Nicola Griffith - Ammonite

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.

Something moved.

She looked up, blinked, tried to focus. There, behind a tree. Sweet gods. It must be seven feet tall. Goth? Cyarnac? Had she come all this way just to get eaten by something like a huge teddy bear? I know a teddy bear, silver eyes and lots of hair, zipping ripping on the plain, kitting until we’re all slain … Maybe she was imagining it. Yes, she had imagined it. No such thing as giant teddy bears. She crawled on.

A woman stepped out from nowhere.

Marghe blinked again, waited for the mirage to disappear. When it did not, Marghe reached slowly, painfully for her knife. The woman’s taar skin boots and cap, the sling and palo on her belt, were all too familiar, even if the carved disk of bone at her belt was strange and her face was one Marghe had never seen before.

She would kill, the woman or herself, before being taken hostage again.

The woman stepped closer, but not within knife range.

“I am Leifin. Daughter of Jess and Bejuoen and Rolyn. Soestre to Kristen.”

“Where are you from?” Marghe’s voice was a whispery croak.

Leifin leaned forward, trying to catch what she said. “I am Leifin. There is no need for your knife.” She took another step forward. “How are you named, stranger? Who are you?”

Marghe thought about that. Who was she? She was not sure. “Where are you from?” she croaked again. The knife point glittered before her eyes.

“Where am I from?” Leifin gestured behind her. “Ollfoss. Three days’ walk away or more.”

The knife point wavered. Ollfoss. Ollfoss. Marghe fell on her face in the snow.

THE GYM’S NEON strips were too bright after the cool grays of Jeep’s winter light. Danner stripped out of her fatigues and into fencing whites. Time now, she thought, to lay aside the question of what trap to set for the spy in their midst, Kahn was already warming up, whipping her foil back and forth, shadow-lunging. Danner pulled a foil free of its holding field on the wall, tested it. She had been mulling over the spy problem for weeks now, getting nowhere. She clipped on her face guard.

Later.

Kahn waited, her en garde perfect but for a slight overextension. Danner studied her. That overextension had to be bait—but if she did not take it, she would never learn the lesson that Kahn obviously intended. She could take the blade in a bind, quarte to sixte; that should at least make her seem not wholly naive.

Neon swam down her blade, twitched as Kahn effortlessly cut over and landed the buttoned tip against Danner’s throat guard.

“The derobement,” Kahn said. “I’d like you to try it with a disengage, then lunge.”

This time it was Danner who assumed the slightly overextended en garde .

“You’re bending your wrist again.” Danner straightened it. “Better. Don’t lean forward so much.”

The world focused down to the two blades, her own steady, waiting, Kahn’s moving closer, reflecting light like the scales of a predatory pike. Danner moved.

Point under, feint, lunge. Kahn parried, beat aside Banner’s foil, bent her own blade against Danner’s chest.

They parted.

“Again.”

Kahn’s mesh mask glittered like the compound eye of an insect. Metal mask, metal foil. Metal.

Danner assumed the en garde mechanically, thoughts elsewhere.

Metal. If Company abandoned them, these foils would be useful, not as weapons but as trade. She extended her arm. The blades were steel, on these foils at least.

Some of the others were composites, some energy blades, some smart blades. Kahn was a traditionalist: learn the basics first, she had said, you can always adapt a sound technique. So they used steel-bladed foils with aluminum bell guards and brass pommels. Three different metals.

Kahn laid her foil alongside Danner’s. Danner started the automatic derobement.

All different kinds of metal: different trade values. And there were other metals available, like the chain-link of the fence.

Kahn beat aside her blade, thrust hard. “You’re not paying attention.” She feinted and thrust again, forcing Danner to parry and retreat. Then she came in with a corkscrewing motion. Double bind. Danner disengaged, managed to parry Kahn’s thrust to the low line, riposted. She was panting.

“Better.” Kahn drove her back.

The fence. It was important, but she could not concentrate with Kahn’s blade flashing. The fence. Metal. If they took it down, melted it…

Kahn’s button punched into Danner’s solar plexus. Kahn tapped her foot. “You need to—”

Danner held up her left hand, trying to get her breath. “Wait.” Kahn stepped back, head tilted to one side.

Danner transferred the foil to her left hand and used her right to pull off her mask.

“The fence,” she said. “That’s how we’ll do it. It’s perfect. And it’s metal.”

“So when we take down the perimeter fence,” Danner explained to Sara Hiam, who peered out from the tiny screen in Danner’s mod, “our spy, whoever she is, should find that worrying enough to call the Kurst . We’ll be listening—Sigrid up there, Letitia down here—we’ll catch her. Or them. And… well, it would just make me feel better if we took down that perimeter. There’s no history of violence from these natives; it simply serves to make us feel like we’re trapped inside, while they have the run of the entire planet. Makes good sense from a psychological point of view.”