Ammonite

Chapter Six

THE WINTER CAMP of the Echraidhe huddled under a fast-moving winter sky: fifty or more tents surrounding three animal pens and a thin, ice-rimed spring that ran fifteen yards before disappearing back into the ground beneath the snow. Blue-gray smoke, sharp with the smell of animal dung, trickled from several of the low black tents. One of the tents was much larger than the others. As they rode closer, Marghe could see the roofs sagging with snow. Winding from tent to tent, to stream and corral, paths had been worn through the snow to the mossy grass beneath. In places there was no moss, and Pella’s hooves rang on the iron-hard ground. A windswirl blew snow up off the ground into Marghe’s face.

Two of the pens were empty. A third held a handful of horses standing nose to tail at the far end near a trough that was beginning to scum over with ice. Their breath steamed. The wooden uprights and cross-planks looked dark and old but were fixed together with rope—a temporary structure, like everything else.

Behind an outlying tent, two children played a game with polished bones. Their heads were bare, hair matted and tangled, and one had some kind of rash on her face. Vitamin deficiency, Marghe thought. The ragtag collection of furs, leather, and felt they wore hid their shape and made it difficult to judge their age. When they saw the riders, one hooted with glee, scrambled up, and trotted alongside the Levarch’s stirrup; the other paused to pick up the bits of bone with a chapped hand before running off into the center of the camp, calling out their arrival. People began pushing aside tent flaps, blinking up at the riders. Greetings screeched through the cold air like the cries of hungry birds. Marghe found the sharp vowels and harsh consonants difficult.

The riders slowed to a walk. Their horses were soon surrounded by old women with brown eyes, smiling through their wrinkles; women holding babies and touching passing saddle leather and fur-clad thighs; girls calling up to the riders, grinning.

Many women pointed at her big horse, and children darted out of the crowd to touch her boots. After the silence of the plains, Marghe felt bewildered by the bright eyes and flashing red mouths. I am an anthropologist, she told herself, not a prize of war, and steadfastly returned their curiosity.

Every few feet, a rider reined in by a tent and was surrounded by a knot of family and friends who almost dragged her off her horse and inside. The further they went through the camp, the smaller their group became, until by the time they reached the big tent, the Levarch’s, Marghe, Aoife, Uaithne, and the Levarch herself were the only ones still mounted. Marghe followed Aoife’s lead and reined in Pella to let the Levarch and Uaithne approach the tent alone.

Six women—one very old, two adolescent—pushed through the flap to greet them. One of the young ones tied up the flap and the other took the reins from the Levarch and Uaithne when they dismounted. Marghe noticed that the girl smiled at the Levarch, but seemed afraid of Uaithne. That difference was mirrored in the greetings of the others: the old woman barely nodded at Uaithne, but her face split into splinters and cracks of welcome when she turned to the Levarch. Uaithne was not ignored, but Marghe could see how formally she was greeted. When she ducked inside the tent, none followed her. The Levarch was still outside, her arm around a woman her own age, grinning and clasping the outstretched hands of others. Marghe wondered why these women, especially the Levarch, shared a tent with someone they did not like.

Aoife sat her horse patiently. Marghe wondered how many times the tribeswoman had watched this ritual, and if anyone was waiting for her at her own tent.

Eventually the Levarch disentangled herself from her family.

Her boots crunched in the snow as she walked back to where they sat.

“Aoife, take the stranger woman to your yurti. I’ll argue you an extra taar from the herds to take the strain.”

Aoife bowed her head. “I will teach her, feed her, replace worn clothes.”

Marghe, alert to nuances, heard the ritual acceptance in the tribeswoman’s response. She had just been disposed of in some way, become Aoife’s responsibility.

“Levarch…”she began, but Aoife was already wheeling them both into a canter.

“Never address the Levarch unless she questions you.”

Marghe could not think of a suitable reply.

Aoife’s tent was set a little apart from the others and close by one of the empty pens. The tribeswoman gestured for her to dismount, then followed suit. No one pushed back the tent flap and smiled.

Aoife took off her gloves, began to unfasten the girths. She looked at Marghe.

Marghe pulled off her own gloves, stuck them through her belt, and began to untie her pack. It looked like most of her teaching was going to be by mime show. When she lifted the pack free, Aoife nodded at the tent. “In the yurti,” she said.

Like the others, this tent was low, made of black felt supported by two wooden poles along its long axis. Two other poles, smaller, set side by side’about six feet apart, supported an awning with its own entrance-flap; this was shoulder height, and laced closed.

