Olivia (124 page)

“Where are they now?” Olivia asked.  Her breasts ached, as if with grief; she had no more milk to give.

“Liz has the girl for now, but I don’t know that she can handle her along with Sunuu and Levonal.  Amy took the boy, but it’s the same story, you know.  She’s still got Smugg and Somurg.  Anita might start producing pretty soon, and until then, some of the older babies are just going to have to eat pulp.  I know you didn’t want them weaning, but…”

She wanted to protest, wanted to jump up shouting, ‘No!  If you wean them, they’ll die!’  But what was the alternative?  Give up on Cheyenne’s twins now, before they could steal milk from the mouths of the others?  Hopelessness welled up as tears; Olivia covered her face and wept.

The other two exchanged glances.

Yawa scowled, patted her clumsily on the back.  “You waste your pity on that animal.”

“I agree.”  Tina leaned back and folded her arms.  “For God’s sake, she nearly killed Wurlgunn.  She nearly killed you!  Twice!  At what point do you look up and say, ‘You know what?  She wasn’t very
nice
!’”

“She wasn’t very nice,” Olivia agreed, knuckling her eyes dry.  “And she died in pain in a room filled with people who hated her.”

Yawa grunted, but looked less sure of herself.

Tina continued to frown at her.  “Horumn’s right.  You do feel too much.”  She switched to English.  “If I had a mirror, I’d show you the scars on your back where she stabbed you.  They ought to name that little girl after you, and maybe every time you heard her called, you’d remember that you had to save her life from her fucking
evil
mother.”

“They should name them both for you,” Yawa added blackly, also in English.  “And every time they speak those names, perhaps it will remind them of the shameful way they robbed you of your mate, pestered you with challenge, and then needed you to save two lives.”

Tina recoiled sharply, blinking, and then burst out laughing.  “I don’t know why I’m surprised,” she said, wiping at her eyes.  “You speak human really well, Yawa.”

“You learned our speech in just a few moons,” Yawa said with a shrug.  “Did you think none of us could learn yours in a year?  Ha!”  She switched back to gullan.  “But this way is easier for me.  You may continue in your birth tongue if you like.  I can follow.”

“I don’t have anything to say,” Olivia said.

Tina scowled at her.  “You are just determined to blame yourself, aren’t you?  It wasn’t your fault, dammit!”

“No,” said Yawa quietly.  “It was mine.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

Yawa met Tina’s frustrated eyes coolly.  “I should not have left her,” she said.  “But I did, and I confess that I did so not because I did not think her capable of any action, but because I did not care what happened to her.  I thought the Beast might easily have some demon left in her.  In the deep places in my mind, I even suspected she might allow that demon to come out if she were alone with a male, and I may have left them precisely to let that game play out, to provoke the killing hand.”

“Wrong hand,” Tina muttered, and Yawa nodded, dropping her eyes.

“I…It was a foolish thing to do, and an evil whim that urged it on.  If there was a demon in that cave, it fed on me, not the human.  If her young ones die, it is I who must dig.”  She lapsed into unhappy silence.

“And you,” Tina added, looking crossly at Olivia.  “You’re sitting there thinking about Cheyenne.  After all this, you are
still
feeling sorry for
her
.”

“Someone has to.”

Tina muttered something uncouth under her breath, but Yawa only looked more thoughtful.

Olivia brushed back her bangs and said, “Tina, if this were a movie, who would you feel sorriest for?”

Tina opened her mouth to snap something, then frowned and knit her brows.  “Come to think of it…Okay, I’m beginning to see your point.”   Her voice softened.  “But look, hon, this isn’t Hollywood, this is the real world.  Sometimes surviving means you have to be the bad guy, and you don’t have to spend the rest of your life beating yourself up about it.  Cheyenne did what she did to
herself
, and in my opinion, she’d have done it anyway.  If none of this had happened tonight, we’d have gone in her room ten weeks from now to find her standing over their little broken bodies and laughing at the looks on our faces.”

Olivia closed her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Tina said after a short pause.  “I shouldn’t have said that, but I don’t think I’m wrong.”

“No,” murmured Yawa.  “I think not.”

“I wish this were the big screen,” Tina said with a sigh.  “The bad guys wear black and the good guys ride off into the sunset, and everyone gets what they deserve.”

