Nicola Griffith - Ammonite

Marghe went very still. “What will you hunt?”

“Oh, queen daggerhorn, wild taars. Whatever’s there.”

“Not goth?”

Leifin laughed. “Goth? They only walk through old stories. Not in Moanwood.”

She turned to the rest of the family. “Have any of you ever seen a goth?”

“I have,” Marghe said steadily. “And you were hunting it.”

“And when was that?”

“When you found me. At the edge of the forest.”

Leifin smiled. “Marghe, you were more than half delirious. You were crawling, crawling mind, in circles. Your eyes were sunken, more than half gummed together with the same blood and mucus that slimed your furs.” She laughed, looked at the rest of the family, drawing them in. Gerrel, Marghe was pleased to note, scowled.

Thenike was expressionless. The others smiled. “You drew a knife on me, do you remember, Marghe? Thought I was an Echraidhe. Now, if you could think that one Ollfoss woman on foot was a mounted savage, you could have mistaken a tree for a goth, or a chia bird for a… dragon.”

“It was a goth.”

“If you say so. Though, even supposing for just a moment that you’re right, what’s wrong with that?”

Leifin must know as well as she did what was wrong with hunting goth, Marghe thought, but Gerrel spoke before she could frame an answer.

“You hunt too much!” she burst out. “And we don’t need any more meat. We’ve plenty of furs. I think you just—”

“There’re never enough furs for trade up in North Haven,” Leifin contradicted gently.

“But…” Gerrel trailed off in frustration. Marghe sympathized. Leifin made it all sound so reasonable.

Thenike stretched and looked up and down the table. “I think tonight would be a good time for a song.”

“Sing the one about how the rivers first decided to run to the sea,” Gerrel said instantly.

“I’ve a mind to sing something special,” Thenike said, and looked at Marghe with an indecipherable expression. “I’ll need my drums.” Her skirts swirled as she stood, and Marghe caught the warm, musky smell of her skin mixed with the sharper, sweeter scent of the herb sachets Kenisi made for the family to lay in with their clothes. The door closed quietly behind her.

The family waited, listening to the crackle of the fire, sipping their wine.

Thenike returned, sending flames leaping in the door’s draft. She squatted near the fire and set her drums to warm, turning them occasionally. The rasp of wood on stone as she moved them was the only sound in the room.

When the drums were sufficiently warmed and the skins stretched tight, Thenike drew her knees up and settled the drums between her skirts. She looked at Marghe with that same indecipherable expression.

“Once upon a time, if there ever was such a time, the world was different. It was round, as it now is round, and the sun rose in the east and set in the west, as now it does, but it was younger, much younger. Where now there is plain, there was forest; where now there is a valley, there once stood a sea. Mountains reared their shoulders high, and were worn away. Rivers formed, grew, and cut through rock as they ran to the ocean. The world turned.

“In these times, upon that raised plain we now know as Tehuantepec there stood a forest. This was the mother of all forests, and her trees stretched east and west from Pebble Fleet to the Oboshi Desert, and south and north from the Trern Swamplands to the northern coast, though there was no woman here to speak those names. This mother of a forest stretched even beyond the north coast, for in those days there was no sea lying between here and what we now call the icy wastes, and those far northern lands were fair and fruitful. On and on the forest stretched, and down and down upon it shone the sun, more strongly than it does today.”

While she spoke, Thenike’s hands moved gently over the drums, stroking and tapping, cupping the sounds, bringing them to life beneath her long brown fingers.

Then she stopped talking, and set the scene to her tale with drums alone. The drums spoke of warm rain and a forest floor steaming with mist, of strange flying creatures whose shrieks rang through the trees and whose feathers flashed purple and gold.

Something about Thenike’s utter concentration warned Marghe that she was about to witness something she had never seen before, something that was at the heart of being viajera. Tonight she would hear more than a pretty tale set to a nice tune.

The viajera’s eyes glittered with reflected torchlight. Her black hair, wound in a careless knot on top of her head, did nothing to disguise the tautness of her neck.

Her head moved slowly from side to side to the beat of her drums, and shadows caught and dissolved in the hollows of her cheeks and temple and skull. Her whole body swayed lightly. The rhythm built.

For one fleeting moment, Marghe wanted to run. Thenike was in some kind of trance. The beat of her drum was pulling Marghe in; she could feel her heart beating with the thud of the viajera’s palms on the drumskin, and her breath sucked in and out to the rhythm of Thenike’s swaying body. Marghe knew, without knowing how she knew, that what the viajera was about to do was dangerous—for Marghe, and for herself. But then Thenike opened her mouth to sing, and Marghe was caught.

Thenike sang.

Marghe did not hear the words. She was there, living it. Though she knew she was sitting by a fire in Ollfoss, her mind was taken back to a place, a glade, where tall animals that were not animals swung long-handled axes at the trees. She was one of them, uncomfortably warm in her thick ivory-colored fur. She watched, fascinated, as her three-fingered and two-thumbed hand swung the ax and the clearing grew.

The scene shifted: north, where it was pleasantly cool. The one before her had a leather strap over his shoulder; it wound about his waist, then up again over her shoulder and round her waist, and on to the one behind her, and another behind him.

They were straining to pull a huge stone. Within hooting distance, on her left, another group of six were struggling with their stone. They had been working for months.

The gods would be pleased.

Time moved on. Back to the clearing, at the southern tip of their great nomadic ellipse. The stones were set, twenty-seven of them in a circle. They hummed. Laid in the center of the circle were three six-sided dressed flagstones. A towering green sculpture of woven vegetable stuff—grasses, moss, leaves, vine—stood on the flags. She sang with the others, a great booming hymn to their gods of sky and earth, and set fire to the sculpture. It burned with an acrid stink. With the others, she took her turn walking through the smoke. Colors writhed at the edge of her vision and sounds swam slowly, like live things. A drug. They danced, and boomed, and mated. She wrote the name of her mate in the ashes with her finger.

Time sped up and Marghe leapt centuries, watched while the snows came earlier and earlier and the northern trees began to die and still she and her descendants traveled south and gathered at the stones to mate and worship. Eons passed like heartbeats: a sea surged between the south forest and the ailing north. Years passed; even in summer icebergs floated in the sea, and the north was white and icy. She and her kind were reduced to grubbing under trees for frozen berries and weeping great yellow tears as their younglings died. None of their number had braved the icy water and the floating bergs for generations.

And then one winter the sea froze.

They sang their booming hymns of praise, wrapped their young as warmly as they could, and set out south. South, to the mating place of their ancestors, to build a fire to their gods, to appease their anger and bring back the sun.