Текст книги "Ammonite"

Автор книги: Nicola Griffith

Соавторы: Nicola Griffith,Nicola Griffith
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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

Danner smiled to herself and left her to it. The doctor knew much more than she realized, but there was nothing she, Danner, could say to persuade Hiam of that; the doctor would simply have to learn for herself. Just as a young lieutenant had learned how to be a commander.

She returned a sergeant’s salute, feeling good, and headed for the western corrals. She wanted to have a look at the Singing Pasture horses while they were here. Then she would have a word with T’orre Na, or Cassil, about trading for some of them–never too early to think about breeding stock. Perhaps she should have brought along Said, the zoologist. Plenty of time for that. They had reared horses at home; she knew enough to be going on with. Besides, it would be good just to see some horses again, and there was nothing more constructive to be done until they heard back from White Moon.

Her wristcom bleeped. “Danner,” she said cheerfully.

“Hannah, you’d better get here right now.”

“Sara? Is that you?”

“Just get here.” Sara disconnected.

Danner headed back at a run.

From three hundred yards she could see the hospital was a hive of activity: people were climbing out of a newly arrived sled, Hiam had a stretcher by the hatch, and she and Lu Wai and a native–not from Holme Valley, judging by the clothes–were lifting someone onto it. The stretcher hissed over the grass toward the hospital, Hiam and Lu Wai trotting alongside working feverishly to connect drips to each arm, the native keeping one hand on the injured woman’s head. Another stretcher carried a body bag.

Two Mirrors and another native, dressed like the first, climbed down just as Danner got there.

“Officer Twissel reporting, ma’am.”

Chauhan looked dreadful. Danner had seen that look before; shock. “You’re injured, Officer Twissel. You and Officer Chauhan report to the medic…”she stared at the native, “and I’ll be there to talk to you in a moment.” That native, it could not be… “Representative Taishan?”

Marghe nodded.

“With respect, ma’am.” Danner dragged her gaze from the woman in native clothes and back to Twissel. “I can wait half an hour for the medic. The viajera fixed it up. I’m ready to make my report.”

But I don’t want to hear it! Danner wanted to shout. This isn’t possible! But it was, it had happened, someone had destroyed her people, and she had to hear how. She studied Twissel; the Mirror’s face was drawn but her color was good. “Very well. But Chauhan goes to the medics. And we’ll find you a chair.”

Marghe stayed.

Danner listened carefully to the report of the storm, of weapons malfunction, to Twissel’s matter‑of‑fact recounting of stupidity and heroism, of the unidentified and mutilated bodies. But all the time she listened, her attention kept wandering to the SEC rep, to the missing fingers and scarred face, the bare wrist and strange clothes. What in god’s name had happened to the woman?

Twissel had stopped and was looking at her oddly. “Go on,” Danner said, and forced herself to concentrate on Twissel’s estimate of numbers and speed. Not listening did not make the truth go away: her people, eleven of her people, had been butchered. $he should never have sent them. She should not have split her forces. It was her fault. Her people were dead because she had let them down.

But what else could she have done? She could not have foreseen that the storm would lead to malfunction. But maybe she shouldhave expected the unknown. They had spent too long down here, too long believing the natives to be harmless. Too long getting soft.

Recriminations would have to wait. For now, she would learn what she could. There were still half‑a‑hundred personnel here to take care of.

“And you didn’t find White Moon’s body, you say?”

“No, ma’am. But there were some that… well, after the tribes had finished with them, I doubt their mothers would recognize them.”

Danner chewed that over. “Why, Twissel? Why did these savages do this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Take a guess. They must have had reasons.” Her voice was harsh.

“I don’t think they did.” Twissel’s voice was flat, dull. “Request permission to see that medic now, ma’am.”

“Permission granted.”

Twissel stood.

“And, Twissel…”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“You did a remarkable job. Without you Dogias would have died, and Chauhan probably. No one will forget what you did. I’ll want to talk to you again soon, but try to rest now, and be assured that you did everything you could have done. Everything.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” Twissel sounded as though she did not care what Acting Commander Hannah Danner thought, and Danner did not blame her.

