Ammonite (29 page)

“You taught me,” Gerrel said to Wenn, “and you, Kenisi, and you yourself, Leifin, you all taught me that actions lead to responsibility. Leifin found Marghe, saved her life. Marghe allowed her life to be saved. These two are, now, responsible to each other. How else could it be?”

Marghe slid her hand into her pocket in an automatic search for reassurance, and for the second time that day was shocked to find the pocket empty. The vial of FN-17 was still in the guest room, where she had laid it aside. She breathed deep, in and out, keeping her anxiety down. She was safe, safe. This was Ollfoss; these women were not Echraidhe. No one was going to pull a knife or hit her for no reason.

“Perhaps we can fulfill our responsibility another way,” Huellis ventured.

Kenisi sighed. “Marghe, Leifin brought you here. We acknowledge the responsibility to feed and shelter you until you are well enough to leave. Is this not enough?”

“I ask to join your family.”

“You haven’t been here long. Will it not wait?”

“No.” She had tried to explain, earlier, tried to tell them all how much she needed to belong, belong now, before the virus crept in and started to lever her away from life. Thenike, she knew, understood, and Gerrel would be happy to have a new sister. Leifin was on her side for reasons she neither understood nor trusted, but the others… They understood her danger, but not her fears.

The next question was inevitable.

Attention shifted around the circle, came to rest on Wenn. The old woman was blunt. “Why should we give you a place with us, a place in our hearts, when in two moons from now you could be dead?”

Because I’m afraid
, she wanted to say. Afraid that she had used up all her self-reliance surviving Tehuantepec, afraid that there was nothing left inside her but empty space. To face the virus, she needed to be able to put down one taproot, to be able to say,
There, it would matter to these people if I died
. She needed to know she belonged somewhere, that the virus would not simply sweep her up in a vast, dark undertow and carry her away forever, with no one to remember, no one to mourn. She needed and was afraid of needing, because if she was refused now, she might never get the chance to try again.

She sat helplessly, not knowing how to say any of it.

“We should admit Marghe formally into our family because she is already in our hearts.” All eyes turned to Leifin. “Already, Gerrel feels as though she has a sister to replace the soestre she lost—” Marghe looked at Gerrel; she had not known that.

Gerrel managed to grin and blush at the same time, “—and Thenike has someone to focus her teaching to stop her fretting while she’s trapped here for the winter.”

Thenike smiled faintly, but Marghe already knew her well enough to see that it was not a particularly friendly smile.

“There’s nothing to stop Marghe staying with us for the winter, earning her keep until she wants to leave in spring,” Wenn said irritably. “Longer, if necessary. And if she wants to ask again to join us in a year or two, then maybe we’d be more inclined to say yes.”

“I didn’t have to earn my keep first, nor Thenike,” Hilt said quietly.

“That was different. We knew your family.”

“No, you didn’t.” Thenike’s voice was soft.

“Well, we knew where to find them, anyway. What do we know about Marghe?”

Being talked about in the third person reminded Marghe of the Echraidhe Levarch assigning her to Aoife like so much baggage. She felt something hot and brittle move under her ribs, but did not know if it was anger or desperation.

She stood up. They looked at her. She felt horribly vulnerable. These women could accept her or reject her, and there was no professional facade to hide behind, no separate place to which she could retire and remain aloof. She looked at Thenike, who smiled, very slightly, and Gerrel, who was frowning. She cared for these people. Two of them, anyway.

Her voice shook. “I accept that my need does not equate to yours, but I ask nonetheless that I be taken in as one of your kith. I have nothing in the way of possessions, but I have my knowledge, which is varied, my limbs, which are strong and willing, and my heart, which is true. Will you take me?”

“I’ll accept you,” Thenike said immediately.

“And I.” Hilt.

“Me, too.” Gerrel.

But Wenn was shaking her head. “We don’t even know where you come from, Marghe, who your people are, nothing.”

“But we do.” Leifin again, sounding calm. “At least, we know she has powerful friends who have trata with Cassil in Holme Valley. These women won’t stay where they are forever; there’s not enough land there at their Port Central for them to grow food. When they move, we need to know what they might do, where they might go.

