Olivia (31 page)

“It has a power inside it, like a scent no man can smell, to fill his blood with fire.  Make your skunk-friend wear it, just a drop.  Perhaps he will stop using his fists when he does not need them to make his little man-prick hard.”

Olivia slipped the bottle into her pouch, dubious but respectful.  “Thank you.”

“You will have to learn to make it if you want more.”  The gulla looked around the room, rubbing and rubbing at her neck.  “There is so much to teach you, little sister.  I will be here most nights and Horumn will know how to find me if I am not.  Fetch me out whenever you can.  It is time to stop telling stories, eh?  Time to stop pretending the world will never find us here.  You must learn to be what I am.”

“Murgull, I don’t think I can do that.”

“Then I die,” the old gulla said, glaring at her.  “And all is lost.”

Olivia looked at her helplessly and finally bent her head.

“You will come,” Murgull said, “whenever you can.”

“I will, I promise.  Maybe not every day, but—”

“Ha, my old bones could not manage every day.  It will be enough.”  She pulled at her neck, running her gaze over her worktable and all its mysteries.  “Perhaps.  Now go.  Murgull has to find Horumn and give her a cuffing for causing all this misery.  Find Bolga and see what can be done to make her belly strong.  Find Borra, maybe.  And Yawa, hmm.  To set a watch around the women’s tunnels night and day against these males who would breed with fools.  Ah, troubles, little sister.  The Great Spirit must love troubles, for he made so many for us.  Go home now, yes?  Go home.” 

Olivia went.

3

It was a bad day, sitting alone and thinking of all the ways Cheyenne’s captor might find to kill her.  Vorgullum had nothing to say to her when he finally came home.  He undressed in silence and lay down without touching her, not even to lay his wing across her.  It was a long time before sleep came to Olivia; she wasn’t sure it ever did come to him.  She woke the next morning as he was gathering up the pile of torn tents and other bedding she had deemed undesirable so many days ago (and which he had left sitting there, patiently waiting for her to take them back), but he did not respond to her hesitant greeting, and he was gone when she came back from the washroom.  He hadn’t said goodbye, hadn’t promised to come back for the mid-day meal, hadn’t even given her that little forehead bump.  There was food enough on his shelves to make up for two or even three meals, but after staring into the fire for an hour or two, Olivia decided to leave.  It might not be the smartest thing to do, with Cheyenne’s captor creeping around, but she really couldn’t hide from him the rest of her life.  Besides, if he decided to come after her, she reasoned she had a much better chance of escaping him if she was free in the tunnels and not trapped in her own lair.

So she put on her claws and climbed down to find her way to the commons.  She was a little surprised to see a meet in session, although three gullan males had been posted to guard the handful of humans, instead of the usual one.  All three raised their hands to her when Olivia entered the cavern, but did not approach her.  They continued their grim conversation with spears in their hands, and Bolga’s name quiet on their lips.

“It’s awful, isn’t it?”

Beth had come out of the small group to meet her, her pale face pinched with worry.  She recognized all but one of the women behind her, but not all of them were welcome sights.  She saw Amy and Tina sitting with Judith and Ellen, but she also saw Victoria standing by herself, and the crazy lady with her saucepan sitting by the hearth, and Maria the Mojo Woman, who had taken to painting large portions of her skin with ash and what looked like lipstick.

“Is that what we’re talking about?” Olivia asked, trying very hard not to whine.  “Because I just don’t know if I can.”

“What else is there to talk about?” Ellen asked, looking towards the gullan guards.  “Or do, for that matter.  I didn’t even really want to come today, but Mudmar sort of insisted.”

“Sort of?” Amy echoed, brows furrowing.

It was difficult to say for certain, given the uneven lighting, but it seemed to Olivia that Ellen blushed.

“I’m sure he thinks it’s good for me, and God knows I was climbing the walls to see another human face not so very long ago, but…”  She looked around at the rest of them, a little embarrassed, a little imploring.  “But is this really all we’re ever going to do?  Just sit and talk?”

“God, I hope not,” Tina said.

“Don’t misunderstand me, I’m glad to get out of the house, so to speak.  I’d just really rather know…what are we supposed to be doing?”

