Forever Young, by Sophonisba [villains challenge]
-title- Forever Young
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-notes- Gen. There were many places in which I was inspired by other works or history, too many to enumerate; the title comes from a song by Bob Dylan. This was originally started for the "Folklore and Superstitions" challenge, and then it stepped in something resembling a plot.
-characters- Sora, Teyla, Genii, cameos
-disclaimer- I am not skilled in discerning the proper amount of ownership and/or creation to be credited to the various people responsible for a work created, produced, and marketed by many hands and several corporations: I am, however, capable of realizing that none of the credit does or should go to me. Tellurian cheiromancy actually prefers to look at the dominant hand. The ferrotype was invented by Hamilton Smith in 1856.
-word count- 6859
-summary- Teyla, age thirteen, visits the Genii; or, "This is the Gateway; you have to be Gatewaysteaders first and Genii second if Gatewaystead is to fulfill its function!"
Forever Young
"Why is she spending the night with us?" the tall fair girl demanded, nose high above the level of Teyla's head. "She's not even Genii."
Teyla glared at the older girl, folding her arms under her budding breasts. "Corydon said I could."
"And she's my chum," Sora said hotly, blood suffusing her alabaster skin, throwing an arm around the Athosian. "I've known her longer than I've known you, and I like her considerably better."
To one side, Aldis giggled nervously.
Sculla rolled her eyes. "Really, Lally, it isn't even your house. If my father said Tagan's daughter would sleep in the hay barn with us, she'll sleep in the hay barn with us. Have you ever slept in a hay barn before?"
"No," Teyla answered the oldest unwed girl in the village. "I have been in hay barns, and slept on straw mattresses, but never both at once. Why are we...?"
"Don't they even celebrate Dayripe on Athos?" Aldis asked, her round face shocked and sympathetic.
The new girl in the village -- Lally, apparently -- scuffed her feet and snorted.
"Aldis," Sculla said, ruffling the younger girl's hair so that wisps of brown hair stood out from her plaits, "other worlds don't have seasons at the same time as Terragena does. Some of them don't have years the same length. That's why we count in annu."
"Athosian years are shorter than yours," Teyla offered. "I have seen nearly sixteen of our years in my thirteen annu."
Sculla, Aldis, and Mena laughed. "Get along with you!" Mena proclaimed, tossing her golden curls. "Sixteen years is old enough to be wedded and bedded!"
"In Terragenan years," Sculla rolled her eyes again, standing a little straighter as if to make herself seem taller than Teyla.
"Tomorrow is Dayripe," Sora informed her chum. "When day and night are equal, and the harvest is beginning, and Things pass from one world to another."
"You're not telling me you seriously believe that," Lally sniffed.
"I don't not believe it, and you needn't give yourself airs, Goodmaid High and Mighty, just because you were born in -- the other village."
Teyla blinked. She thought the other girls had shot her quick, nervous glances, although she couldn't imagine why.
Sculla tossed her own red hair, tied back with a simple ribbon as befitted her older age. "The women have their own mysteries in the chapel this night, and the young men their duties at every house, so we maidens spend the night in the hay barn to protect our modesty; we wouldn't dream of making you stay in one of the houses tonight."
"If she has modesty," Lally muttered.
Sculla glared up at her. "Athosian meat and fruits feed us well and keep us healthy and thinking clearly, and the leathers the Athosians trade us are of use to all of us, here and there also; are you really going to endanger all that for the sake of insulting the Master Trader's daughter?"
Lally's gaze eventually dropped. She looked towards something that might be over Teyla's right shoulder. "I'm sorry I implied you weren't a maiden."
"You don't need to be one to sleep in the barn anyway," Mena said helpfully. "Last year Zinnia still went to sleep with us, and she and Lycus had been gathering bitter honey for months beforehand."
Aldis giggled in half-nervous scandalized glee. Sora just giggled.
Sculla looked up to the skies. "Merciful Lady, grant me patience," she sighed. "Teyla, come and put your stuff in the barn; there will be supper before evening services in the chapel."
"I don't see why I should go," Lally grumbled.
"Haven't your parents been over this with you?" Sora asked. "Dayripe is Dayripe, whether you look to Cora or the Ancestors or both or neither. The harvest is always the same harvest."
Lally sniffed and stalked off, and Teyla followed Sora to the barn.
"What is wrong with Lally?" Teyla eventually asked.
Her Genii friend threw her hands up expressively. "The lot fell on her family this year, and they had to move here."
"The lot?"
"Er... our village is closest to the Ring of the Ancestors... "
Teyla nodded. "On Athos, our people hold that the leader's campsite must be the nearest one to the Ring. I have always lived within a day's journey of it, save on trading trips."
Sora nodded enthusiastically. "Exactly. You and I have grown up in its shadow -- but Lally is certain that she now has a much greater chance of being eaten by Wraith."
Teyla hissed. "The Wraith come when they please and as they please. One cannot live one's whole life -- "
"You know that and I know that, but Lally's still kicking. And making life pretty miserable for the rest of us. Dayripe and the Choice coming up doesn't help, either." She pushed the barn door open and gestured to the wide shelf where bedding and other knapsacks were stowed.
"If I told her of the Genii who sired my mother, would her next target be worse?"
"The... oh, right, you mentioned that." Sora looked at her darker friend thoughtfully. "Did he ever acknowledge her?"
"He sent my grandmother a plate cup for her, when he learned my mother had been born."
"Ohhh." Her light eyes widened. "With that, I think you could come to evening services. Um. If you wanted to. But it'd be a very long time to sit and wait for us otherwise."
"I should be delighted."
*
During the communal affair that was supper in the Alderman's House and that featured all the Genii and most of the Athosian traders talking at once, Sora spoke to her father, who spoke to the vintner --
("Why are your priests called 'vintners'?"
"Because they, they tend us, the way a vintner does a vineyard.")
-- a man almost as old as the alderman and far more hale, who, with two redoubtable matrons, interrogated Teyla on the subject of her mother:
("Nika Emmagan, born Nika Attaven, daughter of Somebody Kolya -- "
"Admetus Kolya," Tagan Emmagan put in, returning with his second bowl of spiced three-bean stew.
At the next table, Lally choked on her steamed green stalks and had to be pounded on the back.)
and thereafter pronounced Teyla welcome at Dayripe-eve services.
("Will the services be in the language of the Ancestors, or..."
"Not Corian services." Sora was shocked. "Ceremonies to the Ancestors are conducted in their language, but Cora has nothing to do with the Ancestors -- and you'd best not say things like that in front of Aldis' parents, they're very devout Corians indeed."
"Are they services for a harvest? My father mentioned..."
"Actually, no. Tomorrow, yes -- we have ceremonies for all four harvests, but Dayripe's the biggest -- but this is more..." She searched for an apt word. "Preparation.")
Tagan drew his daughter's forehead to his before turning to go wait with the other traders in Corydon's house, restraining himself with difficulty from cautioning Teyla to behave herself.
*
Teyla had never been inside a Genii chapel before. It was a plain, whitewashed box, with long benches in two rows facing a wooden boxlike structure and a carving of a young woman with outstretched hands on the wall behind it. One of the redoubtable matrons from supper was posted at the door they entered the chapel by; she dipped her finger into a small bowl half-full of purple-red paste and marked everyone's forehead as they went in.
She sat next to Sora and Tyrus on a bench two or three back from the front. The vintner walked up, stood behind the boxlike structure, and made a lifting gesture with his hands.
Everyone stood up, Teyla a beat behind the rest. She watched Sora out of the corner of her eye, following her chum's lead as the service went on: mouthing along with the litanies, standing up and sitting down as directed, joining in on the litany-songs where Corydon rose from his seat on the first bench, struck a tuning fork on the speaker's box, and sang one line before the congregation repeated it. Teyla thought it very convenient for visitors, although the songs' content were puzzling: one was apparently in praise of harvests, one proclaiming imminent vengeance for ancient wrongs, and one a Genii version of "Lament For That Lost To The Wraith."
At one point, the old alderman of the Genii rose and sang, in a surprisingly clear and strong voice, a song of thanksgiving; at another, Aldis sang a ballad entreating Cora not to let the Genii be unmindful of her in days when all seemed lost... or when a chance to repay old wrongs came about... or when victory was within their grasp... or when they were the victorious lords of all they surveyed, with the remainder of any who had dared to go against them quivering at their feet.
Then the vintner called for the Blessing of the Maidens, and Sora rose and gestured for Teyla to join her as the girls who would be sleeping in the hay barn that night gathered into a wobbly line.