Who they might trade with. If Marghe becomes a part of our family, then it’s
us
trata families will come to in Ollfoss; they’ll know we have the ear of a powerful new kindred from the south. Think about it.”

Wenn looked thoughtful.

Marghe looked at Huellis, who was nursing Moss. Now she had an idea how the poor woman had felt: like a pawn in the greater game of trata. She remembered what Thenike had said—
She seems happy enough with it now—
and almost did not say anything. But she wanted to be accepted for herself, not for something she might not be able to provide. “I can’t negotiate trata with you on behalf of the women in Port Central. Asking to join you means I to no longer part of their… family.”

She sat down. Wenn’s thoughtful expression had not changed.

“Perhaps not,” Wenn said, “but we could learn a great deal from you.”

“And you’re strong and healthy. Or you will be; you heal fast enough,” Kenisi added.

Leifin’s words had done their work. Marghe looked at Gerrel, at Thenike and Thenike’s blood sister Hilt. At least they would be accepting her for the right reasons. Maybe Leifin liked her, as well as seeing her as a way for their family to spread its trata tentacles; and Wenn and the others did not exactly dislike her, they were just wary. She would have a family, of sorts. Perhaps love would come later.

Wenn was nodding now. “Yes, yes, this might work. I don’t see any reason why not. Huellis? Kenisi?” They both nodded. “Very well, then.”

One of Wenn’s knees cracked as she stood up. She held out her arms to Marghe, who scrambled to her feet. “Welcome, Marghe, daughter of…?”

“Acquila. And John,” she added, “my father.” They did not understand the word; there was no word for father in the Ollfoss dialect. She did not want to use the approximation
sire
, it did not mean the same thing at all.

“Daughter of Acquila and John, sister to…?”

“I have no sisters.”

”You do now,” Gerrel said, and leaned forward to lay a warm hand on her foot.

“Welcome, Marghe daughter of Acquila and John, to our hearth and home, to your sisters Gerrel and Thenike and Hilt”—they stood up, one by one, and surrounded her and Wenn—“and Leifin and Huellis, Moss and Otter, and Kenisi.”

She stretched out one gnarled hand and helped her partner stand. “And myself, Wenn.”

“Thank you,” was all Marghe could think to say.

“We will feed you, and clothe you, share everything that’s ours with you, without reservation, without condition. You in your turn must do the same. Will you do that?”

Marghe looked at Gerrel’s eager face, knew that behind her Thenike would be smiling. Family. Yes.

They ate together. Gerrel was full of herself, and Hilt told a story of her last voyage, but Marghe was too shy to say much. She huddled next to Thenike, who seemed to understand her need for quiet. She felt tired, and a little ill.

They were talking about her again. Gerrel leaned over and tugged her sleeve.

“You’re not a guest anymore,” she said, “which means you can’t really use the guest room. You’ll have to share. Do you want to share with me?”

Gerrel was pleasant to be with, for a little while, but Marghe simply did not have the energy to deal with her all the time. She tried to frame an answer.

Kenisi saved her the trouble. “Gerrel, Marghe’s not healed yet. She’ll need the peace and quiet of the guest room awhile longer.”

“But she could decide now whether or not she—”

“Gerrel, the poor woman’s almost falling on the floor with fatigue.”

“But—”

“Later.”

Thenike touched Marghe’s shoulders. “I’ll help you back to bed.”

Now that Marghe felt safe, or at least safer than she had felt before, she started to question Thenike in earnest: How had Ollfoss come to be? How long had it been settled? What about population fluctuations?

“There’s a map in Rathell’s house you might want to see.”

Rathell and her family lived in one of the bigger houses in the west of Ollfoss.

Rathell herself showed them into the great room. “There it is. When you’ve seen all you want to see, come and find me. I’ll probably be in the kitchen. We’ll share a pot of dap.”

The map hanging on the western wall was huge, perhaps four meters wide and three deep, and old. The paper was stiff, and close up Marghe could see where sections had been glued together. The inks, here and there brilliant blue or gold, were mostly faded to the color of old blood, brown on brown. From what Marghe could remember of the precise computer representations of the planet she had called up aboard
Estrade
, the map looked surprisingly accurate. It was crammed with tiny representations of villages, herd grounds, rivers, caves, and dangerous currents.

