Ammonite (25 page)

She felt suddenly lonely. Two weeks would be a long time without Dogias’s irreverence—maybe three weeks if the weather got worse. Danner had ordered them to return immediately if there was any problem with communications; it was too dangerous to be out in this weather if they lost touch, or if their SLICs went down.

That made her think of Marghe: no SLIC, no communication, hundreds of miles to the north where the weather, according to Sigrid, was brutal.

She started to walk away from the perimeter. Half-dismantled, and deserted because of the weather, this part of Port Central already looked like a ruin.

Danner split her screen: Nyo on one side, Sara on the other. “Is it, or is it not, possible to move that damned satellite to pick up Marghe’s SLIC?”

“Well,” Nyo said, “we could move it, yes, but we might not be able to get it back.

And that would screw up what comm you’ve got down there.”

“The SLIC might not even be operational,” Sara pointed out.

Danner ignored that. “Let’s just assume that it is.”

“It really wouldn’t be wise at this point,” Sara said. “What would the
Kurst
think when they saw a satellite being moved? We can’t afford to do anything alarming, nothing that looks like change.”

Hiam was right. Danner would just have to forget Marghe, trust to the representative’s luck and toughness. And the vaccine. When Day got to Port Central, Danner could see if there had been any word through the viajeras on Marghe’s progress. Without Marghe to negotiate trade and friendship between Port Central and the natives, to gain a foothold on this world she would have to rely for now on the personal link between herself and Day, and the natives who had saved her life, Oriyest and Jink. And upon the more impersonal trata agreement between Cassil of Holme Valley and herself as commander of Port Central. And on hope.

Damn small things to base a life, many lives, on.

«
^
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MARGHE AND LEIFIN were three days traveling through Moanwood to Ollfoss.

Later, Marghe could not have said whether it was a year or no time at all. She remembered little: occasional fractured snapshots of trees that were not quite trees, whose roots were greater around than their crowns or which possessed no crowns at all; musty, sharp smells of small nesting animals; pain in her hands and feet and face. Most of all she remembered one day falling down on the snow-dusted floor of the forest and lying on her back, dizzy, while leaves, or what might have been leaves, whirled around her head. She had laughed aloud, but the forest swallowed her thin bright ribbon of laughter and she quieted as she realized it was she who was the alien here; that the dark and the green around her would remain unaffected by her, could not digest her if it tried. Like cellulose in the gut of a carnivore, she could not be assimilated. Alien.

The rest of the journey was a jumble: Leifin climbing on top of her, keeping her warm; soft wet stuff in her mouth that Leifin had already chewed for her; Leifin sneaking something from her pocket then shouting at her to stop, stop, and Marghe realizing she had Leifin’s hand between her teeth and her gums hurt, but refusing to let go until Leifin put the vial back into Marghe’s pocket.

She remembered nothing of arriving at Ollfoss. She had imagined how it might have been, since: stumbling out from under the dark canopy onto the blinding white snow; past the open-walled shelter that housed nothing but a small metal gong; along the snow-covered path that ran between the bathhouse, built over the hot spring, and the famous vegetable gardens of Ollfoss; on to the houses and outhouses and gathering places that looked like stone versions of the tents of the Echraidhe, with horizontal slit windows and wooden shutters under their eaves of sod, and careful stone channels running down the corners of the sloping roofs. Low houses, sturdy houses, built to survive snow and the rushing, runneling thaws of spring.

More days followed spent tossing in fever; shouting in hoarse Portuguese for someone to turn the lights on; trying hard to swallow soup and crying when she spilled it; feeling pain in her hands and feet and face. Being tied down. She remembered faces looming over her, serious or smiling, but all strange.

So gradually that she could not have pointed to one day in particular and said,
There, that was when I began to really recover
, Marghe realized that what she thought were restraints on her arms and legs were bandages of cloth and moss. Her spinning dreams steadied down to a world where certain faces reappeared again and again in connection with lifting her over to the fire, bathing her with warm water, feeding her, trimming the wick on the horn-shaded lamp that sat on the trunk by one whitewashed wall.

