Nicola Griffith - Ammonite

“What do the others make of it—Cassil, Holle, T’orre Na?”

“I don’t know yet. I wanted us both to speak to them, together. They’re waiting.”

But neither of them moved for a while; the night was soft and spicy and peaceful, and the talking that lay ahead would go on until morning. They watched the horses flicking their tails at the flies.

The late afternoon sun was a hot, orangey red, and the shadows of the seven women were beginning to lengthen. Danner stared at the other six one by one, at Cassil and T’orre Na, at Day and the one from Singing Pastures, Holle, at Marghe and Thenike. She could not believe what she was hearing.

“Let me make sure I’ve got this straight,” she said. “These tribeswomen have driven Holle and her kin from their land and slaughtered half their herds. They’ve butchered eleven of my best people for no reason that makes any sense to me, despite what you’ve been saying, and maybe taken one hostage. Now they’re on their way here to wreak god knows what havoc upon us all. And you want to send Marghe here, and Thenike, unarmed, to talk to them.”

No one said anything.

Danner wanted to put them all in a bag and shake them. She turned to Marghe.

“Do you want to get yourself killed?”

“You’ve accused me of suicidal tendencies before, and been wrong.”

“But not by much! Look at yourself, for pity’s sake: fingers missing, scarred, wearing rags. By your own admission you nearly died at the hands of these same…

tribeswomen.”

“There’s no other real choice.”

“There is!”

Danner looked to Day in mute appeal, but the ex-Mirror shook her head. “I think she’s right, Commander.”

Danner would not accept that. “Look. Just wait until tomorrow. Until midday tomorrow. Nyo should be here by then. She thinks she can find a way to stop a storm disrupting our weaponry. Then we can escort you to this Uaithne, protect you. You can talk to her all you want from behind an armored skirmish line.”

Maighe shook her head. “That’s the worst thing we could do. Danner, I know these people. Or what they’ve become. They don’t think the way we do—they never did. And now that they’re behind Uaithne, they’ve become unreachable. They’re living a legend, can’t you see that? They’ve given something up, call it a sense of reality, to live inside something Uaithne has created. They no longer think of themselves as individuals; they’re just the followers of the Death Spirit. They don’t care about dying—in fact, they’d welcome death.”

Danner shook her head in denial.

Marghe thrust her left hand under Danner’s nose. “Look at that, Danner. That hurt. For months I was cold, hungry, treated like an animal. I nearly gave up, laid down, and died. The snow up there does something to you. I’ve lived there. I know what it’s like. They know they can’t survive. They’re not stupid. Every year fewer and fewer children survive into adulthood. There’s more and more deficiency disease. They’re dying, their way of life is dying. They know that. But what they can’t conceive of is that it’s possible to live another way. They live inside themselves in a way it’s almost impossible to understand. So now along comes Uaithne, who says, I’m the Death Spirit, death is glory! And they see a way to make it all good again. To die. To kill others.”

“But if—”

Marghe ignored her. “Some of them, one or two, perhaps, might still be open to reason. And they know me. But if they see your line, nothing in the world will stop them throwing themselves upon you. Can’t you see that? It’s what they want: hundreds of deaths.”

They talked on, through dusk and into the night, until Danner’s teeth ached from clamping her jaw around words she knew she would regret if they were said. When she went to bed, she was too keyed up to sleep.

Damn the woman. How could she risk herself like this? Couldn’t she see that she would just be throwing her life away, hers and Thenike’s? Throwing them away on a useless gesture. And their deaths would be added to the list of people Danner already felt responsible for. Damn them all.

She fell asleep eventually, and dreamed she was standing alone on a grassy plain facing a hundred riders. She was holding a knife, but as they galloped toward her, she realized the knife was a child’s toy, clumsily carved of wood.

She woke before dawn, hooves still thundering through her head. She got dressed and walked barefoot through the dewy grass toward the hospital, enjoying the cool wet sliding between her toes.

Lu Wai was sitting patiently by Letitia’s bedside. The only noise was the faint hum of a machine at the head of the bed. Lu Wai straightened.

“How is she?”

“Stable, ma’am. And improving. She spoke to me last night.” The trace of that miracle was still on Lu Wai’s face. She nodded at the machine. “But Dr. Hiam thinks we should keep her asleep as much as possible.”

“You agree?”

Lu Wai looked surprised. “Yes. Sleep’s a good healer.” She paused. “You’re not sleeping well, ma’am?”

“No. No I’m not.” She pulled a chair up to the bed and sat down. “Lu Wai, how do you decide what to do when you think you’re right, but everyone else, who you would have thought should know better, thinks you’re wrong?”

Lu Wai took a moment to answer. “That depends. Usually, when what I want is the direct opposite of what everyone else thinks is right, I find fear of some kind, my fear, at the bottom of it. Take my request to be sent with Letitia and Captain White Moon.”

“I—”

Lu Wai held up her hand. “No. You were right. What would have happened to Letitia if I’d died out there? But it was fear, fear for Letitia, that prompted my request.”

Danner said nothing. She was thinking of her fears: that all the people she knew would die and she was helpless to prevent it. Helpless when all her training had taught her she must be responsible for her people, that their lives were in her hands.

But Marghe was not her responsibility any more; she had chosen to join the natives; and Thenike never had been. “You might be right. You are right. But how do you stop being afraid?”

“You don’t. ” Lu Wai looked at Letitia, festooned with tubes and wires. “But love and responsibility don’t give a person the prerogative to be always right. We can’t protect people forever.

Letitia had a job to do. She went to do it. It wasn’t my place at that time to be with her.”

Danner absorbed that.

Marghe was a trained negotiator. She knew this Uaithne. Thenike was a viajera, a representative of the other natives. And Marghe was also a SEC rep, better qualified than anybody to do this job.

As she stepped back out into the dawn, Danner punched in Kahn’s code. “Kahn, go find out where Marghe and Thenike are sleeping. Wake them up and tell them I’m reconsidering. That if they want transport north, they have it.”

“But, Commander, they’ve already gone. Borrowed horses from the Singing Pastures women and left last night.”

Danner closed her eyes and swore. Two women on horses was a very different proposition from two women on a sled that could whisk them out of danger if the natives got ugly. She took a deep breath. To hell with it. She was a soldier, not a diplomat. “Kahn, I want you to go find Cassil, Day, T’orre Na, and Holle, and respectfully request that they be in my quarters in twenty minutes. Tell Lu Wai and Twissel to join us. I want the sleds powered up and all personnel ready to be addressed in forty. I want a message sent to Nyo, to read: ‘Am heading with all speed on direct course for last known whereabouts of hostile tribes. Please change course to follow.’ That’s all.”