"Sora Elwyn, daughter of Tyrus and Alcyone Elwyn, stand forth!" the vintner said. Sora stepped forward; he laid a hand upon her head, enjoined "Cora, also a maiden," to look kindly on her daughter Sora, to attend her with good fortune as she grew up strong and true, and to be with her in her pain and in her joy. When the vintner lifted his hand, Sora turned to one of the matrons who had come up with a wide shallow bowl of polished stones, drew a stone from the bowl, and laid it on a cloth-covered table near an odd contraption holding a horizontal candle burning at both ends and a tall thin metal wand rising from the middle of the candle before going to stand at one side of the front.
"Teyla Emmagan, daughter of Nika ey-Kolya, stand forth!" The vintner repeated his entreaty over Teyla; his broad hand was heavy on her burnished hair, and she worried that she might be sweating her forehead mark away.
Feeling rather small and brown and out of place in her good leathers, she turned to the woman with the bowl; both the matron and Sora shook their heads fiercely. Teyla, feeling even more small and brown and alien, held her head high as she moved to stand with her chum. Sora squeezed her arm briefly in a chum's grasp, inner elbow falling between thumb and forefinger, as the vintner called "Sculla Halkis, daughter of Corydon and Rhoda Halkis, stand forth!"
"I'm really sorry," Sora repeated in a normal tone after the vintner had pronounced his last benediction and the Genii filed out of the chapel. "I should have explained that since there hasn't been any clear sign, we're leaving it to the wand's fall to choose who'll be Cora's Face at Dayripe and mimic her journey at Winterwane; and you're going back to Athos, you can't possibly."
"Besides," Sculla added apologetically before Lally could, "they really are Genii mysteries, and you're... well... not."
"I quite understand," Teyla said, watching lanterns bobbing as families peeled off, parents of small children often carrying the latter as their eyes drifted closed.
"Now, Aldis, you do know -- " a woman who looked too much like a grown version of Aldis to be anything but her mother began.
"Mo-ther!" Aldis wailed.
"We will take good care of her," Sculla reassured, holding her own lantern high.
Aldis's mother departed -- not, however, without many parting glances -- and the girls trooped into the barn and began passing packs and bedding up to Mena, who was the first to clamber into the hayloft.
Sora spared a moment to point out the necessary to Teyla before joining in with a will. "You can bed with me," she offered. "This is going to be fun. Nobody to tell us when to go to bed; we can toss the stalks and read heads... "
"Heads," Lally snorted. "That's an old wives' tale. Everyone knows brainpower doesn't bulge the skull out."
"It doesn't?" Mena said, disappointed.
"Of course not! What else did you plan to do, tell ghost stories?"
"On this night?" Mena's sister Melanna blinked, very much shocked.
"I don't believe in ghosts," Sculla said firmly. "And anyway -- "
"It only matters that the ghosts believe in you," Mena interrupted.
"Besides, if anyone was ever apt to come back as a ghost, it would be Messellia," her sister agreed.
Sculla planted her hands on her hips and glared. "Messellia didn't ask to fall ill, or for her illness to become pneumonia, or to die! Really, I'd expect better, great girls like you! And anyway, we all knew her, so there'd be nothing to be scared of if she chose to look in!"
"Messellia?" Teyla whispered.
"She was Sculla's particular chum," Sora hissed back. "She took pneumonia last winter and died."
"Erm... Lally?" Aldis said tentatively in the fraught silence. "I heard you could read palms?"
"Oh, yes," the taller girl said, face softening and becoming almost human. "I learned at home. Here -- give me yours. Not the hand you do most of your work with. Hm. You have good prospects for romance, but you need to watch your tendency to melancholy; if you dream your life away in the winter, you'll have nothing left to greet the spring with. Now, your heart itself is good and sturdy, probably keep going sound as a bell when your hair's pure white... "
"It's just like head-reading," Mena mourned as she and Melanna spread their blankets out. "I thought it would be all 'You will take a journey by Ring and meet a dark stranger and bear six children.'"
Lally sniffed. "This is chiromancy, not fortune-telling. Honestly, I know you're all overexposed up here, but I'd think even you -- "
"Lally!" Sculla snapped.
"It certainly seems less random than that thing with the pome," Teyla offered.
"Thing with the pome?" Lally blinked. "Do I even want to know what you get up to with perfectly innocent fruits on your world?"
"It was a Genii thing Sora showed me," Teyla huffed, eager to defend the honor of Athos before she realized her probable disrespect to her hosts. "You take a pome and pare it so that it all comes off in one long strip..."
"And then you throw the peel over your left shoulder," Aldis continued, "and it should fall into a shape like the first letter of the name of the man you're going to marry."
Mena and Melanna nodded enthusiastically.
"Mine fell into the shape of Unidentifiable Spludge," Teyla finished.
"I still say that was because of the way you Athosians marry entire families," Sora argued, cheeks flushed. "It probably tried to make everyone's initial at once and failed miserably."
"I never quite understood how it was supposed to make the dots myself," Sculla offered.
Lally had dropped Aldis' hand, staring at Teyla. "Entire families? At once? What sort of loose -- "
"Lally," Sculla said.
"If Sora were to marry into Emmagan," Teyla explained, "she would be marrying my father, and me, and Toran, and Toran's parents, and Charin, but not Aunt Kina, who has married into an outlander family and gone away."
"Hey! Why are you bringing me into this?"
"Well, nobody would want to marry Lally," Teyla pointed out reasonably.
Aldis blinked, round-eyed. "Does that mean you're married to your own father?"
The resulting argument drew all seven girls into it before settling back down into Lally offering palm-readings to everyone.
When Teyla's time came around, the tall Genii told her very snippily that she was fiercely passionate but would only grow more controlled as she aged; that for all her fluidity, Teyla was very analytical and would be chronically underestimated all her life by people who did not know her well; that while she was very healthy indeed, her life would be marked by no less than three and very possibly more cataclysmic upheavals that would change the very way she looked at things; and that she would be at the center of momentous events rather than moved in their wake.
Teyla, who had been sick all of twice in her life, nodded politely and ignored the wilder claims.
Once Sora took her place, Lally began by saying "You have a very vicious and violent temper."
"That's not chiromancy," Sculla whispered, "that's experience."
"If you learn to control your temper, your life will be happy and your fate fortunate, even though it will seem at first as though it isn't. If you don't, however, you will live a life of misery and gall until you are able to throw away even your just grievances."
"I have a temper?!" Sora's was evidently up. "I'm not the one who's been throwing a subdued tantrum every time I talk to my new neighbors."
"Oh? Well, I'm not the one who cherishes her grudges until they die of old age, then has them stuffed and mounted!"
The argument went on for some time, increasing to a dull roar, until at last Sculla said "If you hear a noise over the thunderclouds there, it's just our fathers coming to keep watch on us for the rest of the night, because all the racket is throwing the boys off practice."
"W-- what if it's a ghost?" Melanna said in the sudden silence.
"There are no such things as ghosts," Sculla told her firmly.
"I have heard," Teyla offered, "that one of the ways the Wraith confuse your eyes is to show you images of people whom they have eaten."
Mena, Melanna, and Aldis shivered.
"In the place I lived before," Lally offered, "there was this hole, and if you knelt by it and called "Bloody Dahlia" into it three times, when you looked up you would see a woman with the flesh all melted out from under her skin."
"I heard," Sora said, "that if you take a turtur root -- "
"A tuttle root?" Teyla asked.
"Maybe. Anyway, if you dig it up after sundown and before the stars are bright on a moonless night, and wind it round nine times with a red thread you spun and dyed yourself, feed it three drops of your blood, signing Cora's triangle each time, and then wrap it in a dead man's clothes and lay it in holy ground for nine nights and nine days, if you unwrap it on the tenth night and sleep with it under your pillow you will dream of something that is happening right then somewhere in the thousand worlds."
"Did you hear whether you have to do all that again the next time you want to use it?" Sculla wondered.
"Oh, that's nothing," Mena ignored her. "Zinnia told me that if you go out to the Ancestors' fane at the dead of night, turn around three times before entering and walk backwards to the alcove on the left as you come in, chanting three Fathers of Light as you go, and then turn around and lean against the mirror there, touching it by the five points of the flats of your hands and your forehead and your breasts, the Ancestors will grant you a vision of your future and your future husband."
"That what?" Lally blinked.
"They're the Ancestors," Melanna said patiently. "They can do that."
"This works?" The lantern threw odd shadows on Sculla's face, but Teyla thought she looked skeptical.
"We could try it and see." Sora, on the other hand, didn't need to show her face for Teyla to know her chum was intrigued.