The face that appeared most often, the one accompanied by pain in her smeary fever dreams, was a dark, walnut-faced woman, Kenisi, who untied the cloth and removed the moss, rubbed something into the pain, replaced the wrappings with fresh moss and clean cloths. She was smaller, quicker than Borri, but she had the same eyes as the Echraidhe healer. Marghe tried to smile the first time she realized what Kenisi was doing, but split open her healing lip.

After a while she began to stay awake enough to sit up on the narrow bed she occupied, and to greet by name the other faces: Leifin, of course, the one with the shifting-sea eyes and the thin mouth, who often brought a knife and sat whittling wood; Hilt, a tall woman whose hair, just a fraction darker than the coffee color of her skin, was the shortest Marghe had yet seen on this world. Hilt was a sailor, from North Haven, in Ollfoss to visit her blood sister Thenike, a viajera.

As Marghe began visibly to gain strength, Kenisi allowed other visitors, women from neighboring families. Some, like Leifin, wore the cap, furs, and sling of the tribes; others, like Hilt, wore felt cloaks and knit caps; still others, a mix of homespun, pelts, and felt. Many wore jewelry: bright olla beads in strings around necks and wrists or dangling from wooden ear-cuffs, brooches carved and painted in strong colors. Some lived in Ollfoss; others were either living in Ollfoss for the short term or visiting kith or lovers for the winter. All were curious: here was a woman from somewhere totally other, who had survived the Echraidhe and won through Tehuantepec in the winter.

Marghe ignored all their questions. She found she could not think about the Echraidhe, the snow and ice, the way she had nearly let herself die. She still did not know why she had made herself struggle to survive, nor if she was glad she had.

Instead, she concentrated on her body. The next time Kenisi came to change the wrappings on her hands, rather than staring up into the thick rafters that sloped to a point over her head, Marghe asked some questions of her own.

The two crusty scabs where the two smallest fingers on her left hand should have been needed no explaining, but Kenisi pointed to the mottled finger on that hand, and the little finger, missing its nail, on her right. “This one, and this, should heal.” She let Marghe look, then rewrapped them carefully and started to unwind the cloth around Marghe’s head and ear. “There’ll be scars here—” a cool touch of her finger above the left eyebrow—“and here.” Where she touched just behind the ear, Marghe flinched. “Hurt?” Marghe nodded. Kenisi rubbed it gently with the ointment.

“You’ve lost part of that ear, too. Nothing your hair won’t hide.”

Marghe was grateful for the healer’s matter-of-fact tone. It gave her the courage to ask, “Is there anything else? My feet?”

Kenisi smiled, fissuring her face. “They’re a mess, but they’ll heal.” She stopped rubbing ointment into Marghe’s face. “Think we’ll leave these wrappings off for now, see how it goes,” she said, and started on Marghe’s feet.

Marghe was glad Kenisi had already told her they would heal: they reminded her of half-flayed baby seals, an unhealthy mix of purplish black skin and red raw flesh.

She turned away, glad, suddenly, that she had not been able to look into a mirror since she had woken.

Later that day, Leifin brought in a young girl with long, unbraided hair. They were both carrying food. Stewed fish, fruit, water: soft stuff. Marghe’s teeth still rocked in her gums. It would be a while before she was up to chewing meat or fibrous vegetables. Leifin introduced the girl. “Gerrel, daughter of my blood sister, Kristen.”

Gerrel, Marghe saw, was trying hard not to stare at her. Her face. She touched it gently. “What does it look like?”

“Like you ran into a tree,” Gerrel said. She appraised Marghe frankly, shook her head. “Like you ran into a tree twice.”

“Well, it could be worse.”

Gerrel’s expression said she doubted it. Marghe concentrated on eating the food while Leifin and Gerrel took out her pot and brought it back freshly scrubbed with snow and smelling of some aromatic.

After that, Gerrel often brought Marghe’s food by herself, and helped wash her down, or moved her to the fur-draped trunk against one wall while Kenisi and a woman called Ette laid fresh covers on the bed. When Marghe asked, Gerrel went to get lukewarm water and a cake of hard soap. While Gerrel washed her hair, Marghe tried to fill in some of the gaps in her knowledge.

“Who is Ette related to?”

“She’s from Kristen’s family.”

Marghe frowned, remembering. “Your mother and Leifin’s blood sister?”

Gerrel carefully teased out a tangle. “Kristen’s my blood mother.”

