Nicola Griffith - Ammonite

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.

Sometimes she helped Gerrel and Kenisi carry their family’s share of bread and soup to the kitchens in Ette’s house where the women would gather for lunch.

The weather improved, as did Marghe. Gerrel, seeing the improvement in both, took it upon herself to show Marghe the small family garden and teach her what needed to be done.

The sky was blue and clear, and an end-of-winter wind gusted from the treeline, filling her hair with the smell of snow and green. Marghe moved her tatty mat of what had once been taar skin a few feet along the furrow and knelt, glad to get the weight off her feet. Her sharp stone hand hoe cut easily into the first few inches, but she had to work to dig deeper. The hoe slipped; she added her three-fingered left hand to her right, bunched her muscles, and pushed.

The pressure made the scar tissue on her left hand ache. She shook her hand.

Such little things, fingers; she wondered if she would ever stop missing them, mourning them. At least she had her feet. And her life. She was still here to enjoy the cold, wet roughness of fresh-turned dirt and the sharp wind on her face. She would not dwell on her scars. She would not.