Olivia (44 page)

So it was that instead of a leisurely day spent dipping candles, Olivia found herself frantically trying to keep up with Murgull’s instructions, fumbling jars filled with dried herbs that looked nothing like their green growing counterparts, and getting her ears slapped silly every time she mispronounced something.  And they couldn’t begin with something as simple as tea, oh no, Murgull made her start her alchemic career by brewing the aphrodisiac she’d given Cheyenne, the base of which was, predictably, urine.  Not gullan urine, though, which would have been bad enough.  Goat urine, taken during a she-goat’s season.  (“How many animals did you try before you discovered she-goat?” Olivia had asked, wrinkling her nose, and got a smack upside the head.)

Now Murgull uncapped the glass bottle Olivia had just finished with and gave it a judicial sniff.  “Potent,” she said and grinned.  “I hope you are well-rested, wingless sister.  A drop of this placed so and so, and he will split you up the middle!”

“I’m not testing it on myself.”  Olivia took the bottle back and sniffed it, but could only detect a very vague musky scent, much diluted from the pungent piss she’d started with.  “And it wouldn’t make any difference if I did.  We’re mating like minks in the spring as it is.”

“Wrong kind of mating,” Murgull said, watching Olivia cap the bottle.  “But, come, let me show you where to wear the potion.”

“Does it matter?” Olivia asked, and earned a dark glare from Murgull.  “I mean,” she added hastily, “gullan have such a powerful sense of smell anyway, he’d know I was wearing it if I daubed it between my toes.”

“I don’t know what way you couple,” Murgull returned curtly, “but he shouldn’t keep smelling this if it’s worn between your toes.  And he needs to keep breathing it inside him to make it effective.  Hard on him, oh yes, but he won’t complain.” She touched a blunt claw to the side of Olivia’s neck, just over the jugular vein.  “Here,” she murmured, and touched her again on the other side of the neck.  “And here.  No more than a drop, eh?  Cheyenne-skunk, she knows to be sparing with it?”

“I guess so.  At least, she hasn’t complained.”

Murgull grunted and her gaze grew unfocused, perhaps thinking of Cheyenne’s mate, perhaps not.  At last she stirred herself and took the bottle back, putting it indifferently among a dozen similar bottles on her cluttered shelves.  “Now it is late, and he will be waiting for you.  You’ve played the night away in Murgull’s company, little frog, but come back tomorrow and I will teach you the other potions you should know.  One to make his seed strong.  One to make your womb open and fertile.  They are not so easy to learn as this, and more tricky to use, because you have to swallow them.”  She pulled a horrible face.  “Nasty, foul potions, but useful to know.  And these you will test, eh?  Until they do their work!”  The old gulla’s face puckered with thought.  “Old Murgull should like very much to see a baby frog spawned before she dies,” she said.  “If she does not, you must find where Murgull is put in the ground, and show her your little frogling, yes?”

“And I will name it Somurg, because it came from Murgull,” Olivia replied.

That startled her, but only for a moment.  “Fool,” Murgull snapped, and turned away, rubbing furtively at her good eye.  “Spawn first, then name.  Now get out.  It’s late and Murgull’s bones ache.  So much for Murgull to do, and she has to sit and fawn over Olivia-frog,” she grumbled, turning and stumping back into the lab.  “No rest for old Murgull.”

Olivia let herself out of the secret room and raced down the passage to her chambers.  She passed two gullan in the tunnel, both of whom called to her saying Vorgullum was looking for her.

She arrived somewhat out of breath at her chambers and climbed up the chute.  “Are you here?” she called.

“Where have you been?” he demanded, appearing in the doorway.

“With Murgull, learning things,” she replied.  “Is there food?”

“Yes, the bread which I brought at mid-day, and the meat which I brought at dusk.”  His anger had evaporated with the mention of Murgull’s name, but he still looked a little cross with her.  “You could not leave her a little while tell me where you were?”

“I couldn’t even leave to use the waterway, she made me pee in a bucket.  I’m exhausted and my whole body aches with keeping still and learning things.  You think it’s hard to listen to her complain once in a while, try sitting in front of her all night trying to do what she tells you to perfectly the first time.”

