Ammonite

“What do you like to do? In the winter when you walked the hills in Portugal, or lay on your stomach on the roof watching the fisherfolk of Macau”—again the careful words, strange in her mouth—“what was it that you wished you had the time to do?”

“Explore,” Marghe said, surprised. “Go places I’d never seen before. Exciting places, where dragons might just be real.” She laughed, delighted at her discovery. “I always liked to follow paths, see where they went, who they led to. A map, a new world, a strange country—they’re all like puzzles where I have to put the pieces together to feel comfortable, to understand how things are. Once I understand, I feel too comfortable. Then it’s time to move on, find a new place, new people. New discoveries.”

“Always?”

“So far,” she said slowly, suddenly unwilling to go any further with this.

Thenike nodded. “And these places you go, the people you find, do you come to care for them? Or do you only study them, like strange shells you might find on the beach?”

Marghe forced a smile and waved the question aside. Like strange shells that you find on the beach… She did not want to think about it. “What kind of sky would you call this?”

“A chessel sky,” the viajera said. “If I was in my skiff, I’d be looking for a place to put in. We’ll see a bit of wind.”

“Chessel?”

“If you feel up to a little walk, I’ll show you.”

Marghe had to breathe deeply, steadily, and lean on Thenike as they walked the snow-dusted path to a building half-hidden under the trees. The sloping roof was covered in old snow, gone icy and gray, and the slit windows were shuttered from the inside. Unlike most of the other buildings of Ollfoss, much of it was underground.

The steps leading down to the sturdy-looking door were not steep, but Marghe took them one at a time, like a child.

Inside, it was cool and dim, full of barrels, slablike tables, sacks and stacks and huge clay jugs. She ran her hands over one: stoppered with a rough clay seal. Food storage. Thenike used a wooden pole, curved into a hook at the end, to lever open a couple of window shutters. There was a milky, sickly smell Marghe could not identify, and overlaying that, something thin and sharp.

“A chessel,” Thenike said, pointing.

It was a wooden cheese vat. Thenike leaned her pole up against a whitewashed wall and pulled off the gauzy cloth covering, sending a gust of sharp not-quite-cheese smell in Marghe’s direction. In the vat, the whey looked scummy, rancid, like the sky.

“This is where we make butter and cheese, and store what milk we don’t use on any day.” She slid the stone lid off a good-sized bowl. “Yeast. For the bread.” She slid it back. “Through here are the vegetables.” There were mounds of roots and tubers, leaves drying in bunches and bulbs hanging from the roof. Thenike reached into a barrel, pulled out a small, round fruit, sniffed it. “Soca. Here. Can you smell the spice? That means it’s not ready yet. We pick them at the end of the Moon of Shelters, leave them here in the dark until they’re ready. When they’re ready they smell terrible, like bad feet, but they taste like rain after a drought, like wind on a calm sea.”

To Marghe it seemed that the storage cellar was full with enough to feed a thousand people for a year, and it occurred to her that she had never really seen whole-food storage before. At Port Central, there was probably more protein, more vitamins, stored in a tenth this space, all in the form of concentrates, flash-frozen choice cuts, and prepeeled mixes.

The chessel sky was wrapped right around the sun by the time they emerged. A cold wind bowled snow dust along the paths, Marghe’s scars ached. She shivered. Here she was in Ollfoss, the place she had been traveling toward for two years in order to… study the people like shells found on a beach. She was not sure she wanted to do that anymore. Suddenly she was not sure about anything anymore, and that was frightening. If she did not want to do what she had set out to do, then what did she want? Something had changed. Some part of her was gone.

“Marghe? Are you well?”

“No,” she said.

“Lean on me. It’s not far.” The arms that Thenike wrapped around her waist for support were strong and hard. Marghe wanted to lean into them and weep for what she had lost, though she did not know whether her loss was good or bad, or even real. Instead, she started the painful walk back to the guest room.

She allowed Thenike to help her into bed, grateful when the viajera stooped to add wood to the carefully banked fire and stoked it into a blaze. When she turned back to Marghe, her face was ruddy. “That should keep you warm. Do you need anything else?”

Stay with me, Marghe wanted to say. Don’t leave me alone with my thoughts. “No.”

“Then I’ll check on you later.”

Marghe was tired. The fire was hot. She fell asleep.