Olivia (74 page)

“Right,” Olivia snickered.  “And don’t forget to bite him on the shoulders and scratch up his back.”

“Make sure you get the sweet spot between his wings,” Amy agreed, nodding.  “And if you don’t mind rolling that way, taking him downtown some night.  They don’t do that here.  Blows their ever-loving minds.”

Sarah thought about it while Olivia tried hard not to jiggle Somurg too much with fresh howls of laughter, and, “Why not?” she said.  “It’s kosher.”

Olivia couldn’t stop herself then.  Somurg gave up on lunch and started complaining loudly.  A few more eyes came their way.  Pregnant Liz excused herself from a human gab-session and came over to join them.

“You look really good, Olivia,” she said, letting Amy help her down onto the bench.  And with hardly a second’s pause:  “How long were you in labor?”

“According to Tina, twenty-two hours from the time I first realized I was having contractions,” Olivia replied, soothing her son back onto her breast.

Liz blanched.  “Without painkillers?”

“I’m not worried,” Amy announced grandly.  “I come from a long line of easy deliveries.  My big brother was my mom’s first, and he only took six hours.  By the time I was born, she was down to forty-five minutes, just enough time to drive to the hospital and pick up a birth certificate.”

“Well, my mother said she was in labor with me for three days,” Liz said, her lip quivering.  “And I was a breech birth and they had to do a C-section.  Olivia, can Tina do a C-section?”

“I…I don’t know.  She worked the ER, though, so probably.”

They stopped talking while a group of gullan females came over to admire Somurg.  It was several minutes before they could pick up the conversation again.

“Listen,” Liz said in a subdued voice.  “If the worst does happen, and you have to do a C-section, it’s okay.  I mean, I…”

“I know what you mean,” Olivia told her.  “But let’s not think about things like that right now, okay?  You’ve got months to go.  Don’t dwell on it.”

Liz nodded, still looking troubled, but forced a smile and changed the subject.  “Does he cry?” she asked brightly.

“Constantly,” Olivia agreed, just as cheerfully.  “I’ve only had a few hours of sleep since he was born.  He cries when he’s hungry, he cries when he’s dirty, he cries before he goes to sleep and he cries when he wakes up.  Sometimes I swear he cries just to see how fast he can wake me up.”  She paused, and glanced over at Vorgullum, who was thick in conversation with Kurlun, probably having the exact same discussion.  “Actually, Vorgullum wakes up more often than I do, and he’ll walk him for hours without complaint, but they haven’t invented bottles here, so I have to be the one to feed him.”

Somurg made a grumbling gurgle and she looked down and realized he was asleep.  She prodded him, he woke up and sucked listlessly, then fell asleep again.  “I guess he’s done,” she said.

“I guess so,” Amy agreed, amused.  “He’s sort of an amateur at this, isn’t he?  I thought all babies knew how to eat.”

“Not this baby.”  Olivia woke Somurg up long enough to coax a little burp out of him, then let him doze off again.  “And as long as we’re discussing the many wonders of new life, shall we discuss when you’re going to move in to the birthing room, Amy?”

Amy looked surprised.  “Uh, how about the fifth of never?”

“Not an option, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, come on!”

“Be reasonable,” said Olivia.  “I guarantee, once those contractions start, the last thing you’re going to want to do is crawl down out of your lair and walk clear across the mountain.”

“Tina could come to me,” Amy said, but now she looked uncertain.

“Sure, that’s fine.  If you don’t mind waiting ten minutes for everything she has to run to the tunnels and back for in the middle of your labor.”

“Damn it.”  Amy looked at her stomach and then at Olivia, her mouth twisted into a dry smile.  “As of today, I suppose?”

“That’s right,” Olivia replied.  “Better safe than sorry, I always say.”

“All right, all right.”  She heaved herself up with a sour look.  “Let me just go pack some socks and have some sex for the road and I’ll be right there.  Just when I thought this pregnancy thing couldn’t get any worse.”

10

Vorgullum made a half-hearted protest at Olivia’s decision to stay in the women’s tunnels rather than come back to their lair.  Tina was there, he pointed out, and after the pains she had gone to convincing him that Tina was a better choice for the tribe’s healer than Olivia herself, surely Amy was safe in her hands.

“Tina has a lot to do right now setting up the medicines and healing supplies,” Olivia countered.  “She can certainly take my place overseeing Amy’s delivery, but no one else can take hers.  I have to do my part, Vorgullum.”

