Olivia (108 page)

“So besides crushing the rabbit and nearly killing Doru, did you bring anything else back yourself?” she asked.

“As a matter of fact, yes.  I caught another she-goat to replace the one who got away two nights ago.  I personally have no idea what good it does for sparking women to drink milk, but Murgull—” he sighed, hooking at the air and rolling his eyes. “—Murgull always insisted on it, so that’s what we’ve always done.  Damn things keep chewing through the ropes and escaping.”

“You should build a pen,” she suggested.

“We’ve tried that,” Doru interjected.  “They either hop over it, or they chew through it.  Either way, we’re out another goat.  Fortunately for us, their innate ability to slip our bonds is the only real sign of cleverness they seem to have.  They may be hard to keep, but they’re easy enough to replace.”

“All in all, a productive hunt,” Bodual added.  “We brought down eight rabbits.  One of the others caught another goat, and Thugg snuck into an animal pen and made off with about ten big chickens.”

“You and I seemed to have been the only ones who couldn’t perform,” Doru added.  To Olivia, he said, “They’ve been teasing us all night.”

“Too bad they don’t know you like I do,” she said.  “I certainly had no complaints about your performance.”

Bodual flicked a glance behind them, but the other hunters were still hanging back, even if they were watching with some interest.  “I can think of a nice way to improve my crippled ego,” he remarked in a low voice, punctuating the suggestion with a friendly leer.

Doru gave him a light smack to the ear, but turned hopeful eyes on Olivia.  “You are always welcome, you know,” he said. 

She smiled at them, feeling absurdly touched by the offer.  The warmth and genuine friendship flowing off them contrasted harshly with the scene she’d just had with the Great Spirit.  She fought briefly with tears and won. “I’d like that,” she said.  “You really have no idea how much.”

“Good.”  Doru dropped an arm around her shoulders, half-unfolding one wing to tuck around her.  “Then come to my pit,” he said, a little too loudly to be the intimate offer it seemed.  He turned around.

Logarr stood in the shadows just beyond the common cave’s mouth.  He looked at her and then at Doru, who gave no sign of even seeing the other gulla.

Not now
, thought Olivia. 
Later, please, but not now
.

Logarr’s pale eyes came back to her.  Lust flared, sharp and cruel as a knife in her guts, and died away slowly.  He slipped back into the shadows and was gone, leaving nothing behind him but the echoing burn of his warning and a single word whispering through her mind:

Tonight
.

9

Olivia was almost asleep when she felt Logarr calling her from somewhere in the caverns.  She opened her eyes, at once awake and alert, to lift her head from Bodual’s chest.  Doru muttered something—it may have been a question—and started snoring again.

She disentangled herself gently and stepped over them to fetch her clothes.  This time it was Bodual who woke and tried to crawl out of the pit, mumbling something chivalrous about walking her to the women’s tunnels.

“Go to sleep,” she whispered.

“As you command,” he said, and burrowed back into the bedding.

Olivia dropped out of Doru’s chambers and wandered through the empty passages, following the call of Logarr’s mind.  She found him in yet another unused room in an uninhabited tunnel, sitting on a bench and staring morosely into the embers of a new fire. He did not bother to greet or acknowledge her in any way. 

“Is Sudjummar all right?” he asked after several long minutes of silence.

“He was when I left him.”

He nodded, gazing at the flame.  “I didn’t know.  It’s important to me that you understand that.  I didn’t know what she was doing, or even that she was here.  I am a tool,” he continued, speaking almost to himself.  “A man may use a pick to mine rock or to cleave another man’s skull.  The pick doesn’t know.”

“Have you sat here all this time worrying about it?”

Just when she thought he had not been listening to her at all, he shook his head twice, slowly.  “I wish I could say that I have, but no.  I have been looking my life over, trying to find the one place where I could have stopped becoming what I am.  There had to have been a point when I could have walked away, simply, safely.  I could have had a mate by now, a human like you.  When?  Where?”  He rubbed his face wearily.  “How?”

She crossed over to the bench and sat beside him.  Her arm brushed his, but that was the only contact and she hoped it was comforting.

