Nicola Griffith - Ammonite

She spent the nights in the guest room, trying not to remember Thenike rolling on top of her, the feel of muscle warm and hard under her belly, the way their mouths met. No one bothered her. Most of the family was busy; Leifin had returned from a hunt and they were helping her tan the skins and cure the meat.

The third night, Marghe tossed and turned for hours, too tense to sleep. She got up and pulled a cloak around her shoulders; she needed fresh air. Outside, only one moon was visible, blurred behind clouds. She walked hard, fast, stamping through the trees, glad when she startled a pair of wirrels into shrieking and running.

She missed Thenike. But she was scared. If she went back, it meant deliberately putting aside her barriers, letting Thenike right inside, right in where she could see those parts of herself that Marghe had never shown anyone. Those parts she barely knew herself.

Parts she never would know, if she stopped now.

She paused, then strode on, angry. She could not stop now. Not after surviving Tehuantepec, not after fighting off the virus, choosing her name, discovering so much about herself…

She had to choose: Thenike, and the knowledge of who she, really was or might be, or old habits that stemmed from fear that no longer had any foundation.

She turned around, marched back toward the house. She wanted Thenike—wanted to earn the name she had chosen for herself, to find out what it meant to be Marghe Amun, to be complete, whole. She’d be damned if she would give up now.

She knocked on Thenike’s door, then knocked again when there was no reply.

Thenike opened it, a coverlet draped over her shoulders and her face creased with sleep. They looked at one another.

“Come in,” Thenike said, and stepped to one side. The room was dim. Thenike lit a candle from the banked fire.

They faced one another. Thenike looked soft and smelled of sleep. Marghe wanted to gather her up in her arms.“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m just so scared.” And burst into tears.

The candle was guttering, and Marghe’s face was tight with dried tears. They lay in each other’s arms, breathing easily, softly. Flame and shadow flickered over Thenike’s skin, turning it reddish bronze and tinting her hair with copper. Marghe knew that she could match her lover’s heartbeat whenever she wanted, match her breath, her pulse; that their rhythms were still connected.

“I want to do it now,” she said suddenly. “Before I get too scared.”

“Put your hand on mine. Feel the pulse in each fingertip, mine and yours. Yours and mine.” Thenike slid on top of her, muscle on muscle, her mouth an inch from Marghe’s. “Breathe with me. Breathe my breath.”

It was hot; their skin was hot, and their breath. In and out, in and out. And Marghe gave up everything, gave her breath to Thenike, took Thenike’s into her lungs. Then their arms were wrapped around each other, eyes open, staring deep, and Marghe let herself slide down that long deep slope, that slippery slope, sinking in, right in, right down until she was Thenike, was Thenike’s pulse, Thenike’s breath, until she could skip back and forth: her breath, Thenike’s breath, back and forth.

Back and forth.

They slid past each other like slippery same-pole magnets, going in.

And Marghe was standing before the cathedral that was Thenike’s body and all its systems, as Thenike stood before hers. She stepped inside.

It stretched far over her head, a vast, echoing space. She wandered, laying a hand here, against the muscles sheathing the stomach, a hand there, between ribs. She stopped and looked in a side chapel where bronchioles narrowed to alveoli. She wandered on, noting cells and bones and connective tissue, glands and tubes.

Ovaries.

One ovary felt different from the other. Marghe stopped. She felt its heat, and something else, a bulge, a ripe readiness. The bulge swelled. Marghe watched, fascinated, as it split, opened, released its egg. Marghe followed the egg as waving cilia gentled it down the oviduct.

Thenike was ovulating, and because Marghe knew their rhythms were matched, she knew that this would be happening in her body, too, and that Thenike would be watching. Marghe stepped closer, reached out cautiously. The electrum thread inside shimmered and sang, and the ovum almost… changed. Marghe withdrew her hand.

The virus had altered everything. She saw how she could change the chromosomes, how she could rearrange the pairs of alleles on each one. If she reached in and touched this , enfolded that , the cell would begin to divide. And she could control it—she and Thenike could control it.

Marghe felt the connecting tension as Thenike stood waiting.

She could do it. She would do it; Thenike would match her.

She reached out again, and the thrumming electrum strand that was the virus coiled and flexed and the cell divided. Marghe searched her memory of those long-ago biology lessons: mitosis. But altered, tightly controlled and compressed by the snaking virus until it resembled a truncated meiosis. Chromosomes began their stately dance, pairing and parting, chromatids joining and breaking again at their chiasmata, each with slightly rearranged genetic material. But the chromatids did not then separate again and migrate to the cellular poles in a second anaphase; instead they replicated. This daughter would be diploid, able to have her own daughter.

It was like watching beads on a string rearrange themselves. Gorgeous colors, intricate steps, every bead knowing just the right distance to travel. Precision choreography, again and again, as cells divided, normally now, and the one-celled ova became two-celled, four-celled, eight-celled.

As they multiplied, Marghe felt the tight tension, the connection between these cells that would divide and multiply inside Thenike, and those that would grow inside her own body: fetuses. Fetuses that might one day be born as soestre.

Marghe sat up in bed, the coverlet wrapped around her, watching Thenike coax the fire back to life. The candle, forgotten, had long since burned out. The only light was the dull red of the hearth, sending Thenike’s shadow high over the ceiling.

She watched her lover in silence; words would have been too big, too solid, for what they had done together.

Thenike added some dry sticks. The flames leapt, sending her shadow swaying and jumping over the walls. She examined her handiwork and added a log. “You could be a viajera. If you chose. You have the skill.”

Marghe cradled her stomach with her right hand. She had done this. They had done this. She did not want to think about anything else. “They’ll be soestre,” she said. A new thought struck her. “How would I travel as a viajera with a baby?”

Thenike turned to look over her shoulder. “We’d travel together. While they’re young, we’ll travel smaller distances at a time, and less often. And when we get there, we’ll stay longer. We’d be safe, together.”

Marghe imagined the Nid-Nod tossed by a storm, Thenike wrestling with the tiller, Marghe trying to reef the sail and stop both babies from being washed overboard.

“What are you smiling at?”

“The future.” And Marghe knew then that she did want to be a viajera, a teacher and wanderer, a newsbearer, arbitrator, and traveler. “Wenn will be disappointed. I think she’d rather I stayed as a gardener.”

“More useful to her way of thinking,” Thenike agreed.

“I can’t sing.”

“Not necessary.”

“Teach me what to do.”

“I have been doing.”

When they woke up the next morning, they hugged each other tight, then let go.

“Thenike, I need to get a message to Danner, at Port Central. Tell her where I am, what’s happening.” Now that she herself knew, finally, what she wanted, she owed it to them, to Danner and to Sara Hiam, to let them know the vaccine worked, that she had chosen to discontinue taking it; that she was going to stay here with Thenike and have a child.