There went the rest of his anger.  Suddenly contrite, he stepped back and gestured to the bench, where a cold hunk of meat and three crumbly meal-cakes awaited her attention.  “I’ve been meaning to tell you how proud I am that Murgull has chosen you to be her apprentice,” he said.  “Already, the others are asking me when you will be ready to practice your arts.”

“Not for a while, I’m afraid.”  She sat down with a sigh of relief and pleasure and dug into the first of the cakes.  They were heavy and greasy, but so much easier on her jaws than the usual tough bread that she devoured them with an audible groan of pleasure.

“The others will be disappointed to hear they have to wait,” he remarked, seating himself on the opposite side of the pit to watch her eat.

She snorted.  “Oh yes, I can just hear them now.  ‘Vorgullum, fetch Olivia.  I have a lump in my loincloth and I need her to reduce the swelling.’”

He made a coughing sound, and she glanced around, amused, to arch an eyebrow at him.  “Am I wrong?”

“Probably not,” he admitted.

She downed a few mushrooms, took a long drink from the jug, and looked at him solemnly.  “How is Lorchumn?”

“Better, I think.  At least he’s no longer cursing the heavens and threatening to piss on the Great Spirit.”  Vorgullum made an oddly expressive gesture with the first two fingers of his left hand as he spoke this last, as though catching his words before they could reach the divine ear of the Great Spirit.  “But he has been shaken down to his soul, and most of it is my fault, I think.”

“How do you mean?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me.”

He eyed her doubtfully, and then rolled his wings in a shrug.  “There are twice the numbers of males as females in my tribe and none have mates, apart from those with humans, and that has been very recent as you know.  There are a very few women who are barren, but if these were made available as mates, there would be no end of challenge for possession of them.  So.”  He crouched down and glared at the ground.  “So I forbade the practice, as the leader before me did, and the leader before him.  Lorchumn never had another mate before his Judith.  It’s possible that he has never coupled with anyone else.”

“I still don’t understand how you are to blame,” Olivia prompted.

He looked away at the fire.  “I gave him a mate who feared him,” he said slowly.  “Who despised him, who could hardly bring herself to look at him.  It was plain to me and to everyone else that his Judith did not love him.  Lorchumn couldn’t see that.  For him, coupling was love.  And it should be,” he said, cutting one hand through the air in a slashing gesture of frustration.  “It should be, but—”

“Not for us,” Olivia murmured.

He ducked his head, rubbed at the base of his horns, and finally twitched his wings in a very small, spiritless shrug.  “He loved her,” he said.  “I wanted them to care for each other as mates are meant to do, but he loved her when she lived in horror of him, and now he is grieving himself into his own grave for a woman who
welcomed
hers!”

“I know that you encouraged your people to be gentle with mine,” Olivia said after a moment.  “That you wanted us to come together, to be your mates instead of your prisoners.  Vorgullum, is that what you regret?”

“I don’t want to,” he said, not looking at her.  “But there are others like Judith…and others like Lorchumn.  Olivia, this may not work!” he burst out suddenly.  “All the best and most loyal of my hunters have human mates!  If they all grieve as Lorchumn does now, what will happen to my tribe?  How can I stand tall over them when every decision I make brings more suffering?”

She opened her mouth to ask him why he thought all the humans would die…and then heard Tina saying that when they failed to give the gullan babies, they’d be killed.  But she couldn’t ask him that.  Not because she thought he wouldn’t answer anymore, but because she knew he would.  Instead, hesitantly, she said, “Vorgullum, do you think you’re too young to be
tovorak
?”

“Yes,” he answered at once.  “I know I am.”

“How did it happen?”

He uttered a crooked sort of laugh.  “I have no idea.  The old leader hunted with me more and more often, and then he was talking to me nearly every night, and then he died and everyone…everyone was looking at me.”

“Do you think you are a good leader?”

“No,” he said quietly, and rubbed at the base of his horns again.

Olivia slipped her hand next to his and started rubbing, too.  He let his hand drop and leaned into her a little, but did not look at her.  “Vorgullum, you can’t do this,” she told him.  “You can’t spend all of your time thinking you’re not good enough to be
tovorak
, because eventually you’re going to believe it, and the instant you do, your people are going to know it.  Listen to me, Vorgullum, you made a decision.  If…if this doesn’t work, you’ll leave this mountain and find another tribe.  If the other tribe won’t take you in, you’ll keep looking until you find one that will.  Is that about right?”

