Olivia (18 page)

His wings loosened some.  “I neglect you more than I should, or perhaps you would know me better.  I don’t like your book—it will always be a part of you and never a part of me—but I would never ask you to burn it.  I only ask you…not to live in it.  If you are to be tribe, you must live here.”

“I guess I’ve been living in it a lot lately.”  Olivia started to grimace, but turned it into a sigh.  It wasn’t as hard as she thought it would be.  “And I’m sorry for the things I said.  I’m sorry I called you a monster.  It was untrue and unfair.”

“Unfair,” he said, and sat himself beside her.  “Many things I can promise you, my Olivia, but fairness will never be one of them.  You will miss the world you came from.”  He brushed at her knee with the back of his hand, then rested his palm on her thigh.  “You will miss the life you once had, but it…it is gone.”

“I know,” Olivia said.  It was the hardest thing she’d ever said, harder than any “Goodbye,” “I’m sorry,” or “It’s over.”  Nothing could be that hard unless it was true, and the truth in it broke her the way the situation itself never could.  She swallowed any further words—not that further words were necessary—and put her hand over his.

After a long, silent minute, she felt the feather-light touch of his wing on her other arm as he enfolded her.  And in the minute after that, he made his  forgiveness complete by bending toward her and touching his brow gently to hers.  She leaned into it a little and felt his strange, snouted mouth shift in a small smile.  “I have a present for you,” he said.

Her next breath came out as a leaf-dry laugh.  “That was optimistic.”

“A failing of mine, I am told,” was his dry reply as he leaned away to open his belt-pouch.  “But as you know me well enough to see that I would never neglect you, so do I know you well enough to believe you would not prolong a misery for its own sake.  I did not like your words, my Olivia, but I have heard them.  Here is my answer.” He brought out two metal objects and dropped them, clanking, into her hands.

They were each composed of three iron pegs, welded together somehow into a shape that was roughly that of a capital H.  The top two prongs were somewhat hooked, and had been brought to a blunt point over a thickly serrated blade.  The lower prongs were long and flat, with leather straps and buckles fitted to them.  She turned them over, feeling at the impressive weight of the things.  “They are very pretty,” she said, puzzled.

He reached across and fit one into her hand so that the two sharp prongs pointed outward.  “You use them to climb,” he explained, cinching the buckles tight around her wrist and forearm.  “I tried them and they seem to work.”

Olivia adjusted her grip on the uncomfortable crosspiece and made a few experimental passes with it through the air, not so delighted by this implication of freedom that she did not notice it was a lot like having a cinderblock strapped to each arm.  She managed to get the other one on while still wearing the first, clanked them together once or twice, and then gave the closest wall a speculative stare.

“I think you had best try a wall where gullan climb,” he suggested, motioning behind him.  “Iron claws won’t give you the strength to make holes in the rock, only to use the ones we put there.”

“Does this mean you’re letting me out?”

His smile of anticipatory pride faded.  He recaptured it after only a second or two, but it was not as bright as it had been before, and it didn’t go as deep.  “You and others like you,” he said. 

“In small groups, I suppose,” she said, unbuckling her new claws.  “Closely watched.”

“I leave you every day,” he said quietly.  “You have had a thousand chances to escape from me, but you have not.  Not even this day.  You have chosen instead to trust me and so I will trust you.”

Heat crawled in her cheeks.  She nodded, not looking at him.

“I will not hold a watch over my own tribe,” he said.  “But first they must be tribe.”  He quieted, looking thoughtfully back over his shoulder as if he could see through the dark of his many rooms to the tunnels below them and all the people inhabiting them.  “However,” he went on finally, “I see that many of your humans are trying to find their place among us.  As for the others…perhaps they will improve once they have seen obedience rewarded.  In any case, after so long, I suppose it is not unreasonable to offer even the worst of them a carrot.”

He said the last word in English, then glanced at her, crookedly smiling.

She gave him a smile of her own.  It felt more honest.

He bent to bump his brow against hers and stayed that way.  “This won’t be easy,” he murmured, close against her cheek.  “But we will come together, your people and mine…you and I.”

