Proxima.

So this place we are going. When we thaw out...

You don't thaw out. We don't get to go, none of us. Only digitally-stored DNA can survive a journey this long, with the equipment to re-sequence it back to chemical form and then grow those sequences into fresh people. Plus all the other equipment needed to raise and educate them to a point where they can start to look after themselves.

As to the world they will enter, in many ways it will be like our own world was, pre-humanity, but also different in many ways too. We have no way to predict the details, only enough information for broad generalisations. The Archive systems will have the ability to assess optimal time for generating the new population... if any.

Artificial intelligence? Isn't that bunk-technology? It has already effectively destroyed our own world! We are not quite going extinct, but what is left of us is likely not going anywhere else, either!

Intelligence of a constructed nature, yes, but not an 'A.I.' in the classic techno-marketing sense. Think more of an old-world 'expert system', relying on careful hand-programming of inputs and weights, rather than automated net-generation off junk-data in a black box that even its creators cannot understand or properly control. It won't be 'intelligent' in the human sense, and explicitly not a false facsimile pretending to be such. Simply a very complicated conventional data-processing system, no claims to sapience, or even sentience. Nor any pretence of one. It will monitor climate, weather, geology, biosphere, and the like, looking for an alignment of key factors adequately compatible with pre-technological human survival.

Why no tech? For these people, that is.

Look around you. At what is left, at least.

But they will still be human. They will do it all over again anyway.

Quite possibly. Or possibly not. With the cooperation of the stakeholder groups, we have inserted certain biases into the cultures that are to be taught to the travellers after their re-constitution. These may alleviate the worst human excesses. Or may not. The best we can do is a second chance with altered starting conditions. To fundamentally change the... humanity... of the travellers would defeat the point. Any suitable world has the possibility to generate sapient life of a variety of forms. Even this one again, one day, maybe. If we were going to alter the next iteration of humanity to be unrecognisable anyway, then why bother at all? Nature can already do that. Presumably it has, many times throughout the vastness of the universe.

...

Twenty groups were sent, representing a distillation of the widest possible variety of human culture and genetic diversity achievable with the limited available resources. As close as possible to the way they had existed around the first and second millennium, rather than the mushed-up mono-culture of the third, and final, human millennium. Plus starter materials: clothes, shelters, tools, and the training to make more from local resources. They wouldn't be starting from the very beginning, the neolithic, but far enough back to have a chance. At chance at a different path forward.

Two hundred and fifty million years, it would take for them to arrive at a suitable destination.

Archive 20 was a genetic and data repository for the people and culture loosely designated 'Stralian' and represented the indigenous peoples of the continent of Australia, prior to European contact. It wasn't an accurate representation of any of the hundreds of sub-cultures of the group, but a distillation of what had survived hundreds of years of cultural erasure, both deliberate and inadvertent. This was typical of all twenty archives, differing only in the source for the genetic and cultural data-banks.

The archive was a metal monolith, a tall prolate spheroid, half below and half sticking out of the rocky ground in the iron-oxide-rich semi-desert of the ancient land-mass, like a small mountain in its own right. It's location on this part of the planet was not arbitrary: it was the location predicted to most likely be compatible with the people it was programmed to spawn, and their culture, when... if... the conditions were right.

Hundreds of factors had to align. Not precisely, but within a suitable margin of satisfactory. This would be the third activation. Maybe this iteration of human life would survive more than a few generations. The archive didn't actively care: it had no ability to do so. But it had it's program to follow, and a modest amount of of flexibility in exactly how it achieved its defined outcomes.

Archive 20 reached out to its equivalents across the rest of the world's single super-continent, as it did every ten thousand years, connecting to the seventeen other such archives which had survived the long journey to here and now. Fourteen of the other archives reported a similar close-enough alignment with satisfactory conditions. The remaining three were just over the edges, on one measurement or another, but still within the secondary margins. As much as a group of machines could, they agreed: current conditions were within their specification range for the right conditions.

DNA-data was sequenced to long twisted molecules, along with the complex molecular machinery needed to read and replicate the strands. Surrogate cellular nuclei were painstaking fabricated, molecule by molecule, around them. These were injected into generated liposome sacks serving the function of eggs. Tanks were charged with synthetic amniotic fluid. The first generation would not be born, so much as decanted, at a physiological age of twelve years. After which, they would have to fend for themselves using what they had managed to learn in a virtual environment fed directly into their developing senses. It was far from optimal, but it was the best that the creators of the Archive equipment could manage.

