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“That’s really nice, but it might be. I’ve never done this before.”

“I’m sure you can handle it, Rodney,” Elizabeth said in that tone he hated, the one that meant that she expected a miracle from him and wouldn’t thank him if he found one. “Lorne will be through within the hour. We need to find the control crystals for you.”

“Fine,” Rodney snapped. “And he can bring some dinner while he’s at it. I haven’t had anything in hours and I have blood sugar issues, you know.”

“I know,” Elizabeth said. “Lorne says he’ll bring everything you need. Weir out.”

The gate dimmed and the event horizon died. Rodney looked up at the endless sea of stars above. He supposed Major Lorne and a semi-automatic counted as jackal repellent.

Chapter Five

John turned over restlessly for the fourteenth time. The hanging lamp guttered, the flame burning low. Teyla sat up.

“Does your head hurt?” she asked quietly.

John shrugged. “It’s not awful. I just can’t sleep.” He was under a mound of covers against the chill of the desert night, his back to her.

“I can’t sleep either,” Teyla said.

“Sorry.” He rolled over again and sat up, the bandage drooping down over his eye.

Teyla put her hand to his forehead. “You don’t seem feverish.”

“I’m fine. It just hurts.”

“I think I have some Tylenol,” Teyla said. “Can you take that?”

He nodded. “Should be ok. It’s not very strong but it’s better than nothing.” She fetched the Tylenol and the remains of the tea, and he gulped the pills down. “I’m sorry to keep you awake.”

“Well, I can’t very well throw you out, since we’re locked in,” Teyla said. “So I suppose I have to put up with you.” She sat back down on the edge of the bed, propping up against the headboard and pulling the covers over her feet. “We could tell stories.”

“Tell stories?”

“That is what my people do when keeping watch,” Teyla said serenely. “And since we must pass the cold hours of the night together, it is better to do so in companionship.” She folded her hands across her stomach. “I have suggested it, so you may request the story.”

“I don’t know any Athosian stories,” John said, settling back down, the firm pillow like a bolster beneath him. It would take some little time for the pills to help, she thought, but perhaps then he would sleep.

“Still, you must pick one,” she said. “It can be anything. About a person or a place…”

For a moment he looked thoughtful, his eyes shadowed by the bandage. “How about the first time you went through a Stargate?”

Teyla looked up at the dim lamp swaying. “You do not pick an easy one,” she said.

“If it’s a bad idea…”

“No. You chose fairly.” Teyla smiled at him. “I will tell you of my first gate.”

* * *

I am springborn, so I was already weaned my second summer when my mother walked through the Ring of the Ancestors and never came back. My mother was Tegan of the Gate Field, of Emege That Was, and she was beautiful and wild both. My father loved her, and how not, when she was like the storm on the mountains or the wild birds in flight? Four years they lived together, four years they dreamed, and my second summer she walked through the gate and never returned, a smile on her lips and her pack on her back. She was Tegan, and nothing could hold her. She was meant for walking away.

My father never loved again, never chose another, and so in my childhood it was just the two of us. My father, Torren, was a trader. He was a mild man with keen blue eyes and a quiet way, the kind of man who misses nothing but says little. He represented us when people came to buy our wares, and sometimes he walked through the gate himself to sell the things we had made on other worlds, to trade them for things we could not make.

And there were many things we could not make. Plastics — these things you use so freely, even throw away — we prized them for their durability, their lightness, and most of all because we could not make them. The best came from Sateda, but we had nothing they wanted so anything manufactured by them must come through layers of middlemen, traded again and again before it was sold for Athosian grain or the furs of animals we had trapped. An energy pistol like Ronon’s would have been worth a year’s harvest. And so we knew what they were, but we had none.

I was six years old and a bit when I walked through my first gate. My father had business on Narara. We traded with them fairly often, for they were a good market for our furs and our pottery and in return we bought from them the richly loomed cloth that they are famous for, raw silks in all the hues of the rainbow. I loved their cloth even as a child. I could not imagine how they made such bright dyes colorfast, russets and brilliant greens, reds and lambent purples, the turquoise that is my favorite.

“It’s only a short trip,” my father said. “There is no reason Teyla cannot come. We will stay one night on Narada and return in the morning.” I was beside myself with excitement, especially when my father got out my winter coat, now packed away neatly for the season, as it was coming to summer in the lowlands by Emege That Was. “It’s winter on Narada,” he said. “Their winters are cold, so you must bundle up when you play in the snow.”

It is true that some parts of Athos are cold. There is snow in the mountains aplenty, but I had lived my life in the lands near Gate Field, where winters are rainy and cool, with ice in the mornings that sometimes coats the trees until they shine like glass. Real snow is rare and does not stay long. That is how we were, on Athos. You came to us in the uplands, when we had just moved to our summer pasturage with the return of the sun. In winter we were far away, in the deep valleys where the cold does not cut one to the bone. It is good that you came then. Had you come a tenday sooner, you would have found no one at all.

And so I stood beside my father in summer, bundled into my winter coat, while the great Ring of the Ancestors hummed to life, flaring blue as I waited. With good wishes ringing in our ears we stepped up, hand in hand, eager and unafraid.

I do not remember what I thought of the gate itself, of the transit, the sudden cold and the sense of disorientation, but we stepped out into snow. We stood in a broad courtyard, sculpted evergreen trees bowed beneath the weight of the snow, high mountains almost invisible, white against the pale sky. Great white flakes were falling, sticky and huge, drifting on the light wind. The stones around the gate had been cleared, and the new snow there only barely covered my boots, but the drifts around were higher than my waist. I let out a breath, and it came out steam in the frosty air. I turned my face to the sky, watching the flakes in their swirling dance, while in the distance we heard the voices of people and the sound of bells moving in the wind.

What may I tell you except that I was entranced?

We spent the day in the markets of Narada, where every good thing is sold, and my father made many trades. I played in the snow, drank warm tea on a bench beside a park where bigger children played a game I didn’t know, sliding around on snowshoes with two hide balls. We stayed in a small hostel, eating beside a roaring fire alive with the crackling of evergreen wood, and went to the Temple of the Bells by starlight to watch night play on the snow, with the distant glow of lights on the mountains where people lived. We sat in the pool of a hot spring to warm up afterwards, and I was half asleep already when my father took me up to the loft where we would pass the night. I lay drowsy and comfortable, wrapped in a soft feather quilt, looking out the tiny window at the late moon rising in a silver crescent over the mountains, the snow reflecting its pale light, until waking turned into dreams.