Текст книги "Ammonite"

Автор книги: Nicola Griffith

Соавторы: Nicola Griffith,Nicola Griffith
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They fled back north, back across the frozen sea, back past the frozen bodies of their young, back to the cold and ice and stunted trees, for they had received a message, and the message was plain: the gods did not wish for them to journey south. They were to obey the gods’ will and return north, return to scratching at the ice for moss and poor shriveled berries, return to their lonely fastness where their numbers would grow fewer and fewer…

“Oh, my people,” Marghe whispered to the dying fire, then looked up, confused. People? Thenike sat, weary and still, drums on the floor. The glitter was gone from her eyes; they were dark and withdrawn. Leifin’s cheeks were bloodless, and she breathed heavily. Gerrel looked bewildered and a little afraid. Wenn and Kenisi were holding hands, drawing comfort from each other. Huellis and Hilt were both looking at Leifin, the former thoughtful, the latter grim. Marghe wondered if she looked the same. She felt Thenike’s hooded gaze resting on her, and turned.

“Thenike…” She did not have the words. Thenike had done something she did not understand and could barely believe. More than that, she had told a story which, if true–and it fitted the facts that Marghe herself had ascertained–held staggering implications. People…

The next day, Marghe worked in the gardens as usual. Thenike did not come. Marghe went to find her.

The viajera was in her room, sitting cross‑legged on the bed. Light streamed in, staining the white walls lemon, picking fire from a picture painted directly onto the northern wall. Thenike looked like a tired, dark smudge in the middle of so much light; the dark circles under her eyes stood out clearly, and her skin looked pale, almost translucent. Marghe could see a faint blue tracery of veins under her skin. The room was cool.

“I was wondering where you were,” Marghe said, standing by the half‑pulled‑back door hanging. Thenike looked insubstantial; Marghe wanted to put her arms around her, make sure she was all there and all right. She cast around for some plausible excuse for intruding and could not find one. “I was worried,” she said simply.

Thenike smiled, a tired smile, but warm. “Come. Sit up here with me. I’ve been thinking about you. Tell me what you thought of my story yesterday.”

“It seemed true. Real.” Thenike waited. Marghe struggled to give her the truth. “You, the story… possessed me.”

Thenike nodded slowly. “Many viajeras have sung for your people. Your people smile and say ‘Very nice,’ but they don’t hear, they don’t see. We used to think you were all blind. Until you.” Thenike seemed to go away somewhere inside herself for a moment. Marghe set aside her curiosity and waited. “You followed me in deepsearch.”

Deepsearch. The Jeep ritual of naming, of conception, of bonding. Deepsearch. She was not sure if she wanted to believe Thenike. “I thought the virus was part of it.”

“Perhaps.”

Did that mean the virus was already inside her? No, it couldn’t be. She tried to remember what Lu Wai had told her about incubation periods; she knew that contracting a virus and displaying symptoms were not simultaneous. But no, it could not be the virus. The FN‑17 would still be in her blood, wouldn’t it? She remembered waking in Ollfoss and finding that one soft‑gel was missing. Had she taken it or lost it?

Thenike smoothed the coverlet with her palms. “Some viajeras can sing from within trance, from deep inside their own memories. They can bring others into their trance, make them see what they see, feel what they feel. Be what they’ve been.”

“But you’ve never been a…”

“Goth? Perhaps not. But part of what you call the virus may have part of what we call the goth embedded in its essence.”

Marghe realized that Thenike was telling her that the virus contained goth DNA and some of their memories. And then the virus became part of human DNA. She shook her head. That was not possible. She was not even sure she believed that goth existed.

But the stones existed; she had been there, And they were impossibly old.

The trance, then, she thought. What about the trance? That was possible; she had not imagined it. Of course sharing a trance was possible. Mass hypnosis was well documented. And what else was a drum but hypnotic? And singing, too. Rhythm, sound, the heat of the fire. Her body was well trained to follow patterns and rhythms; that was essentially the way one learned to control one’s own biofeedback.

“It’s a matter of training, that’s all.” She wished she had not said that so loudly.

“Like being a viajera.” Thenike eyed her speculatively. “Can you drum?”

“No.”

“I’ll teach you.”

The sun had been hidden behind cloud for two days. The fire in Thenike’s room roared; the door hanging was closed. Marghe put the drums aside on the bed, pulled off her felt overtunic, wiped the sweat from her face, and settled the drums back between her knees. She tapped the right drum, the treble, with the tip of her right middle finger, then the left drum with what had been the middle finger on her left hand. She was more clumsy with the left.

