Olivia (16 page)

“Was that yours or mine?”

“Mine, I think.”  He stood, Vorgullum, and she heard him come a few steps closer, enough to look in on her and Beth in the pit.  She didn’t move, concentrated on taking deep sleep-breaths, and she must have been convincing, because he just stood there and watched her.  It was the other one, Beth’s captor, who ultimately said, “She’s clever.”

“Yes.”

“It’s a little unnerving.”

Vorgullum grunted, or perhaps it was a short laugh.  “I know.”

“But she seems like a good…well, person, I guess.  She’s kind.”  A pause.  “I wasn’t expecting that.”

No reply, at least not one that she could hear.  Her skin crawled under the weight of their stares; her fingers kept wanting to clutch; her brows, to wrinkle.  Olivia gave in and rolled over, away from them, hoping she looked as though she’d done it while still deeply asleep.

“I need to take her home,” Vorgullum murmured, and then he came for her, reaching down to gather her carefully into his arms without waking her.

There was no way she could pretend to be asleep if he was holding her.  He’d feel the tension even if she managed to look innocent.  So she opened her eyes, raising one hand to shield herself from the glow of his lantern.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said, setting her on her feet.

“I didn’t mean to fall asleep.  I thought you’d be here a lot sooner.”

He started to duck his head, then glanced at Beth’s captor and straightened up again.  “I had things to do,” he said vaguely, and gave a nod to Beth, still sleeping soundly in the pit.  “Is she well, do you think?”

“I think so, only a little tired.  All the excitement of seeing her own kind again.”

It seemed to her that he looked at her for a long time, but in the end, Vorgullum gestured towards Beth’s captor and said, “He says you think his Beth is young.  Is she a child?  A human child?” 

“No, not a child.  She is a grown woman, she’s just younger than I am.” 

“But old enough for…for a mate?” Beth’s captor persisted, concerned.

“For babies, you mean?” Olivia asked, puzzled.

He brushed that off absently, searching out how to voice his thought.  “Is she old enough to couple?  To know what it is?”

“Yes, she knows.  She is quite old enough for that.”

“Good.”  He leaned back in relief, fanning his wings slowly in the close quarters.  “I didn’t look closely at you humans when we gathered you that night.  I didn’t realize how much smaller she is.”

Puzzled, Olivia glanced over at the sleeping teenager.  “Not that much smaller,” she said.  Beth was thinner, and lighter in build, but she was just as tall, if not taller than Olivia.

“Not her height,” Beth’s captor explained.  “Her shape.”  He indicated Olivia’s breasts.

She was too surprised to reply at first, other than to blush.

“I don’t think that has much to do with it,” Vorgullum remarked, looking thoughtfully over his shoulder at Beth.  “All the humans look different there, but none of them give milk.”

“Oh.”  He didn’t sound disappointed.  If anything, he sounded relieved that Beth’s relative flatness was not another indication of her sexual immaturity.  When he noticed Olivia’s expression, he added, “Our females are all the same size.  When they have young, they swell with milk for feeding.  When the child is grown, they lessen.  I thought it was the same with humans.”

“We’re different in a lot of ways,” Olivia managed.

“Let us hope,” Vorgullum said quietly, “that we are not so different.  Come, Olivia.  It is very late.”

She went with him and let herself be carried down the squeezing passage into the tunnels.  Once there, he let her carry the lantern as they walked back to his chambers. The sound of their footsteps in the otherwise empty tunnels seemed very loud.

“You impressed the others,” he said at length.  “They thought you were very clever.  I am the only one with a human who speaks so well.”

“I squeak like a mouse,” she teased good-naturedly.

“Apart from that, I mean.”  He carried her up the chimney to his rooms, brought her into the sleeping room, and hung the lantern over the fireplace.  He had dinner laid out on the bench by her alcove already. “I thought you might be hungry,” he said, gesturing towards it.

After spending the day trying not to eat someone else’s meager meal, Olivia was famished.  She fell on the food eagerly, devouring the apple slices and the cut of beef that came with it, saving the tough loaf of bread for last, as had become a habit with her.  The bread filled her stomach, which was the kindest thing that could be said of it, but she dreaded having to put it there.  Hunger was almost preferable to the ache in her jaws that was the inevitable result of her battle to eat the stuff.