She felt him shudder under her hand.  “My tribe will never follow me on such a journey.”

“I think they would.  Partly because they know there’s no other choice.”  She dropped her hand to stroke his cheek, gently forcing his eyes to meet hers.  “And partly because they still need someone else to make the choice anyway.”

“Even if it’s the wrong one.”

“Sometimes it will be,” she said.  “I’m not going to tell you everything is going to work out, but I do know that things work out just a ridiculous amount of the time, for no better reason than just because.  You want proof, go talk to Amy about the number of women who should have been at the place where you took us.  What I will tell you is that you…you made the best decision for your tribe.  And I trust you to keep doing that.”

He searched her eyes, but said nothing. 

“I know you’re worried about Lorchumn, and I don’t blame you for worrying about what people will think when they hear him cursing the spirits—”

He flinched and rubbed at the base of his horns.

“—but whatever you suspected about Judith’s feelings for him, Lorchumn’s grief is still honest grief, and his love was honest love.  That’s just as important for people to know, isn’t it?”

He stared into the fire, then brought his gaze slowly back to her.  “Your words are always wise,” he said.  “I have to think about them.”

She acknowledged this with a nod, then leaned forward, offering her brow for a bump.

He kissed her instead, his rough lips gentle as they pressed against hers, and she was so surprised that she couldn’t do anything at all but sit there and let him.  As soon as she’d recovered enough to try and kiss him back, he withdrew, touched his forehead to hers, and then got up.

“I am lucky to have you,” he said without looking at her.  “I don’t know what I am going to do about Lorchumn, but I have made one decision tonight.  I will tell Bundel to take his human back to the hive where we found her.”

Of all the things he could have said in that moment, that was the one she never expected. 

“I don’t know if it’s the wise thing to do,” he said, and reached up to rub wearily at the base of his horns.  “But it is the right thing.  You’ve made me see that, as much as I wish not to see…”

She reached up to take his hand.  He squeezed once, gently, then pulled out of her grip.

“Go to sleep, my Olivia,” he said, turning away.  “I will sit with Lorchumn tonight and share his grief.  I’ll try not wake you when I return.”

13

On the last day of his time of mourning, Lorchumn came to Olivia to ask the human way to dispose of Judith’s possessions.  It was clear by looking at him that he didn’t want to, and so Olivia made her answer as vague as possible, but in the end, he decided to keep the comb he’d made for her and throw the rest away.  They were human things, he admitted, and they might make the other humans happy to have them, but he didn’t think Judith would want to see them scattered out in other hands.  He would burn them.  Perhaps, in the spirit world, she would have them again.

So he did , and she sat beside him while he fed the contents of Judith’s purse to the fire in Vorgullum’s hearth, one by one.  Last to go was the wallet, and he opened it first, staring for a long time and in silence at the photos of Judith’s smiling husband before setting it face-down over the embers.

“How are you feeling, Lorchumn?” she asked.  “Honestly.”

“Honestly?”  He backed up to a bench and sat down.  “I feel terrible,” he said.  “But I think I must be getting better.  I was hungry today.”

“A good sign.”

“I suppose so.”  He turned his face away, choosing to look instead at the fire.  “I have to tell you something.  I have to tell someone anyway…and you are the only one I trust.  Please.  Will you listen?”

“Of course.”  She sat down beside him and took one of his hands.  It lay in hers limply, too much as Judith’s had done.  She made herself keep holding it.

“Judith…she didn’t like me.”  He reached up and swiped at his eyes.  “Knowing that is worst of all.  I loved her, Olivia, but nothing I did softened her towards me.  Now that she’s dead…I find myself thinking evil thoughts.”

Oh God.  “You can tell me,” she said, and tried to brace herself.

“I think she made herself die,” he confessed, and instantly looked sick with shame.  “I think she died just to get away from me.”

Olivia kept the expression of warm sympathy unaltered by pure force of will.  “Lorchumn,” she said gently.  “That simply is not true.”

“I know. And I feel horrible for thinking it, but I can’t stop myself.  When I first brought her here, I thought the pit was too small for the both of us…”  His gaze shifted to the pit Olivia shared with Vorgullum.  “…and now I’m all alone inside it with nothing but guilt.”