Ammonite

Chapter Fifteen

THE DAYS GREW warmer, and the nights soft. Marghe took turns with Thenike to tell the news to the new faces and old that gathered in the courtyard of the inn. Roth and her sailors said good-bye on the fourth day and left to sail east, to the Necklace Islands. Marghe did not know what happened to Juomo.

One hot day, their ninth in North Haven, Marghe and Thenike were in the kitchen getting cool water before Marghe resumed her drumming practice. Zabett found them.

“There’s a kinswoman come to see you. She’s in the courtyard.”

When they stepped back out into the heat of the courtyard, Leifin was sitting with one hand in the fountain, her two large hip packs by her feet, looking about. She was wearing a thin-strapped tunic and Marghe was shocked to see how much weight she had lost in so few days; the tendons in her neck stood out like cables. Leifin watched them as they approached, examining them first from one eye then the other.

Like a bird of prey.

“Leifin, what’s happened?”

“I was hunting,” Leifin said dismissively.

“What brings you here?”

“I’ve brought some trade goods, and a message.” She wiped her hand dry on her trews and opened the pouch at her belt, took out a message cord.“For you. I don’t think it’s good news.”

Marghe took it and read the knots one by one.

“What…” She read them again, carefully, feeling the knots one by one with her fingertips. Sweet gods. How could Danner be so stupid? And the news about Uaithne… Oh gods, please let it not be true.

“What will you do, sister?”

“I don’t know.” She handed the cord to Thenike. “Does that say what I think it says?”

Thenike read the message out loud. It did.

“Why’s Danner doing this, and what does T’orre Na mean by ‘at a time when she most need support against those who would seek to harm her’?” She paced. “I think Danner’s in trouble.”

“She will be, if she disregards trata,” Leifin said.

Marghe ignored her and continued pacing. “I think something must have happened to make Company react at last.” What, exactly, was relatively unimportant.

What mattered was that Danner was in trouble, and about to make it ten times worse for herself if she refused Cassil’s request. And Uaithne… Why didn’t the others, Aoife or the Levarch, stop her? She wiped her forehead. Damn this heat.

She had thought that, maybe, Aoife would see reason before Uaithne’s madness swallowed them all. She had hoped that her words had made sense to the fierce, dark tribeswoman, that Aoife would do something to control her soestre. Instead, it seemed the violence within Uaithne had ignited into a flame that was now sweeping across the northern continent.

“I have to go back to Port Central.”

Thenike looked troubled. “The journey’s long, and not easy.”

“Some of this is my fault: I made the trata agreement in the first place. It’s my fault that I didn’t make the importance of it sufficiently clear to Danner.”

“Perhaps.”

Marghe did not listen. “And it may well be that Uaithne’s madness might not have… That my presence there, feeding into that stupid, stupid myth… Thenike, I have to go. I might be able to do something.” She did not know what, but she had to try. She felt involved.

Thenike put her arm around Marghe’s shoulders. “Perhaps we could talk later,” she said to Leifin.

“Of course.” Leifin stood up. “When you’ve recovered from this bad news.”

“Speak to Zabett about a room. We’ll find you later, talk about how things go with the family, about your trade goods.”

“Yes.” Leifin shouldered her bag, turned to go.

Marghe forced herself to speak. “Leifin?” Leifin turned back, surprised. “I’m glad to see you.” And she was. Unfathomable motives or not, Leifin was kin.

Leifin nodded, and strode away.

They went back into the kitchen. It was too warm inside, but Marghe felt safer, more secure, indoors. Scathac was nowhere to be seen. They took their water to the table and sipped for a while without saying anything.

“I have to go, Thenike. Even if the family expects me to remain at Ollfoss. I’m responsible for what I set in motion.”

“Responsible, too, to your kin.”

”I know. But I have to do this.”

“If you feel you must, then you must. I’ll come with you.”

Marghe reached for Thenike’s hand. They were quiet for a moment.

“So,” Thenike said eventually. “How will you go to them? As Marguerite Taishan, the one who should have ‘done something,’ or as the viajera Marghe Amun, offering advice and mediation on a trata matter?”

Choose, Thenike was saying: choose who you are and where your loyalties lie.

Marghe held the suke that bumped gently against her chest. “How will we get there?”