It wasn’t the first time she’d wondered where they were getting the bread, but to keep from having to eat it, she asked him.

He seemed surprised by the question.  “The women make it.”

“They grow it?” she echoed, picturing with some disbelief a number of gullan with tillers and hoes working the neat rows of a wheat field. 

He flapped his wings for a shrug.  “There is a…like a basin…on the mountainside where the washwater comes out.  A foul place, full of bugs, but the women do something there that makes some good, wet, black earth, good for growing things.  This food grows as long as the weather is warm, and the women dry it out and grind it up and make that nasty stuff.  Does it hurt your mouth?”

“It can be difficult,” Olivia hedged.

He laughed once, as dry and sour as the bread itself.  “My father used to tell me never to eat it in the dark, or I might eat a rock by mistake.”  He cut his eyes away.  “Or by preference.  I hate that food and I wish I had meat to give you, but I cannot spare the hunters yet.”

Because he’d turned them all into wardens, Olivia thought, guarding their human captives. 

She ate her bread, hating the silence, and finally dredged up a new question for him, a safe one.  “Where does the water come from?”

“Up,” he said vaguely.  “The snow never melts entirely from the high peaks, but what does melt runs down and makes little rivers that run through the rock.  I forget exactly where the rivers come from and where they go.  I could go down to the
sigru
and look, but I do know it comes from far enough away that it is clean by the time it gets here.  Our ancient ancestors made canals for it to flow along so we do not mistakenly drink where we make our waste.”

She echoed the strange word he’d used, realized she’d heard one like it and not too long ago, and said, “Is the
sigru
and the
sigruum
the same thing?”

He gave her a startled look, and then a little laugh.  “The
sigru
is where the
sigruum
does his work.  He paints his stories there.  Not stories like these,” he added, flicking a claw at an ancient issue of
Field and Stream
, “although he keeps those as well.  Real stories.  From the old days.  He sees them in dreams.”

“Like…magic?” She wasn’t sure of the word, and his frown after he heard it did not boost her confidence, but eventually, he shook his head.

“He talks to spirits.  Sometimes they talk back.”  And gave her a quizzical glance.  “How did you hear of him?”

“Murgull said the
sigruum
convinced you to…to go get us.”

He nodded, clearly uncomfortable with the admission, then said, firmly, “I believe in spirits, Olivia, but it takes more than omens and stories to keep my people safe.  The
sigruum
keeps our past and so I hear his words, but I am tallest.  The decision was mine.”

If he were another man, or if he’d just said it another way, those words would have seemed like a boast.  On Vorgullum, with his dark voice and determined eyes, they were a burden he shouldered alone.  It made her smile.

He saw it, started to smile back, and then sighed and bluntly said, “Why do you hesitate to tell me why the other human was afraid?  I have seen tired,” he went on as she opened her mouth.  “And I have seen excited.  What I saw tonight was fear.  Why?”

She looked at him, then got up and went to him, until she was close enough to see that awful hardness if it came into them.  “I told them what you wanted me to say,” she said.  “But it’s a hard thing to hear, a hard thing to promise to be tribe when you don’t even trust us enough to tell us your names.”

He looked away, his jaw tightening, and she put her hand on his cheek and turned him gently back.

“Murgull told me about the White Fever and the wasted ones.  She told me you want us to give you children.  And that’s a hard thing to hear, too.  What will happen to us if there are no children?”

Cold light glimmered deep in his eyes, but it was only a glimmer yet. 

“I can’t send you back to the human hives,” he said finally.  “I can’t trust anyone so much that I would do that.  Not even you.”

“Would you kill us?” she asked.

He didn’t answer right away, but when he did, that answer was, “No.”

“Not any of us?”

He looked away again.  Again, she made him face her.

“To be leader,” he said slowly, “means that all of my decisions must be first for the tribe and then for myself.  There is no other way.  I would never kill one of your humans because she could not give me a healthy baby.  None of my tribe can do that, would I kill them all?  But a human who attacks us, who tries to make weapons, who speaks of destroying souls…I can no more allow such a one to live among us than I could welcome in biting snakes.”