"I don't know... " Aldis said hesitantly.
"We should," Mena pronounced.
"It's not the dead of night quite yet," Sculla half-agreed.
"So we'll wait until it is." Now that the idea had been proposed and seconded, its golden-haired inspirer seemed determined to be in the lead.
"It'll be dead of night when the Three Sisters are over Hooknose Mountain," Sora took charge. "It's nice and clear, so we'll be able to see them from the loft window. Aldis, you're in charge of checking. Until then... didn't Angus ask you to go walking with him yesterday, Mena?"
"He did," the blonde said smugly. "And asked me to partner him in the egg-and-spoon race."
"No!" half the loft said in delighted shock.
The subject of Boys proved to pass the time very quickly before the asterism in question arrived at a point where it was judged to be sufficiently "over" the mountain.
"So, if every other one of us has a lantern... "
"Leave one for me," Lally interrupted Sora.
"You're not going?"
"I'm tired. It's late. It'll have gotten very cold out by now. No, I'm not going to wander around in the dark on the off-chance that this fortune-telling thing actually works."
"Fine, then," Mena sniffed. "Be that way."
*
Once they had made their way down the ladder and opened the barn door, Lally proved to be correct in three things: it was very dark and cold (and late). Teyla clambered up again and got some of the woolen blankets, and at last they made their way to the fane, an irregular and rather shapeless procession with lanterns at its head and tail.
"What is this fane?" Teyla wondered.
"It's a piece of a building built by the Ancestors," Sora explained.
"The roof fell in ages ago, and it's a bit of a walk," Sculla added, "but it's very peaceful there. We use it for ceremonies sometimes."
"Not Corian ones," Aldis pointed out, anxious that their visitor should not misunderstand them.
Something moved in the bushes off to their right.
"What was that?" Melanna gasped.
"A small animal, probably plant-eating," Teyla told her.
Another something moved farther away.
"That -- "
"Melanna!" her older sister hissed.
"But what if it's an artos? Or a sow, or, or a lyon?"
"There are no sows or lyons in this world," Sculla pointed out.
"What if one came through the Ring?"
"If there is a sow or lyon out there that can get itself through the Ring," Sora rolled her eyes, "we would have captured it to exhibit for trade."
"But there could be -- "
"But the Wraith could come through and eat us all, or a star could fall out of the sky onto your head, or the Ancestors could return to their City and decide to come take back their mirror... do you want to do this or not?"
"I... I think I want to go back to bed, b-but I don't want to walk back all by myself... ""
Mena sighed dramatically. "Fine. I'll go with you. Come on, crybaby."
"I'm not a crybaby...!"
Sculla, who was holding the other lantern, moved to the front of the group as the sisters retreated. "It's just around this next bend," she said helpfully.
The fane, from what could be seen of it, looked to be far smaller than the ruins of Athos. Its white stones seemed to shimmer somehow, for no obvious reason.
"I don't know," Aldis said suddenly. "Something of the Ancestors... my parents don't like us to show them respect, I don't think they'd... "
"I didn't think we were planning to tell them." Sora's face was a white, near-featureless oval in the dim light.
"Yes, but you know... they... Cora... "
"Look," Sculla sighed, "Cora loves everyone. Cora loves you even if you're scum. Therefore, Cora won't love you any less just because you ask the Ancestors for some of their wisdom."
"You have a very merciful goddess," Teyla whispered to her chum.
"Well, would your father stop loving you just because you did something bad?"
"No, but he would be disappointed in me, and that -- "
'That's worse. I know," Sora agreed.
During their brief conversation, Sculla had bestowed the lantern and her blanket on Aldis, and was now undoing the ribbons at the neck of her chemise.
"Sculla?!" Aldis choked.
"Mena said 'breasts,' Sculla explained. "She didn't say 'covered with cloth.'" She turned around three times and took a long step backwards and through the doorway of the roofless building, her voice raised in a Fathers of Light as she went.
The other three waited.
And waited.
"Sculla!" Aldis eventually called. There was no answer, but presently the redhead stomped out of the fane, doing up the ribbons of her chemise as she went.
"I was starting to see something," she huffed, "and then I jumped when you called me and it went away."
"Would you like to try it again?" Teyla offered.
"Actually," Sculla said thoughtfully, "you should go next. You're the only one who won't be able to come back tomorrow night and try it again."
Sora nodded. "You really should."
"The mirror alcove is just to the left of where you will be if you keep looking straight through the door," Sculla pointed out, "and our forefathers cleared the fallen roof away, so the floor is clear and even."
"Your shift..." Sora began.
"I will push it up once I am inside," Teyla said. She turned around three times and backed through the doorway, chanting "Fathers of light of the everlasting temple, grant me clear sight of the path that lies before me. Mothers of balance of the everlasting temple, grant me steady feet on the path that lies before me" in the language of the Ancestors.
Once she reached the other side, she felt along the wall until she reached the alcove, and turned into it. The mirror -- at least she decided it must be the mirror, although she saw no reflection within it -- was concave, and she breathed a sigh of relief before dropping her blanket, pulling her shift up, and trying to find some position that would allow her to touch it with slight breasts, hands, and forehead and still be able to at least somewhat look into it.
For a long moment there was nothing, and then an image swam into the small portion of bowl before her. She seemed to be looking straight out rather than down, which confused her for a few moments; when her brain made sense of the images, she realized that she was seeing four maybe-people in a dark building, but that the image was blurry and unfocused as one's sight is on first waking.
One of the people -- Teyla thought it might be male -- had either a very dark face or its back to her, and was waving his(?) arms in excitement or irritation or description or perhaps all three. Another approached her, becoming clearer with each step, and the only reason Teyla did not flinch as Sculla had was because she was frozen, utterly frozen, and could not have moved had there been Wraith Darts overhead.
It was her mother.
Nika Emmagan smiled, and laid her forehead against the mirror so that the not-glass was the only thing between it and Teyla's, and mouthed "Hello, me."
The other three people started to approach the mirror, the one dropping his arms and turning as he did -- and he had been facing away, his revealed face was a blur as pale as a Genii's -- when the picture dissolved into a greater blur, and then into nothing.
Teyla, moving automatically, shook herself to let her sleep shift fall back around her hips, picked up the blanket, wrapped it around herself, and walked straight out of the fane.
"Teyla?" Sora said as the lantern's light fell on her face. "Are you all right? You look -- "
"Thank you," Teyla told her and them, subdued. "Thank you all -- I am so glad that I did this -- "
Sora, without a word, took her forearms in a fierce chum's grasp before shedding her own blanket and unlacing her chemise.
Teyla had managed to get herself under some control, despite being peppered by Aldis's obsessive questioning, when Sora bolted out of the fane at a dead run, screams audible as soon as she had exited the building, regardless or ignorant of the girls waiting outside.
"Sora!" All three pounded through the underbrush after her, lantern bouncing and jouncing wildly, blankets being shed as they went, and on one occasion only a hasty tug on Teyla's part kept Aldis upright and moving after tripping on a root.
As they neared the village, other people started pouring out and shouting questions: men in shirtsleeves, men in nightshirts, fully dressed women, and a whole group of naked boys and young men with dark ribbons tied around their arms and legs, carrying equally beribboned sticks. Is that why we were to sleep in the hay barn? some analytical part of Teyla wondered, even as they rounded the corner of the hay barn and she saw Sora, far ahead, run slap bang into somebody wearing close-fitting tunic and trousers.
And then the door of the barn they were running along opened and Corydon and the other fathers spilled out. Teyla and Sculla stopped dead, only then noticing that they'd outpaced Aldis.
"Inside." Corydon's face was like thunder.
"But Sora -- "
"We will find Sora. Inside."
"But someone caught her, I saw him, and he was not dressed like the Genii!" Teyla said frantically. "He wore a tight-fitting tunic and trousers of the same or similar material."
The Genii men tensed. Behind them, the perorations heaped on Aldis's head by her loving parents carried very clearly.
"That's a costume," Sculla explained suddenly. "The Underworld Guides who meet Cora's Face at Dayripe and lead her on her journey at Winterwane dress like that. I suppose that means that Sora will be her Face and make the journey to the Underworld."
"Often, the night is the only time anyone can rehearse for pageant or performance," the Genii vintner added from behind the two girls. "I expect you're right about this being a sign; now, into the barn with you, and explain, if you can, what you are doing out this late at night."
The explanations lasted for some time, and the men all had a low-voiced council in the corner when they were done.
"You're in trou~ble," Lally singsonged, face peering down from the loft, before her father told her to hush.
