Ammonite

Snow slanted across the mouth of a smaller cave. Beyond a brake of tanglethorn, the clouds were dirty yellow, heavy with more snow. Shivering hard, Marghe shaved slivers of bark from the dry tanglethorn and heaped them in a pyramid around a kindling pellet. Then she peeled back the metal strip and waited for the chemical reaction. A curl of bark puffed into flame. She blew on the tiny blaze, adding bigger stems of the thorn until the fire crackled. Pella snorted and backed as far from the flames as she could.

Her shivering eased and her face and hands tingled and ached as blood squeezed through previously closed capillaries. The scratches on her hands stung. She slapped her arms around her body a couple of times and tried not to think of what might have happened if she had not found the cave before the snowfall had become a blizzard.

“Your turn now, Pella.”

Her fingers were thick and red and felt as though they belonged to somebody else. She struggled with the clumsy wooden girth buckles and staggered a little as she dragged the saddle off. There was a cloak in her pack. She pulled it out and rubbed the mare down with it as best she could. Pella sighed and leaned against her. Marghe thumped her on the withers until the mare grumbled and straightened up. She draped the cloak over the horse’s back, dragged her pack over to the fire, and sat down, exhausted by the cold.

Food would help. She could name only half the items she pulled from her pack: goura, sun-dried until shriveled to the size and color of large apricots; moist wild rice, pressed into squares and wrapped in crumbly rice paper; honey cakes; thick succulent leaves, like vine leaves, rolled to finger size; nuts; strange crunchy shapes that tasted vaguely of bacon; strips of smoked wirrel… She chewed various combinations and decided that the green fingers were good stuffed with the rice, and dried goura went well with honey cake.

She filled a nosebag for Pella, then lay down and listened to her heart beat and the wind howl over Tehuantepec.

When she was young she had lain awake in the sticky heat of Macau and listened to the chirrup of insects and the beat of her heart. It had frightened her that her life depended upon such a fragile organ, that a lump of muscle hardly bigger than her fist was all that kept the blood pumping around her body. She wondered how thick the heart walls were, and if it ever just got tired and gave up, decided it had had enough of sucking and pushing and squeezing blood around her veins. She lay with her hands over her ears, only to discover that made the sound more distinct. Humming herself to sleep worked, or drumming little rhythms on her futon.

As she grew older, she learned to listen more to the beat that underlay her whole life: how it speeded up when she was tense or tired; how it was smooth and confident when she exercised regularly; how she could make it change if she breathed fast and hard, or slow and easy. It fascinated her. She took up yoga, then chi kung and tai chi, until she could increase blood flow to various parts of her body at will. Then she went to Beaver, and had all her confidence beaten out of her.

The months in Wales afterward were full of anxieties and short breath, phobias and panic. Her doctor referred her to a meditation specialist; he said to do this, and do this, but she could not relax enough to try. The specialist referred her on to the experimental-psychology department in Llangelli.

They hooked her up to machines that measured her alpha waves, her blood flow, her temperature, the electrical activity of her skin, the gaseous content of her blood and its pH, the dilation of her pupils. With different words, they helped her relearn that her body was an intricate mechanism made of interconnecting parts, a homeostatic system: change this, and this alters, which changes this. And she relearned: with breath and exercise, music and self-hypnosis, until now she could cut blood supply from a hand or a foot, channel pain, slow or speed her metabolism at will, and more. Once, at a party, she had amused a friend by blushing and paling at will.

Later, on her own, she took her training further, experimenting with sensitizing her body to magnetic and electrical fields. She had hoped to write a paper on biofeedback, autogenics, and the supernormal experience in myth.

Pella snorted, too hot under her makeshift blanket. Marghe took it off, checked the nosebag, scratched the mare behind her ears. The blizzard howled.

Woman and horse were hunched and dark against the snow; veils of cold mist filtered the afternoon to pearl. The only sound was the crunch of hooves and the creak of leather as Marghe’s weight shifted with her mare’s walk.

“Faster now, Pella.”

Her quiet voice was sucked away, swallowed by the silence. Not for the first time, she swung in the saddle and peered into the mist behind her. There was nothing there, nothing but white quiet and the snort of her mare’s breath.