Olivia (67 page)

“She is Murgull,” Yawa said simply.  “It was all she had to do.  It made me no friends…as I’m sure you know, since you walk with her hand upon you all the time.”

Olivia nodded, thinking of Murgull and the cloud of superstitious fear that always seemed to surround her.  Murgull, who healed and harmed.  Murgull, who could make even Vorgullum back away and bend his neck.  Murgull, who had the blood of hundreds of gullan on her gnarled hands.

“I tried to hunt once,” Yawa was saying.  “Since I had survived my Journey and had the right.  But the old leader swore to cut my wings and throw me to the care of the Eldest if I ever touched a spear again.  He made me promise before the tribe that I would stay in the women’s tunnels and be a proper female.”  She showed her fangs in a sneer, then shook her head.  “And that is why the females of the mountain do not like me.  Because being proper is a punishment for me.  Ha.  I don’t need to be liked.”

“Well, I’m not very proper either,” Olivia said after a moment.  “Maybe we can like each other.”

“Maybe,” Yawa murmured, and then said it again, as if the idea came with a taste she wasn’t sure she liked.  As they came into the new women’s commons, she shook herself out of it and gave Olivia a lopsided smile.  “It’s strange to see you in person.  I thought you’d be taller.”

Olivia snorted and would have answered except that a gullan hand closed on the scruff of her neck at that moment and yanked her roughly around.

“Are you still here?” Horumn demanded, giving her a hard shake.  “Unpack something!  That, even your clumsy frog hands can manage!”

Olivia hurried to the heap of backpacks and leather satchels growing beside the tunnel’s mouth and started unpacking flashlights, knives, pop bottles filled with assorted medicines and potions, dried strips of meat, batteries, lamp oil, bundled furs and fleeces and all the other essentials the tribe had thought to bring.  She didn’t try to put anything away, just organized it into stacks and let the women come for what they needed as soon as they found a place for it. 

It shouldn’t have been as much work as it was, except that Thurga and Rumm kept coming with more, and more, until Olivia was compelled to start unloading things in one of the adjoining rooms.  And as willing as she’d been to help the overworked women settle into their new home, she was relieved when Gullnar, one of the hunters who had left with Vorgullum, came to interrupt them. 

There was no iron door to hold him out of these caverns, and so he came all the way inside and stood, leaning against the wall beside a bloody bundle of deerskin to idly ogle the forbidden females resting here.  “The first hunt of our new home has returned,” he said formally, giving a nod to Horumn even as his eyes dipped and crawled over the giggling gullan behind her.  “Vorgullum gives these to his tribeswomen, but there are two bucks roasting in the commons for the hunters…”  His gaze shifted to Olivia.  “And their mates.”

Horumn turned a baleful eye on Olivia, then gave Gullnar a glare.  “Heard,” she said.  “Now clear this tunnel.  Your business is done.”

He lingered another moment (more to show Horumn he would not be ordered around than for any other reason, she thought) and then took himself away.  Horumn spat at his retreating feet, then barked back over her shoulder for Crugunn and Rumm, smiling grimly when their exclamations of delight for fresh meat died on seeing a heap of internal organs, bloody bones, and hides that needed fleshing.  “Go on, then.  Light the fires and fetch a pot, eh?  Stewed guts are good enough for the likes of us.  And you,” she finished, glaring at Olivia.  “Your man will want his mate beside him and all the tribe to see her fed well at this first feast.  All the tribe who
matter
.”

Rumm and Crugunn fussed with the mess until the Eldest had limped away, then gave Olivia twin looks of sympathy.

“It’s not only you,” Rumm whispered.  “Horumn never had a mate to take care of her, only men who made her promises and gave her bad babies to raise under the old leader’s furious eye.  She would be just as bitter even if you were gullan.”

That was actually reassuring.

“Her anger is foolishness,” Crugunn added.  “For all the years of her life, no man has been free to take a mate, save at the leader’s command.  And it certainly isn’t as though you had any choice in the matter.”

Rumm gave her a swift smack to the arm with the back of her hand.  Crugunn flinched with what sounded like a protest, then flinched again and stared wide-eyed at Olivia.

She smiled, a wan effort perhaps, but the thought of her abduction held very little sting for her these days.

