open and the native slipped through and was gone.

“Gracious indeed,” the journeywoman said to Danner, “considering that the message was already paid for.”

“I stressed a smallservice. And I thought it was important to cement good relations.” Now that they were here for good.

“You did right. Perhaps now that your circumstances have changed a little, you’ll be prepared to change your mind with regard to your other obligations in the north.”

“T’orre Na, I can’t, believe me. More than ever, I’ve too much to do here. I have to catch someone, a spy. It’s now or never. If she isn’t caught now, she’ll go underground. We’ll never be sure who we can trust again, I’m responsible for the evacuation of Port Central, just in case the Kurstdecides to eradicate this position. Nearly a thousand personnel and our stores and munitions have to go somewhere; and we don’t even know where, yet. I have to…” She pulled herself up with an effort. T’orre Na did not want to hear all her troubles. “There’s enough work here for every woman twice over–work that’s vital for our survival. I can’t, I absolutely cannot, spare anyone at this time. Please tell this to Cassil and the others of Holme Valley.”

“I urge you to reconsider. The Echraidhe are destroying herds and crops and people now. And trata is trata.”

“And if I don’t do all that needs doing here, right now, there won’t beany Mirrors to keep trata! Please, try and believe me.”

“Oh, I do,” T’orre Na said sadly, “but that makes no difference. Cassil needs help, you refuse it. You break trata. There is nothing more to be said.”

Chapter Fourteen

HILT LEFT FOR North Haven, taking the message with her. The Moon of Rowers came, but Marghe Amun’s monthly bleeding did not. It was then that she realized that what she and Thenike had done would affect her whole life. In a few months–a year, by Jeep standards–she would bear a child. A daughter. It was strange to think that soon she would be responsible for another human being. It made her feel restless, trapped.

Marghe paused, weed in one hand, trowel in the other. The ovum–the blastosphere, her enhanced memory whispered to her–was just cells. She could abort them, it, as easily as she had induced cell division. She could be just herself; she did not need to be responsible.

But she was responsible already. The child growing inside Thenike was partially of her doing. They would be soestre. There was already a bond.

Marghe knelt on the damp ground. She had a child growing in her belly. Did she want it?

Yes. She wanted to bear it–her; she wanted to name her, watch her learn to crawl, speak, think. Wanted her to have a home, belong.

She went back to her gardening.

The clear air of Ollfoss grew warmer daily, and Marghe and Gerrel spent their mornings and afternoons, and sometimes early evenings when the sun lay like an amber cloak over the tops of the trees, digging out weeds on their knees, trimming back excessive growth of jaellums and soca and neat’s‑foot.

When she was not on her knees in the garden, Marghe was with Thenike. They helped Wenn weave, gathered herbs with old Kenisi, took turns looking after Moss and Otter while Leifin and Namri were choosing a tree to cut to make a new door and Huellis made candles. They ate together, slept together, talked together; and Marghe learned.

When she took up the drums, it was to learn from Thenike how to use them to drive a story deep into the hearts of her listeners. When she took up a rope, she learned how the knots spelled out shorthand versions of concepts and phrases, how the colored threads made the words, or added emphasis. She was not a good singer, she did not have that smoky voice of Thenike’s, but she learned how to give a story rhythm and pacing, how to make it live in the mind’s eye of her listener. She was good at that.

She practiced on Thenike, telling her the story of her life, of her mother’s life, and her father’s, of how Company stole what it could not cheat from people, of the worlds she had visited, and the places of which she only knew rumor.

Her skin browned, and her arms thickened and grew strong. The room where Marghe had stayed became the guest room once more, and at night, before she fell asleep, she would look at their hands lying together, Thenike’s long, all sinew and bone, with that white scar snaking over the back of the thumb, her own blunt and spatulate, and feel full of the wonder of their differences. Sometimes she had strange dreams in which her belly swelled so much that she could not get through the doorway, and she felt trapped. She woke on those mornings to sunshine and Thenike’s hair spread over her pillow, and a feeling of restlessness she could not explain.