“I killed her, you know,” he said.  His face, hollow-eyed and haunted, was bathed in sullen orange light.  “That little human.  I hurt her the first time I drove her mad the second, and I killed her on the third.  I shouldn’t have gone back to her, but I didn’t know where else to go.  She opened her eyes when I entered her.  There was a moment when I thought she really saw me, really knew it was no dream.  And then the power ripped out of me and killed her.”

Logarr leaned back and shuddered, his eyes closed against the memory.  “A male burst in on us.  I was in agony with unrelieved power.  I took his head off without really seeing him.  I heard a female scream—the little human’s mother.  Maybe, because she was older, she was stronger.  I don’t know.  She lasted…just long enough.”

He shook his head slowly, opened his eyes and stared at the fire without seeming to see it.  “Afterwards, I buried the bodies and burned the den.  The third time, the last time, I swore it was the end.  I swore I would rather die.  I could not defy the River Woman, but when she was done with me, I jumped into the sky and flew blindly away from the lights of the humans.  The pains came and I endured them until my wings seized up and I dropped out of the sky.  I landed on a road and lay there, unable to move, even to scream.  I am certain I would have died, if I had been left alone.

“I wasn’t.

“As I lay there, wrapped in my own wings, caught between two breaths of silent screams, I heard singing.  I could open my eyes, and what did I behold but a woman, stumbling down the road in a fog of drunkenness.  She might have passed me by if I had not been so horrified at the sight of her that I let out a cry to warn her away.  Naturally, she headed straight for me, her face the very image of concern and compassion.  She dropped beside me and tried to turn me over.  I do not remember attacking her.  I remember nothing at all until after I had finished with her, lying atop this…smoldering thing.

“But after many years, I decided these were things I could live with.  I told myself that I wasn’t responsible, that I’d had no control.  I told myself over and over that it could never happen again, that it was a secret I could keep.”

“And now?”

“I was certain you would be like that poor she-human I killed,” he said, but she somehow knew he was not answering her.  “I would hurt you, turn your mind to moonlight, then return and kill you.  When the third night came and went and you were sound, I feared to find one of my tribe dead.  That never happened, either.”

Logarr paused, then looked at her again, distantly curious.  “I suppose that you must be stronger than I am, or maybe you’re doing something with it that I can’t do.  I don’t pretend to understand this power, I only do what I must to be rid of it.”  He sighed, a sound of reluctant resignation, and stood up.  “That is as much as I am permitted to tell you of that.  All that remains for you to know are Bahgree’s words to me, her thoughts, from that dream of ages past.”

“You can’t just me tell me now?”

He shook his head, dismayed.  “Things are forbidden to me.  I am only a tool, and there is a hand upon me.”

“But you do regret it,” she said.  “You haven’t used any of your tricks on me tonight.  Instead, you chose to sit and talk to me.”

He shrugged his broad shoulders, his eyes dark with hopelessness.  “What does it matter if I speak to you?  When I touch you, it will be the same.”

To prove it, he put out his hand and caressed her hip through her skirt.  A ripple of sheer erotic pleasure flowed outward from that spot.  She closed her eyes, faint and flushed, and melted onto her back on the bench.

Logarr pushed her skirt up and straddled the bench between her open thighs.  “I wish you’d never come here,” he said.  “I wish I hadn’t taken that spiteful, stupid Journey when Vorgullum grew tall.  I wish that damn woman hadn’t picked that night to get drunk and go singing through the streets.”

Moving almost of their own accord, his hands roved over her body, periodically sending out those crushing mini-orgasms that rocked her to her core.  He spoke on, sometimes bitterly, sometimes fiercely, but always with sorrow and a deep sense of shame.  He thrust and rocked, and sweated against her, shouting out remonstrations in gasps and ragged breaths.

Olivia held on to him, but she couldn’t bring herself to concentrate for longer than a few brief seconds at a time.  Her body, independent of her sympathy or her compassion, drove her relentlessly towards the same, gut-wrenching conclusion.

He came with a sudden violent expletive, then heaved himself hard against her and locked into place.  Power coursed out of him, killing her own as it gushed through her.  She expected Logarr to get up when it ended, as he had before, continuing his story and finishing whatever work he’d begun with her.