"Journey to the Underworld... " Teyla said slowly. "I do not mean -- forgive me -- you do not mean to kill her?"
"Of course not!" Sculla said. "What do you think -- well, of course, Sora's your chum, you're right to worry about her, you just don't need to be worried about that. Cora descended into the Underworld; Cora's face goes to study in another village and return with her betrothed. You might not see her for a while, because she'll leave at Winterwane and won't come back till Daybloom, when next the night and day are the same length, but she'll be perfectly fine." The Genii girl sighed.
"Did you want to? And... betrothed?"
"It's a ceremonial betrothal, but there are more girls in the village than boys, so it may stand after she comes back. And yes, I suppose I am a little jealous -- I don't really want to marry anyone here, and I don't want to stay in this village all my life and bear children for someone I didn't really want to marry."
"...oh."
"Go up to the loft and get some sleep," the vintner said when the discussion had ended.
"... is sora in a lot of trouble?" Teyla asked, hesitating on the ladder behind Sculla.
"Sora is in trouble, yes," Tyrus answered. "Whether it is 'a lot' or not remains to be seen."
*
In the morning, Teyla had to explain matters to her father. Tagan listened gravely, nodding at all the right parts, waiting patiently when she stumbled and as her voice grew slower and slower. She explained even more thoroughly than she had to the Genii, and at the end her father nodded.
"How much trouble am I in?" she finished.
"I think," Tagan said gently, "you have grown too great to be punished like a child. When we return to Athos, you will explain to the rest of our people how our trading journey went."
Teyla winced and nodded.
Tagan took her shoulders and laid his head against hers.
"I still do not understand why the mirror of the Ancestors showed me my mother," she said presently.
"Do you recall the tale of the man who traded for the first mirror among his people?"
"He left it to his son, telling his son that he would watch him through it," Teyla obediently summarized, "and when his son married into his lover's family, his lover found it and said 'It is not your father, but another young and beautiful lover you have hidden from me!' The two of them argued until the lover's mother took a look at it and said 'It is neither a father nor a lover, but a wise old elder who is out of patience with you two. You are both very silly people.'"
"Why did the son think it was his father?"
"Obviously, because they looked... alike... "
Tagan waited.
"But my mother was beautiful, and I'm... "
"You will grow into your beauty, as she did. Nika looked very like you when she was your age."
Oh.
"Hello, me."
And when she was grown, she could look into a mirror to see her mother's face.
*
After breakfast, Tyrus came and told Teyla that Sora was in the Alderman's House and wanted to see her. Teyla walked over with him, uncertain of what she could say and so saying nothing.
In the House, she found Sora standing on a stool and having a white gown pinned around her by the redoubtable Corian matrons.
"Um, good morning," Teyla said. "How much trouble are we in?"
"Good morning." Sora raised an arm when one matron tapped it. "Not all that much, actually -- except for Aldis. Her parents really raised a fit."
"The Pollitts are good Corians and conscientious in their devotions," the other matron sniffed.
"Well, yes. And none of the three who were in the barn are in any trouble whatsoever."
Teyla tried to keep from making a disgusted face, with unknown success.
"But I don't think anyone's too angry at the three of us; you've heard, maybe, that they've claimed me for Cora's Face?"
"After you ran into one of the Underworld Guides," Teyla nodded. "I saw. Sculla explained."
"The Halkis girl has a good, solid head on her shoulders," the first matron agreed.
"It should have been Sculla," Sora sighed. "Sculla or Lally. I feel like a thief."
The matrons laughed. "It's a fine thing to see a young girl with a proper sense of modesty."
"Young people these days," the more irritable matron added. "Half of them seem to think the worlds should be handed to them on a platter just because they want."
"And speaking of young people," Tyrus put in, "have you heard that the Speakers have sent us an assistant alderman? That Cowan fellow who was doing some trading through here last year."
"No!" The matrons sounded disturbingly like the girls last night, responding to the news of Mena's young man.
"Stay here till we come back," one of them told Sora before the two of them followed Tyrus out.
"Is that a bad thing?" Teyla wondered when they'd gone.
"Not bad," Sora said judiciously, "but Gramps has been alderman here since way before I was born. Everything's changing, and... "
And you're frightened, Teyla had the sense not to say. "These Speakers can send you one?"
"Aldermen are always Speakers," Sora explained, "so of course they choose their own, and please don't ask me to say more about that."
"Then may I ask you why you think it should have been Lally? I would not think she had done anything to make you feel she deserved it."
"Well... no... Sculla told you I'd be going away, right?"
"That you will be in the other village from your Winterwane to Daybloom."
"It's the village where Lally was born, you see." Sora shrugged. "Since she won't get to go home, she'll be taking it out on the rest of us and me particularly. Sculla wouldn't have minded, she wanted to go and see and learn, especially since Messellia died, but I... I wish I was going to be a trader and maybe come to Athos and visit you."
"I would like that," Teyla said. "I am sure Toran and Orin would like to meet you."
The door banged open and the alderman and vintner marched in, too deep in conversation to notice the girls at first.
"He speaks politely enough, but young Cowan's not interested enough in the village and far too much in being a Speaker. This is the Gateway; you have to be Gatewaysteaders first and Genii second if Gatewaystead is to fulfill its function!"
"Now, Ider," the vintner said gently, "he's young yet, and he's not been in the village a full day."
"He's visited before -- and did you see that he'd brought a ferrotype apparatus with him to make pictures of him and us to present to the Speakers, and was all ready to teach us how to use it on him when Tagan piped up that he could?"
"Your father knows how to make ferrotypes?" Sora said loudly.
"He learned on Manara," Teyla explained, "in return for some service."
The man in question knocked and was called in, trailed by a young Genii man in ill-fitting clothes.
"This is my daughter, Teyla."
"First Speaker Kolya is sorry to have missed the chance of seeing you," the young man said, " -- at least he will be when I tell him about it -- "
The alderman and vintner nodded gravely.
" -- but he has become too ill to leave his bed for more than short periods. If we can take your ferrotype, though, I'm sure he'd like to have it."
"If I may take another for the use of Emmagan," Tagan said, "I feel sure Teyla would agree."
Teyla nodded vigorously.
"And in addition to pictures of Cowan and the honorable Ider Charim, the Speakers would be happy to have a ferrotype of this Dayripe's Cora's Face for their records. If you would come out and have it done, Goodmaid Elwyn...?"
"Can't I have it in here?"
"There is too little light," Tagan explained, "and it would take too long."
"If Teyla will help me with my laces, then, I will be right out."
"Forgive us for interrupting you," Alderman Charim said, and shooed everyone else out the door, closing it behind him.
"Why would the First Speaker have wanted to see me?" Teyla walked around behind Sora, peering at the complicated network of laces across the back of the gown.
"He is the head of the Kolya family."
"But I am an Emmagan, as was my mother after Emmagan wed her."
"Yes, but no matter what family you're registered under, blood ties don't go away. The ones at my waist should be tighter than the laces above and below."
"I am trying. This is a very... complicated...!"
"I know," Sora mourned. "Honestly, it really wasn't that much of a sign, they should have chosen someone else."
Teyla walked back around to check the fit from the front. "Perhaps you were also chosen because of what it was that you saw in the mirror?"
Sora shook her head, face turning a whiter shade of pale. "I -- no -- what did you see?"
"My older self." She smiled at the recollection. "I will grow up to look like my mother, and I was with three other people that I couldn't see very well. I think they were all wearing trousers, and one of them was waving his arms very ferociously." She waved hers to demonstrate.
Sora blinked at her, startled into a giggle. "So, what, you're going to grow up and marry Lally's cousin?"
Teyla made a face. "You're the one going to another village to get be-troth-ed. Maybe you will."
"Eew!" Sora batted at her with the trailing sleeve of the white gown. "I don't -- seriously, I don't know who they'll pick, I don't want to know, I can't think about it now. Here, I'm holding up the skirt, make sure the back doesn't catch on the stool when I step down."
Teyla carefully did so. Sora swept halfway to the door and then stopped, face nervous. "I... what if... "
Teyla faced the paler redhead. "I... I wish I'd seen you. There. Maybe you were just around the corner, and if the picture hadn't fuzzed out when it did, I'd have seen you talk to the other three? Or you were wearing Athosian leathers?" She grasped her chum's forearms, a grip that was matched as fervently at once.
"Teyla, I -- you know you're my best chum, right?" Sora leant her forehead against Teyla's, never letting go of her arms. "Promise me we're going to be friends forever and ever? Promise me -- "
"Forever and ever and ever," Teyla repeated. "I promise."
They stayed like that for a long moment before releasing each other, going out to be immortalized in plated iron.
