Ammonite (37 page)

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

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

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

One evening, Thenike was sitting behind Marghe in the tub, rinsing Marghe’s hair.

It had been windy that day, and the hair was tangled.

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

“I am careful, but a knot is a knot.”

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

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

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

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

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

Thenike reached out and touched her hand. “I’ve watched you the last few days, winding up tighter and tighter, like a bow. Talk to me, and perhaps we can sort something out that does not rely upon cutting your beautiful hair.”

“I feel… trapped. No, that’s not the right word. It’s just that this place, Ollfoss, is so small. I see the same people, who talk about the same things. And every day I go into the garden, and I pull up the weeds from a different patch. And then I eat the same food. It’s… I want to know what’s happening in other places. Has my message got to Danner yet, and what does she think? How will Sara Hiam feel about me not testing the vaccine to the limit? And there’s so much I want to know. Here I am, stuck up here in the north—” She broke off, remembering that this was Thenike’s home.
And yours
.

Thenike merely gestured for her to go on.

“I’m here, in this small place, when there’s a whole world to see! The deserts and mountains, the swamplands and canyons. And the seas. Talking to you, before, while I was recovering from frostbite and exposure, before I got the virus, you made me realize who I really am, what it is that I like: new places, new people, discovering both, and how they influence each other. And since I realized that, all I’ve done is stay here, in one place. I need to be out there”—she waved her arm—“seeing a different horizon. I want to see old Ollfoss. The place where everything began, where all these different societies started. You’ve no idea how exciting that would be for me. To actually see the one place from which all this spread! I know, I know, there’s nothing there, probably, but I just want to
see
it. It’s history.” She wanted to go, taste the air, touch the dirt, imagine how it had felt for those people.

“And I haven’t even seen the forest. Not really. And soon I won’t be able to get out and about. I’ll be stuck here.”

Thenike was quiet awhile, seemingly absorbed in watching her hands slide through the water under the suds. Marghe wondered what she was thinking.

“Your message,” she said at last, “should be in Danner’s hands by now. How she feels, what she’s doing, how your other friends are, that I can’t tell you.” She looked up from the water. Marghe saw herself reflected in the dark brown eyes. “But I can help a little with the rest. How you feel sounds familiar. It’s spring, the season for wandering, for adventure. For love and danger and new things. Probably everyone here in Ollfoss feels it. But you feel it more keenly, because you’re becoming a viajera. I feel it, too. That’s why we
are
viajera. Journeywomen. We travel because it’s in our blood: to see new things, always. To find out why a thing is, but not always interested in the how.” She nodded. “Yes, I know how you feel. Perhaps it’s time for us to travel.”

To travel, to see new places, smell new air, see new skies…

But Thenike was not finished. “But you and I have a debt, to this family, to this place. Wenn and Leifin, and Gerrel and Huellis and Kenisi, took you in. You’ve yet to repay them. We’ll travel just a little, this summer, to North Haven, perhaps.”

“And old Ollfoss.”

“It’s on the way,” Thenike agreed. “We’ll go to old Ollfoss, and North Haven, then come back. We’ll bear our children here early next spring, and then we’ll see.

By then you’ll have brought in one harvest, and be well on the way to another.

You’ll have cooked and eaten and slept with the family for more than a year. You’ll belong. Then, when we leave, and come back now and again, they will welcome you not with grumbles, but with open arms and smiling faces, as they do me, because you’re part of them. Can you do this?”

Marghe looked at Thenike, at her planed face, the hollow by her collarbone where a soap bubble clung, the strand of brown-black hair stuck to her forehead. “Yes,”

she said, and cupped a hand over her belly, barely beginning to round. She already belonged.

The path through Moanwood was not too bad, even with their packs and heavy water bottles, until the second day, when Thenike stopped on the path—such as it was—and pointed east through the trees.

“Old Ollfoss is that way. Perhaps a day’s journey.”

The trees looked so thick that Marghe found it hard to imagine anyone had walked through them in a hundred years.

They took turns forcing a path. It was not like an earth forest; the trees seemed to grow in patches of the same species. Marghe saw what looked like broadened, rougher versions of the skelter tree, with precisely ordered branches and symmetrically placed blue-black leaves. Beyond that, there were trees that looked to Marghe as though they were upside down: roots more spread, and thicker, than the branches that sprang from the crown of a trunk whose girth increased with its height.

It reminded her of the baobab of Madagascar, but that had evolved in dry conditions. She picked her way over the treacherous root systems that threaded the forest floor like an enormous pit of maggots, forever frozen, and crunched through the dry mosslike growth that covered the roots and made them hard to see and even more dangerous. Perhaps the cold climate meant there was very little free moisture available.

After the shrieking wirrels and chia birds of Ollfoss, Marghe expected the noise under the canopy to be constant, but even to her enhanced hearing there was very little audible life under the trees.

“There’s always an abundance of life at the edges of places: where forest meets plain, where water meets land,” Thenike said. “Here, the animals are fewer, and more shy.” Marghe glanced around but saw nothing.

“There. On that tree. Halfway up the trunk.” Thenike pointed. “A whist.”

It was long, not much less than a meter, and shaped like one of the ropelike hangings that twined about the trees. Marghe could not tell which way up it should go.

“Touch it,” Thenike said, “if you can.”

It looked as though it might be slow-moving. Marghe inched cautiously toward it, taking care to make as little noise as possible. When she was two strides away, she lifted her arm to reach out.

