Ammonite

by Nicola Griffith

  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 wassoestre, 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. “ Aoifeprotect me? Who from?”

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

  Chapter Seven

  EACH DAWN BRIGHTENED later and later. Aoife started taking Marghe far out onto the plains, past the grazing grounds, beyond the sight of smoke from the fires. They used their palos to clear away patches of the hard‑packed snow and the tribeswoman showed Marghe a world she had never dreamed existed. A world of frozen ice moss, of fist‑sized scuttlers called ruks, of the snow worm. She learned how to catch the worm, how to bite off the tail and drink down the viscous, sugary fluid until all that was left was an empty, flaccid skin, like a lace. That could be toasted and eaten, or used like a leather thong. They ate ruks, too, but these Aoife had to catch. Marghe, though she was learning to use a sling, was hopelessly slow compared to the hard‑shelled snow crabs. Perhaps because they did always defeat her, she disliked the taste: the flesh was greasy, acrid enough to bring tears to her eyes. Aoife made her eat it because it was good for her bones. Marghe, remembering the vow she made herself to stay as fit as she could, complied.

  Sometimes they just rode, eyepits stained dark against the snow glare, while Aoife told stories of Tehuantepec before the coming of the tribe. Tehuantepec, she said, had long ago been a plain waving with grass, peopled by dark spirits. Marghe wondered about climatic change. On cold nights, Aoife continued, when these spirits still roamed, they might trick an unwary rider from her horse, then eat her, or the horse.

  Marghe asked about the stones.

  “They have always been,” Aoife said, shrugging. “They were there before we came, will be there long after the plain has
returned to a sea of grass.” Every year, she said, they went there to feel the magic, to thank the spirits that sang every spring and made the grass grow and the taars quicken. The spirits in the stones sang all year. Listening, Marghe remembered their electromagnetic hum.

  Sometimes Aoife told stories of tribal honor, of raids on the Briogannon, another tribe who dwelt on the plain; of raids on the herds of Singing Pastures and, in times past, on the forest gardens of Ollfoss.

  “But why not just make trata with other communities?” Marghe kept wanting to know. “You’d both benefit.” She had seen how small their population was. They needed trade, cultural diversity. Genetic diversity, too, though she did not know how that worked. Without the taking of strangers like herself, they might die out. They might die out anyway.

  “Echraidhe do not stoop to trata.”

  “Why not?”

  “We take what we need, not bargain like farmers,” Aoife would say. “The old ways work well enough.”

  “Old ways are not always the best ways.”

  And Aoife would shrug and fall silent. Moments later, she would begin an instructional tale about the Echraidhe code of tribe before self. In such a hostile environment such a code was necessary for survival, Marghe knew; she had encountered it on the harsh world of Gallipoli, in old Scottish clan ties of Earth. She wondered what needs Aoife subjugated for the good of the tribe. She found the complexities of such an honor code hard to sympathize with. Aoife was always patient. “Selfishness is for younglings,” she would say.

  Sometimes, when even Aoife admitted the weather was bad, they would sit in the yurti. Marghe held the wool for Aoife while she wove, or helped her mix with water the acrid powder that was stored in the foretent: Aoife told her it was made from the dried leaves of corax, a black, leathery succulent found in the northern forests in summer. It made a powerful bleaching agent.

  Marghe listened carefully to anything Aoife told her, not knowing what might prove useful later. Despite the fact that Aoife was partly responsible for her capture, for her remaining a virtual prisoner, Marghe watched the tribeswoman enjoy having her there to teach, and felt unhappy; she knew she would be prepared to do this woman injury, if necessary, to escape. At these moments, she would take a deep breath, put aside the confusing thoughts, and help Aoife smear the bleach paste onto raw wool with a bone spatula.