Ammonite (21 page)

She part jumped, part hauled herself up by the saddle horn until she lay belly-down across the mare’s back. She dragged her right leg over and was astride and upright. She swayed as the horse started its slow, plodding walk.

It was the wind that woke her, driving hard and cold into her left cheek from the north, from a sky the gray yellow of lentil scum, a sky full of snow.

The horse was stumbling and weaving; Marghe could feel it tremble and sag at each step. The wind died and the first flakes of snow wobbled down like moths.

Within minutes the wind was back, driving the flurry into a blizzard of ice blades.

She could think of nothing to do but force the horse on. Ice and snow whipped through fur and hair, past eyelashes and under fingernails, to reach places Marghe had thought long numb. The horse staggered, but righted itself.

Marghe tried to guess at how long the storm would last; at least a day, maybe two. She doubted she would survive it. It would take too much effort to stop her mount and climb down, so she simply allowed the horse to wander as best it could.

She felt very peaceful.

When the mare fell, she did so without warning, her front legs crumpling like scythed wheat. Marghe fell free and looked at the wreckage, then crawled over to touch the mare’s neck in apology; the horse was alive, but would not be getting up again.

The blizzard hissed around her. Her hands were so numb with cold that she could hardly feel the bone haft when she pulled out her knife; she had to hold her eyes to slits, and the snow gathered on her lashes made it impossible to see if she was grasping it properly. Spicules of ice clung to the mare’s mane; she stroked it, and sang. Singing seemed like a good idea. It was some wavering tune she remembered from her first childhood visit to a temple. She wanted the mare to hear something other than the blizzard before it died.

While she sang, she scraped a mound of snow up against the big vein that snaked along the thin neck. Then she showed the old mare her blade, smiled, and pushed the knife in.

The blood was impossibly red, pumping onto the white snow. The mare sighed and her eyes glazed as the moisture froze. The pumping blood slowed to a trickle.

Marghe cursed and scrambled to the saddle to get the empty locha skin. She held it up to the vein, but the container’s mouth was too narrow; the skin stayed flaccid, with only about a cupful of blood inside. Marghe scooped up a mouthful of bloodied snow. She held it on her tongue until it melted and warmed. It was sweet, metallic. She waited a little while before her next mouthful. It stayed down.

There was already a drift of snow gathering by the carcass. Not much time. She picked up the knife again and sawed at the dead mare’s belly. Her hands were clawed with cold and the knife was small. She kept dropping it. Again and again she picked it up and hacked. It was very messy, very tiring. She could hardly see. Now and again she stopped to rest, wipe the ice crystals from her eyes, and swallow another mouthful of bloody snow. By the time she was finished, her furs were slimed from cap to boots, but she had several slices of raw meat lying beside her in the snow. She opened her furs and dropped the red, slithery strips inside against her skin where her body heat would stop the meat from freezing.

The blood had given her a little energy, but there was still hard work to do. She shoveled at the snow, dragging great armfuls alongside and between the forelegs, then the hindlegs, of her dead mount. The saddle had to be cut free; she hauled it to lie halfway between the stiffening, outstretched legs. Then she pushed snow against legs, carcass, and saddle until a waist-high wall rose around her. Using her knife again, she made a great, three-sided cut in the mare’s hide. With all the subcutaneous fat gone, it was easy to shear the skin away from the internal membranes in one piece. It was more difficult to drag the flap of skin, about two feet square, over her head and pull its edges down to meet the snow wall.

The result was cramped and stifling, but a shelter of sorts. It was all she could do.

She huddled down around her precious cupful of blood and few tatters of meat, all that kept her from death, and breathed deep into her belly. There was nowhere to go from here.

Marghe’s feet were numb now and the blizzard still raged. She chewed on her last strip of meat, knowing that this one, like all the others, would not give her enough energy to keep warm.

The day wore on. With her snow mask pressed tight against nose and mouth, and her face pressed against the fur of her hood, she could hardly breathe. She could not get rid of the persistent image of herself as a blowfly egg, waiting to hatch into a maggot in the rotting flesh of the horse’s carcass.

