Nicola Griffith - Ammonite

The storm held its breath a moment and she heard Letitia laughing, whoops and rills and great ringing ululations, and when the lightning cracked again Marghe laughed too; they held each other with heads back, mouths wide and open from the throat down to the stomach, laughing and shaking with exultation.

The storm dropped to silence, leaving Marghe blinking and Lu Wai shouting up at them. “Get down! The wind will hit any minute.”

Marghe looked at Letitia; the engineer’s grin had stiffened to a muscle spasm and her eyes were rolled back in her head. Marghe heard the rattle and scramble of the Mirror climbing the scar. Without letting go of Letitia, she peered over the edge.

“Get her down. Please, Marghe, get her off there right now.”

Marghe took a slow, steady breath, “All right. I’m all right. Letitia’s… If you’re steady where you are, stay there. I’ll see if I can lower her over the edge.”

Lu Wai’s face was pale and indistinct. “Go as fast as you can.”

Marghe wrapped both arms around Letitia’s waist. The technician was stiff and unresponsive but still fizzing with silent laughter. “Letitia. Letitia, can you hear me?”

She tightened her grip and half lifted, half trundled her to the edge of the rock. She changed grip, holding Letitia under the arms, and closed her eyes. Breathed in through her nose, out through her mouth, in and out, harder now, deeper. In, out. In.

Out. She pumped strength around her body. She would pay for this later.

“Hurry, Marghe. Please.”

Marghe opened her eyes, then walked Letitia off the edge of the cliff, holding her up using the muscles in her legs and back and arms. She lowered her as fast as she dared; bending a little, going onto her knees, then down on her elbows until only her back and shoulders and arms held the technician’s weight. She lay on her stomach and hung Letitia down like a plumbline.

Lu Wai reached up and took the stiff woman by the hips. In the quiet, the Mirror’s grunt was loud as she steadied herself and the engineer. “I have her. Get yourself down. Fast.”

Marghe swung herself over the edge, hung for a moment, then dropped. The grass was dry and prickly, the yellow moss flower sharp smelling in the still air. She helped Lu Wai drag Letitia into the shelter between the crag and the sled.

The wind hit like a sledgehammer swung low and slow and easy, thudding into her ribs and roaring over her ears until all she could hear was air. A heavy plate of tree bark flew out of nowhere and smashed down onto the sled; the plastic storage bin burst open and the wind tore the packaged rations to shreds, whirled them away. Her traveling food.

Marghe did not dare move. The rock under her shoulder shuddered as boulders rolled and crashed against its other side. She hunched down into the warmth of bodies. Someone put an arm around her waist; she leaned her forehead against a shoulder. She no longer felt like an outsider. The boiling clouds brought rain that pattered, then drummed on the torn food wrappers.

Marghe woke to the distant thunk of a mallet. A wooden mallet. Her coverlet smelled comfortably of use and herbs, tempting her to stay in bed a while longer, resting the muscles she had overused the day before. Ude’s bed was empty. She looked around, wondering how late it was. The ceiling was low and domed; its longitudinal rib arched from the floor, over her head, and back down to the floor at the other end of the lodge. Lateral ribs of black wood were chinked with wattling and daub, decorated in earth tones. Morning seeped through the weave of the door hanging and filled the lodge with air and sunlight. She sat up. Sunlight.

She swung herself off the sleeping shelf and pushed aside the door hanging.

Beyond the trees, Jeep’s sky was Wedgwood blue. Sunshine poured into the valley, filling it with a light like rich yellow cream, sliding over her skin, turning the hair on her arms to gold wire. She just stood there, letting the sunshine push sweet, warm fingers into her aching muscles.

Under her bare feet the grass was cool and luscious with dew; still early, then. She could see no one, but the sound of mallets floated downstream like underwater knocking, and from one of the stone-walled barns near the bank she heard the soft hiss and thump, hiss and thump of threshing.

The edge of a cloud veiled the sun and shadow raced down one side of the valley, blurring the wide glitter of the Ho to a dull gleam, then running up the other side, Her feet were wet and cold. She turned to go back inside. And stopped.

Last night she had been exhausted, and the hot swirling torches of the women who escorted her and Ude to the lodge had only smeared the dark with red. She had noticed the roughness of the roof and walls but assumed it was thatching. She had been wrong. The outside of the lodge was alive with greenery. It looked like a small hill nestling amongst the trees. She reached out and touched a pale green leaf. Cool and silky. Another leaf fluttered as a beetle the size of her thumb skittered out of sight. A wirrel shrieked, then another. This time she did not jump.

Curious, she ducked inside the lodge to take another look at the central rib and the branching lateral spars. Branches. The structural skeleton was a skelter tree.

She dressed, then prowled the lodge, picking up the wooden bowls, polished with use, looking under the table, noting the way the underside was not planed but still rough with black bark, the leg joints fastened with wooden pegs. There was a knife on the table, its blade made of a smoky, vitreous substance: olla, named after the flowers that grew over the raw olla beds. She tested it against the hair on her arm. It was extremely sharp. The pitcher of water was made of red-glazed clay; the cutting slab was stone, like the pestle and mortar. A shelf ran around the lodge at waist height, piled with neatly folded clothes. She ran her hands over them, under them, between them. They were smooth and rough: cotton and canvas, leather and wool.

They were warm. Her knuckles bumped on buttons of horn and wood, caught in ties and laces—no cold shock of metal fasteners. The door bar slid back and forth on greased wooden blocks that were glued and pegged into place.

Marghe followed the winding path between lodges toward the river and, she hoped, Lu Wai and Letitia. She popped a memory chip from her wristcom, inserted another, touched RECORD, and continued her notes from the day before. “Holme Valley has a population of about four hundred women and children. Sometime in the next ten days this will swell by another hundred or so as the community north of here drives their herds down from the pastures to winter in the valley. The women of Singing Pastures and those of the valley form two distinct communities. They even use different calendars dictated by different moons: the valley people divide the year into fifteen months of eighteen days each; the women of the pastures reckon with a ten-month calendar, each month twenty-seven days long.”

She hit PAUSE. She wished she could spare the time to stay and observe the mingling of the different populations, watch how they interacted. It would be like being able to go back in time and observe the early symbiotic interactions between people from human history on Earth.

A wirrel shrieked. Marghe went very still. This was not Earth; this was Jeep, a planet of alien species, a place where the human template of dual sexes had been torn to shreds and thrown away. This was something new. She knew these people had evolved cultures resting on bases very different from those of any Earth people; she did not know whether that made these women human or something entirely Other.

She shook herself. The question, What was humanity? was as old as the species, one she never expected to answer. She resumed her walk through the trees, but more slowly, thinking and occasionally making notes.