Olivia (34 page)

“It seems like the wrong thing to say,” Olivia said.

“It is,” he said without emotion.  “It would even be a little obscene, I think.  I did this to her.”

There was no right way to reply to that, but she knew there were wrong ways, and surely the worst would be to slink out and leave him alone with his guilt, so Olivia stood and bore him her unhappy witness.  After a while, he put the cup down.  The woman began to rock again, still gazing into her saucepan.  Her eyes were wide, wondering.

“This isn’t how it was supposed to be,” Bundel said unexpectedly, watching the madwoman without expression.  “I approved of the plan, but I didn’t want a human for my own.  I didn’t want to have to steal one away, hold one prisoner.  When Vorgullum told me I had to take one, I was sick with it.  All I could think was what would I do if she hated me?  It was the worst thing I could imagine, then.  And I made her mad.  In one night, I made her mad.”

“No,” Olivia said firmly.  “This was not your fault.”

“So they tell me.  They say it was old Murgull’s potion.  But you all breathed the
tharo
.”  He shook his head and dabbed at the madwoman’s slack mouth again.  “So it had to be me.”

Olivia said nothing.  Her feet stayed stubbornly sealed to the floor.

“I don’t think she had enough of it,” he said suddenly.  “Maybe that was the problem.  She was so much more awake than the rest of you.  She fought the whole flight.  I had to hurt her to hold her still.  I had to hurt her—”

“I am sure she would have preferred that to falling.”

“I’m not,” he said flatly.  He looked down at the cup, sighed, and started feeding her again.  “She was quiet when I got her home, but she was crying.  The tears were just…pouring out of her, but she made no sound at all.  She wasn’t even breathing hard.  I thought maybe she was calming down.  Do you want to hear this?” he asked, all in that same dull, emotionless tone.

“Do you want to tell me?”

“It’s eating me,” he said, without heat, without hope.  He poured more broth into the madwoman’s mouth and stroked her throat gently, gently.  “I don’t want to tell you, I don’t want to tell anyone, but this is eating my living guts.  Her eyes were open and she was looking right at me, making those tears, those silent tears.  But she was quiet, so I thought she was all right, that she was calm.  So I put her in my pit and I took away her clothes and I mated with her.”

The madwoman stopped eating.  Just stopped, letting whatever was left in her mouth pour out over her slack lips and down her stained front.  Her fingers curled loosely around her saucepan.  She closed her eyes and let her head slowly droop.  Perhaps she slept.

“She made a sound once,” said Bundel, washing her face.  “And I felt her struggle.  Not much of a struggle, like…like the beating of a moth’s wing.  I looked at her, but she was awake and she was quiet, so I finished.  I finished and I remember thinking that it was even almost nice, and then I realized that she was broken.  That I broke her.”  He dropped the bit of cloth indifferently into the cup with the dregs of the broth and shifted to look around at the empty commons.  His eyes were awful; Olivia had heard of the Thousand Yard Stare, but this was worse.  These were eyes a thousand yards
deep
.  “Do you want to know what this is like, living with her now?  It’s like living with a corpse that never rots.”

She reached out.  He leaned back without looking at her, pulling himself just out of range of whatever pitiful comfort her hand could offer.  His expression did not change.

“She went into season,” he went on.  “I knew she would.  Vorgullum told me to mate with her anyway—”

Of course he did. 
Think of healthy young
.  Oh God, would she ever stop hearing those words?  Would she ever be able to stop looking for that star-cold glint in his eyes?

“—but I couldn’t do that.  When she started, I went to the women’s tunnels.  It was the first time I had left her alone and I know I should never have done it, but it was that or go mad alongside her.  Go mad or be damned.”  His voice cracked on the last word.  He was quiet a long time afterwards, just breathing, gazing dully into nothing while his woman slept beside him.  At last, he said, “Horumn tried to send me away, but Yawa came out.  People say she’s all ice and claws, Yawa, but she’s good.  She’s hard, but she’s good.  She came in spite of all Horumn’s shouting and took care of her until it was over.  I took my spear and went out, but…it wasn’t hunting.  I just flew.  As hard and fast and far as I could.  Until my wings hurt.  Until my breath hurt.  I could see myself flying and flying until I just…fell out of the sky…”

She reached again and wouldn’t let him back away, catching him in spite of his stiff neck and empty eyes and pulling him back against her.  He was cold in her embrace, cold, and even with both arms around him, she couldn’t quite touch him.