Now it was her turn to drop her eyes.  He let her.

“I know these are difficult things to hear.  Do you think they are any less easy to say?”  He touched her cheek with the back of his hand.  “I know that you will have to choose what to tell them…and what to tell me.  I won’t ask you always to be honest.”  He let his hand drop.  “But you can tell Beth, when you see her, that her mate cares for her.  If she will learn to speak, she will be tribe.”

“Then you need to tell her mate that when he teaches her to speak, he needs to speak slowly and make his meanings plain.  And talk about everything, like you did.  Beth isn’t trying to be difficult.”

Unlike some of the others
, she thought, and felt a shiver slide up her spine.

He may not have seen it, but he surely sensed it, because that hardness in him came a little closer to the surface.  “Beth doesn’t concern me, but I have reason enough to be concerned about the others I have seen.  Yet your words are strong with me.  I will wait, and if I see that they are also strong with your humans, I will make arrangements for you to continue to meet.  In small groups, closely watched,” he added.

“Thank you,” she said, and hesitated before venturing, “Will you tell me your name now?”

He looked at her for a long time as the lantern hissed behind him.

“It’s late,” he said at last, and began to undress for bed.

CHAPTER FIVE

COMING TOGETHER

1

She knew better than to hope for immediate change, but days passed and she was kept in Vorgullum’s lair, every bit the prisoner she had been before the meeting with ‘her’ humans. It depressed her, and there were several times when Vorgullum came home at the end of his day only to find her still lying in the pit just as he’d left her that morning.  He had to remark on her appearance before she bothered to wash or comb her hair.  She sat in her alcove when he brought food to share and ate only after he left, if she ate anything at all.  She spent too much time moping over her photo album and crying, even though she knew crying could only make things worse.  Vorgullum could see her red, puffy eyes when she came to him in the pit, and she could see the hurt in his, but he still fucked her.

Fucked her.  That wasn’t fair either.  She didn’t want to call it making love, but it was gentle, it was careful, it was kind.  He called her his Olivia when he touched her, and his stolen name sat in her heart like a stone, because he didn’t want her to know it.

“Am I hurting you?” he asked finally, when there had been too many hours of silence between them, too many times when he spoke to her and she just sat and stared into the fire.

“No.”

“I thought it would please you to see your humans.”

“Did you?”  She looked at him.  “When you showed me only the ones you needed to scare?”

He looked pained, but only for a moment.  Then his face hardened.  “I did not want to scare them.”

“No, you wanted me to scare them for you.”

He got up and headed out.  It wasn’t a victory.

“How is Beth?” she asked, as close as she could bring herself to calling him back.

He stopped and gave her a cautious look.  “She seems well,” he said.  “She tries to speak our words.  Many of the others try also.”

“But not all of them,” she guessed.

“No.”  He hesitated, and then came back to her, touching her cheek briefly before he sat on the bench beside her.  “But all are cared for.  We are not monsters.  We are your mates.”

She opened her mouth to challenge that, to tell him about Cheyenne, whose captor liked to hit her, but in the end, she said nothing.  She had no proof, unless Cheyenne had fresh bruises to show, and she doubted Cheyenne would appreciate being stripped and examined by another male gulla.  If there were no bruises, they’d both look like liars, and Cheyenne’s captor would be furious.

And if there were bruises…

“Think of healthy young,” Vorgullum had said, comforting Beth’s captor when he’d balked at the thought of the brutal sex that overtook male gullan during a woman’s season.  And maybe, “Think of healthy young,” would be all he said again if he knew that Cheyenne was being beaten.

That distance grew between them.  She could feel it stretching, pulling at her heart and soul until every part of her felt thin and cold and tattered.

He touched her again, her knee this time.  “I wish that I could tell you something better.  I do.  Some of them are happy.  Do you believe me?”

“Yes.”  She took his hand and gave it a little squeeze.  “Beth is happy.  She told me so.  And Ellen seemed all right.”