Nicola Griffith - Ammonite

Marghe kept them heading for the cave and the gully. Shelter first. Then they would talk.

In the end, the talking was done at Holme Valley.

When the five leaders had emerged from the cave, they found acres of grassland seared black, still smoking, turning dusk into evening. It was stifling.

Danner touched a stud at her collar. Her suit stopped humming, and she took off her helmet in a spill of cold air. “It’s too hot to leave those bodies unburied. We need to get them bagged and cooled immediately.”

After several strained hours in the cave, standing between two hundred women who would find it easier to fight than talk, Marghe was irritated by Danner’s attitude, but it was Thenike who spoke.

“They’re not ‘bodies’!” Marghe had never seen Thenike so angry. “They are what’s left of your captain and Aoife’s soestre. They were real. They had friends, mothers, people here who will pause in the middle of their next meal and miss that unique laugh or the sight of a familiar hand resting on a table. Their deaths helped to buy this.” She gestured at the gathered forces, still standing apart suspiciously, but not fighting. Not fighting. “They should be buried out there, where they died.

Together. Their grave should be in the place where so many others came close to killing and being killed, on neutral territory so that women can come and visit it and remember why these two women died, and how. Then maybe this… this idiocy won’t ever happen again.”

Together with the massed tribes and a company of Mirrors as escort, Marghe and Thenike, and Aoife, Danner, and Ojo, leading Uaithne’s horse and White Moon’s and carrying shovels, went back to the place that had nearly become a battlefield.

The olla patch had escaped the fire, and Danner suggested that they bury them under the flowers. They looked at Thenike, but the viajera said nothing; she seemed to have withdrawn inside herself.

“No,” Marghe decided, “we’ll bury them where they died. We’ll put them under the charred grass and the seared soil, and their grave will green when the rest of the plain does.”

The funeral was short; there was no ritual that would have been acceptable to both sides. Instead, Aoife stepped forward and told a story about Uaithne, about how she had broken her first pony when she was ten years old, and Danner said a few gruff words about how White Moon had been a brilliant captain, with the respect and trust of her officers. Then Thenike shook herself and began to sing a soft song of harvest time. It seemed an odd choice to Marghe at first, but as the viajera started to clap along with her song, as she raised her voice to sing of harvesting, of threshing, of ground that would be plowed over and seeds that would be sown that the fields would bloom again, Marghe understood. She took up the clapping. As others heard the message of renewal, they clapped, too, and when Thenike stopped singing, the clapping went on and on.

After the burial, Aoife sent most of the tribeswomen back north. To gather the scattered herds, she said. Aoife herself and her daughter Marac, representing the Echraidhe, and Ojo for the Briogannon, followed Marghe, Thenike, and Danner to Holme Valley, where the talks were to be held under the great skelter tree that was the home of Cassil’s family.

Holle spoke for the women of Singing Pastures, and Cassil for Holme Valley.

After much thought, Marghe decided she would act for Danner and the others. She owed them that, at least.

“You’re a tribe now,” she told Danner. “Try to think in those terms. I’ll get what I can for you. Your standing’s high right now.”

“You mean yours.”

Marghe ignored that. “I’m going to secure trata agreements from the tribes and from Holle, if I can, as well as strengthening the arrangement with Cassil.”

“Just as long as we get our seed crop, and some breeding animals.”

“I’ll do much better for you than that,” Marghe promised.

The final trata agreements were reached in the presence of the viajeras Thenike and T’orre Na:

The Echraidhe and Briogannon, temporarily merged under the madness of Uaithne, were enjoined to become one people in order to ensure peace for themselves and other settlements, and in order to survive; the herds of both tribes were decimated, their goods scattered, their children malnourished. They were granted joint use of grazing grounds to the north and west of Singing Pastures. From their herds, beginning the first year the animals reached reasonable numbers, they would grant a tithe of horses to Singing Pastures, in part reparation, and a tithe of breeding taars. These breeding taars would go straight from Holle’s people to Danner’s. Until that time, Danner’s people would receive a small number of breeding taars from Cassil, and help from both communities in capturing wild animals for domestication. Also from Cassil, Danner would get seed crop, first trading rights on the valley’s harvest, two hand looms, and—Marghe had had to fight hard for this—the fostering of six of the valley’s children, along with one or two adults.

“Think, Danner, they’ll be invaluable!” she told the Mirror. “What better way to learn the way a world works than to learn with their children?”

Cassil agreed, if volunteers could be found. In return, Danner had to promise the fostering of a third of any Mirror children in the next five years, again on a volunteer basis. Marghe was not worried about lack of volunteers. There were many on both sides who were curious, and some who would think to turn the arrangement to their personal gain. One way or another, both communities would benefit, in the end.

They went to the Holme Valley cave for the witnessing song. It was evening.

Marghe lifted her spitting torch a little higher; mica and quartz glittered redly as the nine pattern singers walked ahead of the women of Holme Valley, their audience.

Fine sand sifted, cool and dry, between Marghe’s toes.

“Letitia told me about this place,” Danner whispered as she walked deeper into the cavern, “but I only half believed her.”

Before them, glimmering with natural phosphorescence, a lake slid in blues and greens. They were standing on a wide, natural shelf that ran around the walls of the cavern. Thin-waisted columns plunged into the water from the lower parts of the uneven roof. The lake poured with light, throwing shadows on the wall at Marghe’s back, sheathing the columns in shimmering cloaks of color.

T’orre Na began the song. Marghe took it up, followed by Thenike and Holle and Cassil; then Aoife, Day, and Ojo. Danner was the last to join her voice to the eight others and close the circle of nine. To Marghe’s surprise, the Mirror had a light, clear soprano.

They joined hands: Ojo’s rough, dry hand in Marghe’s left, Day’s—warm and soft—in her right. Marghe smiled as she sang the wordless song, enjoying the way harmonies split off and raced over the water, echoing back from the walls. It felt as though the whole population of the valley was singing.

One by one, the voices dropped out. At the edges of the lake tiny pebbles rocked in a slight current.

They ate together outside, with children crying from fatigue and Ojo and Aoife sitting as far apart from each other as possible. Marghe chewed her bread deliberately, determined not to worry about it; no agreement was perfect.

Later, lying next to Thenike, she fell asleep wondering if some deep, quiet place in the cavern still echoed with the song they had made, and dreamed of small pebbles rocking in the water.

HARVEST IN HOLME Valley began two days after the trata agreement was reached. The year was beginning its steady turn toward winter and it was time for the pattern singers to go their separate ways.