“Adjusting,” Olivia replied, and tried to smile.  “I guess as soon as they decide how we can help out—”

“Oh, are we expected to work for them too?”  Victoria uttered one of her brittle, furious laughs.  “It just gets better and better, doesn’t it?”

“I am not going to be a housekeeper in the batcave,” Maria added.  “They can get on their knees and clean
my
floors.”

“Or you’ll put the whammy on them, I suppose,” Judith said, but without much feeling.  She sat on the end of a bench beside Amy, one hand on her stomach, staring without expression at the madwoman, who stared placidly back at her.  “You and all your bad voodoo.”

“You want to see just how bad it is,
cochina
?”  Maria thrust out her fist, stabbed up her thumb and pinkie finger, and spat between them.  All three of the gullan guards snapped their eyes around to watch.  “
Ojala que mueras
!”

Judith rolled her eyes and continued gazing at the madwoman.

“Now my mojo is on you,” Maria said smugly.  “And you will die.”

“You are so full of shit,” said Amy, in what was almost an admiring tone.  “I mean, shockingly full.  Like you had to pound the last ten pounds of shit in there with a hammer.”

Maria started to extend her arm, got a better look at Amy, and settled for popping up her middle finger.  She kissed the tip, blew it mockingly at Amy, and then retreated to a more distant bench to sit and pick unconcernedly at her fingernails.

The gullan guards watched her, only her. 

“That crap is going to get her killed,” Tina said, and it was the same firm, distracted voice Olivia remembered.  “She thinks it’s cute now, when they’re all falling over themselves trying to decide if she’s serious, but they day they do decide is the last day she draws a breath and that’s a fact.”  Her eyes shifted to Olivia.  “I guess we have you to thank for all these little girl-scout meetings, and because of them, I think we can account for everyone.  If all my names and numbers add up, there’s seventeen of us down here, including her.”  She gave the madwoman a nod.  “Most of us were alone the night we were taken, but I had a…I had a roommate,” she said after a short, steadying sort of breath.  “I haven’t seen her yet, but she’s here somewhere.  All of us were young, or looked young,” she added, this time with a nod toward Victoria, who glared and turned away.  “And from what I can tell, we’re all pretty healthy.”

“That’s good.”

“That’s damned lucky, is what that is.  Not a one of us with diabetes or high blood pressure or chronic asthma—”

“Or fur allergies,” Amy inserted.  “Keep going, Tina.  There’s two more glaring anomalies no one’s mentioned yet.”

They all looked at each other, but it was Beth who timidly raised her hand and said, “None of us wear glasses?”

“That’s one,” Amy said mildly as startled double-checks flew between humans.  “What else?  I’ll give you a hint: Statistically, at least three of us sitting here right now ought to fall into this next category.”

Tina’s puzzled expression turned to a scowl at once.  “Christ, I was thinking this just the other day, myself.  None of us are overweight.  And yeah, statistically, that’s a shocker.”

“So add that to our astounding lack of physical ailments and the demographic-busting fact that we were all at High Hill at all, and the odds do boggle one a bit.  I tell you what,” said Amy casually, “I’m starting to wonder about this Great Spirit of theirs.”

They all looked at her, even Maria.

“I’m not going to say there’s no such thing as coincidence,” Amy went on, “but if there is a divine power out there, he does appear to be on their side.  And maybe they deserve it.”

She paused there, as if inviting comment, but apart from some outraged staring out of Victoria, there was none.  Ellen looked at her feet.  Judith rubbed her stomach.  Beth took Olivia’s hand and sat down on a bench.  Tina merely folded her arms and listened.

“I got a real good look at these people yesterday,” Amy continued after a moment.  “And these are people who have been looking death in the face for a good long time.  I just had to ask myself what I would if I were in their shoes, if they wore shoes.  I really don’t like the answer.”

“Then maybe you should keep it to yourself,” Victoria said tersely.

“Maybe I should.”  Amy shrugged, then looked around.  “Anyone here ever see a movie called
Scylla Six
?”

“Oh God,” Beth said.

Amy gave her half a smile.  “You saw it,” she guessed.  “For the rest of us, it’s this horrible, horrible sci-fi movie about the last humans in the universe, who bundle themselves into a fleet of ships and fly away from our doomed planet to colonize another one, only the fleet goes through this asteroid storm and all but one of them is destroyed.”