From further in the cavern, Horumn bellowed and the two gullan guiltily took up her burden and carried it away between them.  Alone, Olivia headed back through the gently sloping passage towards the hub of tunnels that made the new commons.  She wasn’t really very hungry, but the old witch was right: Vorgullum would want her there, being the first to be fed while his tribe looked on.  It had been many days of hardship and uncertainty, only to come home to a strange new place.  This feast would be a promise of comforts to come, a promise that had surely come from the Great Spirit himself.

Olivia’s flashlight, bouncing unsteadily across the tunnel floor ahead of her, suddenly illuminated a dark pair of gullan feet.  The feet stopped walking and stepped aside as Olivia followed the legs up to an impassive face.  Recognition was not immediate; she saw it was Logarr only after she saw the cracked clay bowl in his hand. 

Olivia illuminated her own face for him to see and heard a short, dry puff of laughter. 

“I know who you are,” he said.

She lowered the light.  “Are you coming to the feast?” she asked.

He laughed again, shorter and drier.  “You don’t know who I am, it seems.”

“You’re Logarr,” she said, and that silenced him.  She smiled, just in case he could see it.  “The feast is for all hunters, isn’t it?”

“I am not welcome.”

“That can change,” she told him.  “It should change.”

He said nothing.

“If humans can be tribe, so can you, surely.  It’s a new mountain, a new beginning.  Come with me, Logarr.”  She held out her hand.  “Haven’t you been alone long enough?”

She wished she could see his face.  The perfect stillness of his body and the half-glimpsed glitter of his watchful eyes gave her no indication of his thoughts.  She had decided she’d embarrassed him and was about to move on when his hand brushed at hers, his fingers tracing lightly across her palm before taking it in his grip.  He squeezed once, carefully, then released her.  When she started walking again, he followed.

The feast was well underway already.  Even before she could see the pale light spilling from the commons, she could hear gullan growls and manly laughter as hunters relived their prowess on this first hunt or, in the case of Wurlgunn, their equally entertaining failures.  Someone called her name cheerfully enough when she entered—it might have been Bodual, but she never knew for sure because Vorgullum turned then, his greeting killed in an instant as he saw who stood beside her.

He leapt up, flinging the spit he had been preparing violently aside.  It struck a wall and clattered to the floor, but no one looked at it.

The silence spread.  Vorgullum stood, all his body taut and furious, his hands hooked into lethal claws and the hairs of his neck and shoulders spiking stiffly outward, quivering at each hard breath.  At Olivia’s side, Logarr raised one hand in salute and turned away.

Olivia caught his arm.

Vorgullum sprang forward, just a blur of blackness and snarls.  He grabbed her by the neck of her goat-skin and a few stray hairs, and threw her behind him as he had thrown the spit, except that he didn’t let her go.  Her legs whooped out from under her with the momentum of his swing; she clutched at his arm, but it was iron under her frantic grip.  She could feel a hot tickle creeping down her back as she flailed for balance at the end of his fist.  He’d cut her.  She was actually bleeding.

“I came only at invitation,” Logarr said quietly.  “I will go.”

Vorgullum snarled again, a bestial sound like nothing she had ever heard out him, not even when she’d been in season.  He did not move, did not open his hand or straighten from his feral crouch until Logarr was long gone.  When he did release her at last, it was to shove her in front of him and fix her with his blazing eyes.  “You will not speak to him again,” he said, very softly.

To say that she was stunned by this reaction could not begin to describe her feelings as she stared up at this furious stranger wearing Vorgullum’s face.  “If you say so,” she said, choosing her words calmly and carefully, “then of course I will obey you.  But you have not said so until now—”

He frowned and eased back a step.

“—and so you have no right to be angry with me,” she finished and wiped hard at her neck to show him her blood on her fingers.

He backed up again.  This time, she advanced.

“And in the future, if you want me to move, you ask me.  If you throw me like that again, by the Great Spirit, I’m coming up swinging!”

“Damn straight,” Tobi said from in the crowd, and Doru hushed her.

Vorgullum’s eyes flicked away and came back very faintly chagrined.  He brushed his thumb across her throat—his only apology—and said, “I am not angry with you, my mate.  I trust you to go where you will in this mountain and to keep whatever company you desire among my tribesmen, but that one is not tribe and you will not speak to him again.”

Because he refused to talk about his Journey.  Burgelbun and two other hunters had given their kills to Mojo Woman, would have perhaps supported her inevitable plan to seize control of the tribe or whatever she (or the water-demon controlling her) had planned, but they were still tribe.  Even Cheyenne, who he dismissed as a beast if he spoke of her at all, was tribe enough for Olivia to visit and speak with alone.  But not Logarr.