Thenike seemed to accept the change of mood. “Find out who has a ship going south and is willing to go through the Mouth of the Grave, to High Beaches or Pebble Fleet.”

A picture of the Ollfoss map appeared in Marghe’s head, clear and sharp. She could remember every detail. We remember.

Thenike had said, viajeras remember. Marghe wondered if she would ever grow tired of this new memory.

“Which would be best?”

”A ship to Pebble Fleet would have to travel around the Horn, which would add time to the journey, but then it’s a comparatively short distance overland to Port Central. If we ship to High Beaches, then we can go up the Glass River part of the way… About twenty days’ travel, either way.“

Twenty days. And they would have to wait for a ship. Say a month. What might Danner do in a month?

Thenike was down at the docks, asking after ships south. Marghe stepped out into the sunshine of late morning. There was no breeze and it was already hot. Leifin and two other women were in the fountain courtyard, laughing, talking, drinking wine. Leifin was showing the two women her carvings. She had not noticed Marghe.

The carvings were beautiful. A set of three bowls that fitted together, one inside the other, so perfectly that they appeared to be one bowl instead of three. The wood gleamed softly; Marghe recognized it as the same block Leifin had been carving that morning in the great room when they had discussed her petition to join the family.

Next were two hand mirrors, the reflecting surface made of olla. The carving was breathtaking: natural-looking flowers twined around the glass, turned into grasses around the handle. The two women handled the wood carefully, but wistfully; it seemed Leifin was out of luck. They shook their heads and handed the bowls and mirror back. Leifin did not seem dismayed but fished out a large white hip pouch with beautifully worked and braided thongs. She handed it to the nearest woman.

Marghe edged closer to listen. Leifin, with her back turned, would not see her.

“It’s very soft. What is it?”

The other woman took it, fingered it. Leifin studied her with that bird-of-prey gaze, one eye then the other, “The bag of a male goth I trapped.”

Maighe went still. The scrotal sac of a goth. She remembered Thenike’s song, the stones that had been raised so many years ago. Leifin had been there for Thenike’s song. She knew what she had done.

Leifin took back the pouch, tipped some small white bones into her palm. “Goth knucklebones. Those big ones there are its thumbs. Two on each hand. Looks like they’d be strong creatures, doesn’t it? Like they’d be fearsome to hunt. But they’re not. Just like big taars. Docile. But cunning.” She glanced up, saw Marghe, and said, in explanation, “I’d heard how white their fur is, I wanted it. I really wanted that fur.

You can do a lot with good fur. You’ve seen what I can do. So I said to myself, how can I get the animal without damaging its fur? A trap, that’s how. A pit. It took me three days to dig it—I’d judged by their tracks that they were big, so the pit had to be good and deep. Then I had to make it invisible. I used stuff from the forest floor so after a while I couldn’t even tell where the pit was myself. Then I hid and waited. You have to be very patient when you’re trapping. It’s like carving.” She gestured to the bowls sitting on the edge of the fountain. “I waited for days, more days than I can remember. I ran out of food after three.”

That helped to explain the weight loss.

“It was dark when it finally came along the trail. It was big, big as a tree, and its eyes glowed in the dark. I think if it hadn’t been for its eyes, I wouldn’t have known it was there. It moved quietly as the coming of spring, pulling barkweed off the trees with enormous hands and stuffing it right in its mouth like it was feast bread.” Leifin nodded to herself, remembering. “Yes, it was very quiet, but I was quieter.”

Marghe imagined Leifin waiting, silent and still, patient. Methodical. She watched the women weigh the knuckles in their hands, roll the pale bones between their fingers. Only a few days ago, they had been part of a living, breathing being.

“It walked along the trail, unsuspecting, and fell right down the hole. It hooted and hooted. I’ve never heard anything like it. I don’t mind telling you, I got scared. I thought all its cousins and sisters and mothers and aunts were going to come running and snatch me up with their big hands and stuff me in their big, horny mouths, like barkweed. After a while, though, when nothing happened, it just shut up, so I crawled to the edge of the pit and looked down. It saw me, and hooted, softly, like it was asking a question. I just shook my head and tried to explain that I would take care of its fur better than he could, that I’d make it beautiful, that hundreds of women would admire it.” She looked at Marghe. “I told it that perhaps its fur would buy many useful things for my family. It didn’t understand, of course.”

Leifin broke off, watching the nearest woman hefting the bones thoughtfully.

