Ammonite (15 page)

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.