Olivia (29 page)

“I sure would like to have seen those boulders,” Olivia said wistfully.  The other four went into renewed hysterics.

“I could show them to you,” answered the male, looking down sharply at the women, who set up simultaneous howls.  “They’re not as big as before, but—Great Spirit, woman, what has gotten into you?” he demanded of Amy, who had begun to beat on the floor with her fist.

“Never mind her,” Olivia said, flapping one hand in Amy’s direction.  “Show me your boulders.”

Amy rolled onto her back, grabbing herself around the middle and shrieking with laughter.

The male glanced down at her, half-worried, half-confused, then held out his arm.  “You are Olivia, yes?” he began.  “I’ve heard of you.  Good things.”

“Oh my God, I’m gonna die,” gasped Amy in English.

“I’m flattered,” Olivia replied, ignoring Amy.  “I’ve heard good things about you, too.”

He led her out of the commons and into the maze of tunnels, letting Olivia’s flashlight go before them, although he didn’t seem to need it.  “Your mate talks of you sometimes.”

“Does he?” Olivia murmured, smiling.  “And what does he say?”

The male cut her an embarrassed glance.  “Oh, this and that thing.  How clever you are in speech.  How friendly and…active.  He hopes to see you catch his spark very soon.”

“He might get his wish.”

“If the Great Spirit wills it.  My Amy, she wishes for a daughter.  I would take any child, any child at all, but Amy says, ‘A daughter I can understand.  I never knew much about boys, and I never liked them much, either.’”  He limped along in silence, and then said, “I am old to be made a father for the first time.  I think I am older now than my own father was when he saw the last of my brothers born, and I was the eldest of six.”

“Maturity is very attractive to humans,” Olivia said, and he gave her an odd look.

“That is exactly what my Amy says.”  He brought her down a set of carved steps and into a wide tunnel, hung with lanterns.  All around were sounds of picks striking stone, voices raised to one another, and rocks dropping heavily onto rock.  Some stopped their work to look at her, but most only rested their eyes and let their bodies continue to toil. 

“What are you mining?” Olivia asked curiously, watching the workers watch her.

“Oh, nothing.  Not here, anyway.  We take out the metal when we find it, of course, but between us, the metal-maker has enough raw ore in his stores to last ten thousand years.  No, this tunnel has always been here.  We’re just making it bigger…smoothing it out…”  He glanced around and lowered his voice to something scarcely above a breath.  “Make-work, to say the truth.  To make old fools like me feel useful.  Not all of us can hunt every night the way we used to.”  His eyes shifted to a much younger male with withered, stunted wings.  “Not all of us can fly.”

“I see.”

“A man is a man in his heart first, not his hunting trophies.  Your mate knows this.  He is a good leader.  Here.”  Amy’s mate brought Olivia into a side-passage and displayed the remains of what had truly been enormous boulders.

“There is a good-sized cave past them,” he said, motioning to the darkness beyond.  “And water, which might be good.  And a strong draft, which means good air and maybe light.  We need to bring logs and shore up this tunnel before we clear the opening, but you can see how huge they were.”

“They’re still huge,” she said honestly.  She had to stand on tiptoes to shine her flashlight around the chamber beyond.  “Did you actually break them up by yourself?”

He flexed his whole body, an impressive sight despite his obvious age.  “There are years and years left to this old gulla,” he said, in the oddly purring voice Olivia was beginning to associate with flirting.  “My Amy tries my strength a thousand times more than any cavern full of boulders.”  Suddenly, he seemed to remember that he was speaking to a female, and a human at that, and backed up, looking flustered.  “What I mean to say is—”

“You don’t need to explain,” she said, smiling.  “Human females can be very… aggressive.”

He nodded, looking at her with a new gravity.  “Tell me, Olivia, what can I do to make my Amy happier here?  She doesn’t complain, but I know she still cries sometimes.  Is there anything I can bring her?  I know what she has lost, but there must be something I can do, something to make all of this…at least a little easier.”

“All I can tell you is that my own biggest enemy was boredom.  The human-meets are nice while they last, but the rest of the time, we’re all alone.  If you can borrow a book from one of the others, I am sure she’d appreciate it.  Give her something to do, a game or hobby, or even work, anything at all.”  A thought struck her.  “Bring her a handful of different colored stones from the river.  Bring a pouchful.”