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-notes- Gen. There were many places in which I was inspired by other works or history, too many to enumerate; the title comes from a song by Bob Dylan. This was originally started for the "Folklore and Superstitions" challenge, and then it stepped in something resembling a plot.
-characters- Sora, Teyla, Genii, cameos
-disclaimer- I am not skilled in discerning the proper amount of ownership and/or creation to be credited to the various people responsible for a work created, produced, and marketed by many hands and several corporations: I am, however, capable of realizing that none of the credit does or should go to me. Tellurian cheiromancy actually prefers to look at the dominant hand. The ferrotype was invented by Hamilton Smith in 1856.
-word count- 6859
-summary- Teyla, age thirteen, visits the Genii; or, "This is the Gateway; you have to be Gatewaysteaders first and Genii second if Gatewaystead is to fulfill its function!"
Forever Young
"Why is she spending the night with us?" the tall fair girl demanded, nose high above the level of Teyla's head. "She's not even Genii."
Teyla glared at the older girl, folding her arms under her budding breasts. "Corydon said I could."
"And she's my chum," Sora said hotly, blood suffusing her alabaster skin, throwing an arm around the Athosian. "I've known her longer than I've known you, and I like her considerably better."
To one side, Aldis giggled nervously.
Sculla rolled her eyes. "Really, Lally, it isn't even your house. If my father said Tagan's daughter would sleep in the hay barn with us, she'll sleep in the hay barn with us. Have you ever slept in a hay barn before?"
"No," Teyla answered the oldest unwed girl in the village. "I have been in hay barns, and slept on straw mattresses, but never both at once. Why are we...?"
"Don't they even celebrate Dayripe on Athos?" Aldis asked, her round face shocked and sympathetic.
The new girl in the village -- Lally, apparently -- scuffed her feet and snorted.
"Aldis," Sculla said, ruffling the younger girl's hair so that wisps of brown hair stood out from her plaits, "other worlds don't have seasons at the same time as Terragena does. Some of them don't have years the same length. That's why we count in annu."
"Athosian years are shorter than yours," Teyla offered. "I have seen nearly sixteen of our years in my thirteen annu."
Sculla, Aldis, and Mena laughed. "Get along with you!" Mena proclaimed, tossing her golden curls. "Sixteen years is old enough to be wedded and bedded!"
"In Terragenan years," Sculla rolled her eyes again, standing a little straighter as if to make herself seem taller than Teyla.
"Tomorrow is Dayripe," Sora informed her chum. "When day and night are equal, and the harvest is beginning, and Things pass from one world to another."
"You're not telling me you seriously believe that," Lally sniffed.
"I don't not believe it, and you needn't give yourself airs, Goodmaid High and Mighty, just because you were born in -- the other village."
Teyla blinked. She thought the other girls had shot her quick, nervous glances, although she couldn't imagine why.
Sculla tossed her own red hair, tied back with a simple ribbon as befitted her older age. "The women have their own mysteries in the chapel this night, and the young men their duties at every house, so we maidens spend the night in the hay barn to protect our modesty; we wouldn't dream of making you stay in one of the houses tonight."
"If she has modesty," Lally muttered.
Sculla glared up at her. "Athosian meat and fruits feed us well and keep us healthy and thinking clearly, and the leathers the Athosians trade us are of use to all of us, here and there also; are you really going to endanger all that for the sake of insulting the Master Trader's daughter?"
Lally's gaze eventually dropped. She looked towards something that might be over Teyla's right shoulder. "I'm sorry I implied you weren't a maiden."
"You don't need to be one to sleep in the barn anyway," Mena said helpfully. "Last year Zinnia still went to sleep with us, and she and Lycus had been gathering bitter honey for months beforehand."
Aldis giggled in half-nervous scandalized glee. Sora just giggled.
Sculla looked up to the skies. "Merciful Lady, grant me patience," she sighed. "Teyla, come and put your stuff in the barn; there will be supper before evening services in the chapel."
"I don't see why I should go," Lally grumbled.
"Haven't your parents been over this with you?" Sora asked. "Dayripe is Dayripe, whether you look to Cora or the Ancestors or both or neither. The harvest is always the same harvest."
Lally sniffed and stalked off, and Teyla followed Sora to the barn.
"What is wrong with Lally?" Teyla eventually asked.
Her Genii friend threw her hands up expressively. "The lot fell on her family this year, and they had to move here."
"The lot?"
"Er... our village is closest to the Ring of the Ancestors... "
Teyla nodded. "On Athos, our people hold that the leader's campsite must be the nearest one to the Ring. I have always lived within a day's journey of it, save on trading trips."
Sora nodded enthusiastically. "Exactly. You and I have grown up in its shadow -- but Lally is certain that she now has a much greater chance of being eaten by Wraith."
Teyla hissed. "The Wraith come when they please and as they please. One cannot live one's whole life -- "
"You know that and I know that, but Lally's still kicking. And making life pretty miserable for the rest of us. Dayripe and the Choice coming up doesn't help, either." She pushed the barn door open and gestured to the wide shelf where bedding and other knapsacks were stowed.
"If I told her of the Genii who sired my mother, would her next target be worse?"
"The... oh, right, you mentioned that." Sora looked at her darker friend thoughtfully. "Did he ever acknowledge her?"
"He sent my grandmother a plate cup for her, when he learned my mother had been born."
"Ohhh." Her light eyes widened. "With that, I think you could come to evening services. Um. If you wanted to. But it'd be a very long time to sit and wait for us otherwise."
"I should be delighted."
*
During the communal affair that was supper in the Alderman's House and that featured all the Genii and most of the Athosian traders talking at once, Sora spoke to her father, who spoke to the vintner --
("Why are your priests called 'vintners'?"
"Because they, they tend us, the way a vintner does a vineyard.")
-- a man almost as old as the alderman and far more hale, who, with two redoubtable matrons, interrogated Teyla on the subject of her mother:
("Nika Emmagan, born Nika Attaven, daughter of Somebody Kolya -- "
"Admetus Kolya," Tagan Emmagan put in, returning with his second bowl of spiced three-bean stew.
At the next table, Lally choked on her steamed green stalks and had to be pounded on the back.)
and thereafter pronounced Teyla welcome at Dayripe-eve services.
("Will the services be in the language of the Ancestors, or..."
"Not Corian services." Sora was shocked. "Ceremonies to the Ancestors are conducted in their language, but Cora has nothing to do with the Ancestors -- and you'd best not say things like that in front of Aldis' parents, they're very devout Corians indeed."
"Are they services for a harvest? My father mentioned..."
"Actually, no. Tomorrow, yes -- we have ceremonies for all four harvests, but Dayripe's the biggest -- but this is more..." She searched for an apt word. "Preparation.")
Tagan drew his daughter's forehead to his before turning to go wait with the other traders in Corydon's house, restraining himself with difficulty from cautioning Teyla to behave herself.
*
Teyla had never been inside a Genii chapel before. It was a plain, whitewashed box, with long benches in two rows facing a wooden boxlike structure and a carving of a young woman with outstretched hands on the wall behind it. One of the redoubtable matrons from supper was posted at the door they entered the chapel by; she dipped her finger into a small bowl half-full of purple-red paste and marked everyone's forehead as they went in.
She sat next to Sora and Tyrus on a bench two or three back from the front. The vintner walked up, stood behind the boxlike structure, and made a lifting gesture with his hands.
Everyone stood up, Teyla a beat behind the rest. She watched Sora out of the corner of her eye, following her chum's lead as the service went on: mouthing along with the litanies, standing up and sitting down as directed, joining in on the litany-songs where Corydon rose from his seat on the first bench, struck a tuning fork on the speaker's box, and sang one line before the congregation repeated it. Teyla thought it very convenient for visitors, although the songs' content were puzzling: one was apparently in praise of harvests, one proclaiming imminent vengeance for ancient wrongs, and one a Genii version of "Lament For That Lost To The Wraith."
At one point, the old alderman of the Genii rose and sang, in a surprisingly clear and strong voice, a song of thanksgiving; at another, Aldis sang a ballad entreating Cora not to let the Genii be unmindful of her in days when all seemed lost... or when a chance to repay old wrongs came about... or when victory was within their grasp... or when they were the victorious lords of all they surveyed, with the remainder of any who had dared to go against them quivering at their feet.
Then the vintner called for the Blessing of the Maidens, and Sora rose and gestured for Teyla to join her as the girls who would be sleeping in the hay barn that night gathered into a wobbly line.