Danner looked at Marghe, who looked right back. Even the representative’s eyes looked different, with that scar above the eyebrow. How did she fit into all this? Perhaps she could explain the massacre. There hadto be a reason. There was always a reason.

That would have to wait.

She punched Kahn’s code into her wristcom. “Sergeant, as soon as communications with Port Central are reestablished, I want you to request Nyo for satellite tracking of hostiles, estimated number one hundred twenty, last known position at the relay last night during the storm, and heading north. Estimated speed fifteen kilometers per hour. And advise Sigrid that weather information now has top, repeat, top priority.”

She hit OFF. “Now,” she said, turning to Marghe, “I want you to tell me, as plainly as possible, what has happened to you since you left here and why you’re here now, while we walk over to see how Letitia is doing.”

“Part of the message was missing…” Danner stopped five feet away from the closed flap of the hospital tent, Marghe watched understanding flatten the Mirror’s expression, bring a flush to her cheeks. “You mean all this”–Danner waved at the sleds, the stretchers leaning drunkenly against the walls–“all this was a mistake?”

“Yes. But not my mistake.”

Hiam stepped out of the tent, wiping her hands on her bloody whites. “What mistake?”

Danner ignored her. “Whose, then? You were the one who deliberately stopped taking the stuff. You. No one else.”

“I don’t understand,” Hiam said, looking from one to the other. “Are you talking about the FN‑17?”

“Yes,” Marghe said tiredly. “How’s Letitia?”

“She’s stable. Tell me about the FN‑17.” Hiam was very still, very white. Marghe knew this was going to be hard.

“The FN‑17 worked. Or at least, it worked as long as I took it.”

“But you said, your message said…” Hiam looked from one to the other. “I don’t understand.”

”The message that reached Danner wasn’t complete. The part that was missing explained that I’d chosen to stop taking the vaccine.”

“But why?”

Marghe wondered how long it would take for Sara’s puzzlement to turn to anger. “I was alone in Ollfoss, with about thirty days’ worth of vaccine left, facing a journey to Port Central that would take longer than that, if it was possible at all, which it wasn’t.”

“If you hadn’t insisted on going there in the first place, this wouldn’t have come up.” Danner’s voice was shaking.“But no, you had to go galloping off there in the dead of winter.”

“If I was going to learn anything, I had to go north. And it had to be winter: I only had six months.” That all seemed so long ago. Blame Company, she wanted to say. If they hadn’t landed me in autumn, I wouldn’t have had to go up there in the harshest season. But she said nothing. Danner knew all this, or ought to.

“But you could have kept taking it,” Hiam said. “To see. You could have kept taking it.”

“No. Thenike told me–”

“Thenike?”

“My partner. She said the adjuvants were poisoning me, that–”

“What does a savage know about adjuvants?”

“That ‘savage’ is my partner.” She spoke very softly. “And she knew enough to save Letitia’s life.” There was a small silence while Hiam opened her mouth to argue, then closed it, and Danner slapped her gauntlets against her thigh, over and over. “Thenike said the adjuvants were making my body weak. And I needed to be as strong as I could be, to make sure that the virus, when it came, didn’t kill me.”

Danner stopped slapping. “It wouldn’t have come if you’d taken the damn vaccine.”

Marghe did not bother to answer that. “Sara, for you it was months of hard work–”

“Years.”

“Years, then. For me it was my life. But it worked, Sara. It worked.”

“Yes,” Sara said bitterly. “And that does us a lot of good now. Shall I call the Kursttomorrow, and tell them? No? No. Because they wouldn’t believe me. Because their spy has already told them it doesn’t work, and I’m down here. Contaminated.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?” She laughed, a sharp bark. “So am I.” She lifted the hospital flap to go back in. “Tomorrow, when I’ve more time, I want you to tell me everything. About the vaccine, the virus, your pregnancy, everything.”

