“In these times, upon that raised plain we now know as Tehuantepec there stood a forest. This was the mother of all forests, and her trees stretched east and west from Pebble Fleet to the Oboshi Desert, and south and north from the Trern Swamplands to the northern coast, though there was no woman here to speak those names. This mother of a forest stretched even beyond the north coast, for in those days there was no sea lying between here and what we now call the icy wastes, and those far northern lands were fair and fruitful. On and on the forest stretched, and down and down upon it shone the sun, more strongly than it does today.”
While she spoke, Thenike’s hands moved gently over the drums, stroking and tapping, cupping the sounds, bringing them to life beneath her long brown fingers. Then she stopped talking, and set the scene to her tale with drums alone. The drums spoke of warm rain and a forest floor steaming with mist, of strange flying creatures whose shrieks rang through the trees and whose feathers flashed purple and gold.
Something about Thenike’s utter concentration warned Marghe that she was about to witness something she had never seen before, something that was at the heart of being viajera. Tonight she would hear more than a pretty tale set to a nice tune.
The viajera’s eyes glittered with reflected torchlight. Her black hair, wound in a careless knot on top of her head, did nothing to disguise the tautness of her neck. Her head moved slowly from side to side to the beat of her drums, and shadows caught and dissolved in the hollows of her cheeks and temple and skull. Her whole body swayed lightly. The rhythm built.
For one fleeting moment, Marghe wanted to run. Thenike was in some kind of trance. The beat of her drum was pulling Marghe in; she could feel her heart beating with the thud of the viajera’s palms on the drumskin, and her breath sucked in and out to the rhythm of Thenike’s swaying body. Marghe knew, without knowing how she knew, that what the viajera was about to do was dangerous–for Marghe, and for herself. But then Thenike opened her mouth to sing, and Marghe was caught.
Thenike sang.
Marghe did not hear the words. She was there, living it. Though she knew she was sitting by a fire in Ollfoss, her mind was taken back to a place, a glade, where tall animals that were not animals swung long‑handled axes at the trees. She was one of them, uncomfortably warm in her thick ivory‑colored fur. She watched, fascinated, as her three‑fingered and two‑thumbed hand swung the ax and the clearing grew.
The scene shifted: north, where it was pleasantly cool. The one before her had a leather strap over his shoulder; it wound about his waist, then up again over her shoulder and round her waist, and on to the one behind her, and another behind him. They were straining to pull a huge stone. Within hooting distance, on her left, another group of six were struggling with their stone. They had been working for months. The gods would be pleased.
Time moved on. Back to the clearing, at the southern tip of their great nomadic ellipse. The stones were set, twenty‑seven of them in a circle. They hummed. Laid in the center of the circle were three six‑sided dressed flagstones. A towering green sculpture of woven vegetable stuff–grasses, moss, leaves, vine–stood on the flags. She sang with the others, a great booming hymn to their gods of sky and earth, and set fire to the sculpture. It burned with an acrid stink. With the others, she took her turn walking through the smoke. Colors writhed at the edge of her vision and sounds swam slowly, like live things. A drug. They danced, and boomed, and mated. She wrote the name of her mate in the ashes with her finger.
Time sped up and Marghe leapt centuries, watched while the snows came earlier and earlier and the northern trees began to die and still she and her descendants traveled south and gathered at the stones to mate and worship. Eons passed like heartbeats: a sea surged between the south forest and the ailing north. Years passed; even in summer icebergs floated in the sea, and the north was white and icy. She and her kind were reduced to grubbing under trees for frozen berries and weeping great yellow tears as their younglings died. None of their number had braved the icy water and the floating bergs for generations.
And then one winter the sea froze.
They sang their booming hymns of praise, wrapped their young as warmly as they could, and set out south. South, to the mating place of their ancestors, to build a fire to their gods, to appease their anger and bring back the sun.
The trek was hard. Their feet bled on the ice; there was not enough food. When the younglings curled up and stopped whimpering, and died one by one, each was laid on the ice, with a song for a grave. There were not many left when they reached the snow‑shrouded forests on the southern shore of the sea.
None of the survivors had ever been near the stones, but memories buried in their bones showed them the way. They went forward through the trees with sure strides. But they had hardly lost sight of the shore when it seemed the sky was split by light and thunder and a bolt from god thrashed down and through the trees in a trail of noise and fire. They were knocked over by the blast, and the ground trembled under their feet as the black bolt ground and smashed through the trees. There was a great burning, and alien smells.
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.”