When they were outside, Marghe looked at Thenike. “The story of Torren and the healer?”
Thenike smiled. “Torren was a young girl who thought she knew best and did not always eat her nitta seeds, or wear her cap in the middle of winter. One day she got sick and went to the healer. The healer turned her away, saying, why should she help Torren when Torren always refused to help herself?”
“So what happened?”
“It depends. Sometimes Torren repents, sometimes the healer relents, sometimes Torren dies.”
Marghe pondered that. “So viajeras teach. What else do they do?”
“Depends on the viajera. We witness agreements between kiths and communities; we judge disputes; sometimes we allot land to herders.”
“Land that you hold?”
“No. There’s a great deal of common land. When a family moves, or hits a burn, or simply splits into two, they need to use other land. Viajeras remember which land is in use, and which of that available land would be suitable for the family that’s asking for it. We remember. We remember which family might quarrel with which, and make sure they’re given the use of lands that don’t adjoin. We travel and tell news, we sing songs and spin stories; we lead pattern singings and deepsearch, we heal broken bones and old resentments, but mostly we remember.”
Marghe got the feeling that she was missing something, but had no idea what.
Thenike grinned. “But being a viajera is not all of who I am. I’m also a bad cook and a good sailor, and dangerous to meet over a game of knucklebones.” Marghe did not look satisfied, “Did you expect more? I’m not a sage or a holy woman. I have skills that I use as a viajera. Just as you have skills that you use as an anthropologist.” She said the word carefully, only having heard it once, the day before.“Everything I do can become part of that work, if I choose. Just as it can and does for you, if you choose.” She stared up at the sky, which was swirling like scum on top of a boiling pot, letting the sun through for brief moments. “If I wasn’t a viajera, didn’t have the skills of a viajera, I’d be someone different. A sailor, perhaps, like Hilt, leaving North Haven in the spring and only coming back in the autumn after crossing Silverfish Deeps as far as Eye of Ocean and back again.” She sounded wistful. “And you. What would you have chosen to do if you had not come here, to be an anthropologist?”
Marghe thought about that. “I don’t know.”
“What do you like to do? In the winter when you walked the hills in Portugal, or lay on your stomach on the roof watching the fisherfolk of Macau”—again the careful words, strange in her mouth—“what was it that you wished you had the time to do?”
“Explore,” Marghe said, surprised. “Go places I’d never seen before. Exciting places, where dragons might just be real.” She laughed, delighted at her discovery. “I always liked to follow paths, see where they went, who they led to. A map, a new world, a strange country—they’re all like puzzles where I have to put the pieces together to feel comfortable, to understand how things are. Once I understand, I feel too comfortable. Then it’s time to move on, find a new place, new people. New discoveries.”
“Always?”
“So far,” she said slowly, suddenly unwilling to go any further with this.
Thenike nodded. “And these places you go, the people you find, do you come to care for them? Or do you only study them, like strange shells you might find on the beach?”
Marghe forced a smile and waved the question aside. Like strange shells that you find on the beach… She did not want to think about it. “What kind of sky would you call this?”
“A chessel sky,” the viajera said. “If I was in my skiff, I’d be looking for a place to put in. We’ll see a bit of wind.”
“Chessel?”
“If you feel up to a little walk, I’ll show you.”
Marghe had to breathe deeply, steadily, and lean on Thenike as they walked the snow-dusted path to a building half-hidden under the trees. The sloping roof was covered in old snow, gone icy and gray, and the slit windows were shuttered from the inside. Unlike most of the other buildings of Ollfoss, much of it was underground.
The steps leading down to the sturdy-looking door were not steep, but Marghe took them one at a time, like a child.
Inside, it was cool and dim, full of barrels, slablike tables, sacks and stacks and huge clay jugs. She ran her hands over one: stoppered with a rough clay seal. Food storage. Thenike used a wooden pole, curved into a hook at the end, to lever open a couple of window shutters. There was a milky, sickly smell Marghe could not identify, and overlaying that, something thin and sharp.
“A chessel,” Thenike said, pointing.
It was a wooden cheese vat. Thenike leaned her pole up against a whitewashed wall and pulled off the gauzy cloth covering, sending a gust of sharp not-quite-cheese smell in Marghe’s direction. In the vat, the whey looked scummy, rancid, like the sky.
“This is where we make butter and cheese, and store what milk we don’t use on any day.” She slid the stone lid off a good-sized bowl. “Yeast. For the bread.” She slid it back. “Through here are the vegetables.” There were mounds of roots and tubers, leaves drying in bunches and bulbs hanging from the roof. Thenike reached into a barrel, pulled out a small, round fruit, sniffed it. “Soca. Here. Can you smell the spice? That means it’s not ready yet. We pick them at the end of the Moon of Shelters, leave them here in the dark until they’re ready. When they’re ready they smell terrible, like bad feet, but they taste like rain after a drought, like wind on a calm sea.”
To Marghe it seemed that the storage cellar was full with enough to feed a thousand people for a year, and it occurred to her that she had never really seen whole-food storage before. At Port Central, there was probably more protein, more vitamins, stored in a tenth this space, all in the form of concentrates, flash-frozen choice cuts, and prepeeled mixes.
The chessel sky was wrapped right around the sun by the time they emerged. A cold wind bowled snow dust along the paths, Marghe’s scars ached. She shivered.
Here she was in Ollfoss, the place she had been traveling toward for two years in order to… study the people like shells found on a beach. She was not sure she wanted to do that anymore. Suddenly she was not sure about anything anymore, and that was frightening. If she did not want to do what she had set out to do, then what did she want? Something had changed. Some part of her was gone.
“Marghe? Are you well?”
“No,” she said.
“Lean on me. It’s not far.” The arms that Thenike wrapped around her waist for support were strong and hard. Marghe wanted to lean into them and weep for what she had lost, though she did not know whether her loss was good or bad, or even real. Instead, she started the painful walk back to the guest room.
She allowed Thenike to help her into bed, grateful when the viajera stooped to add wood to the carefully banked fire and stoked it into a blaze. When she turned back to Marghe, her face was ruddy. “That should keep you warm. Do you need anything else?”
Stay with me, Marghe wanted to say. Don’t leave me alone with my thoughts.
“No.”
“Then I’ll check on you later.”
Marghe was tired. The fire was hot. She fell asleep.
In her dream, she walked along a long, bleak shore littered with bladderwrack and feathers and seashells. Someone was down by the surf. Thenike. She held something out to Marghe, something hard and bright, crusted with wet sand. A chambered nautilus. “Do you see, Marghe,” she said, opening it as though it were on a hinge,