Nicola Griffith - Ammonite

Not long, Marghe thought, not long.

They gathered outside in the early afternoon. It was almost warm, but Thenike had warned her to wrap up well. Standing motionless for hours did not produce much body heat. Two chia birds sang back and forth to each other.

Six of her family were there: Thenike, Gerrel, Hilt, Leifin, Wenn, Huellis. Kenisi and the two youngsters were with Namri, who had put her back out. Kristen and Ette made up the eight.

Thenike would keep her safe.

Gerrel, who had made her first deepsearch only last midsummer, started the singing. She hummed deep, tunelessly. The others took up the hum until it sounded like a creaky tree song, the rubbing together of branches. It wove back and forth like the wind high in the forest, apparently aimless. The singers took breaths according to their own rhythms and exhaled in the wavering hum that climbed and sank and wandered without apparent form. Marghe closed her eyes. Two, then three women began to breathe and hum at the same time, then a fourth, and a fifth. Marghe imagined she could hear their hearts mumping together. Her own breath ran with theirs.

Between one heartbeat and another, they all breathed and sang together, great powerful gusts of sound beating at Marghe like rain, rain that grew in intensity, spattering her face, running then pouring over her, pooling at her feet, until she felt she was standing under a waterfall of sound. The sound pulsed endlessly, like the world. Deep inside her cells, something responded.

Thenike will keep me safe.

She followed the plunging water down, where it wanted to go.

Marghe came up from her not-dream. She felt stiff from standing still so long, and her pattern singers were gone, except for Thenike. Marghe smiled at her, but said nothing; she did not want to talk yet.

In silence, Thenike helped her walk through the evening shadow of the trees until her joints unstiffened. Undergrowth rustled beneath their feet.

Marghe felt she had been gone a long time, much longer than the two or three hours it had taken for the world to turn away from the sun and toward the arms of evening. She had been inside herself in a way she had never thought possible; listening to her body as a whole, a magnificent, healthy whole. And she had done more: reliving memories of her childhood she had forgotten, experiencing again days she had never been wholly aware of. Now she knew how it felt to be a baby just ten days old, and that baby had been as alien to her as any species she had encountered since. There had been more: what felt like days of communication between herself now and herself of many thens. She had sent a question down all the avenues that opened before her: what is my name? And echoing back had come: Marghe. And again: Marghe. And then, whispered in a voice she knew: Marghe, and more.

She was on a thin and misty beach; her mother walked from the shadows and held out her hand. On her palm was the ammonite.

“Primitive cultures thought they were coiled snakes, petrified, and called them snake-stones,” Acquila said. “But the word ‘ammonite’ comes, of course, from the medieval Latin, cornu Ammonis , horn of Ammon, due to its resemblance to the involuted horn of Ammon, or Amun, the ram-headed god of Thebes.”

She put the cold thing in Marghe’s whole right hand. “His name, Amun, means

‘complete one.’ He acquired the power of fertility formerly invested in Min, the ancient Egyptian god of reproduction.” She looked amused. “Min was very popular.

But his time passed.”

Her mother had faded, leaving the ammonite. Marghe had not been surprised when it sank into her hand. And now she was herself, and more. The complete one.

Marghe smiled. “I have been so many places…”

“Yes,” Thenike said. “Mind this root here.”

“I see it.”

Two more chia birds called back and forth. The same ones? Marghe stopped and tilted her head to listen. “Do many women keep their child names?” she asked.

“Some. Not many.”

“What was yours?”

“Gilraen.”

“Gilraen…”She considered the woman next to her, with her rich hair, pinned up, her soft brown eyes and strong fingers. “A nice name, but not yours.”

“No.”

They started walking again. After a moment, Marghe said softly, “My name is Marghe Amun.”

The complete one.

No one suggested that Marghe move out of the guest room, but she wondered if she should. There was something she needed to do, she was sure of it. But what?

Marghe felt the need to do this unspecified something as a subtle pressure against her skin, as when the weather was about to change. She did not mention it to anyone. She gardened, and ate, and talked to Thenike and Gerrel and, now and again, Wenn or Huellis. Leifin disappeared on a hunt.

Marghe became restless. When she dug in the garden, she dug with hard, vicious jabs, and took pleasure in her aching muscles when she sank into the hot tub in the evening. She lay in the almost-scalding water hoping, longing for the heat to soothe her. It did not. It was as though she had a muscle, somewhere, that had not been exercised.

She dried herself off thoughtfully. A muscle that needed exercising. Perhaps that was it. She had to find out what she could do now, now that she had part of Jeep living inside every cell of her body; she had to find out how she had changed.

In the guest room—she could not think of it as hers—she lit a small fire, did some gentle stretching and breathing to ease her sore muscles, and then settled down cross-legged on the warm flags near the hearth.

Three breaths triggered a trance easily. Too easily. She jerked herself out, frightened. Such a deep meditative state should normally take twenty minutes or more.

She smoothed her heart rhythm, thought about that. Was it anything to be scared of? She was not sure. Was it something that she could control? Probably. Then she would try again.

As easily as before, she sank into a trance, her breathing slow and deep and regular. Her electrical rhythms, her brain activity, began to cycle hugely and slowly, like an enormous skipping rope. Behind her eyelids, she imagined her blood as a thick red river full of amoeba-like creatures: T cells, lymphocytes, phagocytes, doughnut-shaped hemoglobin, tumbling over and over, rushing past. The overwhelming impression was one of vigor, a good, cleaned-out feeling. No sluggish streams or narrow places, no dead-seeming backwaters where toxins gathered.

She had never been so healthy, or seen it so clearly.

She moved her mind’s eye on, roaming glandular production, the lymph system, her gut. She paused by an E. coli , moved on, settled on a cheek cell. She remembered a long-ago biology lesson: scraping cheek cells onto a slide, examining them under a microscope. It had been nothing like this.

The cell was like an enormous helium balloon in which she floated, swimming through cytoplasm and around mitochondria, bumping gently against the nucleic mass where DNA writhed like a nest of snakes. She moved inward. There, running through the center of the DNA like a bright electoral thread, was the virus. It thrummed like a tuning fork. She glided around it, examining it. So small. She reached out to touch it, pulled back at the last moment. Another time.

When she withdrew back up to conscious level, she found that the fire was long dead and she was shaking with cold.

She discovered that it was too tiring to trance more than once every three or four days, and too frightening. She persevered. Now that she had started, she needed to know more, much more. This was herself she was exploring, uncovering.

Discovering. If she was ever to be truly Marghe Amun, the complete one, then she needed to know what she could do, who she was.