"Sora Elwyn, daughter of Tyrus and Alcyone Elwyn, stand forth!" the vintner said. Sora stepped forward; he laid a hand upon her head, enjoined "Cora, also a maiden," to look kindly on her daughter Sora, to attend her with good fortune as she grew up strong and true, and to be with her in her pain and in her joy. When the vintner lifted his hand, Sora turned to one of the matrons who had come up with a wide shallow bowl of polished stones, drew a stone from the bowl, and laid it on a cloth-covered table near an odd contraption holding a horizontal candle burning at both ends and a tall thin metal wand rising from the middle of the candle before going to stand at one side of the front.
"Teyla Emmagan, daughter of Nika ey-Kolya, stand forth!" The vintner repeated his entreaty over Teyla; his broad hand was heavy on her burnished hair, and she worried that she might be sweating her forehead mark away.
Feeling rather small and brown and out of place in her good leathers, she turned to the woman with the bowl; both the matron and Sora shook their heads fiercely. Teyla, feeling even more small and brown and alien, held her head high as she moved to stand with her chum. Sora squeezed her arm briefly in a chum's grasp, inner elbow falling between thumb and forefinger, as the vintner called "Sculla Halkis, daughter of Corydon and Rhoda Halkis, stand forth!"
"I'm really sorry," Sora repeated in a normal tone after the vintner had pronounced his last benediction and the Genii filed out of the chapel. "I should have explained that since there hasn't been any clear sign, we're leaving it to the wand's fall to choose who'll be Cora's Face at Dayripe and mimic her journey at Winterwane; and you're going back to Athos, you can't possibly."
"Besides," Sculla added apologetically before Lally could, "they really are Genii mysteries, and you're... well... not."
"I quite understand," Teyla said, watching lanterns bobbing as families peeled off, parents of small children often carrying the latter as their eyes drifted closed.
"Now, Aldis, you do know -- " a woman who looked too much like a grown version of Aldis to be anything but her mother began.
"Mo-ther!" Aldis wailed.
"We will take good care of her," Sculla reassured, holding her own lantern high.
Aldis's mother departed -- not, however, without many parting glances -- and the girls trooped into the barn and began passing packs and bedding up to Mena, who was the first to clamber into the hayloft.
Sora spared a moment to point out the necessary to Teyla before joining in with a will. "You can bed with me," she offered. "This is going to be fun. Nobody to tell us when to go to bed; we can toss the stalks and read heads... "
"Heads," Lally snorted. "That's an old wives' tale. Everyone knows brainpower doesn't bulge the skull out."
"It doesn't?" Mena said, disappointed.
"Of course not! What else did you plan to do, tell ghost stories?"
"On this night?" Mena's sister Melanna blinked, very much shocked.
"I don't believe in ghosts," Sculla said firmly. "And anyway -- "
"It only matters that the ghosts believe in you," Mena interrupted.
"Besides, if anyone was ever apt to come back as a ghost, it would be Messellia," her sister agreed.
Sculla planted her hands on her hips and glared. "Messellia didn't ask to fall ill, or for her illness to become pneumonia, or to die! Really, I'd expect better, great girls like you! And anyway, we all knew her, so there'd be nothing to be scared of if she chose to look in!"
"Messellia?" Teyla whispered.
"She was Sculla's particular chum," Sora hissed back. "She took pneumonia last winter and died."
"Erm... Lally?" Aldis said tentatively in the fraught silence. "I heard you could read palms?"
"Oh, yes," the taller girl said, face softening and becoming almost human. "I learned at home. Here -- give me yours. Not the hand you do most of your work with. Hm. You have good prospects for romance, but you need to watch your tendency to melancholy; if you dream your life away in the winter, you'll have nothing left to greet the spring with. Now, your heart itself is good and sturdy, probably keep going sound as a bell when your hair's pure white... "
"It's just like head-reading," Mena mourned as she and Melanna spread their blankets out. "I thought it would be all 'You will take a journey by Ring and meet a dark stranger and bear six children.'"
Lally sniffed. "This is chiromancy, not fortune-telling. Honestly, I know you're all overexposed up here, but I'd think even you -- "
"Lally!" Sculla snapped.
"It certainly seems less random than that thing with the pome," Teyla offered.
"Thing with the pome?" Lally blinked. "Do I even want to know what you get up to with perfectly innocent fruits on your world?"
"It was a Genii thing Sora showed me," Teyla huffed, eager to defend the honor of Athos before she realized her probable disrespect to her hosts. "You take a pome and pare it so that it all comes off in one long strip..."
"And then you throw the peel over your left shoulder," Aldis continued, "and it should fall into a shape like the first letter of the name of the man you're going to marry."
Mena and Melanna nodded enthusiastically.
"Mine fell into the shape of Unidentifiable Spludge," Teyla finished.
"I still say that was because of the way you Athosians marry entire families," Sora argued, cheeks flushed. "It probably tried to make everyone's initial at once and failed miserably."
"I never quite understood how it was supposed to make the dots myself," Sculla offered.
Lally had dropped Aldis' hand, staring at Teyla. "Entire families? At once? What sort of loose -- "
"Lally," Sculla said.
"If Sora were to marry into Emmagan," Teyla explained, "she would be marrying my father, and me, and Toran, and Toran's parents, and Charin, but not Aunt Kina, who has married into an outlander family and gone away."
"Hey! Why are you bringing me into this?"
"Well, nobody would want to marry Lally," Teyla pointed out reasonably.
Aldis blinked, round-eyed. "Does that mean you're married to your own father?"
The resulting argument drew all seven girls into it before settling back down into Lally offering palm-readings to everyone.
When Teyla's time came around, the tall Genii told her very snippily that she was fiercely passionate but would only grow more controlled as she aged; that for all her fluidity, Teyla was very analytical and would be chronically underestimated all her life by people who did not know her well; that while she was very healthy indeed, her life would be marked by no less than three and very possibly more cataclysmic upheavals that would change the very way she looked at things; and that she would be at the center of momentous events rather than moved in their wake.
Teyla, who had been sick all of twice in her life, nodded politely and ignored the wilder claims.
Once Sora took her place, Lally began by saying "You have a very vicious and violent temper."
"That's not chiromancy," Sculla whispered, "that's experience."
"If you learn to control your temper, your life will be happy and your fate fortunate, even though it will seem at first as though it isn't. If you don't, however, you will live a life of misery and gall until you are able to throw away even your just grievances."
"I have a temper?!" Sora's was evidently up. "I'm not the one who's been throwing a subdued tantrum every time I talk to my new neighbors."
"Oh? Well, I'm not the one who cherishes her grudges until they die of old age, then has them stuffed and mounted!"
The argument went on for some time, increasing to a dull roar, until at last Sculla said "If you hear a noise over the thunderclouds there, it's just our fathers coming to keep watch on us for the rest of the night, because all the racket is throwing the boys off practice."
"W-- what if it's a ghost?" Melanna said in the sudden silence.
"There are no such things as ghosts," Sculla told her firmly.
"I have heard," Teyla offered, "that one of the ways the Wraith confuse your eyes is to show you images of people whom they have eaten."
Mena, Melanna, and Aldis shivered.
"In the place I lived before," Lally offered, "there was this hole, and if you knelt by it and called "Bloody Dahlia" into it three times, when you looked up you would see a woman with the flesh all melted out from under her skin."
"I heard," Sora said, "that if you take a turtur root -- "
"A tuttle root?" Teyla asked.
"Maybe. Anyway, if you dig it up after sundown and before the stars are bright on a moonless night, and wind it round nine times with a red thread you spun and dyed yourself, feed it three drops of your blood, signing Cora's triangle each time, and then wrap it in a dead man's clothes and lay it in holy ground for nine nights and nine days, if you unwrap it on the tenth night and sleep with it under your pillow you will dream of something that is happening right then somewhere in the thousand worlds."
"Did you hear whether you have to do all that again the next time you want to use it?" Sculla wondered.
"Oh, that's nothing," Mena ignored her. "Zinnia told me that if you go out to the Ancestors' fane at the dead of night, turn around three times before entering and walk backwards to the alcove on the left as you come in, chanting three Fathers of Light as you go, and then turn around and lean against the mirror there, touching it by the five points of the flats of your hands and your forehead and your breasts, the Ancestors will grant you a vision of your future and your future husband."
"That what?" Lally blinked.
"They're the Ancestors," Melanna said patiently. "They can do that."
"This works?" The lantern threw odd shadows on Sculla's face, but Teyla thought she looked skeptical.
"We could try it and see." Sora, on the other hand, didn't need to show her face for Teyla to know her chum was intrigued.
"I don't know... " Aldis said hesitantly.