“I think I did see that one,” Tina remarked.  “And the ship ends up crashing on some other planet with the bug-men?”

“That’s the one.”

“This is relevant somehow, right?”

“Well look, the aliens in the movie are the humans, aren’t they?  They crashed on some hapless planet where they weren’t invited and they immediately start slaughtering the natives and setting up fort and yet they are still portrayed as the heroic element of the piece because they were the last humans in the universe, get me?”  Amy glanced back toward the gullan.  “And intellectually, anybody could see that what they were doing was dead wrong, but when the scriptwriter said they had this biological imperative to preserve their species, so anything goes, you believed it.”

“We’re all the center of our own universe,” Olivia said, and then all turned and looked at her instead of Amy.  She felt herself blushing.  “Something my sociology professor used to say.”

“He was right,” Amy said.

“And you’re saying, what?”  Tina looked from one to the other of them, one eyebrow very slightly raised.  “That we ought to respect the decision to kidnap and impregnate us because these people have a biological imperative to preserve their species?  That we should feel good about it?”

“Do you feel good when you hear about the bald eagle being brought back from the lip of extinction?” Amy countered.  “Have you ever sent money to save a polar bear, or made an effort to only buy dolphin-safe tuna?”

“That’s not the same thing at all!” Judith insisted.  “Those are animals being threatened by us!”

“What, you don’t think that humans are responsible for any of this?  I can remember enough of that night to guess that they can fly at least as fast as a car drives, and yet their territory is limited to what is right here on this mountain because they don’t dare get too close to a human town, or human farms, or human cows.”  Amy let that sink in a little, and then she lowered her voice and said, “We may not be hunting these people, but we are sure helping to kill them.  And looking at it from a purely academic point of view, kidnapping the seventeen of us out of a pool of six billion isn’t asking a whole lot.”

“We’re not just numbers!” Judith said, her words tight with emotion.

“I know that.  All I’m saying is maybe the numbers should matter.”  Amy studied the gullan, who had gone back to talking amongst themselves.  “I’ve gotten used to the idea that no one is going to rescue us.  It was easier than I thought it would be.  I’ve gotten used to seeing these people
as
people, and that was disturbingly easy too.  Now I have to think about how I’m going to feel about it…and I’ve decided it’s all right to feel okay.  And I’ll tell you something else, I think that giving these
people
hope for their future is a hell of a better life’s work than sending ten bucks every month to the Society for the Preservation of Blue-Breasted Salamanders.  Olivia’s right—”

Olivia blinked, once more at the center of too many staring eyes.

“—If we want to be seen as tribe, we have to stop acting like prisoners.”

“When did I say that?”

“Hey, am I imagining those guards?” Tina asked crossly, pointing to the three gullan and their spears.  “Open your eyes, we
are
prisoners, lady!  And we always will be!”

“I didn’t walk in here on anyone’s arm, if you’ll recall,” Amy countered.  “I can walk on out of here anytime.  So can Olivia.”

“So can I,” Beth said, blushing.

More silence.  The madwoman began to rock herself, her face serene and blank.  No one seemed to want to meet anyone’s eyes.

“Something else you all might want to consider,” Olivia began haltingly, not at all sure she wanted to be saying this at all, “is the reality of what’s likely to happen even if we did escape.  I’m not talking about how we’re going to climb out of here or how we’re going to hike through God knows how much wilderness to get the nearest town, even if we miraculously knew where that was…”  She paused to let that sink in, and saw real surprise in quite a few faces, as if they had expected to simply pop their heads up and be in easy skipping distance of High Hill Apartments again.  “I’m talking about the fact that we have been gone for over a month now, and we are going to have to account for what’s happened to us, and I for one am just not prepared to do that.”

“Well, we were kidnapped,” Ellen said slowly.

But Olivia was already shaking her head.  “That’s not going to be good enough.  They’re going to want us to describe who did it, and then what are you going to say?  That you’ve been held captive all this time by a race of bat-people?  Seriously?  They’ll think your horrible ordeal caused a major meltdown and you’ll spend the rest of your life weaving baskets in a room with rubber walls.  Or, against billion-to-one odds, you’ll find someone who believes you, and they’ll lock you up anyway because there is no way Big Brother is going to put the existence of mountain-dwelling bat-men who need women on the five o’clock news!”