Nicola Griffith - Ammonite

Aoife and Marac, along with the Briogannon, Ojo, stayed a little longer. They wanted to study the ways of the Holme Valley community, Marac said; how they shaped the skelter trees, plowed their fields, used the river. For three days Marghe watched them as they went out and about—the hard, lean Levarch and the younger, softer daughter—fingering an olla bowl, thumping the tendons of a breeding taar, or asking short hard questions on the length of the seasons this far south. Once, she saw them both lift their hands and rub at their chins thoughtfully while Cassil explained a harvest technique. Ojo drifted behind them, a dark-eyed shadow.

But summer was short on Tehuantepec, and Aoife and Marac had to get back north to join their people. “There’s not much time to bring our herds south before the snows. Winter comes early this year,” Aoife said from her horse.

“That’s what Holle said.” The sun was bright, and Marghe had to shade her eyes with her hand to look up at Aoife. Marac and Ojo waited on their small, shaggy ponies some distance away.

Aoife looked diminished, Marghe realized. She wondered how it must feel, to kill a soestre.

“You did the right thing,” she said suddenly. “It’s best for your people.”

“I am Levarch. I always do what is best for the Echraidhe.” Her eyes were bleak.

“Sometimes it is not easy. For me or others.”

An apology?

“You were right when you said the Echraidhe must change. I listen to truth and those who speak it. But I’ll never forget that it was you who made me kill my soestre. You will never be welcome in my tent.”

Aoife looked at her without expression, then wheeled her horse and was gone, Marac and Ojo thundering along beside her.

You will never be welcome in my tent . There was an Echraidhe curse: You will never be welcome on our grazing grounds or in our tents, neither you nor your daughters nor the daughters of your daughters. May your taars lose their fur and your horses their teeth, and may your land be frozen for a thousand years , But Aoife had restrained herself. My tent , she had said, not our grazing grounds or our tents . Even now, the Levarch was keeping the tribe’s best interests over her own: the Echraidhe would need all the help they could get in the next few years, and it would be foolish to declare a powerful viajera and her even-more-powerful friends anathema. Instead, Aoife had declared a personal animosity.

Marghe watched the three galloping horses dwindle into the distance. It would not be long before their strange tribal code eased as the harsh winters of Tehuantepec that had made it a necessity for survival became a thing of the past. She was surprised to find she would mourn the passing of that fierce Echraidhe insularity.

Marghe wished Thenike would come back. She needed to feel strong arms around her; she wanted to lay her head against Thenike’s belly and listen to see if she could hear the child that would grow up as soestre to the one living inside her own body. She wanted to talk and think about something other than Aoife’s unforgiving words, something other than change and death.

That night, Marghe found Sara Hiam sitting on the dry, dusty-smelling grass outside the hospital. She joined her.

“It smells good out here,” Hiam said.

Marghe nodded, then realized Hiam would not see that. “Yes.”

They sat quietly. The breeze blew warm, then cool; autumn was coming. In the distance a horse snorted.

“I like the nights,” Hiam said. “After six years on Estrade , the days down here seem too big, too intimidating. All that sky, and air. Sometimes I get nervous when a breeze swirls. I’m so used to air coming from one direction at a time, and always the same temperature.”

“The storms must have been hard for you.”

“Yes.”

Silence.

“Marghe, this world… You seem at home here. But it scares me. The wind scares me, the people. The virus. You scare me.”

“Me?”

“You’ve changed.”

Marghe did not know what to say. “Yes.”

Hiam moved restlessly. “There’s so much I don’t understand. Like your friend, Thenike. I’m sorry I called her a savage. I don’t know what she did, or how, but whatever it was, she saved Letitia’s life. How did she do that? She was right about the adjuvants, too.” A tiny silence. They understood each other: apologies given and accepted on both sides. “And you’re pregnant. And I don’t understand any of it. I want to know. I want you to tell me.”

Marghe wondered where to begin. She picked a long stem of grass and sniffed it, smelling the familiar spice of Jeep. “It’s the virus. It changes everything, It’s… Well, I have a theory about Thenike’s healing. I felt something, when she was running her hands over Letitia. Over the air around Letitia, really. I was trained to be sensitive to my own body; I think I’m more sensitive than most. Then when the virus became part of me, it was like that sensitivity increased a thousandfold. More. So when Thenike did what she did, I could feel it.” She stripped away the brownish outer layer of the stalk of grass. “I wonder if I might not, in time, learn to do it myself.”

“You’re not making much sense.”

Under the outer covering, the stem was green and juicy. Marghe put it in her mouth, chewed awhile. “I’ve been doing some reading lately. It turns out that every cell in the human body—in every other body, too, plant and animal—and every molecule and atom in that cell, is in a constant state of vibration. All this cell-by-cell excitation adds up to produce enough energy to change the electrical and magnetic properties of the space they occupy.”

“That’s nothing new.”

“No. Anyway, we all resonate on a particular, unique frequency, but because all humans radiate within a narrow wave band we all receive and transmit those signals.

All the time. We’re in constant communication with each other and with the outside world. Patterns of these waves explore everything close-by, so all the time we’re with other people we’re unconsciously probing them. And being probed.” She picked a shred of grass from her teeth. “I imagine if a person was sensitive enough, it would just be a matter of training to bring that kind of probing under conscious control.” She stared out at the dark, heaving sky. Thenike could probably explain this better. “Sara, how would you define healing?”

“Making someone better. Or, rather, helping—tricking, persuading—a body to heal itself.”

“Right. Modern medicine does it mechanically, like stitching, and chemically—antibiotics and things. But what about electrically? Magnetically?

Electrochemically?”

“We do that already,” Sara said thoughtfully. “Strap a power pack around a break and it heals anywhere up to six times as fast.”

Marghe nodded. “According to what I’ve been reading, injury, like Letitia’s, produces a disorganization of the normal, healthy electrical pattern. Are you with me?”

“Yes.”

“Now what if, what if a person has enough control over her magnetic field, her transmissions, to affect another’s? What if the healthy person’s patterns could interact with the sick person’s?”

Hiam looked dubious.

“Sara, when Thenike ran her hands around Letitia, my body could feel it! It was like her pattern was talking to mine, to all the eddies and flows of my cells, saying: See? See how you should be? Like this, this is how you’re supposed to go.”

“But how? I don’t understand how she can do it!”

“The virus, that’s how. Oh, Sara, the things I’ve seen! When I woke up after being sick, it was like becoming conscious for the first time, Like a blind person seeing color… No, that’s not right. It was just more . Like I could see better and hear better and smell better, like my kinesthetic sense was more highly developed.