Around six months prematurely, an emergency dump of the Archive 20 bio-canisters put the third attempt at seeding 'New Stralians' into the real world, naked and crying from the shock of the real, to stand on the hot uneven dirt outside the Archive structure in bewilderment at a world that was not entirely unlike the previous eleven years of their existence, but so much vaster, in scope and detail. A world which would not be at all forgiving of mistakes.

As to the previous two seeding attempts? Even their bones would be long-since weathered away by now. Of their attempt, and failure, there was no trace left at all.

And then the youngsters were running, for behind them a horrendous noise, painful to the ears. A shrill grinding of simultaneously increasing and decreasing pitch, and escalating volume. It scraped on the ears in the high range and traumatised the innards at the lower, making them feel sick and frightened, with a strong desire to get away from the noise. As Archive 20's emergency evacuation systems intended.

It went on for hours, and for that entire time they ran in terror until in the early evening dark, a blinding light flared behind them. Looking back was a huge bright cloud billowing into the sky. Archive 20 had run out of internal components to sacrifice to delay its own internal structural collapse, and had ceased to be.

The New Stralians milled around confused. There were a thousand of them, split into several groups of roughly-similar size, determined by the way the surrounding landform had funnelled their random terrified running. The groups of children slept on the ground, in the chill, huddled for warmth. In the early morning, they continued in the directions they had already started, each group largely oblivious to the others doing the same in their own outward directions.

There were sparse trees about the arid red-soiled plane, and the children began stripping them of anything edible. Then of the sticks themselves, fashioning them into tools which might be used to spear or otherwise entrap some of the small animals scurrying about the region. They had learned to do this in simulation, and while the new reality didn't look exactly like their prior lives, it did seem to work in much the same way.

Faced with sparse resources, the groups split again, spreading themselves out ever more. And again.

Viki was the daughter of sailors. She was a sailor, for even at almost-twelve years old, she could hold her own up a mast, at the tiller or loading and unloading crates of trade goods. She was small, even for a Malan. Not at all weak though, often surprising people with her strength which, while not remarkable for a person in general, was a bit unexpected compared to what her diminutive stature led people to assume.

Not that she was even that small: three-quarters of a head below her age mates, on the rare occasions she had age-mates around to compare to. She would likely just have a late growth-spurt and catch up anyway, her mother had assured her. Probably end up out-growing everyone and become a giant, her father had joked.

Viki actually didn't mind being a bit short. Being routinely under-estimated had its own advantages, possibly more than the extra height would. Plus, she was the only crew-member who didn't have to duck to avoid banging her head on a door lintel!

The boat was her parent's. All the boats in the small Malan trade fleet were owned by their respective families. And crewed by them, plus a few extras to make up needed numbers or skill specialisations. Viki's boat was quite heavy on 'outsiders' as she was an only child. Her parents had been able to have no more after her, which was know to be a thing that sometimes happened. Not her fault, she was assured, just a thing. But she would have liked some brothers and sisters.

Her father could have taken a second wife. Or even more than one. He was not really wealthy, but he was by no means poor. But he never had. Women who were open to living on a ship were not that common, and he didn't feel it fair to keep a wife effectively abandoned on land for months at a time, he claimed.

Her mother was a sailor, though she hadn't always been. The daughter of farmers, she had managed to educate herself just enough to find work doing goods-accounting at a city port. That's where she had met her father, in a relatively-friendly argument about what taxes were and were not applicable to local silk from two ports away versus Innuan furs from the far north.

Her father had told her the tale of his meeting her mother more than once. Her mother had overheard the last time. "That's not how I remember it!" she had commented drily.

"Really?" Her father had responded, seemingly in genuine surprise.

"Well, the general events are true enough, but I distinctly recall not being nearly as impressed with your father on our first meeting as he seems to think I was," her mother had said, conceding "That came some time later."

Her mother still did book-keeping, now for the trading fleet, but also worked on deck with confidence and competence. She didn't do mast-work, but nobody faulted her for that: mast-work was definitely not for everyone!

Neither Viki or her mother were on deck right now. They were in her parent's private cabin (the only such on the boat). Her mother was trying to teach her to read Zhonganese. Viki hated it. It was a stupid way to write a language! Every syllable had its own square-ish picture. Sometimes the picture sort-of made some kind of sense, but usually you had to just memorise them. All some-thousand of them, for proper literacy, of the tens of thousands a true scholar might know.

Not like Malanese, which she had been reading competently since she was six. That language also used square-ish characters, but they were composed of pronounceable sub-elements that were even shaped loosely like the sounds they represented.

Why didn't more countries use Malanese writing? She knew - to a greater or lesser degree - six regional dialects, and five of them, despite having distinctly different words for the same things, all used the same Zhonganese characters for writing them down.