That restlessness grew like an unreachable itch as the Moon of Flowers passed into the beginning of Lazy Moon, and spring became early summer.

One evening, Thenike was sitting behind Marghe in the tub, rinsing Marghe’s hair. It had been windy that day, and the hair was tangled.

“Ouch.” Marghe felt irritable. “Be careful.”

“I am careful, but a knot is a knot.”

Marghe sat stiffly; Thenike worked in silence. Marghe felt restlessness and tension building up inside her until it was almost unbearable. “Stop. Just stop.” She pushed Thenike’s hands away. “We’ll cut it off. It’ll be easier.”

“Another few minutes and the tangles will all be gone.”

“I don’t want to wait another few minutes. And tomorrow it’ll only be all tangled again.” She twisted around to face Thenike. “I want it cut.”

“Well, how do you suggest we proceed? Shall I use my teeth?”

Thenike’s exasperation was understandable but did nothing to curb Marghe’s irritation. “I’m sorry,” she said, not sounding sorry at all. “It’s just…”She slapped at the water in frustration, sending it slopping over the edge of the tub. She would have to clean that later; it made her even more cross.

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 might 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?”

“There’s lots of ships in,” the older one who had started the chant offered, “The wind brought them in all at once. But there’s some room. I think.”

The children followed them, resuming their game as they went.

The inn turned out to be a cluster of buildings: different shapes and ages, built of different materials and to different standards, growing as North Haven had grown–gradually, and in no particular order. The result was a pleasing mix of old stone and raw wood, mossy shingles and bright tiles, with windows winking higgledy‑piggledy into three separate courtyards, one of which had a fountain.

A woman with reddish gold hair down her back was sweeping at the leaves in the fountain yard. She looked up when she heard the giggles of the children, and saw Marghe and Thenike.

“Thenike, is it? About time. That boat of yours needs hauling out of the water and its bottom scraping before it rots down to its timbers. But what are you doing standing there gawping–never seen a woman sweep leaves? Get away!” Marghe jumped, but the woman was shouting at the children. “Away with you. Did they follow you all the way here?” This time she was talking to Thenike. Then she shouted again. “If you’ve nothing better to do than laugh at a poor working woman, then I’ll find you something. Now”–she turned back to her visitors–“what can I do for you Thenike, and your companion.”

“Zabett, I’d like you to meet Marghe Amun.”

“Marghe Amun, is it? That’s a big name. How do you like to be called by ordinary folk?”

“I’m not sure yet. I’ve not had the name long.” Marghe had to struggle not to fall into Zabett’s speech patterns.

“Well, now, a new name.” Zabett gave the leaves one more sweep. “There’s a story there, I’ll be bound, and no doubt the two of you will expect to stay here for free in exchange, and eat me out of house and home.”

“Why else would we come here, to the finest inn in the north?” Thenike said with a smile.

“Flatterer. But flattery won’t get you the best room in the house. In fact, there is only the one room left. Over in the west courtyard. I suppose you’ll be wanting to go there right this minute, so you can rest a bit, and wash that journey muck oft your feet.”

The room in the west courtyard was no more than a lean‑to, an afterthought added to a wall. But there was room for a bed and a shelf, and there was a latch on the door. Zabett patted the bed. “It’s small for two, but no doubt you won’t be spending much time in here, except to sleep, and the bed’s newly made up.”

Maighe liked it. “It’s very nice. Thank you.”

“Well,” Zabett said grudgingly, “it’ll do. Now then, I can have you some food ready in a little while, but not instantly. I’ve more folk than you to look after, viajeras or no.” She left, still holding the broom.

“She likes you,” Thenike said, unrolling her pack.

“You’ve known her a long time.” Marghe prowled the room, looked out the tiny window. “She runs this place on her own?”

“With her sister, Scathac.”

“Is it fair for us to stay here without payment?”