“This is the first goth I know of that’s been trapped.” Killed, Marghe wanted to correct, killed, and wondered why she was still listening. But she felt compelled: she was a viajera, she had to bear witness to this. “Those bones are very rare. They might even have special healing properties.” But the woman just nodded, and did not yet seem disposed to bargain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“—and the skull is enormous.” Leifin held her hands about two feet apart. “I think I’ll lime it clean, carefully, then wax it. Beautiful. Someone will buy it. And the pelt…

it took me two days’ careful cutting just to get it off. The starvation helped, of course. It was virtually hanging off already. I’m going to take my time curing it. It’s the most fabulous—”

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

But would it do any good?

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

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

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

“Vine’s ship?”

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

“Will they take us on board?”

Thenike grinned. “Ships are pleased to have a viajera. Two is twice as good.

Being at sea can be boring. We’ll tell them stories and sing them songs and they’ll take us wherever we want to go out of sheer gratitude.”

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

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

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

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

The shore was a greenish-blue line of forest. That night, or the next day, they would swing out due east to find the safe channel through the Mouth of the Grave.

Open sea for a while. Marghe did not look forward to the prospect. She was used to large vessels of alloy and plastic, equipped with satellite navigation, and Nemora seemed too small, too frail.

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

“Big, isn’t it?” The accent was not one Marghe had heard before. Southern, perhaps. She turned to find a tall, broad-shouldered woman standing beside her.

“I’ve seen you with Thenike. You must be Marghe Amun. I’m Vine.”

She did look a little like Roth: same height and cap, and clinking with clay disks.

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

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

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

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

“That doesn’t sound too good.”

“It’s the safest ship in the world,” Vine said with confidence. “Look, here.” She pointed over the side at the overlapping planks; Marghe looked, too. “Clinker-built. I helped to choose the wood myself.” She straightened, scanned the ship again.

Marghe was beginning to get used to it. “What do you know about wood? Not much? Well, the first thing about building a ship is getting the right timber.

Depending what grain you use, how the wood is sawn, you can just about eliminate the effects of hogging. So for these lengths I chose wood that was quarter-sawn, so it warps against the hogging.”

Marghe nodded, understanding the principle if not the details.

“See this”—Vine pointed to the tiller, fixed to an enormous paddlelike rudder—“not many ships have these. They’re much better than those side-rigged thing’s you’ll see a lot of around here. You can only dock on one side of the boat if the rudder isn’t in the stern. The Nemora can dock anywhere. Steers better, too.

Mind you, that’s partly because we’ve got the artemon. Foresail,” she explained, for Marghe’s benefit. They went over to the mainmast, picking their way past what seemed to Marghe a jumble of ropes, strung in no particular order. “See these side stays and shrouds?” She was talking about the thick ropes running from the top of the mast to the decking. “Lots of ships don’t have these. Only backstays. But these shrouds mean we can take sideways pressure on the mast, too. We can tack. We don’t always have to have the wind right behind us.”

Marghe nodded. If Vine said so.

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

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

Marghe and Vine stood in companionable silence for a while.

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

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

“How long have you two known each other?”

“Long enough,” Vine said, without turning, but she smiled out at the horizon.

“Hasn’t she told you how she got that scar on her thumb, yet?”

“No.”

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

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

“I like the heat,” Marghe said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Thenike,” Marghe guessed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And then?” Marghe prompted.

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

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

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

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

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

“Which you are.”

“—which I am, to some. And I ended up inviting her to come to my room and play the harp. And four days later when we left to sail to the Necklace Islands, I asked her to come along. We sailed together for two years. As lovers, then friends.

Then Thenike decided it was time to move on, go where she could work properly as a viajera, where she was most needed, and we’ve seen each other only five times in the last twelve years.” She put down the rope she was working on and leaned over to hug Thenike. “It’s good to be sailing with you again, even if it’s only for a little while.” She released her, held her at arm’s length. “You’re looking good.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What are they doing?”

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

“Nine knots,” the sailor called.

“Good speed. And yesterday?”

“About the same.”

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

Marghe stroked her hair. Four days, then perhaps another six or seven to get to Port Central. Very good time. Something bright on the horizon caught her eye.

“There’s something out there.”

“Um,” Thenike said without opening her eyes.