Significantly, each picture was labeled in tight, careful script. It was English, the variety that had been spoken three or four hundred years ago.

“You can read this?”

Thenike shrugged. “Where the writing is clear, yes. Look, here.” She pointed to a picture, a waterfall just inside the southern edge of the forest. “Ollfoss.”

“Can everybody read this?”

“Most people here, perhaps, yes. Not everyone wants to learn.”

“You did. Why?”

The viajera smiled. “I like to learn everything. How to sing olla, how to dye cloth, how to throw pots and chip stone. How to hum to a herd bird and skin a taar.

Everything.”

“So you didn’t learn to readjust so that you could understand this map, so that you had accurate directions?”

“No. All I have to do is ask.”

“What if you forget?”

Thenike’s eyes were very soft, light brown. They reflected the sepias and dark ivory of the map. “Viajeras don’t forget.”

Marghe thought back to Thenike telling her
We remember
and wondered if, somehow, the virus conferred extraordinary memory on those who called themselves viajeras. Thenike was watching her. “Are there other writings?” Marghe asked her.

Maybe there would be some kind of ship’s record, something that would say where these people had come from, and when. How it had been for them.

“Some. Not many. Paper doesn’t last as well as message stones or knots. Or as long as memory.”

“Are there any records from the beginning? From when your ancestors first came here?”

“What is it that you wish to know?”

“Many things.” Thenike was offering to tell her, from her memory, from the oral tradition. “But I want to also see the records. The records themselves are important to me, as important as the account they may contain. Are there any?”

“Rathell keeps many old things in here, handed down from mother to daughter.

She showed me, once…” Thenike moved over to a wooden chest, old enough to have had its corners rounded by time and polishing. “I don’t think she’ll mind.”

Inside were several bundles wrapped in cloth. Thenike opened one: it held a broken pot. She rewrapped it, unfolded another. “Is this what you’re looking for?”

Disks. But big ones, as big as her palm, cheerful with refracted color. They were like nothing she had ever seen before, except in old records. Useless. There was no way she could read these. Unless… Perhaps Letitia Dogias could do something with them, if their notoriously fragile information storage had not been long since destroyed. Disks. What a wealth of information there might be here. “Wrap them, put them back. I can’t read them. Perhaps, in time, someone who can will come and take a look.”

Thenike wrapped them carefully and laid them back in the chest. Marghe tried to set aside her disappointment and wandered back over to the map. South of Ollfoss there was a picture of standing stones. Anxiety hit her like a fist in her stomach. She breathed in and out. She was with family now. She looked at the map again. There were two or three communities near where she imagined Port Central to be. She pointed. “I didn’t know these were here.”

“They’re not. Burnstone moved them on a long, long time ago. They’re here now, at Three Trees and Cruath.” She pointed with a long brown finger. Her nail was glossy pink, and a long-ish scar ran from the thumb joint over the back of her hand.

Thenike seemed to be enjoying her interest, so Marghe examined the map more closely. She thought she could still detect a faint hint of blue in the picture of the waterfall at Ollfoss. Waterfall, foss. Ollfoss. “I haven’t seen the foss,” she said.

“It’s no longer here. Or, rather, we are no longer there. The soil was poor. When you’re well, I’ll show you the old valley and foss.”

And the way Thenike said it, something in the way she tilted her head and accented
when
to leave no possibility of
if
, Marghe knew that the viajera meant not only
after you have recovered from walking out of Tehuantepec
but
after you have
been sick with the virus, and have lived
. Thenike had said more than once that she, Marghe, must save all her energy, hoard it until the time came to face the virus.

Thenike, she had discovered, was as much of a healer as Kenisi: “All viajeras are healers,” she had told Marghe, “to some extent or other.” She had not explained further.

Marghe hobbled, then limped, along the paths that ran between the gardens of Ollfoss where women from different families worked, sweeping the dirt free of snow, breaking in the ground with hand hoes—preparing the huge communal plots for the snarly nitta and goura shoots, the squat soca bushes that were harvested and traded every summer in North Haven. She waved at those she recognized.