That was, she realised in one of her rare flashes of insight, why! Malanese writing worked well with Malanese speaking, but not with the other languages. The Malanese symbols would match a different dialect no better than Zhonganese characters did!

Except... you could still use the Malanese character-parts to make your own characters that did match the local dialect, so the characters would be different, but they would at least actually relate back to the speech they represented! So maybe not a such good reason at all!

"Tradition," her mother had told her. "People like their traditions."

Even the stupid ones!, Viki had replied, though only in her own head.

"It also allows the same script to be read by scholars in places with entirely different languages," her mother added, seeing the look on Viki's face. It was an interesting and good point!

"A difficult writing system also keeps the common folk from getting too educated," her father had put in, from across the room. He knew the Zhongan numbers and possibly a few hundred common characters. It was all he'd ever needed.

Her mother shot him a dagger-glance, softening it with a weary smile. Viki smiled inwardly. She might have had her mother's gender, but she took after her father much more strongly in attitude.

Her mother gave up on coaching characters, for now, and pulled out her abacus to focus on Viki's numeracy. This was always a far more successful endeavour, as Viki quite liked mathematics, which was why her mother always made her do her characters first!

Most of all, Viki liked hanging off the top of the main mast. Even when she had no legitimate reason to be up there! The mild vertigo thrilled her, though she was in absolutely no danger of falling, after years of monkeying about in the rigging.

"Don't itch at it!" her mother scolded.

Viki had been idly rubbing her jewel, a small metal disk, a bit larger than her big toe, in the back of her head. Nobody could tell her what it was. She had been born with it, according to her parents. But they couldn't tell her anything about it either, other than exchanging worried glances when they thought they were beyond her peripheral vision.

The jewel bit was a small red diamond in the very center of the disk. The disk itself was a bluish-silver metal that likewise nobody could identify. It was hard, not taking a scratch at all, and didn't tarnish, even with constant exposure to the wet salty sea air. Around it was a rim of hard skin, just like where the fingernail goes under the skin of the finger at its top. Just inside this rim, on the metal itself, was an etched perfect circle, then it was flat to the recessed red diamond, not a fancy one, but just a flat red glassy surface flush with the adjacent metal.

She liked to call it a 'red diamond' but it was just as likely just red glass! She had managed to get a decent look at it only a few times, using two polished-tin mirrors, one held behind and one before herself, and her hair carefully braided and tied out of the way. It wasn't actually as impressive as she tended to imagine when it wasn't in her vision. Just weird and unnatural looking.

The jewel, or more accurately its metal surround, was not just in the skin, but anchored firmly in the bone at the back of her skull. How deep in? They'd likely have to wait until after she'd died to find out for sure, but it was deep enough that it was held in more firmly than a healthy molar in a jaw. It didn't budge a hair's breath if you tried to wiggle it.

Most people didn't know it was there. It was well-hidden under her thick blue-black hair. Her parents had always taught her to not draw attention to it, fearful that some pirate or thug might have the idea to remove the pretty thing from the small girl's head by force.

It wasn't a particularly good twelfth birthday present. Maybe not actually bad, but disturbing and upsetting, to a degree. Or maybe not. Viki's parents had long ago decided that on her twelfth birthday, such as it was, she would be old enough to know she was not actually their own child!

She was a foundling. Literally found on the side of a mountain, if the story that had accompanied her was to be believed. Her parents - they had cared for and raised her, so they were still her parents by any measure that counted, she felt - hadn't been the ones to find her. They had purchased her in a dockside market on the coast near Tiban!

The person or people that had found her had seen the jewel in the back of her head, but had themselves been either too squeamish or superstitious to kill the infant to remove it themselves. It wasn't compassion, her father was sure, since the seller had been showing off the jewel to potential buyers with the open implication that the buyer might want to remove the jewel and discard the infant carrying it, alive or dead, afterwards.

Her father and mother had agreed then and there to buy her, at the ludicrous price being asked, borrowing on top of their own savings from others in the fleet and putting themselves one bad trade-year away from destitution for the next half-decade. Not for the jewel, but for the infant that was likely headed for a dire fate because of it.

She had looked about one year old at the time. So what she thought of as her 'birthday' was actually her sale-date, plus one year!

She wasn't angry. How could you be angry at people who had literally saved your life? And loved and cared for you ever since. They were her parents more than natural parents would be. More than her own, maybe. Or had they saved her too? Maybe the jewel was a cultural thing to wherever they came from - maybe one of the more remote Tiban tribes that lived in those same mountains she had been found near. And maybe her natural parents had been killed for their own jewels, hiding her somewhere so their attackers couldn't do the same to her. Maybe maybe maybe. Who knew? She could make up stories until the day she died and still not know.