“Nobody stays here without payment. We’ll sing for our supper. She was right: we won’t be spending much time in here. We’ll be telling the news to a packed common room every night, and many will want us to take messages with us when we go.”

Marghe had been looking forward to a few days of rest.“Both of us?”

“There’ll be some things only you can tell: about your world, how you were caught by the Echraidhe and escaped, how Uaithne started the tribe feud.”

“That’s a lot of talking.”

Thenike sat down on the bed. “It’ll only be in the evenings. During the day, we’ll sit in the sun and eat Scathac’s fine food, gossip about nothing in particular, and wander the docks and along the coastline. I’ll show you the Nid‑Nod. No doubt Zabett’s right and she needs some work done on her.” She laid her clothes on the shelf, checked her drum. “There. The food should be ready by now. Are you done?”

Marghe was astonished to find that her hands had automatically gone about their business, unpacking, smoothing out her clothes, laying her nightbag on the bed. “Yes.”

They took a seat at the bleached white table in the kitchen. Zabett turned and nodded, busy at the fire. After a moment she brought them hot dap. “Eggs in a moment.”

Marghe blinked. This was not Zabett: same hair, same build, but her face was not screwed up in that skeptical way, and she did not bustle and fill the room with noise. Not Zabett. Thenike smiled, enjoying Marghe’s surprise.

“Scathac, allow me to introduce Marghe Amun. Marghe, this is Scathac, Zabett’s twin, a fine cook, a good listener, and a mind like a wirrel trap.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Marghe said.

Scathac nodded. “Viajering is hungry work. You’re welcome to come into the kitchens and eat at any time. With or without Thenike.”

They ate, eggs and bread and fruit, and left for the docks.

The day had warmed a little, though the wind was still from the north, slicing the tops off the waves, flecking the gray sea with white. Alien sea or not, it smelled to Marghe the way the sea should smell: big and wide and full of the promise of adventure.

They stood at the edge of the wharf, looking out. Several small coracles were tied together and then secured to one of the huge olla rings embedded in the stone; they bobbed precariously on the swell. Marghe pointed. “Where do these come from?”

“Two days along the west coast. From Luast. See how they’re all tied together? Those two, there and there, the ones with the thwarts, are rowed, one woman in each, and the other four are piled up with furs, and little sacks of blue beads dug near Beston‑in‑the‑Mountains. They paddle along the shallows, never out of sight of the shore.”

Marghe was appalled at the thought of such tiny, fragile craft battling the northern seas. All for trade. “What do they take in exchange?”

“All kinds of things: wine from the south, timber–they don’t have much where they come from, though normally they bring bigger coracles for that–sometimes fruit, or spices from Oboshi… whatever they need, assuming that they timed things right and there are people here who want furs or beads.”

Marghe scanned the other ships. There were nine, all different makes: two‑masted, one‑masted; oars and not; double‑ended and having definite bows and sterns; larger and smaller. They looked like brightly colored children’s toys. She pointed out the ship Thenike had mentioned earlier, which looked to be just leaving. Tiny figures were hauling on sheets, and the sails were bellying. “The Nemora. You know someone aboard?”

“Vine, and her kinswomen. Ah, it’s a shame we missed them.” Thenike rubbed the white scar on the back of her hand, smiling to herself.

Sixty yards out, a boat pulled away from a lateen‑rigger. As it neared the wharf, Marghe heard the breath of women pulling oars and the creak of rowlocks, and the sounds of laughter drifting over the water. It was not long before the sailors’ boat was bumping up against the stone.

They threw a rope, which landed at Marghe’s feet. She picked it up without thinking, then looked around for something to tie it to.

“Like this.” Thenike showed her a knot that would hold. “It’s called a fishback.” It did look a little like a sinuous fish doubling back upon itself, Marghe supposed.

A woman hauled herself up onto the wharf. A bracelet of small clay disks clicked as she held out her hand. “Roth,” she said, “Captain of the Telwise. My thanks for the knot.”

“Thenike, viajera.”

