Nicola Griffith - Ammonite

Danner was glad T’orre Na was there. She had a working knowledge of the basic language, but the messenger’s accent or dialect was so thick Danner could barely understand one word in six. She made a mental note to ask Day which would be the most important dialects to learn—yet another thing Marghe could have helped them with.

After several minutes of question and answer, the messenger accepted a beer, tasted it cautiously, and put it down. Danner noticed she did not drink from it again.

Not all natives liked beer, then. She was obscurely glad, though she could not have said why. Perhaps she was already experiencing the faint beginnings of the need to keep her culture separate, like all immigrant peoples on all worlds. For that’s what she and the other Mirrors and technicians were now—immigrants.

She listened harder.

It seemed that the messenger was uncertain about something, and the journeywoman was questioning her hard. Eventually, T’orre Na seemed satisfied, and had the messenger repeat something twice. She nodded and turned to Danner.

“The message goes like this. Marghe Amun, now of Wenn’s family at Ollfoss, to Danner, at Port Central. Greetings. I became ill with this world’s sickness during the Moon of Aches— that’s the Moon of Rain, as we would reckon it, some sixty or seventy days ago— and made myself with child thirty days later. The viajera Thenike and I will bear soestre next spring, I am well and happy. Give my regrets and apologies to the healer .” She repeated it while Danner taped it, for the record.

“Sehanol says the message knot came via ship to Pebble Fleet. Message stones were left by the banks of the Huipil by one of their herders and read by her daughter, Puiell. The stones had been disturbed. Sehanol thinks that some of the message may be missing.”

“Not the important part: Marghe got the virus; the vaccine didn’t work.” The end of everything. “ Marghe Amun ,” Danner said slowly. “I wonder why she did that.”

Perhaps the virus had affected the representative’s mind. Danner had heard vague rumors of Company personnel going crazy when they contracted the virus. They were usually the ones who died.

“Marghe Amun. And she’s with child. Soestre to the viajera Thenike.” Danner could not identify T’orre Na’s expression. It looked like something akin to wonder.

Sehanol said something.

“She wants to leave now,” T’orre Na said. “There’s work to be done in Scatterdell.”

Danner looked at Sehanol, whose eyes were very bright and who had obviously been following what they said. Danner spoke clearly and carefully. “Before you leave, Sehanol, I want you to know that you have my personal thanks and gratitude.

If you and yours at Scatterdell need some small favor in the future, ask.”

“We will. You are gracious.”

T’orre Na punched the door lock. It hissed open and the native slipped through and was gone.

“Gracious indeed,” the journeywoman said to Danner, “considering that the message was already paid for.”

“I stressed a small service. And I thought it was important to cement good relations.” Now that they were here for good.

“You did right. Perhaps now that your circumstances have changed a little, you’ll be prepared to change your mind with regard to your other obligations in the north.”

“T’orre Na, I can’t, believe me. More than ever, I’ve too much to do here. I have to catch someone, a spy. It’s now or never. If she isn’t caught now, she’ll go underground. We’ll never be sure who we can trust again, I’m responsible for the evacuation of Port Central, just in case the Kurst decides to eradicate this position.

Nearly a thousand personnel and our stores and munitions have to go somewhere; and we don’t even know where, yet. I have to…” She pulled herself up with an effort. T’orre Na did not want to hear all her troubles. “There’s enough work here for every woman twice over—work that’s vital for our survival. I can’t, I absolutely cannot, spare anyone at this time. Please tell this to Cassil and the others of Holme Valley.”

“I urge you to reconsider. The Echraidhe are destroying herds and crops and people now. And trata is trata.”

“And if I don’t do all that needs doing here, right now, there won’t be any Mirrors to keep trata! Please, try and believe me.”

“Oh, I do,” T’orre Na said sadly, “but that makes no difference. Cassil needs help, you refuse it. You break trata. There is nothing more to be said.”

HILT LEFT FOR North Haven, taking the message with her. The Moon of Rowers came, but Marghe Amun’s monthly bleeding did not. It was then that she realized that what she and Thenike had done would affect her whole life. In a few months—a year, by Jeep standards—she would bear a child. A daughter. It was strange to think that soon she would be responsible for another human being. It made her feel restless, trapped.

Marghe paused, weed in one hand, trowel in the other. The ovum—the blastosphere , her enhanced memory whispered to her—was just cells. She could abort them, it, as easily as she had induced cell division. She could be just herself; she did not need to be responsible.

But she was responsible already. The child growing inside Thenike was partially of her doing. They would be soestre. There was already a bond.

Marghe knelt on the damp ground. She had a child growing in her belly. Did she want it?

Yes. She wanted to bear it—her; she wanted to name her, watch her learn to crawl, speak, think. Wanted her to have a home, belong.

She went back to her gardening.

The clear air of Ollfoss grew warmer daily, and Marghe and Gerrel spent their mornings and afternoons, and sometimes early evenings when the sun lay like an amber cloak over the tops of the trees, digging out weeds on their knees, trimming back excessive growth of jaellums and soca and neat’s-foot.

When she was not on her knees in the garden, Marghe was with Thenike. They helped Wenn weave, gathered herbs with old Kenisi, took turns looking after Moss and Otter while Leifin and Namri were choosing a tree to cut to make a new door and Huellis made candles. They ate together, slept together, talked together; and Marghe learned.

When she took up the drums, it was to learn from Thenike how to use them to drive a story deep into the hearts of her listeners. When she took up a rope, she learned how the knots spelled out shorthand versions of concepts and phrases, how the colored threads made the words, or added emphasis. She was not a good singer, she did not have that smoky voice of Thenike’s, but she learned how to give a story rhythm and pacing, how to make it live in the mind’s eye of her listener. She was good at that.

She practiced on Thenike, telling her the story of her life, of her mother’s life, and her father’s, of how Company stole what it could not cheat from people, of the worlds she had visited, and the places of which she only knew rumor.

Her skin browned, and her arms thickened and grew strong. The room where Marghe had stayed became the guest room once more, and at night, before she fell asleep, she would look at their hands lying together, Thenike’s long, all sinew and bone, with that white scar snaking over the back of the thumb, her own blunt and spatulate, and feel full of the wonder of their differences. Sometimes she had strange dreams in which her belly swelled so much that she could not get through the doorway, and she felt trapped. She woke on those mornings to sunshine and Thenike’s hair spread over her pillow, and a feeling of restlessness she could not explain.

That restlessness grew like an unreachable itch as the Moon of Flowers passed into the beginning of Lazy Moon, and spring became early summer.