Olivia found herself trying to think of all the movies she had ever seen.  It was a pitifully small list.  The faces of actors swam in her mind, but like her parents, they were blurry and vague.  Snatches of dialogue rang in her ears, but the voices that uttered the words could have belonged to anyone.  The only thing that she could visualize with clarity was a series of explosions, Hollywood-style, as the hero invariably escaped the clutches of whatever surreally impossible situation he’d gotten trapped in.  Oil tanker in the middle of the ocean?  No problem.  Lost island in the middle of nowhere?  No sweat.  Dead starship in the middle of space?  Big deal.  Top-secret military installation guarded by hordes of bloodthirsty guerillas?  Give me a break.

Undiscovered tribe of batmen in a hollow mountain with primitive weapons, virtually no security, and very reasonable rules of conduct?  Hm, settle down, have babies, learn to live with it.

“If this were a movie,” Tina mused.  “I’d never have to shave my legs.”

Yawa, who had understood maybe one word in three throughout the second part of this conversation, looked down at Tina’s leg, puzzled.  “Never have to do what?”

“Remove the hairs,” Tina explained.  “Look at Olivia’s legs.  See how smooth and bald they are?”

Olivia extended her leg and held still while Yawa inspected her.

“Now look at mine,” Tina invited, pulling up the leg of her rough breeches.

Yawa eyed them curiously, and then showed all her teeth in a smile.  “Look at mine!” she invited, stretching out one foot.

Tina glanced at the thick, black pelt that covered her body and uttered a barking laugh.  “Yes, all right, you win,” she said.

“Ha!  And you are only balding, you know.  Not
bald
.  How awful it must be to have such clammy skin,” Yawa mused, eyeing Olivia’s bare leg.

“Well, it’s cold, but I wouldn’t say it’s awful.  At least, I haven’t heard any complaints.”

Tina snorted.  “Yeah, well, I can’t speak for the rest of them, but you ought to know that Doru just isn’t the complaining kind.”

“Doru is a noble male,” Yawa added in low, musing tones.  “The old leader would have made him tall if he weren’t so overwhelmed by authority.”  They sat in companionable silence for a while and then Yawa prodded Olivia in the ribs and asked, “How is he?”

Olivia began to reply, thinking Yawa must be referring to Doru’s present depression.  Then her mouth snapped shut as she realized Yawa intended a far more intimate inquiry.  “How am I supposed to answer that?” she sputtered, completely off-balance.

Yawa blinked at her. 

“I thought you didn’t care about that!” Olivia stammered, still trying to recover her equilibrium in the face of Yawa’s casual inquiry.

Yawa snorted and fanned out her wings.  “I did not care to be worked by every male who brought me meat just because I can’t breed.  This doesn’t mean that I have never desired a male.  Or taken one.  And Doru,” she finished with a sigh, “is a fine male.”

“He is, ain’t he?” Tina agreed, throwing Olivia half a distracted smile.  “If I went for that sort of thing, I’d be on him in an instant.”

“You’ve had plenty of time to seduce him by now,” Olivia argued, sticking squarely to what she thought of as the point in an effort to keep from answering the initial question.

“When I first nerved myself to do so, he was meeting with a female already.  In secret, you understand.  Those were terrible days.  But she died, and his grief was such that…that I just couldn’t.  And since then, he has been like a child that puts his hand in dark places and encounters a snake.”

“Bit,” Olivia said.

“Bit,” agreed Yawa, nodding.  “And bit.  And bit.  And bit.”  She glanced at Tina with faint apology.  “I tell you, when your Tobi put him aside to mate with you, I went away to the tunnels and cried for him.  I thought he would never take another mate in all his life.  I thought that would surely be the snake that killed his heart.”

“Fortunately for all of us, Olivia Issagul had her wicked way with him,” Tina replied, and Yawa returned her full attention to Olivia expectantly.  “So?”

“I’m not going to answer that!” Olivia exploded.  “I wouldn’t even begin to know how!”

“He must have coupled with you by
now
.”  Yawa broke off as a new thought occurred to her and looked absolutely appalled.  “You mean to say that he…that Doru can’t…”  She began to gesture awkwardly, not even bothering to hide her disappointment.

Tina was snickering and trying to cover it by pretending to be coughing.

“Yes, he has coupled with me,” Olivia said, having determined that the only way out of this conversation was just to bull through it.  “Several times a night, in fact.  Very thoroughly.  Doru is just fine.”

Yawa looked first relieved and then envious. 