“I know.”  Those were true words too, and almost as hard to say.  “But I can’t always be happy about it.  You wouldn’t even tell me why you took us, I had to hear that from Murgull.  You won’t let me see the others, or even tell me where they all are.  You won’t tell me your name—”

He started to move away from her, but she caught at his arm, and he let that hold him, even if he wouldn’t look at her.

“—but I have to sleep beside you.  I have to have sex with you and maybe have your baby.  I can live here, because I have to,” she said, and patted his arm once before she released him.  “But you have to give me something if you want me to be happy about it, something more than iron claws and maybes.”

He didn’t get up, but he did lean forward, heavily resting his elbows on his thighs and staring stone-faced into the fire. 

“I don’t want to fight again,” Olivia said.  “But I don’t want to feel like this every day for the rest of my life, either.  If this is my world now, if this is my life, don’t I deserve to have some control over it?”

“Yes.” 

She waited, but that one word was all he gave her.  She could feel that distance again, that tightening tether and impending snap.  “Then nothing has really changed,” she said, more to herself than to him.

His sharp teeth showed themselves in a snarl, and then he shoved himself up and away from her.  His step was light, like the furious pacing of a caged cat, but he did not walk far before he swung around and said, “Olivia, the man in me would make you every promise that a leader would not dare, but it is the leader who has claimed you for his mate.  So come to my pit and if you can’t love me, then at least pretend.”  He dropped his arms to his sides and gazed at her with pained determination.  “Because hating me won’t keep me from you.”

Olivia sighed and shook her head.  She looked down at her new claws, clacked them together once or twice, then set them aside and stood up.  “I don’t hate you,” she said.  “And I know that change takes time.  I just want to hear you say that things will change for us.”

He studied her face and finally offered her a smile of his own.  It didn’t have a lot of feeling behind it, but what it did have seemed honest, like her laugh.  He came to her, nuzzling at her shoulder first and then her brow.  “Things will change for us,” he murmured.  “I promise you this, my Olivia.”

Empty promises, said her heart, still aching.  Empty promises, said her head, still full of unanswered questions.

“Then I can wait,” said Olivia, and put her arms around him.

4

He fell asleep after the sex, snoring, it seemed, almost in the same breath as the last of his mating thrumms.  Olivia pulled the corner of a blanket up around her shoulders and tried to follow suit, but sleep wasn’t quick to find her.  It surprised her, sort of.  Sleep was usually her body’s first defense when confronted with emotional trauma.  God knew it had been one of those days, but she was wide-awake.

Stealthily, she arched her hips up, dug in both her heels, and pushed the heavy canvas serving as her bedsheet as far toward the foot of the pit as she could manage.  A much softer sleeping bag lay underneath, rumpled and musty-smelling, but better than lying in the wet spot on an army surplus tent.  (As always, her mind tried to whisper a few significant questions about whose tent it had been, whose sleeping bag, and where were they now, but after so many nights, she had become quite good at shutting that unpleasant voice out.)  She wrapped herself up and tried to sleep.

Her eyes would not stay shut.  The fire, dim as it was, still managed enough light to throw an outline around the gullan body slumbering beside her.  Her thoughts melted together into thicker and thicker flumes of nonsense, but her brain refused to be lulled to sleep.  She thought of bats, of arms and wings, of the way the moon had looked over his shoulders as they flew, of Vorgullum saying they had become a people of the under-earth, of cavemen hurling stones at flying gullan in prehistoric days, of the survivors of the White Fever crawling up from the depths to wreak their terrible vengeance, of that horrible baby slipping into the thick scum inside the scuffed blue cooler, of Tina saying they would never be tribe, and Vorgullum putting those iron claws in her hands. 

She decided she was cold.  There was nothing left in the fireplace but a few diehard sparks, and even under this heap of furs and tents and sleeping bags, the cave was cool and dank.  Olivia got out of the pit and felt her way to the hearth, scraping away the ashes and blowing new life into the embers she uncovered before adding another dense log of whatever they used for fuel.