Thenike, who had been standing by the fire, listening, came over. She took Marghe’s left hand in her own. “Do these scars still hurt?”

“No.”

”Then stop protecting them. Hit the drum, sharp and swift.” She demonstrated, striking out like a snake: hand from wrist, finger from hand. The drum sang once, perfectly. “Again.”

So Marghe did it again, and again, until both sides of the drum sang with the same depth and the same volume, no matter which hand she struck with. She hit them faster and faster, pleased with herself.

”Now try this.” Thenike played an effortless paradiddle with finger, then palm, both drums. Marghe looked dismayed. “Try it.”

She tried. Over and over. “It’s no good.” She wiped at her sweating face with her forearm.

“Move over, and forward.” Marghe gripped the drums between her knees and shuffled forward awkwardly. Thenike climbed onto the bed and sat behind her, arms snaking around to the drums, stomach pressed up against Marghe’s back.

Marghe felt her nostrils flare slightly and the muscles in her stomach tighten. “Lay your hands on mine. Lightly. Now. Feel what I do.” Thenike tapped out the paradiddle very slowly, beat by beat, then again, and again, getting slightly faster. Marghe tried to concentrate on the feel of muscle and tendon under her hands, to gauge at what angle the heel of the hand came down, at what point the hand swung and the finger took the lead, but all she could feel was the slide of warm skin under her own, the ruffle of Thenike’s breath at her neck. She tried harder.

“Good. Now, on your own.” Thenike laid her arms down on her skirts but stayed behind Marghe. Marghe resisted the urge to lean back into the viajera’s warmth and applied herself to her drum lesson.

Marghe took off her muddy boots and walked barefoot over the warm wooden planking of the bathhouse floor. She loved the Ollfoss bathhouse with its smell of lime and minerals, its high, airy space, and the huge stone tubs that descended in height and water temperature from near the ceiling to close to the floor and were worn smooth by generations of use.

Two women she vaguely recognized, Bejuoen and Terle of Ette’s family, were wringing out a coverlet. Only one more garment floated lumpily in the rinse pool; they would be gone soon. She nodded at them, and pumped vigorously at the wooden lever that forced hot water up from the spring and through stone pipes. When the water was flowing, she slid the wooden stream dam over to the left and watched while water began to flow into a shallow basin set at ankle height. She plugged the hole in its bottom with a stopper and began stripping off her clothes, filthy with the rich garden mud. When the basin was half‑full, she pumped up some cold water, setting the flow dam to direct it into the basin. She dropped her clothes into the water, piece by piece, and climbed in after them.

She enjoyed trampling the heavy clothes in lukewarm water, feeling mud slide out from between her toes. When the water began to turn reddish brown, she leaned down and pulled the stopper free. Filling the basin again, she resumed her trampling.

She nodded good‑bye to Bejuoen and Terle.

When the water stayed clear, and she could feel the fibers beneath her feet again instead of slippery mud, she climbed out of the basin, took out the stopper, and reset the wooden dams near the pumps. The larger basins began to fill while she wrung out her clothes and transferred them to the laundry basin proper, to soak in the cold, biting mineral water that seeped up from the ground beneath Ollfoss. She would not need to use soap.

The big tub was full. Marghe diverted the hot water to a lower tub and climbed up the short ladder toward the steam. She lowered herself in inch by inch, sighing as the heat slid over her skin and enveloped her aching muscles.

“You sound like you need that.”

Marghe peered over the edge: Thenike, holding a bowl of the foul medicinal tea.

“Do you want company? I could just leave this down here.”

“No, come on up.”

After a moment Thenike came up the ladder naked, holding the bowl. She had pinned her braid up on top of her head, and the ladder rungs threw shadows over the tight stomach and lean slabs of muscle over her ribs. Hard muscle, soft skin, taut sinew. Marghe wondered how that would feel. Thenike handed her the bowl. Marghe sighed and drank it down in one long swallow. It was bitter, but it warmed her from the inside as the bath did from the outside.

Thenijce slid into the water opposite Marghe, near the wooden tray that held soap cakes and brushes. “Ah, that feels good.” She splashed hot water over her shoulders. Marghe watched the play of muscle and shadow. “I see that someone has been digging over the south gardens. Your work?”

Marghe nodded. “And I ache all over to prove it.”

The viajera picked up the hand brush, the one with soft bristles. “If you’ll come over here, I’ll rub your back. Ease some of those muscles.”