The numbness in her feet crept to her knees. She was not sure if it was frostbite or a result of her restricted circulation, but moving would mean lifting the skin flap, and the wind would whip away all her hoarded warmth in a heartbeat. She was too weak to survive that. If the blizzard did not stop soon, she would grow weaker and weaker until her heart stopped.

She did not want to die. Even now, half suffocated and starving, with patches of skin dying on her face and hands, she refused to give up. This was not how her life was meant to end, frozen and stinking and alone, forever listed as missing, unless she turned up entombed in an iceberg drifting down the eastern coast between the mainland and the Necklace Islands. She refused to die.

Think.

There was a story her father had told her once, about the organic chemist who had been searching for the solution to the structure of a certain molecule and had fallen asleep and dreamed up the answer: the benzene ring. Her father had used the story to illustrate several of his annoying sayings, like
Where there’s a will there’s a
way
, and
Westerners teach their children how not to think
, and
Relax, let it come in
its own time
. Right now her hunger and fear were blotting out everything else. She needed a clear mind, a relaxed body; she needed to be still, and let it come. Perhaps there was a solution to all this, a solution as perfect, elegant, and obvious as the benzene ring.

Her hands were numb now, as well as her legs. When she unstoppered the locha skin, the tiny movement sent agony into all fingers except the third and fourth on her left hand. She drank the last mouthful of thick, clotted blood and then rubbed her hands as best she could inside her gloves. Feeling did not return to the two fingers.

Frostbite—a clear signal that parts of her body were now shutting down permanently.

Think or die.

But could death really be any worse than this pain in her back, pain from curling around a bottle of blood almost inside the belly of a dead horse? Might it not be preferable to feeling bits of herself die of frostbite, and rot? Death, whatever else it was, would surely be peaceful, not like this constant diamond hiss of cold, this endless grinding fear and pain and struggle. If she just gave up, gave in, who would know, and what difference did it make?

She did not have the answers.

Why was she trying so hard to stay alive? If she lived through this, she might not live through the virus. If she survived the virus, Company might blow the planet to pieces. Life was nothing but a series of fruitless struggles. A sudden memory of herself as a three-year-old dropped into her head like a screen menu. She was in the roof garden of their house in Macau, high above the sweet smells of rot and rice wine, squatting next to an old plastic pail in which she had placed a handful of earthworms. The worms wriggled and humped their way up the sides of the pail, slipping now and again, but persisting, getting closer and closer to the rim, and freedom. She watched them with the utter concentration of all three-year-olds. Every time one reached the top, she leaned over and carefully flicked it back down to the bottom. It was not cruelty that prompted her; she simply enjoyed watching things try. And those worms kept trying, blindly, stupidly, stubbornly, and eventually her three-year-old self got bored and tipped the pail up, and the worms slithered out and burrowed safely into the dirt.

Very well. She would try to wriggle out of the pail; there would be time to worry about the quality of the dirt afterward.

Her first deep breath triggered a coughing fit that wracked her body enough to momentarily crack open the frost-rimed skin flap, admitting a slice of air so cold her eyes streamed. She rubbed her face into the fur of her hood to dry them—ice would blind her. She was well-practiced; her second deep breath, then her third, triggered deep muscle relaxation.

The trick to meditation was to let the mind sit in a quiet soft place full of ease and warmth. Marghe imagined that she was curled up, not under a piece of skin covered in blood-smeared snow in the middle of a blizzard, but on the mauve and green rug that lay in front of her fireplace in Wales. She could smell the applewood logs burning; flames rubbed themselves lazily up against the soot-stained bricks, shimmering with distant hot worlds in yellows and reds. She stared into the flames a while to see what she could see.

Hours passed. Occasionally, she put on another log from the basket, or threw on a handful of salt and sugar and watched the flames burn lavender and spring green.

Then the basket was empty, only wood chips left, and the logs were burning down to embers. The embers dimmed.

