Ammonite

Chapter Ten

MARGHE AND LEIFIN were three days traveling through Moanwood to Ollfoss.

Later, Marghe could not have said whether it was a year or no time at all. She remembered little: occasional fractured snapshots of trees that were not quite trees, whose roots were greater around than their crowns or which possessed no crowns at all; musty, sharp smells of small nesting animals; pain in her hands and feet and face. Most of all she remembered one day falling down on the snow-dusted floor of the forest and lying on her back, dizzy, while leaves, or what might have been leaves, whirled around her head. She had laughed aloud, but the forest swallowed her thin bright ribbon of laughter and she quieted as she realized it was she who was the alien here; that the dark and the green around her would remain unaffected by her, could not digest her if it tried. Like cellulose in the gut of a carnivore, she could not be assimilated. Alien.

The rest of the journey was a jumble: Leifin climbing on top of her, keeping her warm; soft wet stuff in her mouth that Leifin had already chewed for her; Leifin sneaking something from her pocket then shouting at her to stop, stop, and Marghe realizing she had Leifin’s hand between her teeth and her gums hurt, but refusing to let go until Leifin put the vial back into Marghe’s pocket.

She remembered nothing of arriving at Ollfoss. She had imagined how it might have been, since: stumbling out from under the dark canopy onto the blinding white snow; past the open-walled shelter that housed nothing but a small metal gong; along the snow-covered path that ran between the bathhouse, built over the hot spring, and the famous vegetable gardens of Ollfoss; on to the houses and outhouses and gathering places that looked like stone versions of the tents of the Echraidhe, with horizontal slit windows and wooden shutters under their eaves of sod, and careful stone channels running down the corners of the sloping roofs. Low houses, sturdy houses, built to survive snow and the rushing, runneling thaws of spring.

More days followed spent tossing in fever; shouting in hoarse Portuguese for someone to turn the lights on; trying hard to swallow soup and crying when she spilled it; feeling pain in her hands and feet and face. Being tied down. She remembered faces looming over her, serious or smiling, but all strange.

So gradually that she could not have pointed to one day in particular and said, There, that was when I began to really recover, Marghe realized that what she thought were restraints on her arms and legs were bandages of cloth and moss. Her spinning dreams steadied down to a world where certain faces reappeared again and again in connection with lifting her over to the fire, bathing her with warm water, feeding her, trimming the wick on the horn-shaded lamp that sat on the trunk by one whitewashed wall.

The face that appeared most often, the one accompanied by pain in her smeary fever dreams, was a dark, walnut-faced woman, Kenisi, who untied the cloth and removed the moss, rubbed something into the pain, replaced the wrappings with fresh moss and clean cloths. She was smaller, quicker than Borri, but she had the same eyes as the Echraidhe healer. Marghe tried to smile the first time she realized what Kenisi was doing, but split open her healing lip.

After a while she began to stay awake enough to sit up on the narrow bed she occupied, and to greet by name the other faces: Leifin, of course, the one with the shifting-sea eyes and the thin mouth, who often brought a knife and sat whittling wood; Hilt, a tall woman whose hair, just a fraction darker than the coffee color of her skin, was the shortest Marghe had yet seen on this world. Hilt was a sailor, from North Haven, in Ollfoss to visit her blood sister Thenike, a viajera.

As Marghe began visibly to gain strength, Kenisi allowed other visitors, women from neighboring families. Some, like Leifin, wore the cap, furs, and sling of the tribes; others, like Hilt, wore felt cloaks and knit caps; still others, a mix of homespun, pelts, and felt. Many wore jewelry: bright olla beads in strings around necks and wrists or dangling from wooden ear-cuffs, brooches carved and painted in strong colors. Some lived in Ollfoss; others were either living in Ollfoss for the short term or visiting kith or lovers for the winter. All were curious: here was a woman from somewhere totally other, who had survived the Echraidhe and won through Tehuantepec in the winter.

Marghe ignored all their questions. She found she could not think about the Echraidhe, the snow and ice, the way she had nearly let herself die. She still did not know why she had made herself struggle to survive, nor if she was glad she had.