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

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

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

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

The wind direction altered slightly, and the ribs splayed open like the fingers of a fan, turning the sail, stretching it tight enough to show for a moment the vascular system, like a filigree of tarnished silver among the amethyst and aquamarine, before it picked up speed and hissed through the water away from them.

The Nemora swung out of the deep channel onto a more westerly heading. The weather changed again, cooling a little, clouding over. By the time the shoreline lay on the horizon, the world had turned gray. Marghe was not looking forward to making landfall; it would be a long, hot walk to Port Central, and she was not sure Danner would welcome her opinion of the Mirror’s actions.

High Beaches was a forbidding place, all bleak, liver-colored cliffs and rocky promontories rearing from a choppy and restless sea. The Nemora weighed anchor, and Marghe and Thenike took the Nid-Nod in to a steeply sloping pebble beach. A woman with the same liver-colored eyes as the cliff rock met them. She was thin, with lank brown hair rising from a high widow’s peak and the kind of sallow complexion that made her look grimy. She introduced herself as Gabbro.

“The viajeras Marghe Amun and Thenike, sa?” Marghe nodded. “I’m to be your guide through the burnstone to the west,” she said, and set off up the beach in a ground-eating stride. “If we hurry, we can make a good start today.”

They did not follow her. “We can use the skiff,” Thenike called. Gabbro turned; reluctantly, Marghe thought. “The wind should be steady enough to take us upstream faster than we could walk. That is, if the spring rains were heavy enough.”

“Sa, sa. The river’s deep enough.”

“The skiff will save time,” Marghe said.

“Sa, sa.” Gabbro headed back down the beach toward the Nid-Nod.

“But we’ll need to eat before we set out.”

“We can eat on the way. The silverfish shoals are due before the end of the moon. I have to be back by then. Come, we’ll need ropes.”

After so long aboard ship, Marghe struggled to keep up on the sliding pebbles, and she was sure she would be sick of hearing sa, sa before dark, but she said nothing. This had been her own idea.

They were four days on the river Glass, four lazy days of trimming the sail, sitting at the tiller, and watching the banks go past. Marghe spent endless hours trying not to think about how she would persuade Danner to honor trata, concentrating instead on the variety of plants and animals they saw: nutches, knobby dark reptilian predators sunning themselves on stones; sleths, which Marghe at first mistook for bunches of reeds until one exploded into motion as a swarm of boatflies hummed past, catching half the cloud in its sticky fronds; pelmats, slow green amphibious things that crawled on the riverbed, and sometimes up onto the hull of the Nid-Nod.

In the evenings, they tied up on the bank and Gabbro caught fish for their supper.

Sometimes Thenike told a story.

Marghe hardly tasted the fish, barely listened to the stories. Her stomach felt full of rocks. The closer they came to Port Central, the more she lost herself in trying to find a solution to her problem: how to make Danner do the right thing. How? Danner would do as she thought best for her personnel. The difficulty lay in persuading the Mirror commander that honoring trata was the best thing, in the long term.

Marghe went over and over in her mind that original report on trata to Danner, searching for flaws. She found none. It was all there: long-term and short-term benefits. What more could she add? She had no idea, but she knew she had to try.

She just had to hope that presenting the arguments in person would carry more force. The queasy weight in her stomach told her otherwise. No. The problem was not in her arguments, her initial reasoning: something was happening that was forcing Danner into this decision. Something of which Marghe knew nothing. What? She could only assume some kind of Company threats. What had Sara Hiam said? That cruiser out there isn’t hanging around for the view. The Kurst ’s a military vessel…

Every time I wake up, I wonder, Is this going to be my last day?

Marghe picked absently at her fish. It was almost cold, but she did not notice.

What had changed to turn that ever-present threat into something more urgent, something that made Danner believe trata should take second place?

The only thing she knew of was the fact that she was no longer protected by the vaccine. But that would not precipitate Company action, not of and by itself. If the vaccine had been proven ineffective, maybe. But her message had been quite specific: she had chosen not to continue. As far as Company was concerned, that decision would only result in unpleasant consequences for her personally. It should not affect Company’s attitude toward Danner or Hiam. In the long term, Company would be philosophical and simply try the vaccine again with someone else. After all, it was not as though the damn thing did not work…

“Amu? Marghe?”

“Um?”

“That fish is beyond eating.”