Her hands were cold and the flap’s leather thongs were stiff with ice, and the fact that Aoife was watching made her feel clumsy and incapable, but Marghe managed to untie them. She pushed her head through uncertainly and found herself in a tented antechamber with one white wool wall of the inner tent before her and black felt on the other three sides. She had to stoop to get inside, and when the flap fell back into place it was dim. She could make out pots and sacks and other things stacked neatly along the walls. She wondered what they held; the air was acrid with some kind of chemical that made her nose run. There was nothing to wipe her nose on, so she sniffed. The felt and wool absorbed the sound and made the walls seem too close to her face for her to breathe. She dumped her pack down by the far wall and pushed back out into the hard cold.

Aoife had the saddle off her own horse and was loosening her pack. Marghe carefully rolled the flap up and tied it back out of the way with the thongs, as she had seen the young woman do at the Levarch’s tent. Aoife nodded curtly and turned her attention back to her horse.

Marghe was surprised and angry at Aoife’s lack of acknowledgment of her initiative. She jerked hard enough at Pella’s girth for the mare to whicker in protest.

Why was she so eager for Aoife’s approval? Because she was scared; because she already understood that this was no longer an exercise in anthropology and that she was no longer studying in the field, she was the field; because now this woman controlled her life.

They took their mounts to the corral by wrapping fingers deep into the manes and tugging the animals in the right direction. Marghe’s arms were still shaking.

The corral was now almost full of horses standing patiently while children looked at their feet, felt their legs, and curried muddy snow from their coats. One group of girls sat on the fence and watched, calling out to one of the grooms now and again, and three or four very young children dashed about, getting in everyone’s way. One ran by Aoife and Marghe, shrieking, her nose plugged with thick green snot. The air was wreathed with the mist of talk and hard work.

A young woman, about fourteen, saw them coming in and clambered down from the fence to meet them. Aoife relinquished her horse without a word, but Marghe found it hard to let go of Pella.

“Look after her,” Marghe said to the thin-faced girl. The girl frowned at her accent. “She feels the cold more than your horses.”

“She’ll be warm enough with all the others,” the girl said. She looked Pella up and down, mouth pursed. “Her coat’ll thicken up soon enough, and she looks a good size for foals. Bit old, though.” She wrapped the thin fingers of her right hand around a tuft of Pella’s mane, took a handful of the other horse’s mane in her left, and led them into the corral. There she released Pella with a slap on the rump and tended to Aoife’s mount first. Pella trotted into the herd as if she had never belonged anywhere else. The only way Marghe could pick her out at this distance was that the mare was a little longer in the leg, less shaggy in the coat. She wondered if she would be assimilated as easily into the Echraidhe.

Marghe expected the inside of the tent to be dark and oppressive. She was surprised. The light allowed in through the rolled-up entrance flap, already filtered through cloud and reflected back from snow, was further thinned and clarified by the white wool. The result was light like skimmed milk seeping into dark spaces and wetting to a glisten the deep colors of the tapestries that hung on the interior walls. It was a large tent, perhaps sixteen feet long inside, and every wall was covered in weaving of bold, geometric designs. The effect was warm and rich, with twilight purples and hot reds layered like sunsets over thick golds and greens. To Marghe, it was like cutting open the gray exterior of a geode to discover the jeweled crystal inside. She wondered if Aoife’s seamless exterior concealed any such surprises.

Aoife started unfastening her overfurs. Marghe shivered and stepped further in.

The floor was a mix of rough and smooth: coarse felt, worn cool and smooth in places, covered here and there with old furs. She stood on one of the furs, glad to get her feet warm, and looked about.

Where she stood, near a wooden tent pole, the roof was high enough that she did not have to stoop. Directly ahead, two pallets heaped with more furs lay to either side and slightly to the front of a hearth which looked as if it was heaped with dead ash. Two pallets, both used—Aoife did share with someone, then. Such a large space for two people, given the subsistence living of the Echraidhe. Behind the hearth stood a second tent pole. The space beyond that was taken up with several bowls and pots, some in use, some empty.

She shivered. It was cold enough to see her breath.

From the roof hung a bewildering assortment of mosses, a string of shells, semi-tanned leather, herbs, skeins of dyed and undyed wool, strips of drying meat, and bottles made of clay and leather. The smells were smoky, human, rich. Standing free by the right-hand wall was a loom with a wooden shuttle tucked into the half-finished weaving. She did not need to look closely to see the same geometric patterns that were repeated on the hangings.