“But you don’t live with her?”

“No. Her family lives in the house with the two chimneys: her and Namri, Ellyr, Rathell, young Hamner, and baby Gin.”

Marghe shook her head; still uncertain about who belonged in what house.

“Careful. You’ll get water all over the place.”

“So who do you call your family?”

“There’s Wenn, she’s the oldest, and Kenisi, of course.”

“The healer.”

“She’s really a cook. She’s the one that makes most of what you eat. Bakes bread for other families, too. And during harvest, it’s always our family’s cookpot that everyone lines up at. You should see her festival cake!” She scooped Marghe’s soapy hair up in one hand, pulled the bowl of water closer. “Lean forward so I can rinse this off.”

Marghe did.

“Leifin and Huellis have baby soestre, Otter and Moss. Then there’s Thenike, who’s here right now but not often, because she’s always off viajering in that boat of hers, and her blood sister Hilt. This is the first time they’ve both been home together for ages. And then there’s me.”

“So why do you live here?”

“Thenike’s my choose-mother. Wenn said I should come and live here with Thenike’s family because she said I’d end up clashing with Kristen. Something like that, anyway. I’ve been here since I was an infant.”

Adoption, or fostering. “And who’s Thenike related to? Apart from Hilt.”

“I don’t know. But she’s been part of the family since before I have.”

Gerrel was a mine of information. Huellis, she said, was Leifin’s partner, but everyone knew that it hadn’t started because of love: Leifin had wooed her because of the bad trata agreement between their family and Huellis’s, years ago. Now that they were part of the same family, the trata agreement had to be renegotiated, and their family was richer than it had been. Huellis and Leifin seemed to like each other well enough now; at least, Huellis had stayed.

Gerrel was not afraid to ask her own questions. Marghe did not always answer them, but the girl seemed to accept that there were some things Marghe was not prepared to talk about.

Gerrel asked one question Marghe knew she would have to find an answer for, eventually: “Leifin rescued you and brought you here. The family’s caring for you.

How will you repay us?”

Two days later, on a morning when sunlight slid now and again through the window slits set up near the roof and made her want to be outside, Marghe was sitting up in bed and pondering that question. Across her knees lay several objects: the vial of FN-17, her fur mittens, her knife, her palo. All gifts from women she had barely known. All she had in the world.

She touched them one by one.

The vial was almost empty, and there was one less softgel than there had been.

She hoped that somehow, during her delirium, her subconscious body clock had told her when to take it. She was unsure how long she had been here, but it felt as though it was almost time to take another.

The mittens that had been tawny brown when Cassil first gave them to her were dark, crusty with blood and slime. They stank. Unless they could be cleaned along with the rest of her furs, wherever they were, she did not even have any clothes.

The knife, too, was stained; the hide wrappings around the haft looked splotched and diseased. The stone blade had a new chip she did not remember. That should be possible to grind out. She touched it gently with her fingertip. Cold. Rough. Like Shill and Holle, who had given it to her.

She picked up the palo last, hefting it in her right hand. In the light, a long way from the harsh Tehuantepec snow, the carving seemed cruder than it had amongst the tents of the Echraidhe. Aoife had made this, for her.

She put it down next to the knife.

All the gifts had been made for her; not bought in a bright hive of commerce in one quick afternoon, but crafted on cold winter nights by the light of tallow, or cut from the steaming bodies of animals while the sky rushed overhead. The wood had been seasoned, whittled, carved, polished, stained. The knife had been old when she received it: a comfortable, familiar friend to someone, given with love. Even the FN-17 was the product of personal sweat and effort by Sara Hiam.

These things were all she had. These things had kept her alive. She would never be able to repay the givers in full.

When Gerrel came in with soup and a dish of the rough gray-brown Ollfoss bread, Marghe was still staring at the things on her lap. Gerrel put the tray on the floor and cleared them away. “They smell,” she said, and tugged the coverlet, smoothing it. She laid the tray on Marghe’s lap. “Neat’s-foot and onion soup.”

It smelled like asparagus, and was almost clear, with a hint of brown that could have been the wooden bowl, or caramelized onion. Cheese, just beginning to melt, floated on top, It looked too hot to eat right away. Marghe picked up one of the small loaves.