Marghe nodded, still lost in wonder.
“I think of it as my tree, my levin tree. You’re the first person I’ve ever shown it to.”
Marghe wrapped her arms around Thenike. “You give me so much.”
”I have something else for you.” She reached inside her tunic and untied the belt pouch. “Here.”
It was a suke, with a bas‑relief carving on both sides: an ammonite.
“I drew it for Leifin. She carved it, I polished it and drilled the hole.” Marghe touched the silky raised carving. So much love. “Here’s a thong. For your waist or neck.”
Marghe threaded the braided leather through the hole.
“Do you want me to tie it?”
Marghe shook her head. “I’d like to just hold it awhile.”
They sat side by side, watching the water, listening to the soft thunder of the foss. Marghe held the suke more tightly than she would have clutched a diamond.
“The pool’s named after the menalden that used to live here.” Thenike leaned forward and traced an outline in the sand with her finger. “A menalden. They’re dappled, like forest shadow.”
It looked like an awkward‑legged deer, with a flat, rudderlike tail and splayed feet. Menalden. Dappled deer. From menald, seventeenth‑century dialect for “bitten,” or “discolored,” or “dappled.”
Marghe’s heart thumped. How did she know that? She had no idea how she knew it, but she did, and suddenly she knew why the women of this world used ancient Greek words and Zapotec words and phrases from Gaelic, languages dead for hundreds of years. The words just came, and they fitted. Whether that particular knowledge of the menalden had lain in her unconscious for years, after a cursory leaf through a dictionary, and then been pulled up by some incredible feat of memory made possible by me actions of the virus, she was not certain. That explanation seemed easier to believe than the only other one she could come up with: that this might be some kind of race memory stirred by the virus, a memory of someone who had lived long ago and used such a dialect.
Marghe looked at the levin tree, and leaned against the warmth of Thenike’s shoulder.
“What is it, Amu?”
“Just as I thought I was beginning to know this world and understand it, it throws more magic at me.”
“What’s life without magic? Turn your magic into a song, share it with others.”
“You know I can’t sing.”
“A story, then.”
They found a ruined house with most of its roof still intact. Thenike fell asleep straightaway, but Marghe lay awake, thinking of moonlight and magic, and how she could tell a story about what she had just seen so that others would feel what she had felt.
Thenike was already up and about when Marghe woke. Sunlight worked as well as moonlight on the water and the levin tree, she found, though it did not have the same eerie magic. She splashed her face with water from the pool, then leaned forward a little to admire her reflection and the look of the suke on its thong around her neck.
Thenike laughed. “You’ll fall in if you’re not careful.” She was carrying a freshly caught fish.
After breakfast, when they had damped the fire and rolled up their nightbags, Thenike showed Marghe what she had really come to see of old Ollfoss.
“This is all there is left.”
It was a huge valley, gouged out of the side of a hill, ending in a curiously shaped hump; not natural, because it did not follow the gradient, as a stream or glacier might have done. Gouged by human–or at least intelligent, Marghe amended–hands. And so big. It was carpeted with ting grass, and big, bell‑shaped blue flowers that nodded in the slight breeze and filled the air with the scent of spring mornings and sunshine.
“What are they?”
“Bemebells. Or bluebells. There’s a children’s song that tells how at dawn and dusk, fairies creep out from under the eaves of the wood and play upon the bemebells with drumsticks made from grass and the anthers of other flowers.”
Marghe contemplated the valley, with its raised hump at the far end, glad that Thenike had not shown her this in the moonlight; there was too much melancholy here.
There was only one thing this could be, only one thing that made immediate sense: this was the landing site of the ship that had brought the women and men of Jeep to this world for the first time. Marghe did not know enough about such things to determine whether or not it was a crash landing, but she thought not. Forced, perhaps, for who would want to land here in the north when there were more hospitable areas south?
How had it felt, she wondered, to land in such a strange place, where they could see nothing but walls of trees and a lid of cloud? It must have seemed that there was not enough room to breathe. And then, when they began to sicken, and it became clear that the men would not recover… They had been brave.
“What’s under the mound?”
“Nothing,” Thenike said. “What there might have been has been dug up and used and reused, long before today.”
Nothing. “You’re sure? Yo’ve dug there yourself?”
“In other times, yes.”
Marghe wondered if she would ever get used to the fact that her lover could talk about memories that belonged to women long dead and rely upon them, trust them as she would her own. She did not want to believe Thenike, not this time.
“But that heap, it must have been something.”
“Nothing but dirt rucked up like a lover’s skirt.”
Nothing but dirt. It seemed fitting, somehow.
Marghe sighed, and turned away. She had not expected anything useful, had just wanted to find something, some piece of broken ceramic or discarded plastic, something she could hold in her hand and imagine being whole and new. But she did not need artifacts; there were the people themselves– people like Thenike. They carried their history with them. As she herself did now.
They walked out of Ollfoss with their packs on their backs and their water flasks bobbing full at their belts, and Thenike sang the bemebell song for Marghe Amun. It was simple and rhythmic, with lots of repetition and places where children were supposed to clap their hands and slap their thighs and stamp their feet in time to the music. The two women sang, and clapped, and smiled at the echoes in the forest, and walked on through the trees toward North Haven.
On the day of their arrival, North Haven was humming with the simultaneous arrival of new ships and an unseasonable wind that blew cold and hard from the Ice Sea.
“Though now, during Lazy Moon, the ice will be mostly water,” Thenike said. “At least in the more southerly reaches.” Then she pointed out a ship with two masts, whose sails might once have been blue‑green. “I think that might be the Nemora, out of Southmeet. We’ll find out soon enough.” She smiled but said no more, and Marghe decided that some old friend must be aboard.
Apart from its size, what struck Marghe about North Haven was its life: women on the stone wharfs, unloading fish and baskets of what looked like turtle shells, mending nets and splicing ropes, tossing buckets of water over piles of fish guts while fast cadaverous‑looking birds quarreled over the mess. It was noisy; women called greetings and shouted insults, water crashed against the stone wharfs and hissed up to the wattle quays farther down the coast, and baskets and ropes creaked as catches were hauled up from the decks. And everywhere there were children: some busy, some just playing an incomprehensible game of tag that involved running and hiding and getting underfoot, and much whooping and shrieking when someone was caught.
Some of the children recognized Thenike: did she have news? Would she sing? Could she spare a comb of krisbread, or a slice of goura? A tune on her pipe? Who was her confused‑looking friend?