“I’ll do as you say,” Olivia said again, “but I think what you’re doing is wrong.”

Someone, a gulla by the fur-thick sound of it, gave his forehead a smack.  A few people muttered.  Most only watched.

But Vorgullum smiled, crookedly but sincerely.  “It’s your nature to show kindness and I would not change that,” he said, leading her to the hearth with his arm around her shoulders.  “Sit at my side and share my kill.  The Great Spirit has given us a good home.  Come honor it with your
true
tribe.”

2

It took two months for the tribe to completely relocate, and in the meantime, Olivia was continually confronted with how many of the primitive amenities she’d taken for granted back in Hollow Mountain were in fact luxuries.  There were no hot springs warming this mountain from within, and no open room with heaps of spare clothing, or even tanned hides ready to make new clothing from.  There was no useable bedding in the pits, no cooking pots or spits that weren’t rusted through, no soap for the washroom, no oil to fill their lanterns and no flashlights at all.

Save for a handful of hunters, all strong fliers were kept busy transporting goods back and forth from their previous home to this one.  While they were away, the women kept busy cleaning out the unused lairs and trying to find a place to put everything.  Vorgullum and his hunters went out every night, working grimly to keep the tribe fed and covered when they had no idea where the game trails were, or what they might find on them.  Each time the party Olivia had come to think of as the Movers returned, they brought harrowing tales of human encampments in the foothills of Hollow Mountain, coming closer and closer to the mouth of the gullan caverns.  Finally, they found tracks on the mountain itself, and Vorgullum gave the order that there would be no more flights.  For good or ill, they were moved.

And it wasn’t such a bad place, really.  Cold and unfamiliar as they were, the new caverns were certainly easier to travel through.  Tunnels sloped gradually instead of dropping off into unexpected chasms; apart from the short chimneys leading into private lairs, there was no need for the humans to climb anywhere.  There were mirrored vents for light—the reflecting plates were beyond restoration, but Sudjummar assured her he had plenty of metals in the forge to make new ones—and a second entry shaft in what could be made into the women’s tunnels so that the caves could breathe properly.

“And I found the
sigru
,” Sudjummar announced at the end of his report.  “Kodjunn is already there, of course, but if you would like to see them, he said he would allow it.”

She did, and so she took his arm and a fresh flashlight and let him lead her away.

It was a long walk, and not just because Olivia had to stop every ten minutes to take the weight off her swollen ankles.  The archives were in the very deepest part of the mountain, to keep them away from idle eyes.  The dreams of the
sigruum
were sacred, Sudjummar reminded her at her first and last complaint, and not for the whims of the curious.

The
sigru
had been sealed off with a stiff, tattered piece of animal hide.  Red markings were visible in some places on the outer wall, but indecipherable, even to Sudjummar.

Inside, a wonder.  It had begun as a very small natural cave, little more than an indentation in the wall.  Gullan workers had lengthened it, and after unknown time and effort, they had carved out a narrow passage with very smooth, rounded sides that arced beautifully inward on itself.  Lanterns hung from the ceiling at regular intervals, and Kodjunn stood below the first of them, peering closely at the images before him.  It took Sudjummar’s hand on his shoulder to rouse him.

Olivia took her first look at the paintings of the gullan histories.  They were done in simple pigments, mostly reds and blacks, brushed on in the primitive but graceful lines she had come to associate with gullan art.  “It’s beautiful,” she said, since she knew the other two were watching her closely.  “But you’ll have to explain it to me.”

“The first dream is always the story of creation,” Kodjunn said, and reached past her to indicate dark shapes in precise whorls and lines.  “Here, the essence of Night is sleeping while Time flows over and through her, and here it conceives the Great Spirit.  Here, the birth of Urga, and the first gullan.  Here is Bahgree.”  He walked her through the tunnel, which arced on and on in an ever-tightening spiral, taking her past several painted scenes as he rattled on in his distracted way of the legends of various great gullan leaders and their great adventures, great mates, and great disasters somehow averted by their prowess on the hunt or in the pit.  Finally, Sudjummar reached out and gave his left horn a shake, saying, “I want to see what happened here at some point
tonight
, great
sigruum
.  Do you think you could manage?”