“…but who would take care of her?” he finished matter-of-factly.  He gave no sign that he felt her at all.  “I flew all night, but I came back.  I waited all day to be sure, and then I went home to her.  Yawa was cleaning her.  I tried to do it, but Yawa wouldn’t let me.  She cleaned her and then she took me back out into the other room and fucked me.”

The word he used was not one Vorgullum had taught her, but its meaning—in literal translation, the word-picture was that of the fabled Yawa pounding him repeatedly with a rock—was immediate and unmistakable.  It shocked her a little to hear it, but with his distant voice, his terrible staring face, she supposed no other word would do.

“I didn’t want to.  That is, I must have wanted to because…I didn’t know I wanted to, but she got my belt open and I…” 

Slowly, his hand came up and rested on Olivia’s arm.  She could feel the tight set of his shoulders shudder once and finally ease.  He took a shaky breath.

“I must have hurt her,” he whispered, beginning to sag slightly into her embrace.  “I’ve never been like that before.  I must have hurt her, but she just put her hands on my face and said my name, over and over.  ‘I see you, Bundel.  I am with you.’”

‘Good for her,’ thought Olivia, and felt a surge of love for this faceless Yawa so ferocious, it might have been indistinguishable from hate, but she said nothing out loud, only held him.

His story, such as it was, seemed to be over.  He sat and leaned into her side and stared straight ahead as the rest of the world went on spinning somewhere else.  At last, he said, “You’re very strange, do you know that?”

“Am I?”

“You’re comforting me.”  His fingers stroked once along her arm where they rested and then were still.  “After we stole you.  And hurt you.”

She didn’t want to have to come up with an answer for that, but she supposed she’d used up all her healing silences.  This one would only wound him.  So she said, “We are tribe,” and left it at that.

He took a deep breath and let it out as something of a ragged laugh, pulling away from her.  “I believe that, when you say it,” he said, and looked back at the madwoman.  “When they talk about you, I can almost believe that we can still be saved.  But I only hear about you.  I go home with her.”

“It won’t always be this difficult,” she told him, Vorgullum’s words, and she hoped they were still true ones.

“It will be for me.”  Bundel stood up and touched the madwoman’s arm.  Her eyes opened, wide and clear and lifeless.  She stood when he pulled her to her feet, turned where he aimed her, walked when he started walking. 

She could have followed him, walked beside him or perhaps even held his hand.  There was something in her that ached to give him some human touch—a living touch—but his back was very straight when he walked away from her and there was a warning in him somewhere, telling her in silence that he had bared enough wounds for one day.  She let him go with all the weary dignity that he had left to him and she sat in the commons, alone.

Footsteps.  The quiet tap of gullan claws on stone.  Someone came to her across the empty cavern, waited, and then crossed before her staring eyes and sat beside her on the bench.  Vorgullum.  She knew it even before his familiar voice sounded.

“Your words are always wise,” he said.

“I didn’t say much.”

“Sometimes that is best.”  His arm pressed on hers and stayed.  He was leaning into her, just a little.  She could feel the dry touch of his wing just brushing at her back.  He’d opened it some, half-wrapped her, inviting her to come in against his side, to let him wall her off from the rest of the world.

“You have got to let her go,” Olivia said.

He did not answer.  After a moment, she heard the low rustle of his wing retracting, folding tight.

“She’s killing Bundel.  She’s killing his soul.”

“I know.”  He took his arm away, leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees.  “I have thought that I might send her to the Eldest after she has been set with child, and so free him of the burden of her.”

“After…?”

His jaw tightened.  “Her mind is gone, but her body is still fit enough.”