"We should," Mena pronounced.
"It's not the dead of night quite yet," Sculla half-agreed.
"So we'll wait until it is." Now that the idea had been proposed and seconded, its golden-haired inspirer seemed determined to be in the lead.
"It'll be dead of night when the Three Sisters are over Hooknose Mountain," Sora took charge. "It's nice and clear, so we'll be able to see them from the loft window. Aldis, you're in charge of checking. Until then... didn't Angus ask you to go walking with him yesterday, Mena?"
"He did," the blonde said smugly. "And asked me to partner him in the egg-and-spoon race."
"No!" half the loft said in delighted shock.
The subject of Boys proved to pass the time very quickly before the asterism in question arrived at a point where it was judged to be sufficiently "over" the mountain.
"So, if every other one of us has a lantern... "
"Leave one for me," Lally interrupted Sora.
"You're not going?"
"I'm tired. It's late. It'll have gotten very cold out by now. No, I'm not going to wander around in the dark on the off-chance that this fortune-telling thing actually works."
"Fine, then," Mena sniffed. "Be that way."
*
Once they had made their way down the ladder and opened the barn door, Lally proved to be correct in three things: it was very dark and cold (and late). Teyla clambered up again and got some of the woolen blankets, and at last they made their way to the fane, an irregular and rather shapeless procession with lanterns at its head and tail.
"What is this fane?" Teyla wondered.
"It's a piece of a building built by the Ancestors," Sora explained.
"The roof fell in ages ago, and it's a bit of a walk," Sculla added, "but it's very peaceful there. We use it for ceremonies sometimes."
"Not Corian ones," Aldis pointed out, anxious that their visitor should not misunderstand them.
Something moved in the bushes off to their right.
"What was that?" Melanna gasped.
"A small animal, probably plant-eating," Teyla told her.
Another something moved farther away.
"That -- "
"Melanna!" her older sister hissed.
"But what if it's an artos? Or a sow, or, or a lyon?"
"There are no sows or lyons in this world," Sculla pointed out.
"What if one came through the Ring?"
"If there is a sow or lyon out there that can get itself through the Ring," Sora rolled her eyes, "we would have captured it to exhibit for trade."
"But there could be -- "
"But the Wraith could come through and eat us all, or a star could fall out of the sky onto your head, or the Ancestors could return to their City and decide to come take back their mirror... do you want to do this or not?"
"I... I think I want to go back to bed, b-but I don't want to walk back all by myself... ""
Mena sighed dramatically. "Fine. I'll go with you. Come on, crybaby."
"I'm not a crybaby...!"
Sculla, who was holding the other lantern, moved to the front of the group as the sisters retreated. "It's just around this next bend," she said helpfully.
The fane, from what could be seen of it, looked to be far smaller than the ruins of Athos. Its white stones seemed to shimmer somehow, for no obvious reason.
"I don't know," Aldis said suddenly. "Something of the Ancestors... my parents don't like us to show them respect, I don't think they'd... "
"I didn't think we were planning to tell them." Sora's face was a white, near-featureless oval in the dim light.
"Yes, but you know... they... Cora... "
"Look," Sculla sighed, "Cora loves everyone. Cora loves you even if you're scum. Therefore, Cora won't love you any less just because you ask the Ancestors for some of their wisdom."
"You have a very merciful goddess," Teyla whispered to her chum.
"Well, would your father stop loving you just because you did something bad?"
"No, but he would be disappointed in me, and that -- "
'That's worse. I know," Sora agreed.
During their brief conversation, Sculla had bestowed the lantern and her blanket on Aldis, and was now undoing the ribbons at the neck of her chemise.
"Sculla?!" Aldis choked.
"Mena said 'breasts,' Sculla explained. "She didn't say 'covered with cloth.'" She turned around three times and took a long step backwards and through the doorway of the roofless building, her voice raised in a Fathers of Light as she went.
The other three waited.
And waited.
"Sculla!" Aldis eventually called. There was no answer, but presently the redhead stomped out of the fane, doing up the ribbons of her chemise as she went.
"I was starting to see something," she huffed, "and then I jumped when you called me and it went away."
"Would you like to try it again?" Teyla offered.
"Actually," Sculla said thoughtfully, "you should go next. You're the only one who won't be able to come back tomorrow night and try it again."
Sora nodded. "You really should."
"The mirror alcove is just to the left of where you will be if you keep looking straight through the door," Sculla pointed out, "and our forefathers cleared the fallen roof away, so the floor is clear and even."
"Your shift..." Sora began.
"I will push it up once I am inside," Teyla said. She turned around three times and backed through the doorway, chanting "Fathers of light of the everlasting temple, grant me clear sight of the path that lies before me. Mothers of balance of the everlasting temple, grant me steady feet on the path that lies before me" in the language of the Ancestors.
Once she reached the other side, she felt along the wall until she reached the alcove, and turned into it. The mirror -- at least she decided it must be the mirror, although she saw no reflection within it -- was concave, and she breathed a sigh of relief before dropping her blanket, pulling her shift up, and trying to find some position that would allow her to touch it with slight breasts, hands, and forehead and still be able to at least somewhat look into it.
For a long moment there was nothing, and then an image swam into the small portion of bowl before her. She seemed to be looking straight out rather than down, which confused her for a few moments; when her brain made sense of the images, she realized that she was seeing four maybe-people in a dark building, but that the image was blurry and unfocused as one's sight is on first waking.
One of the people -- Teyla thought it might be male -- had either a very dark face or its back to her, and was waving his(?) arms in excitement or irritation or description or perhaps all three. Another approached her, becoming clearer with each step, and the only reason Teyla did not flinch as Sculla had was because she was frozen, utterly frozen, and could not have moved had there been Wraith Darts overhead.
It was her mother.
Nika Emmagan smiled, and laid her forehead against the mirror so that the not-glass was the only thing between it and Teyla's, and mouthed "Hello, me."
The other three people started to approach the mirror, the one dropping his arms and turning as he did -- and he had been facing away, his revealed face was a blur as pale as a Genii's -- when the picture dissolved into a greater blur, and then into nothing.
Teyla, moving automatically, shook herself to let her sleep shift fall back around her hips, picked up the blanket, wrapped it around herself, and walked straight out of the fane.
"Teyla?" Sora said as the lantern's light fell on her face. "Are you all right? You look -- "
"Thank you," Teyla told her and them, subdued. "Thank you all -- I am so glad that I did this -- "
Sora, without a word, took her forearms in a fierce chum's grasp before shedding her own blanket and unlacing her chemise.
Teyla had managed to get herself under some control, despite being peppered by Aldis's obsessive questioning, when Sora bolted out of the fane at a dead run, screams audible as soon as she had exited the building, regardless or ignorant of the girls waiting outside.
"Sora!" All three pounded through the underbrush after her, lantern bouncing and jouncing wildly, blankets being shed as they went, and on one occasion only a hasty tug on Teyla's part kept Aldis upright and moving after tripping on a root.
As they neared the village, other people started pouring out and shouting questions: men in shirtsleeves, men in nightshirts, fully dressed women, and a whole group of naked boys and young men with dark ribbons tied around their arms and legs, carrying equally beribboned sticks. Is that why we were to sleep in the hay barn? some analytical part of Teyla wondered, even as they rounded the corner of the hay barn and she saw Sora, far ahead, run slap bang into somebody wearing close-fitting tunic and trousers.
And then the door of the barn they were running along opened and Corydon and the other fathers spilled out. Teyla and Sculla stopped dead, only then noticing that they'd outpaced Aldis.
"Inside." Corydon's face was like thunder.
"But Sora -- "
"We will find Sora. Inside."
"But someone caught her, I saw him, and he was not dressed like the Genii!" Teyla said frantically. "He wore a tight-fitting tunic and trousers of the same or similar material."
The Genii men tensed. Behind them, the perorations heaped on Aldis's head by her loving parents carried very clearly.
"That's a costume," Sculla explained suddenly. "The Underworld Guides who meet Cora's Face at Dayripe and lead her on her journey at Winterwane dress like that. I suppose that means that Sora will be her Face and make the journey to the Underworld."
"Often, the night is the only time anyone can rehearse for pageant or performance," the Genii vintner added from behind the two girls. "I expect you're right about this being a sign; now, into the barn with you, and explain, if you can, what you are doing out this late at night."
The explanations lasted for some time, and the men all had a low-voiced council in the corner when they were done.
"You're in trou~ble," Lally singsonged, face peering down from the loft, before her father told her to hush.
"Journey to the Underworld... " Teyla said slowly. "I do not mean -- forgive me -- you do not mean to kill her?"