Where the hangings did not cover the walls, the felt had been reinforced by thick strands of what looked like rope that arced down from the tent poles to the floor.

Marghe touched one. Horsehair. Sewn onto it were pouches, each a patchwork of leather, brightly dyed cloth, and felt. They bulged with odd shapes. Marghe could see that at regular intervals, where the walls met the floor, the tent had been pegged down from the outside.

Although she knew that the tent was designed to be dismantled and packed onto horseback in a matter of hours, the whole thing felt secure, lived in, permanent. But cold. She shivered again.

Aoife slung her overfurs across the foot of her pallet and stretched out with her eyes closed. “Fire needs building. Plenty of taar chips outside.”

Marghe waited for more, but Aoife did not open her eyes. She went back through the white wool hanging to get her boots. The foretent was well organized: sacks of grains and legumes stood against one wall, separated from some sealed clay pots by bits of wood. She poked the wood, picking up small pieces. Out here where there were no trees, wood meant wealth. Next to the wood was a neat pile of leather scraps; plumped on top were two tied sacks the size of her fist. She untied one and sniffed at the greenish gray powder. Her nose flooded and stung, her eyes ran. She tied it up again quickly and did not bother with the second.

Her shivering was now a constant shudder. She jammed her boots on and pushed through the outer flap.

She walked around the tent twice, flapping her arms to keep warm, without seeing anything that looked like taar chips. She looked out between the taar pen and the other tents, across the tundra. There might be satellites and orbital stations and a military cruiser wheeling across the sky, but this cold and lonely place, this wasteland, belonged to the Echraidhe. Holle had tried to tell her: Tehuantepec belonged to the wild tribes, to the ghosts of magical beasts. She had no place here.

And she had no idea what would happen to her now. Already this plain made her think in terms of things happening to her, not her acting. Tehuantepec could drain a person of everything but what it took to stay warm. She wanted to run, as far and as fast as she could.

One thing at a time, she told herself, one thing at a time. First, find these taar chips, then get a fire going and get warm. If she could stop shaking, she could think; if she could think, then she would get Aoife to tell her what the Echraidhe wanted of her, if she knew that, she could find a way out of here, somehow.

Walk, she told herself, walk and think. Keep body and mind ready. Every minute you have to spend here, spend it learning, stay supple-minded. She forced herself to look at the tent she was walking around. The forward poles were topped with leather caps; the rear support was left bare. Why, she asked herself roughly, think why. To let out smoke. And the tent pegs, what were they made of? Bone, sharpened bone.

It was getting dark. On her third circuit of the tent, she kicked something that rolled a little way through the snow. It looked like an olive-gray stone. She bent and picked it up. It was the size of a plover’s egg, smooth, hard. Frozen droppings. A taar chip. She sniffed it cautiously, but all she could smell was snow and the wet fur of her glove.

The taar chips were stacked in three snow-covered cairns against the left wall of the tent. She took off her gloves, squatted next to the nearest cairn, and tried to pry a few lumps loose, but it was like trying to tear apart concrete with her fingers. She needed something long and thin, a rod or a knife, to lever the lumps free. She thought for a moment, then began to feel through the snow at the base of the cairns.

She found it: a piece of bone a foot long, sharpened at one end. When she brushed away the snow, she found a leather sack.

Back inside, what had looked like ash turned out to be carefully banked and covered embers. She used the bone stick to hold a lump of dung over the embers long enough to partially thaw, then crumbled it to tiny slivers. She dropped a sliver into the embers. It kindled, a tiny blazing thread. She added another, and another, fanning the threads to busy tongues. Then she added two frozen lumps. They spat and hissed as they thawed, then gradually began to burn with a soft lavender flame that yellowed and filled the tent with a ripe, sweet smell. She sat back on her heels and added more, until there was a good-sized fire and her purple hands turned red and began to itch. She rubbed at them absently, enjoying the animal comfort of warmth. A good fire.

Aoife still appeared to be asleep.

She enjoyed the fire a little longer, then cleared her throat. “Why am I here?” It came out softer than she intended. Aoife did not stir. She tried again, louder. “Tell me why I’m here.”

Aoife opened her eyes. In the firelight they glimmered like the eyes of a beaten-bronze statue Marghe had once seen in a Macau temple. Shadow played over her broken face.

“You are here to learn to be Echraidhe.”

“I’m not Echraidhe. And I wish to leave.”

Aoife looked at her so long that Marghe wondered if she had gone to sleep with her eyes open. “You are Echraidhe,” she said again.