Olivia continued.  “Doru is, perhaps, the best damn coupler in the whole freakin’ mountain.  Doru has a spear that could pierce a bear from three forests away.  He rolls like the mountain.  He is enduring as the great oak—”

Tina burst out in one of her rare laughs.

Yawa began to smile faintly.

“Doru is fast as thunder and slow as snowfall. Doru moves like leaves in the wind in the fall. Doru,” she concluded magnificently, “is the great god under the mountain and when Doru is done, there’s always Bodual.”

Tina threw her head back and just laughed.

Yawa shook her head, patting Tina’s arm.  “I think if you gave yourself and Amy both to one male, that male would burst into flames.”

Tina smiled broadly back at Olivia.  “I’ll tell you something, and you might not think it’s funny, but Tobi told me once that sex with Doru was intense.  Tobi used to go base-jumping, for God’s sake.”

Olivia suddenly thought of the freefall experience only, unbelievably, two hours past.  “You can tell Tobi that Doru says sex with
me
is intense.”

“Oh, that is scary.”  Tina’s smile faded.  “Poor Doru.  I like the big guy, and he’s in there beating himself up even harder than you are.”

Yawa stood and hopped down from the bench.  “You are worried for him, for Doru?”

“A little,” Olivia confessed.  “I feel like I’ve hurt him, by causing him to question himself.”

Yawa nodded.  “You have hurt us all.  To see you flying forward, dropping to heal her even as she stabbed at you…you make me ashamed.  You make me wish…that my ways are the same as yours.” 

Tina snorted.  “You’d want to get stabbed in the back?”

Yawa shook her head.  “But if I were the b—if I were she, I would want someone to go beneath my knife to try and save me.  I would want to belong to a tribe that had such courage.  I would want someone to cry for me.”

Tina nodded and sat there for a while, her smile now entirely usurped by her far more familiar expression of matter-of-fact candor.  “I wouldn’t.  Olivia, I love you and I appreciate what you tried to do, but you’re an idiot.”

Yawa recoiled, staring.

Tina waved one hand as if Yawa’s horror were a gnat, and not a particularly troublesome one.  “You want to feel bad about someone, feel bad about Wurlgunn.  He’s going to lose Beth over this.”

Yawa and Olivia both flinched now.

“There’s been a lot of dissension in the ranks since Wurlgunn came back,” Tina told them. “No one’s been bickering over Beth, because she’s so creepily young, and maybe also because everyone knows the poor bastard would end up punching himself in the nose in a challenge…”  Tina trailed off, shaking her head.  “Everyone was talking about Anita moving in with them, but do you honestly think Wurlgunn could manage two women at once?”

The question called up a variety of intriguing images, but they all seemed to fade into the way she’d last seen him, lying limp beside Cheyenne’s body with blood matting his chest and arm.

“No, she’s probably got her own room, with a big pile of personal bedding and a curtain between them.  She and Beth keep each other company by day, and Wurlgunn feels noble and important by feeding her at night.”  Tina ran her fingers through her limp hair.  “Wurlgunn the mighty hunter.  Good grief.  And now he’s going to spend the next month easy lying flat on his back, and I bet he’s not even moved into the clinic before we get a couple of dickheads locking horns over Beth and Anita.”

Yawa’s brows drew together.  “This will not be,” she said.

“Sure it will.”

“You mistake me, healer.  I will not allow it.  It was my evil that caused Wurlgunn’s wound; I will provide for his mates.”  She stood up slowly, her shoulders squaring and wings fanning out.  “I will hunt for him.”

They looked at her.  Olivia could feel herself frowning.  “Doru said none of you women could fly very well.”

“I am not like the rest of them, digging in the earth for roots and grubs and afraid to let some male spy them in the air and find them ugly for it,” said Yawa, tossing her short horns.  “But I swore to the old leader I would not hunt.  When Doru came to us with spears, my vow kept me silent.  No more.  The old leader is dead.  His ways were not just.  I will break my vow to him and if it means I am forced into the care of the Eldest…”  Her voice wavered.  She shook her head furiously.  “So be it.  But I will hunt.”

“No one’s going to force you into the care of the Eldest while I’m around,” Olivia told her.  “I’ll talk to Doru.”

Yawa nodded and started walking again, staring into space, her expression drawn and grim.  They followed her.

Something that had been tickling Olivia’s mind for some time now presented an opportunity to be voiced.  “While we are still on the subject of providers,” she announced.  “Who’s providing for you right now, Tina?”