Instead, she concentrated on her body. The next time Kenisi came to change the wrappings on her hands, rather than staring up into the thick rafters that sloped to a point over her head, Marghe asked some questions of her own.

The two crusty scabs where the two smallest fingers on her left hand should have been needed no explaining, but Kenisi pointed to the mottled finger on that hand, and the little finger, missing its nail, on her right. “This one, and this, should heal.” She let Marghe look, then rewrapped them carefully and started to unwind the cloth around Marghe’s head and ear. “There’ll be scars here—” a cool touch of her finger above the left eyebrow—“and here.” Where she touched just behind the ear, Marghe flinched. “Hurt?” Marghe nodded. Kenisi rubbed it gently with the ointment.

“You’ve lost part of that ear, too. Nothing your hair won’t hide.”

Marghe was grateful for the healer’s matter-of-fact tone. It gave her the courage to ask, “Is there anything else? My feet?”

Kenisi smiled, fissuring her face. “They’re a mess, but they’ll heal.” She stopped rubbing ointment into Marghe’s face. “Think we’ll leave these wrappings off for now, see how it goes,” she said, and started on Marghe’s feet.

Marghe was glad Kenisi had already told her they would heal: they reminded her of half-flayed baby seals, an unhealthy mix of purplish black skin and red raw flesh.

She turned away, glad, suddenly, that she had not been able to look into a mirror since she had woken.

Later that day, Leifin brought in a young girl with long, unbraided hair. They were both carrying food. Stewed fish, fruit, water: soft stuff. Marghe’s teeth still rocked in her gums. It would be a while before she was up to chewing meat or fibrous vegetables. Leifin introduced the girl. “Gerrel, daughter of my blood sister, Kristen.”

Gerrel, Marghe saw, was trying hard not to stare at her. Her face. She touched it gently. “What does it look like?”

“Like you ran into a tree,” Gerrel said. She appraised Marghe frankly, shook her head. “Like you ran into a tree twice.”

“Well, it could be worse.”

Gerrel’s expression said she doubted it. Marghe concentrated on eating the food while Leifin and Gerrel took out her pot and brought it back freshly scrubbed with snow and smelling of some aromatic.

After that, Gerrel often brought Marghe’s food by herself, and helped wash her down, or moved her to the fur-draped trunk against one wall while Kenisi and a woman called Ette laid fresh covers on the bed. When Marghe asked, Gerrel went to get lukewarm water and a cake of hard soap. While Gerrel washed her hair, Marghe tried to fill in some of the gaps in her knowledge.

“Who is Ette related to?”

“She’s from Kristen’s family.”

Marghe frowned, remembering. “Your mother and Leifin’s blood sister?”

Gerrel carefully teased out a tangle. “Kristen’s my blood mother.”

“But you don’t live with her?”

“No. Her family lives in the house with the two chimneys: her and Namri, Ellyr, Rathell, young Hamner, and baby Gin.”

Marghe shook her head; still uncertain about who belonged in what house.

“Careful. You’ll get water all over the place.”

“So who do you call your family?”

“There’s Wenn, she’s the oldest, and Kenisi, of course.”

“The healer.”

“She’s really a cook. She’s the one that makes most of what you eat. Bakes bread for other families, too. And during harvest, it’s always our family’s cookpot that everyone lines up at. You should see her festival cake!” She scooped Marghe’s soapy hair up in one hand, pulled the bowl of water closer. “Lean forward so I can rinse this off.”

Marghe did.

“Leifin and Huellis have baby soestre, Otter and Moss. Then there’s Thenike, who’s here right now but not often, because she’s always off viajering in that boat of hers, and her blood sister Hilt. This is the first time they’ve both been home together for ages. And then there’s me.”

“So why do you live here?”

“Thenike’s my choose-mother. Wenn said I should come and live here with Thenike’s family because she said I’d end up clashing with Kristen. Something like that, anyway. I’ve been here since I was an infant.”

Adoption, or fostering. “And who’s Thenike related to? Apart from Hilt.”

“I don’t know. But she’s been part of the family since before I have.”