"Of course not!" Sculla said. "What do you think -- well, of course, Sora's your chum, you're right to worry about her, you just don't need to be worried about that. Cora descended into the Underworld; Cora's face goes to study in another village and return with her betrothed. You might not see her for a while, because she'll leave at Winterwane and won't come back till Daybloom, when next the night and day are the same length, but she'll be perfectly fine." The Genii girl sighed.
"Did you want to? And... betrothed?"
"It's a ceremonial betrothal, but there are more girls in the village than boys, so it may stand after she comes back. And yes, I suppose I am a little jealous -- I don't really want to marry anyone here, and I don't want to stay in this village all my life and bear children for someone I didn't really want to marry."
"...oh."
"Go up to the loft and get some sleep," the vintner said when the discussion had ended.
"... is sora in a lot of trouble?" Teyla asked, hesitating on the ladder behind Sculla.
"Sora is in trouble, yes," Tyrus answered. "Whether it is 'a lot' or not remains to be seen."
*
In the morning, Teyla had to explain matters to her father. Tagan listened gravely, nodding at all the right parts, waiting patiently when she stumbled and as her voice grew slower and slower. She explained even more thoroughly than she had to the Genii, and at the end her father nodded.
"How much trouble am I in?" she finished.
"I think," Tagan said gently, "you have grown too great to be punished like a child. When we return to Athos, you will explain to the rest of our people how our trading journey went."
Teyla winced and nodded.
Tagan took her shoulders and laid his head against hers.
"I still do not understand why the mirror of the Ancestors showed me my mother," she said presently.
"Do you recall the tale of the man who traded for the first mirror among his people?"
"He left it to his son, telling his son that he would watch him through it," Teyla obediently summarized, "and when his son married into his lover's family, his lover found it and said 'It is not your father, but another young and beautiful lover you have hidden from me!' The two of them argued until the lover's mother took a look at it and said 'It is neither a father nor a lover, but a wise old elder who is out of patience with you two. You are both very silly people.'"
"Why did the son think it was his father?"
"Obviously, because they looked... alike... "
Tagan waited.
"But my mother was beautiful, and I'm... "
"You will grow into your beauty, as she did. Nika looked very like you when she was your age."
Oh.
"Hello, me."
And when she was grown, she could look into a mirror to see her mother's face.
*
After breakfast, Tyrus came and told Teyla that Sora was in the Alderman's House and wanted to see her. Teyla walked over with him, uncertain of what she could say and so saying nothing.
In the House, she found Sora standing on a stool and having a white gown pinned around her by the redoubtable Corian matrons.
"Um, good morning," Teyla said. "How much trouble are we in?"
"Good morning." Sora raised an arm when one matron tapped it. "Not all that much, actually -- except for Aldis. Her parents really raised a fit."
"The Pollitts are good Corians and conscientious in their devotions," the other matron sniffed.
"Well, yes. And none of the three who were in the barn are in any trouble whatsoever."
Teyla tried to keep from making a disgusted face, with unknown success.
"But I don't think anyone's too angry at the three of us; you've heard, maybe, that they've claimed me for Cora's Face?"
"After you ran into one of the Underworld Guides," Teyla nodded. "I saw. Sculla explained."
"The Halkis girl has a good, solid head on her shoulders," the first matron agreed.
"It should have been Sculla," Sora sighed. "Sculla or Lally. I feel like a thief."
The matrons laughed. "It's a fine thing to see a young girl with a proper sense of modesty."
"Young people these days," the more irritable matron added. "Half of them seem to think the worlds should be handed to them on a platter just because they want."
"And speaking of young people," Tyrus put in, "have you heard that the Speakers have sent us an assistant alderman? That Cowan fellow who was doing some trading through here last year."
"No!" The matrons sounded disturbingly like the girls last night, responding to the news of Mena's young man.
"Stay here till we come back," one of them told Sora before the two of them followed Tyrus out.
"Is that a bad thing?" Teyla wondered when they'd gone.
"Not bad," Sora said judiciously, "but Gramps has been alderman here since way before I was born. Everything's changing, and... "
And you're frightened, Teyla had the sense not to say. "These Speakers can send you one?"
"Aldermen are always Speakers," Sora explained, "so of course they choose their own, and please don't ask me to say more about that."
"Then may I ask you why you think it should have been Lally? I would not think she had done anything to make you feel she deserved it."
"Well... no... Sculla told you I'd be going away, right?"
"That you will be in the other village from your Winterwane to Daybloom."
"It's the village where Lally was born, you see." Sora shrugged. "Since she won't get to go home, she'll be taking it out on the rest of us and me particularly. Sculla wouldn't have minded, she wanted to go and see and learn, especially since Messellia died, but I... I wish I was going to be a trader and maybe come to Athos and visit you."
"I would like that," Teyla said. "I am sure Toran and Orin would like to meet you."
The door banged open and the alderman and vintner marched in, too deep in conversation to notice the girls at first.
"He speaks politely enough, but young Cowan's not interested enough in the village and far too much in being a Speaker. This is the Gateway; you have to be Gatewaysteaders first and Genii second if Gatewaystead is to fulfill its function!"
"Now, Ider," the vintner said gently, "he's young yet, and he's not been in the village a full day."
"He's visited before -- and did you see that he'd brought a ferrotype apparatus with him to make pictures of him and us to present to the Speakers, and was all ready to teach us how to use it on him when Tagan piped up that he could?"
"Your father knows how to make ferrotypes?" Sora said loudly.
"He learned on Manara," Teyla explained, "in return for some service."
The man in question knocked and was called in, trailed by a young Genii man in ill-fitting clothes.
"This is my daughter, Teyla."
"First Speaker Kolya is sorry to have missed the chance of seeing you," the young man said, " -- at least he will be when I tell him about it -- "
The alderman and vintner nodded gravely.
" -- but he has become too ill to leave his bed for more than short periods. If we can take your ferrotype, though, I'm sure he'd like to have it."
"If I may take another for the use of Emmagan," Tagan said, "I feel sure Teyla would agree."
Teyla nodded vigorously.
"And in addition to pictures of Cowan and the honorable Ider Charim, the Speakers would be happy to have a ferrotype of this Dayripe's Cora's Face for their records. If you would come out and have it done, Goodmaid Elwyn...?"
"Can't I have it in here?"
"There is too little light," Tagan explained, "and it would take too long."
"If Teyla will help me with my laces, then, I will be right out."
"Forgive us for interrupting you," Alderman Charim said, and shooed everyone else out the door, closing it behind him.
"Why would the First Speaker have wanted to see me?" Teyla walked around behind Sora, peering at the complicated network of laces across the back of the gown.
"He is the head of the Kolya family."
"But I am an Emmagan, as was my mother after Emmagan wed her."
"Yes, but no matter what family you're registered under, blood ties don't go away. The ones at my waist should be tighter than the laces above and below."
"I am trying. This is a very... complicated...!"
"I know," Sora mourned. "Honestly, it really wasn't that much of a sign, they should have chosen someone else."
Teyla walked back around to check the fit from the front. "Perhaps you were also chosen because of what it was that you saw in the mirror?"
Sora shook her head, face turning a whiter shade of pale. "I -- no -- what did you see?"
"My older self." She smiled at the recollection. "I will grow up to look like my mother, and I was with three other people that I couldn't see very well. I think they were all wearing trousers, and one of them was waving his arms very ferociously." She waved hers to demonstrate.
Sora blinked at her, startled into a giggle. "So, what, you're going to grow up and marry Lally's cousin?"
Teyla made a face. "You're the one going to another village to get be-troth-ed. Maybe you will."
"Eew!" Sora batted at her with the trailing sleeve of the white gown. "I don't -- seriously, I don't know who they'll pick, I don't want to know, I can't think about it now. Here, I'm holding up the skirt, make sure the back doesn't catch on the stool when I step down."
Teyla carefully did so. Sora swept halfway to the door and then stopped, face nervous. "I... what if... "
Teyla faced the paler redhead. "I... I wish I'd seen you. There. Maybe you were just around the corner, and if the picture hadn't fuzzed out when it did, I'd have seen you talk to the other three? Or you were wearing Athosian leathers?" She grasped her chum's forearms, a grip that was matched as fervently at once.
"Teyla, I -- you know you're my best chum, right?" Sora leant her forehead against Teyla's, never letting go of her arms. "Promise me we're going to be friends forever and ever? Promise me -- "
"Forever and ever and ever," Teyla repeated. "I promise."
They stayed like that for a long moment before releasing each other, going out to be immortalized in plated iron.