“I need to know why you have brought me here against my will.” She searched Aoife’s face for an expression she could understand. Aoife said nothing. “You can’t do this to me.” She took a deep breath, exhaled. Another. “It’s important that you understand. People will be looking for me.”

Aoife shrugged. “In winter, tracks fade and the cold stops even the closest of kin.”

“But my… kin… track by a means unknown to you. They and I are from another world. A place far away, in the sky, like… like the moons.” Even to her, it sounded ridiculous.

“You are Echraidhe,” Aoife said flatly.

She shook her head. “No. I’m not even from your world. I—”

Aoife, unfolding like a mantis, sat up, cracked Marghe across the face with her open hand, and was back on the pallet before Marghe understood what had happened. “You are Echraidhe. Never say differently, or you will be whipped.” She stood up. Marghe flinched. “Stay here. Wait for Borri.” She walked through the wool flap.

Marghe blinked, touched her hand to her stinging cheek. She had moved so fast.

Just like those miners on Beaver. Marghe breathed hard. This was not Beaver, and she would not let this happen. She surged to her feet and ripped open the hanging, but Aoife was gone, swallowed by the gathering dark.

She breathed harder, deliberately focusing her anger, husbanding it, trying to think. Aoife was gone; to hand was fuel for fire, and food and water; she had her FN-17. She could run, now. She pulled on her boots in the foretent, then came back in with her saddle pack. First she pulled down one of the bulging skins of locha, then grabbed food and the half-full sack of taar dung. She stuck her head out of the flap.

No one. She heaved the saddle up onto her left arm, supported it with her right, and ran to the horse corral.

It was guarded by two women. One, mounted, laid a hand on her knife. The other straightened from breaking the ice on the trough and folded her arms. They watched her in silence.

Marghe wanted to run at them, smash them out of the way, ride into the cold dark. But there were two of them. She stood there, feeling angry and stupid, weighed down by the saddle. The woman on horseback nudged her mount forward. Marghe turned around and began walking back to Aoife’s tent. The rider followed her all the way.

Marghe calmed herself with breathing and meditation. When Borri entered the tent, she was sitting peacefully by the fire, staring into the lavender and yellow flames.

“So, you’re the stranger.” Borri was taller than Aoife, and older, too, rangy under her furs. She untied a belt hung with tiny pouches and packets and dumped it on the bed.

“Marghe.”

“Marghe, then,” the woman acknowledged. “And I’m Borri.” She sat down, held big-wristed hands out to the fire. “Ah, that feels good. It’s a cold night and they ache from rubbing the phlegm from little Licha’s lungs.”

The talk unsettled Marghe. She had not realized how accustomed she had become to Aoife’s silent gestures. She wondered if she was supposed to do something for this woman, and if she would get beaten if she did not.

Borri was looking at her, head tilted to the side. Her eyes were gray and widely spaced. “I’ve got something for that cheek. It won’t soothe the pain much, but it should ease the bruise away quicker.”

“Thank you,” she said cautiously.

“We’ll need to heat some water.”

Borri filled a pot from one of the skins and showed Marghe how to settle it securely on the fire. “Aoife doesn’t mean to be cruel,” she said suddenly. “You mustn’t let her treat you as badly as she sometimes treats herself.”

Marghe was not quite sure how to respond to that. She wanted to grab this woman’s hand and shout, I don’t belong here, on this world! Instead, she asked,

“Where’s Aoife?”

“With the Levarch.”

Marghe wondered if it was anything to do with her. “Does she go there often?”

Borri nodded. “She’s Agelast.” Marghe looked blank. “Agelast. The next Levarch.”

Marghe searched her memory for the word. Agelast: one who does not laugh.

Marghe stood in her stirrups to scan the taar herd. In the distance, Fion lifted her palo stick and flicked it to full length, slicing the air horizontally in a question; Marghe raised her hand in an all’s well gesture. Overhead, clouds raced by in tatters and streamers, and for the first time since Holme Valley Marghe caught glimpses of hard, deep blue sky. A pensel sky, Borri called it, after the pensels the riders wore fluttering from their spears during bollo games in the spring. Sunlight glittered on the snow that had fallen fresh the day before. Here and there, piles of taar droppings glistened, dark and smooth against the white.

It was her fourth day at the winter camp, her second riding with the herd. While she rode, Fion always kept her in sight. Aoife had told her that the younger tribeswoman was not as good with the sling as she: if Marghe tried to escape, Fion would go for a chest shot, perhaps breaking ribs, or worse.