It was evening, and Marghe was leaning against a fencepost, watching the Singing Pasture horses, when Thenike joined her.

“You look tired,” Marghe said. “How’s Letitia now?”

Thenike slid an arm round Marghe’s waist and leaned her cheek on Marghe’s shoulder. “Steadier. She’s strong, and the doctor knows well enough what to do.” Thenike’s bare skin felt cool; the night was warm and soft. A fly buzzed nearby. “And you?”

“Angry,” They called you savage. “At Danner, at Hiam. At whatever disturbed those message stones,” Nothing she could do about that now. She let her breath go in a rush, “Danner’s going to be even angrier when she hears our idea.”

“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! Lookat 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.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Danner checked the weather reports and thought furiously as she waited for Day and T’orre Na and the others to arrive. When they did, she could tell by their faces that they had already heard her orders.

“You can’t do this!” Day said. “You know what Marghe said. If you’re there, armed, they’ll attack.”

“Nyo isn’t here,” Danner said. “I doubt she’ll reach us before we meet with the tribes. And the latest weather report suggests we, the storm, and the tribes will all meet at the same time. Which means none of our weapons will work anyway. So, technically, we won’t be armed.”

“Then why–”

“We’ll rely on our armor. You know what it can do. If we’re properly armored up, nothing these savages can throw at us can get through. Modern weapons, yes, because of the heat, but impact weapons, especially low‑grade items like stones and spears, will just bounce off. If they got us on the ground, they could probably beat us senseless. Even a helmet can’t stop the brain being rattled inside the skull with enough pounding. But if we stand together… It should work.”

Day opened her mouth to say more, but T’orre Na held up her hand. “Hannah, are you saying that you intend to simply stand, empty‑handed, while Uaithne and the massed Echraidhe and Briogannon charge at you?”

“Only if necessary. And we’ll have our sleds, and the crossbows. Look, Marghe and Thenike might need us. It’s possible that these riders have at least one hostage. Do you want me to let civilians take care of this mess? I’m a Mirror, these are my people. I’ve been trained to deal with situations like this. And the storm won’t last forever. When it’s blown out, we’ll have our sleds, our weapons, our skills. These tribes need to know that.”

She ran a hand through her hair. “Day, T’orre Na… We have to make our way on this world. People need to know that we can’t be pushed around.” She looked at them, unable to tell what they thought. “The sleds might be the only things that save Marghe. And Thenike. I can’t not go.”

Chapter Seventeen

THE NIGHT WRAPPED hot and close around Marghe and Thenike as they galloped north and west from Holme Valley toward Singing Pastures. The pastures did not sing with wind now; the clumps of trees and the long grass hung silent and dark and still. The hooves rushing beneath them kicked up dusty scents of parched grass, despite the storm of two days before. Marghe’s throat was dry.

This isn’t going to work.

She concentrated on urging her mount forward, but with every thud of hoof on turf, the sick feeling in her stomach grew worse. This just isn’t going to work.

The thud of the horses’ hooves changed; they were galloping through a field of flowers, bursting open flower heads closed for the night, crushing the leaves and flattening stalks under hard hooves. They were suddenly drenched with the tight, sweet smell of olla. The smell of fear.

Marghe reined in suddenly. She could not do this. Thenike’s horse slowed, turned, came back.

“What’s wrong?”

“I can’t do it. It won’t work.” Her horse snorted and shifted restlessly.

“He doesn’t like the flowers.” It was too dark for Marghe to see Thenike’s expression. They guided their horses out of the broken blooms.

Marghe broke the silence. “It won’t work. It just won’t. I can’t do it, Thenike, I’m not good enough. They won’t listen to me. They’ll laugh, or ignore me, or…”Or they would kill her, or capture her. Not again. “What if we’re wrong? What if they won’t believe I’m their Death Spirit?”

“If they believe Uaithne, they have to believe that what you say is at least possible. As you said to Danner, they’re living a legend now.”