She hugged both her now-parents tightly. They apologised, and she assured them there was nothing to apologise for. It was a shock to learn, for sure, but it wasn't actually bad. And certainly nothing her parents had done was bad. Quite the contrary!

She did have to spend a good part of the rest of the day up the main mast, looking out over the waves to the horizon and distant passing land just visible there, quietly reaffirming who she was. She was Viki. She was a sailor, daughter of sailors. Good people she was lucky to be family with. Luckier than she had ever known.

By the following day, her mind had dealt with it. She felt normal again. Just Viki, with no more need to self-reaffirm that fact than two days prior.

It was several weeks later that she had the first of many strange dreams. She was on a boat, which was actually the most common dream she had, it being a reflection of her normal daily life. But it wasn't her family's boat. It was built differently, much heavier. And the sails were square rather than triangular. It was cold in the dream. She had never felt such biting cold in her life. And yet dream-her was not worried by it at all, as if it was entirely normal.

Viki hadn't slept in her parent's cabin since she was four years old. She had a sling in the cargo-hold where the dozen other crew also slept in such. Wrapped away in her own private cocoon, nobody noticed that her jewel was now glowing as she slept, a tiny red lantern flickering dimly on the back of her head, buried deep under her hair.

Niki was a shield-maiden. She didn't mind. That's just what you did when you were raised by priests who found your infant-self squalling hungrily on the edge of the hof. How did she get there? She had been far too young to have crawled there herself. And there were no missing infants in any nearby villages.

Then there was the little blue gemstone in the back of her skull, set in a metal sleeve that was, by the feel of it, anchored right into the skull-bone. The priests had been a bit worried about the implications of that. And worried and worried until her white-blond hair grew out to cover it, at which point it became more convenient to ignore it, and to mildly scold her any time she didn't do the same.

Her name was actually Nikkola, since she had been found in the early-morning of the Festival of Nikkola, goddess of victory. But she was casually called Nikki. And she was just a little lazy (as the priests were not shy about pointing out) so tended to drop the superfluous k when etching her name in things she valued and feared some other child might try to steal from her. The priests were good enough to her, but she was well aware she had no actual parent to stand up for her in any dispute over property.

In mythology, a shield maiden was a great female warrior. In reality, it mainly meant she organised meals. For the priests, primarily, though sometimes also for communal feasts. She didn't have to make the meals, though she invariably ended up helping out with that too: her official role was to organise them: to make sure the right foods were prepared in the right way, and presented appropriately. She was middling-good at it: good enough for a small hof attached to an unremarkable village up an un-notable fyord, but not nearly good enough for a great hof or house.

She did martial training with the young men, mostly to their amusement, though they were not actually nasty to her about it. Especially when she started to work out how to use her short stature to her advantage over them. What she lacked in brute-strength, she could more than make up for in leverage! In a regular girl, that might have caused some resentment, but she was a shield maiden, and a certain level of martial prowess was not only allowed, but expected.

She also went out on the boats. War boats, supposedly, although that was far more a name than reality, too. They were mainly for transport and trade. The fact that the only 'warrior' aboard was a diminutive shield maiden, aged around twelve, spoke strongly to that! She was more a mascot than anything, and resented it enough to quite-belligerently insist on helping out with the normal ships' duties, which the other crew quickly came to respect more than her alleged 'status'.

And she had weird dreams. About funny not-quite-right boats with triangular sails, and of forests greener than she could have dreamt, except she did dream them anyway. And a place that was a vast dry beach from horizon to horizon under a baking sun so hot that she could see her fair skin had been baked black. Not that dream-her seemed to mind at all! Dreams were funny like that.

It was one such trading trip, in her thirteenth year, down to Celtan, that she received the fright of her life. They were in a dock market doing all the usual dock-market things, selling stuff from the north, buying southern stuff to take back north to sell there. Drinking more alcohol than was certainly good for them, as their increasingly bad, and increasingly loud, singing was testament to.

Niki didn't drink so much. She felt someone had to remain sober enough to round up everyone else before they caused more trouble than their coin was worth to the locals. She was the shield maiden, so that was apparently one of her unofficial duties, too.

So she wasn't more than just slightly tipsy when she rounded a street corner, in the early evening, to look right into her own face!

Silly, this face had freckles. And curly bright-orange hair!

Silly, this face was as pale as a Púca, with white-blond hair to match.

It had been the similar height and general shape of features that had thrown Aisling for a moment. And her momentarily shocked expression probably matched this poor girl's too. So it wasn't just her seeing Púca, or whatever haunted northerners in their dreams instead.

"Sorry," she said, automatically.