Marghe was careful not to make any sudden moves. In time, she reasoned, Aoife and the others would relax, just a little. A little was all she needed. Whenever she could, she replenished her saddle bag with food. When the opportunity came, she would be ready. Until then, she would be patient and win their trust.

Meanwhile, there were things here to be observed.

She hooked her leg over her saddle horn, pulled off her right glove, touched RECORD. “The Echraidhe number one hundred and eighty-three, and occupy fifty-four tents, or yurtu. Although age is difficult to judge, I guess that about thirty are under fifteen, twenty-eight or -nine over sixty—two of whom are or appear to be very old. More than half the rest are between about forty-five and sixty. There is some evidence that the yurtu hold many fewer people than they were originally built for. I believe their population is declining, and suspect that the absence of trata has led to diet deficiencies which—”

Movement caught her eye; she touched OFF, slid her foot back into the stirrup, and pulled her pony after the straggling taar.

“Haii!” She did not have the extra reach of a palo, so she had to lean half out of the saddle to whip the animal across the rump. It leapt nimbly to rejoin the herd. Fion gave her a thumbs-up and Marghe smiled to herself. That sign had traveled to this world all the way from ancient Rome. Human cultures kept the oddest gestures.

Many too, were lost: in the minimal gravity of space communities, people did not nod or shake their heads; it caused inner ear disturbances.

She wondered if she would ever see any of those communities again. Don’t think of the future, she told herself, stay in the here and now.

In the far distance a woman sat on a horse, watching. Uaithne. After a while, the rider wheeled away. Marghe was glad. Uaithne’s constant scrutiny was unnerving; she did not understand it. She went back to her report.

“The yurtu and their occupants form economic and social units, each laying claim to, and having use of, a variable number of taars and horses. As the Echraidhe subsist on these animals, such divisions of property are vital. They are kept and tended in a communal herd; I am not yet sure at what point individuals or families take responsibility.” Or whether the women watching the herds day and night guarded them from more than just her escape attempts.

They drove the taars back into camp in the late afternoon. They passed a young woman heading out, empty sacks flapping behind her saddle: dung-collection detail.

Fion helped Marghe pen the animals. Children waited to groom their mounts.

Finally Marghe edged sideways into the yurti with the saddle. Aoife was squatting on the floor, feeding the cookfire, one chip at a time. She looked up and nodded. Borri stood near the entrance, filling her medicine belt with pouches and bundles of herbs.

She smiled briefly at Marghe, and the deep frown line above her nose disappeared and reappeared.

“It’s little Kaitlin this time.” She tucked her single braid down under her overfur and pulled up the hood. “Don’t save food.”

Marghe laced the flap after her, for the warmth. The fire would give enough light.

“Kaitlin?” she asked over her shoulder. It was a kinship question, one of the few Aoife would answer.

“Mairu’s youngest. Licha’s soestre.”

Marghe nodded. Soestre: those children, two or sometimes—rarely—more, born at the same time to different mothers who shared the same yurti—though not all children born this way were named soestre. The concept held a special significance which she had not yet been able to unravel. Marghe wondered if it was linked to the fact that the tribe celebrated the anniversaries of their childrens’ conception, not birth. Some yurtu were organized around two or more soestre and their tent sisters, who might or might not be biologically related. Borri and Aoife were tent sisters but not soestre, nor, as far as Marghe could tell, otherwise related.

By the light of the fire she checked the saddle over for wear. Scooping a gobbet of grease from the jar by the hearth, she began to rub it into the leather. Aoife had some water bubbling and was dribbling it over shavings of dap into a clay bowl. One braid hung down her back, the other dangled in front of her, almost dipping into the bowl; the firelight picked out strands of silver, staining them to red gold. Her eyes were soft with concentration. While the drink steeped, she ground coarse grain into meal, her movements graceful and precise. When the dap was ready, she strained it through a cloth into two smaller, wooden bowls.

Aoife dropped a handful of meal into her bowl and stirred it with a finger. To that, she added a scoop of taar butter, then mixed the mess until it formed a doughy, greasy ball the size of her fist. She tweaked off a piece and chewed it.

Marghe set the saddle aside and wiped her hands down her thighs before reaching for the tea. She preferred to drink half her dap down, enjoying the earthy, fragrant warmth, before adding the grain and fat she needed to survive here in winter. She longed for fresh fruit, or vegetables.

Aoife pulled off another piece of dough, rolling it through her fingers into a small ball. “Soon,” she said, “my daughter Marac, and Scatha, the daughter of Aelle, will bring their beds to this yurti. You will become their tent mother, like Borri. Aelle stays choose-mother.”