Instead, the moment he took his first tortured gasp of air, he dropped atop her and banged his fist on the side of the bench.  He roared out a curse, then another, and then broke down into terrible, abrasive-sounding sobs, burying his head in the crook of her neck.

She rubbed the base of his horns to soothe him.  “It’s all right, Logarr.  I don’t blame you.  You tried, I know—”

“I tried to die,” he said raggedly.  “I tried to bleed out my life.  The knife went in, but it wouldn’t cut. My bones don’t break anymore. I can’t starve, Olivia.  I can’t drown.  I have nothing but pain.”  He reached up his bruised hand and wiped his face dry, then regained his feet and stumbled away from her.  “Bahgree told me that any young conceived by humans and gullan would never be accepted by the world.  They were born to die.”

“I know this.”

“But did he tell you the rest of it?” Logarr asked.  “Did he tell you about Urga’s curse?”

Olivia frowned. 

“No, I thought not. Bahgree may be evil, but the evil that has been laid upon us did not come from her.  In as much as she can be innocent, she is innocent of that.”  Logarr looked away, and when he spoke again, it was in the low, inflectionless tones of recital.  “Urga destroyed Bahgree as much as she could be and the Great Spirit bound her powers in the pool where she had been made, and for a time there was peace.  Eventually, the daughters of Bahgree, seeking to reclaim their mother’s power, came to the Great Spirit while his mate waited in the sky for her hour to give birth, and he resisted them no more than he had resisted their mother.  One night, when the moon rose high, Urga looked down and saw her mate thrashing wildly with the daughters of the River Woman.”  Logarr laughed, a low, humorless sound.  “And because Urga had no power over her mate, she cursed the wombs of his children instead.  She did this, knowing our race would die.  She did this
because
she knew.”

“I don’t understand,” Olivia said.

“Each moon-span, Urga comes into our world to lie with the Great Spirit,” said Logarr, glaring at the blank face of the wall.  “Each moon-span, she conceives his child, and at the fullest of the moon, she births that child back into our world through a gullan female.”

A tiny chill sank into the base of Olivia’s spine as she recalled the Great Spirit telling her this was how his essence had passed into Somurg.  She thought of pregnant Urga floating down over her, into her, as she strained on the birthing bench, and how the goddess had risen slender and emptied to look back at her.

“These children,
her
children, she has blessed with health.  All others, she has cursed to carry the full weight of both parents’ weaknesses.  Barrenness, infirmity, withered limbs, foolishness, blindness, foaming fits.”  Logarr turned his head suddenly and spat.  “‘Let no young come save through me,’ she said, and so, among
all
our people upon
all this world
, there are but twelve born each year free of this hell which consumes the rest.  Our race began to die. The gullan raised their voices in desperation to the Great Spirit, and he went before Urga and commanded her to remove her curse. She refused and so long as Urga’s refusal stood, the Great Spirit left her.  For years, he did not talk to or touch his mate, and for years, all the world was barren.”

Logarr fanned his wings, staring into the fire.  “It frightens me to think how close my race must have come to death in that hour.  It must have frightened the Great Spirit as well.  He summoned Urga out of the sky and commanded again that she relieve her evil.  Again, she refused.  So he beat her.  Badly.  And finally, Urga submitted.

“She did not remove the curse,” Logarr said.  “But she did devise the cure.  She gathered up all the waters she had beaten out of Bahgree in their last conflict and poured them into a pool that stands outside of time.  She told the Great Spirit to give Bahgree’s power back into a human vessel and so make it possible for those offspring to belong to this world.  And then, in her fury and her jealousy, she spat out a portion of her own power into that pool, so that the sum of its strength would be greater than his own.  And then she returned to the sky and left the Great Spirit before a pool that seethed with enough power to destroy even him.  She left him, and the evil shade of Bahgree twined eagerly beneath his hand.  The Great Spirit could not unleash her on the world, and so he chose instead to watch all the children born to gullan wither and die.”

“Bahgree’s power has only to return to a mortal body,” Olivia said.  “Not necessarily to her.”

Logarr shrugged listlessly.  “It will make very little difference if Bahgree has the opportunity to enter you.  Even powerless in the way of gods, she is capable of much.”