‘listen to what’s inside you’?”
“Try it for yourself,” Thenike had said. “Then you explain it to me.”
That had been yesterday. Marghe did not want to take the viajera up on her suggestion. She was afraid.
She pondered that as she dug and rooted. Now and again she moved one plant away from another, or closer to its neighbor. She was not sure why she did this, only that it was good for the different plants; it felt right. When the plants were wrongly ordered, it felt on some dim level as though someone were screeching metal down metal, setting her teeth on edge. When she moved the plants, the discomfort stopped. At first she had been disturbed by the fact that she was behaving without identifiable empiric reason, and had tried not to do so. But the feeling became unpleasant. Now she allowed herself to act automatically and tried not to worry about it.
She stood up and stretched, moved to the patch of garden she wanted to break in for the jaellum seedlings growing indoors in the nursery, just off the great room. The ground was hard, still frosty in places. She dug until she was damp with sweat inside her tunic.
She straightened her back. Something was not right. She sat quietly, letting her mind idle, and then she knew: the jaellum seedlings would do better over on the south side of the garden, in the more sandy soil. Which meant she had broken this ground for nothing. She swore softly. It would take hours to dig over a new patch, and she would have to transfer the goura bulbs she had planted earlier in the sandy patch.
Maybe she was wrong. It would be easier if she was wrong. She would continue breaking this ground. Yes. After all, she had no real reason, no good reason, to believe they would flourish better in a different location.
By gritting her teeth, she managed to work for about another half an hour, but eventually she had to stop; her discomfort was almost painful. She admitted defeat.
Whether or not she knew how she knew it, the seedlings would fare better in the sandy south garden. All she was doing was wasting time and energy. What needed doing needed doing.
She sighed, climbed to her feet, and took her taar-skin mat and roll of wet felt over to the goura. She starting digging up the shoots, one by one, and laying them carefully on the unrolled felt. Next time she would listen more attentively to her instincts.
She paused, trowel in hand. What needed doing needed doing.
Deepsearch. If Marghe was honest, she herself knew she ought to do it. Ignoring the need did not make it go away.
She thrust her trowel deep into the soil and took her hand away. The handle gleamed, rounded and polished by a hundred human hands. She wondered how old it was, whether a woman of Ollfoss using the trowel could look inside her past and see her mother or grandmother or many-times-great-grandmother handling the same trowel, bending over the same patch of dirt. The thought terrified her, but what scared her more was the idea that she might look inside herself and find nothing.
Eight women pattern-sang for Marghe; she made the ninth. When she had asked Thenike why always nine, Thenike shrugged. “Nine is the right number.”
Marghe decided not to take that any further. “How long does it take?”
“A few moments, or the whole day. Everyone’s different. It depends how far you go, and how easy it is. Many of the young ones are frightened, which makes it harder. You’ll go in fast, I think. How long you stay is up to you.”
Not long, Marghe thought, not long.
They gathered outside in the early afternoon. It was almost warm, but Thenike had warned her to wrap up well. Standing motionless for hours did not produce much body heat. Two chia birds sang back and forth to each other.
Six of her family were there: Thenike, Gerrel, Hilt, Leifin, Wenn, Huellis. Kenisi and the two youngsters were with Namri, who had put her back out. Kristen and Ette made up the eight.
Thenike would keep her safe.
Gerrel, who had made her first deepsearch only last midsummer, started the singing. She hummed deep, tunelessly. The others took up the hum until it sounded like a creaky tree song, the rubbing together of branches. It wove back and forth like the wind high in the forest, apparently aimless. The singers took breaths according to their own rhythms and exhaled in the wavering hum that climbed and sank and wandered without apparent form. Marghe closed her eyes. Two, then three women began to breathe and hum at the same time, then a fourth, and a fifth. Marghe imagined she could hear their hearts mumping together. Her own breath ran with theirs.
Between one heartbeat and another, they all breathed and sang together, great powerful gusts of sound beating at Marghe like rain, rain that grew in intensity, spattering her face, running then pouring over her, pooling at her feet, until she felt she was standing under a waterfall of sound. The sound pulsed endlessly, like the world. Deep inside her cells, something responded.
Thenike will keep me safe.
She followed the plunging water down, where it wanted to go.
Marghe came up from her not-dream. She felt stiff from standing still so long, and her pattern singers were gone, except for Thenike. Marghe smiled at her, but said nothing; she did not want to talk yet.
In silence, Thenike helped her walk through the evening shadow of the trees until her joints unstiffened. Undergrowth rustled beneath their feet.
Marghe felt she had been gone a long time, much longer than the two or three hours it had taken for the world to turn away from the sun and toward the arms of evening. She had been inside herself in a way she had never thought possible; listening to her body as a whole, a magnificent, healthy whole. And she had done more: reliving memories of her childhood she had forgotten, experiencing again days she had never been wholly aware of. Now she knew how it felt to be a baby just ten days old, and that baby had been as alien to her as any species she had encountered since. There had been more: what felt like days of communication between herself now and herself of many thens. She had sent a question down all the avenues that opened before her: what is my name? And echoing back had come: Marghe. And again: Marghe. And then, whispered in a voice she knew: Marghe, and more.
She was on a thin and misty beach; her mother walked from the shadows and held out her hand. On her palm was the ammonite.
“Primitive cultures thought they were coiled snakes, petrified, and called them snake-stones,” Acquila said. “But the word ‘ammonite’ comes, of course, from the medieval Latin, cornu Ammonis, horn of Ammon, due to its resemblance to the involuted horn of Ammon, or Amun, the ram-headed god of Thebes.”
She put the cold thing in Marghe’s whole right hand. “His name, Amun, means
‘complete one.’ He acquired the power of fertility formerly invested in Min, the ancient Egyptian god of reproduction.” She looked amused. “Min was very popular.
But his time passed.”
Her mother had faded, leaving the ammonite. Marghe had not been surprised when it sank into her hand. And now she was herself, and more. The complete one.
Marghe smiled. “I have been so many places…”
“Yes,” Thenike said. “Mind this root here.”
“I see it.”
Two more chia birds called back and forth. The same ones? Marghe stopped and tilted her head to listen. “Do many women keep their child names?” she asked.
“Some. Not many.”
“What was yours?”
“Gilraen.”
“Gilraen…”She considered the woman next to her, with her rich hair, pinned up, her soft brown eyes and strong fingers. “A nice name, but not yours.”
“No.”
They started walking again. After a moment, Marghe said softly, “My name is Marghe Amun.”
The complete one.