“But what if that isn’t enough!”

Silence. “Do you want to go back?”

Yes! Marghe wanted to say, and nearly leaned from her saddle and reached out into the soft dark to take Thenike’s hand. But if she took Thenike’s hand now, all her resolve would crumble, and she would say, Yes, let’s go, I was a fool to even think I could pull this off. She kept her arms by her sides.

“No.” She would go on, she would try. She had to try. If only she had Thenike’s skills and could use song and drumbeat to drive her words like barbs into the flesh and minds of the Echraidhe, drive them deep, tangle them about so that they could not escape. Thenike could do it, if she were Marghe. But she was not. Marghe was the only one the Echraidhe might listen to, the only one who had lived with them and who was from another world. The only one they might believe. And all she had was her self, and her story. It did not seem much with which to face a hundred spears.

Thenike looked about her. “Here might be a good place for me to wait for Danner.”

Danner would come, they knew. She was a Mirror; she would not be able to help herself. It would be Thenike’s job to stop her, if she could.

They dismounted. Marghe felt as though she had swallowed something so cold it was turning her stomach to ice. She put her hands on Thenike’s shoulders; the bone and muscle felt warm and strong. They pulled each other close, and Marghe buried her face in Thenike’s hair.

When they remounted, the rim of the sun was just touching the eastern hills with orange. The horses’ legs were covered with pinkish yellow pollen. Thenike’s saddle leather creaked as she turned this way and that, sniffing the air. “The storm will come today.”

Marghe knew Thenike could not be smelling anything through the thick scent of olla; it was another sense she used. Marghe herself could feel that crawling under her skin, that ripe sensation she had felt before the last storm. “The sky’s clear.”

“I don’t think it’ll bring rain. Just hot wind and lightning.”

“How soon?”

“Afternoon, maybe. We’ll need to find shelter before then, some rock. The grass is dry enough to burn, without rain.”

They were silent a moment, Marghe’s mount facing back the way they had come, Thenike’s facing Marghe. Their horses whuffled at each other’s necks. Marghe pointed to a clump of trees. “If Danner doesn’t come, wait for me down there. I’ll be back.”

“I’ll wait,” Thenike agreed. “But before the storm, Danner or no Danner, I’ll come looking.”

Marghe knew it would be pointless to argue. She gathered the reins awkwardly in her maimed left hand, preparing to wheel and head north. She wanted to tell Thenike to be careful, tell her how much she loved her. She could not find the words. “If she comes, make her wait. Make Danner wait.”

“Your wait, at least, is over.” Thenike nodded ahead, and Marghe twisted in her saddle to look. The western horizon was hazy with dust, dust kicked up by a hundred horses.

Thenike turned her horse. “Speak well, Marghe Amun. And remember, I’ll come looking, before the storm.”

Then she was gone.

Marghe turned her own horse to face the dust.

She was waiting, reins tucked under her thighs, hands free, and the sun almost fully risen behind her, when the riders came over the horizon. Dawn underlit their faces, orange and alien; their sweat‑sheened mounts gleamed like creatures of molten metal.

The massed tribes were in a long, straight line–a skirmish line, Danner would call it. Slowly, the line wheeled about its center, where the sun picked fire from Uaithne’s braids, and continued to advance, facing Marghe head‑on. Next to Uaithne, tied to the saddle and slumping like a gray sack of grain, was a Mirror. Her armor had been ripped off to reveal fatigues, and there was dried blood on one cheek. Captain White Moon. She did not seem more than half conscious.

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, mywill, 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. Iam the one who has traveled the black void between the stars to come to you; Iam the one who has wandered the white void, the plain that stretches its hand between the worlds of the living and the dead; Iam the one who has spoken with the spirits of the ancestors in the sacred stones. Iam the one who came amongst you and learned, like a child, the ways of my tribe; Iam the one who left, like a ghost, when I had learned all I needed; and Iam 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 notthe 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. Thisis 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.”