It took a few minutes to catch, but when it finally did, the little licks of blue and gold flame proved agreeably hypnotic.  She made herself comfortable there at the hearth and watched the fire burn, content just for this moment not to think about anything.

“It is late,” Vorgullum said behind her.

She glanced around and saw his eyes gleaming at her drowsily.  “I can’t sleep,” she whispered.

He seemed to wake up a little more.  “Are you still angry?”

“No.”  She thought about it.  “No,” she said again, with more conviction.  “I just need a little time.  Go to sleep.  I’ll be quiet.”

He continued frowning at her for a while, then yawned, rubbed at his face, and finally rolled onto his stomach, letting his wings relax, not quite unfolding, on either side of him.  His back rose in a yawn, then dropped in a gusting exhale.  He uttered a grunt of sleepy satisfaction and drifted off again.

Well, now she was effectively locked out of the pit.  Olivia went into the bathroom and started washing.  It did no good, really, to get back in bed if all she was going to do was make another wet spot.

The sting of the cold water gave her pause.  She thought longingly of the baths, steaming happily away down there in the depths.  She thought she could probably find them again.  Of course, there was the Deep Drop.  She doubted she could climb all the way down there and up again.

But the thought of a little walk put down some strong roots, and Olivia wasn’t quite up to the task of talking herself out of it. She crept back into the sleeping room for her new claws, took a flashlight from the box of candles, and snuck out, expecting at any moment to hear Vorgullum calling her back, or to feel his powerful, clawed hand closing on her shoulder.

She didn’t, of course, although she stood in the entry room for a long time, just waiting for one or the other.  At last, it sank in that he was soundly sleeping, and she…she was, well…

“Free to move about the cavern,” Olivia whispered, staring around at the darkness.  Just like they used to say on airplanes.  Or almost just like that.  Cavern or cabin was not the word in question, the word in question was free.

Her hands did not shake at all as she fit herself into the straps and buckles of her iron claws.  They felt good in her grip, strong and solid and right.  The flashlight’s weight was a satisfying anchor on her right side as she felt her way to the narrow chimney and scraped the spikes lightly over the rock until they found some existing holes and just…just slipped in.  The hooked tips dug in when Olivia angled her wrist and stayed snug, even when she pulled a little.

Olivia stood there for a while, putting more and more of her weight on that claw, trying to remember just how deep this chute was, wondering how far you had to fall before breaking a bone became inevitable.  Not far, given that this was a cave, she thought.  And then she groped for second claw-hold, found it, and pulled herself up, inch by inch, until she dangled entirely by her claws.

They held.  The metal frame lying across her arms made her wrists hurt fairly quickly, but the claws held their grip.  She kicked carefully at the wall until she found a solid jut for a toe-hold, then eased one claw out of the rock and groped for another below it.  It held too.  Down she went, hand over hand, until very unexpectedly, her questing foot smacked down onto the cave floor. 

She couldn’t believe it was that soon, had to fish out her flashlight and shine it around for proof, and yes, there was Vorgullum’s lair, ten feet above her.

And here she was, out.

I could escape
, thought Olivia, knowing she wouldn’t.  She couldn’t climb down to the baths and back, and she definitely couldn’t climb all the way up to the surface and then down the mountainside.  Still, standing here with her claws strapped to her wrists made the thought seem wonderfully plausible.  She could escape, she
could
…but she wouldn’t.

Olivia took off her shoes and put them in front of the chimney to set Vorgullum’s apart from all the other identical openings in the tunnel, then started walking towards the common cave.  It wasn’t far, and it was easy to get to without getting lost, since all she had to do was stay in the main passageway and not make any turns.  The rock under her feet was rough and cool, but not uncomfortably cold.  It was very dark; her flashlight only showed her twenty or thirty feet in front of her, and the shadows had a way of jumping with illusionary life.  It was also very quiet.  Although the tunnel was lined on both sides with openings, there was no sound of life from any of them.   Of course, it was late, as Vorgullum had observed, and it was only reasonable for them to all be sleeping, but the silence did get to her.  She found herself thinking of the depths, and the hungry spirits of the wasted ones who surely haunted it.