“shells are not empty.” Chamber after gleaming chamber was filled with soft, wet life. Such a fragile and beautiful thing. Precious. Then the shell and Thenike were gone, and Marghe was running up and down the beach, listening desperately for the cries of her mother, who was trapped inside one of the shells and being swept away on the tide.
But something caught her attention, something dark and wet, gleaming in a nest of seaweed. She stooped for it. A fossilized shell, an ammonite. It was cold and heavy in her maimed hand, like stone. But her mother was being swept away. You can’t lose me now, it whispered, you’ve onty just found me. And while she watched, it sank into her palm and disappeared. When she looked up, all the other shells were gone.
Marghe jerked awake. Her left hand was numb; she had slept on it. She shook it until it began to tingle, shivered as her sweat dried. She remembered her dream, the fossilized shell…
Or do you just study people like shells found on a beach? Thenike’s question had passed Marghe’s barriers and gone deep; it demanded an honest answer. To herself, at least.
Very well.
She had lived alone for as long as she could remember, her father and mother had always been so busy. She had buried herself in study, in observation and analysis.
People were there to be watched, not related to. And now her mother was dead and her father estranged, and she had no friends. She had no friends, because whenever she began to get close to someone it felt like unknown territory, and it scared her; she ran away to a new place, to find new people to study, people to whom she did not necessarily have to be a person back.
To be a person back. She was not sure she knew how.
She was staring at the coverlet, trying to digest that revelation, when Thenike came back.
“How are you?”
“I don’t know.”
Thenike sat on the end of the bed. “What is it?”
Marghe did not dare look up from the coverlet. But she had to talk to someone about this, make it real. “There are some things I haven’t told you.” So many things.“About my mother. About what happened to my face.” She touched her nose, the break that only she could see. “About… about why I feel so alone.”
Thenike took her hand. “You’re not alone. I’m listening.”
“Sometimes… sometimes I feel that all I’ve got is my job. I study people, that’s who I am: studier of people. What you said this morning was true. I treat people like interesting specimens, not like humans. And I do it because… because I don’t know how else to behave. It’s as though all I am is my job. All I am is an empty shell. I look all right from a distance, but up close there’s nothing there, nothing behind the pretty whorls and brittle exterior. But I don’t have that job anymore. No shell. But If I don’t have that, then what do I have?”
She did not mention her dream of the ammonite, sinking heavy and solid, complete, into the bones of her hand.
“What did you have before your job?”
Slowly, Marghe told Thenike about how her mother, Acquila, had been an anthropologist before her, how Marghe had taken up the studies because it was a way to be close to her mother when she wasn’t there, which was often. She told her about Company. About her beating. About the death of her mother and her fear of the virus.
It was not everything, not nearly everything, but it was a start.
They were sitting peacefully, watching the fire, when Gerrel came in with lunch for herself and Marghe.
Thenike looked up. “That smells good.”
“There’s some left in the kitchen. Do you want me to get it for you?”
“Thank you.”
“Here, then. You two start in on these and I’ll bring another bowl for me.”
“If you put them by the fire, they’ll stay warm. We’ll wait for you to rejoin us,”
Marghe said. She suddenly needed the company of this unconcerned child and the woman who denied she was wise. She felt depressed and uncertain, not yet ready to be alone with her new and fragile thoughts.
Marghe and Thenike talked every day. Marghe learned of linn cloud, the waterfall cloud in multilayers which brought very heavy rain; of n’gus, queen daggerhorn, sky—stately and slow-moving like the beasts of the forest; of pilwe sky, soft, white undulating cloud that could hide the sun for a whole moon.
She did not know what Thenike learned, but Marghe told her of coming to Jeep, of the trata agreement with Cassil in Holme Valley, of how Holle and Shill had lent her Pella and given her the knife that helped keep her alive. She spent one whole afternoon talking about Aoife.
“She made this for me”—she showed Thenike the palo—“but she hit me more than once. Sometimes she treated me like I wasn’t human, but sometimes…
Thenike, I know she cared! Sometimes I think she came to care more for me than she had done for anyone for a long time. But she wouldn’t let me go. There was one time when I thought she might, I really thought… I tried to ask why. But it was as though she was two people. The tribe, the tribe, nothing but the tribe. It was all she knew. I just didn’t matter to her, in the end. I belonged to the tribe, I was subhuman, even though everything in her heart told her otherwise. How can people do that?”
“Perhaps she did what she could to help.”
“She was my jailer.”
“She taught you how to survive.”
“So that I could be a good and productive member of the tribe!”
“Nonetheless.”
Marghe brushed that aside impatiently, winced as her healing hands banged on the edge of her cot. “She kept me like a caged animal. Until I didn’t know who I was anymore. Thenike, there were days on Tehuantepec when I wished Uaithne would kill me, just to end everything. No, that’s not true. I didn’t care enough about anything to even bother to actively want anything. I just didn’t care, I was nothing. A blank. Have you ever felt like that? It’s the most terrible thing in the world.” She was crying, but did not bother to brush away her tears. “I nearly didn’t try to run, when I had the chance. I saw the fire and the first thing I thought was, Why bother to run, why not go back, at least it’ll be warm.” She laughed, heard the pain in it. “And you know what the worst thing is? I thought, It won’t be fair to Aoife if I run away. Not fair to Aoife. How can I live with that?”
“But you did decide to live.”
“Yes. I did, didn’t I. I wonder why.”
“Do you think it matters why?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.” She was quiet awhile. “It was hard, Thenike. I had to fight and fight and fight. All the time. When my compass broke. When I escaped.
Through the blizzard. To keep moving, to get to the trees. To keep living. There has to be a powerful reason to stay alive through all that.”
“You’re a survivor.”
“I don’t know what I am.” She wiped away the tears that were drying, cold, on her cheeks. “I don’t want to be Marghe the anthropologist who examines seashells on the beach and moves on. I don’t think I am her anymore. But I don’t know who I want to be.”
“Do you want to know?”
Marghe thought carefully. “Yes.”
“Then in a few days, when you’re stronger, there’s something you can do that might help you find out.”
It was the last day of the Moon of Silence, and the air was still and cold. The structure that sheltered the gong stood near the edge of the forest. It was rough, four timber posts holding up a shingled roof, and lay open to any woman of Ollfoss who might walk by. None did. This was Marghe’s place for the next day and night.
Marghe, tented inside her felt cloak, knelt on the patch of moss she had swept free of snow and contemplated the gong. It hung from the roof by two weathered ropes and was made of hammered metal that caught the light like copper but turned buttery silver in the center where the hammer dents of its making were almost worn smooth from generations of use. Thin morning light cast a blurred reflection of her face onto its uneven surface. Like a moon.