Marghe did not know what to say. “How old are they?”

“At the Moon of New Grass, they celebrate their sixteenth life day.” She put the dough in her mouth, chewed, and swallowed.

Marghe sipped from her bowl. Sixteenth. She would be joint mother to two twelve-year-olds. She tried to think of the right thing to say. “Marac and Scatha are soestre?”

“No.” Aoife stared into the fire. “The old Levarch wanted kinship ties between my yurti and Aelle’s, to strengthen the tribe. Aelle and I are not soestre, not even tent sisters, but we tried.” She bowed her head. “We failed.”

Marghe put down her bowl, tried to work out what Aoife was telling her. “Soestre only come from soestre?” she asked slowly.

“No.”

“Usually from soestre, then.” Aoife nodded. “So soestre from tent sisters is rare.”

“It has been done.”

Marghe ignored the warning in Aoife’s voice. She leaned forward. “But the old Levarch was asking you to do an almost impossible thing, because you weren’t soestre?”

Aoife looked right at her. Brown eyes met brown, but Aoife’s were cold, igneous, compressed by years of hard living. “The Levarch asked, and we obeyed. It has been done.”

It was dark and cold. Marghe crouched in the snow behind the yurti, where the women usually relieved themselves, and lifted her wristcom closer. “So,” she whispered, “although at first I suspected these simultaneous births were the result of menstrual synchronicity of some kind, there’s obviously more to it. Perhaps, then, the term soestre has biological as well as social significance.”

So many people would give so much to understand how these women reproduced. A bitter smile cracked open her lip: she would trade the professional opportunity of a lifetime for an operational SLIC and the sight of Danner and a squad of Mirrors humming over the snow on their sleds.

Her mouth was bleeding. She wiped at it. Snow, crusted on her sleeve, broke open her lip in half-a-dozen other places. She had the foresight to take off her gloves before wiping at her tears.

Five of them ate around the fire. Aoife sat on her own pallet and Marac shared Borri’s. Scatha shared Marghe’s, and whenever either of them moved, it rustled.

Borri had shown her how to weave together the flat, dry ropes of horsehair and stuff the pallet with dried grass and scraps of felt. It was still new enough to be uncomfortable. Scatha and Marac would bring their own pallets, along with the rest of their belongings, from Aelle’s tent after the meal.

Marac was named after the small black knife of a healer, the marac dubh. Like her mother she was dark and slight, her eyes the same brown; she lifted fingers full of spice-yellow rice to her mouth with the same precision. Next to Aoife’s flinty strength, however, Marac was lighter, thinner, and her hair, untouched by silver, was pulled back from her face into a single braid. Marghe looked over at Aoife’s face, all hollow and muscle, and wondered if it had ever been as soft as her daughter’s, even before the scar. Aoife and Marac were identical twins, separated in looks only by time and circumstance. She thought about that for a while. Marac was no one’s soestre. But Mairu’s daughter Kaitlin looked nothing like a twin to her mother, and Kaitlin was soestre, to Licha. Being soestre must have something, somehow, to do with the alteration of genetic information passed from mother to daughter.

Aoife was looking at her. She returned her attention to her food.

Scatha lifted her bowl to Borri. “This is good.” Marac smiled shyly. “We’ll eat better here than with Aelle.” And Marghe was struck by the similarities between these two adolescents and herself at that age. She remembered a meal with her mother’s aunt, Great-aunt Phillipa; she had felt the way Marac did now, a little cautious, a little shy, on her best behavior, but not really ill at ease. These people were utterly human.

But what was human? Human was not just family dinners, human was also the Inquisitions of Philip, the extermination of the Mayans, the terrible Reconstruction of the Community. Human meant cruelty as well as love, human was protecting one’s own at the expense of others. Human also meant having the capacity to change.

Borri helped herself to another portion. She nodded at Marghe’s almost empty bowl, raising her eyebrows. Marghe shook her head.

“It’s not to your taste?”

“It was good, very tender. I’m not very hungry.”

Borri frowned. “Are you well?”

Marghe glanced at Aoife, considered. She did not have to tell it all. She pulled the FN-17 from her pocket. “Every ten days I take one of these. When I do, they take away my appetite for a while.”

“What are they for?” Marac asked.

Borri held out her hand. “May I see one?”

Marghe hesitated, then twisted open the vial and laid one of the softgels on the outstretched palm. Aoife watched Marghe intently.