Marghe sat in front of Thenike, as if they were playing the drums. Only this time, Thenike’s legs were naked alongside hers; this time, she felt Thenike’s breasts touching the skin just below her shoulder blades. This time, there was no mistaking the slow, heavy wave of desire that rose and sank through her guts. She could not help arching a little as Thenike stroked the brush over the small of her back. One of Thenike’s hands lay loosely on Marghe’s hips, and she could feel every palm line, every whorl, at the tips of those strong, lean fingers. Desire wrapped its arms around her and held her still, helpless, able only to breathe.

“There. You can do mine now.” Thenike put both palms on Marghe’s lower back and pushed her away, through the water. Marghe’s breath caught.

She made a slow turn, felt the warm water rise up over her belly and breasts. She took the brush. Thenike was studying her.

“Marghe. The vaccine you took, the poisons, the adjuvants, they would have kept away, pushed down, your need for sex.” She nodded at the empty wooden bowl. “As this gets rid of the poisons, so your need for sex returns.” Marghe watched her. The viajera’s lips were very red, very soft. “But I don’t think you should make sex with anyone. Not yet. Your body and your mind need to be clear, uncluttered, for what lies ahead. Marghe? Do you understand?”

Marghe felt embarrassed, stupid. She knew she was flushing. This was Thenike’s way of saying she was not interested. She nodded. “I understand.”

Thenike sighed. “I wonder.”

Chapter Twelve

MARGHE PUSHED THE stick into the dirt, dropped in a seed from her left hand, and smoothed the dirt over the hole. She sneezed. She jabbed another hole, dropped in a seed. Her hands were cold; the wind had been from the north for the last two days and was bitter, dragging with it heavy gray cloud that shrouded the sun. At least it was not raining.

She made another hole, dropped a seed. It missed. She put down the stick, intending to poke the seed into the hole with her finger. Her hands were stiff and aching; she must be colder than she thought. She sneezed again, which set her head thumping.

Fear stabbed under her ribs. She tried to breathe steadily, and coughed. No, she thought, it cannot possibly be. Not yet. It’s only the last third of the Moon of Aches. It should be days yet.

Not if she had not taken that missing softgel.

The pain in her head was getting worse. She levered herself to her feet. Her knees hurt. What was it Lu Wai had said? My joints ached, knees and hips mostly… and then the headache started. It’s only about a mile from the station to my mod, but I had difficulty walking those last few yards, it hits that fast… Thenike knew what to do; so did Kenisi. She looked around. No one. Well, it was only a few hundred yards to the house. She started to walk.

After about fifteen steps, she knew she would not make it. The path wavered in front of her, and she was shivering so hard that her head felt like it was going to fall off. After thirty steps, she was staggering. So fast, so fast. Impossibly fast. Keep going, she had to keep going. Warmth, liquids, Lu Wai had said. Warmth. She could not afford to fall down here, in the mud. Could not.

It was hard to breathe now. Ten more steps, she told her legs. Find Thenike.

“Marghe!”

Gerrel’s face loomed by her left shoulder. Marghe stood, swaying. Confused. How did she get there? “Sick,” she said, then tottered forward another step.

Gerrel caught her as she staggered. Marghe sagged in the girl’s arms. “Marghe.” Rest. She wanted to rest. “Marghe.” Gerrel shook her. “I can’t hold you by myself. You’re too heavy. You’ve got to help me.”

Marghe felt a dim tugging under her arms. She tried to lift her head. “Warm,” she said, then burst into a hacking cough. Gerrel managed to drag her a few yards. It hurt to breathe. “Got to. Keep warm.”

“As soon as we get you inside.”

Marghe tried to set aside the fire that was in her knees and her hips, that squeezed tight around her head threatening to burst through her eyes. Walk. One leg in front of another.

They moved unsteadily forward. Her lungs burned; she could not breathe.

“Don’t struggle. Marghe, don’t struggle. I’ve got you. You’ll be warm soon. Just walk. Walk. Left leg first. Come on. Marghe! Left leg. Good. Now the right.”

It was like trying to walk through fire. Fire that burned her legs and leapt down her throat to sear her lungs all the way to her stomach; fire, too, that threatened to boil her eyes in her head. But she tried.

“Not far now. Keep your legs moving. Another few steps and you’ll be warm and safe. And then I’ll bring Thenike. And Kenisi. You’ll be well in no time. No time at all. But we have to get there first.” Gerrel’s voice seemed to come from a long way off. “Please, Marghe. Please. Just a few more steps.”

