Thenike wrapped them carefully and laid them back in the chest. Marghe tried to set aside her disappointment and wandered back over to the map. South of Ollfoss there was a picture of standing stones. Anxiety hit her like a fist in her stomach. She breathed in and out. She was with family now. She looked at the map again. There were two or three communities near where she imagined Port Central to be. She pointed. “I didn’t know these were here.”
“They’re not. Burnstone moved them on a long, long time ago. They’re here now, at Three Trees and Cruath.” She pointed with a long brown finger. Her nail was glossy pink, and a long-ish scar ran from the thumb joint over the back of her hand.
Thenike seemed to be enjoying her interest, so Marghe examined the map more closely. She thought she could still detect a faint hint of blue in the picture of the waterfall at Ollfoss. Waterfall, foss. Ollfoss. “I haven’t seen the foss,” she said.
“It’s no longer here. Or, rather, we are no longer there. The soil was poor. When you’re well, I’ll show you the old valley and foss.”
And the way Thenike said it, something in the way she tilted her head and accented when to leave no possibility of if, Marghe knew that the viajera meant not only after you have recovered from walking out of Tehuantepec but after you have been sick with the virus, and have lived. Thenike had said more than once that she, Marghe, must save all her energy, hoard it until the time came to face the virus.
Thenike, she had discovered, was as much of a healer as Kenisi: “All viajeras are healers,” she had told Marghe, “to some extent or other.” She had not explained further.
Marghe hobbled, then limped, along the paths that ran between the gardens of Ollfoss where women from different families worked, sweeping the dirt free of snow, breaking in the ground with hand hoes—preparing the huge communal plots for the snarly nitta and goura shoots, the squat soca bushes that were harvested and traded every summer in North Haven. She waved at those she recognized.
Sometimes she helped Gerrel and Kenisi carry their family’s share of bread and soup to the kitchens in Ette’s house where the women would gather for lunch.
The weather improved, as did Marghe. Gerrel, seeing the improvement in both, took it upon herself to show Marghe the small family garden and teach her what needed to be done.
The sky was blue and clear, and an end-of-winter wind gusted from the treeline, filling her hair with the smell of snow and green. Marghe moved her tatty mat of what had once been taar skin a few feet along the furrow and knelt, glad to get the weight off her feet. Her sharp stone hand hoe cut easily into the first few inches, but she had to work to dig deeper. The hoe slipped; she added her three-fingered left hand to her right, bunched her muscles, and pushed.
The pressure made the scar tissue on her left hand ache. She shook her hand.
Such little things, fingers; she wondered if she would ever stop missing them, mourning them. At least she had her feet. And her life. She was still here to enjoy the cold, wet roughness of fresh-turned dirt and the sharp wind on her face. She would not dwell on her scars. She would not.
She dug into the loosened dirt with her right hand, plucked out small stones and tossed them aside, pulled up weeds. She was alive. Alive. She paused and felt carefully around the bulbs that were just beginning to root, found another stone. She yanked up a clump of creeping lichen and shook it vigorously, freeing the dirt from the roots. The lichen had to be gotten rid of, but the soil was rich, and had to be kept.
“Are you trying to kill it?” Thenike grinned down at her. The viajera was holding a steaming mug. “This is for you.”
Marghe gave the handful of greenery one more shake, then threw it onto the pile that would be kept for compost. She took the offered mug, sniffed. More of the foul brew Thenike cooked up for her every day; it would remove the poisons in her body put there by the vaccine, she said. The viajera had broken one of the softgels open into her hand and touched the oily pink mess delicately with her tongue. Marghe wondered how she had been able to tell about the cumulative toxic effect of the adjuvants just from that test, but had not doubted that she could, and was glad to find someone who thought she could help her body get rid of them. She set the brew aside in the snow to cool and went back to her hoeing.
“What’s this?” Thenike asked, gesturing at the newly broken ground.
“Right now, a mess,” Marghe said, “but if I get rid of all these weeds, by midsummer it should be a patch of cetrar.”
Thenike knelt beside her and watched. Marghe dug up a bulb by mistake.
Thenike picked it up, weighing it in her hand. “Such small roots.”
They did look too flimsy—lacy, almost—to do the job. “The purple bits, growing out of the top, here”—Marghe pointed with a dirt-rimed fingernail—“will be the stalk, and these tiny buds will be the sprouts.”
Thenike looked at it carefully. The buds were the size of aphid eggs, almost invisible. “It’s hard to believe that a lumpy vegetable comes from such a delicate-looking thing.” She pushed it back into the dirt.
Marghe dug it back up again. “How long is it since you planted something?”
“Along time.”
“Too long. Cetrar needs loose dirt. Like this.” She dug a hole, dropped the bulb in, pushed dirt back on top with her hand, gave it a quick pat.
“You’ve learned a lot.”
Marghe sat up and lifted her face to the weak sun. “I have, haven’t I?” After a moment she started digging again, but with her hands. She enjoyed the feel of soil between her fingers. Thenike watched. Marghe looked up. “If you want to help me, you could start on those weeds.”
They worked together quietly for a while.
All through the Moon of Cracking Frost, Thenike gardened with her, bathed with her, sat next to her when the family ate, and listened. Marghe sometimes rambled, reliving happy memories, but often she had questions for Thenike.
They were in the kitchen, washing a basket of freshly dug tubers for Kenisi in the huge stone sink, when Marghe asked Thenike when she had first known she was going to be a viajera.
Thenike paused, tuber in one hand, brush in the other. “As soon as I could crawl, I wanted to follow strange paths and talk to different people. Drove my family mad; I was always wandering off. By the time I was seven or eight, my choose-mother had to take me along with her and Hilt, who was old enough to crew by then, whenever they took out the trading ship from North Haven because none of my sisters or mothers would watch me. Too much trouble.” She resumed scrubbing. “Whenever we came into a new place, I waylaid strangers and dragged their stories and songs and jokes from them before they even had a chance to find out my name. Then when we were sailing back to North Haven I drove everyone to distraction by repeating the songs and the stories until my mother threatened to unship the dinghy and tow me home behind them. She did that once, when I was nine.” Thenike smiled. “It didn’t make much difference.”
“So who taught you how to be a viajera?”
“Everyone I met. My blood mother taught me to drum. I learned the pipes from a sailor, Jolesset, and a woman called Zabett showed me how to judge when to charge a lot, and when to charge a little. Supply and demand, she called it.”