“I’ll accept you,” Thenike said immediately.
“And I.” Hilt.
“Me, too.” Gerrel.
But Wenn was shaking her head. “We don’t even know where you come from, Marghe, who your people are, nothing.”
“But we do.” Leifin again, sounding calm. “At least, we know she has powerful friends who have trata with Cassil in Holme Valley. These women won’t stay where they are forever; there’s not enough land there at their Port Central for them to grow food. When they move, we need to know what they might do, where they might go.
Who they might trade with. If Marghe becomes a part of our family, then it’s us trata families will come to in Ollfoss; they’ll know we have the ear of a powerful new kindred from the south. Think about it.”
Wenn looked thoughtful.
Marghe looked at Huellis, who was nursing Moss. Now she had an idea how the poor woman had felt: like a pawn in the greater game of trata. She remembered what Thenike had said— She seems happy enough with it now— and almost did not say anything. But she wanted to be accepted for herself, not for something she might not be able to provide. “I can’t negotiate trata with you on behalf of the women in Port Central. Asking to join you means I to no longer part of their… family.”
She sat down. Wenn’s thoughtful expression had not changed.
“Perhaps not,” Wenn said, “but we could learn a great deal from you.”
“And you’re strong and healthy. Or you will be; you heal fast enough,” Kenisi added.
Leifin’s words had done their work. Marghe looked at Gerrel, at Thenike and Thenike’s blood sister Hilt. At least they would be accepting her for the right reasons. Maybe Leifin liked her, as well as seeing her as a way for their family to spread its trata tentacles; and Wenn and the others did not exactly dislike her, they were just wary. She would have a family, of sorts. Perhaps love would come later.
Wenn was nodding now. “Yes, yes, this might work. I don’t see any reason why not. Huellis? Kenisi?” They both nodded. “Very well, then.”
One of Wenn’s knees cracked as she stood up. She held out her arms to Marghe, who scrambled to her feet. “Welcome, Marghe, daughter of…?”
“Acquila. And John,” she added, “my father.” They did not understand the word; there was no word for father in the Ollfoss dialect. She did not want to use the approximation sire, it did not mean the same thing at all.
“Daughter of Acquila and John, sister to…?”
“I have no sisters.”
”You do now,” Gerrel said, and leaned forward to lay a warm hand on her foot.
“Welcome, Marghe daughter of Acquila and John, to our hearth and home, to your sisters Gerrel and Thenike and Hilt”—they stood up, one by one, and surrounded her and Wenn—“and Leifin and Huellis, Moss and Otter, and Kenisi.”
She stretched out one gnarled hand and helped her partner stand. “And myself, Wenn.”
“Thank you,” was all Marghe could think to say.
“We will feed you, and clothe you, share everything that’s ours with you, without reservation, without condition. You in your turn must do the same. Will you do that?”
Marghe looked at Gerrel’s eager face, knew that behind her Thenike would be smiling. Family. Yes.
They ate together. Gerrel was full of herself, and Hilt told a story of her last voyage, but Marghe was too shy to say much. She huddled next to Thenike, who seemed to understand her need for quiet. She felt tired, and a little ill.
They were talking about her again. Gerrel leaned over and tugged her sleeve.
“You’re not a guest anymore,” she said, “which means you can’t really use the guest room. You’ll have to share. Do you want to share with me?”
Gerrel was pleasant to be with, for a little while, but Marghe simply did not have the energy to deal with her all the time. She tried to frame an answer.
Kenisi saved her the trouble. “Gerrel, Marghe’s not healed yet. She’ll need the peace and quiet of the guest room awhile longer.”
“But she could decide now whether or not she—”
“Gerrel, the poor woman’s almost falling on the floor with fatigue.”
“But—”
“Later.”
Thenike touched Marghe’s shoulders. “I’ll help you back to bed.”
Now that Marghe felt safe, or at least safer than she had felt before, she started to question Thenike in earnest: How had Ollfoss come to be? How long had it been settled? What about population fluctuations?
“There’s a map in Rathell’s house you might want to see.”
Rathell and her family lived in one of the bigger houses in the west of Ollfoss.
Rathell herself showed them into the great room. “There it is. When you’ve seen all you want to see, come and find me. I’ll probably be in the kitchen. We’ll share a pot of dap.”
The map hanging on the western wall was huge, perhaps four meters wide and three deep, and old. The paper was stiff, and close up Marghe could see where sections had been glued together. The inks, here and there brilliant blue or gold, were mostly faded to the color of old blood, brown on brown. From what Marghe could remember of the precise computer representations of the planet she had called up aboard Estrade, the map looked surprisingly accurate. It was crammed with tiny representations of villages, herd grounds, rivers, caves, and dangerous currents.
Significantly, each picture was labeled in tight, careful script. It was English, the variety that had been spoken three or four hundred years ago.
“You can read this?”
Thenike shrugged. “Where the writing is clear, yes. Look, here.” She pointed to a picture, a waterfall just inside the southern edge of the forest. “Ollfoss.”
“Can everybody read this?”
“Most people here, perhaps, yes. Not everyone wants to learn.”
“You did. Why?”
The viajera smiled. “I like to learn everything. How to sing olla, how to dye cloth, how to throw pots and chip stone. How to hum to a herd bird and skin a taar.
Everything.”
“So you didn’t learn to readjust so that you could understand this map, so that you had accurate directions?”
“No. All I have to do is ask.”
“What if you forget?”
Thenike’s eyes were very soft, light brown. They reflected the sepias and dark ivory of the map. “Viajeras don’t forget.”
Marghe thought back to Thenike telling her We remember and wondered if, somehow, the virus conferred extraordinary memory on those who called themselves viajeras. Thenike was watching her. “Are there other writings?” Marghe asked her.
Maybe there would be some kind of ship’s record, something that would say where these people had come from, and when. How it had been for them.
“Some. Not many. Paper doesn’t last as well as message stones or knots. Or as long as memory.”
“Are there any records from the beginning? From when your ancestors first came here?”
“What is it that you wish to know?”
“Many things.” Thenike was offering to tell her, from her memory, from the oral tradition. “But I want to also see the records. The records themselves are important to me, as important as the account they may contain. Are there any?”
“Rathell keeps many old things in here, handed down from mother to daughter.
She showed me, once…” Thenike moved over to a wooden chest, old enough to have had its corners rounded by time and polishing. “I don’t think she’ll mind.”
Inside were several bundles wrapped in cloth. Thenike opened one: it held a broken pot. She rewrapped it, unfolded another. “Is this what you’re looking for?”
Disks. But big ones, as big as her palm, cheerful with refracted color. They were like nothing she had ever seen before, except in old records. Useless. There was no way she could read these. Unless… Perhaps Letitia Dogias could do something with them, if their notoriously fragile information storage had not been long since destroyed. Disks. What a wealth of information there might be here. “Wrap them, put them back. I can’t read them. Perhaps, in time, someone who can will come and take a look.”