Marghe never remembered falling on the bed, or Gerrel crying and trying to wrap her in furs. She did not know it when Kenisi came running. It seemed to her only that some cruel beast with talons and beak steeped in fire and acid ripped at her body, over and over. She screamed, but there was no escape.

Later, days or hours, the beast retreated for a while. Marghe was aware of lying on her back. Her throat was stripped raw and her tongue felt swollen and dry. Thenike was sitting by the bed holding her hand, a hand that seemed miles away, unconnected with the rest of her body. It was difficult to breathe; her chest felt weighed down under a hot stone.

Thenike stroked her hand.

“Thenike…” It was a croak.

“Hush. Rest. I’m here.”

“I hurt… don’t leave me…” Marghe did not know if Thenike could understand the thick, mucous sounds that struggled out of her mouth. “Don’t go. I need you.” The beast scored her throat with its claws. She coughed and coughed and suddenly could not breathe through the clump of phlegm in her throat. Thenike let go of her hand. “Don’t leave me!” Marghe whispered. “I love you.” But Thenike was moving away to bring back a cup for her to spit in, and Marghe could not say any more, for the beast with hot claws had returned with a vengeance.

Later, much later, Marghe watched the ceiling. She could not move her head, or even her eyes. Now the beast had become a thing of cold, with thin fingers sliding under her skin and beneath her fingernails. She wanted to go away, to a place where she would never hurt again. Go away. Anywhere. She closed her eyes. It would not be hard.

“Marghe!” Thenike’s voice. Marghe did not bother to open her eyes. She was already drifting away, to somewhere warm and soft, where she would never hurt again.

“Marghe, I won’t let you go. I’m here. I have your hand. Do you hear me? I won’t let you go.”

Thenike’s skirts rustled, then her weight settled next to Marghe on the bed.

“Listen to me. I know you can hear. Feel my hand. I can feel yours. It’s warm, alive. Blood is beating along your arm, through your wrist. Just as it does in mine. You’re breathing. You’re tired, yes, almost worn out. But all you have to do is keep breathing, keep that blood pumping from your heart. You’ve done it for two days. Just one more, and you’ll be strong again. Do that for me, Marghe. For me. And for Gerrel.”

But Marghe did not want to return to her body. It was no longer entirely hers. The virus lived in it now, in every pore, every cell, every blood vessel and organ. It slid, cold and in control, through her brain. If she recovered, she would never be sure what dreams and memories were her own, and which were alien. She belonged to Jeep. She wanted to shout, Don’t you see? It’ll never let go. I’ll never be clean again…?

“In me,” she gasped. “Unclean.”

Thenike must have understood. “Unclean? No. Your body is changing, just as it does every time you get sick and another little piece of something else comes to live inside you. If a child gets red fever, then when she is grown and her children get the spots, she will not become ill, because the disease is part of her already, and accepts her. Is this unclean? No. It’s life. All life connects. Sometimes, one kind of life is stronger than another. As happened with your mother.”

Marghe tried to remember her mother. Could not.

“But, Marghe, you’re strong, and what you call virus is weak. Accept it. Let it into the deepest parts of you. It’s the fighting that takes your strength. Let it be. Just breathe, listen to your blood sing through your veins. Here. Feel.” Thenike lifted Marghe’s hand and laid it against her breast. “Feel my heart beat.” She put her wrist along the underside of Marghe’s other hand. “Feel my blood. Feel yours. Breathe with me. In. Out. That’s it. In. Out. In. Out…”

Marghe’s body responded automatically, taking up the rhythm. She was too tired to fight it. She kept breathing. Too tired. After a while, she slept.

She woke gradually, without opening her eyes. She ached all over, and her throat was still raw and her chest thick with phlegm, but it seemed that the beast with its hot claws and cold fingers was gone, and her mind was clear. Someone was stroking her head, and humming. She smiled.

“Marghe?”

She opened her eyes. Gerrel was bending over her, looking worried.

“Good morning.” It was a creaky whisper, but Marghe was pleased with it.

Gerrel’s face split into a wide grin. “It’s afternoon. You’ve slept all yesterday, all night, and most of today.”

“Could sleep more.”

“I’ll go get Thenike. She’s been here most of the time. But then I think she got fed up with you always being asleep and went to find something to eat.” Gerrel cocked her head. “You’re probably hungry. Shall I bring something?”

At the thought of food, Marghe felt ill. “Nothing for me.” She was terribly tired.