“Marghe Amun–” Marghe hesitated, “also a viajera. But new to it.”

“So. We all start sometime.” Other women were clambering up onto the wharf, clay disks tinkling around waists and necks. “So, Marghe Amun, where do you call home?”

Home. A long story or none at all. Marghe hesitated. “Have you heard of the women from other worlds?”

Roth nodded. “The viajera Kuorra was in Southmeet. She had the story from Telis, who had it from T’orre Na. Supposed to be from beyond the stars, or somesuch she said. Set off burns, don’t know anything about anything, wear funny clothes. Call themselves mirrors.” She looked hard at Marghe. “But you’re a viajera… Kuorra says these mirror women can’t deepsearch or remember or even have children.” She looked from Marghe to Thenike, back again. “Yours must be a strange story.”

Thenike said nothing to defend her. Marghe knew this was up to her. “You’re staying at the inn? Then come and hear it. It’s even stranger than you think.”

“No doubt. No doubt. There’s room at the inn?”

“You know Zabett,” Marghe said, “if you’ll pay double the price she’ll find you a floor to sleep on, and make you feel grateful.”

Roth laughed. “No doubt.” She touched the disks at her wrist. There were more, Marghe saw, around her neck and under her tunic. “But we’ve done well this voyage, and the last two or three. It won’t be hard to part with a few of these in exchange for Scathac’s cooking.” She nodded. “We’ll see you at the inn.” She walked away, a strong‑looking woman with legs bare from the knee, a roll of clothes hanging crosswise across her chest and bumping at her hip.

“By the time she gets to the inn, half of North Haven will know what you’ve just said.” Marghe just nodded. “Roth reminds me of Vine: with those eyes that look more easily into the distance, and those strong bare legs.” Thenike laughed. “Like all sailors.” She was rubbing at the scar on her hand again. “Come. Let me show you the Nid‑Nod.”

The Nid‑Nodwas tied fore and aft to one of the double wharves at the south of the seafront. She was a small craft with a stepped mast of about thirteen feet, and one sail, rieatly furled. A silhouette of a long‑legged bird was painted in dark green on both bows. Marghe pointed to what looked like a tiny handprint next to the port symbol.

“What’s that?”

“Gerrel’s mark. The summer the boat was finished, Huellis and Leifin came to North Haven to see me off and to trade some of Leifin’s carvings. They brought Gerrel. She was about four. I was still painting on the name. Gerrel decided she wanted to help. I left the mark on.”

When they got back to the inn they found Roth and her thirteen sailors standing in the northern courtyard, with Zabett pointing an accusing finger at a pile of clay dust in her outstretched hand, shouting.

“See, it’s not there. No fish tooth. It’s a fake. One of you gave me a false credit, and until I find out who, none of you stay here. None.”

Thenike leaned toward Marghe and spoke quietly. “They may ask us to judge this matter.”

“Us?”

“We’re viajeras.”

Roth untied the string around her neck, unthreaded one of the clay tokens. “Here’s another. Genuine. I know it’s genuine because these are the ones I had from you two years ago when we brought in that cargo of keoshell.” She held it out.

“Oh, no, it’s not as easy as all that, Roth. One of your number tried to pass me a false credit, and that’s robbery.” She folded her arms.

Roth looked irritated. “Well, you tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

“Find out who the dishonest one is among you. I’d think that that’s what you’d be after doing anyhow, for your own peace of mind. But I’m not having a thief stay in my house.”

The injured parties glared angrily at each other. Then one of the sailors saw Thenike and Marghe. “Let the viajeras sort it out,” she said.

Roth looked over at the two women, hesitating a moment over Marghe. “Well,” she said to Zabett, “that’s agreeable to me. You?”

Zabett nodded shortly. “But you’ll pay the fee, as it’s your people who caused the trouble.”

They spat on their hands, and shook.

Marghe whispered to Thenike. “Wouldn’t it be a good idea if they agreed now, while they still don’t know who it is, what the punishment would be?” She had seen too many negotiations, on Earth and off, fall to nothing because not enough was agreed at the start.