Gerrel was a mine of information. Huellis, she said, was Leifin’s partner, but everyone knew that it hadn’t started because of love: Leifin had wooed her because of the bad trata agreement between their family and Huellis’s, years ago. Now that they were part of the same family, the trata agreement had to be renegotiated, and their family was richer than it had been. Huellis and Leifin seemed to like each other well enough now; at least, Huellis had stayed.

Gerrel was not afraid to ask her own questions. Marghe did not always answer them, but the girl seemed to accept that there were some things Marghe was not prepared to talk about.

Gerrel asked one question Marghe knew she would have to find an answer for, eventually: “Leifin rescued you and brought you here. The family’s caring for you. How will you repay us?”

Two days later, on a morning when sunlight slid now and again through the window slits set up near the roof and made her want to be outside, Marghe was sitting up in bed and pondering that question. Across her knees lay several objects: the vial of FN-17, her fur mittens, her knife, her palo. All gifts from women she had barely known. All she had in the world.

She touched them one by one.

The vial was almost empty, and there was one less softgel than there had been.

She hoped that somehow, during her delirium, her subconscious body clock had told her when to take it. She was unsure how long she had been here, but it felt as though it was almost time to take another.

The mittens that had been tawny brown when Cassil first gave them to her were dark, crusty with blood and slime. They stank. Unless they could be cleaned along with the rest of her furs, wherever they were, she did not even have any clothes.

The knife, too, was stained; the hide wrappings around the haft looked splotched and diseased. The stone blade had a new chip she did not remember. That should be possible to grind out. She touched it gently with her fingertip. Cold. Rough. Like Shill and Holle, who had given it to her.

She picked up the palo last, hefting it in her right hand. In the light, a long way from the harsh Tehuantepec snow, the carving seemed cruder than it had amongst the tents of the Echraidhe. Aoife had made this, for her.

She put it down next to the knife.

All the gifts had been made for her; not bought in a bright hive of commerce in one quick afternoon, but crafted on cold winter nights by the light of tallow, or cut from the steaming bodies of animals while the sky rushed overhead. The wood had been seasoned, whittled, carved, polished, stained. The knife had been old when she received it: a comfortable, familiar friend to someone, given with love. Even the FN-17 was the product of personal sweat and effort by Sara Hiam.

These things were all she had. These things had kept her alive. She would never be able to repay the givers in full.

When Gerrel came in with soup and a dish of the rough gray-brown Ollfoss bread, Marghe was still staring at the things on her lap. Gerrel put the tray on the floor and cleared them away. “They smell,” she said, and tugged the coverlet, smoothing it. She laid the tray on Marghe’s lap. “Neat’s-foot and onion soup.”

It smelled like asparagus, and was almost clear, with a hint of brown that could have been the wooden bowl, or caramelized onion. Cheese, just beginning to melt, floated on top, It looked too hot to eat right away. Marghe picked up one of the small loaves.

“It’s best if you soak the bread, then scoop some cheese on,” Gerrel said.

Marghe tore off a piece of bread. “What’s neat’s-foot?”

“I knew you’d ask that.” Gerrel pulled two leaves from her pocket. They were the size of bay leaves, milky with pale green veins. “When you first pick them, they’re clear, like olla, and these bits”—she pointed to the veins—“are dark green. But if you don’t use them right away they go cloudy. Like this.”

Marghe was having a hard time with the stringy cheese.

“No, like this.” Gerrel broke off her own piece of bread, dipped it in the soup, twirled it expertly until it was wrapped in cheese, and popped it in her mouth.

“Ah. Like spaghetti.”

“What?”

Marghe explained about spaghetti. Gerrel listened carefully. “Gerrel, do you believe anything I tell you?” she asked suddenly.

Gerrel looked confused. “Why? Isn’t it true?”

Marghe suddenly wanted to cry. “Yes, it’s true. It’s all true.”

Later that afternoon, Marghe had a visitor.

She came in quietly, smiled, gestured to the end of Marghe’s bed with a raised eyebrow, and sat when Marghe nodded.

“I’m Thenike.” Her voice was textured, rich with harmonies.