Gerrel hesitated by the door. “If you’re sure? Well, then. I’ll be quick.”

Marghe listened to her light footsteps turn to a run once she was outside. She smiled again.

Alive. She was alive. She turned her head slowly, looked at the wall. It seemed different. And the bed felt… not the same. She looked more carefully. This was not her room. Not the guest room.

Something chittered and sang outside. From the forest. A bird? She wanted to be out there, walking through the trees, smelling the life, hearing animals scuttle and sing and wind riffle through boughs overhead. She wanted so many things, and was surprised at how hard she wanted them. She felt different. Again.

Thenike opened the door, carrying a tray. Gerrel squeezed in behind her.

“I want to see the sky,” was the first thing Marghe said. Her voice was stronger already.

“No. First you eat. Then you sleep again. Then you eat again. Then, maybe, you go outside and see the sky.”

“Not hungry.” She felt tired again.

“I tried to tell her,” Gerrel said, leaning forward over Marghe, “but she said–”

“I said,” Thenike interrupted, “that you needed food. The fever has burnt the flesh from your bones.” She put the tray down on the swept hearth. “But first, I want to have a look at you. No,” she said as Marghe struggled to lift herself upright, “you relax. Gerrel and I will lift you.”

They lifted her up, propping her with pillows, while Thenike listened to her chest. “Breathe. Deep.” Marghe had to lean forward, her weight resting on Gerrel, for Thenike to listen to her lungs from the back. From this angle, she could see a half‑finished tapestry on the floor, some folded clothes that she recognized on the shelf: this was Gerrel’s room. “Breathe.” Thenike tapped and listened. Marghe coughed.“Good. Good.” They laid her back against the pillows and pulled the covers back up to her chin. “All that rubbish in your lungs should be gone in a day or two. If you do as I suggest.” She gestured to Gerrel, who brought the tray. “So first, eat.”

Marghe only managed about half the soup, then, to her chagrin, felt her eyes begin to roll. Thenike made her drink a bowl of lukewarm water before she lay down again. She was asleep before Gerrel could lift the soup dish back onto the tray.

She woke again just before evening. This time she stayed awake long enough to eat a large bowl of stew, and to ask Thenike why she was in Gerrel’s room: because Gerrel had panicked and brought her to the safest place she could think of, her own room, explained Thenike. Marghe fell asleep with a smile on her face. Gerrel was her sister.

Her recovery was rapid. Almost too rapid, Marghe thought. It seemed as though there was a fountain, a hot spring of energy inside her fizzing and bubbling and demanding to be let out.

“I feel different,” she said to Thenike.

“You are different.”

“No, I feel…” she hunted for a way to describe the incredible well‑being she felt, “like I could live for a year on sunshine and fresh air, like I might never get sick again.”

Thenike laughed, and Marghe listened to that laugh: rich, smoky, warm, it rolled like the breaking waves on a flat beach, as if it could go on forever, changeless. “Oh, you will,” the viajera said, and Marghe heard music in her many‑layered voice.

“You even sound different. And I can smell…” Everything. She could smell everything, and the scent was excitement: her own, Thenike’s. She watched Thenike’s dark brow tighten a little in the center, noticed for the first time how the lines were slightly asymmetrical, canting down toward her right eyebrow, like old timbers sagging at one end. Except it was not just sight and sound and smell, it was something else–a different kind of sensitivity that made Thenike’s voice almost visible, that sharpened Marghe’s sight so that what she saw seemed to have texture, more meaning than mere color or shape.

“It may be that the poisons fed to you as part of the vaccine are out of your system now, that the virus has cleaned you.”

Symbiosis, Marghe thought. Like allowing spiders to spin their webs in a house so that the flies and mosquitos were kept to a minimum. Like the E. colithat flourished in her gut and helped her digest proteins and process fibers, the result of some bacterial infection in a million‑years‑distant ancestor.

Outside, something sang, a long call that started out yellow, dipped in the middle to blue, then rose to scintillating gold and orange, as though the caller had decided that it was not, after all, sad. Marghe smiled. “What was that?”

“The chia bird. She’s been singing for two days now. A little early: today is only the first day of the Bird Moon.”

“What does she look like?”

“Come see for yourself.”

The chia, perched on top of the house, was like a palm‑sized replica of the pictures of herd birds Marghe had studied at Port Central: bony crest, grayish, slippery‑looking skin blushing to pink where the capillaries webbed the near surface, stringy pectorals that powered two true wings like those of a bat, and a fixed gliding wing like delicate parchment. When it turned to examine its observers, Marghe saw that its eyes were startling and green, like a cat’s.