He looked doubtful, but nodded.

“Um, what goes on here?” someone asked curiously.  “The humans are not supposed to leave the commons.”

Amy’s mate flinched a little, fanning out his wings as through trying to shield her from sight, but of course, the tunnel was now lined with gullan, and even those who still pretended to be working were looking their way, not at her so much as at him.  Amy’s mate scowled, then raised his head (and his horns) and folded up his wings in two short snaps.  His thunderous expression dared anyone to challenge him, and when no one did, he took Olivia by the arm and turned around.

She didn’t turn with him.  A gentle hand on his released her, and she took a few steps towards the other gulla, who seemed to be having trouble deciding where to look.  The sound of picks and scraping stone had now entirely ceased.  She didn’t look to see how many people were watching; she supposed they all were. 

“I know who I am,” she said quietly.  “I know where I am and who I am with.  And I know who I am going home to.  I have his approval.  Do I really need yours?”

Amy’s mate folded his arms and found a stretch of wall to lean on, watching.  The other gulla shifted on his feet, muttering and rubbing self-consciously at the base of his horns.  Beyond that, no one moved or spoke.

“There was a time when we needed to be watched,” Olivia admitted, and her thoughts could not help but drift toward Cheyenne and Maria.  “But that time has to end if we are going to be tribe.  Do you agree?”

He bent his head in a ready nod, keeping his eyes averted.

Olivia turned around.  “I think I will go,” she told Amy’s mate.  “But you don’t have to come with me if you’re busy.  I’m sure I can find the way.”

“As you will,” he said mildly, and showed her the palm of his hand in what was either a salute or half a wave.

The other gullan working in the tunnel squeezed themselves flat to the wall as she passed, and she heard the whispers start up immediately.  “Who was that?” someone asked, and the last thing she heard as she climbed out of the tunnel was Amy’s mate proudly answering, “That was our leader’s mate.”

CHAPTER SIX

TRIBE

1

Several days passed in the dark fathoms of Hollow Mountain, perhaps even weeks, and they were, for the most part, good days.  She supposed she was rationalizing if she could come to think of them that way and believe it, but it didn’t feel like rationalizing.  It was a very different life from the one she’d led before, that life in which she’d had family and a job and running water and TV, but that didn’t make it a bad life, really.  The food was tough and came either dried and leathery or stewed and watery altogether too often, but it was nourishing food and she never went hungry.  Moving about in the caves meant a lot of walking and a lot of climbing, but she was proud of her growing strength.  She divided her days between the ever-more frequent human-meets and Murgull’s often terrible company, and sometimes, having the freedom to go anywhere she pleased, chose to stay in her lair and wait for Vorgullum to come home to her.  She tried to be a good mate to him when he was there, not just a sexual partner but a friend, and she knew that he was pleased by her efforts.

The days passed.  In the dark.  Without the sun.  But they were good days.

And then came the night Olivia was shaken violently from sleep.  She woke in immediate panic; Vorgullum, like most if not all of his kind, believed that the dreaming world was as real as the waking one, and those pulled from it before their time risked losing their soul in the unknowable void between the two.  But it was not Vorgullum’s face she saw looming at her over the top of a flickering candle.  It was Murgull.

She was, thought Olivia as she draped herself in a blanket, extremely upset.  One might even say furious.

“What is it?” Vorgullum asked, dazed, pulling a flap of hide around his waist.

“Bolga is with child,” Murgull spat.

“What!”  Vorgullum dropped the hide and sprang out of the pit, now completely oblivious to his nudity.  “How?”

Murgull reached up and slapped him.  “How, you festering little wart!  Some rutting male has been pounding at her hairy shanks, that’s how!”

Vorgullum wrapped his loincloth around his hips, fumbling with the belt pouch.  He already looked angry, more so by the moment.  “Who?” he said tightly.  “Who put that life inside her?  Who is breeding deformity and death inside my mountain?”  His voice rose steadily, thick with fury.  “Who is it that has defied me and sired a new monstrosity among my people?”