“I’m not from here, the north,” Marghe said carefully. “I take these so that I don’t catch a virus, a sickness, from you.”

“Why did you come up here?” Scatha asked. “Where were you going?”

“I was going to Ollfoss. In Moanwood.”

Borri rolled the softgel around on her palm and nodded. “A bezoar. Prevention.

Just as we used to dose ourselves with ellum root when we went south to trade, to stop bowel rot.” She picked up the softgel, sniffed it.“What sickness is it you protect yourself from?”

“I don’t know what you call it. It takes forty to sixty days to develop and can start with a cough and itching eyes.”

“Followed by aches in the joints, sore gums, high fever?”

“Yes,” she said, surprised. “Sometimes.” She looked at Marac and Scatha, who were smiling. “Do you know what it is?”

Scatha laughed. “Baby fever!”

Marghe looked to Borri for confirmation, and the healer nodded. “It’s not common, but sometimes a baby is born early and two moons later comes down with fever. Rarely, they bleed from the nose or the eyes and then their hearts run away, beat themselves to exhaustion. If that happens, they die. Otherwise they cough a few days, and scream enough to try their mothers’ patience, but recover fast enough.”

She looked at the softgel thoughtfully. “I’ve never heard of a grown woman getting it. Not Echraidhe or Briogannon, not at Singing Pastures or Ollfoss.” Her eyes were very bright when they met Marghe’s. “Not even in far-away places across the Oboshi Desert or the Western Ocean.”

Scatha leaned forward. “Where are you from?”

Aoife stirred. “Marghe is Echraidhe now.” She held Scatha’s gaze, then Marac’s.

There were no more questions.

After the meal, Aoife and the two younger women left for Aelle’s tent. Borri stayed where she was, rolling the softgel absently between her fingers while Marghe banked the fire and collected the bowls to take outside and scrape clean in the snow.

“Put the bowls down,” the healer said mildly, “and come sit with me.”

Marghe settled cross-legged opposite her. The healer held the softgel up to the light.

“This is like nothing I know of. Here, take it back.” Marghe dropped it into the vial, stowed it away in her pocket. The healer watched her. “Marghe, where do you come from that you’re so afraid of baby fever, and Aoife is afraid to let you speak?”

Marghe said nothing.

“Don’t fear Aoife on account of me. What you say here is between us two.”

Marghe wondered if that was true. “What do you know of the world?” she asked eventually.

“Much,” Borri said dryly. “What is it you think I don’t but should?”

Marghe felt her cheeks go red. “I meant, what do you know of the physical shape of your world?”

“‘Your’ world?” Borri said thoughtfully. She leaned back a little, but Marghe saw the muscles around the healer’s eyes tighten.

She decided to trust Borri. “There are many; the moons in your sky are worlds, but nobody lives there. The world I come from is something like this one, but the people are different, and the diseases.”

“Have you told anyone else this?”

“Only Aoife. Will you tell me what’s wrong?”

“Listen to me.” She laid a hand on Marghe’s knee. “Aoife was right to protect you. You must never, never speak to anyone of what you’ve just told me. No one.”

The hand on Marghe’s knee was brown; a vein blue-snaked across it from below the base of the thumb. Marghe lifted her eyes from the hand to Borri’s face and could not keep the bitterness out of her voice. “Aoife protect me? Who from?”

A draft blew a spark from the fire. Borri sighed. “ Aoife’s, soestre. Uaithne.”

Aoife and Uaithne? “But I thought…” She thought Aoife had no family; she thought that, like her, Aoife was alone. But soestre usually lived together as family; as tent sisters, if not lovers.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Ask Aoife,” Borri said. “It’s not my story to tell.”

Aoife would never tell her, they both knew that. She tried another approach.

“Why would it be dangerous for me if Uaithne found out I’m from another world?”

“Not just dangerous for you. For all of us.” She glanced at the entrance flap, and Marghe hoped Aoife and the two younger women would be a long time at Aelle’s.

“Something happened to Uaithne a long time ago,” Borri said eventually. “It disturbed her mind. She believes she’s the Death Spirit returned. We have a story, an old story, about the goddess of death and how we came into this world.”

It was quiet and dark outside, with wind slow and steady from the northeast.

Marghe wondered what the stars would look like this far north: Jeep’s sun was one of a huge constellation. Beyond the clouds, the sky probably blazed. She wished she could see it.

She levered a few taar chips free and shoveled them into the sack. Aoife, Borri, Marac, and Scatha were inside rearranging the tent. She had volunteered to refill the sack; she did not want to be near Aoife at the moment, not until she had time to think over what Borri had said.