The girl opposite her stuttered for a moment, struggling to switch back from her surprise to the local language. "I sorry too," she managed to blurt out in slightly broken Celtanic. She seemed a little drunk. Not unreasonably-so, just nicely-so, or Aisling hoped. She had seen plenty of unreasonably-so in the last few days travelling the coastal towns alone, and this wasn't that.

"Let me help you with that." The northern girl had dropped a parcel on the ground in her fright. That was a little disconcerting, actually. Aisling had never frightened someone just by meeting them before! Should she be insulted? Probably not, since she had been nearly as shocked herself. Take away the hair colour and style, eye-colour and shape, pinken up the skin a bit and add freckles, and the two of them could have been sisters!

So, really, not very similar at all other than in general outline.

Both of them bent to retrieve the dropped parcel at the same time, and knocked heads. It wasn't hard, but it was embarrassing, like out of some children's pantomime play. That stupid!

"Ah, sorry again!"

"I have it, thank you." The northern girl said sharply, as she scooped up the parcel and clutched it to herself again, a little defensively.

"I'm not trying to rob you," Aisling assured.

"What?"

"You are obviously a northerner, and in a trade port, and are clutching that parcel like it has all your money in it."

The northern girl slumped a little, admitting, "Not just mine."

"Shhh! Just because I said I wasn't going to rob you, doesn't mean I won't! That's exactly what a thief would say, isn't it!" She grimaced.

"Damn, You're good at this!"

"No, I've just been robbed myself recently. It makes you paranoid!"

"Oh. Sorry. Recently? Were you hurt?"

"I got away. Luckily they were more interested in my purse than me. That time!"

The northern woman said a word that was obviously a cuss in her own language.

"It's okay, honest. I just have to be more careful on the roads in future."

"I'd stay well off them. At least not travel them on my own!"

"I was with a group, a caravan, but we got separated - my fault. I'm trying to head north to catch up with them again."

"We are sailing north tomorrow. You don't look like you eat much."

Based on personal experience, no doubt! "Oh, I'd appreciate that. I don't know anything about sailing, but if you have any work that I can do, feel free to put me to it."

The northern girl looked her up and down. "Speaking of eating much, when was the last time you ate?"

"I was able to beg an apple earlier today. It was only half-rotten." Her faces soured at the memory. "I ate the rotten half too."

"Nope. We can do better than that. I can't put you to work if you don't have the strength to do any!"

Food was good! Any food would have been good at this point, but above that, this particular food was good anyway. It wasn't at all fancy, which was probably for the best, since Aisling suspected she was closer to starvation than she liked to admit to herself. She had honestly been seriously considering selling herself on the street, which was as dangerous as it was unpleasant to contemplate.

As she ate, the northern woman, Niki, watched her intently, like she was studying a new kind of bug on a leaf. Or a fish on whatever fish crawled on. Or swam on? Swam over? Whatever!

"That's enough food for now," Niki told her when the bowl was empty. "But I want you to eat another bowl before bed.

"Where should I sleep?"

"In the hold with the rest of us. Unless you fancy bedding with the captain! Not sure you're his type though. He has never looked at me in that way, at least! Maybe that's just because I know his wife, though."

"Is it safe? I mean, aren't all the sailors men?"

"If you're with me you'll be perfectly safe. And all that pillaging and raping is fine for old stories, but I've never seen it myself. I'm sure it happens sometimes, but not on this boat! The captain would drop the men overboard, just for the potential losses in trade such a reputation would cause us! And I'd be right there not objecting at all!

Besides, they'll all be too whored-out for the next few days to have much interest in women. They'll be all horny again just in time to get back to their own wives!" She rolled her eyes in comment on this. "If you're wondering why I don't tell their wives what their husbands get up to out here, firstly I'm pretty sure they already know, and secondly, I'd then have to tell their husbands what their wives are getting up to back home! Adult stuff is all pretty blah!"

"Do you have a husband?"

"How old do you think I am? I'm thirteen. I don't know what it's like where you come from, but amongst my people that's a few years too young, and even fifteen is a bit on the nose these days! I don't even want to... you know... though the older women in my village assure me that will change soon enough. I'm not sure I want to change."

"I don't think we get a choice."

"In changing, maybe not. In choosing what to do about it.... I'm a shield maiden! I may not be up to an actual battle, but I could drive off any one man in a fair fight!" She calmed down. "Actually, I'm not sure if a shield maiden is even allowed to. It's in the name. I never thought to ask.... Man-woman stuff isn't exactly something I think about any more often than I absolutely have to. Or man-man stuff, which I have seen enough of down here in the cargo hold. Is there any woman-woman stuff? How would that even work?"

