Ammonite

Marghe rolled up her sleeve and thrust her bare arm down the hole. She closed her eyes against the searing cold, began her breathing. In and out, in and out. Hold. In. Out. Hold. In the left nostril, out the right. Hold. The extra oxygen made her dizzy. She visualized the corpuscles rushing red and busy through her arm to her finger, back up to her shoulder, through the pulmonary vessels, the heart, and out again in a gushing rush. Hot red. Hot. And full of information. She sank her entire awareness into her arm. Listened with it, extended her own electromagnetic field as she had learned to do, dowsing. Out and out, thinner, diffuse. Wait.

There was nothing at first. No trace of snow worms, as she had hoped. Then she sensed a far-off scratching, pushing. A ruk.

She opened her eyes. What had Aoife said? The need breeds the skill.

Keeping her breathing soft and her movements slow, she unfastened the palo from her belt, pulled it to about half its length, and wedged her knife behind the fastening strap. Then she crouched over the hole, makeshift spear poised.

The ruk came, beetling its way through the stone-hard ground. Every sense open, every muscle ready, Marghe waited. The ruk came closer; she could hear the rasp of its thick armored skin against the dirt. A snout pushed through one wall of the hole and Marghe thrust. Hunger made her slow. The ruk scuttled away, back the way it had come.

As she had known she might, Marghe vomited up the raw moss as soon as it reached her stomach. The mess steamed in the brittle air for a moment before beginning to ice over. The temperature was still dropping. She sucked snow to take away the foul taste in her mouth and willed her breathing steady. She must think now, or die.

Aoife had told her tales of tribeswomen who punched holes in the neck veins of their mounts and drank the blood. But she was unskilled, and the horse would probably bleed to death before cold plugged the vein. It was an old, half-starved beast; it could not afford to lose even a cupfull of blood. She needed it alive. Her only hope was to get to Ollfoss, or at least the boundaries of Moanwood where she could make a fire, collect nuts, shelter herself from the snow… Even with the horse, she might not get there. Without, she certainly would not.

There was nothing to eat here and the temperature was dropping. She would head east and hope.

Before she pulled on her gloves, she took a long look at her hands. The’bones showed gaunt through white skin. There was not an ounce of fat left on the whole of her body; the cold had melted it away. In a matter of days her body would be scavenging upon itself, absorbing muscle until she was nothing but loose skin and bone. A generous estimate would give her another four or five days, survival, if she carried on as she had been doing. To reach the forest she knew she needed to stretch those four or five days into at least seven or eight. She would have to close parts of her body down when they were not needed. It was possible, theoretically; she knew how. But this was not a controlled environment with monitoring hookups and attendant medics, and she was already seriously undernourished.

She climbed into the saddle. The clouds were low and rounded, as featureless as a basket of eggs. An alien sky. All alone under an alien sky. Somewhere up there, Sara Hiam was sitting in the Estrade, wondering if her vaccine worked. Somewhere up there, too, was a satellite that if it just came nearer and lower could pick up her SLJC, beam it to the nearest relay, to Danner. A sled could get here in four or five days. Oh, and then she would have hot tea, or soup, and bread, and the smiles of a woman she knew. And all the time she ate and drank and had her hands bandaged she would be heading back to Port Central, to safety.

No, she had done enough dreaming. The only reason she should look at the sky was to determine the weather. She was alone. No one was going to rescue her. Not Sara or Danner, not Lu Wai or Letitia. Not even Aoife. As Cassil had said, she was alone, an orphan under this sky. No one knew her. Here she was Stranger Woman, or the SEC rep. Not Marguerite Angelica Taishan, not Marghe. She wondered if that person existed anymore.

Once she had her mount headed in the right direction, she began trance breathing.

Marghe never really remembered the next few days. She rode in half trance through the white and cold and silence. Sometimes there were brief flurries of snow. Twice each day she would swim up from her trance to swing from the saddle and dig out ice moss for the horse, which was getting too tired to find its own. While the horse ate, she would concentrate on opening and closing veins around her body, sending her blood pounding into hands, feet, and face where patches of skin were white and dead from frostbite. Each time, it became harder to shake off her trance and force her body to move.