Marghe dredged her memory. “Blood sister to Hilt.” Like Hilt, she was taller than average, though not by much. Her skin was darker than the sailor’s, and differently textured: close-pored. Her features were planed to bones and hollows and looked strong, like the exposed roots of a mature tree. Unlike Hilt’s, her hair was long, coiled up on her head, dark and glossy, like the wood of massive trees that were too dense to float: mahogany, teak, silkwood.

“Gerrel tells me you’re a viajera.”

Thenike smiled. “I bet that’s not all she’s told you.”

“True. Though she couldn’t tell me how I can repay your family for my care.”

Thenike said nothing for a while. “As you say, I’m a viajera. Your story would be worth a great deal to me. If you feel up to it, telling me how you came here would pay part of the debt to the family.”

“My story in exchange for all this?” Marghe gestured around her.

Thenike studied her. “Mine isn’t the only say. If it was, then, yes, it would be your story in exchange for all of this. It’s not always easy to give a story to a viajera.

But I do have some say, and if you give me what I need, then part of your debt will be discharged.”

“Who decides the rest?”

“The family. All of us. In this instance, because Leifin was the one who brought you, she will have a great deal to say. But back to your story. It won’t be easy, but if it’s done right, both of us will benefit, I think. Are you willing?”

This was a good opportunity to see firsthand the way a viajera worked. “Yes.”

“Then we’ll begin today.” She looked up at the shutters of the unglazed slits that passed as windows. “It’s stuffy in here. Outside, it’s cold, but sunny. Perhaps you would like to breathe some fresh air, see the sky?”

“Yes.” She would have to do better than just yes. She made an effort. “I’d like that.”

“I’ll find you some clothes.”

Thenike lifted the lamp off the trunk and rummaged for a while. “Here.” It was an enormous tent of a cloak. She pulled back Marghe’s covers. “Swing your legs out.

There. Yes. And I’ll help you with these.” Marghe recognized the fur leggings: her own, cleaned. “Now, put this on. Over your head. Put your arm over my shoulder, no, lean on me, and up.” And Marghe swayed onto her feet, draped in the felt cloak.

“How’s that? Can you try a step?”

Marghe nodded, and did. Her feet hurt ferociously. It must have shown on her face.

“It’ll hurt, but a few steps won’t do any harm. Time you were up and about.”

Marghe took another step, winced. “Lean on me,” Thenike said.

After being inside for so long, the sharp, clear air made Marghe cough, which hurt her feet even more. The sun shone—a thinner yellow and from a lighter blue sky, but it was sunshine and the world was still here. She stood and wheezed and not all the tears that she wiped from her cheeks were from her coughing.

“I’ve prepared a place for you, as you see.”

Thenike helped her sit on the pallet that waited on a sunlit patch of moss by the wall. Marghe leaned back, eyes closed, and soaked up the illusion of warmth. She knew Thenike was watching.

“Do you get a lot of sun here in Ollfoss during the winter?”

“This will be the first winter I’ve spent here for four years,” Thenike said, “and the last time it was nothing but cloud until the Moon of Aches.” Marghe opened her eyes to find Thenike smiling. “But, yes, all the other winters I’ve been here, the clouds unwind now and again, and the plants in our gardens and nurseries unfurl their bright new leaves, and we eat well. How is the winter where you come from?”

“I come from many different places.” So many.

“Whichever you choose. It’s in my mind that I’ll have seen none of them. Tell me what you wish.”

And Marghe told her of winters in Macau when the sky was the gray of an upturned fish pot and the air smelled to her six-year-old self of rice wine and sea, and carried with it the excitement of the casinos and the sharp fear-sweat of men gambling more than they could afford to lose. She told of the whiter hills of Portugal as she remembered them from the last time she had visited her father: the cold blue skies, the wind that slid through her clothes when she walked a goat path in the morning. She did not know what winter would be like at Port Central.

The sun disappeared behind a bank of cloud that looked as though it had been carved from slippery gray soapstone. Marghe watched, tired after so much talking.

“A suke sky,” Thenike said.

“Suke?”

“Like the belt sukes some of us wear.” Thenike reached under her cloak and pulled out a round disk, drilled through at the top and threaded with a thong. She untied it, handed it to Marghe. “My suke.”