She wanted to stay curled around the last remnants of warmth, try to sleep.
Get
up
, her inner voice said,
get up
, but she did not want to leave.
Get up
, said that voice again,
there are no ideas here. You must get up
.

Oh, but it was hard. The door from her familiar room led to a high flight of dank stone stairs. No railing. Each step seemed taller than the last, and the higher she climbed up out of her trance, the more slippery the stone became. It would be so easy to lean backward just that little bit too far and go tumbling down, back into the room that was still warm. She set her teeth and climbed, and gradually her legs became numb and she felt her fingers turning blue and cold and curling into claws.

All except two. Her ears hurt.

She woke to dark, sour quiet. Although she was too weak to move, her head was very clear. Meditation had produced no magic formula, no elegant solution to her problem. There was nothing more she could do. It was midwinter, the last day of the Moon of Knives here in the wild Echraidhe country of Tehuantepec, and the only thing left for her to do was to choose her way of dying. The warm room would be a good place in which to die. Perhaps she should go back there, put on the last of the wood chips and just fall asleep forever. There was nothing noble about dying a slow and painful death, surrounded by nothing but empty silence.

She took a slow, deep breath, let it out gently. Took another. Exhaled abruptly.

Silence?

When she breathed the next time, it was strong and deep, a breath that pumped her blood vigorously through those blood vessels that would still open, dragging with it oxygen, life. Her arms tingled with the effort of pushing up the snow-covered flap. She peered out. Snow and sky lay pearly white and quiet. The blizzard was over.

Moving sent pain shooting through her legs. There was no way she could stand up yet. She crawled out from underneath the flap; when she was halfway out, it cracked and broke. The light was blinding after so long in the dark. She had no idea what time of day it was. Late afternoon, maybe. On all fours, she looked around.

She began to laugh. She leaned back against the carcass and laughed at the sky, laughed until icy air tore into her lungs and set her coughing and she had to pull off her snow mask and smother her mouth with her hand. Even then, her shoulders shook.

To her left, looming dark on the horizon, lay the forest. Food, shelter, and firewood lay a couple of hours’ walk away. If she had gotten to this place just a little before the blizzard started, she would have seen. She would have smelled it, as she did now: an alien, green smell, the smell of strange trees unfurling in the dark, furtive and strong. Just two hours away. Half an hour on a horse. But her horse was dead and it was all she could do to sit without collapsing.

Hope gave her the strength that would have come from food, or warmth. The worm prepared to try one last time to wriggle up out of the pail. She pushed herself from sitting to kneeling, from kneeling to balancing on one foot and one knee. She had to lean against the carcass before she managed to drag the other foot up to join the first. She stood, and swayed, but did not fall over.

One step at a time, she told herself. However long it takes. She put one foot in front of the other. Not so bad. Then the other one. Look at me, she wanted to shout, look at me! It was like learning to walk all over again, with legs that did not belong to her. Her heart thumped soggily inside her ribs, but it did its job. She took another step and nearly fell over. Don’t think about it, it’s easier if you don’t think about it.

She opened her mouth and began to sing the first thing that came into her head: a nursery rhyme she had learned when she was five.
I know a teddy bear, blue eyes
and curly hair, roly-poly round the town, knocking all the people down
… She sang all the verses. The song faltered often and her legs trembled like reeds, but she refused to stop. The trees drew nearer. Or what looked like trees. What if an alien forest did not have nuts, or berries, or anything she could eat? Never mind that, just put one foot in front of the other, and sing.

Each step became a test of will. Eventually, she lost the struggle and fell over. She crawled. She had sung all the verses of the nursery rhyme. She began to make them up.
I know a dinosaur, green of eye and red of claw, romping stomping round the
town, having fun chowing down, I know a dinosaur
… Her world narrowed to the stretch of ground under her hands and knees, the eighteen inches she could see before her without lifting her head. Her voice wavered like a newborn’s while she crawled on, over roots and fallen tree debris, not seeing.