The days got warmer, and Marghe moved back into the guest room. There was more sun, and she heard more chia birds calling and more wirrels chittering from the forest, There were insect noises and the soughing of wind in trees, though it was not the same as hearing wind in Earth trees; the leaves were stiffer, the sound higher pitched. Sometimes it hissed.

Marghe turned the soil in the garden and listened to the wind. So many sounds twined into that hissing: insect carapaces scraping the undersides of dead leaves, living leaves shivering in the wind, an empty nutshell rolling up against a tree trunk with a soft tck. It would be a long time before she grew tired of her newly virus‑sharp senses.

As she worked, she thought about what Thenike had taught her, about deepsearching, about patterning, about pregnancy.

They were all part of the same process. She rooted out a weed and tossed it onto the pile she would use for compost. Deep‑search. Something that all did, once they thought they were ready. Often some time around puberty, though earlier or later was not too unusual. The searcher looked within, to find out… what?

“Whatever she looks for,” Thenike had said unhelpfully. “Almost always a name. Sometimes what she would like to do with her life.”

It intrigued Marghe. What did they see, and how did they see it? Like a movie, an interactive net holo, an abstract painting? Maybe it was audio, or tactile. Olfactory.

“All,” Thenike said, and added, just when Marghe was beginning to feel satisfied with that answer, “or none, or a mix.”

The more Marghe had pressed, the less clear the viajera’s answers had seemed. “You’re not being clear,” she had said, frustrated. “How do you mean, exactly, ‘listen to what’s inside you’?”

“Try it for yourself,” Thenike had said. “Then you explain it to me.”

That had been yesterday. Marghe did not want to take the viajera up on her suggestion. She was afraid.

She pondered that as she dug and rooted. Now and again she moved one plant away from another, or closer to its neighbor. She was not sure why she did this, only that it was good for the different plants; it felt right. When the plants were wrongly ordered, it felt on some dim level as though someone were screeching metal down metal, setting her teeth on edge. When she moved the plants, the discomfort stopped. At first she had been disturbed by the fact that she was behaving without identifiable empiric reason, and had tried not to do so. But the feeling became unpleasant. Now she allowed herself to act automatically and tried not to worry about it.

She stood up and stretched, moved to the patch of garden she wanted to break in for the jaellum seedlings growing indoors in the nursery, just off the great room. The ground was hard, still frosty in places. She dug until she was damp with sweat inside her tunic.

She straightened her back. Something was not right. She sat quietly, letting her mind idle, and then she knew: the jaellum seedlings would do better over on the south side of the garden, in the more sandy soil. Which meant she had broken this ground for nothing. She swore softly. It would take hours to dig over a new patch, and she would have to transfer the goura bulbs she had planted earlier in the sandy patch.

Maybe she was wrong. It would be easier if she was wrong. She would continue breaking this ground. Yes. After all, she had no real reason, no good reason, to believe they would flourish better in a different location.

By gritting her teeth, she managed to work for about another half an hour, but eventually she had to stop; her discomfort was almost painful. She admitted defeat. Whether or not she knew how she knew it, the seedlings would fare better in the sandy south garden. All she was doing was wasting time and energy. What needed doing needed doing.

She sighed, climbed to her feet, and took her taar‑skin mat and roll of wet felt over to the goura. She starting digging up the shoots, one by one, and laying them carefully on the unrolled felt. Next time she would listen more attentively to her instincts.

She paused, trowel in hand. What needed doing needed doing.

Deepsearch. If Marghe was honest, she herself knew she ought to do it. Ignoring the need did not make it go away.

She thrust her trowel deep into the soil and took her hand away. The handle gleamed, rounded and polished by a hundred human hands. She wondered how old it was, whether a woman of Ollfoss using the trowel could look inside her past and see her mother or grandmother or many‑times‑great‑grandmother handling the same trowel, bending over the same patch of dirt. The thought terrified her, but what scared her more was the idea that she might look inside herself and find nothing.

Eight women pattern‑sang for Marghe; she made the ninth. When she had asked Thenike why always nine, Thenike shrugged. “Nine is the right number.”

Marghe decided not to take that any further. “How long does it take?”

“A few moments, or the whole day. Everyone’s different. It depends how far you go, and how easy it is. Many of the young ones are frightened, which makes it harder. You’ll go in fast, I think. How long you stay is up to you.”

Not long, Marghe thought, not long.