"Ah, yes, there is."

"You've...."

"Done that? No! Not that there is anything wrong with it, at least amongst my people, but like you, I'm thirteen. I don't have any care to try anything like that yet! I don't even know if I would like a man, or a women, or both, or neither. My people aren't too fussy about who, or even if. Not wanting to at all, ever, is an option. My mother was like that."

"Your... mother? Didn't she have to.... You know, to have you?"

"I'm adopted," Aisling said, in a voice that was a little too over-practised at dropping that fact into a conversation like a stone into a mud-puddle.

"Me too!" Niki came back in false-brightness, countering Aisling's go-to awkward-conversation-killer. "Sort of. No adoptive parents but a bunch of priests doing their best to fill the roll. They did fine at it, I think."

The conversation petered out into mutual embarrassment over the topic of sex. It was not something either of them would have been comfortable discussing so openly with another person who was not a complete stranger they would never see again after two days time.

Aisling wanted to work for her meal. Niki wasn't confident she was up to it, so she just found some simple tasks to keep the local girl happily busy that didn't require much physical exertion. She really looked like she was less than a week away from starving to death!

The captain returned to the ship mid-evening, being more the hard-drinking and less the hard-whoring type. Niki informed him of their passenger, and he was fine with it. She would check with him again in the morning and if he was still fine with it less drunk and more splitting-headache all would be good, but she knew the man well enough to be confident.

Aisling had her second bowl of food, and after a bit of idle chatter to let it settle, Niki put her into a spare sleep-sling hull-side of her own.

"How do you not fall out of these?"

"I've never fallen out. Not even my first time. You'll be fine. And if not, you are only a few hands above the deck."

Aisling let Niki help her into the sling, which insisted on twisting in every direction except the one she needed it to go for her to climb into it.

...

"Niki!"

Niki had never heard someone shriek in a whisper before. She rolled sleepily in her sling. "What? Did you actually fall out?"

"There's.... Nothing. I just had a bad dream."

"Sleeping on a full stomach will do that. Better that than letting you starve, though."

"Niki?" Calmly this time. "Thank you."

...

Breakfast. Good stodgy porridge, with honey, which was all Aisling could eat for her near-starvation, and all the men could eat for their hangovers. Niki was always tempted to fry up some eggs in pig-grease for herself to enjoy in front of them, but knew she would just end up being the one to scrub the aftermath off the deck.

She had taken Aisling up on top-deck to the prow to eat, since the sailors down in the cargo hold were leering at her. Not sexually, it was just their hangovers making them seem leery when they were really just curious. One had looked back and forth between them as his eyes widened, so the similarity of their form wasn't just in her own head, possibly.

"So what was your dream last night?" Niki asked. She didn't really care, but it was difficult to start a conversation with someone you hardly knew.

"Dream?"

"You woke up from a bad dream an hour-or-two before dawn."

"Oh, that. I barely remember. I thought I saw a light in your hair. It was blue. Flickering like a tiny candle. Just my eyes playing tricks in the dark."

Niki had self-consciously raised her hand to the back of her head. It was a reflex. As Aisling had said, just her eyes playing tricks. Her head-gemstone thing wasn't a candle. Her hair was all there, for a start, not burned off by a flame, blue or otherwise.

Aisling had seen the gesture. Anyone else would not have interpreted it, but she recognised it as a defensive twitch she had herself developed over the years.

"Niki, do you have any... ah... jewellery, on the back of your head?"

"What? No! Why?" That was an obvious lie, from someone not accustomed to telling them.

"Like a little green gemstone in a metal ring?"

"No! Definitely not!"

Aisling wasn't a practised liar either, but even she was better than that! She looked around carefully, making sure they were unobserved in the early morning. She leaned in and lowered her voice. "The women of my people.... we wear jewellery on the backs of our heads, inside the hair."

Niki's eyes widened. "Your.... people?"

Aisling turned her head, reaching back to part the hair. "Look."

Niki looked in, reaching with her own fingers to gently part the wiry red hair more thoroughly. "It's green. The stone is green."

"Yes."

"Mine's blue."

"May I?"

This time Niki tentatively turned her head and parted her hair. As promised, her head-jewellery contained a small blue gemstone in its centre. Not that Aisling's own people didn't these days have a number of colour choices for theirs. More significantly, the metal was blue-silver, something nobody had ever been able to successfully fake. Aisling reached in and touched it. Niki pulled away sharply and defensively at the touch, but Aisling had felt that yes, the metal was solidly attached through the skin and into the skull.

"Sorry," Niki said quickly. "I wasn't expecting you to touch it. Nobody other than me has ever touched it before."