“Bolga cannot say.”  Murgull looked fierce and frustrated at once.  “I don’t think she knows.  She says she was hot and couldn’t sleep, so she went out.  She says she met a man who took her into a ‘little place’ and ‘sat on her’.  Bah!”

“
Where was Horumn
?” Vorgullum roared, really roared.  Olivia stared at him and saw a monster for the first time since the night she had been taken.  His horns were low, his hands were claws, and his eyes in the low firelight were blazing red.  “Where was my Eldest if not in her place to prevent this?”

“Where were you, then?” Murgull fired back.  “Has she not as much right to sleep as our great leader?  There are more than Bolga to hold watch over during the dark hours when the males in your charge, ha,
your charge
are prowling for an open hole!”

“And she never saw his face.”  Vorgullum raked one hand back between his horns; the slick fur there stood up in spikes, like the hackles of an angry wolf.  “She has let him put death inside her and still she will protect him!”

“Bolga has clay for brains,” Murgull said, rubbing at her neck.  “If she says she did not look, she did not look.  She is too stupid to lie.”

“And too stupid to breed!  What new horror will she bring upon our heads?”  He started to stalk away, and then whirled back and aimed a claw at her, inches from her glowering good eye.  “Bring Horumn here at once,” he snarled.

“And what will you do when you have cut away the Eldest from all our lives?” Murgull demanded.  “Chain the females to the ground and place a guard around them?  And when they all go into season together, what guard do you trust not to rut with all of them, and bring thirty new brothers and sisters dead and bloated into the world?”

Vorgullum towered over her, breathing hard.

After a moment, in a much-restrained voice, Murgull said, “What is to be done?”

“Nothing,” he spat.  “There is nothing more I can do, damn you!”

“About the child,” Murgull prodded.

“Nothing,” he said, and his shoulders slumped.  “Do nothing.  It has as much right to draw breath as its mindless mother.”

“And shall I bring Horumn to you now?”

Vorgullum bared his teeth, but only for a moment.  “Let the Eldest sleep,” he said.  “Has she not as much right as I?”  He turned away and moved to the hearth, showing his back to both of them.  “Damn us both and the good watch we hold over our charges.”

“As you will,” Murgull nodded, and heaved herself to her feet.  She glanced towards Olivia.  “We will say more of this another time,” she said.  “When Olivia is not so young.  When Murgull is not so old.”  She turned and shambled out.

Vorgullum looked over his wing at Olivia.  She had never seen him look so defeated, so hopeless.  She opened her arms, and he dropped to his knees in the pit to let her embrace him, his arms limp at his sides.  “It is all ending for us,” he said, his voice muffled against her shoulder.  “I am holding a broken mountain together with my hands, Olivia.”

“It will be all right,” she whispered.

“I would give anything,” he moaned.  “My life, my blood, my
soul
if only health would come back to my people!”

She held him, and he began to weep.

“A child,” he said, sobbing.  “A child.”

Neither of them slept more that night.

2

Vorgullum took Olivia to the common cave early in the morning, then left to make a summons.  Soon, it seemed all the tribe was gathered.  They filled the commons, but not to over-crowding, and as much as Olivia had understood intellectually what the situation was here, seeing them before her was still a shock.  She had been in movie theaters with more people than comprised this entire community and half of them,
easily
half of them, were very old.  For the first time, she fully understood that this was it, this was the final generation before extinction, and time was already so short.

Vorgullum climbed up onto the flat rock in the center of the commons and motioned for Murgull, who came forward with a appallingly ugly female with vacuous eyes.  It was a face Olivia had seen before, twisted with idiot pleasure beneath a gulla’s open, muffling hand.

“Bolga is pregnant,” he said without preamble.

Across the cavern, wings unfolded and flattened again, reflected light shimmered over shifting bodies, and gullan voices murmured.  There was no shock, only a sense of dark concern. 

“Who has done this to her?” Vorgullum asked, his voice hard but reasonable.

No one moved or spoke.  Olivia looked back through the crowd and saw Cheyenne with her captor’s hand tight on her shoulder.  Cheyenne glanced over, her color high and excited as much as furious.  She gave her chin an almost imperceptible jerk backwards at the gulla who held her, her eyes cutting like razors where they met with Olivia’s. 
Tell them it was him
, those eyes said. 
They’d never believe me, but they’ll believe you
.