She touched RECORD. “The Echraidhe have a legend that clearly links the virus with their reproduction, and with their retention of languages and customs already dead a thousand years before they left Earth. They tell of a death world, a spirit world which contains all the peoples and monsters there ever were.” Marghe found herself adopting the same singsong cadence Borri had used. “In this spirit world, death is the goddess of all. Or almost all. Long ago, some of these spirit people renounced death: there must be more, they said. Yes, said the goddess, you shall find out. And she cast them forth. At length, they came to a place where the goddess in her normal guise could not follow, a place of strange beasts and too many moons.

“But in this place where the goddess was not, her spirit still lived, though sleeping, in the hearts of fully half the people, and in this place, her spirit awoke and claimed them in a great sickness. But the goddess is ever-merciful. To those who survived was given a miraculous gift: children. It is said that the spirit of these people lives on in their daughters, and their daughters’ daughters, so that all who come after may remember back to what once was, and what may be again. However, it is also said that the spirit of the goddess of death has come to live within all who survive, waiting. It is said that she will rise again in her chosen one, and that there will be an accounting.”

To Marghe, most of the story was clear enough. It was a fable of the original settlers’ journey from Earth and their arrival here, the place of strange beasts and too many moons. The goddess of death was, of course, the virus. According to the story, the virus somehow made it possible for the survivors to conceive children.

The memory references of the fable were not clear, though the allusions to a Chosen One were not too different from the kind of messiah myth found in scores of cultures.

What was unusual was that Uaithne, Aoife’s soestre, believed that the Death Spirit had returned within her. Borri had not told her how Uaithne had come to believe this, but apparently the tribeswoman was adamant, saying she was only waiting for a message. Borri, like Aoife, believed that if Marghe let it be known she was from another world, Uaithne might think she was the messenger. And nobody knew what Uaithne would do then.

Thick indigo clouds moved overhead like a school of whales.

Borri and Aoife had both told her: stay quiet. For their own sakes, or hers? Was this something she might turn to her advantage? And did they know Uaithne was already watching her?

She sat back on her heels and watched the sky. It matched her mood: slow-moving, benthic. What had happened between Uaithne and Aoife, the two soestre? She needed to know.

Over the next few days, Marghe watched Aoife. In a tribe where women prided themselves on self-sufficiency, Aoife was more alone than any. She was liked and respected, she was Agelast, but Marghe never saw her smile, never saw her reach out and pat someone’s hand while they talked, or lean her head on another’s shoulder. None shared her bed. Even the Levarch and her family, Borri, and her own daughters, Marac and Scatha, were kept outside, unable to reach through her solitude.

Out on the plains with Marghe, Aoife seemed content. Marghe understood that, too. Grief was not a spectator sport. After her mother had died, she had spent hours roaming the Welsh hillsides, her only company the sheep that still lambed on the bleak hills in spring. But Aoife’s was a constant grief, a wound that could not heal: Uaithne was still alive.

Once, when they were alone with the herd and the wind, Marghe cut out a limping taar from the rest and dismounted to check its hooves. Aoife reined in and joined her. Marghe lifted the beast’s forefoot to look at the tender spot.

“Tell me why he’s limping,” the tribeswoman said.

“I think it must have been ice. Gone now.” She let go of the leg and slapped the taar on the rump. Aoife nodded approval and then went to her saddle pack and took out a palo. She held it out to Marghe.

“You know enough to have this.”

Marghe hefted it in her hand. It was as long as her forearm and thick as a spear shaft, made of polished hardwood. Near one end was a carving of a horse. Not a shaggy Echraidhe mount: Pella.

“You made this for me?”

Aoife said nothing. Marghe flicked it experimentally; it snapped into a slender pole almost two meters long. Another flick of her wrist telescoped it back in on itself. She did not know what to say. Wood was precious, but it was not only that: Aoife had made this, carved it, polished and stained it in secret. For her.

Aoife held out her hand for it, showed Marghe the tiny leather strap at the end.

“This is to secure it for traveling.”

Marghe did so, then fastened it to her belt. It hung to mid-thigh. She ran her finger down the carefully stained wood. “Aoife, thank you.” But Aoife was already swinging back into her saddle.

On their way back that afternoon, they saw a figure galloping away into the stretching white at a furious pace. Aoife bowed her head, as at some old hurt, and Marghe knew it must be Uaithne.

“Where does she go at such a pace?”

Aoife turned her face away as if she had not heard.