"No, I'm sorry," Aisling told her. "But I had to be sure it was a real one."

"A real one?"

"When I said my people have them, they have fake ones. Not in the skull, just clipped to the hair near the roots. And nobody has that blue-silver metal."

"Why?"

"My people accepted my head-thing from the moment they found me. But we had some trouble the first time some outsiders noticed it. My mother had the idea that all the women should wear something like it, something cheap that was pretty but not worth trying to steal. Then say it was just a thing our people did. Make it... unremarkable."

Niki was staring at her. "Your mother is a very smart woman!"

"Was," Aisling corrected. "She passed on two years ago."

Niki diverted her eyes to the deck. "I'm sorry."

"I miss her. But she was an old woman even when she adopted me. I was with her at the end, providing comfort. She told me I had brought great joy to her final years. She had always said I could call her grandmother or auntie if I didn't want to call her my mother. I refused to call her anything but mother. That's what she was to me." A tear snuck down Aisling's cheek. She shook her head to dislodge it.

After several seconds of contemplative silence, Niki spoke again. "So, your people don't have real ones of these things? None of them?" She had, for a moment, been thinking that Aisling's people might also be her people. Her origional people. Stupid, the people of the North were her people. She even looked like them. She was literally an archetype Scandian, strait out of an epic tale, in all but stature.

"Only I have a real one, buried in my skull," Aisling admitted. "Until now!"

"I... I don't know what to say. Or do. About any of this!"

"Me neither. What does it even mean? And why was your's alight last night - I don't think dreamed it, after all."

"Does yours make light?"

"Nobody has ever said it does, and I can't check for myself easily enough to be looking all the time. Did you see anything last night? My gemstone is green, so it might make a green light, not blue?"

"I honestly wasn't looking," Niki admitted.

"Can you look? Tonight?"

"I will. I promise."

...

Aisling shrieked, a short sharp sound, stifled by Niki's hand hastily over her mouth.

"Shhhh, it's just me," Niki assured her. "Sorry, I didn't mean to startle you, but under all that hair it was hard to tell."

In the dark, Niki felt Aisling relax, and released her mouth, which she had been cupping quite hard.

"Was it...?" Aisling whispered.

"Yes. Green. It went out the moment I woke you."

"So only while we sleep?"

"I guess so."

"What does it mean?"

"No idea."

"Girls! Go to sleep!" A Scandian voice muttered from across the cargo hold. A second mummer concurred, "Or go up on deck and keep the night crew awake with your incessant whispering."

The day after that, they were docked again. Niki was overseeing the unloading of a crate of goods. Aisling still looked starved, but didn't feel it anymore. It would likely take weeks of regular meals to come back from that.

Niki took leave from her duties to help Aisling down the plank off the boat to the wharf, pushing a blanket wrapping up more food, and a few local coins of her own, into the Celtan girl's arms. "Are you sure you'll be all right?"

"Thanks to you, yes," Aisling assured her. "I can never thank you enough."

"We're... kind of sisters, I guess," Niki said, her hand gesturing to the back of her own head, an awkward look on her face. "This is what family do, isn't it?"

Aisling smiled genuinely. She mimicked the gesture, being a little discrete about it. Just flicking an annoying strand of hair back, to the un-knowing observer. "Sisters. Yes! I always wanted a sister!"

"I hope you find your people again. But if you need, we are docked here until morning."

"Thank you. But I am confident I'll find them here. It is a town we usually stay at for some days, before turning back inland on our trail."

"What do your people do? If I may ask?"

"We are just like yours, actually. We trade. But by wagon and road, rather than boat and sea."

"Then we may meet again?"

"Mark this day, and if you are here this time any year, there is a good chance you can find us in the local markets."

She left then, turning to wave one last time, before disappearing into the crowd on the dockside.

...

Aisling did come back, that very night, finding Niki in one of the dockside taverns.

"You missed them again?" Niki said, clear emphatic disappointment in her voice.

"I found them!" Aisling corrected, excitedly. "They want to meet you. To properly thank you."

Aisling dragged Niki out of the tavern by the hand, into the early-evening street. Not that she had to do much dragging, Niki only needing to stop briefly to let the captain know where she was going and why. He smiled broadly and toasted them with his quarter-full flaigín. He was already lightly drunk, but he would never drink to the point of becoming insensate. As captain, he didn't get that luxury.

Aisling's people were a few streets inland, in a small field that was more a commons park than for farming. Large colourful wagons in a circle around a large fire in a stone pit. A small herd of very heavy horses off to one side in a pen that was part of the park. There were two other such wagon-circles there as well, representing other travelling trader groups, and a small amount of foot-traffic between them as people went back and forth to inter-mingle.