“Tell them,” Thenike said, and gestured.

Marjhe took a deep breath. Pretend it’s just like negotiating something for SEC. “Shake, too, on the reparation price and the punishment you’ll mete,” she said, stepping forward. While Roth and Zabett prepared to haggle over that, she turned to Thenike. “Any ideas on how to settle this thing?”

“One or two, but they’re not perfect.”

Marghe thought fast. “These tokens. Zabett has to smash them to see if they contain a fish tooth, otherwise they’re not genuine. So… Zabett makes them? Yes. And someone’s given her a dud. But…” They were one‑time use only. “That’s the central difficulty of the matter, then: once the credit’s smashed, it’s invalid. So how do we check?”

Roth and Zabett were still talking. Some of the sailors appeared resigned to a long discussion and had sat down in the dusty courtyard,

Marghe thought hard. There was no perfect solution. “The only thing I can think of is that we ask each sailor to take off all her tokens, and empty her pockets, too, just in case, and put them on the ground in front of her. Then we choose one from each pile and smash it. We keep doing that until we smash a dud.”

“Some may only have three or four. Losing even one will be a great hardship to the innocents.”

“I know.”

They were silent; Roth and Zabett had finished talking, and were waiting.

“I can’t think of anything better,” Thenike said eventually, “and it may be that you won’t have to break many.”

“Me?”

“You.” Thenike deliberately stepped back. Marghe looked around her. She was Marghe Amun. A viajera. She straightened her shoulders and stepped forward.

“Roth.” She motioned for the captain to join her thirteen sailors, then stood before them. “Take off your credits and put them on the ground before you. We’ll break them one at a time until we find out who did this.”

Roth and two others looked resigned and unfastened anklets and necklaces, dropping them into the dust at their feet. The others glanced at each other.

“Why should we?” one asked, a small fair woman with a chipped front tooth.

Marghe’s heart was thumping. There was nothing to make these women do as she said. Nothing at all.

“Juomo’s right,” said a tall woman the color of rich river mud. “We’ve done nothing wrong. I don’t have enough credits to let them get smashed to pieces for nothing. We could sleep aboard.”

Several nodded in agreement, and folded their arms.

Marghe looked at Zabett. “Perhaps Zabett would agree to replace any genuine tokens that get broken?” Zabett nodded. The innkeeper was on her side, at least. Maybe this would not be so bad after all.

The sailors still looked stubborn. Roth looked at them one by one. “I agreed with Zabett that the journeywomen should sort this dispute, Juomo, Tillis. This is the way they’re doing it. If you don’t like it, elect another captain.”

Marghe saw by Roth’s easy stance that the captain knew the sailors would not go that far; she began to enjoy herself. This might work.

The women muttered, but began to strip themselves of their wealth. Marghe set aside the urge to grin and watched carefully.

One woman placed a string with just two clay disks in the dust; Tillis, four. Juomo, with the chipped tooth, offered a necklace of five.

Tillis looked at Juomo’s necklace and frowned. Juomo pretended not to notice. But Marghe did.

She stepped up to Juomo, touched the necklace with one foot. “Perhaps you have more credits than this.” She watched Juomo’s carotid thump as her pulse increased. “We wish to see it all.”

“You’re seeing it.”

“I don’t think so.”

Juomo stepped back a little, tucked her thin hair behind her ears nervously.

Marghe was no longer enjoying herself. She held out her hand. “Give me the rest.”

Juomo bolted, but Tillis shot out a leg and tumbled her into the dust. The big woman hauled Juomo upright by her belt and casually wrapped one arm around her neck. Tillis yanked up Juomo’s sleeve. A string of twenty or thirty credits was wrapped around Juomo’s biceps. “Knew she had more,” Tillis said with satisfaction. She snapped the leather thong and unthreaded one of the clay disks. She dropped it in Marghe’s outstretched hand. “Try this.”