“You can’t mean that.”  She looked at him and saw, not Vorgullum, but the
tovorak
sitting tallest in his skin.  And all at once, that hard shine that she had seen so often in his eyes seemed to stab out and enter her, freezing her heart in her chest and crawling outward inside her veins until all she felt was ice.  “You need to decide,” she said, in that voice that had made even Cheyenne draw back and look at her.  Now Vorgullum did the same.  “You need to decide whether you want us to be tribe or just wombs.”

“Olivia—”

“Because if it’s true for one of us, then it’s true for all of us.  So you decide.  Right now.  You decide and you tell me to my face whether I am your mate or whether I am your animal, your baby-making
thing
that you can fuck—”

He flinched.

“—and put in a dark corner to grow your baby and push it out and wait for you to come to fuck me again.  Because if that’s all this is, then there is no saving you, there’s no saving any of you, and we might as well end it all now.”

He leapt up, walked away, swung around and came back.  “Do you think I want to do these things?” he demanded.  “Do you think I want these thoughts hammering at my head?  Do you think I like the taste of them spitting from my mouth?  I am leader!  A leader must be hard!”

“Shit on that!” she spat, and he stepped back and gaped at her.  She advanced on him in that cold fury, and he backed away.  “Shit on that and shit on you for saying it!  I can forgive you for taking us.  I can forgive you for giving us to your hunters like strips of meat from your kill—”

He flinched again, harder, as if she’d hauled back her hand and slapped him.

“—and I can forgive you making us bear your children because I know that you’re dying here and we might be able to stop it.  That was being a leader, that was being hard, and I can forgive all that, but fucking a woman whose mind is gone because her body is still
fit enough
is shit, it’s nothing but
shit
, and I do
not
forgive you!”

“You want me to kill her, is that it?”  He raised both hands in a sudden sweeping motion and struck himself on the chest hard enough that for an instant, she thought the sound it made was that of a rib cracking.  “You want me to take that star-filled fool and put her in the ground?  To fuck her would be obscene, but to
murder
her your mercy?”

“I want you to let her go!”

“No!  Never!”

“Because she can still give you a ba—”

“
Because they will
fix
her
!” he roared, and the sudden scrambling sound of people fleeing behind them was the first she knew that they were no longer alone.  “They will find her and they will use their damned river-magic and make her whole again!  Who will I save when she brings your hunters here?  Who will I save when we are all pulled out into the sun and
torn open
by their thunder and iron? 
Leave us, damn you all
!”

The half-glimpsed gullan crowding at the doorways vanished in a wind of whispers and running feet.  Vorgullum stormed away from her, turned, slashed at the wall, turned again, and came back.

She looked at him, that terrible ice melting away under the heat of his eyes, but she did not drop her gaze.  He stood, his breath heaving in and out of him, and then abruptly stepped past her and sat heavily on the bench, elbows on knees, empty hands hanging.

She sat beside him.

The mountain stood. The cool, mineral-sweet air of the caves blew over them.  Light dimmed and glowed out again as the mirrors caught clouds moving over some unseen sky far overhead.

His arm brushed at hers and stayed.  She leaned into him a little.

“I have to go,” he said at last.  “There are still many traps to check before sun-down, and there will have to be a night hunt.  I won’t be back until very late.”

She wanted to ask him to think about it, but instead, she stroked her hand along the base of his horns and said, “I’ll be waiting for you.”

He grunted, glanced at her, and finally sighed.  “I should not have shouted at you.”

“It won’t be the last time,” she said, and offered him a small smile.  “I’ve never had to live with anyone before and neither have you, I think.  All things considered, I think we’re doing rather well.”

He waited, and then it was his turn to smile.  “You were supposed to apologize for saying that you shit on me.”

“I have to work up to that.  But when I do say it, I will mean it.”

He bent down and bumped his brow against hers.  She slid a hand around to the back of his neck, holding him against her while the moment lasted.  Then he drew back and stood up.

“Be careful out there,” she said.

He raised his hand to her and walked away.

Olivia sat on the bench, scuffing at the uneven floor with the toe of her sneaker, then rolled her eyes at the empty room and ran after him.

She caught him giving last instructions to his hunters there at the bottom of the entry shaft, already three good clawholds up the wall and still climbing, but he looked back when she came bursting in on them.  Looked back, let go, and leapt down so that she could throw her arms around him.