Nicola Griffith - Ammonite

Marghe breathed slow and deep, keeping a steady rhythm, hands relaxed on her thighs. They would not capture her again. She would make them listen. A slight breeze lifted the mane of her horse and blew it across the backs of her hands, tickling. Her mounted shadow stretched long and umber across the grass between her and the Echraidhe and Briogannon. The tribes would see her as a huge, dark silhouette, backlit by the rising sun.

They halted a hundred and fifty yards away in a whispering of grass and chinking of bits.

Now.

Everything Marghe had learned, from the death of her mother, from the biting cold of Tehuantepec, and at the hands of Thenike—everything that made her who she was—came together in one hot focused point in her center, flooding her with adrenaline, tightening her skin, raising goosebumps. Her hands felt heavy; she remembered the ammonites. She was Marghe Amun, the complete one.

She held out one hand, palm out, as she had in the storytelling tent of the Echraidhe. Her voice cracked across the grass.

“You have amongst you a liar and a deceiver, one whose heart is twisted and empty, who leads you to a destiny that is false. Uaithne, murderer and betrayer, claims to speak for the Death Spirit. She lies. She claims to know my will, my will, and lies.”

They were listening. Or at least they were not charging at her. Her blood surged powerfully. She nudged her horse to a slow walk, along the line, timed her words to fit her mount’s steady hoofbeats, sent them rolling away from her, unstoppable.

“Listen to me now. I am the one who has traveled the black void between the stars to come to you; I am the one who has wandered the white void, the plain that stretches its hand between the worlds of the living and the dead; I am the one who has spoken with the spirits of the ancestors in the sacred stones. I am the one who came amongst you and learned, like a child, the ways of my tribe; I am the one who left, like a ghost, when I had learned all I needed; and I am the one who survived winter alone on Tehuantepec, and who returns to you now.”

Her words were steady and hypnotic, falling in a strong cadence, up and down with her breath and the beat of her heart until she found strength building behind those words like a living thing: powerful, straining to be unleashed, to bound away to the tribeswomen astride their horses and tear away their masks.

“Uaithne laid the path. Uaithne brought you together before me. Before me , I say.

For Uaithne is my tool, no more. A flawed tool. One that would twist in the hand of any who lean upon her promises, and break.”

She did not look at Uaithne, but caught the eye of Aelle, of Marac and Scatha sitting together, of Borri. She had their attention. There was no sign of the Levarch.

Dead? Then Aoife would be leader, Aoife who was staring at the grass between her mount’s legs.

Lift that head, Aoife, look at me.

“You seek death, and I say to you: it comes. I am its herald and its shepherd. But you are my tribe, you will die as and when I decree, in the way I shall set down. And I tell you now: this is not the way. For this throwing of yourselves upon strangers is merely seeking death of the flesh.” She waved her hand dismissively. “A small thing, an easy thing.”

The energy that had been building inside her climbed to the back of her throat, so that she could barely contain it. She rose in the saddle and lifted both hands, palms out. A peremptory gesture demanding attention. “It is not the death I have traveled the void to witness!” She slammed the sentence home with a double palm strike to the air. The Echraidhe jerked.

“My journey was hard beyond belief!” All the rage she felt at having been held captive and treated as something inhuman came pouring forth, making her words twist and roar. “The death I demand of you will be harder still! It means nothing to me that you prepare to die one by one in blood and heat. Nothing. I demand of you something more, much, much more. I demand of you the Great Death. The death of change.“

She saw a small movement, so tiny she almost missed it: Aoife, lifting her head.

Yes, Aoife. Look at me, listen to what you would not hear before , The sun was warm on her back now, and the smell of olla overpowering, but she did not care, she was carried away on a tide of her own power and her words were hammer blows.

“The death of change,” she said again, “the death of your way of life, the death that is not just an ending but a great and terrible new beginning. This is what I ask of you!”

Oh, she had them now. They breathed with her, blinked with her, sat their horses as still as rocks.

“This, then, is my demand.” And now her words were implacable. “That you lay aside this crusade, that you move your grazing grounds south and west, that you leave Tehuantepec to the snow scuttlers and creeping plants.” She softened slightly.

“You are not stones to endure the wind and the ice, you are people. You need light, warmth, food for your children. You need others of your own kind from whom to choose lovers and friends. Ah, but the finding of them will change you.”

She surveyed the silent women. Uaithne’s eyes glittered.

“You,say ‘Tribe before self,’ and mean ‘Tribe before anything’, because deep inside your selves you have a barren place that wails, ‘Nothing is real but the tribe, there is no one here but us.’ You are wrong.” She spoke directly to Aoife now, who was studying her intently. “Lift your eyes from the barren place and open your ears, see and hear the world I have made ready for you. You will find a place where your herds will grow sleek and fat, where your children’s hair will be glossy and their eyes bright, where you will not have to listen at night for the breath of the ice wind and the coming of the goth.”

Silence.

“It waits for you, if you but have the courage to face this greatest death of all.

This death of change.”

Aoife frowned, and for one moment Marghe thought she had gotten through, that the tribeswoman had heard, but then Uaithne’s laughter splashed over them all like cold, bright water.

“Death,” she said lightly, “is no thing of doubt and struggle, but a thing of heat and bright and red glory.”

The wind rose again as Uaithne spoke, and stirred the hair on the back of Marghe’s neck. The air seemed to hum with it.

Uaithne laughed again and pointed behind Marghe. “And there is our death, come to greet us. We must ride to meet it.”

Marghe twisted quickly in her saddle. The hum was not the wind.

Forty or more Mirrors, visors glittering and black armor dusted with pollen like the exoskeletons of alien insects, crested the rise in a lazy, bunched swarm. Sleds hummed, one on each side of the closely packed Mirrors, one behind. In front of them, her back to Marghe, was a single rider. Thenike. When the Mirrors started forward, Thenike did not move. The Mirrors shifted direction; Thenike shifted to meet them. One woman facing down forty.

Thenike . Later.

“No,” Marghe said to Uaithne, “not this time.”

“Oh, yes,” Uaithne said, and couched her spear.

Marghe pulled the reins out from under her thigh and wrapped them around the pommel. The humming changed behind her but she did not dare turn. She breathed deeply, slowly, and sent oxygen fizzing through her arteries into her long muscles.

This was not Tehuantepec. She would be ready this time. This time she would fight.

She would never give in again.

But Uaithne was not charging. She lowered her spear, slid it into its sheath. For one dizzying moment, Marghe thought she had won after all. But then Uaithne laughed again, snatched out her knife, and in what seemed like one movement pulled White Moon’s horse toward her and slit the Mirror’s throat.