Zabett was there now, and Roth and Thenike. And the other sailors were picking up their dusty credits.

“Leave them awhile,” Marghe said, “until we’ve tested these.”

“You can’t smash my credits!” Juomo shouted.

Tillis shook her. “Shut up. If it’s real, then you can have one of mine.” She grinned at Marghe. “Test it, journeywoman.”

Marghe was not sure she would be able to tell a dud from the real thing. She held out the disk to Zabett. “I think we should give Zabett the privilege.”

After the excitement in the courtyard, lunch was late. Marghe and Thenike ate outside. The clouds were thinning, letting afternoon sunshine heat the wood of the table, releasing a spicy, resinous scent. Their plates were almost empty; they were eating fruit.

Thenike had been explaining to Marghe the credit system. Zabett and Scathac gave board and lodgings on a barter system; if an individual or crew had a large item that was worth more than the number of nights or meals needed, then the innkeepers gave them credit, in the form of clay disks. One disk equalled one night. Because of their fixed value, and because the sailors traveled from one place to another, mixing with other travelers, the clay disks had begun to assume the status of portable wealth in those places–ports and well‑frequented areas, especially around the coast. Protocurrency. Several years ago, Hamner, the innkeeper in South Meet, had arranged with the two northern innkeepers to honor their credits if Zabett and Scathac would honor hers. They agreed, and now the disks were becoming more popular as currency.

Marghe paused, a goura half‑peeled. “But if the disks are being used as currency, then much of it stays in circulation.”

“True.”

“That’s nice for Zabett and Scathac: they only have to honor part of what they receive goods for.” She cut several slices from the goura and laid them on a plate. A boatfly hummed near the glistening fruit and Marghe waved it away. “So what effect does this currency have on the trata network?”

“Not much. The clay credits are a coastal phenomenon. Besides, trata is about more than wealth. It’s about power, and favors: who is beholden to whom. It’s about friendships and enemyhood, a webwork of who is known to be trustworthy and who not. Currency is for strangers.”

They chewed on the fruit for a while.

Marghe remembered the panic on Juomo’s face as she tried to run, as she tried to get away from her, from Marghe. No one had ever run from her before. “What will happen to her?”

“Juomo? All her credits will be taken and smashed. Those that prove to be genuine will be replaced by Zabett and Scathac. But they won’t ever let her stay at their inn again. And Roth will be looking for a new hand. I doubt anyone else will take her on board, unless they’re desperate.”

“But what will she do?”

Thenike shrugged and ate another piece of fruit.

It was harsh punishment: Juomo would not be able to work from North Haven, no one would give her shelter, and even if all her other credits turned out to be genuine, she would not have enough to buy herself a boat to leave. It seemed there were no second chances when people could afford to lose so little. Marghe wondered if she would have been so quick to judge if she had known.

Afternoon turned to dusk and brought with it a warm wind from the southeast. Marghe and Thenike ate their evening meal outside in the fountain courtyard, enjoying the warm smells of grass and blossom and forest along with several others. More who were not eating, or who had already eaten, began to drift into the courtyard, sitting on the fountain rim, the stone flags, benches, the roots of trees. Waiting.

Waiting, Marghe realized, for her and Thenike to tell them the news. And more than that: Roth’s story would have traveled by now. They wanted to see the viajera from another world.

Her mouth went dry and she had to control her breathing to get her heartrate down to normal.

“It was a good winter in Ollfoss,” Thenike began conversationally, “and a better spring. The crops will be early, and big. Marghe here knows about the gardens, about the soil and the seeds.” She gestured to Marghe.

Pretend you’re talking to one person, Thenike had said, a person who listens hard and exclaims in all the right places, and imagine what that person would like to hear, how you might make the news more interesting for them. If the person is a fisher, and it’s a tale of the plains, tell her what she might need to know to understand the story. So Marghe looked up at the women gathered in the courtyard at the inn of North Haven and pretended she was telling her story to Holle, of Singing Pastures.