The whole of Aisling's own group almost pounced on Niki the moment she was pulled by the hand amongst them, thanking her profusely for looking after their 'lostling' and bringing her safely back to them. The 'robbery' Aisling had mentioned had apparently not just been her alone on the road, but an organised bandit attack on the whole caravan, and while they had made it away, Aisling had held back trying to get the bandits to chase her into the forest. She had succeeded, but to her own detriment.

Even as a combat-trained shield-maiden, Niki had to admit that was an impressively courageous act. Stupid, too, but courage was mostly stupidity, in her opinion. Sometimes the stupidity was justified, though in this case she was doubtful of that.

The caravan people had corralled the wagons defensively at the next opening in the road, and sent some of the men back to search for Aisling, but had missed her, eventually having to accept she was lost.

Now, she was back, and the atmosphere was celebratory. Aisling's people had, on learning of how Aisling had made her way back to them, insisted that Niki be fetched and included in the celebration.

Surprisingly, there wasn't a lot of drinking. There was a kind of sweet wine, which was widely enjoyed, but not in quantities to get actually-drunk on, even with Niki's head-start back in the tavern. But people seemed quite able to have a very good time even without the drunkenness. "Drunk on life," Aisling had called it, when Niki had commented on this, adding "In many ways, it's even better, and there isn't a hangover the next morning. At least not much of one!" It was very different to a Scandian celebration, but clearly just as enjoyed by everyone involved.

Niki slept in a spare bunk in a wagon that night, sharing the space with Aisling, just as she had shared her berth on the ship the previous two nights. They both slept hard, forgetting to even wake and check for head-lights.

In he morning, they hugged and said their goodbyes. Aisling teared up a little, which was about the only thing that could have made Niki do likewise.

"I'll do my best to be here next year," Niki promised. "Njörðr's winds willing."

"I too, with Lugos' blessing to the roads," Aisling promised back.

They parted, releasing the final grip between their outstretched hands unwillingly. But the caravaners were harnessing the wagons to the horses, and Niki's boat would already be preparing to sail from the dock on the next outgoing tide.

The captain wouldn't sail without her, but he would be mightily unhappy if she caused delay. Even more so if he had to send men out to find her, as would be the hungover men themselves!

She was back on the boat in plenty of time, assisting with the final loading of traded-for goods, even. After they sailed, she looked from the prow back to the port. On the hill behind the town, a train of colourful wagons were making their way up the hill on the road. It may have been one of the other trains from the park. But Niki felt it was Aisling's train. Would they meet again next year? She would sincerely try, as she knew Aisling would too.

Dubiwe ran. Which was something she normally liked to do. But she liked to do it while hunting. Not while being the hunted! She was in Sanan lands now, though it wasn't the Sanan who were hunting her. She got on well with the diminutive Sanan peoples, possibly because of her own, relative to her own Zanban people at least, diminutive size. Or maybe it was because she actually respected them. Zanban had their own culture and skills, but Sanan had a way with the interior lands. They could survive where no other people could.

She had lived with the Sanan for a time, and had learned some of their ways. And it was those Sanan ways, sometimes made light of by her own people, that were saving her now!

So far, at least.

Her hunters were Zanban. Her own people. Some of them. From the far south had come a strange belief. A new god. The only god, it was claimed by some. A god that demanded worship.

Her people recognised many gods. They didn't worship any of them. They showed them respect, and in turn the gods might show respect back. What use would a god have for the worship of a man?

This new god, or claimed god, demanded worship. And blood sacrifice of all who refused. Most of her own village had refused. And now she was running, far from home. Her family, dead, or converted. If not for real, at least pretending, in fear of their own lives. She couldn't. She wouldn't! So she had run.

She had found the trail of some Sanan, and followed them down. "Don't trust any Zanban," she had warned. Sanan were not inclined to trust Zanban anyway, though the two peoples were not actively hostile most of the time, since their hunting-grounds didn't overlap much. "No, I mean really don't trust them. If you see any, stay well away. Something is in them, or some of us. A sickness of the mind. They are changed. They kill their own. They will kill you too, I'm sure. Spread the warning!"

She had back-tracked her own trail, erasing it as best she could, so as not to lead her own pursuers to the group of Sanan. She turned north again, deliberately intensifying her own trail for several miles, just to be sure it was she they followed. She was alone. It was her only advantage! No, the deep-inland was her advantage too.

Where to go from here? The threat had come from the south. She would go north, of course. And then what?

She was alone. Dubiwe. Her name was her past, a baby found abandoned on the edge of the desert. Alone. Was it also her destiny?