It was half the size of Marghe’s palm and unpainted, smooth on the back, slightly rounded, carved on the front with a fish. The carving was clean-lined, stylized, well-executed. An emblem of some kind.

“You did this?”

“It was my mother’s.”

“She’s dead?”

Thenike smiled. “No. Her lover carved her another one, this time with two nerka instead of one.”

“Nerka?”

“This fish. Blue-backed fish that live at sea but come back to High Beaches every spring to spawn.” As if sensing Marghe’s fatigue, Thenike seemed happy to take over the talking duty. “Hilt and I were born in North Haven; that’s where she makes her home, when she’s not at sea. My home is everywhere.” She gestured around her.

”Ollfoss, North Haven, High Beaches, Pebble Fleet. Up the Ho and down the Sayesh, along the Huipil and on the banks of the Glass.“

“Sounds like you still like to stay on the water.”

“Yes. I have a skiff, the Nid-Nod. You know the nid-nod? It’s a silly bird that lives in the marshes out by the river Glass, and in the Trern Swamplands. She has long legs and a longer beak too heavy for her head, which she’s always lifting up and down to see what’s happening. The nid-nod, the story goes, is convinced that something good is happening somewhere close by and she’s missing it.”

Marghe smiled, remembering a number of people who acted that way.

The sun came out again and they enjoyed it quietly.

“Time to get you back in, I think.”

Marghe did not demur; she was tired. It hurt more to get back to her bed than it had leaving it. Thenike helped her onto the bed, but let her take off her own cloak and fold it. “I’ll come back tomorrow. Early if the sun’s shining.”

When Thenike was gone, Marghe realized she had not once mentioned Wales, or her mother. Or her mother’s death.

The next day the sun was shining; Thenike came while Marghe and Gerrel were sharing a breakfast of goura chunks and pulpy nitta seeds. “Ugly plant, the nitta,”

Gerrel had told Marghe, “all waxy pods and roots, and the seeds are hard to get. I don’t know why we bother with them, taste like wirrel droppings,” But Marghe liked them, and accepted Gerrel’s share.

“You should eat those,” Thenike observed in her rich voice, “they’re good for you.”

“You eat them if they’re so nice,” Gerrel said, unconcerned,

“Unfortunately, I don’t like them any more than you do.” She smiled. “But I value my health. If you don’t eat nitta, make sure you put extra gaver pepper in your soup, like I do,” Gerrel pulled a face. “Maybe it’s time for me to tell the story of Torren and the healer again.”

Gerrel sighed, and spooned some seeds from Marghe’s dish to her own. Thenike pretended not to notice. “No need to rush your food on my account,” she said to Marghe, “the sun will wait. It’s warmer than yesterday.”

When they were outside, Marghe looked at Thenike. “The story of Torren and the healer?”

Thenike smiled. “Torren was a young girl who thought she knew best and did not always eat her nitta seeds, or wear her cap in the middle of winter. One day she got sick and went to the healer. The healer turned her away, saying, why should she help Torren when Torren always refused to help herself?”

“So what happened?”

“It depends. Sometimes Torren repents, sometimes the healer relents, sometimes Torren dies.”

Marghe pondered that. “So viajeras teach. What else do they do?”

“Depends on the viajera. We witness agreements between kiths and communities; we judge disputes; sometimes we allot land to herders.”

“Land that you hold?”

“No. There’s a great deal of common land. When a family moves, or hits a burn, or simply splits into two, they need to use other land. Viajeras remember which land is in use, and which of that available land would be suitable for the family that’s asking for it. We remember. We remember which family might quarrel with which, and make sure they’re given the use of lands that don’t adjoin. We travel and tell news, we sing songs and spin stories; we lead pattern singings and deepsearch, we heal broken bones and old resentments, but mostly we remember.”

Marghe got the feeling that she was missing something, but had no idea what.