“You do enough,” he said, and slipped both arms and one wing around her.  “You do too much.  I will have my mate back.”

“Someday,” she agreed.

He bumped brows with her.  “How dare you defy your leader,” he said with mock severity.

“It won’t be the last time.”

He let her go then, as she’d known he would, and although he came by each day at least twice to see her and the baby, he did a fairly good job of leaving her alone.  She missed him more than she thought she’d have time to. It had been wonderful sharing the baby with him, if only for three days, but she didn’t doubt that the gullan females would trip over themselves in their eagerness to help with Somurg, and she was right.

Indeed, for the first several days, the only time Olivia held her baby was while she fed him, and even for that, she had an audience.  The rest of the time, Somurg was tended by several gullan women, freeing Olivia to help Tina in the spacious caverns she called the clinic, or to make her rounds through the mountain seeing to the other pregnant women.  Sometimes she felt guilty about spending so much time apart from her son, but only sometimes.  She guessed being a mother was something a person had to get used to, and the ‘takes a village’ approach the gullan adopted towards child-rearing made it easy for her to keep on thinking of herself as just Olivia.

She was visiting Horumn in an attempt to learn how to perform that amazing massage on a woman in labor when Crugunn interrupted her, saying, “The
sigruum’s
mate is demanding to speak with you.”

Olivia sighed and settled back down, refocusing her attention on Horumn’s hands and Amy’s belly.  “I’ll be there in a moment,” she said.

Crugunn snorted.  “The Beast does not mark time in moments.  She marks time in now and later.  She wants you now or she’ll kill me later.”

“Oh, all right.  I’ll go.”  She cast Horumn an apologetic glance, but the older gulla was looking at Crugunn with a contemptuously amused expression.

“You fear the Beast?” Horumn asked.

“Fear?”  Crugunn considered the question.  “I think I do. The
sigruum
keeps her in irons at night, but she has begun to be free again during the day.  Always, Vorgullum is watching her, so  she tries to appear very docile, but I don’t believe it.  Her eyes are always angry.”

“There is a child in her, now more than four moons spun,” Horumn said dismissively.  “I think she knows that she is hobbled.  A baby has a way of gentling even a demon’s spirit.”

“Not that demon,” Crugunn growled, all humor fading from her face.  “She’s strong, stronger than any human I have known.  Even chained, she sometimes fights.  She would kill Kodjunn if she could, baby or no.  She would kill us all.”

“Do you say things like that in front of Vorgullum?” Olivia demanded.

“Your mate has never asked me!” Crugunn gasped, just as Horumn said,  “Why would he ask her?”

Their combined incredulity startled a laugh out of her.  “Even the mighty Vorgullum asks for advice once in a while,” Olivia said.

Both gullan exchanged glances.  Horumn snorted. “Not from a female.”

“Of course he does.  He asks me all the time.”

Horumn spat.

“Ah, but you are Olivia.”  Crugunn fanned her wings good-naturedly.  “There has never been a female such as you before. You have brought with you the storm of change, and it is a good storm, like the fires that clear the forest of sick wood.  There are those among your fellows that do things—”  She shook her head with a chuckle.  “—
such
things they do!  And I could not imagine that I would live to see them with my own eyes.  Females that hunt!  That Tina, who says she can set a heart that has newly stilled back to beating!  Ellen, who says she can put food in bottles and boil them to be fresh—fresh as the day they were gathered—for moons and moons!  I feel blessed that I have lived to see these changes.  Olivia,” she said, spreading her arms expansively, “since the coming of Somurg, there has been no shadow of despair in my heart.  You have healed us, even in places we did not know were broken.”

Horumn looked sourly from gulla to human for a short time in silence, then added, “But you are still damned ugly.”

They looked at her, and then they were all laughing, even as Olivia gathered her healer’s gear into a belt pouch and headed for the tunnels.

It was a long walk from the women’s tunnels to Kodjunn’s chambers, and she spent it thinking of Cheyenne and of Vorgullum, although even her thoughts shied away from thinking of them both at the same time.  There was too much danger in that.  As she approached Kodjunn’s lair, there was Bodual, lurking unobtrusively outside, trying not to look bored as he played with his hunting spear.  He glanced up at their footfalls, saw her, and brightened. 

“How is Karen?” she asked as she came closer.

His cheerful expression of greeting darkened at once, but he still managed a faint smile.  “I wouldn’t know. She hasn’t shared my lair since coming to this mountain.”