The whist disappeared.

Marghe touched the trunk uncertainly. Thenike pointed. At the top of the tree hung a new rope, vibrating slowly.

“When I was a child, I spent hours trying to touch a whist, wondering what they’d feel like under my fingers. I never caught one. Never. I don’t know anyone else who has, either. They move too fast.”

Marghe wondered what their prey was, that they had to move so quickly. Or their predator.

They walked on. Marghe, paying more attention now, spotted a strange, scuttling thing that raised its head above the mosslike undergrowth for a moment, flicked its tongue once, and disappeared back to its dry, crackling world. Everywhere there were berries, in greens and earthy reds and bluish black, but all had a milky quality, like neat’s-foot once it was picked.

Toward dark, they stopped for a rest. “The moons will be almost full this evening,” Thenike said as Marghe handed her a handful of dried fruit. “Bright enough to keep walking, if you’ve the energy. Your choice: we could sleep in old Ollfoss tonight, if you like.”

They rested until the moons came up, then set off. After half an hour, the undergrowth began to thin, disappearing in patches here and there. Marghe could sense a breeze coming through the trees from somewhere ahead, and the sound of water, feint but definite.

The clearing, or what had been a clearing, was enormous. It was floored with dark green ting grass instead of the mosslike undergrowth, and the trees were few, scattered here and there. None looked very old. All seemed to have sprung up from the shells of ruined buildings. In the moonlight, the scene looked like an old woodcut washed with silver gilt.

“How long ago was this abandoned?” She fought the urge to whisper.

“Two hundred years ago. Perhaps more. Things grow slowly here.”

In the center of the clearing, the sound of rushing water was loud. Marghe turned her head this way and that, trying to pinpoint the direction. “Where is it?”

Thenike smiled. Her teeth and the whites of her eyes gleamed. In the moonlight, all in monochrome, she looked less like a woman than a creature of polished wood, heartwood exposed for a century and honed by wind and rain to a stylized shape, a symbol. “This way, Amun.”

They walked through the clearing and past a thin stand of trees, toward the sound of water.

“Menalden Pool.”

It was sleek and black in the moonlight. At the western end, water fell endlessly from rock that looked slippery and metaled. Moonlight gave the spray a ghostly quality, and Marghe half expected a nymph to step out from under the sheet of water, singing, wringing her hair.

“This way.” Thenike led her around the foss, to the quiet, northern edge of the pool, where a single tree with outspread branches like an enormous candelabra dipped its roots into the gently lapping water. The journeywoman seemed to look around for something. “Here.” She sat down on a flat rock slightly behind the tree, and to one side, patted it for Marghe to join her, Marghe did, and gasped.

The tree in front of her was alive with light reflected from the water. Light ran like electricity along the underside of its black glossy branches; the tree flickered and shimmered, like a menorah made of fiber optics, a dendrite flashing with nerve impulses. Like lightning.

“I found it the first time I traveled to Ollfoss from North Haven. I was very young. I stayed up half the night, watching it, half dreaming. Every time I make this journey I stop here.”

Marghe nodded, still lost in wonder.

“I think of it as my tree, my levin tree. You’re the first person I’ve ever shown it to.”

Marghe wrapped her arms around Thenike. “You give me so much.”

”I have something else for you.” She reached inside her tunic and untied the belt pouch. “Here.”

It was a suke, with a bas-relief carving on both sides: an ammonite.

“I drew it for Leifin. She carved it, I polished it and drilled the hole.” Marghe touched the silky raised carving. So much love. “Here’s a thong. For your waist or neck.”

Marghe threaded the braided leather through the hole.

“Do you want me to tie it?”

Marghe shook her head. “I’d like to just hold it awhile.”

They sat side by side, watching the water, listening to the soft thunder of the foss.

Marghe held the suke more tightly than she would have clutched a diamond.

“The pool’s named after the menalden that used to live here.” Thenike leaned forward and traced an outline in the sand with her finger. “A menalden. They’re dappled, like forest shadow.”

It looked like an awkward-legged deer, with a flat, rudderlike tail and splayed feet.

Menalden. Dappled deer. From
menald
, seventeenth-century dialect for “bitten,” or

“discolored,” or “dappled.”

Marghe’s heart thumped. How did she know that? She had no idea how she knew it, but she did, and suddenly she knew why the women of this world used ancient Greek words and Zapotec words and phrases from Gaelic, languages dead for hundreds of years. The words just came, and they fitted. Whether that particular knowledge of the menalden had lain in her unconscious for years, after a cursory leaf through a dictionary, and then been pulled up by some incredible feat of memory made possible by me actions of the virus, she was not certain. That explanation seemed easier to believe than the only other one she could come up with: that this might be some kind of race memory stirred by the virus, a memory of someone who had lived long ago and used such a dialect.

Marghe looked at the levin tree, and leaned against the warmth of Thenike’s shoulder.

“What is it, Amu?”

“Just as I thought I was beginning to know this world and understand it, it throws more magic at me.”

“What’s life without magic? Turn your magic into a song, share it with others.”

“You know I can’t sing.”

“A story, then.”

They found a ruined house with most of its roof still intact. Thenike fell asleep straightaway, but Marghe lay awake, thinking of moonlight and magic, and how she could tell a story about what she had just seen so that others would feel what she had felt.