Marghe looked at it. Thenike was right. She threw it onto the pile of leftovers that they would bury in the morning before they set sail again. Gabbro was toasting some gram roots in the embers. They smelled sweet. All of a sudden, Marghe was restless.

“I’m going to walk for a while,” she said, scrambling to her feet and brushing sand from her legs. She faced west, where the last bloody rags of sunset lay scattered on the tops of the distant hills.

“Do you want company?”

Marghe nodded. They walked in silence, occasionally stopping to skip stones on the river, or to listen to the steady, reassuring flow of the water. It was warm, and insects hummed and buzzed. The evening gradually seeped into Marghe, loosening her shoulders, straightening her back.

“That’s better,” Thenike said.

They walked farther, then Marghe stopped to watch the last of the dark red slide from the sky. Inky clouds swept across the sky, and the air stirred with a warm breeze from the nttls. “I have seen dawn and sunset on moors and windy hills,” she quoted quietly, “coming in solemn beauty like slow old tunes of Spain.” A viajera’s memory was good for remembering poetry.

They walked back hand in hand, and ate hot, charred gram roots with Gabbro.

On the fifth day, at the foot of the Yelland hills, they beached the boat.

“From here, we walk.”

Port Central lay southwest, but they had to detour through the Yelland hills, zigzagging northwest then southeast to avoid burn-stone and the possibility of triggering a burn that might smolder for a generation. It would add two or three days to their journey, Gabbro said.

Marghe walked behind Thenike, trying to imagine how it would be to feel the ground suddenly split between her feet, hot gases exploding, sending them tumbling into rocks; the eerie silence while they lay stunned, then the molten burnstone bubbling up through the turf, forming pools and sinks, setting the grass on fire…

The grass was brown from lack of rain, and the hot winds were scratchy with dust. There were no paths, and they had to clamber over outcroppings of needlestone that glittered under the dust and would cut their feet deeply if they slipped. The vegetation was grotesque, shaped by wind and aridity: thick and stunted, with enormous root systems.

On their second day in the hills, they met a band of seven olla shapers, and Weal, their headwoman, invited them to share a meal. Eager to eat something that was not fish or waybread or dried fruit, they accepted.

It was a seasonal camp; the shelters were simple corner posts supporting a roof of wide leaves. There were no walls, and the floors were beaten earth. But the cookfires were big, sunken pits, they had fresh vegetables and ten newly caught wirrels to offer, and a thin and bitter wine.

In return for their hospitality, the olla shapers got a story from Thenike about the nine riding soestre of Singing Pastures who had lived, loved, and died many years ago.

Firelight played on the women gathered around the cooking pit, reflected from rapt faces shiny with wirrel fat, and as Marghe listened to the ageless rhythms of the story, the repetition and ritual description, she knew a stranger looking at the listeners would be unable to tell her apart from the others.

The story was interrupted by the rustle and thump of a landing herd bird. Thenike fell silent as it waddled into the firecircle. It had a message cord around its leg. The viajeras and Gabbro politely looked away as the headwoman unwound the cord and read it: it could be private kin news, or trata business.

“Part of the message concerns the viajeras,” Weal said. “It is addressed to all in the north, and asks that if we meet you, we are to pass on the words of the viajera, T’orre Na. Thenike and Marghe Amun, greetings. Danner is heading north to Holme Valley and the pastures with sixty of her kith, and more following, to fight the tribes. I go with her.”

There was silence. One of the women coughed and the herd bird humphed and raised its crest.

“That’s all of the message?” Marghe asked.

”All concerning you.” Weal tucked the cord into her pocket, gesturing for Thenike to go on.

Thenike continued with the story, but Marghe no longer listened. What had happened to change Danner’s mind? Sixty Mirrors was a lot of firepower; she must intend serious fighting.

Later, when Marghe and Thenike were lying side by side, too hot for nightbags, Marghe was still wondering what had happened to involve Danner with the tribes. “I don’t understand any of this. But I want to find out.”

“Then we’ll head north in the morning.”

“Gabbro won’t like it.”

“No. But we don’t need Gabbro from here. I know the way to Singing Pastures.”

They were quiet for a long time. Just before she fell asleep, Marghe asked, “Were there really ever nine soestre?”

“Maybe there were, somewhere,” Thenike said, and Marghe knew she was smiling in the dark.