Olivia paused, one climbing spike sunk into the wall under Kodjunn’s entry chute, and looked at him.  “What?  Why not?”

He shrugged.  “She left me to live with Augurr.  Augurr,” he repeated, rolling his eyes with a growl.  “If she simply refused to couple, as Tobi does, I could understand that.  But she refuses
me
to be with
him
.” 

“Oh Bodual, I’m sorry,” she told him, and he shrugged his wings and looked away.  “Why don’t you go after her?”

“What?”  He barked a bitter kind of laughter.  “Fight challenge for my own mate with a castrated male?  Are you
serious
?”

“No, but I mean…Where does she think she’s going to get a baby?”  Olivia could hardly believe this was the position she was taking, but the words popped out of her anyway.  “That
is
why we were brought here!”

“She says,” he sighed, “and rightly so, that there are enough babies coming for now and she doesn’t have to make one yet.  What am I going to do, force her?  Don’t tell Vorgullum,” he added, kicking at the floor.  “He’d drag her back and put her in chains if he knew she’d left me.”

Olivia dropped her eyes.

“Karen,” Bodual said, and growled.  “She was miserable when she got here, worse than Sutung’s Carla.  She cried for moons and moons, every time she looked at me, every time she ate the food I brought her or dressed in the clothes I gave her, and in the pit…”  He shook his head again.  “Then the crying stopped and she decided to hate me instead.”

“It was a hard time for us,” Olivia said softly.  “I’m sure that you were kind, but being taken away isn’t like…like hitting your toe on a rock, something that hurts for a little while and can be forgotten.”

“I know that,” Bodual said with half a scowl he directed at the floor.  He stood there, staring at the rock under her feet and tapping the butt of his spear monotonously on the floor, all his unhappy thoughts plainly visible in his eyes.  It was a long time before he even tried to shrug them off, and it wasn’t too convincing a shrug.  “She asked me for space and so I gave it.  I gave it until she was gone.  And what use is it to argue?  I tried to be her friend and she hates me.  I could have lived with that if I knew she hated all of us.  But she went to Augurr and now…damn it…if she wants to be with him, I don’t want her back.”

Olivia looked up through the dark passage to Kodjunn’s cave.  “It could be worse,” she said.

“Yes,” Bodual agreed heavily.  “Poor Doru.”

Olivia blinked.  “Poor Doru?”

“Hm?  Oh, you meant Kodjunn.  Yes, that’s even worse.”

“Is something the matter with Doru?  I mean, beyond the…”  She made a few helpless circles with her hand while he frowned at her with confusion, then reached out and drummed her nails on the wall.  If Doru had told him about Tobi, he’d know what it meant; if not, it wouldn’t mean anything.

Bodual nodded at once, his expression pained.  “I know.  That’s awful.”

She studied him closely in the narrow passage.  “But at least she likes him.  She says so all the time.  She hunts with him.  She sits with him at feasts.  She seems happy, doesn’t she?”

Bodual sighed and shook his head.  “It isn’t my tale to tell.  Poor Doru.  I’ve been his friend since our suckling days.  My mother died on the birthing bench,” he added.  “She never named my sire.  Doru’s father took me as his son.  Doru and I, we sucked at the same teat, lost teeth in the same fights, got stomped by the same elk.  It doesn’t surprise me that we’ve both lost our mates, but at least I’m only humiliated.  Doru is hurt.”

A faint stirring from within Kodjunn’s caves drew Olivia’s attention back to why she was here and Bodual tossed his horns at her reluctantly.

“She’s been calm,” he said, shrugging.  “Or as calm as she ever is.  I can give you privacy since I know you want it, but if she threatens you, shout for me.  Don’t wait for her to come at you.  She’s fast and she’s strong.”

Olivia frowned but nodded, and climbed up the narrow passage to the entry room.

Kodjunn’s lair here in Dark Mountain was noticeably smaller than what he’d had back in Hollow Mountain, but the rooms themselves were also more ornate, with elaborate mosaics over every wall, ceiling and floor, and plenty of carved-in shelves to hold his paints and
sigruum’s
supplies.  He had his own washroom just off the entry—with a bench, no less, and a hide flap over the doorway for privacy—and mirrored fixtures for every hanging lamp.  Cheyenne was waiting for her in the sleeping room, backlit by the fire that burned in Kodjunn’s private hearth, desultorily scrubbing out the pattern on the floor with the burned end of a stick.  “Finally,” she said.  “I thought you were going to piss away the whole night talking to that furball.”