Thenike grinned. “But being a viajera is not all of who I am. I’m also a bad cook and a good sailor, and dangerous to meet over a game of knucklebones.” Marghe did not look satisfied, “Did you expect more? I’m not a sage or a holy woman. I have skills that I use as a viajera. Just as you have skills that you use as an anthropologist.” She said the word carefully, only having heard it once, the day before.“Everything I do can become part of that work, if I choose. Just as it can and does for you, if you choose.” She stared up at the sky, which was swirling like scum on top of a boiling pot, letting the sun through for brief moments. “If I wasn’t a viajera, didn’t have the skills of a viajera, I’d be someone different. A sailor, perhaps, like Hilt, leaving North Haven in the spring and only coming back in the autumn after crossing Silverfish Deeps as far as Eye of Ocean and back again.” She sounded wistful. “And you. What would you have chosen to do if you had not come here, to be an anthropologist?”

Marghe thought about that. “I don’t know.”

“What do you like to do? In the winter when you walked the hills in Portugal, or lay on your stomach on the roof watching the fisherfolk of Macau”—again the careful words, strange in her mouth—“what was it that you wished you had the time to do?”

“Explore,” Marghe said, surprised. “Go places I’d never seen before. Exciting places, where dragons might just be real.” She laughed, delighted at her discovery. “I always liked to follow paths, see where they went, who they led to. A map, a new world, a strange country—they’re all like puzzles where I have to put the pieces together to feel comfortable, to understand how things are. Once I understand, I feel too comfortable. Then it’s time to move on, find a new place, new people. New discoveries.”

“Always?”

“So far,” she said slowly, suddenly unwilling to go any further with this.

Thenike nodded. “And these places you go, the people you find, do you come to care for them? Or do you only study them, like strange shells you might find on the beach?”

Marghe forced a smile and waved the question aside. Like strange shells that you find on the beach… She did not want to think about it. “What kind of sky would you call this?”

“A chessel sky,” the viajera said. “If I was in my skiff, I’d be looking for a place to put in. We’ll see a bit of wind.”

“Chessel?”

“If you feel up to a little walk, I’ll show you.”

Marghe had to breathe deeply, steadily, and lean on Thenike as they walked the snow-dusted path to a building half-hidden under the trees. The sloping roof was covered in old snow, gone icy and gray, and the slit windows were shuttered from the inside. Unlike most of the other buildings of Ollfoss, much of it was underground.

The steps leading down to the sturdy-looking door were not steep, but Marghe took them one at a time, like a child.

Inside, it was cool and dim, full of barrels, slablike tables, sacks and stacks and huge clay jugs. She ran her hands over one: stoppered with a rough clay seal. Food storage. Thenike used a wooden pole, curved into a hook at the end, to lever open a couple of window shutters. There was a milky, sickly smell Marghe could not identify, and overlaying that, something thin and sharp.

“A chessel,” Thenike said, pointing.

It was a wooden cheese vat. Thenike leaned her pole up against a whitewashed wall and pulled off the gauzy cloth covering, sending a gust of sharp not-quite-cheese smell in Marghe’s direction. In the vat, the whey looked scummy, rancid, like the sky.

“This is where we make butter and cheese, and store what milk we don’t use on any day.” She slid the stone lid off a good-sized bowl. “Yeast. For the bread.” She slid it back. “Through here are the vegetables.” There were mounds of roots and tubers, leaves drying in bunches and bulbs hanging from the roof. Thenike reached into a barrel, pulled out a small, round fruit, sniffed it. “Soca. Here. Can you smell the spice? That means it’s not ready yet. We pick them at the end of the Moon of Shelters, leave them here in the dark until they’re ready. When they’re ready they smell terrible, like bad feet, but they taste like rain after a drought, like wind on a calm sea.”

To Marghe it seemed that the storage cellar was full with enough to feed a thousand people for a year, and it occurred to her that she had never really seen whole-food storage before. At Port Central, there was probably more protein, more vitamins, stored in a tenth this space, all in the form of concentrates, flash-frozen choice cuts, and prepeeled mixes.

The chessel sky was wrapped right around the sun by the time they emerged. A cold wind bowled snow dust along the paths, Marghe’s scars ached. She shivered.

Here she was in Ollfoss, the place she had been traveling toward for two years in order to… study the people like shells found on a beach. She was not sure she wanted to do that anymore. Suddenly she was not sure about anything anymore, and that was frightening. If she did not want to do what she had set out to do, then what did she want? Something had changed. Some part of her was gone.

“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 Estrade before 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.”